INSPIRATION AND EFFORT
INSPIRATION
AND
EFFORT
STUDIES IN LITERARY ATTITUDE AND EXPRESSION
AMAL KIRAN (K. D. SETHNA)
The Integral Life Foundation
P.O. Box 239
Waterford CT. 06385
USA
First published 1995
(Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino)
© Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna)
Published by
The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A.
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
j170/17.6.94/750
(A LETTER)
You hold that genuine poetry is written always by inspiration — effortlessly — as if in a state of semi-trance. A correct view, this, as regards fundamentals. But you take my breath away by adding that, because in my letter I used words like "tried", "attempted", "sought" when I spoke of producing poetry of a mystic and spiritual order new in many respects to the English language, you drew the conclusion that I wrote my poems with a manufacturing mentality which thought out with intellectual labour all the phrases, linked up the different parts like a mechanic rivetting joints and constructed artificially an unfamiliar out-of-the-way model!
Inspiration is a fact and it does come from a region that is beyond the muscular brain and the tense sinews of thought: it comes from a hidden fountain of force which is more spontaneous, swift, suggestive, vision-bright and harmonious: its outflow brings a condition of mind cleansed of a too external and intellectual and deliberately constructive activity — hence the semi-trance, as it were, of poetic creation. But poetry does not always rush through the mind in an unbroken and perfect river of light. The fact that sometimes it makes a godlike rush proves its source to be other than the wide-awake labourer brain, yet often the river is a series of spurts, jets, clogged clarities, fragmentary freshnesses — half-lines, scattered phrases, words that glow like separate drops unable to meet and move forward. The interrupted nature of inspiration is the lament of all poets. What they do when inspiration fails is at times to stop writing and let the mind rest, at other times to strain with the mind vaguely towards the missing music. This straining is not intellectual: it is an instinctive, intuitive groping, the response of some living iron in us to a mysterious magnet across unknown inner space. The poet feels hazily the direction in which he
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must go, he is drawn towards a point whose presence he has an inkling of, without any vision of its exact word-focus of meaning and suggestion. This intense yielding of the consciousness to the unknown fountain of inspiration must be distinguished from the brain's manufacturing labour. The poet lends all his powers of concentration to the yielding movement, he leaps into the unconceived with his thought, his imagination, his emotional being, his senses, and brings forth tentative words and lines, attempt on glimmering attempt to catch the final felicity of poetic speech. That is why there are so many versions before the right one is found, corrections and changes and recastings that frequently precede the full satisfying phrase.
No doubt, it is difficult not to use the manufacturing part of the mind in this groping for inspiration: and that is the reason why several versions are altogether defective, while in others a mixture takes place of the inspired and the manufactured — and, only after repeated trial, attempt and seeking, the winged beauty is captured without the least stain on it of the pedestrianism of prose. So the fact of deliberate concentration reinforcing the vague unease of the "soul-search" does not prove the resultant poetry to be less poetic. Nor is the process of correction an intellectual labour: correction must be done, as every poet knows — chiselling and polishing are often necessary for even the most inspired singers, and this implies effort. The poet consciously and deliberately sits down to alter what his instinct tells him is insufficiently "quintessenced". He sets about transforming the imperfect parts, alembicating the impure stuff; only, it must be understood that he does not chop and change with just a logical acumen: he brings to bear upon his work a creative sense, and all that he does is to try again to contact the source of his inspiration. He withdraws into himself, collects his mind, becomes unaware of ordinary thought-movements, enters to that extent into a semi-trance — you can't deny that his is an effort no matter if it be an effort to catch what is effortless or spontaneous or inspired!
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I may here dwell a little on a point which is never properly seized by those who do not write poetry. The point is Spontaneity. The ordinary notion is that spontaneity is the first flow of words when one starts writing or the flood that overwhelms one all of a sudden. It is frequently these things but it is not confined to them. The spontaneous word is that which comes from a certain source — the deep fountain of inspiration beyond the logical and ingenious brain: no more, no less. There is not the slightest implication that the initial flow of words is the most inspired: it may be so or it may not — everything depends on whether you are a clear medium or a partly clogged one. If you are not quite clear in the passage running between the creative source and the receptive self, the lines that come to you all of a sudden or at the first turning towards poetic composition are likely to be a mixed beauty and even a facile imitation of the beautiful. Consequently, you have to take a good deal of corrective pains or resort to a total rejection. It is of no moment how much you re-write; all that is important is whether at the first blush or at the "umpteenth" trial you catch unsullied the shining spontaneity of the secret realms where inspiration has its throne. Shakespeare never "blotted" a word; Keats "blotted" a thousand, and yet Keats is looked upon as the most Shakespearean of modern poets in "natural magic". Even Shelley, to all appearance the most spontaneous of singers, was scrupulous in his revisions. What still kept him spontaneous was that each time it was not intellectual hacking and hewing, but a re-vision, a re-opening of the inner sight on the hidden realms in order to behold as accurately as possible the lines and tones, the shapes and designs of those dreamworlds weaving their simple or complex dances.
If you have followed me so far with a nodding head — I mean nodding in agreement and not in dozing boredom — I should like to take you a little further into the business of "trial" and "attempt" and "seeking". Just as there may be various versions, some tinsel, others half-lit, before the aureoled authenticity is found, so also there are various
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kinds of the poetically authentic — not merely more inspired or less inspired but different types of perfect inspiration. Byron's famous stanzas beginning
She walks in beauty like the night
are flawless in their own manner, while Humbert Wolfe brings another mode of sight, speech and rhythm equally flawless:
Thus it began. On a cool and whispering eve
When there was quiet in my heart she came,
and there was an end of quiet. I believe
that a star trembled when she breathed my name.
One may stress the difference in terms of attitude or terms of style, but I think a subtler classification is possible in terms of plane of consciousness. Each plane, like each attitude or style, is capable of an equal poetic excellence: still, the cast of vision, mould of utterance and movement of music are dissimilar. On one plane you may have a lot of attitudes — secular or sacred, sensual or spiritual; Swinburne's frenzy of the flesh in Anactoria and his part-Greek part-Norse part-Indian pantheism in Hertha function on an identical plane as regards essential qualities of sight, speech and rhythm. On one plane you may have also a host of styles: a colourful vitality whose impact is on what Sri Aurobindo calls the nerves of mental sensation prevails among the Elizabethans, ranging through styles that can be distinguished one from another — Marlowe's explosive energy, Chapman's violent impetuousness, Shakespeare's passionate sweep, Webster's quivering outbreak. But beside Milton, however, they all seem kin and offer a contrast to the no less powerful yet more purely reflective or ideative voice heard in Paradise Lost. A contrast by plane can be drawn even between the several portions of one and the same writer's work: occasionally the lines of the very same passage belong to different planes.
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Thus when Wordsworth says:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky and in the mind of man —
he begins with a fine poetic statement of a mystical perception on the mental level, then towards the close of the third line shifts to a level intermediate between this and some other that has a thrill of more than the mind acting the mystic — an intermediate zone which ends with the word "interfused" and leads completely to the ultra-mental in the verse:
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
Here the change is not merely in the coming forward of the visual faculty: such a faculty is clearly at work also in the two lines that follow — without altering their mental-mystic imagination to the sheer spiritual-mystic vision that is aglow and athrob in that single verse with a magnificent straining of sight towards secrecy and with an in-tone and overtone and undertone of intimate yet immeasurable suggestion of some deific grandeur.
Now, a mystic poet who is active on several planes may feel that one of them provides the most precious and profound embodiment to his divinations. Therefore, while not always discouraging the other planes, he may prefer to write more abundantly from that which affords him the greatest sense of fulfilment. To do this, he will have to turn his mind in a particular direction, concentrate on a special type of utterance, even reject other types just as excellent in poetic quality and aspire always to pluck his words from a certain depth or height of consciousness and give all his
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thought, emotion, sense-experience the value and figure and vibrancy that come from that selected centre behind the commonly conscious being, whence flows what he deems his most spiritual expression. So, guided by his pointing instinct, helped by his discriminating intelligence, carried by his exploring intuition, he dedicates himself more and more by a conscious aesthetic yoga, so to speak, to special mystic sources in the Parnassus of inspiration. By intensely seeking to lift all his powers to the revelatory rhythm of such sources as let out lines like that Wordsworthian rarity, he may create, en masse, types of word-vision and word-vibration found hitherto in stray lines and passages both in himself and in the poets who have gone before. There is effort here, and attempt, and choice between alternatives, but nothing that goes against the basic nature of the Muse, the spontaneous creativity of art. Because the poetry he writes is of an unusual order and derives from a psychological fountain difficult to tap with the normal human way of being, however poetic that normal way, he has to sift and select, revise and remould, fix himself in one sole ever-widening variety-disclosing direction. Yet, inasmuch as his goal is the mystic Divine, the Superconscious beyond man, all his effort and attempt are towards sinking himself much more into a state of semi-trance than is needed when composing the ordinary types of first-rate poetry. Hence, more than any other kind of poet, he fulfils the ideal posited by you.
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POETIC VALUES AND POWERS
You have defined the poet as a bringer of joy — and, since the joy of the mystical consciousness is the highest, you arrive at the conclusion that the highest type of poet is the mystical. Your conclusion is valid from a certain standpoint, but not as a judgment on art. Is art to be judged by its explicit nearness to or farness from the mystical realisation? The joy which art brings us is not always explicitly the mystical ananda: it is mostly that ananda in a specific disguise and it is not required to be more: hence our judgments on art have to be within the realm of that disguise. A poet is great not by speaking solely of God in a perfect way: he is great by speaking of anything in a way that is perfect. Nothing except perfection of manner embodying a significant substance constitutes the highest poetry. And this perfection does not depend openly on one's belief in or awareness of God. The mysticality or non-mysticality of the theme makes no difference to the status of a poet as a poet. Shakespeare's
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well
which has no definite spiritual significance is not less high poetry than a mystical phrase like Frederic Myers's
Leap from the universe and plunge in Thee.
Nor is the poetry of either of these lines less high than Sri Aurobindo's
Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,
a line which derives in manner as well as matter from a plane of inspiration beyond the mind — an "overhead plane", to
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use an Aurobindonian label — and comes suffused with a fathomlessness of suggestion and harmony absent in the mystical snatch from Myers, the vigour and wideness of which derive from a mental plane, imaginatively and not abstractly so, yet mental all the same. The manner, the form, of the "overhead" line may be described as directly mystical, while that of the non-"overhead" is indirect in its mysticism. Such a difference counts in a mystical consideration: it does not count in the least in the artistic — and the artistic is all that is of moment when a poet's rank is in question. Neither the theme nor the plane of consciousness from which the perfect manner is born introduces any difference in poetic merit.
Even an atheist can be as high a poet as a mystic if there is active in him an inspired fashioner of perfect form. Of course the ultimate source and support of all poetry is the activity by which the Eternal shapes Himself into the archetypal world of perfect truth-forms that are being evolutionarily manifested here in the world of phenomena. But we need have no conscious acknowledgment of that source and support in order to be poets (though I dare say that for a sustained poetic flight over a lifetime some sense of hidden superhuman presences inspiring us is necessary). Nor will conscious acceptance of God make us poets if the fashioner of perfect form is not somehow active in us. Without that fashioner coming into play, "a mystical idea pouring down from above" will not produce poetry. Unless that fashioner receives and embodies it, no poetry will crystallise. God is joy and art too is joy, but God's joy becomes art's only when that fashioner is the medium. Mystical ideas pour down from above into many people, but all don't write a Rose of God, that poem of Sri Aurobindo's which both of us regard as a ne plus ultra of spiritual incantation. I don't aver that a man who has so far given no sign of being a poet will not blossom into one under the impact of a down-pouring mystical idea: some inmates of Sri Aurobindo's Ashram have become poets almost over-night — but that is because the poet, the artist in
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them has been awakened. Since the Divine, the fashioner of the archetypal world of perfect truth-forms, is Himself a supreme artist, the chances are frequent that an intense impact of a mystical idea will awaken the artist in us — and the chances are increased a hundredfold in our Ashram because of Sri Aurobindo's being a master-artist — but it may so happen that the artist in us does not awaken and only the philosopher does or the man of action: then we have a different type of divine manifestation. The mystical idea by itself is not sufficient for poetry to take birth, though it may bring with it, as you say, emotion and vision and rhythm; the artistic or aesthetic transmitting faculty in us has to be at work, the faculty of fashioning flawless form has to be the medium in us of that idea.
A natural corollary to this is that in our appreciation of poetry the perception of flawless form is essential. Without flawless form, no poetry. By "flawless" I don't mean outward technical perfection alone. I mean an outward technical perfection that is an embodiment of the living thrill of the inward afflatus. Without that living thrill we shall have the mechanism of form instead of the organism. The organic form is the sine qua non of poetry and if we don't respond to it we may get out of poetry a lot of pleasure or profit but not the whole poetic profit or pleasure. I believe your failure to rate properly the organic form is responsible for your statement that a spiritual truth expressed in prose can be as successful as in poetry. Successful in what? In giving the intellect a notion easy for it to hold and turn to practical ends? For such success, prose is as good as poetry, perhaps even better. Not, however, for giving us vivid concrete intimacy with the being of that truth, an enrapturing concrete vision of the body of that truth. Spiritual truths are not abstractions or bare ideas: they are presences and entities, they are faces and forms of the Divine and the intellect can by itself take hold of them as little as it can of human faces and forms, presences and entities. The intellect is a valuable faculty; it is always there, I suppose, in some mode or other in all self-aware experience,
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a human mode on our plane and a divine mode on higher planes, but its function is not successful in giving us the being and the body of anything: it has to join with other faculties, other modes of consciousness. To these modes prose cannot make as successful an appeal as does poetry and for the simple reason that the poetic expression is intenser in rhythm no less than in word; it appeals more keenly than prose to our senses and our imagination, to our heart and our intuitive self: it carries home to us better, therefore, a spiritual truth's stuff of body and stuff of being. Prose succeeds in communicating these stuffs as it approaches more and more the form of poetry. Yet inasmuch as it stops short of the full form it misses the last degree of the intensity with which they can be communicated.
In fact, prose is not meant for that extreme communication, and if it forgets this by interspersing its harmony with a marked poetic element like metre it achieves an objectionable hybrid. Leave aside spiritual truths, even non-spiritual communication in prose is spoiled by the intrusion of metre in a regular poetic way. Dickens is notoriously guilty of metricising his prose when aiming at pathos: sentence after sentence in the description of Little Nell's death is iambic blank verse not cut up in lines, and to the true artist ear the passages are jarring. Ruskin also indulges in the same device now and again: he jars less because his vision is poetic and his words too have a poetic turn. Still, his metricised prose in the midst of genuine prose writing is not very pleasant and seems somewhat cheap, as if he were avoiding the true discipline of prose art. Poetic prose should keep regular marked metre at arm's length: what it should have is a subtle subdued play of certain recurrences of beat, a play even more subtle and subdued than a skilful poet's who desires to eschew a monotonous base. After all, the base in poetry has to assert itself on the whole, in spite of the various modulations: in prose there must be no such assertion, only a general euphony emerging from many bases briefly appearing and changing before their appearance can be distinctly
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noticed. Metre in the strictly poetic sense must be taboo if prose is to be good. A few typically poetic motions of the mind may also be said to be out of place — a certain super-audacity, or super-picturesqueness or super-ornamentation or super-compactness. The spell-binding power of metre lends these motions a naturalness and an easy effectivity which are hard to produce in the looser and more pedestrian pace of prose. Prose, therefore, by its very swabhava is debarred from the highest expressive office — the top note of revelation, spiritual or secular. Its excellence, its integrity, depends on its being true to its swabhava and on its not trying to ape in patches the last and crowning perfections of speech belonging to the swabhava of poetry.
It is because form is bound up with those last and crowning perfections that as sensitive a knowledge as possible of the sound-values and the metrical laws of the tongue in which a poem is written is most helpful. Those values and laws go to constitute a good deal of form. Not to be able to distinguish between the long vowels and the short, or to pronounce correctly the combinations of vowels and consonants, or to know where exactly words are accented is to miss the musical significance of English poetry. I say "significance" on purpose, for sounds and beats have not just a quality of fineness and crudeness, concord and discord. More than through anything else, the thrill of the poetic afflatus is transmitted through the rhythm they combine to build. This rhythm bears both the nature of the emotion behind a burst of poetry and the nature of the plane on which the emotion finds tongue. Each emotion has its own vibration, and this vibration is within a larger vibration which characterises the living stuff of a plane of consciousness. For an example take the compactly emotioned descriptive line about wintry boughs in Shakespeare:
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,
and put it beside Wordsworth's less compact but equally keen-emotioned description:
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...more desolate, more dreary cold
Than a forsaken bird's-nest filled with snow
'Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine.
They have a kindred heart-thrill which communicates itself to the language, but the language shapes itself on dissimilar planes in them, and the dissimilarity is felt even more in the movement and sonance of the words than in their turn and order. In the Shakespeare it is as if our bowels of pity were exquisitely stirred together with our heart, whereas in the Wordsworth the heart seems to set up with delicate piercingness a mournful tremor in our grey cells. To the one the life-force in us, where sensation throws up thought, directly answers; to the other, the mind-force throws up sensation, gives a direct echo: the emotion finds voice in the two lines on two different planes because the two poets do not draw their inspiration through the same plane. Nor is the emotional vibration within the larger one of the predominant plane the only thrill in rhythm: there is a vibration too of the consciousness-stuff becoming a vision, becoming an idea, becoming an intuition of realities that cannot wholly be caught in idea or vision. To hold and communicate all these thrills with all their deep and far-reaching suggestions, sounds and beats are prime factors in poetry. (I mean English poetry, where beats are concerned; other languages have other metrical determinants.) Poetry, and to a lesser degree all imaginative writing, are wholly appreciated, wholly absorbed, wholly lived with and lived in, when the musical significance is felt side by side with the verbal, the former re-inforcing and filling out the latter.
As we go poetically to higher and higher levels of spiritual consciousness — or rather, as higher and higher levels of spiritual consciousness get expressed in poetry — the musical significance keeps increasing and gets more and more important. The mantra, as the Rig Veda and the Upanishads understand it, is characterised chiefly by the unfathomable hints borne on the rhythm. Alter the rhythm,
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however slightly, and the mantric potency is diluted: the words may remain the same and the alteration of rhythm caused by altering their order may let the sense be also the same, and yet the sheer Godhead will depart because, though the verbal sense is the same, the musical sense is different and has not the suggestion of a profoundly penetrating massive infinity and endlessness. If for instance, that superb line of Dilip Kumar Roy's —
His sentinel love broods o'er the universe.
is slightly rewritten —
Broods o'er the universe His sentinel love,
the meaning is unmodified by the inversion, the poetic quality too is as perfect and yet the two lines do not hold the identical vibrancy of the watchful infolding vastness they connote. I believe the rhythm of the one creates mantric waves in the hidden layers of our consciousness, that of the other somehow falls short of this extreme mystical effect. A mystically-minded reader may not lose the sense of the sheer Godhead despite the rhythm being altered; but then it is he and not the line that supplies the sense. People have drawn that sense from the most unlikely poetic phrases because their own sensitivity to the Eternal could contact a spiritual magnitude looming behind secular symbols and rhythms. Since the magnitude was looming behind instead of emerging to the front, it would be wrong to trace their experience directly to the quality of the phrases. Judged in themselves, the phrases could not be credited with mantric might.
To feel the mantric might we must allow the rhythm to get realised by us and this is most satisfactorily done when poetry is read aloud. If we do not read aloud we are prone to pay attention to the verbal sense rather than the musical. Audible reading presses the latter into us more easily; by keeping the outer ear engaged we stop the sound-values
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from escaping — a concrete holding of them is accomplished by the air-undulations we start. Our sensational being is put in action, our very body commences to respond, the nerves grow attentive, the heart follows the rise and fall of the air-undulations, the blood begins singing the poem within our veins. All this stirs the mind that is using the body as its medium and that has become by too much identification with it dependent on bodily means for getting impressed and influenced. I am convinced that if a poem is never read aloud it will not yield its finest magic. Only by repeated audible reading the subtle overtones and undertones spring to life within us. But I do not imply that a poem is always to be read aloud. Once we have gathered its "soul of secret sound" there is no need to hear it each time with the outer ear. In fact, for turning a poem into a meditation we should slowly dispense with the outer ear's ministry. But we must not jump into an utterly soundless commerce with the poem: though not employing that ear we should still hear the sounds, an inner ear giving us service and bearing to us the full rhythmico-metrical significance. With mouth closed we should yet carry on articulation: the eye, or the visual memory when the book is not with us, must be accompanied by the ear in a subtle form: the auditory phenomenon, however inner, must be there. So the distinction between loud reading and silent is not radical: it boils down really to articulating sounds in an outward way or an inward. The inward way may be the goal of effective reading, especially for purposes of meditation, but the outward has to precede it sufficiently and make the inward seizing of the "soul of secret sound" possible before that soul can be borne to deeper and deeper levels of our consciousness.
From what you write, I infer that you believe the process of going deeper and deeper in the consciousness ends with a Great Silence which is the ultimate depth. No doubt, there is a Great Silence — all mystics testify to it. Yet I wonder if in the integral Divine any Great Silence drowns and annuls all speech. A divine silence incompatible with even divine
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speech strikes me as a partial experience — an experience due to our inability to reconcile or hold together seeming opposites of the divine Existence. The Personal and the Impersonal, the Multiple and the Unitary, the Active and the Passive, the Voiceful and the Silent — these are some of the contraries in which God has been conceived and realised — and the tendency is to regard the second term of each pair as the more truly Godlike, as having more of the essence of the Ultimate. The cause of this tendency lies in the lagging of our Nature-parts behind our pure self. The self soars up to the Eternal, but our nature of mind, life and matter remains untransformed. As long as no key to their absolute transformation is found, it is logical to conclude that they labour under a basic undivinity and hence must be finally dropped and escaped from: one step further is to look on them as some incomprehensible illusion that has got attached to the sheer self: all that is personal, multiple, active and voiceful is deemed of less and less worth — secondary, subsidiary, superfluous, phantasmal. Sri Aurobindo, however, has found the key of Nature's transformation: past masters had sometimes dimly glimpsed it and groped for it in a hazy manner, none had clearly seen it and sought for it in the right way and grasped it for good: Sri Aurobindo alone has, and now at last the cry of travailing ages for the plenary Godhead here below and not only there above will be answered: our matter itself will live in the light and the law of the Immortal. Our Nature-parts have their archetypes of truth in a Divine Nature that is inalienable from the Divine Self and, by the descent of that truth without which indeed everything in Nature would be a supportless Maya, our mind and life and body will put on divinity. That is the Aurobindonian revelation. Its bearing on the point we began with is that the final depth of our consciousness is no solitary Great Silence but a Great Silence for ever accompanied with a Great Voice.
Though there is in God a positive ever-present hush which no amount of utterance will abrogate, He is no annulment of all utterance nor is the being of Him such that it
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can never be uttered. He is not exclusively a hush and His being is beyond utterance in only this respect that no speech falling short of the Voicefulness proper to the plane of the supreme Divine is entirely adequate to the Existence, Consciousness, Beatitude and Archetypal Creativity of that plane. In brief, God cannot be truly spoken except by God Himself! To fasten on God an incapacity to utter Himself would be to cast a slur on His Godhead. It is speech taking shape on the level of the human consciousness or even on any-level below the highest divine, that to a more or less extent may be said to "come a cropper". On the highest divine level an everlasting Song that is God goes on simultaneous with God the everlasting Quiet. No inadequacy to capture the very secrets of the Eternal in language mars that interminable Harmony.
Can poetry give us this celestial music? The ancient Indian rishis held that it could, and it is precisely the type of poetry possessing the power to do so that they termed the Mantra. The Mantra, they said, is not anything born of the human consciousness or, rather, anything garbed in the shape and colour of the consciousness that is human. The values and figures of it come from the divine Consciousness straight and sheer: the life-throb and rhythm of it spring from the very heart of the Eternal and the Infinite. It is the direct epiphany in words, the sovereign scripture. Apart from the fact that God's song-aspect is not the one and only He has, there is no Unutterable for it in the essential sense: the sole sense in which it faces the Unutterable is in relation to us, for we can derive in our poetry not His whole Harmony at once but snatches and portions and masses of it. The conditions of the time-state under which alone we are obliged to manifest His Song and Harmony preclude the endless totum simul, the boundless Totality all in an ensemble and in one miraculous illimitable Now. Inasmuch as the totum simul is beyond poetry as we know it, even the Mantra as manifested by us labours always under an impotence and is dogged by the Unutterable. But in itself it is "the Word that was in the
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Beginning," the Logos, the Shabda-Brahman, and when it manifests under our time-conditions it still brings us in essence the flame-tongue of the original Fire that, in the Upanishadic phrase, has gone forth everywhere and become all things.
In view of the Mantra's divine nature I am inclined to make a few remarks as to how exactly your beautiful statement about poetry's shortcoming as well as service should be interpreted. You write apropos of spiritual art of the Aurobindonian character: "the inner journey that one makes with the poet acting as the charioteer becomes a pilgrimage to the spaces beyond in the mystical wideness, but the poet stops at a point and, as if with a finger, points out something far away and seems to say, 'Now the rest of the journey has to be made all alone. The chariot will not go any further. I have been there and I have tried to tell you what it is all about. You have to develop your own wings to reach the foot of the Himalaya of the Unknown.' " What happens has been finely and correctly described here — it is true that we have to pass beyond poetry, acknowledging its high aid, yet also recognising its insufficiency for us. Personal sadhana, personal Yoga is needed — a profound meditative passage to the in-world and the over-world, a passage of stillness in which poetry is left behind. Yes, we have to still everything that we know in our ordinary waking life, the to-and-fro of the consciousness has to end. One-pointed, we have to shoot ourselves into the Eternal as into a target — arrows of silence speeding to the Unseen. But two queries arise: first, have -we to do this because the Unseen is the opposite of all speech? and second, is our procedure due to the defect of poetry or to our inability to get from poetry its full substance of heavenward help? Without depreciating the need of silencing our ordinary consciousness and leaving poetry behind, we can affirm that the Unseen is not incompatible with every kind of speech: it is speech that is not mantric that has to be abandoned as helpless after a particular stage. Even mantric utterance has to be abandoned — but that is because we
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cannot get out of it what is really inside it. Do not blame the Mantra for this. The blame should fall on us, obscured mortals, who cannot get God-realisation even through God's own word. The Mantra is indeed God's own word, a wide door opened into His magnificence" and His mystery. That door is the Divine Himself, in one aspect, drawing us. And if we were apt to mystical experience, we would fuse with the Divine as soon as the Mantra swept across our being. Mantric poetry chariots us only to a certain distance not because poetry cannot carry us right into the Divine but because we are incapable of being charioted by it to the very end. Lack of direct power can be charged to poetry if shape and colour have been given it by the poet on a human level. A varying approximately direct power can be attributed to poetry that is above that level yet still below the sheer divine plane — a power not enough to take us to the grand goal though it may make us neighbour it. But how can we accuse the Mantra of any defect? The inspiration of lines like Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God in which the mantric breath plays all over in different degrees fails by our defect, and not by any fault of its own, to lift us clean across the boundaries of Beatitude: its chariot is not compelled by any internal limitation of power to roll up to a certain mark and there stand still: if no rolling further is possible it can change its luminous locomotion and fly instead of rolling: it has wings as well as wheels and on its pinions it can bear us, if only we let it, to "the foot of the Himalaya of the Unknown" — nay, even to the crest of the Sacred Mountain!
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MOODS AND MODES OF POETRY
(TWO LETTERS)
1
You are right in saying that the true objective of poetry is not merely expression but also communication. A poet should not care solely to please himself or one or two of his own mind; he should try to establish rapport with the large number of cultured men who are receptive to poetry. Yet, to make easy communication his entire ideal would be unfaithfulness to his own inspiration, particularly if he happens to be a mystic. "Clarity winged with beauty" is indeed a fine thing finely stated and some of the world's greatest verse conforms to this type — but clarity is a relative term and what is clear to one may be obscure to another and what may be clear on one plane of consciousness may be on another pretty obscure, at least at the start.
If we take the mass of men as our criterion we confine ourselves to the mental plane which is at present our general status. There are many other planes deeper and higher than the little bit of individualised mind which homo sapiens enjoys, and they have their own concrete and harmonious and vivid contents — like Sri Aurobindo's
Sun-realms of supernal seeing,
Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss.
Why should poetry convert everything into a mental clarity? I do admit that poetry errs when it is undisciplined and has no moulding of significant form. Does it err, however, when it transmits a state of consciousness which is not familiar to most people, even most people of culture, and into which they cannot easily enter? — an Aurobindonian state, for instance:
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He who from Time's dull motion escapes and thrills
Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast,
Unrolls the form and sign of being,
Seated above in the omniscient Silence,
or
My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight.
Poetry has its obligations to men but it has also its obligations to the Gods: it is not altogether a man-made thing and so other planes than that on which man is normally at home have their rights of expression — and expression in their own modes and not just in the modes of the human intelligence. If we say Nay to these modes on the ground that they would not be found vivid and vibrant by us at the first blush, we set up a rather rigid and unnatural standard, besides shutting out influences that would evolve our consciousness by mingling with it the patterns and tempos of the ultra-mental in an undiluted form. Art is not only recreation: it is revelation too, and it need not be understood or appreciated easily. Even in recreation there is some strain: one does not hit a boundary or score a goal without the least fatigue! You have gone to the extent of conceding that poetry succeeds if its meaning can be even "dimly divined by anyone and everyone whose mind, imagination and spirit are in a sufficient measure capable of appreciating beauty and art." But don't you think the dim divination is somewhat arbitrarily defined as happening almost at once and without any strain? Of course if a poem remains a total Sphinx for ever and yields no significant suggestion to a cultured man in spite of his brooding on it and absorbing it and living with it, there is for all practical purposes failure. What I want to claim is that a poem should not be considered to have missed its objective if it does not yield immediately its purport. One must try to open oneself to it, let its figures and rhythms sink into one and stir layers of consciousness subliminal and
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supraliminal. I do not wish to defend the pretentious gibberish that is often written by modern poets and labelled Surrealism. Perhaps even those who style themselves Symbolists are also at times guilty of a mere musical mystification. I am pleading only for those who convey authentic figures and rhythms of the subliminal and the supraliminal — as Nishikanto does with
O Sleeping Lion in the caverned darkness
Of the rock-heart of every sentient thing!
Give us thy glance, if only for a moment,
Of a child up-gazing in its slumbering —
or Dilip Kumar Roy with
O deep starry secrecy
Twinkling in my heart
or Sri Aurobindo himself with
The dragon tail aglow of the faint night
and
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering
winged through the universe!
I dare say I may thus give the benefit of the doubt to many an ingenious purveyor of abracadabra — but the insistence of the French savant you quote on "No Fatigue" and yours on simplicity and clarity of the mental kind run the risk of condemning what is beyond the mind's threshold in a genuinely inspired and beautiful way together with what is confused and chaotic, nebulous and nonsensical.
To be involved in construction and precious in language are faults if one is these things for their own sake. However,
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if a certain state of being cannot be fully brought out in a simple and straightforward manner or with easy and ordinarily poetic words, hasn't one to be true to one's complex vision and to the atmosphere of a rich rarity that envelops that vision? You will perhaps declare that there is nothing that cannot be said clearly and simply. Well, some people declare that there is nothing that cannot be said sufficiently in prose. Poetry, in my view, comes in to say what prose cannot; and in poetry, complexity and out-of-the-way speech come in to do what simplicity and so-called natural speech cannot. When the vision is not complex and the atmosphere not a rich rarity and still the poet tries to make them out to be such, it is then that he produces spurious word-manufacture and mechanism instead of creation and organism. Not otherwise. And this holds for non-mystical poetry no less than mystical: poetry of the mental plane as well as of planes beyond the mind. I do realise that we must spare no trouble to bring our vision to a focus, we must not luxuriate in the hazy and the slipshod. The point I am trying to make is that there can be a focus in which several shades of light mingle and there can be a multi-faceted distinctness and a crowded accuracy. You mention Greek poetry as being the opposite of the involved and the complex. I must admit Greek poetry to be superb and to be in the main, despite Aeschylean and Pindaresque elements, "clarity winged with beauty". But I wonder what the Greeks would have thought of Shakespeare at his most Elizabethan, at his extreme of mercurial mood, metaphor-gorgedness, word-variety, protean syntax. More or less the same, I suspect, as what Voltaire did. The French have an intellect very much like that of the Greeks, though in other respects they are very different, and most probably Aristotle would have proclaimed like Voltaire that Shakespeare was a drunken barbarian. And would the Greeks have got hold of the Romantic Movement in its Shelleyan, ethereally entangled aspects by the right end? And would they have relished the bold and colourful intricacy that is so
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magnificent in certain portions of Francis Thompson? Would the Celtic twilight of Yeats with its labyrinths of vanishing iridescence have found any place in their subtle yet "sunny" consciousness? Intellectual criss-cross and sophisticated maziness are definitely objectionable in poetry — and I am of the opinion that it is these that Milton excluded when he talked of poetry being simple as well as sensuous and passionate. Milton himself — as compared to a poet like Homer — was far from simple. I don't believe his construction and his mode of thought were even as simple as Sophocles's or Euripides's. His "simple", therefore, I understand as "unforced" or "fresh" or "alive with a natural vigour": it is opposed not to "complex" but to "mechanically constructed" or "dryly devious" or "artificially abstract". To be "simple" in the Miltonic sense one must have authentic vitality, a force as of Nature. Is Nature or authentic vitality always simple in your sense? Is an organism uncomplex? Are the formations of the life-force quite straightforward? The important point appears to be that whatever the complexity there must be a harmonious working, a fine unity of effect — what the Greeks called the quality of being felt as a whole. The means for achieving such an end can be elaborate or ingenuous, multiply-wrought or plain-built, highly coloured or crystal-clear, remote in suggestion or of the earth earthy, precious in language or direct-dictioned: does it matter a hoot what manner of thought and word the poet employs so long as the manner is appropriate and there is the creative elan? Sometimes the impression of the involved and the precious is given us because an unfamiliar plane of consciousness" is manifested; the manner of thought and word may be in itself quite simple on that plane without seeming simple to the plane we commonly bring to poetry. But even when the expression is actually not simple and straightforward on any plane, I am disposed to think it has a right to exist as a legitimate manifestation of the poetic spirit; there is nothing in it intrinsically opposed to the play of genuine inspiration.
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2
Your original position which amounts to saying that mysticism is an affair unusual enough and that its poetry, if not simple and clear, becomes useless to the world at large is quite definite though open to serious dispute. What puzzles me is the qualifications to it you are prepared to make. Besides adding that at least dimly the mystical poet should make himself understood you affirm that even this he should do at not necessarily first sight. Your "at least dimly" and much more the lease of time you are ready to grant a poem for delivering its purport — don't they take away the edge of your formula of "simple and clear"? A poem which gives a dim sense of its drift at the start and especially a poem which gives it only after effort by the reader through a period of time can never be called clear or simple. Intricacy and complexity and preciousness are admitted as soon as you relax the demand for crystalline disclosure and quick communication. It is just this relaxing, on behalf of a certain type of inspiration, that I was asking for in my letter. Where then do our ways part? Do they part solely in that you personally prefer clear and simple poetry while conceding a firm locus standi to the other sort and that I enjoy the two sorts equally in general while personally preferring the latter when it is the result of allowing planes higher and deeper than the mind to speak straight away in their own mode of consciousness? Perhaps the crucial parting lies in one thing alone: the native speech of the ultra-mental planes.
In the light of your relaxing your demand, your reference to the frustration and irritation most readers feel with a great many modern poets acquires a special meaning: their work must be such as to yield nothing at all to the bulk of readers although it may be studied again and again. And since your discouragement of the native speech of the ultra-mental planes is almost in the same breath as your reaction against those modern poets, I take it that according to you the communication by this speech to the bulk of readers is nil
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and hence this speech must be eschewed, no matter how deep and high it may be, until humanity has evolved beyond its present level by means of the poetry which converts mysticism into terms mentally understandable.
But is it true that here general communication is nil? What I declared to be naturally lacking was "mental clarity", the absence of which is not the same as the mind's hold reduced to zero. The speech I am talking of may not be clear to the mind, but it does give some hold to our mental awareness: a dim hold at the outset or a hold dim or otherwise after effort by the reader. It differs from intricate or complex verse of the mental type not by denying the mind any hold but by addressing its appeal to layers of consciousness in us that are hidden at present and by making their response a condition for the development of the hold afforded. In the appreciation and absorption of all poetry, to see and feel and intuit are as important as to understand: in fact, understanding has to be brought about by them instead of vice versa. It is because of this that rhythm with its strangely moving, subtly suggestive potencies and metaphor with its impact on sight, on imaginative association, on "empathic" powers in us have been regarded as so vital since the dawn of literary history. The peculiar mode of poetry would lose its raison d'etre if mental understanding which is the arbiter of prose were deemed the chief recipient of impressions here. Now, what the direct poetry from planes higher and deeper than the mind does, while giving the mind a small initial hold either immediate or after effort, is to push through the more important avenues of seeing and feeling and intuiting towards the ultra-human background in us; stirring that background, it supplies the understanding mind with a species of revelation which on analysis satisfies the demand for significance. Communication, therefore, to the mental understanding is not nil. It is achieved after difficult contact with secret forces accessible to the seeing and feeling and intuiting side of us — secret forces which, in the case of the large run of poetry, are never substantially stimulated but which in a kind of surface-
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projection are always evoked by all genuine poems of the mental plane since it is always on what we vaguely name the soul that poetry presses for essential appreciation and absorption.
"After difficult contact", I have said. Counterbalancing the difficulty of communication, however, is the value of it. For the contact with the ultra-human background is of the utmost use in our progress beyond our present level. Though you admit the need of progressing to the planes deeper and higher than the mind you consider the best method to be mental instruction in the matter of them. I believe that one of the most important methods is to expose, through poetry, humanity as much as possible to them in their own original form instead of "mentalising" them. The responses called forth by such exposure are dynamic in a manner that nothing else can equal. Mental explanation and elucidation and interpretation of the mystical Beyond by poetry can be helpful in preparing humanity for a step inward and upward; yet we cannot dispense with the help of a direct touch of the In-world and the Over-world. The two helps are something like the Guru's precept and his example, his teaching and his personal influence, his putting us in the way of his books and his permitting us to sit at his feet in meditation.
Deeming ultra-mental poetry to be an immense aid to human evolution, I hesitate to stop trying my hand at it side by side with mental. And I feel sure that if you who have so keen and sensitive yet critical an approach to the Muse gave closer thought to the question you would discern all the abyss that gapes between this class of verse and the product of the high-brow coteries from whom you seceded during your literary life in England. I myself am no apologist for the various schools of dadaists, surrealists and futurists nor the intellectual contortionists and abstractionists and those who elaborately manufacture private symbols. I think it is these men you refer to in your interesting account of the change of outlook undergone by you — writers who tap the chaotic side of the subconscious in one mis-shape or another and
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who employ the ingenious outer brain with this or that faddist penchant. Not only is no small initial purchase permitted by them to the mind in the midst of their obscurity but even the obscurity they go in for is cut off from the roots of inspired living, is sterile, is haphazardly intricate or deliberately recondite. The vital breath is missing in such obscurity — there is not the afflatus and the enthousiasmos without which poetry can never make us see and feel and intuit. Authentic mysticism is very far indeed from the cult of the modern unintelligibles. It is a mode of intense living, charged with the concreteness and directness of warm throbbing intimate experience. Even the peace-aspect of it is not arid and artificial and unfructuous but fresh, fragrant, all-enfolding and most creative by stilling the diverse petty confusions that hinder and impair the founts of spontaneity. The obscurity of authentic mysticism has an atmosphere of wide reality — it is not haughty or exclusive or self-satisfied — it does not stand apart from vital springs. Neither the chaotic side of the subconscious nor the ingenious outer brain can produce art. Authentic mysticism comes with a fire in the emotions and a light in the imagination and a golden glow in the intuitive self, it strikes harmonious chords in our being and finds a most natural outlet in artistic activity. It is entirely different from the "modernism" from which you broke away. The latter is incapable of being truly inspired and consequently has no evolutionary value. Wanting in that value, it has no justification for being obscure — nor, I should add, the power to overcome the neglect into which it may fall, for only when an obscure work is inspired the possible neglect of it by people will pass because of its innate drive towards their seeing, feeling, intuiting faculties. Sooner or later it is bound to become a force in the general life of the world and deliver the illumination which is hidden in its apparent obscurity.
I do not aver that all mystical art should be ultra-mental or that, when the ultra-mental confronts us, there will always be difficulty in getting through its "door of dreams". I am
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just putting my finger on the merits of the ultra-mental art; they are undeniable, be the difficulty what it may. One of the most profound merits is in connection with the meaning you give to the term "democracy": the basic brotherhood of man. I agree that the universal acceptance of the spiritual principle of human brotherhood is not assisted by the esoteric doctrines, narcissism and intellectual snobbery characterising the work of the modern exponents of poetry among whom you began your literary career and whose inadequacy and wrong-headedness you soon realised. But to be intellectually democratic does not travel a long way. It is, no doubt, a worthy thing — yet if it occupies the whole domain of literary endeavour it becomes a menace by shutting out still more puissant agents. Together with it, there should be the direct sweep of the ultra-mental planes. For, on these planes alone the brotherhood of man is no sentiment or idea but an actuality of experience, a burning truth of our very being. There the Self of selves is found — and even further than the human formula the spiritual basis extends, underlying all living creatures, unifying the entire cosmos. The inmost throb of the world's oneness is there, a universal unity of conscious existence as natural and indefeasible and immediate as our present sense of distinct individuality. Understanding and sympathy, intellectual democracy and ethical fellow-feeling are fine as far as they go. But they have serious limits: the beast in man and much more the devil in man are too strong to be changed by them. Even mentalised spirituality is not enough; the planes where oneness is an automatic experience must invade us in their own original form. And part of the grand invasion must be through the sort of poetry I am advocating — poetry like that invocation by J. A. Chadwick who was known in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram as Arjava:
Immortal wisdom of gold which was thrice refined,
Shine in the clear space of holy noon
On all the upland hollows of the mind:
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May every shadow-harbouring thought be strewn
With solar vastness and compelled
To feel all fear and all self-limits quelled.
Such poetry, more than any other, creates in us the turn of consciousness which opens into the Upanishad's One who has gone forth and grown many.
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SOME PROBLEMS OF POETRY
(THREE LETTERS)
To D
Artistic intensity I have always stressed. It provides the key to a lot of problems connected with poetry. The problem of sincerity which you mention is one of them.
A poem is admittedly an art-medium and if an art-medium is chosen for what one has to say, artistic intensity is of paramount value. Once you grant this, it becomes pointless to speak, as you have done, of "simply an artistic value" in a spiritual poem. Perhaps you mean by "artistic value" decorativeness laid on from without or mere technical skill. But these things are not art. The former is in fact a fault which art must avoid. Technical skill is indeed necessary, yet it is not all that art comprises. A particular kind of force from within, a certain type of intensity, has to become technical skill if we are to have artistic value. Thus understanding artistic value we may state that in a spiritual poem, as in any other kind of poem, sincerity is worthless without it. If spiritual sincerity in a poem is to depend for its worth on anything else, what purpose can be served by selecting a form of art for its expression? Why not just blurt out what you feel? Why cast it into image and symbol, why attend to qualities of rhythm, why resort to metre and rhyme?
I am not asking you to be an art-for-art's-saker in the sense that so long as you create art it does not matter whether the art is spiritual or no. You are quite right, as a sadhak, to believe that you must produce spiritual stuff or nothing. But don't forget you are producing it in an art-medium. If you do, the quality of your work will suffer. I don't think you are oblivious of the paramount importance of artistic intensity. Otherwise, why should you pick and choose, as you do, from among your poems? All you write is
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spiritually sincere: yet you reject some poems and keep others. Your sifting is done because, no matter how sincere you may spiritually be, your sincerity will not be the sort necessary in poetry if you do not achieve artistic intensity.
Here you are likely to raise the point: "Is it not possible for a poem to come artistically intense, to be inspired in form, without being sincere?" Well, how is a reader of poetry to judge what poem is sincere and what insincere? He is not supposed to know how a poet has lived: he has only the poem to go by. You surely do not expect all your readers to be aware that you are a resident of Sri Aurobindo's Ashram and are faithfully following in your Guru's footsteps? Lacking that awareness, will they be doomed for ever to doubt your sincerity? I put it to you that they will never fail to feel a poem to be sincere if there is artistic intensity in it, the inspiration of form. In the absence of this intensity they may feel that you are sincere as a man, but they will never feel that you are sincere as a poet. Conversely, they will feel that where a poet has artistic intensity he is ipso facto sincere.
Is this startling? It wouldn't be if certain misconceptions were removed. The first truth to bear in mind is that a poet is not bound to have an actual experience of whatever he says. When, for instance, you write:
Twinkling in my heart! —
are you stating a fact of your experience as a man? You may be, but you could just as well have written the lines without doing so. Certainly, you did have some emotion of what you said; but I doubt whether your psychic being actually experienced a mysterious vastitude, realised a divine cosmicity full of a myriad glimmerings and thrillings of intuition. What did happen, most probably, is that such an Immense existing within the hitherto unexplored profundities of your inner and higher self found you sympathetic to its presence, stirred your imagination and used you as a verbal medium. Of
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course, if one were possessed of the full experience one would be more frequently a verbal medium of its rare richness, but outbursts of regions of consciousness unrealised by the poet do occur pretty often in poetry.
The second truth to remember is that a man can have many sides to his nature and, while one side may have a turning towards God, another may have a penchant for the Devil: the work he does through the former is not insincere just because the latter has play in him too. Unless he rejects the devilish side, he will not create very often through the Godward side and his creative possibilities there will remain unfulfilled on the whole. Yet, what does come forth in poetry through the opening he somewhere has to the Divine can be as sincere as the work of a consistent spiritual seeker, provided the artistic expression is perfect.
The third truth to keep in view is that a poet has the power of entering into some sort of communion with anything and everything — even those things which are far removed from his trend of life and run counter to his general disposition or character. A dramatist may write a play to illustrate his own vision of the truth of the universe, but one of his dramatis personae can be somebody who holds a diametrically opposite vision and this vision can be expressed also with poetic perfection in the course of the play. You don't suppose Shakespeare was a murderer or even in sympathy with murdering: still, the speech he puts into the mouth of Lady Macbeth invoking the powers of evil to aid her in killing Duncan is one of the peaks of the Shakespearean Parnassus. And it has not one false note, it is absolutely sincere, a potential murderess seems actually speaking.
I have written at some length merely to help you look at poetry in the right way. My remarks are not meant to dissuade you one whit from cutting yourself off, for the sake of your personal sadhana, from certain poets and feeding more and more on certain others. But what I have written can assist you to distinguish grades of artistic excellence in the
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poets you like and not accept everything as equally good. Also, I hope some parts of this letter will help you in intensifying your own inspiration and guiding yourself along the correct path in your self-criticism.
I cannot say that the path indicated by your friend in his letter is really desirable. If we went by the criterion of the same recognisable Force which is behind all your poems, there would be no need to weed out anything: all your poems bear the mark of an Aurobindonian sadhak and, judged in that light, they must without exception be preserved and published. But to lump everything together would be to serve ill even the Force your friend speaks of: that Force is best served in poetry by what is poetically intensest.
To R
We must not underrate in the poetic phenomenon the importance of form. When you respond to poetry, words and rhythms seem to remain for you a little in the background. I do not deny that to write with striking phrases and euphony and effective metre without any inner word-life and rhythm-movement getting expressed is to construct verse rather than to create poetry. But, conceived as inwardly animated and determined, form cannot occupy "a secondary place" and for the obvious reason that without it there can be no poetry at all. The bhava, the living sense, which you speak of as being the primary value to care for, cannot function poetically in its absence. To miss form in the connotation I have given it is to miss poetry. The bhava has to be there, or else we shall have gibberish; but side by side with it we must have form to produce poetry or any artistic work. If you are only after bhava, you are going to art not for its artistic qualities but only for its idea, its sight, its emotion, and if you do not attend to those qualities you will get these things in just a general way and not in their individual character and force. The general idea, sight and emotion in Browning's
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God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world
is almost the same as in Dilip Kumar Roy's
For 'tis His will that overarches all,
And yet what a gulf of difference between the individual character and force of the one and that of the other! The vision is merely skimmed in Browning: it is caught with its depths wide open in Dilip Kumar Roy. Both thought and feeling in Roy are luminously and rapturously mystical: they have in Browning no turn or tremor beyond a lightly lyricised religious outlook's. The profound glow and rapture in Roy can get realised by us only if we respond in full to the form of his expression, if we let his words and rhythms play upon us. Change the words, alter the rhythms and though the general bhava may stay the same, the beauty has vanished and with the beauty all individual character and force.
Maybe you will argue that once you comprehend the idea and grasp the image and stir to the emotion, it is not necessary to let the values of words and of their order and of sounds and stresses hold the consciousness: the feel of the language, of its movement and of its music may seem to you secondary if not negligible. But in that case any words so arranged as not to be without concrete import and correct grammar would do just as well for conveying Roy's substance, and prose would be as effective as poetry. Surely you cannot imply this? And if you do not, then form is of extreme use. And in form the elements which you regard as very minor — long and short syllables, assonances and consonances, basic beats and modulations — count a lot. You may not pause to notice them and the poet may not have paused every time to manipulate them, but they are there: the inspiration working through the poet has intuitively attended to them and we must attend too, though not with a
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schoolmaster's dry-as-dust mind. We need not start analysing them, but we do need to give them their proper realisation: if we mispronounce and misaccent, we shall mar the music and prevent the subtle suggestions borne on the music from filling out those of the words taken as intellectual pointers. If you go to art and do not respect form as much as what you call bhava, you fail to draw from art the specific values and powers it has to offer.
By the way, your observation that no great poet thinks of stresses and feet and long and short syllables while composing his poem is erroneous. Inspiration coming in a perfect rush leaves no need for the poet to play consciously the artist; but inspiration coming slowly and after considerable effort on the poet's part calls for a fair amount of conscious art-activity. Many poets correct even while they create instead of leaving correction to be done afterwards. And you are mistaken in your idea that, if they created without any correction then or afterwards, the poem would always be more touched with natural freshness and radiance. You believe Walt Whitman never revised or modified his first draft and thereby achieved a rare sincerity and simplicity which to what you term "sophisticated ears" sounds somewhat crude. That is not so. Whitman worked over his first draft as assiduously as any other poet: Of course, on several occasions he had no need to work over it, but he never thought such working to be a loss of sincerity and simplicity. His free verse is not another name for poetry just flowing through — without the "sophistications" of chiselling and polishing as well as of rhyme and metre. There is plenty of deliberate art and cunning rhythm-scheme and deft disposition of subtle harmonic units in his free verse.
The first draft of anything has nothing to recommend it in being first: it may be inspired or no, it may be sincere and simple or it may be "sophisticated": everything hangs on whether genuine inspiration has found a channel or a false facility has got an outlet. A corrected version is not bound to be "sophisticated", it may be the very soul of simplicity and
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sincerity. Keats originally began his Endymion with the line:
A thing of beauty is a constant joy.
Only later, when a friend found it lacking something, he rewrote:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
The first draft was tame, the second electric. Those famous lines of his —
...magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn —
had in the first draft "windows" for "casements" and "keel-less" for "perilous". The whole spirit of the thing was lost: the magic atmosphere and the fairy feeling entered only when Keats started being what you term "sophisticated".
I must here mention that by your coupling of sincerity with simplicity and opposing them to sophistication you appear to suggest that to be sincere and not sophisticated one must be simple. I don't see sincerity in terms of simplicity alone. To be complex is not necessarily to be sophisticated. Sophistication is truly the product of an artificial braininess or a deliberate high-brow ingenuity. The "metaphysicals" of the seventeenth century are often sophisticated in the former sense: the "modernists" of the twentieth in the latter. But there are effects in both that are brainy or ingenious in an inspired way: some of Donne's conceits, for instance, are not superimposed on the idea and emotion but organic to them and Eliot has at times an intricate cross-light imagery that is really penetrating. Here they are apparently sophisticated while being truly sincere. Where, however, there is in a poet complexity without any braininess or ingenuity the charge of sophistication has not even an apparent bearing. Poetry may be simple or it may be complex — according to the personality of the poet and the theme in hand.
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Complexity can result from a packing together of many glimpses or a drawing out of one glimpse into many details; it can result also from a colourful and opulent style instead of an austere one or a multi-winged structure of sentence and syntax rather than one that is straight-lined and direct-designed. No jot of sincerity is sacrificed by thus being complex: we may with equal force declare that Nature is natural only when she sends forth a straight stream and not a winding river, raises a mountain with easy contours and a single peak and not a steep-faced mass of several summits, unfolds a majestic oak or a grand baobab spreading uniformly upward and not a sublime banyan hanging from its height shoot on strange shoot downward to the earth. So long as some elemental energy, some urge from within, drives a poet, he rings sincere: inspiration perfectly expressing itself is the sign of sincerity and there is no reason why inspiration should be simple and not complex.
There is also the fact that occasionally the vision transcribed from an abnormal plane of consciousness seems complex to our normal mind, whereas in reality it may be quite simple for a perception in tune with that plane's spontaneities, as in a similar fashion what is clear to the mystical eye is blurred and hazy to the gaze unaccustomed to hidden yogic lights. We need not doubt the sincerity of poems expressive of such seeing. Again, a poet may be simple in one respect and complex in another. Homer is said to be the best example of simplicity. His sentences have on the whole a simpler construction than Milton's or Keats's. Still, Homer has an extraordinary variety of inflexions and a recurrent play of polysyllables beside which the cast of Miltonic or Keatsian words is simple. He is simpler in his basic ideas than either of these English singers and yet if we mark the manner in which he lengthens out and details off his similes we must deem him more complex than they. Sincerity can go hand in hand with a lot of different things.
I am sure you did not intend to question this, but as your statement was leaning slightly to one side I have made bold
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to point out the impression it creates. My ideal is to be as wide-notioned and many-viewed as can be consistent with an unsleeping watch to distinguish the genuine gleam from the spurious glitter. I insist unrelentingly on authentic inspiration in poetry — the ring and radiance of the gold of beauty. Once sure of that gold, I let no bias rule me about the plain or the luxuriant, the forthright or the subtle, the clear-cut or the intricate.
To K
All poetry must be patiently and intimately lived with if we are to extract from it its full delight: spiritual or mystical poetry still more, and most the type of inspiration a few Aurobindonian poets aim at. "Most" — not simply because the meaning is likely to be difficult to grasp at first or because the life-stuff of spiritual or mystical inspiration is a reality which cannot be seized except by a sort of aesthetic Yoga. There is yet one more reason: the poetic aim now is the Divine in the original and not in a translation! This rather puzzling statement is best made clear by answering the query: what kind of poetry is the most spiritual or mystical?
To be most spiritual, poetry must draw much more than its thought-substance from a lofty source. The thought-substance of all sterling religious literature has its origin in the altitudes of the Spirit, but one usually deals in abstractions or in some emotional reconstruction of spiritual idea. The thought, of course, has to grasp the spiritual truth — but an effort must also be made to let that truth speak itself instead of our finding speech for it on the planes of consciousness on which we habitually live. The speech of these planes will not render the poetry deficient as poetry nor prove the poet's mysticism to be sham. Yet, what may be genuine as mysticism and wonderful as poetry is not necessarily supreme as the Spirit's own intrinsic expression, not necessarily vibrant with the actual life-throb of the Spirit's own heaven and home where it stands everywhere revealed
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in every aspect. The Spirit clothing itself superbly in the mind's garments — there you have the wonder and wealth of the main bulk of mystical poetry in English. A few other movements are mixed with this, but this is the predominant one, and with whoever wishes to write first-rate poetic literature of mysticism copiously, it cannot as a rule help being predominant, since mind-stuff is for us the easiest to draw upon. But what a few of the Aurobindonians aspire to do is to write things in which the mind's garments are set aside and the Spirit's body grows visible and vibrant.
Nor is that body most desired by them as it appears on certain inner planes. An exquisite or dynamic Occultism catches the Spirit naked; so too does a radiantly piercing and sweet Psychism — but neither the habitat of God's magician nor that of God's saint holds the divine body in its direct amplitude and puissance. These poets do not rest content with the "deep within": they strive to press on to the "high above", the planes from which has descended the cosmic formula, inward or outward. And there it is the rhythm, more even than the cast of vision and the word-mould, that is the secret of the shining out of the pure Spirit. The rhythm of the "high above" is the most difficult capture. Not in all its forms, though; for there are gradations and only at the very top the utter rhythm of God's self is immediate and absolute. Then we have the mantra, the word plucked from the heart of the ultimate Unknown. Then "translation" is left leagues behind: we have not only a direct poetic intimacy with God in the "original" but a sheer poetic identity with Him: we not only are beyond the mind's intervening medium, we have passed from the lesser intensities of God's presence to His keenest and profoundest and vastest Self and Supernature. The mantra arrives in utter authenticity on the pinions of a rhythm that seems to make each line a brief aureoled manifestation, so to speak, of its passage from infinite to infinite. A consciousness, sovereign and boundless, is at play in it, and the play is most vividly communicated through an immense unfathomable vibration, as in Arjava's lines:
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This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude
Of Truth's abidingness, Self-blissful and alone —
or in Dilip Kumar Roy's:
Dark waifs aspire to Thy white haven of sleep,
With voice of clay sing to the immortal stars —
or in the second of Nirodbaran's couplets:
All joy of life is now a shining part
Of the ecstasy of the Eternal Heart
Where time is a voyage with wide unfurled wings,
The flame-sails of unknown awakenings.
Sometimes the word-mould and the cast of vision are nearly of the top and still are prevented from being entirely so by a subtle lack in the sound-values. This calls for an extremely sensitive perception on the poet's as well as the reader's part to be recognised. How crucially determining a factor rhythm is can be observed if we take such a line as:
A cry to clasp in all the one God-hush.
The quality and movement here emanate from the broad clear daylight of the Spirit prevailing in the Sahasrara Chakra, "the thousand petalled lotus" of consciousness immediately above the head. But we at once leap through two still higher stages and reach the threshold of the amplest intensity by merely shifting a pair of words from the middle of the line to its end:
A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all.
The rhythmic movement goes somehow sweeping into the Unknown, just drawing the sense out to a massive measure-
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less suggestion. Such a minor alteration — a change in the place of two words, that does not perceptibly modify the meaning — and so great a difference in the spiritual quality of the line! The purely poetic power was not less before; what is added now, however light it may be, is the mantric touch.
The way the mantric touch gets in leads me to consider another question: Does intense spiritual inspiration sustained from poem to poem prove an intense spiritual life throbbing in the poet day to day?
Indeed, to get the mantric touch often, one must be initiated into Yoga. Even to write, with some degree of command, in the language of the regions above the human mind yet below the level of the mantra, one must spend years in contact with the divine Truth. In the past, except for very short accidental spells, poets outside the Rig Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita never caught inspiration from these realms of light. To succeed in making these realms one's habitual fount would be to create a new poetic literature, to usher a novel era in inspired utterance. It is part of the mission of Sri Aurobindo to give poetry this large and luminous innovation. In his later work he has performed feats of spiritual creativity that are a breath-bereaving grandeur. A moiety of his opulence those who have stayed close to him have been able to receive. They can never thank their stars enough for the privilege to reside in his Ashram and learn by his gift of inspiration and critical insight the art of opening doors to the in-world and the over-world.
Yes, they have learnt to open mystical doors, but you must not conclude that they can keep the portals open all the while or pass through them at will into the innermost shrine and the loftiest holy of holies. They may take a few steps forward now and again; what they most often do is to stand at the divine doors and practise a concentrated looking at the mysteries within, an intent hearing of the footfalls of the Gods. If they had the courage and consistency to walk right in and remain there among superhuman presences, they
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would bring to birth a more shining song, a poetry more frequently alive with the pulse of the Eternal. But, even as it is, a contact deep down inside them with the Divine persists and, though it may not kindle up a transformation of their whole self, it is at times a laying of golden fingers on the heart-strings of the poet in them.
To write with spiritual intensity is not always to be a great Yogi. If the lines that are mantric were pointers to the poet's realisation, he would out-halo Ramakrishna and dwarf Vivekananda's sagehood. Do you know that these lines derive from the dizziest pinnacles of the over-world? They flow, if not from the top of Shiva's shadowless head, then at least from under his radiant feet — and those immortal feet are all the summit of samadhi and the ne plus ultra of Nirvana! Surely, even though some of the poetic triumphs issue from there, the poets do not dwell in their kingdom. Nor can anyone claim to have jumped from the thousand-petalled lotus to the ineffable flower wherein the ultimate deity stands — by just transferring a pair of words to the end of a line from its middle! The jump is an act of art, not of life.
No doubt, there is an experience of vague spiritual exhilaration in every act of art that aspires to the Divine: the force of the Eternal is intuited and a grace of soul added to the consciousness; yet the phenomenon is not tantamount to realisation. The poetry has aided the Yoga but it does not measure it accurately, for it is more a shadow of things to come than a shape of what the poet is. The Spirit has sent down powerful or delicate messages to his artist-being and he has transmitted them, himself deeply thrilling in the process and moving readers like you. He has transmitted them with a new and unusual fidelity because he has been taught by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to watch and wait concentratedly for the Everlasting Voices. Some day he will rise from his lowlands to the kingly peaks with his whole self and live in the consciousness of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Then bis poetry will not shame its imperfect composer but project in art the artist's very life and be more
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than a short and occasional and interrupted rapture; it will be all the time a moulded magnificence — a conflagration under divine control, a trained tornado out of the vast, a deluge of ecstasy directed by the Heavenly Hand.
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"Poetry is life at a remove of form and meaning."
This dictum of R. P. Blackmuir's strikes me as crystallising a very central truth. Let me interpret it to you as best I can.
It is a mistake to cut poetry off from life, but it is also a mistake to equate it with life. In poetry we do get life, but not in its crude immediacy. We get it at a remove — with a certain refining change of it.
Life, as it is, has a looseness, a roughness, a disorder-liness: it lacks a perfect organisation of energy, a rounding off and a finishing touch, a harmonious weaving together of many strands into one whole. All that life lacks here is attained in poetry as Form.
Similarly, we see in life a welter of motives, a series of cross-purposes, a shifting scenery of intention and action that falls short of satisfying coherence. But in poetry we have a vision that is not only sight but also insight: our thinking, willing, feeling, sensing are all seen lit up with an importance beyond the passing moment; they carry, together with their individual quivers, a rhythm of universal experience and, even beyond this experience, a thrill of some eternal Ideality trying to manifest in the flux of time. Each experience reveals its true direction, its substance of creative idea and becomes a worth-while end achieved. All that life lacks of Meaning is attained in poetry.
Poetry arises from life but does not repeat it. There is a transcendence of it and yet no withdrawal or rejection. Poetry returns upon life, seizes its adventure of exciting imperfections and half-lights and infuses into that adventure the sense of a soul seeking to fulfil a high and happy purpose in a body of faultless beauty and power.
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I have always wondered who could be reading my "Talks on Poetry". There cannot be many to take interest in the music of the spheres that poetry really is. The cry of things that are close and claspable is always so much more appealing. Who wants to be haunted by unattainable planets?... But are we not actually living in the Space-age when planets are fast becoming attainable? Physically at least, the heart of the poetry-lover is now not cut off from its goal. But the spheres that have called it are, of course, symbolic, and when the poetry-lover rockets to Venus or Jupiter, he will not outgrow
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
That "something afar" is in the depths of the Divine, and poetry in its essence is the rhythm of the movement of the Gods from one state of rapturous repose to another. Living as we are, we cannot imitate this movement, we cannot share in its splendour — and for this reason most men take poetry to be offering us nothing that can satisfy the acute needs of life. But that attitude is an error committed by those who have failed to vision feelingly and comprehend visionarily and feel comprehendingly the touch of the rhythm I have spoken of. Being a movement between two rapturous reposes it is inevitably what Sri Aurobindo terms
Force one with unimaginable rest.
In the aching dream of divine distances which poetry gives to its lover, there is yet a "rest" unimaginable to the common man. The substance of poetry is an infinite seeking: the form of poetry is an eternal attainment.
You have found this secret: you are one of the earth's lucky ones.
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A PERSONAL DOCUMENT
People sometimes ask me: "How do you get poetic inspiration?" Inspiration comes to me in the form of a sudden spark or flame-seed falling into the consciousness. A kind of shock is felt and I know that the soul is pregnant with a poem. The poem may follow after a brief interval or there may be a long period of gestation, but I am absolutely certain of its growth in the subliminal as soon as that subtle shock is experienced. For instance, "Pointers", beginning —
Everything points now
Somewhere, somewhere,
Silverly straining
Through the dusk air —
was the result of my gazing out at the sky through a window one evening. Something unexpectedly touched me from the faint atmosphere, and two ideas sprang up at the same time — "softness" and "piercing through". But I was unable yet to discover definitely what import they might bear. I fumbled a little while, when looking out through another window I spied a long cloud like a white finger through the thin dusk. A sense of completeness in the inner impregnation came to me, and the first draft of the poem was the almost immediate result.
At other times the impulse or rather the impact is got less directly from Nature or life than from books. Thus I came across the French words: "O divine adorable Mere!" They arrested me by their combination of sublimity and sweetness. Very much moved, I tried to become more consciously aware of the feeling — to visualise concretely its implications. I remembered my frequent experience at the feet of the Mother — as if some ecstasy were trickling luminously into
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the heart; so the line at once occurred to me: "And the still heart drinks heaven drop by drop." It is the last line of the poem composed: the rest was a matter of discerning the whole sequence of mental and emotional gestures consummated in that final soul-act.
Often a simile or metaphor or imaginative phrase in some author strikes the mind and becomes a part of one's own peculiar vision, gathering around the skeletonic symmetry borrowed from that author a living flesh of significance quite original and individual to oneself. Several of my poems are born in this way and the debt I owe most for such inspiration is, among English writers, to Francis Thompson. It is a kind of plagiarism which is often practised by poets, even by very great ones, and most legitimately too so long as one either improves the matter adopted or clothes it in a novel hue and harmony. Virgil's quarrying from Homer is well-known, so also are Chaucer's beautiful imitation of the Italians and Milton's recutting the gems he discovered in the splendour of the Classics. Wordsworth's finely intonated
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn
is undoubtedly a reminiscence of Spenser's
Triton blowing loud his wreathed home;
while Keats's
...Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn
is a superb transfiguration of Wordsworth's idea about his "lady of the lake":
Sole-sitting by the shores of old Romance.
A certain similarity of language or imagery between one poet
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and another is an extremely interesting starting-point for a revealing study of their psychological uniquenesses as evinced by the different applications they make of analogous phrases or figures.
Once the glow of inspiration is somehow caught, there is no telling the manner in which a poem may develop. My poems commence almost anywhere; that is, I do not begin at the beginning and reach gradually the close. Stanzas spurt up haphazard: usually I have the ending first and then perhaps the opening or part of the middle. I find myself mostly on the peak of the poetic experience to be embodied and then work down in the reverse way. The whole inspiration is summed up in an intense cumulative moment and afterwards set forth in its broad manifold bearings — a phenomenon perhaps akin to what Mozart meant by saying that he heard his musical pieces not in a succession of notes but all at once as one whole and later arranged them out. This arranging out or setting forth is also frequently done by fits and starts, and the first draft of a poem is bound to show lacunae, gaps not only of epithets or substantives or verbs but also of entire lines and even complete stanzas. The missing links I for one try to supply by raising myself to a tenseness of expressive effort in which I keep humming what precedes and follows the absent words or lines so as to kindle or conjure up the connection between them; or I gather myself into a deep silence and cast a hook, as it were, into the inner spiritual being and wait for the necessary words or lines to get caught and give a pull which immediately enlightens my consciousness with their essential form and substance.
*
I believe that this fragmentary method of inspiration is due to insufficient liaison between the outer transmitting mind and the elemental poetic enthousiasmos. It is not correct to say that "born" poets encounter no difficulties; there is indeed a supreme class of poets who could never have done
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the prodigious amount of fine work which stands to their credit if they had not been gifted with an almost supernatural spontaneity of perfect utterance, but otherwise facility is a dangerous delight. A powerful facility prevented Victor Hugo from seeing that often when he was thrilled by some profound emotion he did not take care to plumb it adequately but just took the surface suggestion and, led on by his mastery over language, manufactured rhetoric instead of poetry. He rose grandly in verbal excitement but without having plunged deep enough in thought and emotion: so there remained even in the midst of his most grandiose flights a not infrequent ring of insincerity: he sounded like a prophet, but a prophet who had not lived up to his own message. One was astonished at his eloquence, but not taken absolute prisoner — sense and soul laid under a spell — as one is again and again by the speeches in Shakespeare. Shelley was a "born" poet, so much so that, after Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser, nobody has been productive to such an extent and with such a sustained poetic quality as he, yet it was not because of his facility only that he could be a channel of almost continual inspiration. It was his inspiration that made his facility bear fruit — he wrote easily enough when he fell in love with Harriet Westbrook but no poet of his young age wrote more wretchedly. Nothing before "Alastor" is of any value: one has only to read his ludicrous juvenilia to wonder how so weak and unoriginal a versifier could almost at a leap become a feeder on honey-dew and a drinker of paradisal milk. The fact was that in some way a connection got established between the outer and the inner, the man and the Muse that was the soul of his soul.
How unspeakably important it is for the man who feels the seed of song in him to get the sun and rain that shall awake its giant potentialities may be realised from the instances we know of men possessing wonderful talents yet baulked of that ability to take one step forward which constitutes the salto mortale between verse and poetry. A mind like Pope could have put to magnificent use the
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neatness, clarity, point and speed of his versification if only the true spirit had possessed him. As it was, he wrote rarely anything comparable to those four lines of his which show what we have lost because his talents never caught fire — lines which by their solitary excellence epitomise in what they say the tragedy of the man who wrote them:
Most souls, 'tis true, but peep out once an age,
Dull sullen prisoners in the body's cage:
Dim lamps of life, that burn a length of years
Useless, unseen as lamps in sepulchres.
Speaking about myself, I fear I would have been nearly a lamp in a sepulchre — in spite of my having indulged the itch for poetic composition for a length of years — without the liberating touch of Sri Aurobindo. Ever since boyhood the pen has been to me the ultima Thule of all pleasure and the poetic output of my early teens was prolific but blissfully innocent of the true poetic glow, except perhaps in a chance phrase here and there, and my first notion about metre were most laughably original: I actually used to imagine that if one packed two or more lines, by means of close or spaced, small or large writing, into equal lengths across the page they became metrically uniform! Later I learned to scan and developed a pseudo-Byronic style which gradually grew more individual, yet something of Byron's temperament remained and, in conjunction with an incisive intellectuality, love of the recherche and a passionate complex decadent desire for sense-experience, led me to my first true self-expression in poetry. I say "true" not meaning aesthetically valuable but as showing the promise of something such to come: there was an evolving consciousness of rhythm, image-beauty, structure. However, apart even from technical defects, one element seems at present to me to have definitely flawed much of that early production — an element which has been admired by "modernistic" minds of my own milieu, with the result that the book I published then and half
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regret now is still discussed and praised for its vital frenzy and perverse intellectual zest. Luckily it was under the nom de plume of Maddalo, the name given by Shelley to Byron and hinting in my hands at a kind of Shelleyan idealism gone Byronically topsy-turvy in which Byron's healthy vulgarity became sicklied o'er with the pale cast of a gout d'infini lost in a world of sensations — a fever of the soul, so to speak, striving after a grotesque perfection — idealism expending its power in a twisted intensity of physical passion. No doubt there were a few fine efflorescences in the midst of this strange psycho-analytic mysticism and towards the end of the phase illustrated by the book a catharsis of the sensations was perceptible, an opening of the genuine emotional being, less pathological, less modernistic, more directly inclined towards the spiritual depths. And, though now something verging on sentimentality threatened to use the intellectual energy to shape variously another ingenious idea-pattern of image and word-colour, there was some true liberation into the pure accent of poetry. Still, I cannot be said to have really come into my own, the reason being that my centre of most individual inspiration was not, as I had imagined, in the mind or in the passionate nature, but in something beyond them — an amor Dei not merely intellectual or inclined to see in a rosy haze the common feelings and bodily excitements, but aching for the Spiritual, the Eternal in its unadulterated form, a straight nisus towards deity. The trouble, however, for those whose poetic inspiration must be drawn from beyond the normal mind in order to be perfect and who yet have too active and ingenious an intellect is that, until' the latter is fully illumined with the Spirit's smiling certainties, the inspiration is likely to come in fitful rushes and a lot of shaping has to be done, conscious artistry to be practised — not to cover up and conceal the gaps but patiently to draw out, from within, that part of the poetry which has got suspended somewhere in the subliminal instead of coming through like the rest. A strong faculty of self-criticism has to be acquired, a Flaubertian sense of the only word and the
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unique cadence, lest the pondering consciousness should too easily content itself with rhetoric and ornament in lieu of the inevitable expression. Once acquired, this faculty is a veritable oestrum and the poor poet goes sometimes fretting for days before he sleeps the sleep of the just, the man who has done justice to the divine discontent in him. Dorothy Wordsworth records how William once wore his nerves to shreds trying to find a new revealing epithet for the cuckoo. I can quite understand William's scrupulousness — would he had never learned to wear his readers' nerves to shreds as he did in later life by finding a country parson's tongue in trees and Sunday School sermons in stones! I myself have spent a whole fortnight on tenterhooks for the sake of one noun1 and had to wait for over a year before a certain inspired line brought down in a sudden stream its complete context of an eighteen-lined poem.2 One does not, however, regret these poetic pains: I can never sufficiently thank Sri Aurobindo for his yogic power that put me in touch with the inspiration my real temperament was fumbling towards through blind alleys, but, next to the faultless prolificity for which I aspire, there is nothing I could value more than his critically opening in me an eye to sift in my work the gold from the tinsel glitter that might accompany it, together with his gift to me of a ear that can occasionally catch the "sweet everlasting Voices."
There are, of course, many poems the whole of which are bull's eyes scored at one shot: some of Shelley's have that look and Shakespeare in his best passages must have laid line after mighty line without needing to halt anywhere or amend anything: has he not the reputation of having never blotted a single word? If he really wrote Macbeth in this fashion, that play is surely the most amazing miracle of the human mind, for excepting perhaps a couple of short scenes at the very start, it is one unbroken rush of imaginative grandeur. Lear, that other peak of his genius, has an intenser dramatic
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quality in parts and is vaster in its sweep of occult elemental vision, but the progress of its poetry is not so consistently high as here: if not valleys, it has marked lesser and greater eminences, while the mountain that is Macbeth uplifts, gigantically, an almost straight sky-line. But even Shakespeare is now and then liable to slips which make us wish he had done a little "blotting". Take the lines (from Hamlet):
...When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear...
One doubts if the concluding "bear" is an embellishment, almost repeating as it does the sound of the bodkin's epithet; it may not be easy to substitute this quasi-homophone, but Shakespeare ought to have spurred his super-Pegasus to carry him over the difficulty. Often the impetuosity of a poem or its dazzling richness covers up such peccadilloes, and in blank verse, where the technique is a special one and factors like assonance and consonance have got to help the reader forget the absence of end-rhymes, one cannot as legitimately pick fault with regard to these points as in rhymed poetry, but even there it is possible to overstep the limit. Where rhyme is already playing its part, force and fluency and fertility of imagination become unquestionably more chaste and quintessential in their functions if they are not strained to render little flaws less prominent. All the same, it must be added that one can easily fly from the eddies of irresponsible inspiration to the hard and dry rocks of hyper-critical technique, failing to see the effective use possible in some places of what would be defective in others. Thus, a sound (particularly if stressed) in a line, echoed noticeably by another coming rather close in the next, may be open to objection, as in
Lo then my love — a single-aimed fearless dart!
Shall it not pierce lone-leaping through the void
The dim indifference of Thy God-heart?
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I would regard it as a positive improvement to replace "fearless" by "flinchless"; but when an undeniably poetic suggestion is secured, all theoretical qualms must be thrown to the winds — a suggestion as in the line,
Burns with a benison the murk of time,
where a word like "dark" instead of "murk" would weaken the competent "murk"-combating power the similar sound gives to "burns", while "gloom" would render the rhythm at the close too congestedly labial and sticky: one would have to press the lips together and pause twice without any perceptible interval. Swinburne would have preferred "murk" simply on the ground that it interwove an extra echo-effect with the general rhyme-scheme of the stanza from which the line is taken, and he would have considered the substitution of "fearless" by "flinchless" a serious blunder. Perhaps "fearless" too can be defended, though not as so inevitable a word as "murk"; but to concede without demur the utter lightness of Swinburne's tendency towards extra effects, assonantal, alliterative of rhymal, would be to forget that, even with a great metrist and musician in verse like him, there were occasions when these devices struck an artificial note which his rapid complicated lyricism could not excuse.
I do not share the present-day cult for the frigidly terse, the roughly deliberate, which inveighs against Swinburne's so-called effusiveness, verbal and rhythmic. Keats, too, would seem pompous, romantic, colourfully emotional, and thus open to the charge of effusiveness in the eyes of the extremists of cold and dry light in poetry. My criticism of Swinburne is directed only at his failure sometimes to practise the art which naturalises art and not at his penchant for harmonic recurrences or rich proliferations of word and idea and sentiment. There is in him a rhythmic ecstasy which
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is of the fundamental essence of poetic expression: without that breath of exaltation no poetry is possible and on the wings of it Atalanta in Calydon and Tristram of Lyonesse reach a sheer glory of inspiration nowhere else to be found in Victorian times. Tennyson's art and music are a pale finicky dandyism compared to this masterful exuberance: the older poet surpassed Swinburne in sense of character and in narrative skill, but in the true furor poeticus the younger was with the very few masters of English verse, while Tennyson never fulfilled on a grand scale that subtle yet pungent quality his genius possessed by which he could interpret languid and intricate distempers of the heart against a changing detailed background of sympathetic landscape-colour. This quality he himself was not completely conscious of: else he would not have smothered it under a suave or sentimental superficiality. Anyway, the supreme accent is not often his — such as many pages of Tristram of Lyonesse reveal; much less can we hope for it in the anti-Swinburne school that makes a fetish of neglecting the high enchantment their bete noire seldom lacked. Of course, Swinburne's style is not the sole possible medium for such enchantment: no poet could be more concise, more clear-cut than Dante, but there is also a richness in his restraint, he is a fire on the leash. Whether controlled or expansive, it is a rhythmic intensity of vision that constitutes great verse, a thrilled mating of sense and sound within an austerely beautiful or an ample and luxurious bed of metrical rhythm. Swinburne was mostly for ampleness and luxury — not in the least a fault by itself: when he failed it was not because of his style or temperament but because there happened in him pretty often a curious division between the music and the matter of his inspiration. The former, except when the art remained somehow insufficiently concealed or naturalised, left him very rarely: almost always his song was a bright flux and reflux, "a foam that the sea-winds fret", as he himself put it, but he did not invariably take care that "the thought at its heart should be deep as the sea".
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What happens in the case of many modern poets is nearly the opposite: they have the stuff of poetic experience and even a certain power of language, but the sound and the rhythm that uplift everything, the charm or the nobility of mental and emotional stress in language — these are absent. Instead we perceive either a flat colloquialism or a self-conscious cleverness, the latter defect perhaps more fatally prominent. Even when they are not openly cutting intellectual capers, they seek after a flaring abnormality of form and phrase in order to prove their virtuosity. It is not true that their utterances lack depth; only, the tendency nowadays is to say deep things in a clever way, which can be done in prose provided the writer keeps within due measure, whereas the function of poetry is, if we may hazard an antithesis, to say clever things in a profound way. Poetry aspires to give the talent or genius for getting striking images a noble thought-value, a fine emotional tone, instead of letting it succumb to the temptation of scintillating itself away in mere epigram. Analyse true poetry wherever you find it and you will immediately notice how clever the similes and metaphors are. Take Wordsworth's
It is a beauteous evening calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration.
Is it not ingenious of the poet to link up the idea of a nun to that of the departing day? Yet, we are not struck only by the novelty of it: a hush full of rapture falls on us and the tense emotion with which the link is rhythmically forged in his mind goes straight to some inner centre of vision in ourselves. Give a modern poet the same clue and instead of converting the surface brilliance of the analogy into a profound luminosity which has a touch of something ineffable he will perhaps perpetrate a stroke of unexpected double entendre and at least mutilate the noble theme even if in spite of his modern predilections he is still a true poet. I can more
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or less conceive what some Ezra Pound gifted with no negligible force and subtlety would do. Most probably he would resort to a pyrotechnic display of cross-light imagery in treating the fast-fading sacred atmosphere of Wordsworth's sunset:
The evening's red tranquillity Is like a short but beautiful nun Whose silent thoughts are haunted by The bleeding Son!
These hypothetical lines have at least some rhythm and completeness, unlike the fantastic free verse and violent excess of word-vision several contemporary poets are practising — rather poetasters, for Yeats and AE and, at their best, Abercrombie and Masefield are in the great tradition of English poetry. But the lines are spoiled none the less by their too patent intellectuality and striving after flamboyant effect.
In modern poetry, much that is neither frigid nor hectic, that avoids conceit and mental acrobacy no less than being prosaic and undistinguished, is yet outside the pale of inspired rhythmic speech because the modern critical conscience is too easily satisfied. A writer full of promise begins to relax his artist-sinews when he is not asked uncompromisingly for the best and nothing save the best within his power. One remembers how a chorus of unreserved praise crowned Gordon Bottomley as the most astonishing creator of the poetic drama since the seventeenth century. Poor Stephen Phillips with his Paolo and Francesca and Herod seemed quite forgotten; but that did not matter, for it is the nature of enthusiasm to forget rivals and, even if the critics had wanted to be just, Phillips would not have occurred to them, so completely has the "ripple of oblivion" gone over
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his brief incandescence. The important question was: Did Gordon Bottomley deserve the laurels of a true dramatic poet? Without doubt, he displayed the instinct of a dramatist: he could create revealing situations and throw into vivid relief the phantoms of his mind. In that sense he was "poetic" enough — "poet" meaning in Greek a maker of forms; but there is form of dramatic situation and there is form of character and there is form of imaginative word-music. Balzac shares with Shakespeare the vastest power known to Europe of living characterisation and is his superior in plot-weaving: a regular world criss-crossed by remarkable incidents and tense with vital genius he projects out of his multifarious being. But has he Shakespeare's word-music, Shakespeare's miraculous rhythm of metaphorical thought? He fashions here and there a striking sentence like "La gloire est le soleil des morts", but that is all: he does not teem with unforgettable phrase or rhythm. It is true that his medium was different, but Victor Hugo too was a creator in prose, though not so intense in emanation of character as Balzac, and even in prose he had what Shakespeare had in poetry, though naturally there not to such a heart-disturbing degree as Shakespeare — the gift of imaginative music. Passages in his novels, therefore, approximate often to great poetry, while Balzac for all his giant capacity of dramatic fiction is not seldom the despair of both the artisf s and the grammarian's ear. What Hugo lacked here also was enough depth and sincerity — a lack which flawed his poetic vision just as want of word-music left Balzac's creative gusto incomplete. In the case of Gordon Bottomley, there is sufficient creativeness of event and personal nature, and no false "high-faluting" alienates the reader's sympathy. He is sincere and restrained, never unduly raising his tone nor straining after rhetorical flourishes, and his language can be suggestive; but in his caution against rhetoric he clings too much to the conversational rhythm and the merely adequate pitch of language. Verbal surprise and rhythmical spontaneity are not constant in his verse: no lightning leaps out
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from his lines, no celestial thunder rolls through them, with that fine frequency so needful in poetry, in especial when rhyme is absent. Leaving aside pentameter-freaks with which he intersperses his plays, such as the almost unscan-nable
Like an after-thought that deceives nobody,
his average movement and idiom are weak and their weakness is rendered more glaring, as Enid Hamer points out, by sudden bursts of poetic adjectives:
I know not why it is I must be fighting,
For ever fighting, when the slaying of men
Is a more weary and aimless thing to me
Than most men think it... and most women too.
There is a woman here who grieves she loves me,
And she too must be fighting me for ever
With her dim ravenous unsated mind.
This is from King Lear's Wife; possibly the tone is meant to anticipate that of the "foolish fond old man" in Shakespeare, though Lear mad seems to have been inspired, and, when sober, just puerile. But even in Bottomley's best play, Gruach, which is conceived as a prelude to Macbeth, showing what kind of girl Lady Macbeth must have been when she first met her husband, and is admirable for its dramatic structure, live characterisation, thrilled atmosphere of forces seen and unseen — even Gruach is not a perfect success as poetic drama. The author is surely a poet: that is revealed in a score of instances — passages of varying lengths: but in between these oases lie considerable deserts not exactly of dull thought, false feeling, inadequate phraseology or technical gaucherie but of rhythmical commonplace and imaginative feebleness. There is a certain haunting presence of imagination throughout the play but it does not focus itself as much as it should nor where foci arc formed does it tingle
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and glow with the necessary intensity, so as to give again and again either a wide-winged eagle-sweep or a light lark-soar of enchantment. Of really marked poetic style — that is, a clean spurt of originality in sound and significance — only three or four moments occur besides the one striking passage sustained on a level where for the first time the poet in Gordon Bottomley may be considered to achieve something of a Shakespearean sovereignty of expression. Gruach, going to the hearth and gathering a handful of wood-ashes, pronounces a curse on the house and the family in which she has been immured:
It shall go down, or like a broken tree
Whiten and crumble to a hollow bone;
The moon shall soften it to a cowering dread,
And shapeless noises shall inhabit it.
(She moves slowly from the hearth to the great door, scattering the ash with a sower's motion as she goes)
I sow and I sow the chaff of the seed of fire:
The waving barren harvest of wilding flame
Shall here spring up, nourished by stormy air.
Come ruin, ruin and grief upon this old
Dwelling of sorrow and my captivity.
My mother died of grief; it is not ill
Her hard unfaithful race should die of grief.
Come, ruin, down upon this greedy life,
Destruction and unseating of the mind;
Woe, be embodied to their unclosing eyes
While brackish tears run down and lodge in their lips,
And all they have flies up in flakes of flame,
To fall as now these ashes.
That is marvellous; and if Gruach had more of this level, it would be a unique performance. Seeing it one might have thought Gordon Bottomley would do what, despite several
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astounding fragments, Beddoes, the only other poet who entered the Elizabethan lists with some real hope of success, failed in because of temperamental defects. Great poetic drama consists not only in an exciting accuracy of plot, in a delicate or powerful portrayal of personality, in subtle or sublime action: it has something in the language superadded to all these — a kind of profound exuberance which is no otiose decoration but a rich overflowing as if the words were made to grow wider and deeper than their own logical connotations and to carry in their combined music a rapturous heat or a vibrating splendour their separate sounds or any other combination could never give. Judged by that standard, Gruach is what a great artist in the making would produce, showing a very developed dramatist but not yet a full-fledged poet. It is a pity Gordon Bottomley did not cultivate a conscious artistry keen enough to make it a prelude to some Macbeth from his own pen!
A conscious artistry careful of every sound and syllable, loading each rift with ore according to Keat's famous advice, is, however, fruitful only when the self-critical mind succeeds in drawing down a new corrective inspiration where the old creative inspiration has left hiatuses. Otherwise a sort of ornate or eloquent labour or else a false simplicity must result — in any case, artifice instead of art. But even inspired verbal technique is just one side of poem-building: though it is true that the highest poetry demands the smallest detail to be a gem, a collection of gems cannot sparkle into a perfect poem. Besides the necessity of fusing idea and emotion in beautiful precise and moving words, there is another desideratum: each poem under composition must be sensitive to that quality so notable in Greek literature of being felt as a whole. Of course a general plan is indispensable, and a satisfying conclusion, too, by way of climax pregnant with a significant resolution of the mood or a clear winding-up as though the energy naturally came to rest, unburdened of all
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its intention. But a certain selective control also has to be practised, by which the work throughout its varicoloured play preserves its essential tone and temper, its basic unity of idea, its original emotive vibration. This control must be ruthless if it is to shape a poem in the proper image of the archetype that from behind the external consciousness, either directly or in response to life's stimulus, presses for manifestation. Not merely the rough and the insipid have to be ruled out: the charming and the effective must also be sacrificed if they do not agree with the peculiar substance and style of a poem: else the creation, no matter how delightful, how august in general, remains yet faulty to the instinct which considers the scheme with an analytic view at the same time that it appreciates the total impression. And when the poem is long and complex in its psychological chiaroscuro so that it is a masterly blending of many mood-phases, each well-nigh a little poem by itself, the same scrupulousness needs to be applied on a large scale: that is to say, not simply the ensemble but every mood-phase must be executed with the same attentive gradation of shades, not one scene should lack its individual perfection as well as its vital propriety in the full plan. Usually a laxity vitiates either the parts or the whole; there is much vividness and skill of detail without a taut constructive technique or the work is done with an eye to cumulative effect at the expense of the minutiae. And it must be repeated that constant poetic value is not sufficient: both in the harmonisation of the masses and in the disposition of qualities within each mass the poet must be coupled with the artist. For example, the first book of Keats's Hyperion as it was originally prepared was magnificent in its total impression, but there was a curious flaw in the picture with which it opened though every line was admirable. Thus, no poet would be ashamed to have written
No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as a young vulture's wing
Would spread upon a field of green-ear'd corn,
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so clever and delicately suggestive of its meaning was the indirect allusive turn Keats had given to the language in order to keep the manner of the whole passage consistent. Yet in the passage itself the two complete lines from the above seem out of place:
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went noiseless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.
The manner and the music are of a piece, an identical type of imaginative method is at work; what is wrong with the lines,
is the sudden change of sight-suggestion by means of that subtle method, the incongruity of shape, colour, association — as though some touch of Titian's rich gaiety crept into a sombre strangeness a la Rembrandt. Figures from a "brave new world" have brought their hues into the mournful mystery and quiet round an old order declining to its grave. What has a young vulture, in the eager force and novelty of its flight through unobstructed space, got to do with the dense sunken shadows framing Saturn's fallen divinity; or the enlivening fresh gleam of an abundant harvest, with the
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primeval foliage that broods over him and his surroundings of chill silence? How can the atmosphere, however tranquil, of a landscape where those natural and bright and vivid entities flourish merge in the grey motionless unfamiliarity evoked by Keats in all the other lines? There is no poetic failure, only a failure in consistency, a lapse of the dominant motive; and Keats, artist to the marrow, was troubled by the discrepancy. So, before sending his manuscript to the press, he tried to improve the lines: the young vulture he spirited away, also the glaring colour and life introduced by the green-eared corn, and re-wrote:
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not at all the dandelion's fleece.
The first line fitted in flawlessly, the word "summer" suggesting calm and, though implicative of sun, general enough in its explicit purely seasonal significance not to contrast with Saturn's forest-world in which, even if summer's sun were shining somewhere, the heat and light could be checked by the thick overgrowth. The second still struck a dissonant chord: the dandelion whose gay sound too was a little out of tune in that context was primarily objectionable because its dazzling yellow was again an intrusion from a blithe colourful scene foreign to the mood. The disturbance was not so directly bright as that by an adjective like "green" added to a noun like "corn" redolent with bountiful memories, but an alien intensity was none the less mixed up, for all its indirectness, with the picture. Hence Keats, when the proof-sheets came to him, cast about for the appropriate visual tone, and almost at the last moment found it:
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass.
A remarkable triumph of artistry! — as precise as the line deleted but without its aura. The picture grew complete,
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shapely, harmonious: "grass", by its neutral association and peculiar dry sound, and "feather'd", by its insistence on shape and texture, distracted the attention from the imaginable freshness or colour of the objects mentioned, saving thus the subdued spell of the passage from being broken. Keats deserves all the praise he has won from critics for these alterations, for he has thereby accomplished an entire manifestation of one of the aesthetic archetypes, the conscientious pursuit of which can alone justify poetic composition.
To allude to the two sides of poem-building as a double quest for an archetype lays one open to the charge of playing the mystagogue. But I really do not know in what other way one can faithfully represent the poetic process. That something abnormal takes place cannot be denied — call it what you will, subliminal upsurge or supraliminal downpour: the point is, the poet during the afflatus is aware of a thrilled idealistic quality in the diverse mood-modulations of that mediative force in him, polishing each detail and shaping the totality, which we call his style. But let it not be misunderstood that style is mere personal idiosyncrasy of expression or that it is primarily a question of verbal distinctness. Style here is not the man as in the Buffonian definition: it is what the man is not but aspires to be — it is that in him which attempts to transmit his intuition of a final, absolute and perfect loveliness hidden in his heart, which his normal exteriorised consciousness is not identified with but is always fascinated by, in spite of all the perversities and weaknesses to which he is subject. Style takes birth when the poet fashions his work according to his feeling of this ineffable deep down in himself, when he makes words respond to the pressure of its delight and accomplish thereby their own suggestive possibilities: it is the way in which his consciousness trembles to the touch of an utter Beauty beyond words.
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For, all that words do is to provide the writer with a stimulus towards establishing a more concentrated contact between his intelligence and his instinct of perfect Beauty and then to reflect that light within him. They are to him as a strange wine with which he gets intoxicated and sees visions. They cast a spell on him, draw him into a waking trance in which he opens wide the gates upon some inner world of flawless archetypal dreams. Dreaming, he gives his medium the mould of his ecstasy, an impress of the manner in which he found contact with a perfection, inviolable and lovely, which smiles in secret behind the fragmentary uglinesses of surface-existence. Of course, one need not believe explicitly in a Jewish or Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan deity in order to be a great poet. One may even, like the earlier Aldous Huxley, consider God just a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach. But some such nameless feeling there always must be before we have poetry: for style, which is the process of poetry, is nothing else save the animation of language by this feeling. Hence the usual distinction of Matter and Manner is, when applied to genuine poetic literature, insufficiently clarifying inasmuch as by Matter is meant the idea and Manner its expression in language. Rather, Matter is the corpus of words with their infinite potentialities on which the poet works — it is his crude material, the quarry which attracts his creative impulse, the indeterminate chaos which lures him to impregnate it with the god in him. And it would be far more profound in connection with true poetic literature to speak not of Matter and Manner but Matter and Spirit. It is indeed Spirit, a transcendent Beauty perceived by the writer, that shapes a piece of poetry, though it may act on different levels in a Francis Thompson and in a Baudelaire. But its presence is unmistakable on whatever plane and in whatever personality it may shimmer through the veil of articulate sound. On a congenial level of manifestation it bursts upon us in the "majestic instancy" of a Hound of Heaven; it is, however, none the less present, irradiating the
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ordinary rhythm of life, in an utterance of such exquisitely decadent despair as
Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,
Riche mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres vieux!
The only pity from my point of view is that Baudelaire could not allow the Spirit in him to find tongue in the highest key possible to his consciousness. No poet but is eternally grateful for a magnificent phenomenon like Baudelaire; but one need not on that account be completely satisfied with him: I for one endeavour to catch a glimpse of the supreme noumenon behind Baudelaire. And that is why I am not fundamentally content even if in my own personal output there comes into being many a phrase which, to use Alfred Douglas's powerful figure, could be thrust "like a lean knife between the ribs of Time". It is not merely first-rate poetry I yearn to produce: most gratefully I receive whatever the Gods grant, but it is my constant aspiration to manifest a particular kind of rhythm, a particular soul-vibration — spiritually the highest which I can recognise now that Sri Aurobindo has shown me the path of inwardness. Great verse has a vast variety of word-movement and on the wings of many different styles can one reach the top of Parnassus. Shakespeare's teeming vitality of phrase, Shelley's ethereal rainbow-speech, Yeats's jewelled spontaneities of occult utterance have all the inevitable character which makes for immortal life in human memory: they are each a type of poetic masterhood, but the rhythm I search for is not dominantly there. The expression is flawless, the music unimpeachable, but where is any assured glow of the voice of some supreme consciousness that rolls from the everlasting to the everlasting, the voice not of that multi-coloured passion which filled the spacious Elizabethan days or that haloed subtlety of emotion which is Shelley's inimitable genius or that exquisite sensibility whereby Yeats conjures
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up vistas of a twilight perfection — the voice which for a moment before returning to its home of fathomless awe lingers in a miraculous line like Wordsworth's
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
Notes and References
1. "Alchemy" in line 14 of "Sky-rims"
2. "Pool of Lonelinesses"
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THE ADVENTURE OF THE APOCALYPSE*
The poet who is not merely idealistic or religious but has a direct mystical sensitivity and of whom it may be said that his adventure is the Apocalypse — what species of poetry would he particularly aspire to write? In general answer to this query we may begin with some remarks on production from the dream-consciousness, the phenomenon now loosely known as Surrealism.
The ordinary notion about the dream-consciousness is very restricted and, though Freud and Jung have interestingly and ingeniously explored certain layers below the mind's threshold, they have not driven home the fact familiar to all practitioners of Yoga that behind the normal waking mind there is an immense range of being, with several strata or planes, each a universe in itself with objects and creatures as real as any we meet from day to day. These objects and creatures interact with our universe, pressing upon it their forms and potencies and moods. We are usually touched by them in our dreams in the midst of a welter of memories and wish-fulfilments, but even at other times there is constant communication between them and our life. Psycho-analysis skims only the surface, so to speak, of this communication; nor has it any concrete sense of the cosmic actuality, the world-substance, of what works behind. So it achieves nothing more than a fragmentary probing of the subconscious — mostly the individual subconscious and sometimes the general and collective, but even the collective is felt to be just a play of the similarities lying at the base of the variations of individual psychology. Everything is "found" psychological — even God is a psychological pattern — and the basic similarities are seen in terms of primitive impulses and the more developed and subtle velleities are interpreted as
* This title echoes that of a book of poems by the author, to which there is "A Personal Preface" and for which the present article may serve as "An Impersonal Postscript".
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refinements of those impulses. Surrealism in the West, guided by the findings of Freud and Jung, does not escape the psychological taint and, with it, the limitations of a shallow and sporadic awareness of the dream-regions. One of the worst limitations is the fitful, confused, inconsequential imagery.
Yoga serves to join the outwardly wakeful to the inwardly wakeful, the physical world to the supra-physical principalities and powers, the visible formulations to the occult structures of the one substance of Spirit that has emanated everything. The symbols of the Yogic surrealist are transcriptions of interrelated occult realities: either they are adapted, though never quite subdued, to the normal mind's manner of perception and conception, or presented "neat" with the normal mind acting the interpreter as little as can be helped. The latter course is the rarer creativity. When it is followed, the reader is called upon all the more intensely than in the ordinary type of poetry to see and feel instead of understanding. Understanding, of course, does come ultimately, but as a fiery intuition that breaks out through seeing and feeling and reveals the coherences and significances in a total comprehensive sweep which cannot everywhere be analysed into a system of progressive parts. The particularity and precision without which no poetry can live is not ignored: the particular and precise steps are vividly realised: they, however, cannot be throughout marked as orderly phases of imaginative thought developing into a definable mental scheme. Rather, the steps seem often to be self-sufficient and there is for the normal mind some lack of connectivity: the parts, though inter-related, do not always piece together, they are harmonised mainly by an intuitive "whole view" flooding the interspaces between the parts with a subtle cementing light which does not need the labour of thought in order to know.
The Yogic surrealist's explorations of the dream-consciousness are revelatory as well as profound, and they are both profound and revelatory by being made with the occult
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sight directly. But there is one other characteristic: they use the occult sight not for its own sake. It is the Supreme Divine who is sought, and the occult worlds are penetrated in order that they may yield strange thrilling tangibilities of God's sweetness and grandeur by which the earth-consciousness may grow more alive to its own evolutionary purpose. The Yogic surrealist is activated by the deepest of all the occult planes, the plane of the World-Soul where the Supreme Divine has His most luminous delegate power in the subliminal. And it is in rapport with this plane that there functions from behind the emotional heart the true soul-centre within us, God's nucleus in the evolutionary process of the individual, round which the mental and vital and physical personality is built and organised. Nor is the secret soul by itself the plenary inspiration of God-discovery. It has to open the subliminal upwards to the supraliminal. The planes of God's free and full being are "overhead" — answering to the innate sense we have of His living high up in the sky. The inspiration which descends from there is no longer surreal in the strict connotation of the term, unless we take the term broadly as signifying all that is beyond the reality of which our normal waking mind is aware. The ancient Upanishads distinguish two divisions in what is beyond: the dream-consciousness and the sleep-consciousness. We enter into the former through subtle centres or chakras which have some sort of corresponding plexuses in the physical body. We enter into the latter by going beyond the system of the inner and the outer through a chakra that has no corresponding physical plexus, the traditional "thousand-petalled lotus" above the brain. When first we break loose from both the subtle and the gross we have the experience of an infinite void, a featureless self-liberation without end, a sublime superconscious sleep. Really there is no vacuity here, cosmos on glowing and vibrant cosmos is disclosed, but there is an underlying indefeasible unity through all the divine multiplicity — a single boundless Selfhood that is perfect peace, within which and upon which
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perfect power is at play. From this peace and power the Yogic poet has to catch his inspiration if he is to be the apocalypt par excellence.
Poetic visitations from the "overhead" planes come with a vast powerful ease of illumination and harmony, for now there is no translation of the Divine into terms near the human formula: there is the original and authentic self-expression of the Spirit, the Divine uttered in the Divine's own way. A fine hierarchy climbs from intensity to greater intensity of divine substance and divine form, Spirit's matter and Spirit's manner — until the top is reached where abides what the Rishis named the Mantra, the divinest of all poetic words — a sovereignly luminous and miraculously rhythmed expression like that stanza of Sri Aurobindo's, summing up his own Integral Yoga:
Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
In lines like these there is at the same time a sheer exceeding of the normal waking intelligence and an absolute fulfilment of it. For, while realities before which human logic stands dumbfounded are disclosed, a tremendous clarity rules everything, the Truth is seen face to face and the omniscient consciousness pervading all plunges right through to the very essence of our being and wakes a power of identifying ourselves with whatever is spoken of or shown. Of course, reader and reader will differ in response and some may kindle up more than others. But amidst the extremest oddity and alienness of the revelation a grip will be felt even on our whole waking consciousness and the intelligence will stir with an immense philosophical joy of ineffably understanding what yet "passeth understanding". Not only symbol at its most living and most intimate but also philosophy at its most far-reaching and most synthetising is the apocalypse of
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"overhead" poetry, especially when the vision and language and rhythm are of the Mantra.
We have described the supraliminal and the subliminal as two divisions of the Beyond. They are, however, not cut off from each other. They can combine and get mutually coloured in various degrees and sometimes fuse inextricably. Both are at play in all poetry that is inspired. But poetry is not always written with its eyes directly turned on them. It is written mostly with a look on the physical universe — and through the forms and scenes of this universe the subliminal and the supraliminal are glimpsed. Mystical poetry reverses the progress. It does not reach the greater through the smaller but the smaller through the greater. It goes from a sense of the within to the without, from a sense of the above to the below — it catches up what are called nature and life into the light from which they are narrow projections, it is not limited by them, nor bound to their fixed terms: it does not use them to make vivid what is vague to the consciousness but, rather, finds them vague in comparison to what is vivid to it and suffuses them with that vividness in order to bring out what has been vague in them. It does not compare God's infinite Self to the blue sky: it compares the blue sky to God's infinite Self. I am talking of the essential movement of mystical poetry: actually it may phrase its comparisons in the ordinary way, but the way will only serve to express a direct feel of the superhuman and the divine and a feel of the human and the natural as obscurities to be lit up by the former instead of as lights by which the mysteries of the latter are brought nearer to our understanding.
"The direct feel of the superhuman and the divine": the phrase must be taken in its proper meaning. The feel is not merely of a secret existence greater than the human and the natural: this existence is felt in terms of sensation as concretely as the objects usually sensed by us. Thus God's infinite Self to which the blue sky is compared can be felt in its own rights as an expanse of luminous azure. There is the blue sky of our common experience because the mystical
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origin of it is a divine existence that can be experienced as a never-ending blue of absolute bliss and because between that ultimate being and our ordinary firmament there are amplitudes of sapphire expressing grades of happiness intenser than our world can hold. It is precisely the sense of such actual concrete stretches that marks the difference between ordinary verse talking of God's infinity and mystical poetry doing the same. Ordinary verse employs similes and metaphors about that infinity as if they served to concretise what can "never be sense-experienced. Mystical poetry knows that the superhuman and the divine can be seen, heard, touched: out of some seeing, hearing and touching of them in the recesses beyond normal waking life its words are caught, and that is why by the significances which they bear and the suggestions which they breathe we are given the impression that no similes and metaphors are here but the emergence of strange realities through the striking imagery. The imagery is not the face and figure put on the Unknown in order to awaken us to what is hidden and remote: it is the face and figure shown us by the Unknown of itself, awakening us to its own living closeness and to the pale derivativeness of earthly things from mighty miraculous terms of occult and spiritual sensation.
Here a word of warning is necessary lest every mystical poet should be credited with achievements of mysticism because of his achievements of poetry. The dream-conscious or the overhead poems he writes are certainly a transcript of occult and spiritual actualities, but they do not imply that in each instance he has had the experience his poetry embodies. Poetic mysticism is not identical with personal mysticism: the poet is indeed a mouthpiece of the Gods and is in touch with them through some part of his being, yet he may not in his personal consciousness have risen to the heights or delved into the depths. Thus, for instance, when he says, "I have seen the inmost truth behind man's form", he must not at once be taken to mean that in sheer fact he has beheld this inmost truth as he beholds man's form. Personal mysticism
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can do this marvellous beholding with a direct sense-faculty of a non-physical kind: poetic mysticism need not have exercised this faculty — all that it need have exercised is a sympathetic imagination by which the inmost truth directly visible to personal mysticism is projected for him as on a cinema screen. The cinema screen can bring very vivid impressions and call forth responses as though to concrete things: still, we cannot deal with its figures and scenes as we do with men and women and natural objects in the world which the film represents. There is, on the screen, realism without reality. The sole difference between the screen's realism and the realism of mystical poetry is that at any time the latter may merge in reality and become mystical experience. Although the difference endows mystical poetry with a strange trembling on the verge of the real, we must not forget that often the verge remains uncrossed and that always to attribute to the man the adventure of the apocalypse belonging to the poet is a naivete fruitful of many confusions. In a Sri Aurobindo the man and the poet are one. Every mystical poet, however, is not a Sri Aurobindo, not even a full-fledged Yogi. No doubt, if mystical poetry in glorious abundance is to take birth, the man must be in some sort of powerful rapport with the superhuman and the divine: true mystical experience must be his, but our notion of this experience should not be packed with every amazing detail recorded in the poems: the experience may serve merely as a centre of attraction by which words are drawn from the wonder-crowded vastnesses of the Unknown — words charged with the realities of those vastnesses but probably bringing to the man nothing more than an exalted and intense imaginative sympathy spontaneously generated, effortlessly sustained. The poet is primarily an apocalypt of revelatory words: whether he is also an apocalypt of the realities whose life-throb comes in the shape of these words cannot be decided straight away and the decision is not required for assessing the authenticity of the poetic inspiration.
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KEATS'S ON FIRST LOOKING INTO
CHAPMAN'S HOMER*
SOME CRITICAL NOTES
This sonnet, an early composition of Keats's, is one of his best and has ranked with the most celebrated sonnets in the English language, like (to mention a few) Shakespeare's Poor Soul.,., Milton's On His Blindness, Blanco White's Mysterious Night..., Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much With Us..., Shelley's Ozymandias, though it is a descriptive rather than a reflective sonnet and as such is more comparable to the last-named than to the others except that Ozymandias contains, as usual with Shelley, a wide imagination-charged moral whereas this, as mostly with the early Keats, leaves us with only a keen symbol of lofty feeling.
As far as the sonnet-mode allows, it gives brief snatches, often intermixed, of nearly all the various manners and tempers compassed by Keats in his poetic career. There is the romantic mood of wonder and exultation, the penchant for Greek mythology and the Greek spirit in its movement towards the beautiful mingled with the sublime, the distant charm of Spenser, the Miltonic majesty, the Shakespearean
* Much have I travelled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne,
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific — and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
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swiftness and surprise, the excited energy of some of the Bard's contemporaries — and, fusing all of them, the typical Keatsian quiver of both sense and soul and intense imaginative response to Art as well as Nature.
It is a sonnet on the Italian model a la Petrarch. Its form is the simplest and most straightforward possible in that model: abba abba, cd cd cd. There is also the required sense-pause at the end of the octave, unlike in the overflowing Miltonicised Petrarch. But the continuity of theme is well-sustained and in a manner at once natural and striking. The image of travel and discovery, with which the sonnet begins, comes at the close also and finds its climax in a historical picture (though "Cortez" is a mistake for "Balboa"). In between there is a slight shift of vision — from voyaging and exploring to the adventure of astronomical observation. But it is woven into the fundamental pattern both by what precedes and follows it. For, as preparation of the "skies", we have the breathing of the "pure serene" — the atmospheric suggestion serving as the link. And as a sustaining of the sea-discovery idea we have in the astronomer-passage the word "swims". Similarly, in the sea-passage that comes after, there is "eagle eyes", the eagle-association immediately sending our mind to the sky. Again, the Cortez-incident is vivid with the use of sight — Cortez's own staring at the Pacific and the looking of his men at each other. This use of sight joins up with the astronomer's watching in the preceding simile, and the different thing seen — namely, skies — gets assimilated into the thing beheld here — namely, sea — and becomes part of the basic symbol. Another point of linkage is the peak in Darien, something that is — in Shelley's phrase elsewhere — "pinnacled high in the intense inane", a position in the sky. A less exacting view could be that the basic symbol is simply of searching and of witnessing wonders, with sea- and sky as variants. But the view which we are holding goes deeper into the details of imaginative art.
Now for some other artistic minutiae. Line 1 is rich with
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liquids — l's and m's. The word "gold" is suggestive not only of precious brightness, the opulence of poetic imagination and the light of poetic revelation, but also of the rhythm and resonance of great poetry, its golden music. Line 2 is comparatively commonplace, but, over and above the significance continuing in it, its sound connects with that of the first by the prolongation of the m's and the taking up twice of the g of "gold"; this helps the fitting of it into the uplifted and forceful expression of the rest of the piece. The next two lines are more visual and vivid and with the mention of "Apollo" and the "bard" we are made aware of what the "realms of gold" really are. Line 5 hits off very well the character of the Homeric spirit in poetry. "Wide expanse" is what Homer's epic achievement in conception and music is and the epithet "deep-browed" for Homer suggests splendidly both the majesty and profundity of his tone and the grand brooding experience and vision that were his, particularly the experience and vision of suffering that furrows the foreheads of mortals. The phrase "pure serene" is also intensely evocative of the Homeric mood and Muse that in the midst of the greatest power of poignance is yet poised, ordered, harmonised. Appropriately does Keats speak of Homer ruling his kingdom — "demesne" — that is, showing a balanced mastery in his inspiration. Line 8, on the other hand, gives us Chapman to perfection. Keats did not intend a contrast, rather thought of equating Homer and Chapman; he did not realise that Homer's energy is unlike Chapman's vehemence and vigour, it is never "loud and bold". Chapman strikes strong chords out of the jolty four-line ballad-metre converted into a striding, coupleted fourteener, but nowhere revives the surge and thunder of the multi-motioned yet sinuous and calmly controlled Greek hexameter. Yes, Keats hardly realised the difference, but some unconscious intuition brought into the three lines where he speaks of Homer something of the very accent of the Greek poet, while in the one line where he talks of Chapman we have precisely that Elizabethan's manner. The lines about the sky-watcher and
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the new planet have a combination of facility and felicity which has made them, either as a whole or in part, stock phrases almost, yet without any loss of their immediate uplifting grip. The next line is equally memorable in a different way, and the figure of Cortez in it agrees excellently with Chapman's loudness and boldness: the epithet "stout" (which, of course, does not mean "fat" here) and the noun-adjective "eagle" convey a sense of daring, keen, sturdy splendour. But the whole close which the mention of Cortez brings is far above anything Chapmanian. It is, in its own kind, a Darien-peak of poetry, wonderfully tense, the last line absolutely superb with its breathlessness, remoteness, magic and semi-spiritual strangeness. We are no longer in the world we know, the geographical reference gets transcended and transfigured, and a symbol rises before us — some eternal elevation of visionary vigil in the mind's solitude is conjured up, some hushed high point of indrawn consciousness giving the glimpse of an uncharted infinity beyond of
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A true critic of poetry passes through three stages of development. He begins by a conscious exercise of the analytic mind upon his experience of a poem. He takes his impression to pieces, classifies his reactions, studies the structure from the outside and considers both the matter and the form inasmuch as they are communicated to him across a gulf of strangeness: his criticism is the result of his mind's evaluation, as regards both significance and technique, of the relation established between two separate ends, the poem and himself.
By constant practice he discovers a few points of contact with the poem, through which he visions the founts of the poet's inspiration and now and then a sudden sense of the living waters themselves awakes in him. It is not only an impression, a vivid response to a communicated experience: it is rather an entry into the poet's own creative act, a self-identification with the poem. The analytic mind has led somehow into the very life-throb of the work.
At this state the critic becomes more and more absorbed into the poem as a self-sufficient entity, an entity which says what it alone can say and therefore rules out anything else to be said about it. The critic loses his own voice and stops being a critic: a load of the inexpressible bears him down. All that is worth saying in respect of the poem is felt to be the poem's own words. The critic is no longer the critic but, through the poem, the poet whose say is the work he has created.
This state of incapable dumbness is most necessary if the critic is to hope for an interpretation of the poem not as a communicated thing but in its own posture of being. When this state is no longer a wonderful novelty but becomes a settled delight, the intellect which was in abeyance at the start reappears on the scene and co-exists with the joy — of identity; it is now not an enemy of that identity, a foreign
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power excluded by it: it is now something with which that identity can have relations, something which it can illumine, something which it can use as a mode of expressing itself in suggestive and interpretative terms. Of course, the poem, qua poem, cannot be any other expression than itself; yet, while its existence is unique, its essence can be caught in the language of a different plane provided this language is sufficiently plastic to that uniqueness and moulds its own terms in living answer to those of poetry.
Once the plasticity and the moulding are there, the intellect can deploy itself in analytic study without any outsideness spoiling or even limiting it. Now the critic's analysis never lays the knife to the living tissue of vision, never wounds what it dissects. The intellect now does not bring its own piercing gleam to lay bare the composition of the poet's work, the meanings and the rhythms within it. Rather, the poem gives the intellect its own light and, infused with that light, the intellect acquires insight. The critic turns upon the work not a knife but a flood of X-rays. The structure, both psychological and technical, of the poem stands revealed without being hurt by the analytic process. This is the climax of criticism.
It rarely is sustained without some sinking here and there. But when the sinking is very little we have a disclosure of the poem in a manner native to the intellect yet without any intellectual intrusion upon the mystery and the magic. The mystery and the magic are not translated so much as transposed into intellect.
But this kind of criticism is to be distinguished from what goes by the name of "creative criticism". In the latter the writer builds up from his own inspiration a response to the inspiration of the poem: it is a subjective splendour which tells us more about the critic than about the poem. The criticism we have in mind builds from the inspiration of the poem itself: it is objective in the sense that the critic is busy not with the splendour of his own feeling and vision but with that of the feeling and vision put by the poet in his work. He
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is not "faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion": the fashion of his faithfulness is caught from the commanding beauty of Cynara: he is faithful as she would want him to be, as the line and quiver and lustre of her being would hold him in their living net of loveliness.
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An English friend has written for the benefit of foreign aspirants to authorship in his language:
"In English, and especially in Modern English, one has to be very careful about over emphasis and over-statement. The word 'great', for example, which makes such a show in many other languages, is but sparingly used. We may apply it to men or women whose importance resides not in their position, not even in the stir they may have made in the world, but in the genuineness of achievement tested by time. It is felt to be too big, too judicial a word to be lavished on what is contemporary.
"A critic in a review will hesitate before describing a writer of the eminence of, say, Mr. T. S. Eliot, as a 'great poet' although he may be acknowledged to be one of the best writing in English. This is so much a characteristic of the English as to be a fact of usage, in spite of the cry from other peoples using the language for a richer, more elaborate, more ornate, even more verbose style to accomodate Oriental or American tastes. But I suppose, after all is said and done, it is a matter of 'taste in ties' — or there is no other go than to leave one to one's own certitude."
Two-thirds of the above pronouncement — the reference to the word "great" and to T. S. Eliot — echoes almost the words of Bernard Blackstone in his Advanced English for Foreign Students (page 264). And there is some sound advice in the pronouncement. But one is afraid Blackstone himself is a little too anxious to save the expansiveness of foreigners from ringing false in an acquired tongue which lets itself go less often than theirs; and, when the advice is cut off from Blackstone's own context to be given a still sharper and more exclusive turn at the beginning and also at the end where English usage is sought to be pin-pointed, it loses its value further by the very fault underlined — over-emphasis and over-statement. Not that the expression runs away with the
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writer; but the fault can lie in the thought no less than in the expression. And what is here counselled strikes one as an extreme view. Even the conclusion with its moderating air does not really balance it: the Oriental or the American is allowed his own "taste in ties", his own "certitude", but not quite granted that he is using English in the truly English way. The English way in all ages and yet more in modern times is believed to be symbolically summed up in the sparing use of epithets like "great".
A recent issue (October 31, 1958) of the Times Literary Supplement is at hand. On glancing through its advertisement columns one finds short quotations made from reviews of several books by writers of less eminence than T. S. Eliot. Still, what does one observe? On page 619 The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt is advertised and underneath we have the opinion of Philip Toynbee as expressed in the Observer: "A great work of the mind and the imagination." On page 623 Dr. Leslie D. Weatherhead is cited as saying about John Magee's Reality and Prayer: "A great book... Its insights again and again are startling in their originality." As for equivalents of "great" or else at least approximations to it, we light upon them almost everywhere. On page 628 Dr. J. H. Plumb characterises A Study in English Kingship by J. P. Kenyon: "A remarkable book, based on very sound scholarship... immensely readable". On page 620 we have J. B. Priestley pronouncing J. G, Cozzens' By Love Possessed to be "one of the major pieces of fiction of our post-war age".
Priestley on Cozzens' book is worth pausing over for a minute. He is admitted by all to be very English, and Cozzens is an American whose novel has received considerable slating from some English reviewers for what was regarded as over-writing and pretentiousness. Priestley evidently takes another view of the qualities seen thus by them and finds also merits they have overlooked; nor does he merely give grudging praise, as if to say, "The book is good, considering it is after all American". Could it be that there is no sharply fixed English attitude to style? Might
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there be not Englishmen and Englishmen, with one or the other of two opposite sides in prominence, and might not both these constitute in a subtle harmony the genuine English genius? Do we not also find responsible English critics ready to let themselves go in the matter of superlatives?
Over-emphasis and over-statement are defects, but in the review of books one must discriminate between a false encomium and a true or at least a plausible one and not be too facile in condemning a writer's phrases if they are not restrained. It is the quality of mind brought by a critic to bear upon a book, that should determine one's acceptance or rejection of words like "great" in his piece. And also there is no reason why a book, if it deserves enthusiastic recommendation, should be covered with a wet blanket for fear of slipping into an un-English style. It would seem that to be habitually restrained in writing is not necessarily to be English.
Even apart from the question of giving a fair amount of praise where praise appears due, the quality of restraint requires careful analysis. The exaggerative and the effusive are always to be avoided. However, to equate over-emphasis and over-statement with certain orders of style — the rich, the elaborate, the ornate — is an error. A style that is rich, elaborate and ornate need imply no more than a mode of thought and vision and emotion different from the mode that gets expressed in a bare and clipped style. Several sorts of styles can each make authentic literature and be in a fundamental sense sincere, whereas over-emphasis and over-statement always bring in falsity. Who would think of censuring out of hand a prose style like Sir Thomas Browne's, Jeremy Taylor's, Donne's, Gibbon's, De Quincy's, Landor's, Car-lyle's, Ruskin's, Meredith's, Henry James's, Chesterton's, Charles Morgan's, Sir Winston Churchill's?
These very names — three of them contemporary — should make one hesitate also to declare that the typically English style is the opposite of the rich, elaborate and ornate.
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In our own day the simpler, more curbed, more conversational style has found greater favour, but here too there are degrees and few modern styles are quite as bare and restrained as Swift's at his best. Even Bernard Shaw who has been most compared with Swift has his flourishes, his rhetorical colours and complications. And, apropos of Sparkenbroke, at once the most richly and the most subtly written of Charles Morgan's novels, did not James Agate in the Daily Express describe its author as "probably the most distinguished [living] master of English prose"? Then there is the very recent phenomenon of Lawrence Durrell, poet turned novelist, whose Justine, Balthazar and Mountolive have obtained an unusually good press. On Mountolive, which is hardly four months old, Elspeth Huxley1 spoke on the BBC: "I am lost in admiration at Mr. Durrell's superb use of details... and, above all, at his sheer imagination." The Times2 hailed this novel as "a delight" and the Manchester Guardian3 as "masterly". But Durrell is far indeed from writing a plain hand. Richard Mayne,4 in the Sunday Times, declares: "His prose beguiles us with marvels of virtuosity." And even Pamela Hansford Johnson,5 who finds the book wanting in a centre, criticises it by saying that one reads it for just "the glittering, elaborate, lyric beauty of the style".
Yes, even today richness of expression is still with us and earns bouquets from good English critics — and may it never leave us! The least likely are imagination and eloquence in diverse manifestations to leave England of all countries, in favour of a single order of style and that too the subdued functional. For, English is especially a many-strata'd many-strained affair. The stratum and the strain our friend has in mind are mostly those of Englishmen at common talk among themselves about ordinary things: there the bare and clipped have much play. But when Englishmen pass from quotidian speech to the finer and deeper utterance of literature, many other elements in the complex English consciousness come up — modes of thought and vision and emotion that are Celtic, Greco-Roman, Italian, Hebrew, even Oriental, in
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addition to the Anglo-Saxon, the Teutonic, the French. All of course are assimilated into something that can be distinguished as English, but to define what is English so trenchantly as our counsellor has done is rather an injustice to the veritable solar spectrum that is the English spirit in its creative mood.
Besides, English invites by just its flexibility and varied responsiveness the play of personality and individual character. There is indeed some sort of norm, but it is never very clear-cut and never rules the writer very strictly as for instance the easily recognisable norm of nettete and ordonnance may rule the writer in French. This is dangerous doctrine and not to be shouted from the teacher's chair — hardly even to be whispered without serious caveats to the Indian student lest the already luxuriant Indian mind run riot, forgetting that in English we cannot indulge in luxuriance with absolute impunity. Even to the English student it should be offered with care, for, where the writing of literature is concerned, people to whom a language is native are not proof against going astray (any more than they are invariably apt to write better in it than foreigners of genius, like Conrad, Santayana, Madariaga, Maurois, Saurat, Cape-tanakis, Nehru, R. K. Narayan, Tagore, Radhakrishnan, Sri Aurobindo). But the doctrine remains true and, provided the writer has sufficient mastery over the elements of the language and a living sense of its genius, individual idiosyncrasy no less than psychological "Orientalism" or "Americanism" may be given its head and asked only to attend to four fundamental "No"s: it should see that there is no excess of sound over significance, no intricacy of word that does not really answer to an intricacy of idea or experience, no weakly trailing movement of clauses, no gaucherie of rhythm.
In certain small matters which are more syntactical than stylistic, the feel of the form — the feel of how a sentence would shape if it ran in one way or another — may be the only guide. We should refrain from making a fetish of "common usage", though we may not encourage habitual
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flouting of it. Grammar books and pundit manuals deserve respect: they help us to learn a language. What, however, they can at most do is to equip us to write a workman-like prose. Surely such prose is not to be disdained, but in itself it is not style. It can be the basis of a certain type of style when the artist-sense takes it up and makes an effective instrument out of it. But all literature is not called upon to be a transfiguration of such prose and its syntactical conventionalism. A sentence can be structured in various manners: a manner is not incorrect just by being unusual. Wide and intimate acquaintance with literature will guard us from being extra-suspicious of the unusual and from running our blue pencil too sharply through a student's phrases. Style is a creative, not a stereotyped, activity; and, so long as the four "No"s we have mentioned are kept in view, the less rules we make about it the better.
To those that are creatively inclined let us teach a double capacity: to be simple and restrained or to be subtle and splendid, as the occasion demands. And let us teach also a blend of the two powers, a blend faithful to the specific spirit of prose as distinguished from poetry and yet not devoid of the essential poetic touch — the style perhaps which Sir Herbert Read6 in our own day recommends when he praises as the finest prose in the language the Centuries of that Restoration mystic, William Traherne. Thus only can a multi-shaded and individualistic tongue like English be rendered fully alive for the Indian turned creative in it.
1. Quoted in the New Statesman, 1 November 1958, p. 597.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. The New Statesman, 25 October 1958, p. 567.
6. Quoted by Kathleen Raine in the New Statesman, 1 November 1958, p. 598.
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"GOD'S DOORWAY "
A shining door, immense and unmoving, stands between our worship and the Beyond. That is all the light vouchsafed to us, a hard light blocking our passage to the ultimate Secrecy. We knock and knock, but no grace slides through the fast fitting, no glimpse of the other side is given us by any relenting of the giant hinges. Still, we find that every knock gathers — with its harsh and hurtful rebound from the surface of gold confronting us — a ringing sweetness, a most melodious and heart-ravishing "Nay" to all the importunate prayers of our flesh and blood. Here is a refusal that is a rapture more rich than our grandest triumphs in the world. Out of its mysterious reverberation our deepest poetry takes birth and, though we fail, the failure of our effort to pass beyond our finitude is an affliction which is the most wonderful creativity known to mortals.
But is this superb affliction everlasting? Yes, so long as our attempt to draw an answer from the Beyond remains entangled with outward things. We look at the tremendous beauty that shines upon us from the universe in spite of all the shadows that fall across its face and we throw our minds upon the huge and baffling spectacle to understand its appearances. But to know what is inside those appearances we must go inside the consciousness in us that catches their challenge. The mind must turn inward its sense of the cosmic beauty. The usual subjective tensions of poetry do not go far enough. Their "soul-searchings" no more than hover on the verge of the true abyss that must be plumbed. Not on the peripheries or the mid-ways but in the centre of our cosmos-thrilled being is to be found the magic perfection which inspires each effort of ours to outgrow finitude. What is behind the universe is also behind ourselves who are a part of the universe. But while we cannot break open the universe's heart, we have pathways leading towards our own depths, knowing which we shall know the Beyond that is at
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once hinted and hidden everywhere. The shining door by which we are blocked is the outward gaze of our eyes; our eyes open and the Mystery gets shut. By shutting them completely and looking inward to the sheer centre we shall see what lies on the other side of the "great door — the Divine Loveliness — and having done so we may open them outward to find the Light and the Beauty no longer hard but yielding and responsive to our touch, letting us in through their splendour to the same supreme Delight. From our turning towards this vision and experience there is born the poetry that is called mystical.
People believe mysticism to be an exalted dumbness and incompatible with any mode of speech, even the exalted speech of poetry. The mystical plane, they argue, is above distinctions — an infinite featureless unity. How can such a world be expressed in the language of a world of countless objects that are separate and clearly defined? This question is rooted in an error. The mystical world is not a featureless unity. It has indeed a vast unity which can be felt as featureless by an exclusive concentration on it; but, on the basis of the experience of an inalienable oneness, there is an experience of infinite diversity — distinctions innumerable are visioned and felt though with no sense of rigid limitation or mutual exclusiveness. Line, colour, mass, design are not lost: they cease to be a hard shutting in and shutting out, they become pervaded by a single reality, a single consciousness, a single bliss. That is the nature of the balanced mystical experience, whether cosmic or transcendental.
The cosmic experience, enfolding a universe whose parts have jagged edges looking imperfect and ugly, bears a vision in which the jagged edges of the different parts fit into one another and make a perfect and beautiful whole. The transcendental experience has the vision of a universe whose perfect whole carries the fitting together of parts that have themselves flawlessly beautiful contours: this is the universe of archetypes, of ideal forms which our jagged universe is meant progressively to manifest. Both in the cosmic vision
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and the transcendental, there is no compulsive loss of distinctions and so no inability to use language with its lights and shadows of a world where distinctions have play. Doubtless, the language of mysticism does not move always in step with the language of logic; but neither does poetry obey the logician's dictate. Not systematic thinking so much as harmonious perception is the power of the poetic consciousness — and this power mysticism seizes upon as akin to its own and charges with its hidden intensities. To charge it thus is to make poetry's habitual "in-feeling", its moment after moment of sudden felicitous penetration of things, function in a new province of its own nature: the mystic does not distort it to a use utterly alien and unpoetic. Hence he need be no outcast from the golden-voiced circle of the Muse.
The end of mysticism is not silence. But the source of mystical poetry must ever be a deep and large ego-exceeding silence, a hushed receptivity of the mind and heart in which they are swept beyond their merely human experiences. When that silence is found in the being, even for an instant, the poet becomes capable of hearing voices which come from above the normal level of consciousness, above even the subliminal recesses to which he is usually open. Only when we attempt, without any self-exceeding or illumination, to utter mystical truths we are borne down by the conviction that we are trying to utter the Unutterable, define the Indefinable: an awed impotence seems all our art in the face of that Mystery. We lapse, not unnaturally, to the conclusion that the Spirit escapes utterance and negates distinctions, whereas the sole legitimate conclusion is that the speech of the mere mind is not competent and that our normal imagination is incapable of getting spiritual reality into focus. To discard speech and lay aside vision as non-mystical is a grave blunder.
Every plane of consciousness in us has its own speech and vision, characterised by its own peculiar rhythm of being. Shakespeare's
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is a triumph of exquisite pathos that goes home to our vital nerves, as it were, making us feel and see poignantly through the sensitive life-force in Us: our guts seem to respond — like flames that are wind-shaken and go out. Shelley's
He has outsoared the shadow of our night
has an exaltation, a threnodic thrill, of the intellect — its words are plucked out of a passion of the mind-energy and not the life-force: our brain-cells grow warm and appear to stretch upward a kindled thought-power. Suppose we came across an account of death in some such terms as Sri Aurobindo's
Rapt, thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast.
The whole movement here is different from Shakespeare's and Shelley's. It does not take place in the impassioned life-force or the impassioned mind-energy, though it has affinities with both of them — a word-design and rhythm-urge that have a concrete touch upon our nerves as in Shakespeare and at the same time an atmosphere of ideative height as in Shelley — but added to these is a draw inward, a pull deep within that seeks to liberate us into some unknown yet intense and intimate immensity reaching out around and above without end. This sense is created by the words being caught from a plane beyond the human: the rhythmic vibration no less than the stuff of significance is derived from an ampler consciousness and carries the actual thrill of it. If that plane were contacted and drawn upon all the time, poetry would lay bare the Spirit's own speech wherein the nature of the mystical world is not something that fits ill, or by half, the shape and sound of language but makes one organically moving body with it. Simile and metaphor
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become then no dubious effort to suggest what seems to the mere mind a state of formless being that is outside the range of imagery: language with its various devices grows a natural mode of expressing the one yet manifold cosmic Divine as well as the archetypal Transcendent.
The mental energy and the life-force can both poetically catch fire when the Spirit presses upon them, a fine outburst of revealing figures is possible on these planes of consciousness if somehow a channel has been cleared between them and the Unknown till
From cloud-zoned pinnacles of the secret Spirit
Song falls precipitant in dizzying streams.
But in a Thompsonian sonority like that, the Spirit's accent is attuned to a force belonging to the human rather than the Superhuman: the sight and the movement are of the inspired imagination, they have not the profound ease and colossal freedom of a direct spiritual experience. More inward, more authentically swept with the true spiritual suggestion and resonance is the poetic soul of those two lines about mystical inspiration, by the Indian poet Harindranath Chattopa-dhyaya during his stay in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram:
See me go from silence to deeper silence
Song by song bird-marking a cloudless azure.
In rendering the process and the meaning of his music alive to us, the poet here does not take his sense of the Divine and proceed to make it concrete to himself by equating it with figures from Nature — "cloud-zoned pinnacles", "dizzying streams"; he appears rather to intuit the Divine in a concrete way from the first and then proceed to envelop and permeate natural figures with that intuition. The secret Spirit is not felt through Nature so much as Nature is felt through the secret Spirit: that is why the vision-impact and the rhythm-movement bear some kind of largeness and directness that is more
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revelatory than an imaginative magnificence helping out mysticism.
An even more puissant largeness and directness should be the mystic's goal. In the just-quoted lines, haunted though they are by the mood of the In-world and the Over-world, there is yet something missing from the highest spiritual point of view. Aesthetically, they are faultless — so too are Thompson's lines; mystically, their revelatory rapture is not altogether the sheer substance of the Spirit thrown out in luminous speech. To get that substance and its direct disclosure, the poet must practise a deeper concentration, realise a keener concreteness of the Eternal and its thronged infinities. Above everything else, he must still all the vibrations of his ordinary being, no matter how grand or exquisite they may be, and fix himself on letting loose without any reshaping by those vibrations the pure rhythms of the wide and massive Divine such as the ancient Indian scriptures carry and in our own day Sri Aurobindo's recent work in which
Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces
Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;
Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions
Blaze in my spirit.
Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;
Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway
Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,
Ecstasy's chariots.
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A moment's warmth and the intimacies of a handful can never be my terminus. I must either possess like a God or feel the universe alien and strive to destroy its endless multitude by some mystical fiat of my consciousness. If I fail, I move among men like a dusky cloud, depressing them and myself losing all savour of life. Even the poet in me, whose natural being is to discover the veins of gold embedded in dull rock, keeps drifting with a listless countenance. I know that a Light dissolving every imperfection lives somewhere and that I have a home in it which on occasion I attain. But the sense of not having attained it for good is often the verge of lunacy for my wits and devours each poetic thrill as soon as it is born.
Oh I am obsessed with the illimitable! It is not only because the visitations of exalted feeling are rare that dumb blanks occur in the history of my mind. Great inspiration can never be too frequent a capture — we are not strong enough to bear and retain the glowing pressure of deep significances — we are soft and yielding to the downthrusts of divinity, the sublime lights plunge through us and out of us because we hold up no sustained response to their cry and cannot catch their brightness on a firm tablet of memory. If our emotions could stand the impact of high heaven and resound to it instead of answering to rhythms that are commonplace, there would be more poetry in this world. But sometimes a most peculiar numbness debars me from clasping inspiration. It is not that the receptive vessel is weak or the skies are empty. Reflecting that in a thousand million years the sun will be a shrivelled ember, the earth a frozen sleep and no least stir of even a grass-blade pierce the silence, the inanimation, the winter without end and all that passion and poetry have built grandly in the spaces of human consciousness leave not a mark on the vacuity of that distant doom, I stand paralysed. An utter hopelessness comes over me: no stroke of my pen, however delightful, seems worth the
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trouble of lasting for a mere thousand million years. Does not every phrase claim, by the superb imagination burning in it, an eternity of existence? Why then should I be baulked of the Spirit's immortal right, why suffer the indignity of being fobbed off with a few paltry millenniums when God's own termlessness is my dream in all that I manifest of His creative glory? Most foolish to the practical sense — this petulance of the dreamer in me; but many a page that might have quivered into beauty is left by it a white desert like the snow of that inhuman epoch prophesied by Science as the tomb of all the wonder of words poetry sets winging through the ages.
If my work must perish and I go down the dark road even before, I must seek after a more durable power than is granted to the poet or his poetry. Nothing appears to me satisfying save the breaking of whatever walls guard me from self-loss in the Infinite. To bear the indifference of the winds and the tides, the aloof greatness of wheeling worlds that outsoar man's living, the magnificent and icy touch of the Cosmos, we must ourselves become a greatness, an immensity, a transcendence of all human heat. But a tiny creature who has in him the power to feel the weight of infinitude must be in essence an infinitude that has forgotten its own grandeur. The tremendous gap we suffer is the oblivion of a tremendous fullness which is our deepest life. I cannot help the intuition that we are equal to the Cosmos. But we can know our own immeasurable truth only by dying to the smallness of our ego, the littleness of the whole human race, the finitude of all earth, the limitation of even the sun and the moon and the planets heaped together in a colossal bonfire. Stripped of the least attachment, we must endeavour to become nothing short of a pure Existence stretched without end through space and time, free and featureless and immutable. No form, no period should confine us. That alone is master within us, which can stand outside each object and beyond each circumstance. Once that sovereignty is acquired, then without harm each object and circumstance can
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be embraced and our life throb with burning details.
You must be considering my mystical megalomania the pursuit of a majestic mirage. What will you think if I fling at you the sublime perversenesses of a nympholept? You will deem me not just reverie-infested but also a Grand Inquisitor putting the human heart-beat on the rack. For, I have a most difficult confession to force out of love's delicate mouth. I want lovers everywhere to admit to themselves that all their consummations were tumultuous betrayals of what the wistful eyes and the hungry hands had promised. Not the brief flare-up of the nerves had lifted a beacon on the hilltop of the future to call forward love's limbs. Surely a mightier fulfilment had haunted us, mightier than flesh clinging to flesh — mightier also than two souls hurling against flesh-barriers to become each other's possession. Abelard, what you were looking for when Heloise came to you was not Heloise but your own priesthood, the command of some absolute Beauty smiling above change. That is why the barred door of your refusal to look beyond her had to be pushed open by Fate smiting away your genitals like an obstinate padlock! But all are not made God's eunuchs in so crude a fashion, and their paths to Truth are cut short instead. In the lives of those who stir with a vague superhuman trouble that wears no familiar face, the stroke of Fate in some form or other is always in waiting. They are beaten down from their proud kisses and the embracing ease of their marriage-beds — down to the dust where they may learn to kneel and worship. But if we are wise and if all would behold the true light behind the surface glitter, lover should speak to lover: "Various miseries will befall us, time will tear many a precious portion out of our lives, and death may divide — who knows how early? — the touch that is our entire happiness. If suffer we must, since none can escape being vulnerable clay, why should we not turn to the Everlasting in the midst of the ephemeral and, separated, clasp yet the Wonder where all separations cease — not the blind clod of death but the shadowless Spirit within, that is always and
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everywhere one? There the ecstatic pain is found in which, by being cloven apart here, we shall know the love which holds together the quintessence of all things."
Cruel, no doubt, is my admonition. I myself who give it shudder at times. Yet I cannot deny the Truth, for hours are there when I stand in the presence of a Beauty and a Beatitude whose very invisibleness has the power to blot out the gold of our broad day. How can I wrong Thy kingship, O Spirit Eternal, by forgetting those hours? I am called and called beyond each mundane prize. Whatever Thy form, Thou unknown menace to my human heart, I love Thee. O sweet devouring Wideness — from above and around and below Thou comest. Nowhere can I escape Thee then: and at the first touch of Thy seizure of joy there is no desire left in me to escape!
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THE MYSTICAL POEMS OF NISHIKANTO
It is high time critics took serious note of the new school of poetry that has arisen in India under the inspiration of Sri Aurobindo who is himself the centre of it. The new school is of special interest not only because of the novel content and form of its poetry but also because of the way in which that poetry comes to its members.
The old view of a divine breath blowing through the poet is rather at a discount today. Not that the poet is regarded as altogether a conscious intellectual agent deliberately fashioning out his work. Much indeed of modern verse is an intellectual exercise, an attempt at being clever and recherche and recondite; but there is also a good deal which is said to spring from non-intellectual sources and to come upon the writer without conscious effort. Unfortunately, this kind of verse has very little of harmony in it — either of vision or rhythm. It is chaotic, a throw-up of the Subconscious. Although it is a breath from beyond the outer mind of the poet, it is a spasmodic and foul breath, it is in no sense "divine", it is neither from mysterious deeps nor from magnificent heights, it has no intuitive substance and no felicitous expression. A power more than human and bearing in itself a secret light of spiritual reality is nowadays held to be a figment of self-deluded poets rather than the active inspirer of them.
The Aurobindonian school offers a mass of work which gives the lie very effectively to this notion. It is, of course, full of sublime or exquisite flashes that provide us with an insight into matters beyond the mundane; but it is as well a process in which the poet's usual shortcomings are masterfully transcended and harmonious wholes of a rare originality created through apparently unpromising human material. The lips seem really touched by a divine flame. Men whose
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preoccupations are far from poetic almost awake one morning and find themselves poets. An English mathematician and logician, after a few fumblings shot with hopeful gleams, brings out poem on poem of a profound haunting quality. A Bengali doctor feels drawn to the Muse and soon gets his finger on the pulse of perfect rhythm and feels the heart of all beauty and truth beating through his words. The case of the author whose book is before us was not so hopeless on the face of it as was John Chadwick's or Nirodbaran's. He was a powerful poet in his own tongue, Bengali. But, as K. H. Gandhi's short yet pregnant preface declares, his knowledge of English was nothing to boast of and his grasp of poetic form and technique in English absolutely rudimentary. And still by sheer absorption of the influence excercised by the Yogic presence of Sri Aurobindo, he was able to open himself to subtle worlds of visions and voices and his poor English equipment was magically made use of and transfigured, with the result that he produced poems which, whatever flaws there might have been in places to be set right by Sri Aurobindo's own hand, were splendid surprises of word and rhythm.
Naturally, the whole book is not an uninterrupted flow of the highest inspiration. There is a mixture at times of the moderately good. But on balance the amount of the extremely fine is so great that Dream Cadences by Nishikanto stands out as an extraordinary achievement. Part of the book consists of translation into English from the poet's Bengali. Two or three of them are superb and several have impressive moments, but the level of the translated work is in general lower than that of the poems written directly in English. We have not primarily to consider translated work while judging Nishikanto in the English garb: the best of it speaks much for his pure force, as also for the merit of Dilip Kumar Roy who has rendered so well the Bengali originals; but Nishikanto the poet dealing straight away with the English medium is what is of paramount interest from the point of view of the wonders the Aurobindonian influence has accomplished for
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him in the form no less than the content of poetry.
Word and rhythm are notable in Nishikanto in two ways. There is the sovereign tackling of forms that are not alien to the poetic tradition in English. And there is the moulding of forms that are of a new and modern variety, without any of the capriciousness and crudeness of much modern experiment. When, for instance, he writes in The Soul's Cry a revelatory verse like
Inspirations come
From a God-white source
And my heart-beats drum
To their wide-open force,
he produces something of great value — a royal intensity is there with a golden weight of meaning carried in massive-textured strongly stressed words. Similarly, in the lines from Descent with an analogous import —
In my bosom's secret core
Thou hast opened a radiant door
And through it vast melodies pour:
A gold-descent with heavenly murmur,
an angel-stream —
we cannot sufficiently admire the cunning craft of phrase so faithful to the mystic experience, the wizardry of that triple rhyme suggesting the continuity of the pouring melodies and that final long line clinching this suggestion as well as hinting the amplitude of the melodies while wording accurately the exquisiteness one with the vastness of their illumined flow. Yes, poetry like these two excerpts is beyond price, but its moulds are reminiscent of past poets. This does not in the least detract from their value, for by the term "mould" we mean not the individual shape each poet's expression takes but the basic pattern on which he plays the individual variation. All the same, no new technical base is ventured,
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though it must be noted that a very plastic metrical movement is present and the feet scan with larger freedom than in the usual run of the traditional forms. That plasticity, that freedom is characteristic of Nishikanto and supplies a sort of connection between poems where no new base is essayed and those where a base-novelty makes itself felt. Examples of the latter kind may be taken from the sonnet entitled The Artist Almighty:
On the dead-red canvas of a stone-stricken soil,
Here I have seen a straight brush-stroke, iron-ash grey,
A long winding of palm groves horizon-stretched,
Branches of star-triangular rhythm with heaven-sapphire
play,
Steel-strong sinews by deathless spirals caged,
Give Thy colour-fountained luminous brush of power,
Let bloom through my hard granite a heavenly flower.
Here we have effects which may be scanned according to old rules, but we shall have no unifying measure and the variations would be rather revolutionary and intractable. Lines of six, seven and five feet seem to rub shoulders — quite an anarchic assortment in a sonnet! And what is the base? There are so many kinds of feet occurring with almost equal frequency that we are at a loss to fix the metre. It appears that a reading by significant stresses alone is called for. It does not matter on what syllable of a foot the stress falls nor how many syllables a foot carries: one dominant stress to a foot, falling anywhere, is the guiding principle and each line has six dominant stresses. Perhaps we should not speak at all of divisible feet, but say simply that the lines have a six-stress rhythm unifying the whole poem and further enhancing the unification by each line bearing at its end a stress on the rhyme-syllable. This type of verse has been practised by Sri Aurobindo himself in the bunch of poems
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that are his experiments in uncommon metres, including his version of the quantitative system.1 But Nishikanto gives it, at least in The Artist Almighty and one or two other attempts, a more bold turn, verging almost at times on a free-verse technique.
So much for the strictly formal aspect of Nishikanto. Looking at the purely expressional aspect, we are struck again and again by alternation of condensed force and equally packed delicacy. Much-in-little is often his quality. But this quality must not be understood to mean that he writes very brief poems, four-line wonders that spring to birth suddenly and pass, yielding place to one another in rapid succession. Nishikanto is not limited to mere flashes, though the peculiar nature of his occult inspiration may create the impression that even his lengths are a series of loosely connected flashes. Nishikanto can build up his effects, he can raise substantial edifices of music, he can proceed unflagging to a fair enough distance. Only two poems are just a quatrain each — the rest mostly develop fourteen or sixteen lines, and several cover more than one page and three run to even three pages. But whatever his length, he compresses on many occasions a lot into each phrase. This compression is a sign of his essential energy and vari-colour, whether they come with a stride and a march or with a trip and a dance. Glance at this picture out of The Yawning West:
The lost dark sun shines like a hungry vulture's eye,
A serpent way from horizon swirls
Its flow of aimless, dreamless travellers....
or this out of Flower-Transformation:
From a little opening in the earth
A tiny spark of mud-black birth
Desired release
From cruel stress
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Of crust-claws, demon-dark
And pain obscure and stark,
or, again, this out of The Cat and the Rats:
Mad the shadows writhing a shabby tail,
Storing clay-crumbs with crooked miser nail.
In a less Aeschylean-cum-modernistic style, in a more limpid manner we have
I am the barren brownness of desert-desire,
Far-calling fountain voices of deep emotion
My life plays with all and with all
It blends its fluted footfall;
All my channels I fill
With an intimate One-Ward thrill.
Yes, much-in-little characterises a good deal of Nishi-kanto's way of putting things. But the same may be said in general of all that he writes: the way may not openly have the trait I have mentioned — a trait which frequently invites the compound word, either noun or adjective — but even where the energetic vari-colour is not evident in the very turn and texture of phrase, we always sense a whole world of pressing significance, large visions shining out through small spaces, as in
Primitive, nude and powerful
The great hunger of life,
Always fresh and flowerful,
Overleaping pain and strife,
O trivial creatures of flesh
In pleasure's dim painful mesh,
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I shall make you bright and fresh
And free, with the marvel touch of a mighty
luminous hand.
Or take the intense and immense revelation of snatches like
Omniscient dreams in his wide illumined sleep
the crystal source
Of the Creator flows through the stillness of burning stars.
Lines of this kind hail from poetry's most spiritual heaven — some Over-world speaking its own tongue, the mortal words lifted straight up into its high direct dazzling mystery instead of getting lit up with some reflex of its altitudes.
Nishikanto does not employ such transcendental speech always or even often, but there is often a transcendental vision invading his verse and mingling with what is his more usual range, the occult and psychic sight of the Divine's play and purpose. Before I touch on that range, I should like to express my pleasure at the sheer painter-viewpoint that also distinguished his seeing of the hidden things. I happen to know that Nishikanto is an artist with the brush no less than the pen and has to his credit rich creations of symbolic design and suggestive hue. But the painter in him would be evident even if I knew nothing of his activity with the palette. Delightfully many are the traces he leaves in his work of the specialist's interest in colour:
A barren evening's nut-brown atmosphere,
Before me moves an ocean of vastitude sapphire
With wavy curves cream-soft and Chinese-white,
Crimsoned snow and ranges of purple light
Kissed by cobalt firmament,
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Through the valley's labyrinth of emerald green.
Of course, he is no mere painter of outer things: all his word-canvases are flushed with shaped glories from behind the earth. The occult, the psychic and something from secrecies not only inward but also high above are a constant feature of his work: it is not only an inspired play with mystical ideas and emotions that is Nishikanto's poetry: his poetry is a visitor to actual mystical planes and is closely aware of strange presences inhabiting them and through his images and symbols their concrete though subtle realities meet us and find entry into our being. A very self-revealing poem, gathering together in a general fashion the modes of his experience and the trends of his nature, is the sonnet Tremolo:
A mystic land, a world of magic wonder;
A picture painted with subtle light and shade;
A white moon lotus of deep and delicate splendour;
A rainbow romance — a rose of passion-red.
A land of light with a delightful play;
A festival manifested with heavenly claim;
Descending showers that make to blossom the clay;
An eveless and a sleepless sunfire flame.
A land of earth with many laughters and tears
Churned and cherished in the bosom of a yearning
source,
Through the mortal game immortal experience bears
And pulls at the sky with giant cords of force.
O painter and poet-musician of my human birth,
I am tuned in thy tremolo of dreamland, heaven
and earth.
This is beautiful poetry, perfect in every word, but it is all the
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more fine because of the rarity of its beauty, the unusualness of the realms glimmering through it: even the earth is seen and felt in its inner soul-pregnant activity.
There are two poems, however, which are most outstanding for that rarity and unusualness. One is "Lion and Deer":
A deer of lightning comes and goes;
Flitting it plays,
Swift-limbed, spotted with silver rose —
A bodied golden grace.
It moves and hovers in green woodland,
A beauty-born thing;
On flaming heels that can hardly stand,
Its gait is a flash and a spring.
A lion of thunder and hungry fire
Paws with red-hot nail,
Groaning in the caverns of desire
By the side of the mystic veil.
The red beast runs through the rocky ways
Like a power of wild flame;
One sees a burning giant face
Move in a dreadful game.
When the screen is rent by a moment's slit
And shows where two lands end,
The lion-fire and the deer of light
Run and flame and blend.
But the veil blocks them then and there,
And still the drama goes on —
On a stage that is swept with noise and flare;
For each longing fire is alone.
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The giant beast leaps up and roars,
A hunger ever-burning,
The slender prey swerves back from its course
In a flight of fear and yearning.
One day, the two of themselves shall tire
And lie tossing on earth,
Till comes with help the secret Fire
To release their painful birth.
At its beckoning life's weird and muddy
Mystic veil has vanished,
The struggle-weary earthly body
In motionless peace is banished.
Then by the stroke of heaven's crimson flower
From either body shall rise
An angel of beauty, an angel of power
And kiss each other's eyes.
The lips of thunder, the lips of lightning
In an ecstasy mixed and dense
Cling, a married splendour widening,
And smite with a touch of intense
Immensity, — through my heart they enter
And my soul they force
With sunpower wine and honey-star tender
At vision's close and source.
It is not easy to explain and interpret this poem clearly. In fact, to try to do so would be to spoil its beauty, to limit and lessen its significance. Significance it certainly has, we are aware of a meaningful movement half on life's stage and half behind the scenes, a strange play is felt to be going on, whose figures and gestures are seen before us but not wholly, for they are projections from mysteries whose
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presence we intuit yet do not grasp with the outer mind. In this respect the poem has the atmosphere of certain works of Blake that have an occult vision conveying to us the emotion of that vision without any definite intellectual key to its symbols. But Nishikanto has something also of Blake's less occult but not less deeply suggestive Tyger. The latter classic with its picture of a terrible magnificence,
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
and with the disturbing question it poses,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
has been interpreted alternatively as Blake's confrontation of the paradox that even evil things have beauty and as Blake's symbolisation of the co-existence in God of the utmost tenderness and the utmost wrath. Either interpretation is pointed by the query the poem later puts to the tyger:
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
The "lamb", of course, can be seen as hinting of Christ who, as Blake says in another poem, is called by that name. Nishikanto, too, offers us a pair of opposites — on the one hand "a bodied golden grace", "a beauty-born thing", and on the other "a power of wild flame", "a hunger everburning". And the picture of the beast among the rocks, moving its "burning giant face" and pawing "with red-hot nail", is worthy of Blake's imagination. But in the poem as a whole there is an intimate grip on the deeps of being, a direct subtle psychic insight, added to the apocalyptic turn and tone. Blake is amazed, awed, swept out of himself into mystery unfathomable; Nishikanto passes with a luminous rapture into the Unknown, he appears to be on terms of
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intense felicitous familiarity with the hidden worlds, he is at home with the "secret Fire" that comes to release the contraries from their finitude and separation into their own archetypes, as it were, which blend and mix and marry in the midst of their difference. From the divine unity of the soul the drama of diversity, of conflict among splendid protagonists, comes out — protagonists whose splendour is stained with a dark defect and has become either a vulnerable exquisiteness or a murderous majesty. The defect remains and the conflict continues so long as the mystic veil is not rent and what emerged from vision's deific source is not found in its truth at vision's deific close. Enchanting is the dream-delicate deer in idyllic woodland, but the lion of the harsh rocky ways, with his pursuing limbs of a hoarse passion, is no less a glory at heart even as the prey does not lose its core of immortal value because it is fragile and flitting. Somehow the two splendours fall apart — "each longing fire is alone" — and that division is their defect. To perfect them, to rid them of their sense of being fragmented and opposed to each other, there is required the veil-rending stroke of "heaven's crimson flower" in which fuse flawlessly the rose light of the deer and the red fire of the lion — and then there will be the Beatitude one with the Omnipotence. The poem imprints on us its intuition with a varying imagery that may puzzle the outer mind — thunder and lightning, sun and star, wine and honey — but the ultimate suggestion is single.
And what an "intriguing" art bears home that suggestion! The expression has a finish, yet with no marmoreal smoothness as of all difficulty conquered and erased: the phrases are a-quiver with a sort of dangerous innocence as if they came happily right on the edge of going wrong, as if they were a slightly wayward dance whose step might any moment slide down a precipice but keeps high and graceful and perfect by an unexpected instinct. Two factors combine to create this peculiar touch-and-go absoluteness. First, a constant outbreak from inner planes: the mind is not given any stable standing-ground, it is all the time stirred and teased by sights
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and significances that at once yield and withhold themselves, and as soon as what is yielded is used by the mind to build an expectation on, a new thrust from the inner planes disturbs it and seems for the fraction of a second a misfire before the recognition dawns that the correct revelatory gleam has arrived. Occasionally, it is the difference of shade between one inner plane and another rather than between the outer and the inner, that sets up the illusion of a momentary maladjustment and then puts the picture in accurate focus and perspective; for the inspiration has formed a pattern with strands drawn from more than one hidden level of consciousness. Added to all this simple or diversified strangeness is the second factor: a most free sensitivity of rhythm-modulation. In tune with the ever-new occult or psychic aspect of the vision the stresses and the slacks change very frequently in position and number while weaving stanzas metrically concordant in general. The play of vowels and consonants is also according to the necessities of the inner planes, a plastic process of sound insistent and repetitive or flying and altering — in a manner not quite immediately seizable by the normal poetry-pursuing ear. The small interval between the particular rhythmic impact and that ear's absorption of its inevitability makes the perfection of the poem ring out after an instant's peril, rendering the surprise that is inherent in all true poetry doubly effective.
A poem fit to stand by "Lion and Deer" for its intuition of occult and psychic profundities is one with even an actual affinity of ultimate message: it is called The Sleeping Lion and its first stanza,
Of a child upgazing in its slumbering,
sets the key-note of some concealed soul-reality, at once grand in the extreme and tender to the utmost, that has to be
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awakened in the outer being — a fusion to be realised by us of "an angel of power" and "an angel of beauty". The whole is an unforgettable piece of symbolic verse and the translator Dilip Kumar Roy has risen fully to the occasion. He has acquitted himself just as inspiredly in Oscillation, a poem charged with the Yogi's surge towards the Supra-cosmic, conquering all great obstacles whether attractive or frightful, whether of heaven or hell, yet drawn subtly back by the cry of small frail insignificant things, a poignant Maya of compassion bringing into his other-worldly heroic heart a sweet sense of the value of the universe he spurns and the deep need of transforming life instead of merely transcending it. All this is not directly stated as a theme — it is suggested, half positively half negatively, in a sweep of imaginative eloquence —
I wound the elephant mad with passion,
And the tiger impale on my pitiless sword,
And yet an infant gazelle's appealing
Eyes make me miss my way to the Lord.
If I drain to the dregs earth's wine of Maya
My feet will not falter nor body sway.
I kneel to no godheads, I cringe to no demons,
I outstrip both Heaven and Hades in play:
And withal, a derelict blind boy's cry
Still makes me pause — I know not why!
The entire poem rather than one stanza deserves to be quoted. Nor is the itch to quote in full caused by this poem alone: slim though Nishikanto's book is, there are only a few things in it that do not call for quotation. It is all the more a pity, therefore, that Nishikanto has let his poetic possibilities in English stay unplumbed beyond the short spell during which he wrote these poems. The urge visited him almost without his wanting it and left him without trailing a desire in him to recapture it. Perhaps his preoccupation with the Bengali Muse is so strong and is felt by him to be of so much
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value that he does not care to tackle a foreign language on his own initiative. I think we are missing very precious pleasures. For, the English language can have expressive effects, especially of a mystical type, which no other modern tongue can rival, and whoever is able to handle English poetically should do so. Nishikanto is a superbly endowed singer, and his natural gifts will always get the better of his normally hesitant English. With Sri Aurobindo's influence as well as correcting touch, what has been done once can be done again. And across the silence that has fallen on Nishikanto since his Dream Cadences broke through the mystic veil to "chase our nether shades", we appeal earnestly for a recurrence of his far-reaching vision and his deep-searching voice: to quote two lines of his own —
Come, O thou powerful prophet
Whose words are fire-blades!
1. Six Poems, Transformation and Other Poems and Appendix A in the Second Volume of his Collected Poems and Plays.
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NIRODBARAN'S ACHIEVEMENT IN MYSTICAL POETRY
Doctors have been good novelists: there are enough unusual incidents of human value in their clinical experience to make arresting stories under the selective surgery of a realistic imagination. But rare is the doctor who turns poet. A Dr. Cronin is conceivable, a Dr. Bridges is a wonder indeed. The book Sun-Blossoms which is before me is a radiant curiosity since — as the Foreword to it by K. H. G. tells us — the poems here collected were penned by a doctor. The wonder, however, becomes easier to accept without ceasing to be splendidly out of the way, when we are told also that Dr. Nirodbaran blossomed into a poet under the revelatory sun of that Master of Yoga as well as Poetry, Sri Aurobindo.
Dr. Nirodbaran has followed the old command: "Physician, heal thyself" — but the health and wholeness he aims at are the transformation of the human into the divine:
I will rise yet healed of my mortal wounds
To thy dome of jewelled ecstasy,
A warrior soul invincible,
Chainless, orbed with infinity!
And the book charts the course of his celestial cure. A magical chart it is, the lines of progress being luminous lines of highly inspired poetry. Yes, Nirodbaran's book is highly inspired; but perhaps the enthusiastic conclusion of K. H. G.'s interesting and well-written Foreword is too sweeping in one place. When it is said that never does Nirodbaran "lapse into the mere intellectualised or the externally vital or sensational level of speech or seeing," the judgment is perfect. But can we declare that "even at his lowest pitch he never forsakes the intuitive felicity of the genuinely inspired word and vision"? I dare say all poetry to be genuinely
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inspired must have, in essence and in general, some intuitive felicity — but this felicity is not always of the same kind and to call everything felicitous is to weaken the force of that term just as to use the epithet "intuitive" for each kind of felicity is somewhat to water it down. Take the stanza:
Belated traveller, vainly dost thou mourn
Because the transient night engulfs thy way!
Thou art not on the perilous road alone,
Left to some cruel demon's sovereign sway.
This is not unpoetic, but is it more than passable? Would we not have to wear rose-coloured glasses to discern in it "intuitive felicity"? Even at a keener pitch —
My solitude is filled with thy delight;
I drink thy beauty like a passionate wine.
My flickering mortality grows divine,
A shadowless image of the Infinite —
poetry can leave us hesitant about that characteristic. Even now the speech, in spite of the attractive pair of phrases "passionate wine" and "flickering mortality", seems a little easily found. Except in the broadest and a hardly distinctive sense, the ascribing of "intuitive felicity" to it would be an exaggeration. As such speech is more frequent in Nirodbaran than that of the first quotation, what can be confidently averred is that he always brings us the substance of mystical inwardness and that the expression seldom stops with barely skimming this substance; but at times, instead of diving deep, the expression goes just below the surface. Then the result is good poetry as contrasted to passable, yet not packed with the subtle intense novelty which would make the poetry at least fine, if not superlative. Good poetry is not anything to disparage, but surely its temper and tone we cannot equate to the real "intuitive felicity" of verse like Nirodbaran's own:
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My passions one by one turn towards thee
Like stars in midnight's silence; peacefully
They lie on the altar of a silver dream
To be cast into the vision of the Supreme.
These lines may not be superlative poetic articulation: they are, however, truly fine and not merely good.
Nirodbaran has plenty of the truly fine utterance. And often the truly fine is interspersed with things that have a superlative touch. There is no doubt that the two closing lines of the passage,
Of the ecstasy of the eternal Heart
The flame-sails of unknown awakenings,
are magnificent. The vision is a grand suggestion of spiritual movement onward and inward; the language, at once subtle and concrete in its turn, is an illumined embodiment of the sense; the rhythm goes home from some vast beyond to some hidden vast in ourselves. Mark how apt is the fusion of "wide unfurled wings" with "voyage" by means of the word "sails" and also "awakenings" by means of the word "flame" with its implication of golden visibility and bright uplifting as in dawn-break when the eyes too become lit and begin to see with the uplifting of the lids and appear to be like two wings wide and unfurled. The inspiration here is a mighty magical bringing-together of many vivid and far-reaching intuitions into an inevitable unity.
Nirodbaran is successful in achieving such inspiration not only in short snatches; there are whole poems that stand out as veritable masterpieces. Naturally they are not a multitude, but in this matter the achievement of even half a dozen poems of all-round perfection is a feat eminently worth noting. To focus all the better the quality of these poems we may distinguish three varieties of poetic performance. Some
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poems reach their goal more by a total effect than by individual details: the diverse parts in them do not strike us as particularly memorable, but the ensemble makes an unforgettable impact on the mind. Other poems move to their goal by brilliant steps and everywhere there is an impressive play of word and image, but though the total effect is felt the individual details stand out more. Still other poems have an integral harmony in which both the details and the ensemble are equally seizing, neither are the parts subdued to the whole nor is the whole subdued to the parts, but there is a beautiful balance and every part is a perfect whole in itself and the sum of the parts is a perfect super-whole. If we are to label the three varieties, we may stress one shade out of the hundreds seen in the old terms "classical" and "romantic" and say that the first type of poetic performance is classical, the second romantic, while the third is a union of the two. The best works of those usually called classical and romantic poets are such a union. And it is the poems in which Nirodbaran brings about this union that I consider veritable masterpieces. The rest are truly fine creations, but here are the sheer climaxes of poetic genius.
As examples of the three types, we may cite "New Life", the very first poem in Sun-Blossoms, as a "classical" perfection — feeling that is not superficial at all, tone that is authentic throughout, imagery that is organic to the mystical feeling, but the graceful details adding up without drawing special attention to themselves and only the complete poem "clicking" in the deep background of the receptive consciousness. As compared to this, the second poem, "Your Face", has many lines leaping out to us, lines that can be culled from the context and exhibited in their own rich right, but the whole piece does not form a sudden cumulative revelation: it has a poetic point but not quite a sharp and shining one, and the total impression, felicitous as it is, is not momentous enough; what is gripping are the various significant phrases that catch fire in the course of the movement to that slightly unsurprising total impression. The book's
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third poem, "Secret Hand", mingles the classical and the romantic qualities; it is memorable in a step-by-step scrutiny and memorable in a synoptic survey. But perhaps the best examples of the supreme art are the sonnets "Creator" and "Earth-Cry". The former runs:
A giant figure carved from the rock of Night
Chiselled with poignant fires of Sun and Moon,
A body outlined with a measureless might
Where heaven and earth have joined their spirit-rune.
A myriad streams flow from his luminous feet
To elemental spheres of voiceless hush
Where nascent worlds are rhythmed to one heart-beat,
Lit with creation's primal roseate blush.
He stands behind the heaving stress of the hours,
A tower of triumphant Force and Light,
A lonely peak crowned with the Infinite
Hiding within a passionate heart of flowers.
Lightening our shadow blossoms of life his grace
Hews from earth's clay beauty of a white-moon face.
Every line is a profound surprise — mysticism finding its happiest originality of expression, and the complete work is a "white-moon face" as flawless in unity as are its features in their multiplicity. Of course neither the multiplicity nor the unity yields itself to immediate appreciation by the unprepared non-mystical reading. This is verse of super-normal symbolic insight, and we have to be attuned to its new "wave-length" to get the message correct. Quiet sensitive concentration can alone secure the rich critical response. But even an aesthetic alertness can provide some measure of the double excellence. The same can be said of the other sonnet:
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Bright mystery of earth, O foam-washed shore
On the edge of time, you bring thoughts pale and sweet
Of happiness long lost, memories that bore
In their veiled bosom twilight's starry heart-beat!
These desert-tracts, as they lie lifeless, cold —
Strange melancholies buried in their sand —
Are like dry barren moments deeply scrolled
On endless canvas by an inscrutable hand.
Whence like a cry of fire night and day
Your soul climbs to the topless distant peaks
In the heart of solemn vastness holding sway,
Lined with immutable silence's golden streaks.
Your body's faint murmur falls slowly heard,
A dying warrior's last half-spoken word.
Splendid is each stanza and equally splendid is the fourteen-lined fusion of the several pictures. And what an achievement is that closing couplet with its deep defunctive music — its echo of a grand ebbing of the body-consciousness, with the soul entering no domain of common death but a realm of trance where the human gets absorbed into the deific.
Nirodbaran's poetry is full of the passing of the outer being into the Unknown that is like a death into a larger and richer life —
a death
Tranquil and luminous-whorled,
as he puts it in "Heaven-Ascent". He speaks also of
The tranquil dome of Death
and of
The starry wings of Death.
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Evidently he is visioning some transcendental reality, a sky of the Ineffable, nirvanically calm yet not empty, a high world of untroubled pure puissances. This transcendental height haunts Nirodbaran and his poetry catches now and again glimmers and vibrations from if, but perhaps the major portion of his work is more an inwardness of the mystic mind exploring occult vistas of its own or mirroring in lovely lakes and torrents the colours and designs and dynamisms of the Overworld. In consequence, there is often a kind of "faery" spirituality, an affinity to something Yeatsian in sight without being Celtic. The inner worlds are not the magic mid-worlds of Yeats that have a certain exquisite self-sufficiency, a certain completeness of the Divine in a restricted fixed formula of creation. Nirodbaran's are planes washed indeed with the glint and gemmy tremulousness of moonlit mysteries but there is everywhere a cry to the Infinite that is overhead. Through many rifts the inspiration glimpses the Eternal who is beyond all formula and capable of all creativeness. Through many apertures are received the urgencies of the earth-soul that has an evolving and not a typal career and that yearns to broaden from its deep dreaming centre of Godward devotion into some Cosmic Consciousness and into some overarching Ultimate brooding with utter fullness of light and love and life upon cosmos and earth. The Yeatsian atmosphere and vibration are felt in:
Candle-vision from haunts of starry caves
Flickers on my path of dreams
Like sinuous smiles of pearl-glistening waves
On the heart of rock-strewn streams,
but there is mixed with Yeatsianism a higher call, a vaster longing, a poignancy more inwardly experienced without losing any enchantment or delicacy. The difference within the similarity to the Irish wizard is more noticeable in:
Birds of Vision, fraught with heavenly treasures,
Brimming with diamond peace,
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Fill our yearning vastness with the measures
Of your unhorizoned seas.
A trait akin to Yeats is also a fluctuant imagery that is not self-consistent on the surface, varies suddenly and sometimes seems even conflicting in its aspects. This is no surrealistic confusion — feverish jerky disconnected oddities of sight. It is also not the complicated obscurity of Donne, a curious and far-fetched and many-meaninged play of thought. Nor is it exactly Blakean, teeming with a private mythology. It is the subtle many-sidedness of occult vision. In Nirodbaran this Yeatsian trait, like all others, goes beyond Yeats by a boldness that is more direct. Yeats makes different symbols follow in succession; Nirodbaran not only does this but also runs two or three symbols into one another, since the proprieties and plausibilities of the occult planes differ from those of ours. Look at the poem "First Word". There the same mystical entity is called a star rising out of the mountain-sea and said to be calm and inviolable like a mountain and then described as "first word breaking the womb of agony" and then summed up thus:
A voice it brings and opens the hidden door
Through a narrow fissure of encrusted earth:
A blazing eye of the invisible core
Came down like an eagle into mortal birth.
The lay reader is likely to be puzzled, but it is impossible to miss the drive of a supra-logical harmony, and the drive, paradoxically enough, is most potent in the last two lines where the images, picturing the all-seeing power of the transcendence descending into cosmic manifestation and embodiment, are most a-jostle in a surface view. The language and the rhythm have become so alive to the occult phenomenon here hinted, that somehow the intuitive sense in us is smitten to recognise the significance even though the constructive intellect finds it hard to dovetail the lightning flashes of the several hints.
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Fidelity to the inner truth of mystical perception is Nirodbaran's motto. Fidelity, however, can be of several sorts. Nirodbaran at his most alert does not write with the intention just to convey spiritual meaning with the help of a plastic imagination: he wants to write of the inner in the inner's own way and he lets the meaning emerge as a sort of oblique effect. Ordinarily, poetry puts its mysterious halo around a centre that is easy to recognise. Nirodbaran likes to make the centre itself a mystery and let the recognisable meaning come as a halo. All true poetry of the Unknown should be like this, though it need not be of one fixed type. The central mystery in Nirodbaran is mostly a many-coloured shimmer. One can also centre a sun of fiery truth-knowledge which is above the mind and whose mystery is caught by us through the intense dazzle it produces, forcing us to shut our eyes, as it were, and feel the immense Inscrutable which has put forth that golden focus of itself. The poetry of Sri Aurobindo is thus sunlike. Nirodbaran gets the sun-apocalypse in rare instances, and more often by reflecting it in a full moon midway between earth and ether. His usual activity, though never without an instinct of the sun-wholeness, is shimmery. But that does not detract from the poetic merit of his work nor from the sincerity and power of his mysticism. Neither does his poetry suffer because most often it is a seizing of brief moods, passing perceptions, touch-and-go gleams, "flickers on the face of Destiny", either directly occult or indirectly so with a kinship to the visionary vein that is at its best in AE. Perhaps the finest instance of the half-visionary half-occult mood is in "Fingers of Light":
On this dark corner of my cell
Fingers of Light fall — slow and white —
From the invisible crescent moon;
Ethereal seems the prisoned night!
The beams pale, slowly move away;
Through the iron bars my dream-eyes cast
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A final glance; the silver trails
Wing to some unknown region's Vast.
This style has another aspect in which a greater simplicity has play, a limpider tone that is born less from the mystic mind than from the psychic being, the infant divinity at the deep heart of us, and then the poetry is capable of moving along a range of beautiful expression in which the simple and the sublime, the childlike and the seerlike, are constantly meeting and parting and meeting again in a delightful game. Thus a poem starts with the utterly ingenuous:
No more I ask of thee
What I have gained or lost,
What shadow-veils wrap me,
What distance I have crossed,
and ends with the high note that is yet the same style:
I feel within my soul
Crowding like gold fires
The hidden immortal scroll,
The word that for thee aspires.
This style gains its most luminous point in "Childhood-Dream", a poem linking itself with Vaughan and Wordsworth in their phases of recollecting the soul-sight of early childhood. It begins:
My childhood veiled a secrecy
Within its delicate shroud
Like a splendour of celestial light
Under the folds of a cloud.
Often I used to think and feel
That a white dream was laid
Upon my eyes and suns and moons
Out of that dream were made.
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The poem runs on, through felicity after felicity of speech, to a perfect conclusion and faultless general effect. I have mentioned Vaughan and Wordsworth and indeed they come to the mind, but there is in Nirodbaran a clearer recognition of hidden realities: he has a sense of universal consciousness that is not prominent at all in Vaughan and more keenly than Wordsworth he feels occult or spiritual presences of an individualised character:
I felt a sudden cry
Within the closed fane of my heart
Reminding of a sky
That hid behind its sapphire veil
Strange faces orbed with light
And beckoning to their splendour-home
Beyond the brink of night.
Wordsworth could sense the universal consciousness sufficiently, but these "strange faces orbed with light" are rather outside his pantheistic ken. They are allied more to the Gods of Yeats walking the inner worlds in unbearable beauty and the Undying Ones of AE residing in purple lucencies behind the earth: only, they are in Nirodbaran a touch of the transcendental beyond the cosmic, the ultimate archetypes of earth's living creatures, though they are intuited rather through the psychic heart than by a straight ascent to the overhead immensities.
If it is objected by some captious critic that one cannot keep feeding on divine realities and that some contact of common Nature through a fresh sensibility is required, we need not leap to a defence of divine realities, for Nirodbaran has enough of that contact. Of course, he is no lover of Nature for her own sake and there are always inner nuances glancing out. But Nature is present in his work and the dew is upon his poetry both in the sense that his poetry is receptive to the influences of the earth's atmosphere and that it is quite free from the artificial and the hot-housy. Look at this stanza:
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The first glimpses of a new-born
Laugh of earth-flames in the green wood.
Birds bringing from the depths of dawn
Music of God-beatitude.
A more typical way of Nirodbaran's of treating Nature is to see her through a strong mood of the inner consciousness and project that mood through the outer eye rather than receive through that eye a picture to create a mood. A faultless snatch of such Nature-poetry is:
A smothered sigh is the heavy air
And Time a press of pain,
Night trails her sad infinity
Under a sick moon's wane.
As effective in the same mode are the verses:
A star struggling to climb from a black sea,
In the cradle of night curtained by nebulous dreams.
Single-lined miracles are these verses — and such miracles are often accounted the test of a poet's power. They are not infrequent in Nirodbaran. There is that hinting of the inner Yogic process, ardent, harmonising and revealing, in the subtle phrase:
A rhythmic fire that opens a secret door.
There is the finality of supreme spiritual achievement, at once solid and soaring, ecstatic and immutable, in those intensely clear words with a regular rising beat of iambs:
Our heaven built with granite rocks of peace.
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There is the insight summing up the whole secret quality of existence in the simple yet infinitely pregnant description:
Life that is deep and wonder-vast.
A rare greatness is Nirodbaran's in these marvels of much-in-little. But face to face with them one feels it all the more a pity that he should on occasion drop into an echo of Harindra-nath Chattopadhyaya at his somewhat feeble rather than at his most flaming. Chattopadhyaya at his middle pitch is all over the stanza:
A lonely tramp of heaven I go
Along the highwater-mark of Time
Where Time itself has ceased to flow
In the silence of the vast Sublime;
while Chattopadhyaya almost lashing his Muse in an effort to carry off a weak moment is:
Wipe off the dew from your tortured brow;
The blood-stained soul's lone Godward vow
Must never flicker or become
A shadow of pale martyrdom.
There is also Chattopadhyaya at his "highwater-mark" in certain places, but as soon as one recognises him one's rapturous and unique response to Nirodbaran's poetic value diminishes. Luckily the individual strain re-emerges soon and we are happy again with bold things or exquisite things like:
Where flowers of a heavenly hue
In silence born,
or powerful things like:
What mighty crystal hands
Release the music-flood of the sun-bird?
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This last quotation can stand side by side with the famous questions in Blake's Tyger, though the whole atmosphere and association are different:
Could frame thy dreadful symmetry?...
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
Nirodbaran needs no model, Chattopadhyaya or any other: he has a living fount within him and it is best for him to let it spring into our earth's day in the way it wants. And he is not only an original poet but also an original artist. No doubt he would have been a more attractive artist if he had tackled a larger variety of forms and not remained within the cherished charm of just two or three kinds of poem-structure; but the diverse manipulation of his chosen metres is beyond praise. An extreme ease of audacious effect marks his technique, extraordinary variations of beat are freely achieved as if there were no fear of anything going amiss. Scan, for instance:
A moment's touch — what founts of joy arise
Running through dull grains of my life's dead sands.
The first line is almost regular, the second is trochee, iamb with a quantitatively long opening syllable, trochee, iamb and spondee, a remarkable combination fully justified by the rush, the slight slowing, the speeding up again, the smooth flowing, the struggle against the final obstruction, that is the many-tempo'd progress of heavenly delight through earth's dim and coarse stuff. Or analyse:
Falls off like a leaf torn by a short breath
Of wind.
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Outside Donne and Hopkins — and occasionally Milton — it is difficult to meet with such metrical license indulged in so masterfully. The line is a pentameter but composed of a semi-spondee, a semi-pyrrhic, a full spondee, a pyrrhic and again a full spondee! And the result is not chaos but a most telling irregularity charged with the destructive staccato of the very event described. Only once in Nirodbaran the metre seems limping and ill managed in the midst of novelty and freshness of accent.
A deep glimpse of a memory behind
The veil of time when my soul was with thee
has a flawlessly modulated first line, the suddenness of a glimpse conveyed by that inverted second foot, but the next line is overstrained by the inversion of stress in the fourth foot following a foot that is as good as a pyrrhic. One may plead a profound excitement at the celestial memory and a consequent catch in the voice speaking of it. I do not feel convinced; neither do I find "soul" specially distinguished from something else and therefore occupying that metrical position, nor do I incline to stress that "was" so as to make the foot a spondee balancing the preceding pyrrhic or else to stress "my" and render the latter an iamb. There cannot be on principle a ban upon a trochee coming on the heels of a pyrrhic; what I am asking for is sufficient psychological justification, as can be found in Sri Aurobindo's line:
This truth broke in in a triumph of fire.
A forcible and violent action is here suggested, the first half of the metre is appropriate to the powerful bursting in of the truth, while in the second half the high exultation and exaltation of the inrush is brought out by the quantitatively long and accentually strong vowel in the opening syllable of "triumph" and in "fire", coming contrastingly after a pyrrhic in the one case and after two short syllables in the other.
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Nirodbaran's slip, however, does not matter much, just as the slight falls in the poetic level do not, nor the over-use to which he puts the rhyme-pair of "sleep" and "deep", nor his repeating twice or thrice in the book that lovely and profound phrase: "a universe of tranquil prayer". Who cares about small foibles when there is abundance of valuable content no less than expressive skill? Inspiration blows like a well-nigh endless wind through Suin-Blossoms. And I personally enjoy this inspiration the more because it is not always easily appreciable by the lay mind. Mystical poetry should not be too easy, it loses its own truth by becoming clothed altogether in shapes that are denizens of the non-mystical world. A certain secrecy and a certain distance are most delightful and fitting when God is the theme. Just what the mystic Muse should be is Nirodbaran's source of song as revealed in that descriptive apostrophe of his:
O radiant minstrel of my heart,
Sing from your shadow-lonely bower,
Where in white plenitudes apart
Your songs are wed to the timeless Hour.
As significant as "white plenitudes" and "timeless Hour" are for me the terms "shadow-lonely" and "apart". Unless the mystic poet is to some extent "shadow-lonely" and "apart" without being ascetic or other-worldly, he cannot make the supreme soul-discoveries or the supreme soul-disclosures, even as the doctor in Nirodbaran cannot, I am sure, deal very successfully with the complexities of the body unless he keeps his mind a little aloof and employs methods that are somewhat subtle.
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Joyce Chadwick and John A. Chadwick, contemporary with each other and belonging to our own time, are hardly heard of in English critical circles. The former died in England in 1950, the latter in India as far back as 1939; but their works have made little headway. Identical in surname, they were yet no relatives; they did not even come in contact and wrote without knowledge of each other's poetry. But their common surname is highly symbolic; for both expressed themselves under a similar spiritual stress and combined with the typical English note a mystic motive either directly caught from or indirectly attuned to modern renascent India.
1. THE POETIC VISION OF JOYCE CHADWICK
Selected Verse1 by Joyce Chadwick — this slender volume of nine poems I received from the author in August 1950, with six poems inscribed in ink in her own hand on the blank spaces. It confirmed the very favourable judgment prompted by three poems she had sent me for publication in the cultural review, Mother India, whose editor I was. My opinion has not changed over all these years. And that has made me wonder all the more how English critics could be completely oblivious of a poet not only genuine but of a really rare sensibility.
Of course, in a general way, all genuine poets possess a sensibility that is rare: indeed without it they cannot write living poetry. But there is a range of sensibility that most poets share despite the individual perception of each — and there is a range which is uncommon and shared by only a few like Miss Chadwick. The latter range may not by itself make a poet finer or greater, but it does provide us with a most unusual "inscape" and "instress", a depth of vision and an intensity of emotion that reveal with a vivid directness occult, mystical, spiritual meanings and convey a keen
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sense of the superhuman, the divine, the eternal.
I cannot say that Miss Chadwick's work is uniformly excellent. Perhaps this is a grave criticism, considering that the book presents "selected verse" and that the poems number no more than fifteen in all. But two things must be said to counteract the gravity of this censure. To be uniformly excellent in the poetic disclosure of such "inscape" and "instress" as we have in Miss Chadwick's work is to expect almost the impossible and, in view of this difficulty, I may aver that the amount of her excellence is large. Besides, there is a flamelike livingness in her work, perceptible in the background even when not fully brought out, which shows the possibility of writing often at one's highest. Both, therefore, as promise and as achievement, her selected verse is remarkable.
Not only freshly found word and image — intense, beautiful, deepening into distances — but also a strange rhythm imparting an emotion that seems to come with a holy force as if to remake one's life and, through the new subjectivity, a new objective world: this is the general impression Miss Chadwick's best work leaves on me. That is why she must be read not with the eye alone. The sounds must get their full value and be physically heard if their suggestions are to envelop us and succeed in materialising, as it were, the inner mystery. When the poems are read with clear though soft audibility, a heart-breaking loveliness is realised: the heart thrills and breaks, so to speak, into a rapt smile and a dream-exploring sight, the eyes catching hold not only of things but also of what is wonderfully behind them and, by that vision, drawing the depths out. This vision, we may say, is of "the force and the function" such as Miss Chadwick puzzles over in the stanzas called Felled Hornbeams which were published in an English magazine2 and speak of "a firm blue-grey" revealed when hornbeam thickets were cut down on a hill:
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...No watching has taught me as yet
What is the activity of blue-grey light
Flashing from log to dead leaf, leaf to eyesight;
Running the logs on a blue-grey squirrel's feet.
Received at the same time from the printed page and from the vibrated air, the best pieces in Selected Verse are at once delicate and dynamic — a structure often as of modulated mist which one imagines a breath might dissolve and yet marble-strong with a packed precision and purity that pattern forth significances from unknown dimensions of being.
The opening piece, To God the Creator, is perhaps the most magnificent in the genre I have tried to indicate. There is some touch of Hopkins — a gripping, rapture-raw, close-flashing though complex directness — and some touch of Abercrombie's uplifting thought-vigour and impatient massing of ideas — and a touch of the later Yeats's taut ex-quisiteness crossed with the quivering and plunging passion that is the mind of the Metaphysicals. But when I say this I do not mean anything imitative. The touches are only signs of broad affinities. Even if there were imitation, the fusing of three or four such temperaments and manners would itself be a striking originality. But there is much more here. Miss Chadwick has a mood and a music all her own, full of a more insistent mystical experience, a concreter seeing of spiritual presences — and the technique too is individual.
In view of that experience and seeing, the truest affinity we may trace is perhaps with what we may call the general or essential poetic current passing through some of the English-writing disciples of that Master of "Integral Yoga" from India, Sri Aurobindo, though most of their work Miss Chadwick could scarcely have seen before penning hers. They are, as a rule, more elaborate-structured, more clearly moulded in even their complexities and may be said to have more poise in the midst of their dazzlements: she is more nervous in not only her intricate but also her massive
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movements, she puts shade within shade with great quickness (often telescoping the grammar), as if she were a little afraid lest she should lose the light that breaks upon her in gushes through what appear to be expanding and contracting apertures. Yet there is for all the difference a subtle resemblance, all the less liable to be missed if one lets the ear "read" and the intuition understand — a resemblance which, when felt, seems to make her and them part of some new emergent Zeitgeist one in fundamental drive behind renascent India's rediscovery of "inwardness" and modernist Europe's "heritage of Symbolism".
There is hardly a poem in Miss Chadwick's booklet without the suggestion in it of the leap upward of a Godhead secret within the human or the leap outward of a Godhead waiting in world-nature or the leap downward of a Godhead poised above the mind's knowledge. Occasionally it is difficult to make distinctions: all the three leaps seem to fuse, as also in the strangely affecting lines she sent me in a letter (dated 23rd August 1949), introducing them with some words on their theme: "Last November I did a poem about artists which ended —
Coming with knowledge out of the primal Fire —
The felt and the kept: not to be lost any more —
Questing soul through the whole of body can pour
White, red, apricot, grey, rose, amethyst, pure B
lue, and the shrill
Colourless Fire."
But there is sometimes a wrestling with the sense she has of the marvels within, around, above, and a turning of them into poetic shape with a deliberative and constructive imagination — a vivid forceful thinking out in images: then the effect is not directly revealing and the inner tone which is almost never absent gets weakened. Here and there we meet with a certain smiling ambiguity, as though the poet were happy with her own seizures of spiritual nuances and did not
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care whether the word-body into which she puts them brought out their beauty in full. An example may be found even outside her booklet — in a poem I received for publication, called The Sun's Quiet Side:
Blake's Moon "with delight
Sits and smiles on the night":
I've known that Moon — but smiling on a day.
It was in me,
And round our hub, gyrating Possibility:
Wind smoking along grasses,
And quiet, heavy horses;
People, and creative and destructive forces —
But which was which, or what was meant or was a
meaning distorted —
Of that, no knowledge.
O which is which, and what is meant, and how is
meaning distorted?
Ssh! This Moon is a strange Moon —
And wisdom reachable by being still in it wholly
delighted.
This poem, except for two or three lines, may serve also to illustrate in one of several ways the occasions when Miss Chadwick's language has a lowered intensity and the idiom of our times displays its accidental as distinguished from its essential character and we feel the merely contemporary accent rather than the individually modern.
From Selected Verse, as total successes I should choose To God the Creator, A Woman Said This in My Dream, The Seven Abilities of the Body, All Shape has a Sun and a Moon in It and Ability. I have said enough about the first in my general description of Miss Chadwick's inspiration. I specially fancy in it the lines:
No prophet's notion of you, yours I want;
I want you, tiger-fierce, like lilacs gentle,
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Your breath may burn me so, or so enchant:
No matter, come! And if your hurricane Will
My littleness do disperse and my presumption,
And so I am split and burned and, shrivelled, fall,
I can but fall into your dark Destruction —
And your Destruction is you.
This transposes to another and perhaps a feminine plane the mood and impulse of lines by one of the poets who have sprung up around Sri Aurobindo in response to his own literary as well as Yogic creativity. Those lines Miss Chadwick had not at all read when she wrote hers. They are from a poem addressed to the god Agni of the Rigveda: the Rigvedic Agni is the divine Fire visioned in various forms as the secret urge of our evolution towards the perfect Splendour that is the Spirit:
O smile of heaven locked in a seed of light —
O music burning through the heart's dumb rock —
O beast of beauty with the golden beard —
O lust-consumer in the virgin's bed —
Come with thy myriad eyes that face all truth,
Thy myriad arms equal to each desire!...
Shatter or save, but fill this gap of gloom...
Work thy strange will, but load our gaze no more
With unexplorable freedoms of black air,
An infinite rapture veiled by infinite pain.
Lightning of Truth, God's lava passion, come!
Possibly the feminity, no less than the difference, of the plane to which Miss Chadwick has transposed the mood and impulse of these lines may be indicated more directly by following up her verse —
And so I am split and burned and, shrivelled, fall —
not with her own two —
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I can but fall into your dark Destruction
And your Destruction is you —
but with a rephrasing of their admirable point and force more deliberately, thus:
I can but strike the depth of a Destruction
Whose very darkness is you.
In the same poem I like immensely the following also:
Now you are golden around me. I am dark,
Central and safe within you, winged with you;
Move in your music towards that mundane mark
All moves to, but entranced...
It is a fine commingling of the mood of "the Cloud of Unknowing" with something Shelleyan as well as Dantes-que. Miss Chadwick's glimpses of God as Nature itself super-natured are most enchantingly concrete:
Sweeter to smell than sun-warmed cedar bark,
Shaped with more grace than cats or willow trees,
Harder than stone, more soft than petals, cool
Than a pear, musical than bees,
Movement of stars, May thunder, autumn's full
Glorious gale-paeans in green uplifted seas
That fall again like young gannets; kind like sleep,
Stiller than old carp in a lily pool...
And I find poignantly profound the phrases:
What is the stabbing principle in these
Homely delights? — why dreadful as dear
Dogs barking across mist-riding moonlit hills
Out of old farms, ducks quacking, linden-trees
Sweet far beyond pleasure when the turned summer fills
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Field, courtyard, bee-soul with their blossoms' tune — Bell-note surely to returned Paradise?
Here we have to a distinct advantage the qualities of the English genius which, even in its mystical orientation, differs in several respects from the Indian. One of the points of difference — and this is what is here — is a more intimately affectionate awareness of the outer life's details, including the details of Nature. Other points which are hardly an advantage are, in general, a tendency to have the inner vision in excited spurts instead of in a steady glow and a proclivity to hold together the golden glimpses either in a sort of happy heap or by means of a cementing intellectual imagination instead of catching them up against an immediately perceived mystical background which serves to make them cohere.
I am touched deeply also by the first paragraph of Beyond the Moonbeam:
Labour done,
To her own music, slenderly,
the Moon goes down; Leaving the sea to anguish for the shore alone,
The growth-struck seedling alone split and spiral on;
Child-bearing, love-bereft women strive to find
Beyond the Moon's working a more pitiful Mind.
It is worth pausing a little over both the art and the significance of these lines. The brief opening phrase, "Labour done", could not technically be bettered for suggestion of nothing more remaining to be accomplished and of a quiet yet implacable finality. The next line —
To her own music, slenderly, the Moon goes down —
is a triumph of subtlety. In conjunction with the words preceding it, it manages to convey with an easy concision that now the Moon is free from the cosmic toil to which it was
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applied and so it attends to its own being's rhythm, gets rapt in its own beauty which is an exquisiteness no travail can exhaust or mar, and moves out of the world's sight to a repose that has no ears for the struggle and the agony of the world. This last shade of meaning is brought out clearly in the next three lines which carry in perfect language the pathos of a world derelict of the light and abandoned to the loneliness of its own self, all its movement and growth and creativity a painful thwarted grope. The concluding words of the passage, hinting the blind direction of the search by "child-bearing, love-bereft women" —
Beyond the Moon's working a more pitiful Mind —
are a veritable masterpiece, full of "the tears of things", charged with the terrible coldness of the vast and beautiful powers that rule our sublunary life, powers attracting and stimulating us, working within our hearts and limbs, giving us short spells of pleasure and then forsaking us to an unfathomable woe — a woe which strains towards some Mystery beyond the indifferent wonders of the visible universe and calls out for compassion, for understanding, for guidance and personal response. Mark the craftsmanship of the line — the play of all the three labials in the language (b, m, p), the scheme of a varied fivefold labiality which gives an extreme or saturated sense of an alliterative yet spontaneous insistence expressing the constant cry of the human soul: the labial alliteration is especially apt because a sustained "feel" is created by it of trembling lips of prayer appealing beyond time to eternity. And the two m's of "more" and "Mind" pick up significantly the initial sound in "Moon", as if to connect Nature with Supernature and to pass through both the beauty and the power of the former to some marvellous Godhead that gives the cosmos its being and also transcends the cosmic workings by bringing not only beauty and power but also a brooding love.
One wishes the whole of Beyond the Moonbeam had the
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same inspiration. Not that the rest is infelicitous or superficial; but except for a line here and there we miss the absolute accent. It seems that, though Miss Chadwick has generally a deftness of phrase, she is mostly at her best in short snatches and in small poems. Take A Woman Said This in My Dream:
"Father, give me
Half a crown.
I must pay
For time to pray:
Holiness is
Dear to-day.
Father, give me half a queen's,
Half a martyr's
Crown."
This has admirably the crosslight of a dream-experience which yet goes beyond mere dreaming to the spontaneous and surprising felicities of the inner mystic mind. I think it is unique in its naive but still deep charm and its sudden splendour of suggestion with the help of a revelatory pun. In another way the poem Miss Chadwick has written out in ink on page 9, The Seven Abilities of the Body, is also of the same exceptional quality:
All the powers before they go
Bless a body's overthrow:
Scarlet, rose and purple toil —
And the honeysuckle Heart —
To despoil.
These that held it, loosen the knot:
The grey inhabitant of the throat Moulds it out;
The white watcher in" the head
Spreads by gazing at it, the rout;
The blue lily over them
Is — already — on a new stem.
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An exquisite occultism is here, a freshness and an unstrained surprise by means must simple yet packed with breath-taking secrets. I am inclined to put All Shape Has a Sun and a Moon in It (again a poem handwritten in my copy) on a par with these two gems, because of its pure distilled intuitive-ness:
A Moon that sees,
A Sun that is,
Form finds in itself
On its knees.
Kneeling Man
Arising can
Move delighted in any place
That silvern face,
That flaming head,
On his little, needed, neat
Clay feet.
This kind of art is a rarity, seldom practised before except by Emily Dickinson perhaps, but not by her in the same fashion. Hers was a certain intuitive epigrammaticism or else paradox-play that by a most economical inspiration, in which homely phrases were injected unpredictably with a piquant splendour, pricked open the mystery of the human heart or pinned down the far-calling strangeness lurking in familiar sights: Joyce Chadwick's is an intuitive symbolism, an immediate seizing of inner realities through concrete unela-borated emblems or emblematic gestures. Emily Dickinson seems to catch through the wide-awake intelligence's two outward-gazing eyes intense twinkles from life's depths: Joyce Chadwick is an artist of what is termed by Eastern initiates the Third Eye and she operates with quick flashes in a dimension of which the wide-awake intelligence knows nothing but into which one might slip between waking and slumber.
Something of this art but now less occult though still inly-lit is in the lines from No!:
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Old woman, you want praise for a flower
Who should sigh for a Sickle,
Who should burn for a Bonfire.
But the connection with the common world is more clear. That does not detract from the poetry as such, and Miss Chadwick is fine too in her straightforward descriptive mysticism:
Still, I arose on a white ladder,
Thence in the ultimate whiteness was:
Its energies dropping in pansy-petal
Rich heats for the terminal
Cold body to use —
White light, white will,
White fire that forms all,
Be you wine or be you fever
Working in me, your manifestation...
This booklet is, of course, not everybody's meat, and a tendency in places to be in both thought and language condensed and complicated may keep some people away and, I should add, a degree of elusiveness, a sort of bright slipping through the fingers, in a few poems may discourage the average reader; but these are not in themselves faults. And though they are not always enlivened into positive qualities and merits by Miss Chadwick, I am of the opinion that Selected Verse — especially my copy of it with the poet's additions — achieves, on a small scale, a good deal of radiant value in an extraordinary and difficult field. What perhaps is most precious about it is the glimpse it gives of the luminous future open to the poet in a broadening vista. But the future in the usual sense was never to be.
A couple of excerpts from her two last letters will provide the explanation. The letter dated 20th June 1950 begins:
"I have to thank you for a letter which very strongly
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'spoke to my condition', as the Quakers call it. This 'remoulding' process — now marvellous and fascinating to watch!
Sun the Person is leaning down;
His rustle of Godhead's on my skin;
It takes my pain
To use, I suppose,
To colour a rose,
To kill a man.
Within, within
The hands are working; the lips whistle
Into my mouth the pomp of his purple
Golden magnificent Breath...
As He does, I look down on my death.
The deep X-ray treatment was, I admit, terrifying. One had the feeling of a much too powerful force being hurled into one's body by people without any at all adequate knowledge of what they were doing — of course, no spiritual or occult knowledge. The whole thing was 'State medicine' at its worst, and regimentation at its maddest. (Even the times of getting reactions were fixed and woe betide you if you got one sooner! It was just ignored and you must get on as best you could for another 48 hours or so, when the same condition became legitimate and something was done for it.) Finally the exhaustion they produced was so great that they had to leave off, but expect me to go back and begin the whole thing over again..."
The next communication, dated 9th September 1950, is from a Nursing Home. After a few literary and political comments it says:
"You must excuse a poor letter. I was brought to this place five weeks ago, having been nearly killed by a second course of deep X-ray treatment. Thanks to blood-transfusion
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and good care I have recovered from that, but a new growth has started which is not operable, and I do not expect to be in this body a great while longer. The packing-up process takes a lot of energy, which is why this letter is what Keats called 'such stuff. But it is a necessary process... 'All suffering in the evolution is a preparation of strength and bliss.' It is this which has to be set up against the prevalent and, I am sure, absurdly exaggerated dread of cancer there is in this country. For the rest it is just an example of the sweeping out of that 'dusty room' of which we are told in The Yoga and Its objects."3
2. THE INSPIRATION AND ART OF
JOHN A. CHADWICK
The most famous work of the prominent philosophical writer, C. D. Broad, Mind and Its Place in Nature, is inscribed to J. A. Chadwick. Although this inscription is enough to hint to us the esteem in which, even as a young man, that student of philosophy and Mathematical Logic was held, we can never guess from it that he deserves an essay which might well be entitled Chadwick and His Place in the World. For it is not as a philosopher or mathematical logician that he has become significant, nor was it at Cambridge that he did so. Only after leaving Trinity College to sail to India and after throwing up a professorship at an educational institution at Lucknow he suddenly flowered into a poet of exceptional quality. What brought about the flowering was his stay in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram of Yoga at Pondicherry. There, after a short spell, he made one of a group of poets writing in English whom, during the 1930s, Sri Aurobindo carried with a most acute and intimate care, both analytic and constructive, towards the Ideal of a perfect mystical and spiritual expression.
As we might expect of a mind trained to careful intellectuality, Chadwick — or Arjava, as he came to be known from the name Arjavananda (meaning "Joy of straightforward-
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ness") given him by Sri Aurobindo — did not achieve closeness to the Ideal through a lavish spontaneity whose very breath is song. A deliberate self-critical compact perfection belonged to him. Instead of taking the Kingdom of Heaven by a stormy frontal assault, he laid slow seige to it and won its treasures by patient compulsion — a victory no less complete though differing in plan and technique.
Here too is a superb energy of imagination expended not so much in a royal diffusion as in concentrated exquisiteness or magnificence. We feel, to quote the poet's own words from a sonnet, "a chaos-ending chisel-smite" in each work — a faultless statue emerges in which every line and curve has been traced by an inspired precision. Naturally the result is less prolific — a volume4 of merely 327 short poems with 2 playlets in verse, published soon after their author's untimely death in 1939 — but a greater stress is brought to bear upon the understanding, a stress which produces a peculiar intensity of rapture packed with haloed mysteries, so to speak — unfamiliar twilights, symbolic enchantments, hieratic seclusions — and yet no narrowness in the ultimate revelation made: the sole difficulty lies in turning the key which throws the esoteric doors wide open into expanse on shining expanse of heights and depths.
It is an art which may be a little baffling at first, but for those who can absorb its strange atmosphere there awaits a reward often of a beauty which takes one's breath away by its magic spells or by its grave amplitudes of spirituality. The style is highly original with unexpected turns that are vividly forceful and a power of pregnant construction armed with a genius for rhythmical innovation is everywhere manifest — as in that finely as well as incisively imaged poem called Communication:
Ebbing and waning of joy, the day estranged:
Here, petalled evening droops;
Below sky-rim the petals have drifted — all is changed
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To a dim listless stalk where Twilight stoops
Horizonward; and then
The black scorpion, Night, lifts claws of loneliness
and loops
The zenith and all the sky
(Its venomed blackness is in the life-blood of men).
...O then, love-armed cry,
Bring with compulsive dream the moon's foreglow
Over the difficult edge
Of being, that eastward-straining hopes may know
Lit pearl of untarrying pledge, —
Counsel, and laughter, and undissembling eyes.
Time-tameless thought shall dredge
Wide welcome for the glimpsed sail of moonrise,
The ship of understanding and conjoined wills,
The keel of trust from far-off friendly skies.
Remarkable as this poem is, with its subtle variations of tempo and appositely manipulated expressive drive which promise a capacity for effective blank verse if ever the poet were to be inspired in that direction, Chadwick's most majestic work seems to be those flights where bursts upon the gaze an imaginative colour widening every moment into some "objective correlative" of high philosophy charged with the profoundest spiritual illumination. A striking instance is Moksha:
As one who saunters on the seabanks in a wilderness
of day
Is dazzled by the sunshot marge and rippling
counterchange
Of wavebeams and an eagerhood of quivering wings
that range —
Grey on the sky's rim, — white on the foam-pathway, —
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Each man is wildered myriadly by outsight and
surface tone
Engirdling soul with clamour, by this fragmentary mood,
Of Truth's abidingness, Self-Blissful and Alone.
But when eastward-streaming shadows bring the hush
of eventide
The wave-lapped sun can wield again his glory
of hencegoing
And furnish by his lowlihead vast dreams of
heaven-knowing —
A golden wave-way to the One where Beauty's
archetypes abide.
One can see how deftly the fourteener can be modulated by a hand conscious of the possibility it offers of many internal tones — swirl and stream and surge playing significant roles within the cumulative dignity of the whole movement. The two alexandrines in the above quotation are very suggestive also — the fourth line with its truncated first foot and its inverted accent in the fourth produces by the resultant emphasis on "grey" and "white" just the changeful bewildering effect which is sought to be conveyed by the sense of the stanza; while the eighth line, marking a contrast to the three longer ones preceding it, is eloquent of the self-compactness and isolation attributed therein to Truth. In a similar way the comparative lengthening out of the finale seems to indicate the triumphant roll of the meaning like a lustrous billow towards some immutable mystery beyond the mind's horizon. All the three stanzas are consummately inspired art, and no greater praise is possible than that the middle — particularly in its second half — might well be one of the supreme moments of the Upanishads, a Mantra.
The large and lofty utterance met with in the major Upanishads, carrying with it an echo of some rhythm infinitely vibrating out of a stupendous Unknowable, is indeed d
a rara avis in the atmosphere of the English language. Hardly any recent poet of the British Isles writing with a marked mystical penchant shows even a glimmer of it. AE has filled his verse with a wonderful simplicity of soul-vision; Yeats of the earlier phase brings a poignancy dipped in secret wells of faery colour and, when the later masterful will is at play, there is the "gold mosaic" of "God's holy fire" and the cry to be gathered into "the artifice of eternity"; Kathleen Raine now and then gives her song a crystalline touch of inward meditation in which yet the pulse both of the elements and of the human heart finds a richer rhythm. Among the less known poets there are James Cousins and Joyce Chadwick, gravely or delicately articulate in their intimacy with Light. But the best work of all these, whatever its aesthetic perfection, falls short of the eagle-height of spiritual quality. Not the substance by itself confers that pure zenith; what is necessary is a profound intonation vitally one with substance and language, and John Chadwick at his finest reflects something of this triple intensity because his English mind has more consistently steeped itself in Yoga and caught a breath from what we may call the luminous spaces of Sri Aurobindo's inner life.
If we wish to find among English-writing poets a match to that pair of lines ending with the full yet far-away gong of the word "alone" we shall have to pick out from Wordsworth his noblest music. Curiously enough the verses that equal them are just the two that also end with the same word's long rounded o and bell-like consonance — the lines on Newton's face in the bust at Cambridge:
The marble index of a mind for ever
And here it may be significant to mention that the terminal "alone" is not confined to Wordsworth's and Chadwick's Upanishadic pictures. It seems to have some innate affinity with the peak utterance of the Spirit, for it crowns too one of
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Sri Aurobindo's own poetic masterpieces, a passage visioning the very state hinted by Chadwick:
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.5
To continue with Chadwick: he is not only a spiritual poet but an occult one. And in his occult sensibility too he strikes a new note. His Unicorn —
Unicorn uncreated,
Time may grow tired, not you!
For changes of rhythm are dated
By the clang of your topaz shoe —
and his Phoenix —
Tranquil the phoenix poise of golden-crested
Fleece-white and sorrowless
Head of the undefeated vision who had nested
Where on Time's moments looms the Everlivingness —
are neither of them merely traditional figures; they are a fresh contribution to symbolic sight. The white Unicorn with its single pointed projection on the head seems to be a symbol of purity and of faithfulness to a spiritual purpose, while the golden yellow of the topaz is emblematic of some spiritual principle behind manifested life in the recurrences as well as the variations of Time's movement. The Phoenix appears to stand for a power of some solar altitude of divine Truth, a power missioned to renew in the heart of Time the flame of aspiration towards the unquenchable and imperturbable luminosity above that has to be caught and intimately felt in Time's flux. But the achievement of Chadwick's symbolic
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Symbolic sight again, blending now the outer scene with an inner occult-spiritual lucidity of shape and significance, casts its spell on us in that short piece called Unveering Light:
Across unmoving lake
A mirror-theme
Of swans with white wings take
Their endless dream.
Poise-perfect is the set
Of lunar-bright
Pinions of trance where silence met
Unveering light.
The swan is an old symbol of the human soul as a representative of the immaculate Eternal. But here it is given a specially revelatory attitude. The compound adjective "lunar-bright" immediately refers our imagination from the embodied soul to some Beyond of sheer Bliss. And the relationship indicated between the bird and the lake suggests a unison between the soul and environing nature. Here is a double reception of the transcendent beauty and purity — the soul realising its divine origin not only by an in-look towards the heavenly height but also by an out-look upon the natural elements amongst which it lives with the ideal of progressively manifesting the supreme light in the changeful character of earth's limited existence. That existence is here glimpsed in a transformed moment of tranquillity and made one in substance as it were with the soul's vision of its own enraptured being — and the whole double identity is caught by the poet's eye in a tranced inner dimension where the perfection that is to be accomplished in Time waits full-formed in an immutable Nunc Stans, an ever-standing Now of Eternity.
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...the faint moonbeams on the dark stair
That goes down to the empty hall
...the dark turf 'neath the starred and leafy sky.
Delicately imitative, this, of an occult landscape, but how stark and realistic a projection of some "terrible elsewhere" are Chadwick's
...the empty eerie courtyard
With no name
...a crescent moon swung wanly
White as curd.
And, as the poems proceed, de la Mare goes on increasing
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his exquisite ghostliness with strange movements whose meaning is elusive, while Chadwick presses home to a weirdly dynamic symbol of a soul-attitude struck by the human in accord with some drama of hell's tyranny and murderous monotony. Here is de la Mare's ending:
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward
When the plunging hoofs were gone —
and this is the way Chadwick recounts how his "traveller", feeling frantic after having flashed his single sword-blade in a night where none resisted,
Hurled his weapon through the gloaming,
Took no aim; Saw his likenesses around him m
Like his own — Then first knew in that cold starlight
Hell, alone.
De la Mare's poetry is undeniably fine in a daintily phantasmal vein, but it is ever so far from Chadwick's dreadful revelation of an occult depth reaching its climax with the gripping resonance once more of that predicative epithet about whose poetic suggestiveness we have already remarked.
Perhaps something of this kind of dreadful revelation dealing with the soul's own recesses is to be found in a few verses of that eccentric little genius Emily Dickinson, where e
she emphasises the individual's solitary confrontation of himself in some spectral profundity of consciousness. She lacks Chadwick's direct occult sight and consummate symbolic art, but she has an occult feel by means of an inward-straining thought and a terse elliptic style adding to the psychological eeriness:
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Far safer of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.
Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place...
Even when a scene of external earth-nature is clearly recognisable, Chadwick always throws a visionary hue upon it, calling up immediately a soul-reality: as in that atmospheric snatch, half Yeatsian half de la Maresque —
Drowsy pinions whitely winging
Smoulder dimly past the strand —
or in those lines that end with a most sensitive vibration from the depths of the Godward-turned psyche —
...the eve
Has limned a trance upon the air,
A swirl of sunset on the stream,
An ecstasy of quivering bells that seem
Born from the heart of prayer.
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But Chadwick is not only depth-suggestive; he has many moments that burst upon us with amplitude and power. Instead of a sensitive psychic vibration, indirect in its description of the physical stars twinkling as though tinkling, he can look straight at the constellated firmament and give us an in-feeling of it in a line where the entirely monosyllabic pentameter with its various dispositions of similar or dissimilar vowels and consonants and with its meaningful massings of stress makes a most effective conjuration:
You stars that span with strength long leagues of space
.
Or else, with less direct power but equally direct communication of a vast experience-value, we have the same starry phenomenon:
To gaze and gaze upon the fire-strewn sky
Until the hush of heaven loom within.
Here there is a breath of what Sri Aurobindo has called "overhead" rhythm. This rhythm, winging down as if from some boundlessness above the brain-clamped mind, tends in Chadwick to touch at times the very summit. And the Upanishadic magnificence of a poetic gesture like the following apostrophe to the transcendent divine Force which he visions as drawing the quintessence of a triple Absolute of Being, Consciousness, Delight, and reigning from on high over the mental plane like a Sun-kingdom of Knowledge, is, like those verses about Truth's solitude that is perfectly withdrawn from the mind's "fragmentary mood", the most memorable of Chadwick's poetic victories:
Unsullied wisdom of gold which was thrice refined,
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of course, the fact that a poet seizes or at least neighbours the Mantra does not mean that he is so filled with a supreme spirituality that he can never drop to a lower level of utterance. Neither must we expect all his speech on that level to be one tissue of originality. In Chadwick we may trace, except when he is at his best, certain general influences from poets preceding or contemporary. The Nature-poems, start-lingly fresh though they are as a whole, share in details the vocabulary of Edmund Blunden's inspired pastoralism enamoured of the English countryside. The magic vision within many verses casts our mind back to Yeats's Celticism and here and there is a drift of dreamy fancifulness not very far removed from de la Mare. Even on some occasions the colouring shows a touch of the minutely marking as well as luxurious painter eye of the young Tennyson, and not infrequently the phrasing bears an aspect of traditional poeticism from Spenser down to William Watson, which especially the rebellious modernist ear may dub wearying. In a semi-modernist manner we get at a few moments an affinity to Gerard Manley Hopkins. But if we look deeper and hear more intently we realise that in the echo-semblances themselves a novel genius runs to create a general pattern of mind which is sheer Chadwick and that an artistic flair lends by vigorous compactness or airy suggestiveness originality even of language to the ensemble and makes almost every stanza if not every line sparkle in at least one place with pure dew on whatever petals may have grown from the past or have reflected contemporary burgeonings. This should restrain the critic from pronouncing anything to be stale or even merely traditional.
Further, we must remember that Chadwick is not confined to old forms of verse. He is perfectly aware of recent tendencies and can exploit the possibilities of new forms without losing the true poetic quality. Thus he has several experiments in free verse, each an artistic success, and at times he not only works out the substance revelatorily in faultless language and rhythm but also brings superb depth and energy:
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A green-grey twilight hush in the ageless forest,
After the immense canopy of boughs
Has strained all glare and vivid colours from the sunlight.
Plinths of tree and stems of giant creeper rise up from the
floor of dimness
To the full height of these grey spaces
In a cathedral calm.
A plashy thud of some hard-rinded fruit
Ripples momently the tapestries of hush.
The greyness and the quiet are over all, a many-fathomed
covering of ocean mystery.
The turbulence of harsh atomic being,
Those hard and garish colours of the upper day
Are no more;
And only a faint dissolving line, a bubble's
membrane holds
Frontiers of existence and not-being.
We may apply to this the remarks made by Sri Aurobindo about another splendid performance in free verse: "Its rhythmic achievement solves entirely the problem of free verse. The object of free verse is to find a rhythm in which one can dispense with rhyme and the limitations of a fixed metre and yet have a poetic rhythm, not either a flat or an elevated prose rhythm cut up into lengths. I think this poem shows how it can be done. There is a true poetic rhythm, even a metrical beat, but without any fixity, pliant and varying with the curve or sweep of the thought and carrying admirably its perfect poetic expression." We may also note here, in passing, the phrases: "a plashy thud" and "a bubble's membrane." They do not sound quite poetic in the old style of verse-writing. But they are entirely in place not merely in free verse but also in the type of work turned out by Chadwick in all forms, and they constantly mix a sort of modernism with his usual avoidance of the modernist degradation of poetry. They are intrinsic to his aim, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out at the very commencement of
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Modern-sounding or traditional-seeming, Chadwick's artistic technique is nearly always flawless, and it is original by more than a living sense of word-value and rhythm-value reinforcing thought and vision: there is the originality of the thought and the vision themselves. And this originality is of a rare order by being mysticism which is not merely intellectual or emotional but comes of a genuine intuitive hold on hidden domains. Even when the symbols chosen are old ones, verging on the well-worn, he can transmute everything into a masterpiece. Who has not heard of the shell that brings from its whorl the long boom of breakers? And has not Swinburne familiarised us to easy enthusiasms like "the sea, my mother", and "my mother the sea"? But take now Chadwick's:
Out of an infinite ocean
Time arose;
By his shore with a thunderous motion
That Splendour flows.
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Cast on the beach;
Hold it and hark to the singing, —
Eternity speech.
Flotsam and jetsam of Onehood
Unbaffled and free, Spurring Time to remember his sonhood,
His mother — the Sea.
With masterful ease the whole depth of the poetic significance of sea-born land and stray sea-cast shell is plumbed and a power of mystical sight creates a little marvel of profound word and rhythm out of what may seem almost nursery-rhyme properties. In view of this power, whether exercised with striking novelty or within a known symbo-logy, Chadwick's art in even its most traditional appearance must be distinguished as a new element at play in poetic literature, a pioneering triumph of one kind in what Sri Aurobindo has designated as "Future Poetry". And this triumph which springs from a heart of spiritual feeling attuned to an inmost Presence never so permanent and piercing in any English poet and approached in intensity by perhaps none else than Shelley and AE, is not a matter of a few isolated poems. In piece after piece that Presence makes Chadwick an expert discloser of mystical songscapes. We should hardly exaggerate in saying that it leads his poetry to overtop in sustained quality the production of all his English contemporaries and to hold a promise of greatness rendering his premature death a tragedy whose true significance can be adequately uttered only by a fineness of word comparable to his own, whether the fineness quickens, the imagination by a sober felicity as in
Boles of strength with that whisper of blessing,
or by a rhapsodical beauty as in
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Lustrously pale like the starlight when the air has been
washed by the rain,
Gleam and bend cloud-centaurs from afar
Moon-bow that is aiming, silver-taut,
Arrows made of silence at a star,
or with a vividly strange suggestiveness —
Only a moon-pale ledge of rock,
Lapped by that sullen waste
Of Limbo-drift where a shadowy flock
Of dream-birds spaced
In the unquiet wideness of their lonelihood
Are as that sky-line aimlessly empty of good —
or with an exceedingly exquisite "moon-prompted" aspiration —
Power and immaculate Glory
Whom outward eyes may greet —
In this hour might the inward quicken,
Cloudlessly meet
Mother and Beauty Divine —
or with an august intuitiveness coupled with an inmost poignancy, setting Shiva before us —
Aimless yet knowing each goal, —
As unfrontiered Space
Moves not at all,
But centres in each place
One instant effortless control;
Or as the pity finds Thy face
When on Thy shrine the tears and bel-leaves fall,
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or with a profound ingenuity of "counterchanged" sense-perceptions spiritualised —
Timid clamour-pomps we see
Whose mingled sound
Leave naked yet the limbs of earthly faring:
While all around
The undraped silences go Selfward, wearing
Form's ecstasy —
or with a powerful insight symbolling the seer-trance by a "rock-hewn cavern" open to unrealised spiritual possibilities —
So sleep the strong and keep their guarded peace,
Whilst gracious dreams from aisles of future Time
Lean past the bars of Being, whisper their secret word,
Yearn to be made rock...Dilapidate Sublime —
or with a fusion of almost all the varieties exemplified above of poetic imaged speech in a grand attitude of keenly felt self-dedication to the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo:
Precarious boat that brought me to this strand
Shall feed flame-pinnacles from stem to stern,
Till not one rib my backward glance can find —
Down to the very keelson they shall burn.
Now to the unreal sea-line I would no more yearn;
Fain to touch with feet an unimagined land...
The gates of false glamour have closed behind;
There is no return.
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2. Poetry, the Magazine of The British Poetry Association, edited by Hardiman Scott, Vol. 1, No. 2, Summer 1949, p. 7.
3. An early booklet by Sri Aurobindo.
4. Poems by Arjava (J. A. Chadwick), with a Foreword by Sri Krishna Prem (Ronald Nixon), published by John M. Watkins, 21 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W. C. 2, printed at Government Central Press, Hyderabad, Deccan, India, 1941.
5. Savitri (Sri Aurobindo International University Centre Collection, Vol. II, Pondicherry, 1954), Book I, Canto 3, p. 39.
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1. THE PRODIGAL POETIC PROMISE
(a)
The Irish mystic and poet, AE, has written:
The gay romance of song
Unto the spirit's life doth not belong.
And it is true that AE utters the core of himself best in chaste simple whispers. But the spiritual feeling caught in the series of great little books published by Harindranath Chattopadhyaya in his early days is like a jet of rainbow-flame. Sometimes the colours fuse into a white light, but usually they sparkle and quiver and trace in the veil between the outward and the inward a variegated rift, so to speak, through which may be poured with an ever-largening impetus the luxuries of the Eternal. No poet writing in English in our day has given such a prodigal promise to convey the Spirit's authentic thrill as Chattopadhyaya.
I have the good fortune to have my perusal of his works prefaced by a personal impression of him at the height of his career as a young man. It was in 1926, when he was 39 years of age, at one of the weekly soirees organised by an energetic Begum ambitious of having gifted artists appear under her auspices to a cosmopolitan circle. Every Sunday she made a new lion: I happened to be caught in the trap of her enthusiasm, just a fortnight before Chattopadhyaya was launched upon us as the most Numidian of all the lions she had rejoiced in. I must confess that my own poetry at that time was hardly even an articulate mew; all that was leonine about me was perhaps the sweep of my mane. My poetry, nevertheless, was applauded; and when on his Sunday Chattopadhyaya appeared, a well-meaning mutual friend
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intimated to him that a rising poet was in the audience. But there seemed at first no chance for him to meet that "poet" — so great was the pressure on his versatile genius to pack itself within the couple of hours during which he was to be on the stage. And I must say he was a volcano compared to the crackle of burning twigs that had been the talent displayed hitherto in that circle. I looked and listened and lost myself; for, as that resonant, richly flexible, deep-vowelling tone filled the ear and that expressive fiery-gestured figure crossed the eye, I felt a strange beauty run through my veins and beat upon the intellect's reserve and judgment, until the whole being awoke to the perception of some elemental force blowing through Chattopadhyaya's personality as through a flute of the most profound tremolo possible.
He recited his poems, sang his songs, acted snatches from his plays; uplifted, bewitched, impassioned his audience; and when the whole gorgeous hubbub was over, and the flashing eyes and floating hair became more recognisably a fellow human being instead of a mouthpiece of incalculable magic, I found myself beckoned to view them at close quarters. The words spoken to me were very kind, though a trifle patronising; I could see at once a genuine love for poetry wherever it might come from; but before we could slip into the technical intimacies in which all writers of verse delight, there was a call on him to please the other artists who had gathered in his honour. So I retired, with a resolve to buy his complete works at the earliest opportunity and try him out in cold print away from his voice and gesture which I felt could pass off what might be thin pseudo-Sufism as fumes of the unmixed Wine. When I did go through his books I noticed certain flaws which had been missing during the recital but which I had managed dimly to suspect by recollection in tranquillity on my way home. These were that his mind, very subtle and plastic though it was with an astonishing power of various profusion, did not sufficiently exercise a power of massive or concentrated control; and that his imagination lived in a state of dazzling speed capable of
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being magically creative but lacking somewhat in that self-understanding which broods and chisels and sifts patiently when the creative furor slackens. Deficiencies like these, if accompanied by a flow of inspiration whose tumultuousness can make them like weeds upon a mighty wave, may be negligible and on the whole nugatory; they may seem even inevitable as a price for that unique phenomenon — a poet possessed; for they can be the outcome of that peculiar and rare type of genius which can produce so much and so richly that there is neither the time nor the necessity to refashion and perfect what has been already done. In short, instead of correcting a slightly flawed poem, a poet may spend the same time writing half a dozen new ones, at least three of which may be born as miraculous as Aphrodite fresh from the foam. But Chattopadhyaya's verse did not give me the impression that he had reached such a height of lavish excellence: he had to his credit many brief masterpieces, but as often as not he betrayed a danger of letting his poems get finished without the substance attaining the true imaginative crystallisation, and there was also a danger of the vocabulary becoming more decorative than passionate. Hence the defects could not be excused; still, I had the firm intuition that the whole drift of his genius was towards the beautiful prolificity that covers up all peccadilloes; for I could not help marking that his fluency was exceptional though not quite marvellous and that not a single poem of his, even among those that were flawed, failed to exhibit in however partial a form qualities of the first order and through three-quarters of it a really valuable inspiration. It was this abnormal fact that confirmed my experience, during the recital, of contact with a poetic surge deep and original beyond measure.
Before looking at some of the short miracles by which Chattopadhyaya has given a secure longevity to his verse I must record a minor aesthetic irritation. For one thing, he makes an excessive use of certain hackneyed rhymes, though there also he is in the company of the Masters, for Crashaw in the most exalted flare of his religious aspiration couples
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"fire" with "desire" twice, with less than a dozen lines in between and only the plural to make a variation, while Swinburne who had the ingenuity to overcome the supposed unrhymableness of "babe" by producing that neglected poetic gem "astrolabe" could yet allow his inventive power to suffer complete paralysis whenever "fire" gleamed at him from the end of a line: like a penny in the slot it invariably drew out the stale delight of "desire". The same fault is to be laid at the door of AE, forbidding us to read him at a stretch, "crystal purities" though many of his poems are. Chattopadhyaya mixes this "fire-desire" cult with a side-worship of the "God-clod" twins, the former cheapening in a total survey the technical impression on a critic and the latter bringing in sometimes an almost bathetic turn.
Another tendency which jars on one when it is aimless or distorts itself in what may be called, in Max-Nordauese, "echolalia" — a tendency capable of a fine haunting or else epigrammatic effect but not seldom an easy result of negligence and an instrument of perverse ingenuity or rhetorical barrenness. Shakespeare is notorious for his pun-mania and in his comic scenes one may excuse him provided he is neat and does not torture the language too much; but nobody can help jibbing at the immortal Will's becoming so unrhyth-mically willful as to write "your eye I eyed". Chattopadhyaya, who with myself is in private life a victim to Shakespeare's disease, keeps punning out of his poetry; still, even an innocent line like
And be the being I was meant to be
does not make charming homophony, nor does his later and most magnificent poetic phase gain by the sudden cropping up of a lesson in grammar such as
Began before Beginning was begun.
Far from having powerful or profound reverberations the
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phrase jolts against the tympanum as nothing except a thought-saving blatancy.... All this is rather by the way, for it would be perverse to insinuate that the genuine worth of his poetry is spoilt on the whole by occasional blots. And what that worth is can be conveyed only by superlatives.
It may not be out of place in appreciating Chattopadhyaya to defend him against a probable charge of being exotic and therefore overstrained or meretricious. Exoticism need not always be an artificial hot-house product; when it blossoms directly from an imaginative thrill, there is a sovereign excess about it which carries a high artistic potency of suggestion. The Song of Solomon is exotic in its poignant richness of word and vision; the Book of Job is exotic in the figurative revel of its grandiose closing argument; Spenser and Keats are exotic when they diffuse their heavily-charged sen-suousness. What is essential is that confusion should be avoided and some clear outline cling to the warm colour-riot both en masse and in the details, just as tropical efflorescence comes to the eye not only with a clean-cut fiery impact in general but also with a vivid distinctness of colourful particulars. Wherever in Chattopadhyaya at his best a tropical brightness is perceived, the hues compose unmistakable pictures crowding towards a total significance, though I dare say those who are used to a less warm and fertile atmosphere of mind may take time to adjust their perspective.
The difficulty is perhaps enhanced by the peculiar source of this poet's opulent ardour; for that source is the ancient mystic insight which feels a supreme Oneness behind and within the universe, an unfamiliar light consciously playing through the pageant of sky, passion of sea, prodigality of earth, and transmuting even the dull dross of shadow and ugliness to a hint or symbol round which the divine joy can irradiate. Once, however, a sympathetic insight is opened, the reader moves with ease among the spiritually sensuous intensities expressed by Chattopadhyaya and realises how grievous the loss might be if he were to find no entrance to the heart of this God-drunk music. There is an early poem
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which very well represents his exoticism in a certain aspect of the mystic mood:
You flood my music with your autumn silence
And burn me in the flame-burst of your spring.
Lo! through my beggar-being's tattered garments
Resplendent shines your crystal heart, my King!
Like a rich song you chant your red-fire sunrise,
Deep in my dreams, and forge your white-flame moon....
You hide the crimson secret of your sunset,
And the pure, golden message of your noon.
You fashion cool-grey clouds within my body,
And weave your rain into a diamond mesh.
The Universal Beauty dances, dances
A glimmering peacock in my flowering flesh!
Obviously, the stanzas do not grow according to an explicit logical method or paint their pictures with an eye to surface meaning. They must be considered by stepping a little back from the usual domain of the imagination and then the coherence and the clarity appear. The first two lines proclaim the combined peace and power of the divine presence as felt by the poet — the peace mellow and fruitful, the power a fiery bloom — in a kind of correspondence between the world without and the world within. The next two subtly connect up with the preceding pair by intimating with paradoxical felicity how the keenly felt divine presence within is able to manifest its glory despite the faults and frailties of human nature: we are reminded of Plato's famous rejoinder to Diogenes — "Your pride peeps out through the holes of your raggedness", but here it is the high and rare splendour of the spirit taking by surprise the poor surface self: not only the so-called beautiful but even the wretched does the King of Kings use for a gateway into the universe. The language again joins the ideas of peace and power:
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"crystal" indicates the cool virgin beauty which is yet here not void of a royal resplendence. The second stanza continues the same theme with a different set of images and symbols: the pulse of life in the poet is in tune with the spiritual throb at the core of each day's procession of sky-moods — flaring sunrise and sunset, midnight's lucid trance of moon and midday's unperturbed lustre. A slight technical immaturity of expression renders the poem at this point not so finished as might be desired, for "deep in my dreams" is too far to be easily understood with "You hide..." The final verse carries the dominant motif a step further by transferring the spirit's thrill to the very physical being: body and soul seem to fuse in one illimitable sensation of light, as if the entire cosmos were unfolding its secret to the individual. Clouds become soft serenities in him and the rain a gorgeous yet pure intricacy of life-movement whereby the flesh blossoms into perfection, and the whole cosmic spirit, drunk with its own infinite magnificence, traces there its rhythm of delight:
This is a climax of the exotic imagination, a figure and fantasy packed with the richest significance and consummating the fundamental idea by a last stroke of concrete colour.
A vision analogous in breadth and vivid cumulativeness of meaning to this grand finale, though by a puissant rather than a rhapsodical utterance, is William Watson's symboli-sation of the factor of disharmony in the world by the figure of the raven: he suggests the strange shadow whose raucous intrusion and weird touch are felt everywhere. Here is his concluding verse —
Coils the labyrinthine sea
Duteous to the lunar will,
But some discord stealthily
Vexes the world-ditty still,
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And the bird that caws and caws
Clasps Creation with his claws.
The end of this verse compares very fairly in poetic excellence, while contrasting in psychological attitude, with Chattopadhyaya's close. It is of interest also as what Chattopadhyaya himself might have written in the period subsequent to that which gave birth to his first book. He came like a bacchanal of paradise, scattering largesse of poetic joy; but soon another mood possessed him or, more accurately, shared his soul — the raven and the peacock existing now side by side. That this should occur one could have predicted from the acute sensibility of his nature. I remember that when I saw his face during the recital I said to myself, "Here is a highly strung temperament — clearly a man who would be moved to intense passion, either joy or grief, and would most probably veer from one extreme to the other — a mind borne away on great impulsive gusts, plunging headlong into whatever seems momentous to him, living, therefore, dangerously but with prodigious possibilities of development along the bent his mood assumes."
(b)
The bent of anguish which disengages itself from the various velleities of Chattopadhyaya's verse brings with it an intellectual confrontation of the world-problem. Not, to be sure, a logical arguing in poetry; a mental strength is what I mean and a faculty to catch, more often than before, intuitions through the aesthetic sensation. The old exoticism remains — accompanied by a more contemplative force, since there mingles with his acute experience of world-pain a longing to solve its great riddle. Faith, too, keeps its old fervour and thus the new philosophical temper in him accepts pain with open arms like an inscrutable beloved with whom he has to wrestle to the point of death before he can
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earn a surrender of all-transmuting bliss. Suffering is a sacred privilege to him: he is pushed by it not to blaspheme or even doubt, but nearer and nearer the goal he seeks. Though, like William Watson in the "Crow"-stanza, he can be puzzled by the spectre of discord haunting the world-ditty, he utilises the invasion of his being by it to raise to yet intenser a pitch his aspiration towards the ideal harmony. "Give me the sorrow that shall take me to the Holy of Holies," he seems to cry: "welcome grief and tears and heartbreak — if the sharp agony rend the inner veil, the salt tears corrode my chains, the heartbreak fling wide open a door to the All-Beautiful." He even regards pain as an indispensable means for attaining the godhead, since the sum of impurity in human nature is so massive that a burning sacrifice alone can destroy it to the full. A characteristic expression of this mood is in these twelve lines:
O pain, I love the lonely wine-red gleam
Within your deep and ever-wakeful eyes:
Old Arab in the dark tent of my dream
Under the burning skies.
Excess of ecstasy, immortal pain,
Comrade of love, companion of desire,
Lone Bedouin riding through life's desert plain
A camel of red fire.
Most splendid traveller of eternity
In whose first footfall the wide world began,
A holy Mecca in the heart of me
Awaits your caravan.
The poetic quality here is striking, but it is possible to overlook the implications which certain phrases have and which make that quality singularly rich for its thought-stuff. The eyes of pain are "deep and ever-wakeful" and "wine-red" not only because they have become sunken and blood-
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shot with sleeplessness; there dwells an unobscurable profundity in them and their red gleam reveals some hidden joy behind, a relish as of some rare wine that induces a mystic self-awakening. For this pain is the biting disappointment with things that pass turned into intense longing for the Eternal — a longing which by the splendour of its vision and the arduousness of its effort is miraculously bitter-sweet: just because the splendour is so great, the arduousness necessary to compass it is gigantic — the excess of the ecstasy causing the unbearable travail. The line "In whose first footfall the wide world began" adds a shade broader to the conception by envisaging the entire time-process as a difficult movement from eternity to eternity through the immortal Spirit's self-separation and self-pursuit, a long cyclic pilgrimage each individual can hasten in himself if he directs life's pain to a sacred end, "a holy Mecca" of prayer — that is, if he invites it to perform a mystic worship through his inner consciousness.
Another remarkable poem tinged by the same mood is "Challenge"; it has, besides, a more personal note:
You have done well
By having hurled me into such deep hell,
Since from its fires which burn my heart and eyes
I shall erelong arise
Like brave sweet incense to the peaks of time
Your feet could never climb!
Star in your high estate,
Who share not now the darkness of my fate!
Some sudden night you will begin to be
A nursling light in my eternity,
Since in deep sorrow I am being bent
To an unfathomable firmament.
The idea of suffering spiritualised is presented vividly by the similitude of incense rising self-offered to the Divine from a
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holocaust of human life: the epithets "brave" and "sweet" convey the exact psychological experience of sorrow accepted as a means to direct the soul of desire to a sacred end. A subtler and more powerful imagination leaps from the second stanza. By addressing his tormenter as "star" the poet not only suggests her once-idealised loveliness now standing aloof from his misery in cold disdain, but also enhances to an utter transcendence the mysterious "peaks of time" which he has declared unscalable by her feet. For, even star-height seems too poor compared with the altitude his soul has felt as its inevitable destiny. And what is this altitude? "An unfathomable firmament" wherein constellations are lost and light-years dwarfed into a negligible span — a lofty God-consciousness before which all other exalted states are nothing, but which the poet links up to "deep sorrow" by the apt word "bent". The metaphorical feat here has wellnigh no parallel in poetic literature for profound novelty, though others have figured the sky in language felicitous or striking. We have Blanco White's fine and adequate
This glorious canopy of light and blue —
there is Baudelaire's recherche exclamation,
Le Ciel! couvercle noir de la grande marmite —
and its less hectic counterpart in Fitzgerald's Omar,
And that inverted bowl we call the sky
Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die —
Shelley has an unforgettable image in speaking of Byron,
The Pilgrim of Eternity whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument.
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The last idea would be the most original as well as the grandest, if Chattopadhyaya did not exceed it by a further subtlety of boldness: to have pressed the optical illusion of the sky's bend into service of a condition of torture fraught with immense spiritual possibilities is feliciter audax to a supreme revelatory point. It represents to my mind Chattopadhyaya's summit in his young days in what I have distinguished as the capacity to receive intuitions through the poetic intelligence, just as the lines about the dancing peacock I have emphasised earlier are his climax through the aesthetic sensation.
The philosophy of suffering embodied in the two poems quoted above is not the sole expression given by him to his developing poetic intelligence. He does not become insensitive to the waves of beauty that in his earliest period flooded his being; the old joy remains despite the new sorrow, for all beauty seems to him the conquest won by the Spirit over the obstacles in the way of its universal manifestation, it is the constant sign of God's emergence and increase. The pain-motif brought in a certain ache for the supracosmic; and the theory of Maya, with a stress on some featureless light and peace beyond, plays a perceptible though not very prominent role henceforth in his verse. He has moods when the issue of suffering turned soulwards appears to be an escape into a "white hush" far from earth's panorama of change and even the beauty and delight possible here a path to a perfection behind the temporal and the manifest, behind also the larger occult planes that form earth's immediate background and from which the poets draw the multi-hued stuff of their dreams. At such times his colourful poetry becomes like the pictures of the young Andhra artist whose premature death he commemorates in a series of sonnets:
In the deep red, sweet yellow, quiet green
We see the gorgeous striving of your mind
Towards the perfect ultimate serene
Vision of Love which strikes all colour blind.
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The main trend, however, of his muse is to sing the Spirit as realisable within the time-process, so that the movement from eternity to eternity may mean the suffusion of each hour by the secret Splendour:
What do I seek beyond the golden edges of the earth?
Here is the Image clothed in light and mystery and fire.
In conscious hours our restless human hands can bring
to birth
All that the Spirit may desire.
The glories of beyond are here, the destiny of skies
Is being fulfilled on earth; the fate of every silver star
Is hidden in a seed. A sudden vision in my eyes
Plucks all the radiance from afar.
Where do you wander, restless heart? All that you seek
is born
Each moment in you, though you know it not, since
you are blind.
See, I am clothed in regal gold and purple cloths of morn
And mantled in the scented wind.
This cry, twelve lines long like much of his best verse, is a fitting note on which to end a survey of Chattopadhyaya's genius before its self-consecration for a couple of years to Sri Aurobindo's yoga in the Ashram at Pondicherry. But there are some other peculiarities of his work deserving notice. Here the aesthetic sensation and the poetic intelligence are openly allied, the lines
A sudden vision in my eyes
Plucks all the radiance from afar
being again a phase of the latter in an intuitive crystallisation of considerable power.
The seventy and odd sonnets, too, that we have from him
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during his early years illustrate more or less the same alliance; they give a very mature ring and they point to a rather prolific future in the genre, for he writes them with an inspired ease not usually to be found where a firm yet flexible tone and structure are requisite for success as in the Italian form, and Chattopadhyaya's penchant is for that: even when the sestet is English a la Shakespeare, the octave he generally builds with a Petrarchan punctiliousness of rhyme. The muscular energy other sonneteers employ is almost absent: instead, a nimble quickness executes the complexities — a magician and not a master-builder rears up the flawless fabric. There is no dearth of force whenever that is necessary, but it is of a man surefootedly leaping up difficult edges rather than strenuously climbing them. Alfred Douglas has written a sonnet with a curiously phrased sestet of great strength —
Only to build one crystal barrier
Against this sea which beats upon our days;
To ransom one lost moment with a rhyme
Or if fate cries and grudging gods demur,
To clutch life's hair, and thrust one naked phrase
Like a lean knife between the ribs of Time.
Critics might, like grudging gods, demur to the slightly histrionic shade, but the compressed aphoristic magnificence of the traditional sonnet-language is in ample evidence. Now listen to Chattopadhyaya:
One perilous moment wherein must be told
All the deep-hidden mysteries which lie
Within a lifetime's darkness like pure gold:
One moment lent to utter the great cry
Of love, which lost, Time greyly passes by
And leaves the world broken and bent and old.
The technique leans on a subtle urge, a widening out to fill
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the form and not a packing in as by Alfred Douglas, but the strength is there and as if to give conclusive proof of it the inverted foot made by "broken" violates the metre by a highly effective jerk emphasising the sense.
Taken ensemble, Chattopadhyaya's accomplishment in the sonnet-medium — before Sri Aurobindo's series of sonnets in 1939 — is perhaps the most notable in our century by its sustained poetry. Rupert Brooke has been awarded the palm by English critics but his work is too scarce and the highest inspiration peeps out just once or twice, whereas Chattopadhyaya has in almost every sonnet some genuine flash. The former has, however, one feature which is very striking and worth emulating — a vivid quaver and restless beauty expressed technically by anapaests and an unusual overrunning from line to line. Chattopadhyaya's vividness is due to colour and image, while the feeling-tone depends on the shortness or length of sentence, grammatical staccato or suspense. It is difficult to choose the very best when so much merit is scattered throughout: perhaps the following catches the typical accent in more than one variety:
Clouds close and clash across the starry deep
And darken every corner of the sky.
Holding their breath under a sullen sweep
Of sudden rain, the lakes and meadows lie....
Loud wind and storm have hushed the croak and cry
Of frog and cricket. Lightning flashes leap
Like amber serpents from the grey-black sleep
Of clouds, and earth seems like a blind man's eye!
But tranquil dreams the sky behind the storm
And the clear stars burn with a fleckless flame
Beyond the veils which the dim clouds have drawn
Across them, as the dreams serene and warm
In me though storm-clouds cover up Thy name
At times between the weeping dusk and dawn.
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Chattopadhyaya's performance with the sonnet has in a particular context disclosed a quality not represented in the above — a quality which is neither the poetic intelligence nor the aesthetic sensation, but can only be described as creative insight: the rhythm and the language, though not superior as art to what is done elsewhere, are then of a kind eminently desirable by one who seeks to utter the Spirit from increasingly authentic sources, for the word-music bears upon its surge an experience, or at least the reflection of an experience, proper to occult planes not easy of access. Chattopadhyaya has not written any poem woven all of this rare light, but in places it breaks through and we have a magic and an intonation practised by only a few poets in their most spiritual moments. I shall give three examples, two occurring outside the sonnet-sequences. He sees once the twilight fall like some great benediction of quiet from the sky over "the ripening gold of ricefields" — yet there is no quiet in his own heart and the "black storm" raging in it threatens to destroy for him the spell:
What lips are these which strive with shadowy breath
To extinguish the rich flame upon the height?
In the words and the music of these lines the atmosphere of the very spell and the weird darkness opposing it enters: it is not just explained or imaged — the veil has been stirred aside from across mysterious regions. On another occasion he writes of "plying swift oars of inwardness" in "a dim boat of dreams" and passing beyond all time and change until he reaches
the city of old sleep
Where the lone ways are crowded with white peace.
The whole occult picture is made to grow real, one feels oneself actually in that unknown place — the poetic suggestion from there has come out pure and sheer, helped by the vowellation, the trio of spondees and, in a line of mono-
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syllabic slowness, the significant dissyllable "crowded" as if by its single occurrence to enforce the fact that it was only with aloof calm that the ways of the sleep-city were packed. Four lines in one of the sonnets upon the young Andhra artist's death reflect the most intimate mystic revelation intuited by Chattopadhyaya direct on some inner plane:
Departing, you have left a track of light
Over the solitary ocean-deep
Of my dark soul across which day and night
My body voyages like a boat of sleep.
The vision and the experience emerge by degrees, gather more and more concrete fulness until in the last line the native vibration of them flows out. The total effect is a highwater-mark of creative insight.
At this point I might have said:
"If the faculty of creative insight develops side by side with the exotic and the mental strain for Chattopadhyaya's genius, we must have, as a result, work of unprecedented depth as well as exuberance and power. Already in 1934, when he has joined Sri Aurobindo's Ashram, the bulk of his work is sure of a permanent place in English literature: he will hardly lie on a lower level than AE and Yeats; but they have come to the fading hour of life, all their triumphs lie behind them — Chattopadhyaya is still in mid-career and his future is big with a versatile fruition to which it is hard to assign cautious boundaries. There is a flow in his richness that is prophetic of diverse self-fulfilment on a grand scale with regard both to the swelling number of individual poems and to work executed in large proportions. Among shorter poetic forms one kind strikes us as hardly exploited elsewhere by his published books. In them we come across rhapsody bejewelled with sense-colour, reflection alive with apposite simile and metaphor, vision vibrating with imagery of truth — but the personal emotion-cry of a lyric directness is not often heard. Lyricism is present, yet rarely direct and
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personal as for instance in Shelley, and when the peculiar mood is felt it is not with the mystic touch discoverable in all places. Chattopadhyaya has responded to the Divine as a presence suffusing Nature, haunting the kingdom of thought, sweeping down strange curves of world on unfamiliar world other than this; what he has not awakened to is the Divine as a person, an archetype of the human nature — face and lips and hands and feet that are perfect and at the same time like ours by a close warmth.
''Shelley and Yeats mix the ideal and the real in a manner that is mystic by imagination, not by experience: Emilia Viviani was in fact nothing save a fancied symbol of the Soul within Shelley's soul, and the woman with odorous twilight about her tresses and about her mouth is a mere shadow hinting by gesture here and there the Rose of all Roses enshrined in Yeats's heart. But the personal emotion burns none the less, joining its heat to the light of high dreams: in Chattopadhyaya the two elements fall almost apart as if he could not somehow adjust a blending of the human shade and the divine substance — except on a couple of occasions and then too not in the finest vein. The purely human love-poems, though not negligible, suffer by comparison with the unstrained fire in the mystic pieces: only one stands out, altogether non-mystic yet steeped in witchery, to indicate his potentialities if ever he were to fill himself with a passion for God as a spiritual body, an archetype of the human. This extraordinary lyric should take its place beside Robert Bridge's 'Awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake!' Bridge's stanzas have ranked with the supreme cries of English lyricism by an exalted sweetness; this poem of Chattopadhyaya's is a more simple rapture but just for that simplicity works perhaps a more intimate magic:
My love and I will meet each other again,
O joy, it is going to be soon and very soon.
And when we meet we will kiss each other's pain,
Kiss each other's pain away under the moon.
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Though I have wounded my love she will come to me,
For she, my love, is generous, she is so kind.
Pour more goldenly, light of day, on the tree!
Touch the leaves at twilight more tenderly, wind!
Though I have spoken to her unbeautiful words,
Though I have broken her heart she will come again.
Sing more sweetly at dawn, O beautiful birds!
Slip more silverly over the stones, O rain!
The spontaneous technique is beyond praise: the varied tremolo of glide-anapaests, the effective truncation of initial feet in the more ecstatic lines, the euphonious surprise of other less usual stress-arrangements — and running through all these modulations a play of long vowels and ringing liquids and lapsing sibilants. It is a pity we do not have more of this impassioned imaginative delicacy in Chattopadhyaya's verse — but that may be because its complete outflow has waited for the true bent of his personal emotion to manifest itself: that is, in the mystic way, as all other parts of his nature have done.
"A second line of development is towards creations of long breath, poems or poetic dramas conceived and constructed largely, bold sweeping canvasses whereon the fullblown prolificity of which he seems capable if signs can be believed shall paint some story of the soul with occult planes of forces and personalities and godheads as its theatre. The plays he has produced ere now are fine poetry but the blank verse tends to be a rich monotone because of a lack of strong variations in style and rhythm; besides, they are too brief to claim a royal afflatus of idea and craftsmanship. That he would write short poems in abundance enough to put him on a par with any other English poet who has done the same is certain. But to deal out a generous quantity of excellent quality in small and separate outbursts is not the sole factor determining poetic rank; the decisive factor which lifts one clean to the top is the gift of designing a spacious, a palatial, a
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multitudinous unity. By this time, the thirties, we know only one attempt to make mightily; but Hardy's Dynasts is a sprawling greatness. Though its plan has behind it an intention more intricate and extensive than the Iliad, it lacks the organic control the latter, for all "our vagueness about its single authorship, exhibits so lucidly to the mind, and it suffers also by an unsteady poetic fire in the various parts. If Chattopadhyaya makes something even less colossal yet large and poetic enough, if he fashions a new Prometheus Unbound, essays and finishes another Hyperion or rebuilds a Paradiso, in terms of a fresh and mature mystic originality, he will stand like a giant in the dawn of a new era, his masterpiece gathering its lines of light from a creative Sun beyond both our day and our darkness."
2. THE GLORIOUS POETIC FRUITION
How far have my hopes and prophecies about Harindranath Chattopadhyaya come true? At a moment of crisis in his personal life he joined the Ashram of Yoga which had sprung up in Pondicherry round Sri Aurobindo. Two years he lived there — two glorious years in which he did the poetic work of two lifetimes, so abundant and so uniformly excellent were the poems of various kind he rattled off at breakneck speed on his typewriter. But this phenomenon came to a sudden halt when something in the man proved too rigid for the transforming pressure Sri Aurobindo was putting on all his disciples. Something refused to change and Chattopadhyaya, instead of humbly withdrawing from the "brave, new world" emerging in the Ashram, rose in revolt, flung away the luminous power that was lifting his poetic genius to its climax and plunged back into the melee of common life. He could have kept sweet his inner contact with the Master, even though the outer association had been split. Then the result of his departure would not have been a stop in genuine inspiration. The old mystical beauty of his work no less than the new light that had suffused it vanished. Its place was
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taken by a communistic enthusiasm, a passion of the proletariat, turning out excited propaganda in verse relieved at extremely long intervals by the true poetic flash. Various concerns of an all-too-common kind also occupied the forefront of his mind. Art has an alchemic touch that can turn to gold anything on which its fingers may fall, but all men have not the capacity to carry the philosopher's stone wherever they go. There are trends of genius as there are trends of character, and while Chattopadhyaya the mystic could voyage through magic seas of poetry and discover golden countries, Chattopadhyaya the "comrade" and commoner could not wield the sickle to gather any rich harvest and the hammer in his hand could only drive nails into a coffin for his own dying poetic spirit. This, to the mind of any critic who has seen his work under Sri Aurobindo, is the most appalling tragedy that has overtaken the world of art in our day.
After his break-away from Yoga, he has published two books compiled from the output of his Ashram days. They scarcely represent the many-sidedness and range of his creativity. As they are the only ones somehow allowed to slip from the stranglehold he has applied to his mystical penchant, the public cannot adequately appreciate what Yoga did for him. But even these meagre volumes are packed with supreme qualities. The poems are of an intense inner life figured forth in several styles. The most prevalent is a lyric fluency simple to the point of spoken speech yet alive with the most rich and profound suggestion. Perhaps this style is best illustrated by Shaper Shaped:
In days gone by I used to be
A potter who would feel
His fingers mould the yielding clay
To patterns on his wheel;
But now through wisdom lately won
That pride has died away,
I have ceased to be the potter
And have learned to be the clay.
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In bygone times I used to be
A poet through whose pen
Innumerable songs would come
To win the hearts of men;
But through new-got knowledge"
Which I hadn't had so long,
I have ceased to be the poet
And have learned to be the song.
I was a fashioner of swords
In days that now are gone,
Which in a hundred battlefields
Glittered and gleamed and shone;
But now that I am brimming with
The silence of the Lord,
I have ceased to be sword-maker
And have learned to be the sword.
In other days I used to be
A dreamer who would hurl
On every side an insolence
Of emerald and pearl;
But now that I am kneeling
At the feet of the Supreme,
I have ceased to be the dreamer
And have learned to be the dream.
No finer and at the same time no plainer statement of the self-dedication which animates Yoga can be offered. The new Chattopadhyaya does not sing for singing's sake but because each song streams from the silence of the divine Spirit growing within and floats him into a yet deeper realm of the same Spirit. However, while the lyric light displayed by Shaper Shaped needs no interpretation, unfolding as it does its profundities like a bud opening into a flower — exquisitely natural — and calling for no effort on the reader's part to respond to its revelation, the stuff of a poem like The Shepherd
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has a different quality and appeal. Here too is a natural felicity, a flowerlike process, yet we feel at once that this flower with the mystical aroma has not risen from the outer mind sown with seeds of the inner divinity. It is a growth in another region of consciousness than Shaper Shaped, a region where the inward is expressed not in an outward language but in a language that has itself the turn and rhythm of inwardness. The mind feels somewhat baffled, for an order of reality is imaged, which exists beyond our mind's usual vision of Nature. The mystical life is not presented here through earth-symbols so much as carried bodily out, as it were, from its profound plane: the symbols belong to an unknown dimension and may seem surrealistically incomprehensible in a strange luminous way instead of the murkily fitful way adopted by Surrealism in Europe. To a brooding attention, the poem loses its bright inconsequence and becomes concrete and harmonious, a masterpiece of what I have termed creative insight:
My soul is a shepherd
Leading the sheep of hours
Silverly across wide silences
Strewn with singing flowers.
He is driving his lonely
Old gray-silver sheep
Towards the solitary fold
Of inward-shining sleep.
They are gathered slowly
Into the soundless fold
Where they are long rows of silver
Washed in hushed gold.
Read the poem three or four times, not by the eye alone but with the ear attentive to a slow subdued intoning. The rhythmic effect is as important as the vision-stimulus, for the
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vision is of a "subliminal" region to which we are unaccustomed and, unless the rhythm is absorbed, the living thrill, the vibrant sense of the reality brought into view will escape. There is a deep vowellation throughout, and across it runs a thin or thick sibilance: wideness and profundity are suggested, with a sweep through them into a spiritual quiet. In the second and third stanzas the predominant vowel is the long o: it brings here a sense of entry into some large yet enclosed secrecy of inner space. Growing into a state of purity and calm "strewn" with lovely spontaneities of inspiration and concentrating all its awareness of the time-process into a movement towards the Timeless, the consciousness is pictured as passing into a condition of trance wherein the diverse aspects of the purified human nature are steeped into a divine silence, a divine illumination — "long rows of silver/Washed in hushed gold." The sibilance of that closing phrase is remarkable. Added to the effect of washing and hushing, there is subtly indicated the increase or change from the soul's silver to God's gold by the deepening of the thin s-note into the thick sound of sh.
It is difficult to align this poem with any particular trend in English verse. The general stuff of atmosphere and rhythm has affinities with stray passages in Blake, but Blake has a more nocturnal touch, so to speak — he gives us mystery rather than revelation. Yeats's twilight, with its fairy and mythic hues, is also close to the tone here, but a more genuinely spiritual light is present in The Shepherd, an Indian rather than an Irish trance. The impression is as of something Yeatsian crossed with AE — not the magical occult but the mystical occult. Chattopadhyaya has struck a vein of far-reaching originality, with novel possibilities of poetic expression.
A poem equally out of the way on the whole, though not equally consistent in plane of inspiration with regard to the parts, is the sonnet entitled Mask. This sonnet is not exactly typical of Chattopadhyaya who writes as a rule from the plane of vivid thought: no doubt, mystical vision and spiri-
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tual experience grip that plane, yet they assume the form and rhythm of the thinking mind. No bit of poetic excellence is thereby lost: only, the turn of language and the cumulative sound-suggestion are not such as would be found if he wrote directly from planes of consciousness above the mind — the planes that break upon us in the ancient Upanishads. The highest Upanishadic range is wellnigh impossible to catch except in a few isolated moments: no published work of Chattopadhyaya's shows it. The middle ranges are not beyond a spiritual poet's reach: it is their presence in Mask that makes it stand out from Chattopadhyaya's usual style. The usual style, when austere and not lavish, speaks thus of a spiritual realisation:
...the naked everlastingness
Which nor by pleasure nor by pain is stirred,
Being a hush that bears no human word
Nor deed nor dream nor passion as a burden,
Since it exists unto itself, a truth
That ages not but, gifted with a youth
Won from the lonely Light of God as guerdon,
Its path is pure and smooth.
The substance is drawn from above the mind: the language and rhythm instead of leaping out straight from there are transposed to a mental key. It is high poetic utterance with the accent of a Sophoclean chorus without the precise choric measure. But the style is of the spiritualised mind: another style is possible, not more poetically perfect yet more spiritually vibrant. The peculiar excellence of that rare style can be gauged if we set the sonnet Mask side by side with the quotation just made and if we compare in its own octave or sestet the lines that are spiritualised mind to those that are sheer spirituality:
Beyond your many-coloured moods I bear
The flowering white monotony of foam,
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The diamond dimness of the domed air
And the deep Mood which silence makes its home.
In me, the Timeless, time forgets to roam,
Drunk with my poise, grown sudden unaware,
Offering up its noontide and its gloam,
Withdrawn in a lost attitude of prayer.
I have grown illimitably alien
To the brief gaudiness of time and space,
A thing immortal beyond mortal ken,
Evasive essence that you cannot trace.
Here, even here, amidst a crowd of men
I hide the light behind a human face.
The inner state depicted is not altogether the same as that in the preceding quotation or even in The Shepherd. Still, it has affinities with them which render a comparison fruitful. The inwardness suggested by
Nor deed nor dream nor passion as a burden
carries a rhythm and motion of wings different from
Though the former has a revelatory force of its own, I should say there is more subtle illumination in the latter, more intuitive breadth, more rapt closeness to the spiritual reality, even as there is more of these things in that picture of a high heavenly mood of night-coloured mystery —
than in the picture of spiritual agelessness gifted with
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a youth
Won from the lonely Light of God as guerdon.
The same more and less of sheer spirituality is perceived if the close of the sonnet —
I hide the light behind a human face
is weighed against the two lines immediately before it:
It is not merely the presence of images or of visual terms that constitutes the differentia. We can have a penetrating mystical figure, as in another poem —
Then life begins to know itself at last
As an immortal moving pyramid
Conscious of the arcane within it hid,
A pyramid of glow which does not cast
The shadow that it did —
and feel none the less that a quality of spirit-stuff — at once ample and intense, far-sounding and close-throbbing in the rhythm as well as in the word and the vision — draws a dividing line between the two kinds of mystical exaltation.
Between The Shepherd and Mask the dividing line is thinner in some respects. Even the products of the spiritualised mind have no absolute gulf separating them from those of sheer spirituality. Influences from the latter steal across, influences of amplitude and height. What, on the other hand, is common to Mask and The Shepherd is direct intensity and light. The feeling and seeing in both are spiritually intimate, the vision is so worded and rhythmed that it invades us with a tangible concreteness of the
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Unknown. But the Unknown has many domains, and there is missing in The Shepherd the wind of an eagle's passage through unbounded space. Its style is a dip shiningly inward, whereas that of the intuitive parts of Mask is a kindled soar upward in broad circles from an inward starting-point.
As pure poetry, however, all styles can sit on equal thrones. And Chattopadhyaya's work is full of throned inspiration. It would be a shame if he suppressed for good the immense bulk of verse to which his two years of Yoga gave birth. His later life having been out of tune with mysticism, he might not have cared for so masterful an expression of spiritual truths. But what has art to do with the man's phases? Each phase can be, for art, of paramount value; art is any substance caught up in an insightful perfection of form; if Chattopadhyaya was still an artist at heart, no matter with what communistic or hedonistic bent blocking his outlet, he should not have muffled a voice from his past that had rung so beautifully true. Nor should he have let himself be cowed by the superficial tendency of the public to declaim against an artistic creation if it did not reflect the man as he might be at the moment. Few artists are on a par with the height and depth of consciousness opening up before us in their works. It would be crass folly for anyone to charge a spiritual poem with being pretentious, should the poet not be a practising saint twenty-four hours of the day. A good poem stands by itself: if it has inspiration it fulfils itself and is perfectly sincere. A poem's sincerity or truth lies in the verse being a faithful transcription of something fine in the heights and depths of our consciousness, regions that are mostly far away and hidden from our normal state — the sincerity or truth does not consist in whether the poetic revelation agrees altogether with the poet's day-to-day outer life or even with the actual experience with which the poem began. That is the first thing to understand about art. If Chattopadhyaya has written spiritual poetry of a truthful order in the artistic sense, why should he be debarred from publishing it? What can be pretentious about such a pub-
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lication? If poeple want to measure one's outer life entirely by one's poetry, they are going the wrong way about a most delicate business. It is their fault and not the poet's or his poetry's. Great poetry does not pose: the simple reason is that it is truly inspired. In art, mere intellectual ingenuity, mere rhetoric, mere artifice of word and rhythm are the only poses. So true is this that if a man leading a non-spiritual life were in a spell of inspiration to dash off Shaper Shaped, The Shepherd and Mask they would nowise stand condemned as hypocritical. It is not in the least beyond possibility that such a phenomenon should take place. As Whitman said, each of us contains multitudes, and a personality at once poetic and mystical can very well appear in brief flashes among the jostling crowd within us of egotist and altruist, fool and philosopher, solitary and society-hunter. The man and the artist do not always coincide: art is often if not ever an outrush of hidden splendours of the subliminal and the supraliminal through one side of the man that is afire with a sense of beauty and quick with creative genius. Provided this particular side serves as a transparent medium, a work of art can be held as authentic, with no stain of pose upon it.
Only from one point of view the publication of the gigantic wealth Chattopadhyaya gathered during his Yogic years would cause a mood of bitterness. Knowing the wonders he created and dreaming of the miracles such genius would foreshadow, we should be bound to make a wry face. A man whose genius has at its roots the mystical aspiration ruins himself by shedding the mystic in him. Perhaps he cannot really shed that side, but he can keep it choked and rob year after year of the most golden fruition. Despite all weakness and obstacle he should treasure and cherish the mystical spark until the day when it can burst into a myriad tongues of flame. The more he does that treasuring and cherishing, the greater will be his fulfilment. And what a superb fulfilment Chattopadhyaya could have had! The sorriest thing that can be spoken about him is such an exclamation. That is the epitaph of damning praise his
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admirers dread they would utter if they saw the mystic's magnificence which the "comrade" and commoner have kept unpublished.
One judgment, however, can be boldly pronounced. No matter how short he has fallen of the empyrean accessible to him, the complete publishing of the poetry born in his two years of Yoga will prove Harindranath Chattopadhyaya the writer of the largest number of first-rate poems of brief length the world has been enriched with by one single man.
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A POET, A POEM AND A COMMENTATOR
A LETTER
My delay in acknowledging and estimating your commentary on my poem, A Poet's Stammer,1 must have led you to think: "How cold and ungrateful are poets — they don't care how much labour critics spend on appreciating them." But that would be a mistake.
Poetry is not everybody's pet and the poet knowing how much "life's clamour" tends to drown his small silvery voice is hardly likely to miss valuing the few leaps he finds of the reader-heart to his tune. If there is any neglect by him, it is due to other causes than coldness and ingratitude. Often the work he turns out is so intensely dedicated to what Graves calls the "White Goddess" (none other than Homer's "Thea" and Milton's "Heavenly Muse") that he feels nothing more is necessary to be done about it. Praise or blame seems irrelevant. At times even publication appears to be pointless. All that the poem, if it is really good, requires or demands after it has been offered at the inner altar is — another poem
1 My dream is spoken
As if by sound
Were tremulously broken
some vow profound.
A timeless hush
Draws ever back
The winging music-rush
Upon thought's track.
Though syllables sweep
Like golden birds
Far lonelihoods of sleep
Dwindle my words.-
Beyond life's clamour
A mystery mars
Speech-light to a myriad stammer
Of flickering stars.
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equally good! For the White Goddess is Infinity calling. She is the endless Creatrix and from each creature of hers she asks also endless creation. Or else the sequel she desires for every living poem is the poet's living out of its perfection. And this may mean either an attempt by the poet to draw himself inward into a silence where the fragments of his fallen nature get composed into "one entire and perfect chrysolite" — or an endeavour on his part to go beyond great words into great actions where all his limbs work to compose patterns of a dynamic truth that is a silent beauty, rather than the poet's significant forms, his patterns of an eloquent beauty that is a static truth.
To come down a little from this somewhat rarefied plane of Art's semi-mystic philosophy, I may add that frequently the seeming coldness and ingratitude are due simply to the fact that the poor poet was up to his ears in the irresistible tides of an enormous urgent undertaking that had nothing to do with mysticism or philosophy, even if it still had something to do with Art though not without a mixture of the service to God with service to Mammon.
I am afraid I am still writing with the Mantle on. Let me quite come out of it and "talk turkey", as they say in the States. For the last month or so I have been at my typewriter for nearly eight hours every day. I'll briefly tell you why. The firm of MacGibbon & Kee and of Panther Books had announced a prize of £3000 for the best book submitted of any kind before 31st March. I thought: "Why not have a go with my most recent work?" A perfect copy had to be prepared in a race against time. So I set about the race and now at last it is over. I have tried to do my best, but the Gibbon and the Panther in the names of the firms concerned are none too happily suggestive to a lifelong lover of Plato. Plato long ago spoke of the difficulty of dealing with the ape and the tiger in man. But let me not be led away by a poet's sensitivity to sound. An Aurobindonian poet should be mystic but not pessimistic.
This brings me round very naturally to your "explication"
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of A Poet's Stammer. Your first two pages are unexceptionable. When we come to the third I find your point about "urge to communicate" a little difficult to accept. You say: "The urge to communicate is so powerful that the pattern of the dream is threatening to break ('tremulous' having the suggestion of shaking and being shaken). The temptation to speak (when one has taken the vow of silence) is irresistible." I smiled when I read the last sentence. No doubt, every poet has something of the feminine in him but surely not so much as to make him incapable of containing a secret and to render the forbidden fruit the most tempting for him? The poet is not impelled to speak just because he has taken a vow to the contrary. Rather, when he is impelled to speak, it is as if he were breaking a sacred silence to which his soul is pledged. The impulsion does not threaten to break the pattern of the dream; perhaps the reverse would be the true thing to say. The pattern of the dream has the power to break the impulsion — it constantly works to absorb the poet's inner consciousness and that is why he feels a "tension" in the act of speech and the breaking of some vow to remain plunged in the profundities of the Beyond. The tremulousness is not in the dream-pattern as the result of the poet's urge to communicate: it is in the poet's own communicating movement as an effect of the pull which that pattern has on him. This word prepares the final metaphor of the "flickering stars". In fact all the stanzas prepare it in one way or another. What "tremulously" does here is done in the second stanza by "draws ever back" and in the third by "dwindles". And there is a concrete reason for it. But before I give the reason let me make a remark on the puzzling "dwindles".
At present this verb is used in the intransitive. But I am reviving an old transitive form of the late seventeenth century, a form which is more rare than obsolete: it means "to cause to shrink, to make less, or to bring low". The first and second senses apply here.
To return to my point. In the days when this poem was written, inspiration used to come mostly with the last lines of
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a poem flashing first into mind. A poem would be felt as pressing for birth when suddenly, while reading or looking at things or reflecting or aspiring, a small shock would be felt in the core of the being (which would be something midway between mind and heart). It was like a shining seed, a packed pulsation, an intuitive thrill, without yet any clear knowledge of what had been intuited. As soon I had this experience I was sure that a poem was on the way. But what would emerge first was the climax of the thing that was piercing through the inner into the outer. The culminating revelation would crystallise and the job then would be to trace the process leading to the crystallisation. To put it another way: I would find myself standing on the peak of the poetic moment and I had to discover the way by which I got there without my knowing how. And the success of the writing lay in disclosing correctly the process and the passage. It was as if the whole poem had already been waiting behind, showing me its grand finale of a tail or, if one likes, its ultimate crown of a head. As in a super-detective story, my job was: "find the body." It could very well happen that a poet would tag on to the part in his hand a body not quite belonging to it. The work might be compared to a modern palaeontologist's, the reconstruction of a prehistoric animal from one bone-fossil. Or one may think of the Latin saying: Ex pede Herculem — "From a foot, Hercules". Anyway, with a hushed inner receptivity I would try to get slowly the entire poem whose crest or conclusion I had chanced upon. Here also there would not always be a proper order of emergence. Not always did the first stanza spring out first. Even middle portions would appear. And I had finally to recognise what should stand where. A Poet's Stammer was born in this fashion — the two ending lines forming the actual historical beginning. I suppose such paradoxes are to be expected when it is Mystery that becomes History.
Another feature of my poetry in the old days was that a certain basic image would be variously worked out — facet
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after facet but in spite of different reflections the same central vision. Here "a myriad stammer/Of flickering stars" is the heart of the imaginative insight. And everything preceding this expression would in diverse modes and manners anticipate it so that when it did come it would bring the sense of a flaming all-fusing fulfilment, the white inevitable seal in which all the visionary colours would come to rest.
Perhaps this feature of the inspiration is what determined the hysteron-vroteron fashion in which the poem took birth. The central image broke forth at the end of the poem and gave the clue to the remainder of the piece to be drawn out. It set the poetic consciousness along a certain track, it provided a guiding light by which I might be prevented from drifting along false paths of seeing and feeling. Here I had to ask myself whether the new stanzas answered in their vision to the fundamental flickering-stars image — an image in which there was the sense at the same time of a far light, a tiny light, a tremulous light, a vast scatter of such lights against an infinite background of fathomless secrecy. If you keep this image steadily in your mind you will find a key to the whole creative movement of the poem's symbolism, thought-scheme and sound-design.
Yes, even the sound-design. For the peculiar stanza form adopted is also expressive of the basic vision. And this brings me to your question: "I shall be happy if you can explain to me the significance of the inversion in the first stanza."
There are several points here to be marked. The inversion makes for suspense and a final focus on "Some vow profound" which in the inner imaginative experience serves to balance the speaking of the words and to explain why this speaking should be such as it is pictured in the poem. The inversion also induces a feel of the breaking that is mentioned: the regular order of the phrases would not correspond to the shape of the significance, the posture of the meaning, the gesture of the semantic action. Again, the natural non-inverted sequence of the language —
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My words are spoken
As if some vow profound
By sound —
would make the second line a trimeter and the fourth a unimeter in contradiction of the metrical lengths disposed in the rest of the poem's stanzas, and create an initial dissonance in the spelled harmony intended. It would thus spoil something of the mysterious atmosphere and suggestion which are the true life of this kind of utterance from what Sri Aurobindo calls "intuitive mind". There would, further, be a marring of the musical mysticism which lies in the stanza-structure. For, two trimeter lines — the second and the third — would stand together and make a somewhat heavy mass and not be so effective rhythmically as the present form in which there is a pattern of jet-jet-gush-jet, a sort of subtly stammering movement.
As for the symbolism and the thought-scheme, you must have now got an answer to your query. The golden birds (with vibrant wings) prefigure the star-image, while themselves symbolising truth-gleams, song-awakening, ethereal elevation. The speech-light is of course the manifesting power, but this power gets worked upon by the tremendous Ineffable of ultimate Reality and what gets manifested is not the full infinity of this Divine Darkness but a boundless wealth of intense pin-points, between which the mute Mystery still holds sway. The speech-light is at once let loose and held back: hence the dwindling of the revelatory words. The lonelihoods of sleep are the depths of God-trance which are behind all creation. The true poet is, as it were, in touch with them in the profundities of his being and is constantly being pulled into them in the very act of expressing their locked light, their truth-secrets. The visual correlate of these lonelihoods is, as I have already hinted earlier, the night-sky.
Your whole last page of interpretation is original. I had no conscious notion of all this series you set up: (1) sound, (2)
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winging music-rush, (3) syllables sweeping, (4) words, (5) flickering stars. Your exposition here is ingenious but brings out, I think, some genuine complexity of implication. It is a fine piece of reading between the lines or, more appropriately, behind the scenes.
The third page is, on the whole, weak. If you pep it up with more of the pasyanti vak of which you speak, you will have a well-knit texture of interpretation.
P.S. Soon after writing this letter I fell to turning the pages of Literary Criticism in America, edited with an Introduction by Albert D. Van Nostrand. Opening in the midst of Emerson's essay on the Poet I struck on the following passage which has an interesting general relation both to what I have said and to what you have.
"Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity..." (p. 72)
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A READER'S CRITICISM OF A POEM AND
THE POET'S REJOINDER
LOVE AND DEATH
We sign mortality in our marriage-beds.
Brief bliss alone cries out for the unborn child
To carry a little farther man's flickering heart;
That kiss of creation proves death's seal on our life.
Immortals need no mating: dawns to come
Laugh ever already in their sun-stream blood.
They strive to sow the future with no sparks
From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh.
O soul, clasp not in love the body's doom.
Let love be largeness never called to leap
Breathless for kindling from two death-bound halves —
Man that must perish, woman that must fall —
An impossible unfading hermaphrodite.
Lain under vast-hung mystery at night,
Make the heart's throb count, star by lonely star,
The myriad moments of one breakless peace —
Void whose infinity nowhere needs to run
To keep the whole cosmos a-glimmer within.
Moved by that huge hush as by one beloved
Whose secret will is a brightness in your pulse,
You shall be free of the grave's gape in each kiss
And of the future's fret in your small veins....
If all life's slaves to the hunger-that-is-death
Found this enraptured endless liberty,
The flesh, now strained to a breath beyond its own,
Would draw from deeps where the Perfect lives
all dreams
A dense divinity no time-strokes cleave.
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A Reader's Criticism
Dear Mr. Sethna,
I read your poem "Love and Death" in the Mother India of December 5, 1969. Your first line, "We sign mortality in our marriage-beds" has a fribbling intervention of mind. Marriage is a flame which must have lighted you. The poem is rigged up in 'dense divinity' which presumes an ego to feel with. 'Mating' itself takes lines unknown which are more interesting than becoming 'immortal'.
The writhing movement of 'f'-sounds in the eighth line, "From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh", takes us to the body's doom which is a self-inflicted doom. There is inevitable defeat in using the word 'hermaphrodite'.
My God, why do you find 'the grave's gape in each kiss'? Does it not lose the sensational potency of a poet? One may have hunger for a woman or for a pound of apricots. I feel that you have pitched all your wits against 'flesh'.
The Poet's Rejoinder
Dear Professor X,
Thank you for your letter about my poem. I suppose you expect me to comment on your criticism.
Well, as Gertrude Stein would have said — or perhaps has said — "A poem is a poem is a poem..." You are a Professor of English, not of Philosophy or Erotics. So why not give primarily an aesthetic response to my lines? I don't see — except in one place — that you have considered them as poetry at all. And in this one place I am afraid you have caught the rhythm wrongly. You speak of "the writhing movement of 'f'-sounds in the eighth line, 'From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh'." What you have mistaken for writhing is really the trembling, quivering, flickering movement that is natural to an 'f'-alliteration, as in Shakespeare's
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After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
Shakespeare has a twofold rhythm — with sibilants accompanying the fricatives — because he wants to suggest not only the "evermore unrest" (as one of his Sonnets has it) of life but also the soothing end of it like a perpetual falling into slumber by a fever-ridden patient. I have kept up the restlessness all through in order to suggest life's process of brief burning and the fear within it that vitality might soon vanish, leaving no trace behind of the body's passionate existence. No doubt, life has other aspects than this, but I am not concerned with all of them: I am concerned with one, and the relevant question from the literary point of view is whether I have expressed it successfully. You don't raise this question. And nothing of the poem's aesthetic gesture and posture has gone home to you. Is it a good poem or not? Has it felicity of word and rhythm, intensity of vision, force of style, the ultimate quality of being felt as a whole? I should expect you to ponder this issue before discussing the "philosophy" of the verses or the element of erotic truth in the imaginative picture.
Let me come now to your quarrel with my attitude and message. You refer to "a fribbling intervention of mind" in my opening sentence:
"Intervention of mind" I admit — in the sense that here is poetry of thought probing the problem of love. Thought surely is legitimate in poetry provided it is not abstract but moves with an intuitive edge. I do not plead guilty to "fribbling". I should say I am doing the very opposite of being frivolous: I am taking the phenomenon of love more seriously than people usually do. I am trying to understand why there is in us the urge to mate, and I say that it is because we are incomplete beings — incomplete both inwardly and outwardly — and one of the marks of our
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incompleteness is our little span of life, our mortality. To escape this sense of a life ending too soon and putting a finis to our hopes and dreams and aspirations, we move towards procreation, a continuance of our beings in the form of our children, a multiplication of our selves beyond the death of the body, a vicarious immortality. And in the act of reproduction there is also a drive of idealism: we have the vague prayer within us that our children may be wonderful — paragons of beauty, vessels of light, embodiments of happiness. The completion we ourselves lack is instinctively sought for in what we create: this is the point of the word "hermaphrodite" which I have used: it symbolises the wholeness that is not ours, the consummation of the frag-mentariness which pushes us towards a counterpart. And I have qualified the word with the epithets: "impossible" and "unfading". The latter implies the overcoming of the death dogging us; the former has the double sense of an ideal perfection and an unrealisable ideal. We fail here: our children prove to be like us — both fragmentary and mortal. Every time we make the vain attempt in our marriage-beds to pass beyond these hallmarks of our existence we confirm them. If we wish to achieve plenitude and perpetuity of being, we must search for their secret in another way.
Much of this import you seem to have missed. You mention "a self-inflicted doom" and accuse me of using words so as to involve "inevitable defeat". But the doom and defeat are in the nature of things. Against that fact you have only the peeved protest: " 'Mating' itself takes lines .unknown which are more interesting than becoming immortal." Nobody denies other lines; but my pointers are no mere trifling. And I may add that you are off the mark when you exclaim: "My God, why do you find 'the grave's gape in each kiss'? Does it not lose the sensational potency of a poet?" I grant that a poet must have "sensational potency". But it would be illegitimate to confine it to the enjoyment of kisses or, as you say afterwards, having "hunger for a woman or for a pound of apricots". No doubt, Shakespeare
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showed "sensational potency" in the exquisite intensity of love he portrayed in Romeo and Juliet and the tremendous immensity of passion he depicted in Antony and Cleopatra. Striking indeed is the "sensational potency" of the lines:
O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear,
Age cannot wither her nor custom stale
Her infinite variety,
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven.
Yet is there a poverty of "sensational potency" when Romeo himself agonises in the vault?
And here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh,
or when Cleopatra adjures the asp:
Come, mortal wretch,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool,
Be angry, and despatch.
Not life but death is desired in these two passages: the foiled vital current turns awry and abandons the world of the
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senses. Again, there is disgust with that world in Hamlet's
cry —
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!...
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
or in the Prince's recoil —
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeyed and making love
Over the nasty sty...
Would you say that "sensational potency" is absent in these outbursts which hardly celebrate the earth as a bed of roses or appreciate the pleasures of the marriage-bed? Macbeth too is surely not lacking in "sensational potency" with such words as:
I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but in their stead,
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath...
or — leading on to a line already quoted —
Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
Lear also comes with splendid poetry, though his bowels
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have turned against life and love. He shouts to the storm on the heath —
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once That make ungrateful men! —
and he castigates women and their passions —
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above;
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends':
There's hell, there's darkness, there is the
sulphurous pit...
Then take Shakespeare of the Sonnets. Has he forfeited "sensational potency" by penning the passages:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action,
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth that disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please,
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Fooled by these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay,
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge?
Is this thy body's end?
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To cut a long story short: "sensational potency" for a poet does not lie solely in exalting the sexual desire, praising life and love, pleading the cause of flesh. It can be just as manifest, just as dynamic, just as magnificent in the exact reverse of all these turns. A poet remains a poet, and retains all his "sensational potency", as long as he charges his language with seeing and feeling, as long as his speech is of things proved upon his pulses. If you can show that my poem is not vivid, vision-packed, impassioned in its call beyond physical passion, then I shall admit that I have lost my poetic spirit.
Most probably you will here argue: "Is there not a contradiction in terms when a man talks of sensationally denying the life of the senses? If a poet is a poet only by speaking in the language of sensation, then surely the life of the senses must be understood as being of paramount importance for him. He is going against his own grain by refusing that greatest of sensations: making love to a woman."
There are a number of non-sequiturs in the argument. First of all, about the problem we can say from the practical standpoint what was said when Stephenson's steam-engine was put on trial before sceptical theoreticians of science: solvitur ambulando, "it is solved by the moving". In other words, the problem here is solved by the very fact that superb poetry has been made down the ages and can still be made for all that may run counter to what you consider of paramount importance for the poet. Secondly, making love to a woman is not of the essence of the sense-life: it is just one mode of it: there are various other modes like Wordsworth's animistic and pantheistic Nature-love, Keats's happy self-identification with every kind of natural energy and form, Rupert Brooke's intimate response of joy to the touch of objects, the craftsman's-love of moulding matter, etc. Thirdly, the senses are not, in their origin, merely physical powers: the life of the Spirit is a life of inner vision, inner contact, inner fusion — it is a life of concrete experience of the Divine
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and of marvellous universes beyond the physical, it is a life in which the Infinite and Eternal are no abstractions but the uttermost Existence, Consciousness, Bliss, the Heavens, the Platonic World of Archetypal Forms, the Supreme Beauty, the Inexhaustible Love. All that we know of the sense-life in the physical universe, including enjoyment of woman and union with her, is a pale shadow of the sensuousness of the Spirit. The shadow, however, has a value and can be used and may be used both for life and poetry. What its origin permits is that it can be used easily and splendidly for an expression of spirituality. If some part of it is found obstructive to the spiritual trend, it can be avoided without the other parts needing to be sacrificed. Even in the doubtful part, there can be a Spirit-helpful aspect which may be sifted from its opposite and a new "sensational potency" established with the old terms brought into a new relation. A man and a woman can be close friends, with a pure passion between them — and that would be a "sensational potency" too, but clear of sex, clear of ordinary excitement.
If you like to believe that, merely because I have seen and expressed the tragic frustration of life behind the ecstasy human beings prize so much and because I look for a greater and intenser fulfilment of our embodied existence, I have pitched all my wits against flesh, you are welcome to do so. But to my mind you will have only shut your eyes to the deeper truths of the divine adventure of the Word made flesh. I have argued that poetry even in a non-vitalistic vein can be fully poetic if the non-vitalism itself has been imaginatively and emotionally experienced and uttered. But, of course, if one lives too ascetically and turns away from
Life that is deep and wonder-vast,
or fails to feel that
The world is charged with the grandeur of God,
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and no cry rises in one like
Glory be to God for dappled things —
well, then one may be said to have pitched one's wits against flesh. Very few poets, however non-vitalistic, have lost their keen response to the world's beauty. And a mystic poet of the Aurobindonian Yoga will never do so. It seems to me absurd to contend that by passing beyond the sexual urge one ceases to be thrilled by the colour and shape and pattern of things. Even the beauty of a woman's face and form can thrill one without one's getting into a fever to mate with her or to treat her like a pound of apricots.
Here I may note your fling at me: "Marriage is a flame which must have lighted you. The poem is rigged up in 'dense divinity' which presumes an ego to feel with." I don't know what precisely you mean by "rigged up". I guess you imply some sort of obsession with or unnatural absorption in being "divinised". And you see the ego rampant there. But all idealism, mystic or otherwise, cannot be branded as obsession and suspected of egoism. To dream of and hope for an ultimate divinisation of the body by some super-Yoga may be like what older generations used to call 'crying for the moon'. But to set one's idealism so high need not be an egoistic movement, nor can we assert, in view of the recent moon-landings, that it is an ache for the unattainable. Your accusation of egoism is too hasty. You hardly know the constant emptying of ego that the Yogic discipline demands. As for the other part of your statement, it is certainly a fact that if my father had not married my mother I would not have been born. I am not a cynical celibate like the one who wanted his own epitaph to be:
I've lived quite glad
Without a dame:
I wish my dad
Had done the same.
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I am thankful that I have come into this world, but before I accept "marriage" as the divinely appointed destiny of man at all times I have to inquire what the ultimate purpose of all this evolution through the millennia of earth's history has been. Marriage — or rather, mating-— has been Nature's means up to now of bringing souls into the world and of continuing the existence of the race, as well as of making men and women feel less fragmentary for the time being. But even if no substitute means is available at present it does not follow that all humans should go in for marriage and mating throughout their lives. If some exceptional seekers of Perfection feel that by entirely avoiding them they can attain a finer and deeper and wider consciousness, beneficial to themselves and to others, they are quite justified in cutting them out. The race will not come to an end by their brahmacharya. Thousands and thousands will always be there to propagate their kind. Of course, to preach to the whole world at present to abstain from marriage and mating at all periods would be an anti-life movement. But to tell the whole world that at some time or other, before all life-powers fail, a person should turn away from his practice so far of procreation and go in for the spiritual experience, the transcendence of desire in a vast Brahmic Consciousness or in a rapturous Bhakti-surrender to the Personal Deity — to tell this is surely nothing anti-life. Rather it is a call to Super-life. Indian Culture has always sent forth this call with its system of the four ashramas. I see a great wisdom there and refuse to shrivel up in shame at your jibe.
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ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY AND
EXISTENTIALIST ANGUISH
If I were a historian of literary thought I should call your letter a connecting-link of tendencies between some moods of the nineteenth century and some complexes of the twentieth. In terms of colour, it is a creamy grey of uncertain aestheticism, joining the poetic pallors of those days to the philosophic blacknesses of our own. In terms of shape, it is a bridge between romantic melancholy and existentialist anguish — shall we say, a Bridge of Sighs, recalling those lines of Byron's? —
I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
A palace and a prison on each hand....
Well, the word "palace" may seem odd as a description of the romantic melancholy. But a little consideration will resolve the paradox. For, this melancholy was something rich and splendid, a mood in which the poets luxuriated and which they exhibited to the world in a vivid grandiose form. When we speak of its pallors we at once think of the pale magnificence of marble. Indeed it stands before us like a palace.
The word "prison" describes the existentialist anguish very well. The Romantics were strangely happy in their unhappiness, the Existentialists writhe and quiver even in their pleasures. They do not — like Byron — trail all over Europe the pageant of a bleeding heart; they concentrate their bile, they gather their bitterness into intense packets and feel that their souls are caught in a severe constriction, pressed into a lightless prison. The Romantics lived in the presence of a supernal Mystery, in comparison to which this known world was a sphere of imperfection and sorrow. With
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their very tears went the blur of a Beyond that was all loveliness. To the Existentialists there is no burning secret except of an internal fever. No beautiful Beyond beckons to them across the desert here: they live in the presence of no ineffable dream, they live in a sharp realisation that there can never be such a dream. Not a wonderful presence but a terrible absence haunts their yearning eyes. Man is for them dreadfully alone, uncompanioned by any God: he is locked within his own fearful loneliness and a mass of men is but a multiplicity of small solitudes and not a largeness in which the individual finds release. In fact, Sartre, the "prophet" of Existentialism says: "Hell is other people."
The Romantics also shunned "other people" at times; yet when they withdrew into themselves they felt the friendship of the infinite Spirit — a friendship which did not transfigure their own world, as it would a true mystic's, but which gave them a spacious imaginative escape. The Existentialists meet with nothing except an abyss when they are withdrawn from other people, for the most horrible fact, the deepest tragedy, for them is that in place of God they see a neant, a void, a nothing. Here they differ from the Dialectical Materialists who dispense with God because they feel no need for Him: God's "non-existence" is a matter of indifference to them. Not so to the Existentialists. They agonise under that "nonexistence", that "absence": they are people to whom it is a crucial experience whether God exists or not. In this the existentialist Man is the Man of Pascal, who is profoundly concerned about God. Only, this Man is the Pascalian Man inverted — he is religiously vibrant with God's devastating disappearance from his consciousness. That is one of the reasons why Sartre, for all his regrettable co-operation with the Marxists, can never be a follower of the philosophy of Marx or be psychologically in tune with Soviet Russia. A sociological delusion makes him join hands with the French Communists. (On a less intellectual plane I suppose it is the same delusion that led an extreme individualist and ultramodern painter like Picasso to participate in the bogus peace-
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campaign sponsored by Stalin.)
The Romantics, of course, are doubly removed from the Dialectical Materialists. But we are not here concerned with their difference from the brood of Sartre. Apart from the question of God's presence or absence, the solitude of the Romantics is never doomed to be so stark, so absolute, as that of the Existentialists. For, they believed in the old proverb that two is company and, while shunning the crowd, they hungered for the one beloved, representing on earth the Eternal Beauty. To quote Byron again:
Oh that the desert were my dwelling place,
With one fair spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race
And, hating no one, love but only her!
We cannot imagine an existentialist poet rhapsodising in this vein. He does have a sweetheart — like Sartre's own famous Simone de Beauvoir — but she is still "other people" and all her ministrations cannot reduce the philosophic sense he has of his own lonely Godlessness. The Romantic is temperamentally and emotionally a man of sorrow and solitude: the Existentialist is philosophically and intellectually so, and hence the sweetheart's embrace is at the same time a delight and a reminder that he is held tight as in a prison, the prison of his own self, the narrow absurdity of a finite that has not the Infinite for its ultimate ground and rationale.
To characterise Existentialism I have suggested the Pasca-lian Man standing on his head. Perhaps a closer link with the depth of things would be in terms of an eastern religion. At the heart of Existentialism there is a Buddhism manque, an unrecognised missing of Nirvana, just as at the heart of Romanticism one may discern a would-be Vedanta, the puzzled sense expressed by Shelley:
Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.
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Not awakening to the truth by which they are moved, both mix with the basic spiritual source a lot of odd matter: in the case of the Romantic the assertion of the individual — at the best the egotistical sublime — and the flight from hurtful actuality into flashing fantasy, in the case of the Existentialist the morbid isolation from the whole and the constant nausea at the sight of a fragmented world. Because the centrally moving truth is not wide-open to their gaze, their relation with the rest of their fellows is also somewhat falsified. They cannot avoid the relation, but it fails to show the right adjustment: what is wanting is the harmonious touch of the Vedantic equality and at-home-ness of the One Self that has become all beings and things, what is lacking is the Buddhist compassion for and service of the universal multiplicity that can find no rest until it forgets its own changeful surface existence and dissolvingly deepens into a fathomless featureless Unknowable.
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WORDSWORTH — MAN AND POET:
SOME REFLECTIONS IN 1970
1970 makes two hundred years since Wordsworth was born. Both during his lifetime and after, a lot has been written about the man and the poet. He is a figure of considerable importance and we may well set ourselves to throw together some facts and observations to stimulate a living perception of this strange and great figure.
APPEARANCE AND RELATIONSHIPS
Let us start with his appearance. We have often heard him described as most unpoetically horse-faced. But that is not the impression produced on all. Nor did he himself regard his physiognomy as poor. When Hazlitt spoke of his forehead as being narrow, Wordsworth exclaimed: "Narrow forehead! I went through three large magazines of hats in Paris, before I could find one large enough, and yet my skull is almost cut away behind." It is also helpful to recall Leigh Hunt's impression of his eyes: "Certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural. They were like fires half-burning, half-smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes."
Now to his life and work. First, his relationships. It is well known today that the highly respectable and conservative sage who never let any suggestion of sensuality or of lawlessness enter his poetic works had been a sower of wild oats in his youth. He was a young man when the French Revolution broke out and in the early phase of it he was actually in France, one of the little group of fiery orators who called themselves Girondins and with whom probably he would have gone to the guillotine, had he remained longer in the country. During his stay there he had a tempestuous
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liaison with a girl named Annette Vallon who bore him a child. Herbert Read has noted that Wordsworth's genius awakened suddenly after his experiences in France, developed gloriously in the next nine years during which he had not given up the idea of marrying Annette as soon as the political situation would make it possible for him to return to her land, and declined from the time of his sedate marriage with Mary Hutchinson.
There seems little doubt that his efforts to remove all trace of Annette from his life had a harmful effect on the spontaneity and power of his inspiration. But to connect the spontaneity and power wholly with Annette is to exaggerate her significance in his life and to forget that the "culture of feeling" in which his genius lay and which made him write —
....all grandeur comes,
All truth and beauty from pervading love,
That gone, we are as dust —
was not concerned only with natural human interchanges of emotion between man and woman but with a sort of cosmic sensibility, an awareness of all life and nature in terms of the deep heart. About "every natural form, rock, fruit and flower,/Even the loose stones that cover the highway" he used in his Prelude the phrase that is one of his most astonishing in bare power: "I saw them feel." And he adds:
...the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul.
His "culture of feeling" was a multi-mooded pantheism in which the deep heart of man communed with and got illumination from the sentient Spirit of the universe which was the ultimate ground of man's own self.
If any particular woman contributed vitally to the growth of Wordsworth's poetry it could not be Annette Vallon. She may have stirred his poetic imagination and remained a significant stimulus for many years, but it was his sister
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Dorothy who principally kept his genius alive; she was a true sister to his soul, feeding it and strengthening it by her own extreme sensitiveness to the details as well as to the vast general presence of nature. She was little of a philosopher, but no finer companion could a pantheistic poet hope for. And between her and Wordsworth there was a special passage of feeling which brought an intense personal colour to their companionship. There was something of a pure physical passion about their intimacy — nothing perverted by any direct sexuality but a love, both acute and profound, that went beyond mere brotherliness and sisterliness. No sister, in the common acceptation of the term, would dream of writing to her brother as Dorothy did when telling Wordsworth how she tried to bear his temporary absence: "I tasted and bit the apple where you had bitten it." And, again, no ordinary brother could write as he did of her:
And she who dwells with me, whom I have loved
With such communion that no place on earth
Can ever be a solitude to me.
Most probably the celebrated "Lucy" poems which are Wordsworth's high-water mark of personal love-expression were really a dramatic transformation of his relation with Dorothy. An actual Lucy has not been identified yet, while all his descriptions of her as "a child of nature" and all his tenderness and devotion in writing of her agree with what we know of Dorothy's temperament and of his relation with her. At least the poem, A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, that most Wordsworthians take to belong to the "Lucy" series, Coleridge terms "a most sublime epitaph which, in all likelihood, reflected some gloomy moment when the poet had fancied the time his sister might die".*
* Sri Aurobindo has read a purely spiritual — pantheistic — experience in the lyric and the present author has written at length to substantiate Sri Aurobindo's interpretation (Mother India, August 1956). Coleridge's authority is not definitive. Does not Wordsworth himself declare in general that nobody
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And we know for a fact that the glow-worm incident described in the "Lucy" poem starting "Among all lovely things my Love had been" took place in 1795 — most probably at Racedown — between the poet and his sister.
Not Annette, therefore, but Dorothy was Wordsworth's main inspirer and sustainer. And if his genius suffered gradual eclipse after his marriage to Mary Hutchinson it was not so much because he drew the curtain completely over Annette and became respectable as because the new relationship cut across his unusual communion with Dorothy and she was too dutiful a woman to come in any way between man and wife. We know that she suffered terribly by the marriage: even if it did not lead directly to the loss of reason, to which she became subject, it has much to do with her living for twenty years an invalid in Wordsworth's house.
Wordsworth had too much self-conceit to experience the same heartbreak, he had also a philosophic intellect to fall back upon, an intellect which was not dependent on Dorothy; but his poetic springs could not help drying up, especially as he was also altogether out of touch with the only other human being of his circle who could sustain both his heart and his imagination in the paths of poetry — Coleridge. Coleridge above anyone else nourished Wordsworth's philosophic intellect and made it poetically creative, just as Wordsworth in his turn gave Coleridge's unstable and erratic genius strength and staying power. Coleridge's tragedy was even greater than Wordsworth's for when he got estranged from his friend he lost Dorothy as well, whereas his friend had her for many more years to keep his mind kindled. But when Dorothy was made to play second fiddle in Wordsworth's emotional life and Coleridge had become just a splendid memory, the poet of The Prelude and the simple yet profound lyrics and the beautifully contem-
___________________________
really understood him, "not even Coleridge", because the latter was "not happy enough"? However, we are not here concerned with this or any other reading: we are concerned with the identification which Coleridge, taking the poem to be an unhappy one, an epitaph, made between its "she" and Dorothy.
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plative sonnets and the supreme Ode on Intimations of Immortality started on the way to becoming a dry stick.
TRAITS OF CHARACTER
He grew not only staid and respectable but also ridiculous in many things. For instance, he refused to attend de Quincy's marriage to the country girl who had borne him several children. In his later years he could not endure to read Goethe; he found in Goethe's works "a profligacy, an inhuman sensuality" which he described as "utterly revolting". He wrote a whole series of sonnets praising capital punishment. Several traits of his character which were merely odd in his younger days became now cranky no less than offensive.
Even in his younger days he had always a certain self-righteousness and a particularly high opinion of all he expressed in his writings. No poet of the nineteenth century, except perhaps Tennyson who perpetrated lines like "The monkey would not eat since little Willie died," could have come out quite seriously with the line "A Mr. Wilkerson, a clergyman" as if it were great poetry, or with a strange lapse of poetic taste begun one of his best sonnets dedicated to National Independence and Liberty with the word "Jones". One recalls also his sudden remark at a dinner party: "Davy, do you know why I published The White Doe of Rylstone in quarto?" "No," replied Davy. Then Wordsworth said: "To show the world my opinion of it." One remembers too his statement to Lamb: "I believe I could write like Shakespeare if I had a mind to try it." We do not know what he said when Lamb's answer came, as swiftly as the stutter would allow: "Yes, n-nothing is w-wanting but the m-mind."
There is a bit of odd conceit, though mixed with a bit of startling common sense, in that incident in the English Channel where he and Dorothy and Mary had gone boating. A squall overtook them and it seemed as if the boat would
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capsize. Wordsworth coolly took off his coat and vest and prepared to swim ashore, leaving his wife and his sister to drown because they could not swim. Luckily the weather changed, but that resolve to save his own skin was strangely in contrast to the sentiment he had voiced in the sonnet to his wife:
Dearer to me than life and light are dear!
Many other quaint glimpses we have of him, not always showing him in an egoistic or humourless light. Once on talking of letter-writing and the care that men like Southey lavished on it he said that such was his horror of having his letters preserved, that in order to guard against it he always took pains to make them as bad and dull as possible! There is considerable simplicity as much as the poet's proverbial enthusiasm about his own products, in the account Haydon gives of Wordsworth reading one of his most famous poems, The Leach-Gatherer, to his hairdresser! Even the egoism that was his was mostly unconscious: there was no deliberate attempt to magnify himself, nor any resentment of circumstances which put him in a laughable situation. When he had to go to receive his Laureateship he had no appropriate garments in his own wardrobe and went dressed in Samuel Rogers's ill-fitting suit. According to custom he had to get down on both knees. But so tight was the suit that he could not get up at all and had to be helped to a standing posture. Nothing on record indicates that he here minded looking funny, though surely he must have known the comic figure he cut, kneeling on the floor for an inordinate length of time until the bystanders realised his predicament. That he was not quite without either humour or charm is testified by Charles Greville who described him at almost sixty as "very cheerful, merry, courteous and talkative". His mood of merriment is evidenced by an anecdote related by Haydon. Wordsworth and Haydon were walking across Hyde Park one day and Wordsworth was quoting his beautiful address
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to the stock dove. On finishing the poem he started telling Haydon how once in a wood Mrs. Wordsworth and a lady were walking, when the stock dove was cooing. A farmer's wife coming by said to herself, "Oh I do like stock doves!" Mrs. Wordsworth, in all her enthusiasm for her husband's poetry, took the old woman to her heart; "but", continued the old woman, "some like them in a pie; for my part there's nothing like 'em stewed in onions."
POETIC EXPRESSION
The stock dove brings us back to Wordsworth the poet. And after all it is as the poet that Wordsworth is great and destined to be remembered. What is the value of his poetic experience and expression? Not all that he wrote appealed to his fellow-poets. Blake was so upset that he got a bowel complaint that nearly killed him, when he read Wordsworth's lines on passing Jehovah unalarmed and on realising that nothing
can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our minds, into the mind of man.
"Does Mr. Wordsworth think he can surpass Jehovah?" Blake asked in horror. On the other hand, when the Immortality Ode was read out to him, he fell into almost hysterical rapture. In this connection we may mention Wordsworth's own attitude to Blake. When some of Blake's abnormalities were reported to him, he remarked: "The insanity of this man interests me far more than the sanity of Byron and Moore." The remark shows how much against Wordsworth's grain ran the slick sentimentalism of Moore and the crude power of Byron and how the central motif in his own writings was the feeling of universal mystery and the sense of profundities in the human soul. He did not have
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Blake's awareness of what Dr. Otto calls the "numinous", the Mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the transcendent Godhead, but even more intensely than Blake he had the consciousness of the perfect presence and the ineffable peace that live secretly not only in the mind of man but also in the earth, the ocean, the sky — the Cosmic Godhead who looks out at us from things of beauty and majesty, who lures us with magical or tranquil distances and
Tennyson regarded this line from Tintern Abbey as the grandest in the entire range of English poetry. Perhaps Tennyson indulged in a little exaggeration, but part of the exaggeration consists in overlooking the fact that some other lines of Wordsworth himself merit to be ranked beside it among the greatest treasures of poetic expression in English: for example,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
... a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
In a less august manner, too, Wordsworth can work up to a marvellous felicity:
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The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place,
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
But, of course, Wordsworth is not all perfection. There are immense stretches of aridity and abstractness in him, especially in his later work. And not everything that even fine critics have praised is pure gold. Thus, it is impossible to agree with Keats when he remarked that The Excursion was one of the wonders of the age. Much less can we join Coleridge in that fantastic estimate of The Borderers, a play of Wordsworth: "His drama is absolutely wonderful. There are those profound touches of the human heart, which I find three or four times in The Robbers of Schiller and often in Shakespeare, but in Wordsworth there are no inequalities."
Yes, there is a lot of padding in many of Wordsworth's poems, but as he wrote a large amount of poetry the quantity of true gold is also huge. And whatever he wrote he did with care and scruple, even though they could not always result in imaginative finish as distinguished from intellectual polish. Dorothy records in her diary how her brother once made himself sick, finding a new epithet for the cuckoo. And we know how there was no facility in at least the manner of composition: he used to pace restlessly in the groves of Alfoxden or on the garden path of Grasmere while composing poetry. Nor was he averse to correction and chiselling and recasting: he did believe in spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, but he had no superficial idea of what spontaneity consisted in. It did not, for him, consist in just the first draft of a poem, neither did it lie in an uncontrolled or unselective expression. His poem, Dion, originally opened with a descriptive stanza beginning —
Fair as the Swan whose majesty, prevailing
O'er breezeless water on Locarno's lake —
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but he resolutely cut it out because it detained the reader too long from the real subject and precluded, rather than prepared for, the subsequent reference to Plato. His principle, as declared in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, was that the poet should never "interweave a foreign splendour of his own with that which the passion naturally suggests". Hence, on the side of matter and substance, spontaneity lay in avoiding all imaginative superfluity, all incongruity of vision, however beautiful in itself. On the side of form and style, it was equivalent to the avoidance of what he called "poetic diction", the artificial language the eighteenth century had employed as well as the tortured language often favoured by the seventeenth century and the late Elizabethans. In the pursuit of this spontaneity of form he was often conscientiously studious. "I have bestowed," he says, "great pains on my style, full as much as any of my contemporaries have done on theirs. I yield to none in love for my art. I therefore, labour at it with reverence, affection and industry. My main endeavour, as to style, is that my poems should be written in pure intelligible English."
By "pure intelligible English" he was at one time inclined to denote "the real language of men in any situation", but later described it as, in his own words, "a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation". In practice he wavered between the two definitions and not infrequently went beyond either when he achieved his greatest effects, but when understanding his criterion we must remember that in speaking of "men" he did not confine himself to his ordinary contemporaries, much less his humble Cumberland neighbours: he included also "men" like Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, the three poets he perhaps valued most. What he really aimed at when he intuitively rather than intellectually understood and followed his theory was a certain simplicity and austerity wedded to intensity, as in lines about happy commonalty, like
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
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or in lines of personal pathos, like
And never lifted up a single stone,
or in lines of poignant racial retrospect,
...old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago,
or in lines drenched with the tears of things, like
The still, sad music of humanity...
The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.
The last quotation can serve as a good starting-point for a few remarks on Wordsworth's technical artistry. The adjectives "heavy" and "weary" with their common y-ending reinforce each other's sense by sound while the w-beginning in three words has a marked expansive effect hinting the immensity of the burden, and that immensity with its peculiar ambiguous and baffling character is brought into apt relief by the lengthy yet slackly moving and lingering epithet "unintelligible". Similarly a most skilful play on the varying sounds of o and a is part of the inevitability of those two lines of poignant racial retrospect cited already from The Solitary Reaper. There is perfect art, full of the sense of water hailing from hidden sources, in the many-shaded crystalline rhythm of
Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves.
And nothing could be finer for conjuring up both beauty and mystery than the alliterative phrase in the poem where a young woman is told that if she remains a child of nature, grey hairs will never sadden her,
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But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
Wordsworth is particularly felicitous with names of places. As faultlessly used for poetic effect as Glaramara and Lapland is the name of those remote islands in that couplet, sibilant as well as liquid, which is a masterpiece of half atmospheric half psychological strangeness —
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
An effect not so strangely evocative but as deeply and skilfully intoned is where Wordsworth says to the spirit of liberty whose chosen home he considers to be England and Switzerland, the one country full of the sea's voice and the other full of the voice of the hills:
what sorrow would it be
That mountain floods should thunder as before,
And ocean bellow from his rocky shore,
And neither awful voice be heard by thee!
Little room remains for doubting that Wordsworth was not incapable of careful conscious art. His many lapses are mostly due to the extreme importance he attached to whatever figured in his perception or experience: the novelty, on the whole, of both thought and feeling that formed the centre of his world-message made him rest complacent again and again with the bare intellectual statement of it — he was not so absorbingly an artist as to admit nothing without the stamp on it of beauty; but there was sufficiently the beauty-lover in him to enable the artist to function effectively not only on the sheer breath of inspiration but also on afterthought and back-view and with the help of sifting and polishing and revising. His frequently wide-awake sensi-
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tiveness to word-values is illustrated by the remark we have quoted from Dorothy about his feverish exertion to hit upon a revealing adjective for the cuckoo, and also by his own reference to Sir Walter Scott: "Walter Scott is not a careful composer. He allows himself many liberties which betray a want of respect for his reader. He quoted, as from me,
The swan, on 'sweet' St. Mary's lake,
Floats double, swan and shadow,
instead of 'still', thus obscuring my idea and betraying his own uncritical principles of composition." Clearly, Scott's word was conventional claptrap: not only what Wordsworth would have called the spirit of the lake remained uncaught but also the experience he had sought to convey was spoiled by an alien element. The acute and direct communication which, together with intense sympathetic vision, Wordsworth aimed at in his poetry could indeed never be possible unless often enough he had the capacity to be, in Keats's phrase, "a miser of sound and syllable."
POETIC ARTISTRY
However, we must distinguish his artistry from Keats's. Keats was the word-craftsman par excellence and it almost appears as if he wanted intensity of vision and feeling more because they could electrify language into breath-bereaving exquisiteness or splendour than for its own revelatory life-enrichment. Wordsworth had the conviction that he had extraordinary things to say and that poetry was the best instrument of embalming as well as transmitting his experience. Keats was drunk with the wine of words and in order to make it always'champagne instead of common claret or even good Burgundy he desired the richest and loveliest ideas and emotions to distil it from. The Muse accomplishes her end in various ways: somehow or other she wants great
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meaning married to great music and she makes diverse temperaments and dispositions her vehicles, and it matters little what starting-point is adopted. But significant differences will be there in the poet's attitude to his creative work in relation to both manner and matter.
Wordsworth could rarely treat language as anything save a necessity: Keats could easily treat it as a luxury. Even the abundance of the former was mostly a prodigious piling up of effects economical and clear-cut; even the brevity of the latter tended to be astonishingly packed with "fine excess". In regard to matter, Wordsworth, dominated by his own definite sight and emotion, was anxious that his words should be utterly faithful to them. He had a special meaning antecedent to expression and when he cast about for the correct phrase it was for that which embodied with fine exactitude his meaning. Keats had a more fluid consciousness, a "negative capability" — as he called it — which enabled him to feel that his own self was undefined and could immediately become the self of whatever he saw, be it a tree or a pecking bird or an idle stone. He gave no importance to any fixed meaning arising out of his own previous experience or meditation: he cared only for the most beautiful significance he could get out of the vast potentialities of language at the disposal of the broad scheme or theme he had in mind. He would welcome any suggestion valuable in itself and assimilable by his subject: it would not trouble him in the least if instead of writing the poem he intended he turned out something entirely dissimilar in mood or direction. In this he resembled Shakespeare who, among English poets, was the most protean genius we know of, though Shakespeare was not so keenly conscious a connoisseur of words and threw up his wondrous wealth of them out of a masterly multifarious vitality much more vibrant than Keats's. Wordsworth resembled Milton who, among English poets, was the most firmly structured genius on record, though Milton differed in being far ahead of Wordsworth in sustained artistry and far behind him in
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either poignancy or amplitude of spiritual perception suffusing and transfiguring the powerful analytic and synthetic mentality.
POETIC EXPERIENCE
In that poignancy, in that amplitude of spiritual perception is Wordsworth's uniqueness in the poetic literature of England. There have been attempts to depreciate this uniqueness, calling that poignancy and that amplitude pretence and woolliness. We may, of course, enjoy a witticism like James Stephens's apropos of the famous line in the Immortality Ode —
Heaven lies about us in our infancy —
"That is no reason why we should lie about Heaven in our old age." But it is impossible to take seriously any detraction of Wordsworth's far-reaching spiritual quality. He was the first Seer in English poetic literature, answering in however limited a measure to the definition of seerhood current in the mystic Orient: one who has known by direct intuition and by intimate personal realisation and by concrete entry of consciousness a Divine Reality at once emanating, containing and pervading the universe, an Existence that is an infinite Consciousness and eternal Bliss and the secret Self of all things and beings.
Wordsworth's seer-sense of this Reality is not a possession always intense and all-permeating, but it forms the permanent background of his best work and at several places comes to the fore and then his poetry is the sheer speech of the Godhead residing in cosmic nature. He is not strictly a nature poet, catching felicitously the colour and atmosphere and thrill of her myriad phenomena: he is the singer of the mighty and superhuman presence whose outer face and body is she or, rather, whose manifold degree of manifestation make up her stuff and activity. Together with
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Shelley who was an atheist according to conventional Christian standards just as Wordsworth was according to the same standards an apostate — together with Shelley he is the greatest Yogi of pantheism that has appeared in the poetic history of England.
But we must not understand either his pantheism or Shelley's in a narrow sense which erases all distinctions between high and low, good and evil, right and wrong. If important distinctions had not been acknowledged in Reality's outer field, Shelley would never have had the ardour of the world-reformer or Wordsworth the zeal of the character-builder. But their ardour and zeal arose from something beyond the mere moral consciousness, some light of which this consciousness is itself a variable reflection, and that is why they instinctively looked for the source of all good not in the rational will but in some indescribable vastness of peace or in some ineffable wideness of ecstasy that are the hidden universal oneness of all diversities, even all contradictions. And of the two pantheists the more powerful was Wordsworth, though Shelley was the more vivid. Wordsworth it was who awoke in Shelley the pantheist dormant within the rebel against orthodox Christianity, and Wordsworth it was who had the more massive awareness of what he called "Wisdom and Spirit of the universe", an awareness which dissolved more effectively than Shelley's feeling of the "white radiance of Eternity" the pains and fears infesting mortal life, and which replaced them with an enduring calm until Wordsworth could recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
WORDSWORTH'S PANTHEISM AND SHELLEY'S
The greater massiveness of Wordsworth's pantheism than of Shelley's derived from the fact that Shelley lived in a certain luminous detachment from flesh and blood, and the
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pantheistic intuition he shared with Wordsworth was not equally interfused with "the meanest flower that blows". Pantheos, for him, shone rather through than in the meanest flower, and had indeed a brighter vibrancy because of not being one substance with clay, but lacked the solidity, as it were, which Wordsworth found because he felt clay to be only the dense superficies of a single Reality whose lustre-packed interior was God. The solidity not merely makes for us Wordsworth's realisation more overwhelming in its tranquillity than Shelley's in its exhilaration: it also takes, for all the richer effect Shelley has on us, a firmer grip on flesh and blood with which it is subtly continuous; so that, by its effect, however vaguely, in even our outer being
We feel that we are greater than we know.
Shelley was like an exile from some Beyond against which the defects of the physical universe, in spite of that universe's shimmering transparency to one kind of spiritual sight, stood out grimly to another. To remove these defects he was all afire: he was a perfectionist haunted by the idealities of his Beyond and the redeeming powers necessary to bring about world-transfiguration were conceived by him as an occult company — ethereal Dreams and Splendours, "Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies". Towards such strange presences he held forth his hands, and when his ardour of world-transfiguration got increasingly frustrated a poignant melancholy sat at the core of his rapture. Although Wordsworth was no alien to earth's defects, the redeeming powers for him were no occult company but in the very activities of nature and humanity. He names his province — intra-terrestrial rather than ultra-terrestrial — when he tells the unfortunate Negro liberator of San Domingo, Toussaint L'Ouverture:
Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee, air, earth, and skies:
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There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.
Not that Shelley is without fight: after all, he has written Prometheus Unbound and its grand close is as heroic, as loftily strong, in the midst of the world's wreckage as this apostrophe to Toussaint. The difference, however, is that Shelley is bravely defiant while Wordsworth is bravely acceptant: the one is obsessed by earth's recalcitrance and frets to make a heaven out of what seems most earthy, the other is convinced that there is no great cause for disappointment and that the pantheistic realisation is sufficient refuge and that by its building up an inner life the sharp need is removed for wishing away the many rigidities and angularities of outer fact. Nature, in Wordsworth's eyes, has in her deep breast an asylum here and now for the anguish that frequently arises in us owing to physical vicissitudes. Shelley cannot make his peace completely with world and life and time: perhaps his most Shelleyan lines were the exquisite fragment he wrote a few months before his death and which a critic has regarded as having an unequalled intensity of aspiration:
I loved — ah, no, I mean not one of ye,
Or any earthly soul, though ye are dear
As human heart to human heart may be,
I loved I know not what; but this lone sphere
And all that it contains, contains not thee,
An insatiable spiritual idealism is in this fragment — a pantheistic ecstasy which is yet touched with an agonised dream of some perfect Beyond and thereby subtly differentiated from, though not proved less valuable in its essence than, Wordsworth's calm intuition of the omnipresent Godhead. Of course, we cannot say that Shelley is never
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quite Wordsworthian in mood or that Wordsworth is always untinged by the Shelleyan perception. Poetic moods and perceptions are seldom found in watertight compartments. Yet we shall not be wrong in thinking the most Wordsworthian lines to be perhaps the fragment retrieved by Mr. H. de Selincourt, suggesting no perfect Beyond but magnificently emphasising a single-selfed Within:
One interior life
In which all beings live with God, themselves
Are God, existing in the mighty whole,
As indistinguishable as the cloudless east
At noon is from the cloudless west, when all
The hemisphere is one cerulean blue.
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SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI,
THE NATURE OF EPIC AND THE EXPRESSION OF
MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH POETRY
The script of your friend's projected lecture, incorporating your touches, on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri makes interesting reading and is surely helpful in several respects. Most of these are analytic, classificatory; but the labelling is done skilfully and catchingly. I can understand his dissatisfaction with the passages he has quoted from Sisir Ghose, Srinivasa Iyengar and myself. But I don't know whether it is right to pull out a passage from me like that, as if I have written nothing to explicate what I mean by "a direct poetising of the Divine". All the detailed description of "overhead poetry" that I have given time and again seems overlooked. To explain overhead poetry may not be sufficient for the lecturer's purpose, namely, the bringing home to his students the structure or texture of Savitri in the ordinary senses of these terms; but that does not rule out the legitimacy of other approaches provided one does not indulge in empty va-pourings. It never occurred to me that I was called upon to justify the word "epic" or to distinguish the "narrative voice" from any other. To discuss these points is quite pertinent, but I had other axes to grind and I believe they are just as valuable weapons for breaking into the poetic quality of the work.
Now that the question of "epic" or "narrative" has been raised, I may say a few things. Why should we stick to old norms? We may pick out the essence and reject or go beyond the appearance. To me "epic" is a certain frame of mind and a certain tone of voice. The subject proper is secondary and so too is the mode of treatment or development. As for the basic subject, I see little in common between the wrath of Achilles and Man's first disobedience to God along with the
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justification of God's ways to men. Again, the wanderings of Odysseus are dissimilar, in their innate orientation, to Dante's tour of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. The deeply religious epic, with metaphysical implications, cannot be equated with the heroic epic, even the literary heroic like the Aeneid. Savitri takes further the former genre and subjects it to the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri. And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring a frame of mind marked by a high seriousness, a cosmic outlook on life in general and a weaving together of many strains of knowledge. Then there is the tone of voice, which links together the utterances of various poets. Take
Zenos men pais ea Kronionos autar oixun
Eikhon apeiresien,
(I was the son of Zeus Cronion, yet have I suffered Infinite pain,)
O passi graviora! dabit Deus his quoque finem,
(Fiercer griefs we have suffered; to these too God will
give ending,)
Nessun maggiore
Dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria,
(The greatest
of all woes is to remember days of happiness In misery,)
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Fall'n Cherub! to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.
All these get linked up with Sri Aurobindo's
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss,
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.
This tone of voice can come even into less momentous utterances: there is a breadth, there is a controlled power, there is an harmonious intensity, which distinguish it from poetic articulations such as we find in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso or Spenser's Faerie Queane. Ariosto and Spenser can be very poetic, but they are not epic in tone. Even when they bring a frame of mind akin to Homer's or Virgil's, Dante's or Milton's, something in the way of their speech lacks the epic touch. Compare Ariosto's
Cose non detta in prosa mai, ne in rima
with Milton's almost exact translation of the line:
Things unattempted yet in prose or rime.
Somehow the two voices are worlds away from each other. The very technique differs. The extraordinary import of Ariosto's line does not find sufficient support in the expression: the expression has too easy a run and thereby creates somewhat the sense as of a melodious commonplace. Milton at once masters us with a double means in the word "unattempted". It is the one four-syllabled word in the midst
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of six monosyllables, coming at the right place with a suggestion of the rarity of what has remained to be done as well as of the lengthiness of the labour involved. Nor is this all. It also brings a considerable number of consonants which give weight to the sound and it joins three of them — mpt — together to effect a retardation of the voice: the long labour involved now seems markedly heavy and difficult. The high seriousness of epic verse comes through with an impressive technique reinforcing the tone.
On a still higher level of meaning and music we may note the difference of Shakespeare's
But was a race of heaven —
from Dante's
Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce tale,
Che la vostra misera non mi tange,
Ni fiamma d'este incendio non m'assale.
(I, by the grace of God, am fashioned such
I move untroubled by your suffering, Nor me these cruel tongues of fire can touch.) —
and even more from Sri Aurobindo's
A traveller of the million roads of life,
His steps familiar with the lights of heaven
Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;
There he descends to edge eternal joy.
Whereas the tone of Ariosto is not intense enough, the tone of Shakespeare is intensity itself, but, as Sri Aurobindo would say, it is the intensity of a tremendous vital thrill which makes the poetry unrestrainedly romantic, though the absence of restraint is not explosive as in Chapman but finely
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organised in its outbreaks. Sri Aurobindo has said that there is some essential "austerity" in the epic temper which emerges in the tone of voice. But we must remember that this "austerity" does not preclude all richness or colour, nor does it prevent the exercise of energy. Dante, for instance, combines great richness with his sharp-cut concision and restraint: we may even say his is an ideal epic "austerity" — except that, according to Sri Aurobindo, he does not have enough of the "epic elan" such as Homer and Milton in their own individual styles possess.
Of course all these shades I have distinguished are not easy to appreciate and perhaps I am talking an esoteric language; but I feel that epicness has fundamentally to be perceived in the two qualities — cosmic outlook and tone-energy on the leash — which I have listed and only afterwards in the conventional categories set up by academic critics. Or, if we must pay respect to these categories, then we may declare Savitri an epic narrative or a narrative epic.
Perhaps even this combination is not acceptable from the paper's point of view. For the "narrative voice" is found on the whole to be submerged by the "apocalyptic voice" as well as the "prophetic voice". Thus Savitri appears to be quite a poser to the academician. I like the way the paper brings out the elements of the poser. The treatment is very competent on the whole, even if a little overdone in parts and in spite of small errors of textual interpretation. As you have asked me to point out any such possible slips, let me come first to them. It is said that in the passage —
And Savitri too awoke among these tribes
That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner's chant
And, lured by the beauty of the apparent ways,
Acclaimed their portion of ephemeral joy —
it is Savitri who "acclaimed". If this is so, it is again Savitri who is "lured". The second inference is absurd; the first conclusion is unwarranted. The "tribes" — "the thousand
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peoples of the soil and tree" — were both lured and doing the acclamation just as it is they who "hastened" to take part in the day's bright rhythm of common life. Besides, if Savitri "acclaimed", what is the relevance of "their"? Why should she acclaim the tribes' portion instead of her own? Again, in the passage —
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink,
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge —
the paper says that "opalescent" stands for the milky light coming from the interior. I know that a secondary sense of "opalescent" derives from a semi-translucent white glass in commercial contexts. But I am sure Sri Aurobindo never thought here in terms of human manufacture: he would both artificialise and superficialise his meaning if he did. It is the true opal he has in mind or, rather, what is known as the common opal, which is milky or bluish in colour with green, yellow and red reflections. Not translucence but iridescence is the suggestion here — a touch preparatory of the slightly later
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unknown...
However, we can say that the whole gate of dreams with its gold panel and opalescent hinge is a prevision of the mystery of the Light that is coming into the world's view. I should be disposed to interpret the adjectives "gold" and "opalescent" as suggesting ultimately the sun's golden light and the rainbow hues which are within it, the prismatic plenitude included in its aureate richness. The double quality goes appropriately with the dawn-scene with which Sri Aurobindo is here concerned, as well as with the multifarious content of the one creative Consciousness — the
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"Rose of God" which is "fire-sweet, seven-ringed with the ecstasies seven".
Now for a few topics arising in the course of the paper. First: "the supreme moments of the poem are those in which all the three (voices) are fused". If this is a theoretical assertion, as if supreme poetry cannot come unless there is the fusion of the narrator, the apocalypt and the prophet, it is mere dogmatism. If it is an affirmation based on an examination of all the supreme moments, it shows aesthetic insensitiveness. Perhaps the sweeping character of the judgement is an oversight; for elsewhere occurs the phrase: "some of the supreme poetic moments" — and the passage where the mantra-image is elaborated is described as one in which the poet is employing his apocalyptic voice and the result fits into the narrative context.
Here only two voices are at play and yet we learn that the passage is "unmistakably great poetry by any critical standards". I am sure many passages have supreme excellence even though they embody only one voice or another of the three.
Further, we hear: "...the epic bard should never distract the listener's attention from the on-rushing flow of the narrative. Milton following the Homeric tradition also does the same thing." Well, does he? Milton is famous — or notorious — for his large digressions and even his personal asides like parts of the exordiums to Books Three and Seven, where we learn of his blindness and of the evil days on which he has fallen. Would you not consider his long-winding similes and parallels to be distractions of the reader's mind from the narrative? And, if he is most like Homer, it is just in this respect. So Homer himself, who initiated the Homeric simile, which the paper calls the image of impression — the simile where the "vehicle" is elaborated into a full-scale picture and the "tenor" is either ignored or omitted — so Homer too can hardly be said to rivet the reader to the narrative. As F. L. Lucas has observed somewhere, Homer does not care for cross-connections or "links of relevance".
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There is only one point of likeness, the rest is mostly a divine bounty. I do not know of a better image of impression than the one giving us a starlit scene. I am quoting Tennyson's version:
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed.
Mind you, we are presented with a battlefield as the occasion of the simile. The point of likeness is between many twinkling stars and many twinkling fires. Nothing else bears the least connection. Rather a strong contrast is there: the lurid darkness of the battlefield on the one hand and on the other the utterly peaceful night above the happy Wordsworthian shepherd on his moonlit moorland. I seem to remember another full-blown simile of Homer's, where we get a night-scene, this time with a sudden lightning bringing a surprise to the eye and striking one dumb: Homer likens this visual moment to the one when the Trojans all on a sudden heard the terrifying war-cry of Achilles. If my memory is correct, we get here a passing insight into the psychologico-poetic complexity of Homer's proverbially "simple" mind, the kind we attribute to the singer of a "primary epic". Even Homer'in several respects cuts right across the exaggerated notion of what an epic bard must do or not do.
I would demur a little also to the contention that when Sri Aurobindo turns "the reader inward in order to make him debate within himself what the poetry is communicating" he is failing in the role of a narrator. The narration of a "legend" like Savitri, which is at the same time a "symbol", must involve such inner debating by the reader. Here is no
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straightforward narration, but why should narration be limited to being straightforward? There are inner happenings no less than outer, and a suitable method of bringing them vividly before the mind of the reader has to be adopted and if Sri Aurobindo adopts the method the paper speaks of, he need not thereby cease to be either narrative or epic. In this connection we are told that Milton is epic because he focuses his reader's "attention on what is happening which is conveyed through poetry". But would you classify all the long speeches in the conference in hell as an aid to concentrating on the narrative's on-rushing flow? These speeches communicate inner debates of the devil's minds no less than phases of an outer powwow. The character of each devil is laid bare: the most memorable of the psychological disclosures is Belial's speech, with Milton's greatest moment in it and one of his greatest irrelevances:
To be no more; sad cure: for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense or motion?
How are the intricate character-sketches of the minds of Satan's followers necessary to the course of the story? Is all that subtlety and variety of intellectual argument helpful to the sheer purpose of telling a story? I don't believe so, but who would lose, though full of pedantic pain, these vast side-tracking thoughts which, just like the elaborate similes and historical correspondences ("Fontarabbia" and the rest), slow down if not submerge the tale?
I find one or two little touches of pedantry elsewhere also. What is the pertinence of the point made by saying that "Aswapati", the name of Savitri's father, first occurs only on page 368? Does a narrative or epic become simple merely by each character getting his proper name from the start? Does
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Milton name Jesus or Christ anywhere in Paradise Lost? At the start he refers to him as "one greater Man" and everywhere else he is called the "Son". Even in Book XII, when his human birth is spoken of in a long passage of historical prevision, he remains anonymous although other figures, like Abraham and Moses, get their known appellatives. Of course it may be that the person here is too well-known to need naming. But in Aswapati's case there may be a reason too: he is a certain type — "A thinker and toiler in the ideal's air" — whose being and doing are of importance rather than his human particularity. As soon as he figures in a clear human context he gets his identity-card. Before that, he is summed up at the end of Book Three as "The Lord of Life", preparatory to his human role as "Aswapati" in the next Book. Apropos of the line —
But Aswapati's heart replied to her —
the special comment is made: "Even here, we notice that it is not Aswapathy that is talking but his heart". Is there any sense in such a distinction? Surely Aswapati's heart did not convey its message directly to Savitri's heart: words did the work of communication, words in which the heart-element found voice. Merely because Aswapati is not pictured as saying things with his lips, do we get a submergence of the narrative Voice in any intelligible sense? What does Milton write about Satan beginning the debate in hell? He tells us that Satan
His proud imaginations thus displayed.
Like Aswapati's heart, we have the arch-fiend's "imaginations" talking — no, not even talking but just being "displayed". What an unnecessary subjectivism has barged in, spoiling the epic tone!
Here I am tempted to ask, perhaps not quite relevantly at this place but with some bearing on the general argument:
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"Milton's theme is the loss of Eden by man's disobedience. And yet the first three Books — the best of Paradise Lost — march majestically in utter indifference to the announced subject and we are whirled through events that form the backdrop, as it were, of the true plot. And even the whole Book connected with the war in Heaven has nothing directly to do with Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve, the ostensible hero and heroine of the poem, don't make their appearance until thousands of lines have been written. Is this the way an authentic epic must proceed?" Savitri, the heroine of Sri Aurobindo, at least makes her debut in the very first Canto of Book 1 — even though she disappears soon after Canto Two for nearly ten thousand lines. But Milton cannot be exonerated from complicating his epic by all that endless thunder of the opening three Books. Actually, there are two stories in Paradise Lost, and what is meant to be the secondary story steals the show. And yet we are told that Milton is carrying on the genuine epic tradition.
So far I have dealt with more or less formal points — and I would not think it especially necessary to break a lance over them, except in the matter of the nature of epic. But I now come to a rather serious business, the general comment on "the long and difficult revelatory passage, 'the Symbol Dawn' ": "The English is compelled to communicate a testament of faith which the genius of the language resists to communicate. There is also perhaps something there foreign to the ordinary mentality. That is why it is full of terms with negative prefixes and suffixes, or abstract nouns used to convey a concrete meaning. This is not only true of the first canto, but of the entire poem. In the first fifty lines of the poem we come across the following words: unlit, impenetrable, eyeless, unbodied, zero, nothingness, insoluble, nought, featureless, unknown, unconscious, unseeing, formless, soulless, unthinking, inscrutable, nameless, un-thought, unfilled, moonless, unremembering, unshaped, unsounded, endless. It is clear the poet is trying to articulate an idea which defies articulation."
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The immediate inference, though perhaps not the definitive deduction, from this comment can be: Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is a poetic failure both because it is highly mystical and because it is written in an intrinsically unmystical language like English.
I should have thought that after Milton's ambition or aspiration in the words with which he hails the "Heavenly Muse" —
I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rime —
no one writing in English need be daunted by any theme, however recondite or "foreign to the ordinary mentality". Particularly a medium like poetry which traditionally brings into its articulation a breath of the Gods and plunges into the secret places of the human heart and soars into the distant spaces of the divine Spirit or, as the Negro preacher styled his work, tries to "fathom the fathomless and unscrew the unscrutable" — well, poetry should never be tagged with any innate inability to express "unknown modes of being". All the more ridiculous is it to charge a language like English with having a restricted genius able to communicate only a certain kind of testament of faith, a language which has not only a strong element of the Celtic fire and ether in it but has received fecundating streams of psychological power from so many European tongues and become multiform, complex, subtilised, armed with almost endless potentiality, ensouled with a flexible universality behind or below its Anglo-Saxon surface of mind and has in the last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence — even if unlabelled as such — through Wordsworth and Shelley and AE and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and
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Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy articulation:
...solitary thinkings such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain.
The first canto of Savitri — as well as many a later part of the poem — is tough business. It is true that the frame of reference within which the opening passage is to be interpreted is not explicit. But all this creates only a difficulty, particularly for readers unprepared for the Aurobindonian relevation: there should be no conclusion to the effect that the substance falls outside the genius of English or even that all language must always fall short of the ideas concerned.
The proof the paper appears to see for such a conclusion strikes me as pretty artificial: namely, "terms with negative prefixes and suffixes, or abstract nouns used to convey a concrete meaning". The means and methods Sri Aurobindo adopts are suited to his theme, which is a huge spiritual Negation, the Inconscient, a fathomless zero, "the abysm of the unbodied Infinite". The negative prefixes and suffixes are just the right thing here, direct helps to communication. So also are the abstract nouns used to convey a concrete meaning. I may add that such prefixes and suffixes and such concretised abstractions have always been employed for particular poetic effects. Milton is not a truly mystical poet, but he knows that when his theme is either Chaos or the Empyrean he has to be negative-suggestioned and abstract-nouned in order to vivify it — as in:
who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark unbottomed infinite Abyss
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way...?
where "unbottomed", "infinite", "obscure", "uncouth" are
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all negatively prefixed and even "Abyss" comes from the Greek "abussos" meaning "bottomless". Or take:
Thee Father first they sung omnipotent,
Immutable, immortal, infinite,
Eternal King; thee Author of all being,
Fountain of Light, thyself invisible
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st
Throned inaccessible —
or else:
a globe far off
It seemed, now seems a boundless continent
Dark, waste and wide, under the frown of Night
Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms
Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky...
No doubt, Sri Aurobindo is more philosophical than Milton here, but Keats is sufficiently so in the lines I have quoted and Sri Aurobindo is not more abstract-nouned in the service of his philosophical turns than Keats there. What makes those lines poetic is the concrete movement imparted to the abstractions. Sri Aurobindo, too, concretises all the terms. Even the most abstrusely metaphysical stir with life:
Something that wished but knew not how to be
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.
And I can't imagine anything so vivid as what immediately follows:
A throe that came and left a quivering trace,
Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,
At peace in its subconscient moonless cave
To raise its head and look for absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,
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Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire.
You may complain that you can't properly tell what it is all about. I can sympathise there, but I would refuse you the right to say that it is not something alive (if not kicking). Here is no mere arrangement of dead matter, nor yet an efficiently operative machine: here is a palpitant organism "doing or suffering". You may not be able quite to make out what is being done or suffered, but there is an harmonious movement, an internal order, a directed process, the tracing of a significant figure, even though some of its details alone are understood by you and you cannot get the sense of the whole. From the way the vision functions, from the mode in which the rhythm is patterned, we can feel that expressive poetry has been born no matter if it passes somewhat over our heads.
The closing phrase of my sentence sends me to the pun I made in a recent talk of mine to our students about the type of poetry I had essayed to write with Sri Aurobindo's inspiring help and which he had called "overhead" because it seems to come from secret dimensions of consciousness felt high above the brain-mind. My pun was: "Overhead poetry is the poetry that passes over everybody's head." To get its full impact, therefore, calls for some sort of aesthetic yoga, by which one receives impressions in a wide quiet consciousness thrown open, as it were, to a descent of vibrant word from a spiritual sky. The top range of this poetry is known as the Mantra. About the Mantra Sri Aurobindo has written:
"The mantra (not necessarily in the Upanishads alone) as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is what comes from the Overmind inspiration. Its characteristics are a language that says infinitely more than the mere sense of the words seems to indicate and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into Infinite, and the power to convey not merely some mental, vital or physical contents or indications or
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values of the thing it speaks of, but its value and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind them all. The passages you mention (from the Upanishad and the Gita) have certainly the Overmind accent. But ordinarily, as I have said, the Overmind inspiration does not come out pure in human poetry. It has to lift it by a seizure and surprise from above into the Overmind largeness; but in doing so there is usually a mixture of the two elements, the uplifting influence and the lower stuff of mind. You must remember that the Overmind is a superhuman consciousness and to be able to write always or purely from an Overmind inspiration would mean the elevation of at least a part of the nature beyond the human level."
Of his own Savitri he has written in a private note:
"There have been made several successive revisions each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry. As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them."
Sri Aurobindo has also pointed out that overhead poetry in small quantities had already been written in the past in various languages — and even the rare Overmind accent has come in. Particularly is this kind of verse possible in a language like English about which Sri Aurobindo writes in connection with translations from it into Bengali:1
"It is not that I find the translations here satisfactory in the full sense of the word, but they are better than I expected.
1. The translations were most probably of the stanzas of his In Hons Aeternum (The Eternal in the Hours).
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There is none of them, not even the best, which I would pronounce to be quite the thing. But this 'quite the thing' is so rare a trouvaille, it is as illusive as the capture of Eternity in the hours. As for catching the subtleties, the difficulty lies in one supreme faculty of the English language which none other I know possesses, the ease with which it finds the packed allusive turn, the suggestive unexpressed, the door opening on things ineffable: Bengali, like French, is very clear and luminous and living and expressive, but to such clear languages the expression of the inexpressible is not so easy — one has to go out of one's way to find it. Witness Mallarme's wrestling with the French language to find the symbolic expression — the right turn for what is behind the veil. I think that even in these languages the power to find it with less effort must come; but meanwhile there is the difference."
"The expression of the inexpressible": this means bringing out in words the suggestion, the presence, of what is beyond the mind's habitual conception or imagination. It is not an attempt at the impossible, the inherently self-contradictory. And it can best be done in poetry — in poetry of the overhead Aurobindonian type — in overhead poetry created in English. If we approach Savitri with a proper understanding of the process, we shall feel and see and intuit its truth through the figure and gesture of its beauty, and all that the narrative, the apocalyptic and the prophetic voices in it, which the paper so well describes, have to convey will go home to us and keep winging for ever in those depths where the poet in each man hides and holds the inexpressible as his own eternal Self.
26.12.1970
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SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI AND TENNYSONIAN
BLANK VERSE
I was much interested to read the views you have sent me of the two dons — one English, the other Irish — on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. The first of these Academics seems to me rather misguided in his evaluation of the epic's blank verse.
No doubt, he is right in saying that there was plenty of end-stopped blank verse in English before Savitri — but did you actually say that the only type had been the enjambed? Most probably, when you pointed out the "originality" of Sri Aurobindo's metrical form, you had more things in mind than merely its abstention from overflowing. It is a form deliberately adopted and deftly manipulated. Of course, whatever Sri Aurobindo wrote in his later life was not from the actively planning intelligence: it all came to him from "overhead" through the Yogi's silent mind — but the overhead inspiration does assume the modes of the mind and it can produce psychological phenomena which can be differentiated among themselves as those which look instinctively immediate and those which look consciously selective and formative. In his early days Sri Aurobindo had not gathered any body of technical knowledge and it was his keen art-feeling — engendered by his long self-steeping in the greatest and finest poetry of several countries — that was his guide. But later he acquired a mass of technical knowledge, and a critical sense constantly accompanied the dictates of the poetic enthousiasmos; he knew with wide-open eyes, as it were, how the inspiration worked and where it came from and whether it was anywhere distorted in the transmission. Even here, as he has written to me, he did not "think": he saw and felt; but whereas formerly he had just felt he now saw as well, and it is this seeing against a
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background of technical knowledge that constitutes what, in our ordinary language, we may call his deliberate adoption of a form and his deft manipulation of it.
This implies that his end-stopped blank verse was not merely opposed to the overflowing kind by being end-stopped: it had other and deeper motives, wider purposes, higher functions and was even end-stopping itself on account of these factors in a way all its own — all its own both with regard to the single verse-unit and in respect of the various ensembles the verse-units built up (blocks of one line, two lines, three or four or five lines). I question whether the early Elizabethans and the young Shakespeare had any crystallised art-idea when they "practised" a blank verse based on the unit of the single line. They followed a model that had somehow come into vogue and they had not yet realised the full possibilities of the enjambed variety.
Tennyson's revival of "this sort of blank verse" must have had more consciousness behind it, just as in a greater way Milton was conscious of the overflowing sort in his "organ music" and the mature Shakespeare in the large curves of his many-motioned violin, though I may doubt if the Shakespearian "consciousness" was much more than the Life Force of the Late Renaissance complexly kindling up to self-sight within this individual instrument of intense passion and curious imagination. But to compare Tennyson's revival with Sri Aurobindo's and, much more, to compare the practice of Marlowe, Kyd and the young Shakespeare with it is to overlook the very heart of the Aurobindonian art: "an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalida-sian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English", as Sri Aurobindo himself briefly and rather modestly puts it.
I may grant that certain Elizabethan and Tennysonian effects take on a fresh avatar in passages of Savitri, and a critic may legitimately juxtapose some Marlovian "mighty line" with any of Sri Aurobindo's, of which one may feel that here
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The wide world-rhythms wove their stupendous chant,
or a commentator may justly measure the accent of a Tennysonian novelty against some song-thrill of new discovery in Sri Aurobindo,
A bow-twang's hum of young experiment.
But surface-affinities discoverable here and there hardly justify the verdict of your professor friend: "Much of Aurobindo's blank verse seems to me Tennysonian..." It is a superficial verdict — and its character is little improved when the writer brings in what he must be considering a similarity of temper and adds that Sri Aurobindo was affected "also possibly by the Tennysonian blank verse of Sir Edwin Arnold, whose work he certainly knew well".
Mind you, I am not a hundred per cent denigrator of Tennyson the Poet. I set a fairly high value on his "young experiment", but his old performance, which constitutes the bulk of his work, is well hit off by Sri Aurobindo himself apropos of Indians writing blank verse: "Tennyson is a perilous model and can have a weakening and corrupting influence and the 'Princess' and 'Idylls of the King' which seem to have set the tone for Indo-English blank verse are perhaps the worst choice possible for such a role. There is plenty of clever craftsmanship but it is mostly false and superficial and without true strength or inspired movement or poetic force. As for language and substance his influence tends to bring a thin artificial decorative prettiness or pic-turesqueness varied by an elaborate false simplicity and an attempt at a kind of brilliant, sometimes lusciously brilliant sentimental or sententious commonplace." Even the nineteenth-century blank verse of Sri Aurobindo — Urvasie, Love and Death, The Hero and the Nymph (the last-named a translation of a drama of Kalidasa's) — are free from the typical Tennysonese, and it is free not merely by being impetuously enjambed as against Tennyson's mixture of end-stopping
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and overflow. Somewhere in my writings I have put together a passage of Tennyson's and one of Sri Aurobindo's that have some similarity of general theme and pointed out the world of difference in vibrancy, sensitiveness, vision-vitality, art-intensity. Here is Tennyson in the middle of the Enid story:
O purblind race of miserable men,
How many among us at this very hour
Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves,
By taking true for false, or false for true;
Here, thro' the feeble twilight of this world
Groping, how many, until we pass and reach
That other, where we see as we are seen...
Now take the following from Love and Death — part of a lover's lament visiting the underworld:
...O miserable race of men,
With violent and passionate souls you come
Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days
In fear and anguish, snatching at stray beams
Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;
Then from your spacious earth in a great horror
Descend into this night, and here too soon
Must expiate your few inadequate joys.
O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads
Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,
The naked spirit here...
Sri Aurobindo appears to make a Tennysonian take-off but immediately he soars up into an intoxicating ozone and his touch-down is still with "trailing clouds of glory". Mark too the dissimilarity of the sheer form, the verse-body that goes soaring. Tennyson is loosely articulated, with a generic shape, so to speak, rather than a specific one: only one line (the sixth) has some originality of contour —
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Groping,/how man/y, until/we pass/and reach —
but it is a newness languidly achieved. Sri Aurobindo disposes his beats with a constant vivacity of variation, and the very motion of mind and mood becomes a face and figure of beauty ("Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes", to remember a Byronic snatch). Particularly the last five lines and a half have that organic out-thrust and "a terrible beauty is born". They modulate themselves on a most creative in-stress. But the moulded energy is multi-toned, rhythmed "in inward time", in the earlier lines as well, though with less passion and more poignancy.
The usual tendency of commentators — at least in India — is to bracket Savitri's blank verse with that of Paradise Lost. So far as quality is concerned, this is not such an off-the-centre remark, yet it still bespeaks an obtuseness, a non-particularity of the aesthetic sensorium in the matter of turn, rhythm-curve, line-structure. The significant difference between the Miltonic and the Aurobindonian, in spite of a general common impression of elevated tone and massive dynamism, I have set forth in some detail in the course of a number of Notes published some years back. But I suppose that to an English scholar the opposition between the repeated enjambment of Paradise Lost and the predominant end-stopping of Savitri is too insistent to be ignored and hence is inhibitive of a glib comparison of Milton with Sri Aurobindo. That, however, is no reason why Tennyson's end-stopping in a good part of his verse should push one into the equal and perhaps worse glibness of Tennysonifyihg an afflatus so remote as is Sri Aurobindo's from that of The Princess and The Idylls.
To complete my contention that such compositions of the Victorian Poet-Laureate have really nothing to do with the "future poetry" in Sri Aurobindo's epic "Legend and Symbol", I may pick out a few lines to contrast the thought-quality of the two. Savitri became in its final version a Philosophy as well as a Legend and a Symbol, and there are,
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as the second Professor ably discerns, innumerable currents of philosophical thought in it. Now, one may urge that the passage I have culled from the Enid story does not totally lend itself to a juxtaposition with my excerpt from Love and Death. It has less of image-colour, less of emotional abandon, more of mental vision, a broad touch of poetic philosophising, with phrases like "taking true for false, or false for true" and "that other, where we see as we are seen". A movement is indicated from the twilight-illusions of this world to a world of verity, from the troubles of time to the equipoise of eternity. Well, let us extract whatever intellectually poetic pleasure we can from the thrill Tennyson conveys to us of his grey matter in the moulding hands of the Muse — and then let us look at a short spell of spiritual thinking in Savitri which transfers to a different plane the basic motif of the passage from Love and Death, with even a linking phrase ("Death helps us not") from it:
Our being must move eternally through Time;
Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;
A secret Will compels us to endure.
Our life's repose is in the Infinite;
It cannot end, its end is Life supreme...
(Book 10, Canto 6, p. 221)
The utter depths of the soul surge up here and move with a mighty measure in which the speech of the intellect is recognisably caught yet carried beyond itself by the Spirit's undertones and overtones. Not alone the waves of an unfathomable sound-significance but also the living hues of a genuine mind-vision playing in and out of their sweep towards luminous horizons are foreign to dear old Alfred for all his floating hair and prophet beard and mist-rapt eye trying to swim beyond our ken on a portwine-dark strange sea of thought. (I must apologise to Homer and Wordsworth for tainting the lovely "stock-description" of the one and the grand trouvaille of the other with a touch of the bibulous.)
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Please do not think I am prejudiced in favour of the second don as against the first because the former has given Savitri high praise. It is the temper of the mind behind the pronouncements that I have considered. If the latter had offered authentic criticism after realising what sort of work, both in matter and manner, this epic is I would have respected his viewpoint even while attacking it — or perhaps I may have seen some area of agreement upon the ordinary level of literary criticism. Savitri is not a completely finished creation, it did not receive the absolute ultima lima from its author. So one may, if one wants, pick fault with a few parts of it from an overall outlook, if one does not have a sufficient inlook to take one away from such petty and superficial carping. And an impartial judge is bound to concede some room to competent reservations. But a facile summing-up cannot be let pass. Perhaps the Professor did not intend to make any censure. At least the mode of his expression is not censorious at all. But he appears to have given a very perfunctory response, as if to imply, "Oh, you make too much of it all — a fair amount is deja vu."
From his letter to you I can see that he is a very kind and helpful person. And the suggestion he proffers to you to "say something about the remarkable parallel between the legend of Savitri and that of Alcestis" seems a fruitful one.
I had no idea the other Professor was such an old man. His mind has kept its full vigour and, what is more, its penetrating power. All his observations go to the heart of a thing — and he has many observations to make. I cannot conceive of a better tribute in a short space than his few lines by way of a general comment: "The poem has impressed me by its sublimity, richness of imagery, and lofty spiritual level, allied with great skill in interpreting unusual psychic experiences through appropriate imagery." And what genuine warmth of response is there in the other declaration: "I... greatly appreciated the privilege...of making the acquaintance of Savitri, a truly remarkable poem." Then there is the perspicacity of his note: "there are two points which struck
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me emphatically. (1) The frequent echoes — quite deliberate — of well-known lines in English poetry in Savitri. They are all over the place. (2) Sri Aurobindo says somewhere in the prose notes that he has discussed and examined in the poem every important philosophical theory... You have touched on the matter in various places in your thesis, but a detailed examination would call for a book all to itself. Some day perhaps you or a pupil of yours will write this book; but it would call of course for considerable philosophical equipment." Finally, there is the statement equally worth marking: "I may add that I was immensely impressed by the extraordinary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modern cosmopolitan world."
I see too that in this Professor's last letter to you, he refers again to Savitri as "this great poem" and goes on to say: "I am interested in Sri Aurobindo and his work... Already there is a small collection of books in our world-famous library in Trinity College, Dublin, dealing with Sri Aurobindo and his work and writings. Your book will be a most valuable addition to the growing group of works in this important field."
You were indeed lucky to come into contact with such a fine consciousness. I write "consciousness" on purpose instead of "mind", for here there seems to have been an all-round sensitiveness and perceptiveness, a culture that permeated the whole being.
I am glad you have undertaken to carry out one of his wishes — that you should try a comparative study of Dante and Sri Aurobindo. Here I may note that in Savitri we have not only deliberate echoes of several great lines of English poetry, lines passed through the typical Aurobindonian spirituality, but also reverberations from the poetic literature of other countries. Dante too has contributed some strains. One may be mentioned at once. Do you remember the story he makes Ulysses tell, but none of the classics know, the story which has served as the basis of Tennyson's Ulysses,
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that memorable success of his in blank verse, along with Morte d'Arthur and Tithonus? I have Laurence Binyon's translation — poetic enough but naturally nowhere near Dante's unique blend of simplicity and exaltation, clear-cut flow and concentrated force. Dante's Ulysses tells his comrades:
"Brothers," I said, "who manfully, despite
Ten thousand perils, have attained the West,
In the brief vigil that remains of light
To feel in, stoop not to renounce the quest
Of what may in the sun's path be essayed,
The world that never man-kind hath possessed.
Think on the seed ye spring from! Ye were made
Not to live life of brute beasts in the field
But follow virtue and knowledge unafraid."
Now listen to what Savitri's father, King Aswapati, caught of
A word that leaped from some far sky of thought.
Sri Aurobindo's passage is much longer than Dante's. I'll cull a few parts of it:
"O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,
O petty adventurers in an infinite world
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind
Around your little self and petty things?
But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,
Not for vain repetition were you built;
Out of the Immortal's substance you were made;
Your actions can be swift revealing steps,
Your life a changeful mould for growing gods....
A greater destiny waits you in your front:...
You shall awake into the spirit's air...
And look through Nature with sun-gazing lids...
Authors of earth's high change, to you it is given
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To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul
And touch the mighty Mother stark awake
And meet the Omnipotent in this house of flesh
And make of life the million-bodied One.
The earth you tread is a border screened from heaven;
The life you lead conceals the light you are.
Immortal Powers sweep flaming past your doors;
Far-off upon your tops the god-chant sounds
While to exceed yourselves thought's trumpets call,
Heard by a few, but fewer dare aspire,
The nympholepts of the ecstasy and the blaze...." 1
This is a fine example of the end-stopped technique, with just two lines effectively enjambed:
To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul...
And the whole passage has an affinity in a general manner to the grand finale of Tennyson's Dante-inspired little piece — perhaps the noblest blank verse the Victorian poet penned:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rest unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From the eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
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The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tennysonian blank verse of this calibre — as adroit in end-stopping as in overflowing and charged everywhere with a winging afflatus, whether light and mobile, or massive and high-poised — may well stand beside the Aurobindonian as sheer poetry. But Ulysses is an exception and not the rule. Neither can it, for all its masterful semi-mystic romanticism, match the deeper tones that sweep through Savitri again and again. Perhaps the passage with the Dante-correspondence does not quite bring those tones home to the inner ear as markedly as others, such as:
Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;
The toiling thinker widened and grew still,
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart;
His soul could sail beyond thought's luminous bar;
Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.
Through a faint glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
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And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
If we may close in a technical strain, we may observe that in the last five lines here there is an intriguing mixture of the end-stopped and the enjambed, not in the sense that they alternate but in the sense that they appear to fuse. The first line is a regular overflow — while the next two form a partnership which is not easy to distinguish as the one kind or the other: the two kinds interplay, seeming at the same time a single whole and a pair of self-sufficient parts. Nor, when the third line is taken along with the two terminal ones, can this whole be really cut into three independent phrases, yet the links are so delicate and subtle that each has a telling life of its own and a monumental strength which still has a singing and a soaring, in which the great significance-packed words turn ethereally luminous and, on some haunting undertone of suggestion and some suffusing overtone of vision, achieve a poetic paradox which we can only characterise as the uttering of the Unutterable.
What exactly we mean may be indicated by a few critical hints. When we read at the very start of the passage —
The toiling thinker widened and grew still —
we can see and feel with a fair distinctness the movement of the human mind towards the Spirit beyond it. The weighty spondee of the initial line's first foot, the next trochee with its reversal of the basic iamb-flow of the metre and then the couple of regular beats leading to a sort of uninsistent trailing away of the poet's own voice into voicelessness — all these are effects we can discern. Similarly we can measure the drift of the succeeding line, with its first three regular feet conjuring up a large easy transition from the finite to the infinite, and then an accentless pyrrhic balanced at the end of the line by a spondee — "grew still" — conveying the
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fullness of the spiritual state, the culmination of the God-ward growth of the soul. The two lines together prepare the other duo with which the revelatory passage reaches its resolution. But in that duo we tend to lose our bearings. The phrases are not striking with a conscious poetry. The opening expression — "Where judgment ceases and the word is mute" — is most simple and direct, almost a prose locution: what animates it to a pitch far beyond the finest prose is a deep undercurrent, an intonation which nearly effaces the stresses and carries its meaning on a stream of silence, as it were. The next pentameter appears to have as abstract an air with its "Unconceived", an economical straightforwardness striving after no colourful imaginative effect, yet accomplishing an extreme of the vivid and visionary by the vocables "lies pathless". They evoke the sense of a super-personal Divinity in an eternal self-extension that defies all attempt of discriminative thought to pass across its mystery. And the epithet "alone" comes as a summing-up of the utter transcendence — or, if you like, a humming-up of the ultimate Silence, a tolling as of a huge golden bell, a very sky-dome ringing, to round off the multitudinous activity of the universe and announce the reign of the unfathomable Supracosmic, the boundless Godhead reposing in His secret self-luminosity, dissolving the universe into its indescribable divine potentiality. This is a poetry in which seeing and feeling draw intensely inward and disappear into an immense unmediated experience: seeing and feeling are then no longer needed: all the supernatural Wonder which words seek to communicate by seeing and feeling is now as if known by identity with it: there is here a spontaneous power of poetic Yoga holding by a transparency of language this Wonder in its own authentic plenitude of existence.
What Tennysonian blank verses can vibrate with the quality of such a Mantra?
Reference
1. Savitri (Revised edition, 1993), Book Four, Canto Three, pp. 370-71.)
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SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI
AND DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA
TWO LETTERS
The thesis you have passed on to me cannot stand as it is. Although the research is excellent its foundation is rather unfortunate and needs some modification. If left without a shift in perspective, it will blur the truth of the matter.
The author conceives Sri Aurobindo as modelling Savitri upon Dante's Divine Comedy, following its theme and making extensions of it in the light of his own spiritual experience. It is even suggested that he is presenting Dante, filled out and expanded, to the modern world. And his own poetic performance is attributed to his extreme admiration for the Florentine's work and to its overwhelming influence on him.
It is true that Sri Aurobindo gave Dante a very high rank: Dante figured for him among the giants of poetry. But Sri Aurobindo certainly did not put him at the sheer top. Dante stood on a slightly lower level, along with Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton — just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the e1ite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa.
Four criteria Sri Aurobindo set up for the absolute first rank. They may be summed up: originality of imagination, power of expression, creative genius, range of subject-matter. The last criterion implies also scale of work or what we may call quantity of quality. Dante just misses the utter Everest-point and sits crowned on a Kanchanjanga because his work does not have an equal genius with Vyasa's, Valmiki's, Shakespeare's and Homer's for creating a teeming world of living characters and real-seeming situations and "unknown modes of being". An energetic constructiveness
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on a grand scale rather than a formative force as of a demiurge distinguishes Dante, even as it marks out Kalidasa who, like him, would otherwise be in the company of those topmost four.
So Sri Aurobindo's admiration for Dante could never have been of the extreme order. Though, among the world's epics, he put the Divine Comedy alongside of the Odyssey as least sinking in poetic quality throughout its great length, he could not but be aware of their difference in elemental creativity. And it is also this difference that should be one of the factors deterring us from pressing too far the comparison between Savitri and the Divine Comedy. We may also remember that to have a sustained quality does not necessarily render a work superior to another which has ups and downs. Horace's dictum, "Even Homer sometimes nods", refers to the Iliad, but surely the epos of Achilles's wrath is greater than that of Odysseus's wanderings. There is a dazzling fire, there is a dizzying flight in the former that reveal more and reach farther than all the wondrous discoveries of the "many-counselled" sailor among the islands of the Aegean. In a dissimilar yet perhaps not quite unconnected universe of discourse we may note Sri Aurobindo's rating Shakespeare much higher than Racine in spite of the Frenchman's uniform perfection of art and the Englishman's repeated scoriae or, to put it more expressively, his sun-spots. Shakespeare has a height or a depth of vision, a magnificence or a mystery of word which Racine, for all his beautiful polish and finish, rarely, if at all, equals.
Sri Aurobindo may be said to have been poetically influenced in a basic sense by Homer and Shakespeare from his earliest days and, later, by Vyasa, Valmiki and the mantras of the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita. If any poetry not exactly of the sheer top, though high enough, deeply permeated him, it was Kalidasa's more than Dante's.
This is not to say that Dante has nothing to do with Savitri. Interesting and even illuminating comparisons may be made, on the whole as well as in some details, between
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Savitri and the Divine Comedy. Many parallels drawn by the thesis can hold, but its point de depart has to be changed. And here the most important thing to be borne in mind is the real source of the Aurobindonian epic.
Dante differs fundamentally from Sri Aurobindo in not being, in the true sense, a mystic. Sri Aurobindo has designated Dante's poetry, as well as Milton's, religious, not mystical. And that means it is the imaginative projection of certain strong mental beliefs and vital attitudes touched by an intuition of God and of a supernatural Beyond. There is no direct occult experience, no immediate spiritual realisation at the back of it. Something from the occult domain and the spiritual plane was sure to come on the breath of the intense and authentic inspiration that was Dante's, but upon it and around it his poetic imagination has played. And, since he did not have, in the supreme degree, the creativity of which Sri Aurobindo speaks, the play of the poetic imagination could not always transmit that "something" in its utter essence.
A further point is the emphatically Christian character of Dante's "towering fantasy" (to use his own expression). The theology of Thomas Aquinas, with the metaphysics of Aristotle as its substructure, and the whole orthodox framework of the Mediaeval mind are an integral part of Dante's universe. The poet's individuality, his personal concerns, his sympathies with the old Classical world and the boldness of his opinions have blended with the traditional elements — and there is also a wide humanity tingeing everything and bringing what we may term a world-cry into so many of the poet's articulations. Still, Mediaeval Christianity, however universalised, is magisterial in the Divine Comedy — and with it there opens a gulf between Dante and Sri Aurobindo.
No doubt, Mediaeval Christianity, no less than Graeco-Roman Classicism and Modern Europe, are included in Sri Aurobindo's vast cultural consciousness. But all these strains are taken up by a profound identity with the oriental soul and particularly with the multi-dimensioned Indian spirit.
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Even more, there is at work in the Aurobindonian consciousness
the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
Sri Aurobindo does not merely sum up the whole past of human history: he also embodies the light of a new evolutionary future pressing for universal realisation. With the varied past of mankind and especially India's broad-based synthesis of Nature and Supernature as his launching-pad, his vision zooms into a Vita Nuova beyond Dante's conception, and from the height of this Unknown he looks at everything. A fresh astonishing light — the infra-red of Nature's unfathomed secrets, the ultra-violet of Supema-ture's unreached arcana — is brought forth by him. What was a vague dream of the Ideal, an elusive hope of the Perfect, a struggling aspiration to the Plenary — all this is given substance and shape in Sri Aurobindo's experience and self-expression. All this comes to verbal life most clearly and comprehensively in the 23,814 lines of Savitri. Knowledge of states of being and planes of consciousness such as even the greatest spiritual scriptures of India have never compassed shines out in intimate detail. These scriptures, with their warm touch on mystical reality, may be said to have prefigured that knowledge; but they are themselves shadowy in comparison to Sri Aurobindo's masterful disclosures. How much more so must be the Dantesque Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, for all the systematic accounts of their levels and all the insets of human drama they carry!
The system itself of other worlds unfolding in the Divine Comedy has little counterpart in Savitri. Where in it is the hierarchy of planes — subtle-physical, vital, mental, psychic, "overhead", and lastly "the radiant world of the Everlasting Truth"? Except for the common factor of exploring the ultra-terrestrial and for some correspondences here and there of setting and symbolism, we are in radically dissimilar dimen-
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sions. Nor can we say that Sri Aurobindo's hierarchy can be divided and distributed into three general sections covered by Dante's labels: "Inferno", "Purgatorio", "Paradiso". The subtle-physical and vital planes have their own hells and heavens: neither these hells nor these heavens can be lumped together to make a Dantesque picture. It is not possible also to ignore these heavens and restrict that label to the idealities of the mind-plane and the rapturous intensities of the psychic. Both below them and above we have para-disal expanses, and at the summit we have the supreme beatitudes —
White chambers of dalliance with Eternity
And the stupendous gates of the Alone.
A breath from such altitudes does get wafted in the closing canto of Dante's epic, which, barring a symphony of Beethoven's, is perhaps the most glorious voice Europe has heard of the Divine Ananda, but there too the scheme of Christian theology is at work. On occasion we have an anticipation of some Aurobindonian God-glimpse as in:
O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,
sola intendi, e da te intelletta
e intendente te ami e arridi!
Laurence Binyon englishes the lines:
O Light Eternal, who in thyself alone
Dwell'st and thyself know'st and self-understood,
Self-understanding, smilest on thine own!
Barbara Reynolds's version reads:
Eternal Light, that in Thyself alone
Dwelling, alone dost know Thyself, and smile
On Thy self-love, so knowing and so known!
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Both the translations are awkward in places and lack the clear natural conciseness and force of the original; but the original is perfect with the harmonious directness of the imaginative intellect's language intuitivised. It is not that Sri Aurobindo's utterance always differs toto coelo, but everywhere we have the sweep of a deeper vibrancy, and again and again we get mantric outbursts dealing with a theme not far removed from that of Dante's lines, either quietly spell-binding —
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone —
or thrillingly rapt:
Timeless domains of joy and absolute power
Stretched out surrounded by the eternal hush;
The ways that lead to endless happiness
Ran like dream-smiles through meditating vasts:
Disclosed stood up in a gold moment's blaze
White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite.
Perhaps the spiritual difference will be best gauged if we put side by side with these passages an Aurobindonian moment itself which comes nearest the Dantesque:
There knowing herself by her own termless self,
Wisdom supernal, wordless, absolute,
Sat uncompanioned in the eternal Calm,
All-seeing, motionless, sovereign and alone.
Mention of mantric outbursts, involving a disparity between the sources of the two poetic perfections that are respectively Dante's and Sri Aurobindo's, brings us to a final point. In all those parts of Savitri where the old poem written in 1916, as far as we know, was enormously enlarged and completely transformed, Sri Aurobindo writes with an in-
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spiration that comes straight from "overhead" levels through a mind entirely silent in a permanently established peace of the infinite and universal Self of selves — Atman that is Brahman. Sri Aurobindo's mind does not build up anything on its own: it does not say to itself," "Here is Dante's Divine Comedy describing an other-worldly journey through the pit of punishment and suffering, the mount of repentance and self-chastisement, the free spaces of ecstasy and epiphany. I will take up this theme and erect the lucent structure of a new epic. A tale from the Mahabharata of a fight between Love and Death is apt to my purpose. Basing myself on it I will write a new Divine Comedy. Everywhere I will take help of a Dantesque scaffolding and bring my own spiritual experience as well as my awareness of the modern world's needs to bear upon the general pattern of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise and on various particulars of the Mediaeval Italian poet's significant vision. I will be a magnified Dante." The whole mode of procedure natural to a master Yogi like Sri Aurobindo would be foreign to any such self-conscious mental project.
True, Sri Aurobindo's mind was a highly and diversely cultured one and the "overhead" afflatus would take up all that richness full of sounds and sights caught from numberless past creations of poetry. But it would not start from this richness. The start would be far beyond it. An adesh, a divine command, would be upon his mind in poetic work as in any other. And the command would bring about an expression of his multifarious spiritual realisation, his immediate experience of all the inner and upper worlds beyond our earth and pour all his knowledge forth in inevitable words propelled sheer from the mystical truth of things and never from any artistic ambition, any emulation of past poetic achievements, even though the literary loves and cultural responses that were his would find a new avatar for themselves in several portions of the epic creation that is essentially independent of them. If we properly understand the Yogic manner in which Sri Aurobindo wrote Savitri, we would,
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while noting and underlining whatever Dantesque affinities have got woven into the fabric of vision and word, refrain from ascribing to him an all-influencing motive of writing Dante larger and more luminous.
I admire the spirit in which the writer of the thesis has taken my criticisms — and the spirit persists in spite of the "defence" put up at some points. This defence is welcome, for it clarifies a number of issues, without wanting us to refrain from modifying the language and turn of treatment in the thesis wherever necessary. The writer's modesty is worthy of a true researcher and comparative student.
I should like to make a few remarks apropos of some "defensive" observations. In one matter I fear the observer has gone rather astray. The impression seems to be there that "perfection of form" is missing among the criteria Sri Aurobindo has set up for the highest poetry. That is why the writer desires us not to concentrate only on what is called "elemental creative energy". But surely "perfection of form" is implied in the criterion "power of expression", which stands for the poetic gift of making flawless form by means of words. Actually this criterion involves both the things the writer puts apart. It is precisely "the channelising of that energy into a creative work of art". By "creative genius" (Sri Aurobindo's third criterion) is not meant merely a Niagara-rush a la Kazantzakis. There is a specific meaning attached to the term. It stands for the demiurgic capacity to create a world of one's own — living characters or else vibrant modes of being variously interrelated within a real-seeming milieu. It is because Dante, just like Kalidasa, has not enough of this capacity that he fails to rank with the sheer pinnacles of Parnassus: Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Vyasa. His having less of inequalities, fewer ups and downs, does not help him: those four have enough ups, and these ups have in a greater
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degree the creative genius which Sri Aurobindo speaks of. All great poets must have great elemental energy, but only when that energy is at its greatest in all the four attributes mentioned by Sri Aurobindo is the greatest poetry born. The isolation of this energy as one of the attributes out of the four and the identification of it with "creative genius" has made our correspondent labour an irrelevant point.
Not quite accurate also is our friend's placing on a par Sri Aurobindo's choice of the five-act Elizabethan model of the Drama and his choice of the Savitri-story for an epic like Dante's, dealing with other worlds. His Savitri in its gigantic "multifoliate" complexity has little in common with the Divina Commedia's structure to merit comparison with the close approximation of the structure of Rodogune and other plays to the model followed by the Elizabethan dramatists. Of course in general we have hells and heavens and perhaps even purgatories in Savitri, but they are of an entirely different kind and also they are differently organised. The correspondent appears to be somewhat in two minds here. At one place we read of "the occult experiences during the travels of Aswapati" and at another we get a reference to Savitri's own inner explorations "of the triple worlds of Night, Twilight and Day". It is only the latter that invite some comparison with Dante's scheme, but still in too broad a manner. The former hardly provide "vital connections" — though both may and do admit now and then the striking of a Dantesque chord in the Aurobindonian symphony.
And the chord would be all the more authentic because Sri Aurobindo, as the author of the thesis should know, was familiar with Italian sufficiently to read the Divina Commedia in the original. But nothing really links up Savitri with this mighty product of the Middle Ages of Europe in an organic and inevitable manner. I go to the length of asserting that even if Dante had never lived and his epic had never reared its "towering fantasy" the tale of Love and Death out of the Mahabharata would have been taken up by Sri Aurobindo and metamorphosed into almost the very same super-epic of the
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Spirit that is Savitri. I say "almost", for what would have been missing are lines here and there which have not only a Dantesque cast of utterance but also something of the substance of the Florentine's vision. That is all.
Provided we keep this foundational truth in mind we are free to make a comparative study and bring with it a fine literary as well as philosophico-spiritual insight. But I would rather dwell on several small pregnant anticipations by Dante than trace a host of amplifying correspondences in Sri Aurobindo.
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SHELLEY, SWINBURNE, HOUSMAN —
AND MARY SHELLEY
The Times Literary Supplement of November 21, 1968 (pages 1318-19), discusses under the title, "Shelley, Swinburne and Housman", the famous eighth line —
Fresh spring, and summer and winter hoar —
of one of Shelley's most Shelleyan lyrics beginning, in its standard published form,
Oh, world! oh life! oh time!
The lyric consists of two stanzas, and the line in question which is in the second stanza is one foot shorter than the corresponding line in the first. The tale of the seasons is also short by one of them: namely, autumn. Critics naturally have asked: "Why the double discrepancy?" They have believed that either the poet himself created it or it is due to a mistake in printing.
W. M. Rossetti's collected edition of 1870 (volume 2, page 274) gives the line completed:
Fresh Spring, and Summer, Autumn, and Winter hoar.
The editor appends the note that he owed this "indisputable emendation" to the Shelley scholar, Frederick Gard Fleay. But in his edition of 1878 he reverts to the current text. For, in 1875 Swinburne ferociously pilloried the emendation as "this incredible outrage". Swinburne's comment on the line is celebrated for its note both of absolute certainty and of unreserved eulogy:
"If there is one verse in Shelley or in English of more
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divine and sovereign sweetness than any other, it is that in the Lament,
Fresh Spring, and Summer, and Winter hoar.
The music of this line taken with its context — the melodious effect of its exquisite inequality — I should have thought was a thing to thrill the veins and draw tears to the eyes of all men whose ears were not closed against all harmony by some denser and less removable obstruction than shut out the song of the Sirens from the hearing of the crew of Ulysses."
Swinburne's word stood unchallenged until 1911. In that year A. E. Housman delivered the Inaugural Lecture as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge. There we have what Henry Jackson described at the time as Housman's "trouncing of Swinburne in respect of a reading of Shelley". With less open ferocity but with devastating irony, the Cambridge Professor, himself no mean poet, made Swinburne's comment his target example of—in Jackson's phrase — "aesthetic criticism" and — in his own language — "the performance of the literary mind when, with its facile emotions and its incapacity for self-examination, it invades the province of science". Not that Housman accepted Ros-setti's reading or denied the exquisiteness of the "inequality" Swinburne had spoken of. He declared: "I may say in passing that I do not think Mr. Rossetti's verse a good verse, not worthy of Shelley; and I suppose that when Mr. Swinburne in his Essays and Studies [1875] spoke of Mr. Rossetti's deaf and desperate daring, he was expressing, in nobler language, the same opinion." Rossetti, we may adjudge, foisted on Shelley a lack of poetic sensibility and subtlety by making the line too much of a seasonal list. Doubtless there was a not unhappy balance — the extremes of the verse having two seasons with descriptive epithets and the middle portions bringing in a pair of seasons without them — but the common succession of the four parts of the year spoiled
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the whole phrase with a touch of obviousness. Housman could not help agreeing with Swinburne's condemnation of Rossetti, and yet be rebelled against him for — as he put it to his audience — "objections which you may call, as you please, scientific or pedantic". His case ran:
"Shelley's MS exists; and the inequality, though exquisite, does not exist in Shelley's MS. Shelley wrote with his own hand,
Fresh Spring and Autumn, Summer and Winter hoar...
The one verse in Shelley and in English of more divine and sovereign sweetness than any other is the verse, not of Shelley, but of the compositor. Mr. Swinburne's veins were thrilled, and tears were drawn to Mr. Swinburne's eyes, by a misprint."
The version Housman put forward of the line is not unworthy of a poet like Shelley. The avoidance of the mechanical season-series is only the negative side of its virtue. The positive side lies in the fact that the couplings — "Fresh Spring and Autumn" at the start and "Summer and Winter hoar" at the end — have each a significant contrast: opposed or counteracting seasonal conditions are set facing each other. Again, while in the first pair the opening term of the contrast has an adjective to it, the closing term has an adjective in the second pair: thus a felicitous variety is present in the balancing sets of oppositions. Still further, this variety carries an important suggestion in its felicitousness on either hand because of its occurring within a mode of contrast. For, when "Fresh Spring" is opposed to "Autumn" and when "Summer" is counteracted by "Winter hoar", we do not need descriptive epithets for "Autumn" and "Summer": these two seasons are automatically implied to be, respectively, the reverse of "Fresh" and "hoar": we should understand Autumn to be something like "sere" and Summer something like "green" or "golden". Thus the omission of epithets is meaningfully justified.
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We feel convinced that if Shelley wanted to name all the four seasons he could never do it better than in Housman's citation. But did Housman settle the issue? When he made his pronouncement he thought he had done so. Being, however, a scrupulous and "scientific" scholar, he wished to give the proper reference for "Shelley's MS". That such reference was possible he felt sure. To the suggestion by the Oxford University Press in September, 1929, that his Inaugural should be included in a collected volume of his prose pieces, he mentioned in his reply that he was anxious to substantiate his claim which, according to him, had been inspired by his seeing, "not far from the beginning of this century,... in some literary journal... an autograph, or some early impression, of Shelley's O world, O life, O time..." He added that he could not trace the account and he would not permit the publication of his lecture because it contained "a statement which I cannot verify".
The Oxford University Press mobilised a number of Shelley experts to ferret out the basis of Housman's unverified recollection, which may be conjectured to have been some review of Thomas Hutchinson's Clarendon Press edition of Shelley in 1904. Not only did they fail: all further search also was discouraged by the report of a leading Shelley specialist, Roger Ingpen, to Frederick Page of O.U.P. that in "Sir John Shelley-Rolls's original MS of A Lament Shelley 'fair-copied' the stanza with the line concerned reading as in the traditional text, although an earlier version in the MS had 'Autumn' written above a heavily scored-out word, of which 'su — (probably summer) is visible'." Charles Williams of O.U.P. communicated to Housman the results of the inquiries. Housman replied, finally dismissing the Oxford project: "On the one hand I must thank and congratulate you, but on the other hand you have cooked your own goose, for Mr. Ingpen's report contradicts that on which I relied."
An article in the Times Literary Supplement of September 6, 1963, recounted the various diligent but unsuccessful efforts
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on behalf of Housman, and the issue of May 9, 1968, published the Inaugural from a typed transcript recently found among the papers of his brother Laurence. But in deference to the author's known scholarly conscience the Shelley-Swinburne passage was dropped. Later a complete text in book-form by the Cambridge University Press was projected for 1969. And in preparation for it John Carter and John Sparrow resumed the research. It is their discoveries that form the contents of the article I have mentioned at the beginning of mine.
These discoveries put a new complexion on the problem. For, they have proved Ingpen's report "incomplete, inaccurate, and misleading". A photostat reproduction of the page from which Ingpen was professing to transcribe is placed before us, and the two researchers' interpretation of this draft page is as follows:
"Shelley wrote the opening two lines of the second stanza at the foot of the page, just managing to squeeze in the third line at the bottom below them. After [autumn] in the third line there is an appreciable gap, in which Shelley, in paler ink than that in which he had written the rest of the line, wrote and then deleted what looks like gra. He then, it seems, copied out the whole stanza at the top of the page in the same pale ink as that in which he had written gra, still preserving the gap into which gra had been written. The difference between the two inks is not appreciable in the reproduction, but it is decisively plain in the original.
"What can one safely infer from this? First: that Shelley had not settled on a final version of the line. Second: that he had it in mind to insert something between summer and winter hoar. Third: that, while one cannot be sure that (as Rossetti emended) autumn would have been the word decided on to fill the gap, Swinburne was certainly wrong in regarding the line as complete without any such insertion. (It looks as if the poet at one stage toyed with the idea of inserting gray, to go with autumn, and then rightly rejected it as impossibly flat.) Finally: that the manuscript does not
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prove that Shelley regarded summer and autumn as alternatives and would not have included both in his final version of the line. True, he struck out summer, apparently in favour of autumn, in his first version of the line and reinstated it, without adding autumn, in the second. But the contents of the page were written down during the process of composition so roughly and rapidly that one must be chary of drawing precise detailed conclusions from the evidence they afford. One conclusion, however, seems certain: Shelley did not regard the line as metrically complete in the form in which it was so highly praised (particularly for its metrical beauty) by Swinburne."
Carter and Sparrow claim that their analysis "is confirmed by other surviving manuscripts of the poem about which Ingpen was misleadingly silent". Including the one already examined, the total number of manuscripts comes to three, two of them in Shelley's hand and one in Mary Shelley's. In the already examined manuscript there are two details of some interest though not bearing directly upon our problem. Shelley started the line originally with From and then cancelled the word. Instead of the opening Fresh which he ultimately put we see Green. In the next manuscript of Shelley's own — his final fair copy of 1821, according to Mary's chronology — the poet not only has a blank open space after summer but also leaves the space decisively wider. Sparrow and Carter comment: "there is room for a six-letter word at the least." Their suggestion evidently is that Shelley might have in the end put even autumn. And their general conclusion is: "Plainly, therefore, the poet himself regarded the eighth line as still incomplete when he copied the poem out for the last time (he died in the following year, 1822)."
On the remaining manuscript the authors write: "Mary Shelley, although she took liberties with the punctuation, was scrupulous in her transcription of the text itself: that she realised that the eighth line had never been finished is emphatically indicated by the fact that she doubled the width of the blank space — even though it meant crowding hoar
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right into the edge of the page."
Carter and Sparrow next remark: "Down to the last stage of its transmission in manuscript, then, the line preserves the crucial blank. Yet, on its first appearance in print [Posthumous Poems], in 1824, it is closed up so as to present the text in its familiar form. There are several possible explanations of this. Mary Shelley doubtless wished to publish a beautiful poem even though one line was plainly unfinished... Yet elsewhere in the volume we have noted more than a score of cases where she left a square-bracketed blank for a missing or undeciphered word; not counting more than half a dozen in The Triumph of Life, Shelley's last major poem... Why, one wonders, did she not do so here? Since she did not, we may suppose that she used her editorial discretion in deleting, whether in the printer's copy or in proof, the gap so carefully maintained in her own fair copy; perhaps she anticipated Swinburne in finding a special music in the assymmetrical line. Alternatively, the compositor in 1824 may have closed the gap wide though it is, without any warrant from the editor."
Now our authors return to Housman and continue: "If the last hypothesis were the right one, it would exactly substantiate Housman's conclusion [apropos of Swinburne] ... But even if the traditional reading was established deliberately by Mary Shelley, the evidence of the manuscripts substantially vindicates Housman. Shelley throughout intended a longer line (metrically matching line 3), and Housman was thus fully justified [contra Swinburne]...
"Housman, in short, was right, even though he could never find the evidence to prove it and therefore never published the argument."
Can we agree with Carter and Sparrow about Housman's position? I think they have overshot their mark.
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In the first place, it is perfectly clear from all the fair copies that, even if autumn might have been inserted in the blank, summer would always have preceded autumn. The blank is not before but after summer. So Rossetti's emendation would at most be supported and never Housman's adduced version. Such emendation Housman not only considered bad: he also considered it "unworthy of Shelley". What he believed Shelley to have written has not at all been vindicated. What might be credited is something which, in Housman's opinion, could never have been in Shelley's manuscript.
In the second place, even Housman's general idea that all the four seasons were enumerated by Shelley, in whatever order, is highly improbable. Shelley did not have to cast about for any word for the omitted season: autumn was always there and nothing else could have substituted it. If he never put it, it must be because he did not want it. Something else than the omitted season was his lure. Here the sole alternative is an adjective, short or at most about six-lettered, for summer to match his treatment of spring and winter. The quest exclusively for an adjective is indicated also by his actual toying with gray when he tried out autumn instead of summer. Sir A. Quiller-Couch's notion — pointed out by P. S. Falla in a letter to the T.L.S. of November 28, 1968, page 1338 — that Shelley intended to put a monosyllabic epithet after summer strikes one as quite correct so far as the point about the epithet goes and perhaps also in regard to the monosyllable.
In the third place, the chances of the printer having taken the liberty to close up the gap left by Mary Shelley are remote indeed. There is not merely the contrary evidence of all the numerous other gaps by him. There is also the fact, implied by Carter and Sparrow, that her blank here, like all her other blanks, must have been square-bracketed. It would have been impossible for the printer to ignore so explicit a direction. Our authors must not be allowed to give the impression that it was just a matter of ignoring a bit of empty
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space. We have to realise how astronomical are the odds against the printer's deleting an empty space in spite of the square brackets at either end. Hence, strictly speaking, Housman's attack on Swinburne is baseless: no compositor, no printer produced the exquisite inequality of the line. Nobody except Mary could have done it in the edition of 1824.
In the fourth place, on the testimony of Carter and Sparrow themselves, Mary has not been shown anywhere in her transcriptions to have gone against what she knew to be Shelley's own blanks. If in the printer's copy or in the proof she deleted, as she alone must have done, the gap preserved in her earlier transcription, there is only one conclusion possible. It is not that she anticipated Swinburne's ecstasy over the asymmetrical line, though she had a ear good enough. It is simply that she sincerely came to believe at the end that Shelley would not, rather than did not, fill the blank: it was some inspired instinct in Shelley that let the blank stand in spite of his conscious mind's technical concern to fill it. This mind was prompting him to find the word technically needed, yet he desisted from inserting any — even tentatively. And this desistance and not just the "impossibly flat" nature of gray after autumn may have been with him from the start. True, his blanks persist till the last; but that is because he could not come to a decision as between his conscious mind and his inspired instinct. Such must have been Mary's intuition immediately before the poem went to press. And it must have been strengthened by the idea that after all Shelley could not have found it so difficult to light upon an adjective for summer. He must have had several in his mind, but he committed none to paper although urged by formal considerations to do so. Something deeper than the latter and not any adjectival impotence made him — to use Arnold's piece of notorious picturesqueness — beat his wings ineffectually in the void persisting in his manuscripts.
The genuinely scientific view, vis-a-vis the manuscript and the final closing up of the gap, would be the very
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opposite of Housman's. Yet Housman, with the fine instinct that could offer so beautiful an alternative to Rossetti's version and with his own experience, recorded in another lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, of how poetry is a matter of inspiration, a power from some submerged part of the being that is master of one's conscious mind and can even achieve wonderful transfusions of feeling — "pure poetry" — which this mind can hardly understand, surely such a poet gifted with such critical sensitiveness should have been the first to share Swinburne's thrilling of the veins and drawing of tears to the eyes. And he would have done so, had he not been misguided in his memory. No Shelley authority could have given the version he quoted. Perhaps he came across a mention somewhere that at one time Shelley put autumn after spring but later retained summer. And he definitely might have seen Notebooks of Percy Bysshe Shelley from the Originals in the Library of W. K. Bixby, Deciphered, Transcribed and Edited, with a Free Commentary by H. Buxton Forman, C. B., 3 volumes, Boston, The Bibliophile Society, 1911. After printing A Lament in its traditional form, Forman adds the note (Volume 1, page 201): "Though I have always resisted the insertion of autumn after summer in line 3 of stanza II, what I have gathered in handling these Note Books lends some colour to the suspicion that a word has dropped out of the line. I do not truly think anything of the sort happened, but, if it has, the loss must have been that of an adjective before summer — which I do not attempt to supply and would only accept on conclusive manuscript evidence." Housman, playing with the possibility — mis-guidedly encouraged by Forman — of a word-omission before summer, but disagreeing with Forman about its having been an adjective and aware that autumn was the missing season in the verse and even that Shelley himself had once brought it in, may have' surmised the true version to have been the one afterwards submitted in the Inaugural. By the time of the lectures he may have fallen into the error of believing he had read it in some literary journal.
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Our supposition acquires a bit of body from Carter and Sparrow's scrutiny of Housman's pencilled notes in his own copy of Shelley's poetical works: a volume in "Moxon's Popular Poets" series published by Ward, Lock and Bowden, without date (but after August, 1891, when Bowden joined the firm of Ward, Lock, and Co.), "unannotated edition, edited with a critical memoir by William Michael Rossetti". Among these notes, "two detect echoes from Goethe and Spenser, several remark metrical irregularities or faulty rhymes..." Three in all record variant readings. One of them, apropos of The magnetic Lady to her Patient, has textual variations pencilled in, with a reference given: "Athen. 12 Oct. 1907". The reference is to H. J. C. Grierson's recordings in The Athenaeum on the date cited from the Trelawny manuscript at Aberdeen. But there is no reference put down when he registers the "variant reading" of line 8 of A Lament. The text of the poem has Rossetti's original emendation. Here Housman entered the version he gave in his Inaugural as his "remembered" reading. When there is so important a change, we should expect from a scholar like Housman a naming of the source. The absence of it at so critical a point creates some sort of presumption that what he had entered was the version he thought more probable as Shelley's than was the Rossetti-emendation. Obviously he believed the line's inequality to be a mistake of printing and obviously too he rejected Rossetti; but there is no certainty that his substitute was drawn from any literary journal rather than being his own poetic conjecture.
The uncertainty is increased by the fact that assiduous combing of journals and original manuscripts has failed to reveal any basis for Housman's alternative to Rossetti. Thus his sarcasm at Swinburne's expense appears to be completely misdirected, a gaffe into which he was in all sincerity tricked by a lapsus memoriae. The only saving grace to it was that it provided us with such a fine Shelleyan invention.
However, even
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Fresh Spring and Autumn, Summer and Winter hoar
cannot equal in exquisiteness
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
which Shelley's creative unconscious, keeping the outer poetic craftsman at bay, managed to leave to posterity and which Mary in due time recognised to be the God-given Shelleyan music as distinguished from the man-intended strain that had threatened through that blank to vitiate it.
Carter and Sparrow take Swinburne to emphasise the metrical inequality of the line as its main cause of exquisiteness. But actually Swinburne writes of "sweetness" and "melodious effect" no less than of a technical difference perceived on taking the line with its context. Surely, by merely being four-footed when it was expected to be five-footed, the verse's inequality cannot become "exquisite". The surpassing loveliness which over-powered Swinburne lies in the way verbal and rhythmic suggestions make use of the metrical shortness. Every important word has a music of r-sound plus whatever other delicate or deep tones result from vowel or consonant combinations. This sound not only binds the line together with a lovely roll stirring the heart: it also meaningfully links up with the r recurring in the keywords of the next two lines:
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more — O never more!
The sound in question would be partly muffled by Housman's version, and the rhythmically significant reverberation in grief, more, never more would not be so absolute. In Mary's version, in addition to the metrical inequality of the line, we have the inequality of summer going without an epithet in contrast to spring and winter. This inequality does three
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things: (1) it avoids the somewhat mechanical adjectival activity which would have come in general, an adjectival triplication; (2) it saves winter hoar in particular from being duplicated by a preceding pair of noun and epithet in the same order; (3) it charges summer with an unspoken store of quality and gives it a strange emotional force as of a manifold significance held back from speech. And when our imagination is called upon to interpret the pregnant silence, our mind is brought to a concentration on the life, so to speak, of the solitary noun in a suggestive self-sufficiency. What would be the unuttered import of summer? The natural associations, of course, are sunshine and greenery and flowering and bird-song. But the vocable itself, unaided by a descriptive adjective, starts into a literal expressiveness: summer would be that which makes a sum of everything, a multiplicity and a totality which consummates all. It is the packed peak-point of the year's seasonal process. And its position in the very centre of the poetic phrase stresses the climactive fullness of its meaning. But to be a peak-point of centrality between spring and winter is, on the one side, to hold the former's essence raised up and completed and, on the other, to carry the essence of the latter, ready to be unfolded in a sloping down towards its complete manifestation. Summer bears, in its central summing, the actual acme of "fresh spring" and the potential plenitude of "winter hoar". It thus has not only the open extreme of spring's freshness but also the secret all-power to initiate winter's hoariness. As such, it subsumes the whole character of autumn, the movement of the change of sunshine, greenery, flowering and bird-song into Winter's clouded, bare and mute universality of snow.
A further imbuing of summer — because it is not trailed by a circumscribing description — with qualities connecting it to both spring and winter arises from spring being called "fresh" and winter "hoar". Summer, unqualified in itself, comes to be at the same time, by its collocation with spring and winter, something else than fresh and something else
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than hoar. In this role, it stands to spring not as its extreme nor yet as its contradiction and to winter not as its preparatory all-potentiality nor yet as its opposite, but as a variation from either. Varying from spring, it can point towards cloudiness, bareness, muteness, snow-whiteness. Varying from winter, it can tend towards the sunny, green, flowery, bird-songful. Hence the autumnal movement in the direction of winter is implicit in it in general by virtue of its acquiring attributes different from those specified in more or less mutual contrast for both spring and winter.
Here we must make an important clarification. Even granting the implication of autumn in summer and ultimately of winter itself by means of the verbal magic and mystery of the line's peculiar posture, how are we to visualise the autumn-winter Nature in the Nature-glory of summer? Is not the former characterised once for all by Shakespeare's imagery for himself in Sonnet 73? —
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Or else do we not have the last two parts of the year clearly distinguished from summer in Sonnet 5? —
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnowed and bareness everywhere.
All this is true, but there are other ways of looking at autumn or winter. Edna St. Vincent Millay is all in love with the former season:
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide gray skies!
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Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour.
Here is Roy Cambell on the latter season:
I love to see, when leaves arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.
Shelley, in A Lament, was not seeing winter as a desolating and distressing phenomenon. Nor, when he first wrote autumn in preference to summer and called it gray, was he pinpointing a depressing Nature-mood. The implication of autumn that we have read in summer is not to be interpreted as the lurking shade of something regrettable. For, if anything in the line under discussion were such as to cause melancholy, the next two lines would not be:
The explicit winter and the implicit autumn, as much as spring and summer, figure in our verse as if they could be a source of delight: instead, they bring grief. Were they to Shelley what those stanzas from Shakespeare make them, it would hardly be a wonder if his heart were moved to grief by them. He is moved so because his heart is "faint", not because they are less than delightful in themselves. Every season is contemplated sub specie pulchritudinis: winter and autumn, in their individual ways, are seen under the aspect of beauty equally with spring and summer in theirs. A single loveliness deserving a response of delight runs variously through them all — but, alas, in vain for the poet, because, as the lines just preceding ours out it.
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Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight.
The poet's discontent does not abrogate the presence of the one beauty pervading the entire year in diverse fashions and essentially interfusing all the seasons. If, then, our line's verbal magic and mystery give us autumn within the aura, as it were, of summer, there should be no reason for surprise or scepticism.
To confirm still more our reading of Shelley's vision of a single loveliness from spring to winter, we have only to turn to a poem long recognised as a sister in spirit to A Lament. The poem is called Song and starts,
Rarely, rarely comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
There we have the lines:
I love all that thou lovest,
The fresh Earth in new leaves dressed,
And the starry night.
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.
I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost...
Here are the seasons again. Spring is "the fresh Earth" dressed in new leaves. "The starry night" may belong to it or to unmentioned summer. Next is autumn with its evening as well as with its morning of golden mists. Next comes winter as represented by snow and the radiant multiform frost. All the seasons are phenomena of loveliness that are equally dear to the poet's heart. But the poem's beginning and ending tell the story of A Lament. The Spirit of Delight is addressed:
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Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
Tis since thou art fled away...
Thou art love and life! O come,
Make once more my heart thy home.
Perhaps a too practical intellect may protest: "Even though beauty is diversely pervasive of the whole year, and in that sense all the year's parts are essentially interfused, how can we overlook the diversity of pervasion?"
Well, the diversity itself is not so strictly distributed. We have drawn upon Shakespeare's Sonnets. Sonnet 28, after asking whether the poet could compare his friend to "a summer's day", has the descriptive account:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May...
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed...
Autumnal or wintry aspects of Nature are observed in the midst of May. And who has not heard of
The uncertain glory of an April day?
The phenomenon of cloudiness that is typical of autumn or winter can have its touch already in spring. Even for the over-practical intellect, there should be no fundamental difficulty.
To return to our analysis of Shelley's line. Summer's centrality in it has also a subtle bearing on the technical stance of the verse. Being a dissyllable, this noun renders the line a little longer than four feet, although still shorter than five. The corresponding line in the first stanza —
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Trembling at that where I had stood before* —
has ten syllables: now we have not eight but nine: the mer of summer is the extra half-foot. Our verse can be scanned with a modulation in the shape of either an amphibrach —
Fresh spring, | and summer, | and winter hoar —
or an anapaest:
Fresh spring, and sum|mer, and win|ter hoar.
Either scansion introduces, with the additional syllable, an emotional quiver, a tremble technically echoing the earlier corresponding verse's statement. The metrical exquisiteness of the line owes everything here to this appendage or pre-fixture: a perfect tetrameter would have been comparatively flat. But there is another effect too of the additional syllable. The former scansion gives us a slight overflow beyond the first two parts of the line as if there were a small extension beyond the first two seasons of the year. The latter scansion fills the line's second pair of parts with a little initial quickness as though a small leap were there within the period belonging to the year's second pair of seasons. In the one scansion the third season autumn, which is not named, is vaguely suggested by the overflow at the end. In the other this unnamed season is faintly indicated by the quick leap across at the beginning. Either as a dim presence after summer or as a hovering absence before winter, the tiny irregular-
* We may remark that the "had" here is rather strange from the grammatical point of view. There is no past tense or present perfect before this line. We should expect "have" as in the earlier version (T. L. S., Nov. 21 1968, p. 1319, col. 5, Note 5):
Trembling at those which 1 have trod before.
Besides, "had stood" is a little harsh in sound, particularly with "at that" shortly preceding it.
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ity of the tetrameter conjures up autumn. This conjuring up would be impossible if the metrical inequality as between the third lines of the two stanzas were clear-cut. Here again, in the matter of technique, the exquisiteness arises precisely out of the unexpected half-foot more. Arid the wonderful thing is that if Shelley had completed the pentameter by subjoining an adjective to summer, which would have got the missing half-foot in and made up the full tale of the ten-syllabled pentameter, one would have sensed the omission of autumn in the seasonal series. Only the irregular inequality — a hanging between two metrical patterns — can, from the side of the technique, render the naming of autumn unnecessary.
Possibly the query will be framed: "Suppose the pentameter had not been one with only ten syllables but carried, like the existing tetrameter, an extra half-foot. Would the omitted autumn have been conjured up then too?"
From the purely technical standpoint we may say "Yes". But here the basic question of form and content comes up in one aspect. The tetrameter's half-foot more was formed by the second syllable of summer with no epithet accompanying the noun. The half-foot more of the pentameter would be formed by the second syllable of a two-syllabled adjective of summer — as, say, in
Fresh spring, and summer golden, and winter hoar.
An adjective like "golden" or any other apposite one would define and limit summer; so summer could have no penumbra in which a season with a different quality might secretly exist. Then the omission of autumn would be glaring and constitute a defect. Not the extra half-foot alone but the proper phrase holding it is the all-accomplishing all-satisfying art-touch in Shelley's verse, turning what might have been a defect into an exquisite effect.
No, nothing else than the line as traditionally it has appeared — without any blank after summer to put us in two minds — can be the divine and sovereign poetry which
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Swinburne hailed. Lovers of literature cannot thank Mary Shelley enough for doing what she must have believed the true Shelley would ultimately have done if in 1822 that ill-starred boat had not capsized in the Bay of Lerici.
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THE WORDS OF POETRY
Degas, the famous painter, once said to Mallarme, the famous poet: "How is it that though I have plenty of ideas I still can't write poetry?" Mallarme replied: "My dear man, poetry is not written with ideas, it is written with words."
This statement may seem at first to poke fun at Degas, archly pointing out an obvious truth to the rather dense painter. Mallarme no doubt, had often his tongue in his cheek, but he never lost a chance to comment on the essential nature of poetry. Coming from an indefatigable theoretician of aesthetics, the statement is a bit of literary criticism rather than a piece of academic witticism. It is meant to endow poetry with a special function in words, by which it would stand in particular contrast to what is written with ideas.
Prose no less than poetry employs words, but its eye is primarily on the substance to be conveyed and this substance is ideative and the conveying has to be expository — that is, clear and connected, with intellectual judgment ruling and shaping it even when it is eloquent, moving, image-coloured. Prose deals fundamentally with thoughts, and words to it are a means to an end, and the same thoughts can be expressed by it in many different combinations of words. When it discharges its office with skill and charm and power it attains the status of literature; but its basic character remains unchanged: it is written with ideas and its verbal form does best its job as a go-between. The thought-substance, which can assume various forms, is intended to stand out: the particular words employed fall into the background.
The words of poetry are not simply a means to an end: they are ends in themselves. Poetry begins when words carry as much importance as what they express, and the words of poetry in the main are not vehicles of ideas. At times they may appear ideative, but that is because the intellectual mind has been made a medium, not because this mind is their
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source. The source is something significant without being itself intellectual. Mallarme attempted to cut out the intellectual medium altogether. That is why he is often accused of obscurity and he went himself to the extent of making a cult of the obscure. With the puckish that was seldom away from the high-priestly in him, he once asked for the notes taken by a student during a lecture of his. "I want," he said, "to put a little obscurity into them." But we must not mix up the Mallarmean obscurity with heaviness, clumsiness or haziness of expression. He was obscure not from failure to endow with proper form what he had to say or from confusion of mind. He was so because the things he said were themselves not easily seizable and he desired them to come forth in their own right without intellectual elucidation or representation. Strange symbols quivering up from the subconscious or glimmering down from the superconscious, elusive dream-shades or swift vision-lights — these were the stuff with which his words got filled, these were the inner movements to which his language corresponded and with which it grew rhythmical.
The way Mallarme moulded language to mirror and echo unknown depths of man's consciousness or of the outer world rendered his words conspicuously void of the elements of the thinking intellect: his verse carried nuances in marked opposition to what is meant by "ideas". But all poetry, by springing from an ultra-intellectual source, need not be Mallarmean. Always to rule out a recognisable thought-content is to take too narrow a view and make poetry the pleasure of an esoteric coterie. A wide circle is no less legitimate than such a coterie for the poet's audience. Symbolism, whose dedicated mouthpiece was Mallarme, is itself inclusive of several modes of poetic utterance. Superb symbolist verse of the esoteric coterie is the opening of Mallarme's Le Cygne (The Swan):
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous dechirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
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Ce lac dur oublie que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!
This may be englished with a mixture of faithfulness and freedom:
Virginal, vivid, beautiful Today —
Will it tear with a stroke of drunken wing this lone
Hard lake where haunts mid hoar-frost's overlay
The transparent glacier of flights unflown?
Challenging mystery and revelatory violence are here: but can we deny that symbolism is splendidly active also in those lines of Yeats from Cool Park and Ballylee — lines which, unlike Mallarme's, have an intellectual atmosphere, an explicitness of reflection and meditation?
At sudden thunder of the mounting swan
I turned about and looked where branches break
The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.
Another emblem there! That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning's gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.
True poetic audacity and subtlety meet us here despite the undeniable mentalisation, the play of ideas. Symbolism at its highest spiritual level — supra-Mallarmean as well as supra-Yeatsian — can still employ the intellect as its channel: the speech of the intellect is transformed but not effaced and what we get is the sheer poetic revelation for all the philosophical manner adopted, as in the passage from Sri Aurobindo's free-verse Ascent, where too the swan-symbol
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occurs. This symbol comes as a crowning disclosure after the "spirit immortal" has been asked to soar beyond "the turning Wheel", the world of "the grey and the little", and then called upon to outgrow even the Alone and the Absolute and penetrate the Supreme which embraces both Time and Timelessness:
Single and free yet innumerably living,
All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,
Act in the world with thy being beyond it...
Outclimbing the summits of Nature,
Transcending and uplifting the soul of the finite,
Rise with the world in thy bosom,
O Word gathered into the heart of the Ineffable.
One with the Eternal, live in his infinity,
Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal.
Yes, the thinking mind is not in itself an enemy of the poetic. As Sri Aurobindo tells us, we, while rising above Nature, must not reject Nature, since there is the Divine's intention of self-unfoldment in it, and surely Nature includes the thinking part of man. From its poise beyond, our art also must lay hands on the natural world and lay bare its true meaning as a progressive manifestation of the Spirit. The thinker in us has thus a role to play in art too: he must act more and more as a mind of light, something that does hot try to seize and shape in its own terms the inner inspired illumination but lets that insight seize and shape it into crystalline concepts.
Poetry cannot be allowed to become altogether a narrow intensity: at the same time that it is intense it must be immense. Without a comprehensiveness it cannot be great in the ultimate measure. But we have yet to hold on to the essence of Mallarme's declaration to Degas.
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And in the first place this essence, as we have already suggested, is: words in poetry assert themselves, words in prose are merely instrumental. Of course, the instrument has to be fine and forceful if it means to be art, but it does no more than clear the way for what is to be communicated. Once this work is done, it fades out of the reader's sight. Quite the reverse happens in poetry: there the form is not subdued to the content. Art in prose is exercised towards a felicitous forgetfulness of form: it is exercised in poetry towards a rapturous remembrance of it.
This distinction does not imply that poetry decks out its language and hangs it with all sorts of ornaments for the sake of ornamentation or that it is "beautified" with a flourish of flowery words. Poetry can be very bare, sparing of epithet and simile, having apparently the gait of a prose of the most functional order, but there is always an intense harmony hidden within it, fusing form and content to an inevitable perfection. Unlike in prose, it has just one form for its content and no other, and every part of it is equally necessary, equally final, by a close-linked inter-activity.
Bare and direct poetry brings us to what in the second place is the poetic essence. Again, as already pointed out, ideas are not the matter of which poetry is built. Even verse that is simple and straightforward in style and looks like an expression of ideas with little of imaginative colour is yet communicative on a far more deeply significant level than prose. And this level is effective in the very effectivity of the words themselves, it lives in the very artistry of the vibrant form.
To realise this, we may pick out some miniature masterpieces of bareness and directness: Milton's
Shakespeare's
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
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Wordsworth's
F. T. Prince's
What no one yet has understood,
That some great love is over what we do,
A. E. Housman's
The troubles of our proud and angry dust,
Sri Aurobindo's
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Everywhere the words are irreplaceable and combine into a pattern whose each point has a life of its own, which yet unites utterly with a life of the whole. And through that double life a deeper vision than the ideative shines from the look of a simple and straightforward idea. The inspired technique of Shakespeare's line has been well recognised, particularly for its central intensity — four massed stresses ("this harsh world draw"), three of them on long or lengthened vowels, the clotted consonants in all the weighted monosyllables creating a difficulty in respiration, almost a pain in the chest, at the very articulation of the phrase. But a special complex of harmony in the word-body pervades all the lines.
Consider the art of Wordsworth's declaration. We have the pressure of the voice at the very commencement, with the falling rhythm of the first foot's trochee as if from a primal and original height Love went down into the world of manifestation. Next is the firm halting of the voice at "found" after a gap of two slacks syllables as if the poetic seer had discovered the leap of Love across everything to make its
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multiple landing at chosen places of the earth. Now follows the picking up of the aspirated h of the unstressed "had" and "he" by the same sound in the strongly accented but short-vowelled "huts" as if the revelation from on high was definitely caught there in however narrow-seeming a compass and as if the human seeker became there the fulfilled recipient of the revelation. Then there are the three consecutive stresses at the end. They not only hammer into our minds the presence of the "poor men" but also fix in our hearts their humble yet happily side-by-side living. Further, by means of the word "lie", they drive home into our inmost intuitive self the sense that the "Love" with which the poet's insight opened is secretly confirmed here through the closing alliteration, through the echoing I which affines the down-to-the-ground significance of the weighted "lie" to the pure ether, as it were, of the ideal-suggestive wonder-loaded "Love".
An art equally admirable is in Sri Aurobindo's verse — with almost the same inspiration of the technique basically at work, binding the beginning to the end by the alliterative emphasised b and deftly weaving "Bear" and "bliss" into oneness with the middle portion by the s and l and r held together in it. There is even the "find" in the iamb which makes the second foot, to match the "found" in the same metrical place and with the same role in Wordsworth. Only, the whole inner movement is not from the ideal to the actual but the reverse: the human condition starts the line and the divine destiny terminates it. The "plane" is certainly a more fundamentally meaningful one, though the poetic quality as such of the Wordsworth line is no whit less. Now a vast world-cry rings out from profundities of pathos to peaks of beatitude. And both the former and the latter emerge in the ultimate light more momentously if we add the line which immediately follows our quotation and at the same time cull a verse from elsewhere in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri to go before the pair. Then the end of the first line would be the beginning of the second and that of the second would
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commence the third, enriching with a system of word-responses the psychological message and the metaphysical overtone:
To know is best, however hard to bear...
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives.
Each member of the trio illustrates eminently the economical "unbeautified" style that can yet constitute great poetry — the form and the content so fused in a connotative music as to transcend any possible words of prose passing on to us a burden of valuable thoughts.
The words of prose, even at their best, are transmissive: they draw attention less to themselves, whether singly or in an ensemble, than to that which communicates across them. But, if the words of poetry perform a different function, let us not commit the mistake of imagining that they do it by subduing to themselves what makes a communication across their independent existence. That would give rise to sheer verbosity, an excess of sound over sense. The true performance of the poetic word is just to be inseparable from its substance. If you alter the word, the substance ceases to be the same. What a world of difference if Wordsworth came rewritten:
Love had he found in huts where poor men sleep —
or Sri Aurobindo were converted into:
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to joy.
Even to substitute "rest" for "lie", and "path" or "way" for "road", would mean utter loss. The word of poetry is not transmissive, it is — if we may coin an epithet — incarnative.
There, too, however, we must discriminate. Poetic in-carnativeness is itself of three varieties. The first takes place
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when language rises from its most primitive stage to a more conscious grade. A man's chuckling, whining, shouting or else imitating Nature's noises to express himself: that is language at its most primitive — a voice of raw feeling or crude sensation. At a slightly higher level we have some stir of thought, but it is tied down to the arranging of sensations and feelings, and the language is still rather awkward and incomplete — helped out by gesture and look. It is not yet a skilful and self-supporting medium. But we have a foreshadowing of the poetic level, for significant onomatopoeia is frequent. And, out of the tremors and quivers of sensation and the thrilled answers of emotion, words can now be vividly born for thought to arrange them. Sri Aurobindo has cited the Sanskrit word vrika, signifying "tearer", for the wolf, as an excellent example of subtly significant speech put by sensation and emotion at the disposal of thought. The English word "wolf" is also of the same kind, though here what is conveyed is a blend of frightening noise and ravenous swallowing. Raised to a degree of greater psychological refinement, language at this level can yield on a collective scale whole lines that make use of such words or their more cunning analogues to constitute a complete unit of expressive poetry. We have Tennyson's
The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm
as an exquisite music snatched from the natural world. Nature and a touch of some mystery behind it come together on a haunting sound-ripple in Seumas O'Sullivan's
And many rivers murmuring in the dark.
An evocation of a supernatural being is Sri Aurobindo's powerful picture — in a narrative written in 1899 — of one of the Serpent-guardians of the Underworld as Hinduism has imagined it:
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Magic Carcotaca all flecked with fire.
A more eleborate triumph in the same genre is the sense Sri Aurobindo creates in us of that Underworld itself, "Hopeless Patala" where
in vague sands
And indeterminable strange rocks and caverns
That into silent blackness huge recede,
Dwell the great serpent and his hosts, writhed forms,
Sinuous, abhorred, through many horrible leagues
Coiling in a half darkness. Shapes he saw,
And heard the hiss and knew the lambent light
Loathsome, but passed compelling his strong soul.
Such speech is surely incarnative, for substance and word have grown one; yet the incarnative function is limited. The poetic perfection is of the surface, whether the surface be of Nature or Supernature. The gross body, sthula sarira — to employ an Upanishadic description — of the poetic movement is made soul-active, the subtle body, suksma sarira, is still not called into play, much less the causal or archetypal body, karana &sarira, which is the inmost and highest truth to be manifested in the incarnative dynamism.
But before the subtle and the causal incarnativeness can come, there intervenes in the process of language what I have labelled as the transmissive use. Here the thinking mind disengages itself from emotion and sensation and Works in the interests of its own acute or rarefied or far-ranging powers. At first it is — to take again a term from Indian philosophical psychology — the witness Purusha, the watching Self, just saying "Yes" or "No" to the Nature-flux, Prakriti, of the speech of sensation and emotion, but by its support or lack of support it gives the flux on the whole a deliberate turn serving its own characteristic purposes. Afterwards there is a greater more detailed lordship, leading to a creativeness exercised from a free domain above and
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beyond sensation and emotion: the Purusha becomes the Ishwara, the Godlike Self, and orders his own representative language. But there is a certain aloofness from words, a being outside them — and somehow the finest potentialities of them are untapped. Words tend to be counters, any word can be made to mean anything provided all agree upon the usage. The closeness between sound and experience, between tone and consciousness, is diminished. Abstract language, though highly efficient in its freedom and analytic exactitude, is the result. But the intellect, in its Ishwara-poise, can also stretch its hand, as it were, to guide the word-flow instead of ruling that flow by its lordly eye. Then we get some warmth of pressure, some feel of nearness, and the thought-speech becomes prose as an art.
A few instances may be offered. The master of words handling them not quite from afar but by a dexterous contact is T. H. Huxley clarifying in one of his "lay sermons" a certain side of universal fact, a side most likely to impress a hard-headed scientist in his moments of enlightened analysis:
"The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance."
The word-master not only leaning near and manipulating his counters but also warming them with the contact of his own mind is the writer of this eloquent excerpt from The Education of Henry Adams (Chapter 28):
"Power is poison. Its effects on Presidents has always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds
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whose lives depend on snatching the carrion."
The wielder of mastery over words, gone further than warming them and grown successful by a hold on their potentialities to kindle them into disclosing secrets of our being with a measured yet moving light, is Robert Green Ingersoll who, atheist though he was by intellectual persuasion, could nonetheless articulate — as At the Bier of a Friend shows — an eternal aspiration of man's heart:
"We have our dream. The idea of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, beating with its countless waves against the sands and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any creed, nor of any book, nor of any religion. It was born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness, as long as love kisses the lips of death."
As a whole this is true to the dharma (innate law) of prose — it is thought set forth in sequences of progression, employing imagery to render itself clearer, but in places the non-ideative which the ideas are trying to shadow forth pierces through and the rhythmic imagination of poetry takes intermittent charge and at the end stands out boldly in a perfectly phrased and effectively modulated pentameter with a reversed third foot achieving appropriate emphasis and poignancy:
As long | as love | kisses | the lips | of death.
This pentameter may well exemplify in one kind what we have termed the subtle body of poetic incarnativeness, which can be achieved only after the transmissive mode of prose literature has been made sovereignly available in the poet's consciousness during the act of creation. Ideas and a strong controlled precision in transmitting them must grow natural to one before one can pass beyond them to a power of more than gross icarnativeness. Now capable of all thought, words again are no longer counters or even marionettes moved splendidly from outside, but living bodies: the substance gets
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identified with them. There is not the primitive identification but a superior one. To adopt Aurobindonian nomenclature, we have not the soul's blind absorption into Nature but the bright fusing of the inner with the outer, the golden descent of the higher into the lower, a transformation of Nature by the soul and Spirit. Once more we have "sensation" or "emotion", but it is filled with nuances beyond the crude touch, the raw appeal of things — or rather the touch or the appeal of things is not found just vibrantly surface-new by an inner seeing and hearing: the inner itself is seen and heard and the experience of it merged with the sensation-quality, the emotion-aspect, of language.
If we wish to exemplify at more length the incarnative-ness through the subtle body, we cannot do better than start with the sestet of a sonnet of Rupert Brooke's, which when detached from the much inferior octave can stand as an independent piece at once of Nature-evocation and of visionary symbolism:
There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day, and after,
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
A more explicit emblematic expression, the metaphor more directly taxed for psychological suggestion, we meet in a few words of Eliot's, which vivify an adventure of the soul, dangerous and arduous, through a glimpse of exotic geography opening up some strange inner world of pilgrim vision and priestly aspiration:
Across a whole Thibet of broken stones
That lie fang-up, a lifetime's march...
Perhaps a more helpful citation would be one that allows a
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thematic comparison in general with some of those we have listed for gross incarnativeness. Over against "Magic Car-cotaca" and "Hopeless Patala" from Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death we may put a few lines from his Savitri, holding again a vision of Supernature. A perverse paradoxical religion in the worlds of anti-divinity behind the veil is pictorially interpreted:
A dragon power of reptile energies
And strange epiphanies of grovelling Force
And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire
Drew adoration to a gleam of slime.
An inlet to a black void at the back of evolutionary Nature comes fraught with its suggestion of an abysmal Enigma:
Weird ran the road which, like fear hastening
Towards that of which it has most terror, passed
Phantasmal between pillared conscious rocks
Sombre and high, gates brooding, whose stone thoughts
Lost their huge sense beyond in giant night.
It is not easy always to discern where the subtle body ends and the causal or archetypal, which discloses concretely the very source of all magic and mystery, begins. From inevitable imaginative description to inevitable imaginative interpretation or suggestion goes the poetic word from the sthula sarira to the suksma: one may succeed in demarcating the two, though at times there is overlapping. But the borders between the interpretative or suggestive on the one side and the revelatory on the other are often shifting or fluctuant. In the last two quotations the causal appears to peep out through the subtle at one or two spots. Similar is the case of a pair of stanzas from John A. Chadwick. No difficulty in distinguishing them from a short poem by C. Day Lewis on a subject we have already illustrated with three passages: the Swan. Day Lewis achieves what a critic has
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designated as "a memorable and clearly realized experience through... one of the most conventional articles of the poet's repertory":
Behold the swan
Riding at her image, anchored there
Complacent, a water-lily upon
The ornamental water:
Queen of the mute October air
She broods in that unbroken
Reverie of reed and water.
This is the sthtula sarira in an elegant posture of sensation and emotion responsive with poetic inwardness to the surface of things. Unquestionably different from it in incarnative shape is Chadwick's
A mirror theme
Sri Aurobindo's comment on the stanzas runs: "Exceedingly beautiful, full of light and colour and suggestive image." Have we here the acme of the suksma sarira sheer and clear or is there a blend of the karana with it or does the pure karana confront us?
Beyond any misgiving, however, in spite of the descriptive and suggestive modes taken up into them, are nine verses that stood together in an old version of Savitri. We may assert the full feel of the causal poetic body when we receive through them the first light of dawn with an effect
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upon the most inward eye:
The impassive skies were neutral, waste and still.
Then a faint hesitating glimmer broke.
A slow miraculous gesture dimly came,
The insistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
That glowed along a fading moment's brink
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
What is it that divides this passage from Brooke's sestet? Broadly one may observe: "Something in the manner of the sight, the mode of the rhythm. In Brooke the sight draws natural phenomena more or less as they are — at least through most of the lines — into an inner significance. Except for the tinge of humanising nouns like 'laughter' and 'gesture', these phenomena remain themselves in the first two sentences but are so arranged as to conjure up an extraordinary sense: only in the third sentence is there a sudden quickening of sight into insight — and the inner significance, the extraordinary sense, deals directly with them. In Sri Aurobindo the insight is all the time working in the sight: every movement is inwardly meaningful while being outwardly descriptive. And there is a tone which is addressed to the Upanishadic 'Ear behind the ear': a vast sound-wave rises and falls with an impulsion that mingles the controlled resonance of connotative language with an unfathomable harmony of the Unknown. Such a harmony always accompanies poetic speech, but mostly it enwraps this speech like an aura: here it precipitates in the speech and pervades it."
Perhaps no comment could more elucidate the quality of these nine verses than the answer Sri Aurobindo himself gave to a critic's question apropos of the technique. The critic
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had asked: "Are there not too many double adjectives? Would it not be an improvement if some variety were introduced and a less obvious method followed?" Sri Aurobindo wrote back:
"If a slow wealth-burdened movement is the right thing, as it certainly is here in my judgment, the necessary means have to be used to bring it about — and the double adjective is admirably suited for the purpose. Do not forget that Savitri is spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure. Done on this rule,, it is really a new attempt and cannot be hampered by old ideas of technique except when they are assimilable. The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psychophysical concreteness. According to certain canons, epithets should be used sparingly, free use of them is rhetorical, an 'obvious' device, a crowding of ima?es is bad taste, there should be subtlety of art not displayed but severely concealed. .. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton wherever he chooses. Such lines as
In hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge —
(note two double adjectives in three lines in the last) — are not subtle or restrained or careful to conceal their elements of powerful technique, they show rather a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing language to its utmost power of expression. That has to be done still more in this kind of mystic
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poetry. I cannot bring out the spiritual objectivity if I have to be miserly about epithets, images, or deny myself the use of all available resources of sound-significance. The double epithets are indispensable here and in the exact order in which they are arranged by me. The rich burdened movement might be secured by other means, but a rich burdened movement of any kind is not my primary object, it is desirable only because it is needed to express the spirit of the action here; and the double epithets are wanted because they are the best, not only one way of securing it. The 'gesture' must be 'slow miraculous' — if it is merely miraculous or merely slow, that does not create a picture of the thing as it is, but of something quite abstract and ordinary or concrete and ordinary — it is the combination that renders the exact nature of the mystic movement, with the 'dimly came' completing it, so that 'gesture' is not here a metaphor but a thing actually done. Equally a 'pale light' or an 'enchanted light' may be very pretty, but it is only the combination that renders the luminosity which is that of the hand acting tentatively in the darkness. That darkness itself is described as a quietude which gives it a subjective spiritual character and brings out the thing symbolised, but the double epithet 'inert black' gives it the needed concreteness so that the quietude ceases to be something abstract and becomes something concrete, objective but still spiritually subjective. Every word must be the right word, with the right atmosphere, the right relation to all the other words, just as every sound in its place and the whole sound together must bring out the imponderable significance which is beyond verbal expression..."
An interesting point for comparison with the Brooke-sestet is provided by the occurrence of a few common words in the two quotations. Sri Aurobindo has spoken of his "gesture" being so supported by the rest of the line as to be no mere metaphor but a thing actually done. In Brooke we have "Frost, with a gesture..." It is vivid but still merely metaphorical. Similarly he has "lit by the rich skies" — a
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happy description of the many-coloured multi-lustred day in action, but it works a different charm altogether from the objective-subjective presence of void Nature and vague Supernature in
Finally, take the neo-romantic "wandering loveliness" generalising "the waves that dance". Although it felicitously widens out the meaning, there is nothing in it of the revelation prepared of the gold-panelled opalescent-hinged gate of dreams by
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light.
Sri Aurobindo has not just seen a divine power behind the dawn-moment: he has brought it right into the speech echoing the break of day and he has done it with an accurate word-scheme and a precise rhythm-design — the latter perhaps even more crucial than the former, for in it the very life-throb of the hidden reality is reproduced, setting up vibrations in our deepest aesthetic self and awakening in us an empathic response to the intuitive art.
It is the intuitiveness that constitutes the poetic karana Sarira — an artistic capture, by the poet's inmost core, of the inmost core of a thing and its manner of pulsation. But there are many levels of being, and poetry can start on any of them, according to the peculiar psychology of the poet. Every great poet need not live on the Aurobindonian level in order to be supreme in his art. What he needs to do is to act intuitively on his own level: this will render his words incarnative of the causal body. Sri Aurobindo himself has instanced dialogue after dialogue from Shakespeare for a sovereign operation of the intuitive mind, creating the ne plus ultra of poetry. And yet, according to Sri Aurobindo, Shakespeare is the poet of the plane of the life-force, the mind borne on a surge of sensation and emotion, throwing up
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ideas in plenty but not for their own sake, least of all for any sum of philosophical vision: they arise to enrich sensation and emotion with ideative correspondences. An outburst of royally intuitive poetry from Shakespeare that Sri Aurobindo has cited has not even any marked ideas carried on the crest of the sensational and emotional being, except in the introductory line — and still all is intensest incarnative language:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world...
Set these lines beside Eliot's on a lifetime's perilous and toilsome march and you will immediately perceive a difference in the degree of poetic inwardness, in the intensity of the imaginative word and of its power to bring out the imponderables by the sound-suggestion. Eliot achieves a poetically pointed statement with an original image, but it is an effect that is a little self-conscious, the "Thibet" which introduces the most telling associations has also slightly the colour of a striking contrivance. The sole phrase comparable to Shakespeare's lines is: "broken stones / That lie fang-up" — and there too it is the last three words that emerge from the very heart of the enthousiasmos. The terror and horror raised up by Shakespeare of the strange half-physical half-supraphysical states and places have a fascinating and compelling intimacy of vision and voice which Eliot as a whole falls short of. Throughout the nine verses Shakespeare has a revelatory music of the plane on which he functions. Eliot's two lines do not hold in each part of them the intensest possible on his own plane.
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We may, however, be asked: "You have said that before both the subtle and the causal incarnativeness are won, the transmissive use of the language must be a background portion of the poetic moment. This implies that 'thought' is present in Claudio's speech on death even if the elements that overwhelmingly impress us are 'sensation' and 'emotion' experienced through an inner seeing and hearing of both the outer and the inner. How would you make out as more 'thoughted' — implicitly if not explicitly — the line
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice
than Tennyson's
The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm?
As for Seumas O'SuIlivan's
And many rivers murmuring in the dark,
it seems surely a more ideative effect for all its sensation-content than anything in Claudio's speech, even a most intense phrase like
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds?
Our reply must read: "There is more complexity in the Shakespearean sensation. And not the least of it comes from the greater presence of emotion than in the two other lines. Emotion always involves a certain attitude and it is because emotion has a more direct play in the Seumas O'Sullivan that you find a clearer ideative effect there than in the Tennyson and pick it out for a 'clincher' against the supposed presence of 'thought' in that intense phrase in the Shakespearean passage. The line from Claudio pitted against the Tennyson has a strong subjective tone: the nerves of mental sensation — to quote a phrase of Sri Aurobindo's — receive an impact through it; one feels in the mind's 'entrails', as it were, the thing described, whereas the ouzel causes no such emotion-
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quiver, it conveys just a happy superficial caress on the emotional being. O'Sullivan is not so much of the surface: a felicitous pricking of it occurs and a concept faintly looms out; but where in it is the keen penetration that gives us in
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
the feeling of the soul caught and confined within an invisible airy nothing that is yet a tyranny and a torture — the feeling which carries with it a living idea of being a helpless and anguished exile for all eternity from human pleasure, human volition? A shuddering heart-deep pessimism, which can either burn to the bone or freeze to the marrow, keeps thinking through sensation and emotion in the entirety of Claudio's excited confrontation of death: this excited confrontation is also a spontaneous contemplation. No doubt, the contemplation is not philosophical, it is the vital mind and not the intellectual at poetic activity here. Shakespeare contemplating is different from Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley or even the mature Keats: still a beat of thought, along with a beat of sensation and emotion, is communicated through the quick core-piercing phraseology and the profoundly ringing rhythm, which makes Shakespeare's body of poetry a 'causal' complex rather than a 'gross' compound or even a 'subtle' congeries."
But this thought does not disengage itself from the sensation-emotion and the latter is one with the energy and pattern of the words. Possibly, Shakespeare in such passages is the example par excellence of the words which Mallarme spoke of to Degas as constituting what ideas are incapable of producing: poetry. And Shakespeare in general too strikes us most by his largesse of words, his imperial way with words. Not only is his vocabulary the most varied among poets — nearly 23,000 different words — but also he has an inexhaustible eagerness for words, a constant adventurousness with them, a godlike delight and superabundant creativeness of idea-exceeding yet significance-seizing sound.
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A GREAT PIONEER OF YOGIC POETRY:
AN APPRAISEMENT OF AE'S INSPIRATION
It was in starlight that I heard of AE's death. I do not know if he died also under the stars, but there could have been no better time to hear of his passing. For often he must have shut his eyes in tranced forgetfulness of earth at this deep and passionless hour: he was one of those to whom meditation and self-communion was the truest life, and he has told us how those little gemlike songs of his early days came to him pure and perfect out of the profound hush into which he had plunged his mind. I remember my own joy on first realising what his poetry disclosed — a cool unpretentious flowering grace, yet laden with a glimmer of mystery rooted beyond our earth's transiences. Tiny they were, his poems, but I felt that their smallness was an illusion produced by the great distance of soul-height from which their inspiration glowed upon us: they were small like the stars — immense worlds that were pin-points because of the farness of their flame.
AE's work is remarkable for the unique spiritual experience by which it is kindled: an experience of many colourful changes resolved by a certain underlying movement of mystical aspiration into a single-shining mood. The colour and change were not valuable to him for their own sake; they derived their intensity, their appeal, from something hidden and invisible, an essence of eternal beauty secretly one behind all its magic myriadness. And the presence of this sacred simplicity AE suggested not only by his words but also by a simple spontaneousness of metre; his rhythms, bare and whisper-like, seem to spring from a chaste unaltering calm. That is at once his merit and his defect. Defect because his technique is prone to be monotonous and his creation to lack vigour and wideness; if he had commanded a more flexible and conscious artistry he could have embodied with a finer verisimilitude many realisations which are now lost by
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his poems in a sort of enchanted emptiness. Still, at his best the sense of a primal peace, a white tranquillity dreaming vaguely behind the veil of multi-hued vision and emotion gives his work a Spirit-touch found nowhere else. Blake may have a deep suggestiveness born of the simplest phrases but he has the clairvoyance of a wise child, not the remote, the ultimate, the transcendental gleam. Though Wordsworth catches a vastness as of the Spirit, the philosopher in him often preponderates over the mystic. Even Shelley's wizard tunes float in an ether different from AE's. The world of AE is not the rarefied mental with its abstractions and idealities come to life under the stress of a lyrical feeling, but an occult atmosphere of mind out of reach for the normal poet and open only to those who follow a discipline of concentration, a yoga of insight such as the Orient has always prescribed. To a sensitive Celt like AE, in whom the old Druid race with its reveries was still alive, the practice of yogic concentration was bound to be fruitful. No doubt, he also lives in iridescence and not in the full Spirit-sun; but the shimmering haze of Shelley differs from his diffuse illumination in that Shelley sees hazily from an aching distance while AE sees diffusely from very near. And it is the satisfied nearness which imparts to his verse the Spirit-appeal peculiar to it. There is a more intimate, more effulgent poetry possible, but this is the first expression in English literature of a close relationship with some sovereign Splendour through a poetic yoga transfiguring both thought and image.
Almost the whole mood of AE's mystical desire is summed up in his Alter Ego:
All the morn a spirit gay
Breathes within my heart a rhyme,
'Tis but hide and seek we play
In and out the courts of time.
Fairy lover, when my feet
Through the tangled woodlands go,
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'Tis thy sunny fingers fleet
Fleck the fire dews to and fro.
In the moonlight grows a smile
Mid its rays of dusty pearl —
'Tis but hide and seek the while
As some frolic boy and girl.
When I fade into the deep
Some mysterious radiance showers
From the jewel-heart of sleep
Through the veil of darkened hours.
Where the ring of twilight gleams
Round the sanctuary wrought,
Whispers haunt me — in my dreams
We are one yet know it not.
Some for beauty follow long
Flying traces; some there be
Seek thee only for a song:
I to lose myself in thee.
Four psychological motifs are to be observed in these lines. AE seeks the Divine with love's happy instinctive heart; then, he wanders in search of this Divine through a various world of occult brilliances, either suffusing earth-vistas or in their native cosmorama opening to the sealed eyes of trance; but the master-passion is not a wanderlust of the mere occult, it is an amor dei athirst for an all-absorbing contact. Not for any gift of vision or inspired voice does AE follow the Great Magician — he yearns for the Magician's being of beauty rather than for his many-coloured miracles. The divine display too is a valued experience; yet it is not the goal of desire. As a poet, AE cherishes the wealth of inspiration scattered from the Unknown, but his soul goes inward with hands that hunger to clasp the Supreme and not to beg
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of Him a boon of music or magnificence. For, the mainspring of the whole psychic process is an intuition that the lover is craving to gain consciously what he already holds somewhere in the buried places of the subliminal. As the penultimate stanza hints, he is at heart one with the Divine; only, he does not remember with an entire certainty this ecstatic fact. An obscure feeling is all that he has; but the feeling is pregnant with fate, and its sleeping seed determines the blossom which shall crown his life.
There is, without question, an earth-self in AE which takes interest in the passing phenomena of time; it is drawn by human faces, but in them also he is ever visionary enough to trace the hidden Beauty. Along the rays shot here in the mutable world he travels home to the centre of light in the inner heaven. Sometimes the inner meanings call so imperiously across the outer symbol and suggestion that he has no sooner loved than lost the mortal and the tangible. In that plunge into the deep, the human starting-point looks well-nigh an illusion:
What is the love of shadowy lips
That know not what they seek or press,
From whom the lure for ever slips
And fails their phantom tenderness?
The mystery and light of eyes
That near to mine grow dim and cold,
They move afar in ancient skies
Mid flame and mystic darkness rolled.
O beauty, as thy heart o'erflows
In tender yielding unto me,
A vast desire awakes and grows
Unto forgetfulness of thee.
At other moments, there is a balance between the known and the unknown: the truth is seen without the appearance
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being destroyed — the phenomenon assumes a secondary place but is not robbed of its warmth and its right of response:
I did not deem it half so sweet
To feel thy gentle hand,
As in a dream thy soul to greet
Across wide leagues of land.
Untouched more near to draw to you
Where, amid radiant skies,
Glimmered thy plume of iris hue,
My Bird of Paradise.
Let me dream only with my heart,
Love first and after see;
Know thy diviner counterpart
Before I kneel to thee.
So in thy motions all expressed
Thy angel I may view:
I shall not on thy beauty rest,
But beauty's self in you.
There is also another phase of AE in answer to earthly contacts. It is an idealistic acceptance of the clay's caress; the human is given a reality, a justification to exist in its own nature just because that nature is regarded as an echo of some divine drama enacted on the higher planes. Beauty's self is here visioned as projecting its own glories below rather than absorbing those of the earth and drawing the poet's consciousness beyond:
We liken love to this and that; our thought
The echo of a deeper being seems;
We kiss because God once for beauty sought
Within a world of dreams.
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We must not, however, commit the mistake that the echoes of a deeper being are the flesh and bone of one brief life; these are the outmost vibration, so to speak, of the "mirrored majesties". The true correspondence is between some heavenly game of archetypes in the Eternal and the play of soul with soul down the ages. A believer in reincarnation, AE makes poetic use of the meeting again and again of souls in sympathy with one another; and the earthly love he praises at times is the flame leaping to flame across clouds that change with each rebirth. Perhaps the most attractive turn taken by this inner romance is in Babylon:
The blue dusk ran between the streets: my love was
winged within my mind,
It left today and yesterday and thrice a thousand years
behind.
Today was past and dead for me, for from today my feet
had run
Through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of
ancient Babylon.
On temple top and palace roof the burnished gold flung
back the rays
Of a red sunset that was dead and lost beyond a million
days.
The tower of heaven turns darker blue, a starry sparkle
now begins;
The mystery and magnificence, the myriad beauty and
the sins
Come back to me. I walk beneath the shadowy multitude
of towers;
Within the gloom the fountain jets its pallid mist in lily
flowers;
The waters lull me and the scent of many gardens, and I
hear
Familiar voices and the voice I love is whispering in my
ear.
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Oh real as in dream all this; and then a hand on mine is
laid;
The wave of phantom time withdraws; and the young
Babylonian maid,
One drop of beauty left behind from all the flowing of that
tide,
Is looking with the self-same eyes, and here in Ireland by
my side.
Oh light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings,
While we are in the calm and proud procession of eternal
things.
In this poem we are struck with a richness and a variety of movement which are not so frequent in AE of the earlier years but which develop as he grows older. His art undergoes a change owing to a more alert mastery, though the seeds of that development were already there in his young days, as proved by pieces like that veritable quintessence of Vaishnava insight, the poem entitled Krishna. Artistically, Krishna and Babylon are the most opulent things he has done, opulent in the sense of not only jewelled phraseology but also rhythm-modulation, the technique of pause, stress and changing tone. The poet and the artist are fused: AE's inspiration had tended to be lyrical cries subdued in their rhythm, theirs was an intensity of feeling but not of art, an intuitive appeal was in them which almost made us forget that it came on word-wings, the language was like a breath of air laden with perfume and we got dreamy with the strange scent of the spirit and did not notice the medium by which it was conveyed. Surely such a transparent inspiration is precious; but it gives by constant recurrence an impression of tenuity no less than monotony, and the greatest poets have, besides the direct touch of intuition, a life and strength of language, a palpable motion of that word-body as well as the soul's sign from afar. This means that not merely the subtle mind or the inner vision but at the same time the energy of the full waking consciousness is employed to catch inspi-
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ration. What is thus created acquires a certain impetuous diversity; and in AE the new movement comes when he begins to write with a more open-eyed intelligence. Formerly he used to draw upon trance-depths, now he listens with the same inward ear but without dissolving into trance. He does not shut his eyes, as it were, but watches the turn and thrill of his poetry, so that it grows clearer and stronger under his gaze, modulating itself sufficiently in order to satisfy the observing artist-conscience.
We can gauge the new alertness from the fact that he actually turned to blank verse where the grip on the medium must be most steady. Even a poet like Milton who was born with a blank-verse genius had to revise and polish in daytime what Urania had whispered to him in the still hours. With Shakespeare the art was immediate but because he was the most wide-awake, the most out-gazing and conscious of all poets, his nerves ever on the qui vive to respond to sense-stimuli. Yeats's blank verse can float in a half-light and seem a sudden birth from secret worlds — and yet is in fact the most deliberate perhaps of all recent poetry; for Yeats writes with an unsleeping vigilance over words — to such a degree that, occultist though he is, he does not incline to accept AE's description of how his own songs were snatches heard verbatim from the recessess of his meditative mind. Of course., poetry composed with deliberate care is as much really heard from within; only, it is heard after effort of the consciousness to tune-in to the soul-ethers and it is received sound by sound instead of in a running strain. Blank verse especially is accompanied by a wakefully inspired intelligence, though its composition may be slow or rapid according to the poet's power to grasp the suggestion out of the subliminal. And AE's resort to this form of self-utterance shows the awakening word-artist in him and from that coming to grips with the language are evolved a force and a versatility absent before. Indeed many of his efforts are not wholly successful and the majority of his work lies among the simple voices with which he began; nevertheless, the innovation is worth weighing
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because of a few astonishing triumphs.
Being contemporaneous with Lascelles Abercrombie and Gordon Bottomley, the two poets who have influenced modern blank verse most, he models his with rather a free and quick hand, pushing nervously the idea-vision into the language when he might achieve a better result by teaching the language to respond organically to the creative glow. There is, in consequence, an unassimilated look about many of his lines even if they are metrically normal and not inlaid with truncated feet, trochees, anapaests, tribracha and cretics. Poems like The Dark Lady are full of a metricised prose, rich and puissant though that may be; but the new will-to-power, when put in tune with older types of blank verse, brings forth fine rhythmic swings and expressive strokes. AE's most ambitious work in this line is The House of the Titans, wherein he sets to potent use a Celtic myth for embodying his conception of the worlds of light and darkness born from the Absolute, the descent of the Soul with its heavenly godheads and powers into earth-consciousness, their slow oblivion of the heights whence they derived but ultimately their recalling that high home and their destiny to transform chaos into a divine image. Despite unfinished versification in several places and even limping lines like
She heard first the voice of the high king,
or,
If thou
Hast from pity come to help us, fly —
and despite drops again and again into a half-kindled style, The House of the Titans is a notable performance. There is a reflection of Keats, naturally enough since the theme is affined to that of Hyperion where also grand music is made from the falling of Titana. Especially the start, after the first five lines, is reminiscent of Keats's picture of Saturn stone-
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still in the lightless woods with Thea by his side. Keatsian too are the lines:
Her weeping roused at length the stony king,
Whose face from its own shadow lifted up
Was like the white uprising of the moon.
Quite original, however, are the manner and the movement in the vehement unwillingness of Armid, the fallen king's companion, to let the memory of heaven die in order to cut short the nameless grief in her heart:
"Let it not die," cried Armid flinging up
In fountainous motion her white hands and arms
That wavered, then went downward, casting out
Denial.
And boldly individual like that famous Homeric comparison of the elders on the walls of Troy to thin-legged squeaky grass-hoppers is the image:
And as a spider by the finest thread
Hangs from the rafters, so the sky-born hung
By but the frailest thread of memory from The habitations of eternity.
But the choicest passage in this poem packed with AE's peculiar Celtic clairvoyances is the speech of Dana the Goddess of beauty, the mysterious all-mother:
I am the tender voice calling away,
Whispering between the beatings of the heart,
And inaccessible in dewy eyes
I dwell, and all unkissed on lovely lips,
Lingering between white breasts inviolate,
And fleeting ever from the passionate touch,
I shine afar till men may not divine
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Whether it is the stars or the beloved
They follow with rapt spirit. And I weave
My spells at evening, folding with dim caress,
Aerial arms and twilight-dropping hair
The lonely wanderer by wood or shore,
Till, filled with some vast tenderness, he yields,
Feeling in dreams for the dear mother heart
He knew ere he forsook the starry way,
And clings there pillowed far above the smoke
And the dim murmur from the duns of men.
I can enchant the rocks and trees, and fill
The dumb brown lips of earth with mystery,
Make them reveal or hide the god; myself
Mother of all, but without hands to heal,
Too vast and vague, they know me not,
but yet I am the heartbreak over fallen things,
The sudden gentleness that stays the blow,
And I am in the kiss that foemen give
Pausing in battle, and in the tears that fall
Over the vanquished foe. And in the highest
Among the Danaan gods I am the last
Council of pity in their hearts when they
Mete justice from a thousand starry thrones.
My heart shall be in thine when thine forgives.
AE had nothing to learn in blank verse style when he burst into so exalted a cry; and it is very probable that had he lived he would have reached often this consummate eloquence. As it was, he could not keep the sustained mastery vouchsafed to him in this moment and though telling periods and unforgettable flashes of poetic vision are frequent he could not be said to have mobilised fully the fine energy and prophet-passion that was in him and that had not found deliverance in the intonations of his usual mood.
He will, therefore, take his place in the poetic pantheon as a pioneer of yogic art mainly for his ability to cast brief exquisite Spirit-spells. A fair amount of his work will go to
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Limbo owing to an ambiguous phantasy, a thinness of imaginative wash with no clear articulate thrill. Nevertheless, what remains is destined to mark the beginning of a novel epoch in verse, an effort to clothe sense and sound with strange radiances or shadowy raptures drawn from an inner mystical life lived constantly by the poet unlike the fitful dips made on rare occasions into the unknown by former bards. There will be, ultimately, a tremendous outburst of spiritual fire, poems that bear the full frenzy of that "multitudinous meditation" which is the Soul; but before the unearthly day breaks we shall have a constellation of singers whose voices float in a dim sky, the divine darkness heralding the divine dawn. Of such, AE is the leader, the evening star first plumbing the secret regions beyond the mere mind and the life-force. And among his achievements will rank, side by side with his early poems, the variations he played on that simple tone when the urge for diversity came to him. This urge took two channels — on the one side blank verse and on the other a freer handling than before of rhymed metres, a less repetitive form, a poignancy shaping itself with an innocent caprice and not falling into a rigidly regular pattern. Many failures are noticeable here, the inspiration is frequently lost in a too outward shifting of rhythm and word but essentially as excellent as the old uniform lilt or chant are the subtle changes rung on a simple movement and style as in The Outcast:
Sometimes when alone
At the dark close of day,
Men meet an outlawed majesty
And hurry away.
They come to the lighted house;
They talk to their dear;
They crucify the mystery
With words of good cheer.
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When love and life are over,
And flight's at an end,
On the outcast majesty
They lean as a friend.
The seeds of this modulated simplicity, like those of the variegated richness of other poems of AE's old age, were not absent in his period of youthful sowing, but they were less perceivable because the tendency then was towards transfiguring by sheer subtlety and depth of feeling a steady run of iambics or trochees, the modulations occurring chiefly with an anapaest touch now and again to obtain some particular effect. In The Unknown God, however, mere anapaests do not sway the metre: many deft unexpected modulations of two and three and, if we count the feminine endings, even four syllables combine in a suggestion of lovely star-flicker as well as of ecstatic heart-beat:
Far up the dim twilight fluttered
Moth-wings of vapour and flame:
The lights danced over the mountains,
Star after star they came.
The lights grew thicker unheeded,
For silent and still were we;
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty
Our eyes could never see.
It is not easy to reward such a gem with adequate praise — the intuition is so perfectly kindled and with the most economical elegance. Indeed AE is always a wizard when he faces poetically his favourite hour of dayfall: masterpiece on miniature masterpiece issues from his pen as one by one the planets flower into sight, and I believe that though men can no longer see the intense and far-visaged form that moved among them for a while, their hearts will be drunk to the end of time with the song-creative beauty of his soul.
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