Talking on poetry is best done if the talker is not only a critic but also a poet. It is with an eye to this double role that Amal Kiran (as Sri Aurobindo had renamed K. D. Sethna, giving the new designation's meaning as "The Clear Ray") was appointed lecturer in poetry soon after the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education had been founded.

The class he took twice a week was from the beginning an unusual one. He had told the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, who had appointed him, that he would follow no set method but teach according to his inspiration. The Mother at once said: "Then I shall be with you." And she must have been with him, for he taught for nearly two years without opening a single book in the classroom or consulting any notes. Practically no record remains of the work done in that period. But luckily the later talks, which too were mostly delivered without any helpful accessories, are available. They constitute two series. One is a specialised study: "Classical" and "Romantic" — An Approach through Sri Aurobindo. The other has a more general bearing. And it is the talks in this preliminary series that we are now presenting in book-form.

They were given to a group of students starting their University career. They appeared in print for the first time in the monthly review of culture published from the Ashram, Mother India, whose editor was himself the deliverer of the talks. They were prepared for publication from jottings and memory — with a few exceptions. In some places they were expanded a little to make the matter more complete. One talk has been partly redone because of the light thrown on the theme by a letter of Sri Aurobindo's which came to hand at a later time. The last talk of the series was never delivered, as the year ended before the day fixed for it. It was to be written out according to the plan originally in view.

In the talks that appeared in Mother India, not only were the actual turns of phrase used in the class recovered as far as possible; at the request of the students, even the digressions were sought to be preserved. The talks make, in this form, somewhat unconventional pieces, but the aim has been to retain, in addition to their touch of literature and serious thought, their touch of life and laughter.

Apropos of the latter touch it may be of interest to mention that Amal Kiran's class was the sole one in the educational Centre that kept "open house". He had asked the Mother to let him admit anyone who wanted to attend it. The rule of consulting her or, at a lesser level, the head of the Centre was to be bypassed. Complete freedom was given to the lecturer as if his class had been an autonomous unit. Visiting professors dropped in, students from other classes came whenever possible, adult Ashramites found chances to attend. Each lecture was practically self-contained. And there was an informality in all the proceedings. At one time there was even a threat by the authorities to put up a notice that Amal Kiran's students should not laugh so much since other classes were disturbed by being tempted to stop their own work and join the high jinks that seemed to be going on there.

Considering the demand by Amal Kiran's fellow-professors for the talks in book-form, we may be sure that the high jinks were quite instructive. Asked to state in brief the general drift of his teaching, the lecturer has provided us with the following note:

"The talks were meant to encourage an approach to poetry with a sensitive wide-ranging zest and a look at it as at a breathing and moving organism. Not that its technical minutiae are to be slurred over; great precision must be brought to them, but they must be dealt with as if the postures and gestures of rhythmic expression were vital elements of what a Wordsworth would call 'the growth of the poet's mind'. In all poetic creation there is the heart and there is the art. The latter reveals the self-discovering develop-ment of the former. To neglect either is to miss the true organicity of a poem. To study a poem rightly we must let a happy excitement of detailed scrutiny play at once over its core of significance and its outspread of suggestive sound. Finally, the adventure of measured speech that has sprung from the depths of the poet cannot be said to find its fulfilment in the reader unless it becomes for him a permanent mode of finer living."

It has been thought fitting to append to the present collection a number of talks on poetry given in a later period to a general audience or to a different set of students.

The publishers wish to thank the Government of India for generously bearing the cost of bringing out this book which, they hope, will serve poetry-lovers as both an educative compendium and a boon companion.

SERIES OF TALKS

THE HEART AND THE ART OF POETRY

TALK ONE

We are here to study the marvel that is poetry. But a Poetry Class involves duties as well as beauties, and I wish to get over the most prosaic of all duties before we launch into our delightful work. You know that the whole lot of you are supposed to grace the benches of this room with regular attendance and I am expected to go through the horrible task of taking the roll-call. I want to avoid the horror. So let me express a hope. There is a famous riddle: in an accident what is better than presence of mind? The answer is: absence of body. Well, I sincerely hope you will not regard me in the light of an accident and deal with me by absence of body. Let presence of body be always there — and, of course, let it not be accompanied by absence of mind. For otherwise we cannot achieve what is the first fundamental of success in a Poetry Class.

In a Poetry Class the primary thing the professor should say to his students is that they and he should try to rhyme: in other words, be in tune and have harmonious responses. We cannot quite be the same in metre. Metre is a system of rhythmic units composed of stressed or unstressed syllables and called feet. There are various kinds of feet — the most frequently used being iambs, trochees, spondees, pyrrhics, anapaests, dactyls. I shall not deal with all their details just now. I shall merely say that a spondee has two syllables that are equally stressed and an anapaest has three syllables the first two of which have no stress and are termed slacks while the third bears a stress. I pick out these metrical units because they are relevant to my remark that we cannot be quite the same in metre. The metre of all of you may be said to be spondaic: your feet fall with equal stress on the ground. Mine do not on account of a limp in one of them. And I use a stick to help me walk better. So my metre is two slacks and one stress: I am an anapaestic fellow. Yes, we have to differ in metrical movement. But there is no reason why a predominantly spondaic line should

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not rhyme with a predominantly anapaestic. I may give an illustra-tion by adopting some phrases of Sri Aurobindo's poetry and adapting some others of it to make the sort of couplet we want:

You will see that the first line has three spondees out of five metrical units and the second has three anapaests out of the same number.

I may point out another feature that is both appropriate and desi-rable. I expect something more than a rhyme-harmony between us. Our association should be not only a harmony on the whole by end-rhymes but also a harmony by internal details. One line may be Amal and the other may be Class Arts English, First Year, but in the Amal line, while anapaests predominate, there should be at least a single spondee and in the line that is Class Arts English, First Year, the Amalian movement should not be quite absent. The couplet I have presented accomplishes the needful. In the first line there is an anapaest which stands for my being included in you:

and the second line has a spondee which stands for your being included in me:

This mutual inclusion would imply agreement by some kind of psychological interpenetration over and above agreement by a common purpose and general sympathy. Not from the surface, not from the outside, should we have reciprocal response: we should enter into one another's mind to enjoy and understand poetry together.

Poetry is not a matter of surfaces, of outsides; it is a matter of profundities, of insides, and the appreciation of it has to come by a response of the inner self, the inmost soul. I want to give you what I have felt most vividly of the poetic utterance, my stir to it in the recesses of my being and I want my words to get into your recesses so that you too may kindle up likewise. Then alone will poetry have been truly taught and truly learned.

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Perhaps you will say: "You are a poet yourself, but we are not. How can we respond in the way you wish?" But, while pleading guilty to the charge of being a poet, I say: "There is a poet in each of us, because each of us has in his composite personality a dreamer, an idealist, a beauty-lover, a seeker of concordances, and poetry is but these beings in us grown vocal, finding tongue. Now, there are two ways in which the vocalisation, the tongue-finding can take place. Either you burst into poetic speech or else you get so identified with the creative life-process of somebody else's poem that you feel as if the poem came out of your own soul. That is to say, when reading a poem, you experience as it were the actual writing of it. First, you draw away from common clamours and hold an attentive and receptive silence in yourself, for all poetry comes from beyond the ordinary noises of the world and of our own mind, from an in-world or an over-world whose native voice we can hear only when we turn to it with an intense hush. Not that poets always openly practise this hush by going into solitude or by shutting their ears to daily distractions. What hap-pens very often is just an automatic inward switching off even while the outer self is engaged in common occupations or else two lines run side by side, an inner line of receptive attention catching the in-world's or the over-world's vibration and an outer line directed towards day-to-day affairs. But, in whatever form, essen-tially there is what I have called an intense hush. You too have to repeat in yourself the calm which precedes all creation. But the calm is extremely sensitive — it is nothing dull and apathetic. It is all alert, it is emotion and imagination held in a profound poise, ready to light up. You have to thrill to the significant turn of the word-sound, you have to glow with the imagery in which the thoughts and feelings move. Then the poem repeats in you the act of its creation and what has happened to the writer happens to the reader. This is a wonderful experience and by it you can feel as if you were Shakespeare, you were Shelley, you were even Sri Aurobindo!"

Thus all of you can indirectly be poets. And who knows that even in the direct sense you may not poetically blossom forth if you intensely re-live the expression of other poets? At least it was the experience of Keats that he awoke to his own poetic possibili-ties by intensely re-living the work of Spenser. And most poets draw a quickening spark from great poems when their own crea-

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tive fire sinks a little. If I may indulge in a bit of symbol-reading I should declare that the description which this Class bears is a promise of a direct poetic flowering in many of you. This Class of Arts English, First Year, is called AE 1 — and all of you must be aware that the name of a great English spiritual poet was AE. Rather, it was his pen-name: George Russell, under the influence of Plotinus, Theosophy and his own visions, once signed an article with AEON. The printer somehow knocked out the last two letters. So the author was left with the first two. A lover of mystery, he gladly accepted this stroke of fate. Now, AE 1 may mean that there can be various grades of AE and you are the first grade, which may in turn mean either the lowest rung, the begin-ner's level, or the top of the scale of excellence. If the top can be signified by the English usage, "Oh, it is A1!", why should I not understand a similar shade of significance in the phrase, "Oh, you are AE 1!"?

Whatever the interpretation of that numeral, let us hold fast to the symbolic suggestion of the letters AE and let us remember that the AE in you, the direct or the indirect poet, is at once the most natural part of your being and the part most to be watched, most to be carefully kept alive. The poet is as old as history, he lies at the very roots of human life. Anthropology tells us that the mind of early man worked more in terms of poetry than in those of prose. Not that early man talked about everything in accomplished verses: surely he spoke prose about daily trivialities. But when he employed language not for mere utility, when he employed it for a satisfying self-expression and with an enjoyment in its use he spontaneously composed poetry. Present-day primitive races have a large fund of poetic utterance. Of course the utterance is itself primitive, but it shows how very naturally the poetic impulse comes to the mind and heart of man. Have you read the Australian blackfellow's hunt-cry? Listen:

The Kangaroo was very fast,

But I ran faster.

The Kangaroo was very fat;

I ate him.

Kangaroo!

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This will hardly strike you as the sort of poetry you would like to write. Nor would I specially recommend it. But we should not overlook its qualities. Take the opening two lines. Evidently they refer to the capture of the Kangaroo; yet they nowhere speak of it. What is spoken of is only the relative speeds of the animal and the man. Literally we may consider them indications of a race in which the man won. But the unspoken suggestion is of a race in which the life of the animal was at stake. Just by declaring that the man outstripped the animal the lines tell us of a successful hunt. Nor do we feel the competition to be all unequal. The Kangaroo by its exceptional speed set a challenge to the hunter and only by a rare burst of vital force did he get hold of it. We have the beginnings of an imaginative gusto here as well as of the intuitive manner of speech. The intuitive manner by its keen compactness and kindling contact of words needs to express no more than half of the matter: it is a manner that makes silence itself the most effective speech. Perhaps in the blackfellow's harping on the race there is also a touch of delicacy by the omission to speak of slaughter. The next two lines are much cruder, yet even here the slaughter is only by a gross implication and even here we have a tinge of elementary intuitiveness. Not only is the enjoyment of a substantial meal conveyed. Also a conquest of quantity by quality is suggested — the comparatively smaller man getting the bigger animal inside him. Then the last two lines which are a sheer outlet of joy are not merely a magnified belch of satisfaction. A triumph-cry is raised in which we have, besides a sense of emotional completion, a sense of imaginative self-enhancement as if the living reality not only of one Kangaroo but of the entire Kangaroo-species had passed into the man and added to him an extra power of being. Mark too the double exclamation, One appropriate to the conquering of the animal and the other to the consumption of it: an instinct of artistic logic is at play. And the repetition of the word communicates also the singer's love of significant sound, his relish of the music of a rich-ringing important appellative.

In crude quintessence we have, almost all the qualities of poetic creation. You will have noticed that I have dwelt considerably on the mode of utterance, the way things are put: in short, the form. Wherever there is poetry, be it primitive or highly progressed, the form is remarkable. The more highly progressed it is, the more remarkable the form. And it is the form that grips us or bespells us

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though we may not know it. I should like you to awake to the presence of the form in every poem you come across. You may have always been aware that poetry says wonderful things, but you must realise that the wonderfulness is bound up with the manner of saying: the words are such as draw attention to themselves either by their fineness or by their sensitive combination and the sounds are a direct power and both make a marked pattern exciting the eye and ear. When poets foregather, they rarely discuss the substance of their work: they are most interested in the "how" of the whole activity — the particular turn of the image, the special collocation of phrases, the chime or clash of rhythms. And it is because the poetic effect takes place by means of this turn, this collocation, this rhythmic play that after the initial uncritical happy surrender to a poem has been made for the sake of its general intuitive impact, the understanding appreciation of form is necessary if you are to be wholly intimate with the true nature of poetry.

Let me, however, hasten to say that by form I do not mean anything exclusively outward — the mere technique. It is always helpful for a poet to master the technical niceties of his job and the reader too will increase his pleasure in poetry by noting the inspired tricks of the poetic trade. But the fact that the tricks are inspired and not invented is never to be forgotten. Poetry takes the word-form it does, not only by externalising the substance, the theme, but also by externalising an internal manner, an internal form. The "how" of expression originates in the "how" of experience or, to be more accurate, in the "how" of vision and emotion. Not just the thing you inwardly see or inwardly thrill to, but the mode in which the imagination shapes, the manner in which the thrill modulates — these are the determinants of the word-form in which the substance, the theme, ultimately appears. There are a hundred ways of seeing and feeling, and the intuitive way is what creates poetry. An energy that shoots deep by a bright leap of vision and by a keen quiver of emotion is the poetic impulse and what renders a verbal image poetic is the particular shining slant with which the vision darted and the particular vibration with which the emotion was intense. You cannot make an image revelatory or a word-movement significant in sound without these inner phenomena. No matter how much you manipulate your technique from the outside, you will never achieve the inevitable eye-opener,

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the impeccable ear-enchanter in your poem. Of course, a poet by shuffling his words about in various experimental shapes can at times strike on the right gesture and gait of language, but what recognises a gesture and a gait to be right is an inner sensitiveness which knows at once that the true visionary and rhythmic mode of experience has been reflected and echoed in the expression. The hidden life-glow of a thing as glimpsed through a certain break in the consciousness, the secret life-throb of a thing as caught by a certain shake of the consciousness — there you have the origin of the authentic word-arrangement conjuring up a penetrating picture and a felicitous rhythm. The form which the mind and heart take inside is the maker of the technical design outside. When, therefore, I insist on study of form as vital to poetic appreciation I do not mean anything superficial. I mean the recognition of the inspired excitement within through the verbal form without. But I mean also that a close alert response to the verbal form without is the sole path to the fullness of this recognition.

If I were asked to illustrate in brief what poetry is I should quote a few lines from Thomas Nashe and comment on their verbal form. Most probably you are familiar with the lines:

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour:

Brightness falls from the air;

Queens have died young and fair;

Dust hath closed Helen's eye...

Here we have two levels of inspiration. The first two lines give us the poetic mot juste, the appropriate poetic word. The next three give us the mot inevitable of poetry, poetry's perfect archetypal word. The whole temper and pitch of utterance undergo a decisive change towards an absolute enchantment.

The opening line is a good but none-too-original metaphor — the seeing of all beauty as a short-lived blossom. The second shows the poet stirring to the challenge of the metaphor and entering into the vivid details of flowery transience. The word "wrinkles" gives point to the metaphor: it immediately connects with the human face ageing, but it applies also to the creasing and shrivelling to which a flower is subject when it is in decline. Already the imagi- nation has started being penetrative. And when we come to the

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word "devour" we have it at an intenser pitch. This word hits off most effectively the ravage of time, time the devourer of all things, be they ever so beautiful, but the effectiveness of expression is not the sole function of this word nor does it constitute the master-stroke here: it is the appropriateness of this word to the wrinkling that makes the poetic climax of the two lines: wrinkling involves the shrinkage of the flower, its process towards disappearance, and the shrinkage is as if the wrinkles were eating up the surface of the flower with their lines like clenching mouths, until the petals dry up into insignificant lifelessness. A common occurrence in Nature is passed through a new vision which conveys the very bite of mortality and gathers all human fate into a symbol small yet packed with profound pathos.

But the imagination is still working in bondage to common facts, though it turns that bondage uncommonly vivid and wide in mean-ing. In the third line the imagination leaps clear away into a revelation lit up by a magic at once ineffably mournful and rap-turous, mournful by the import of the imagery, rapturous by the words and the rhythm through which the imagery becomes in-tensely significant. Beyond the unavoidable tragedy of the beauti-ful growing aged and shrunken we move to the heart-shattering irony of beauty dropping from the height of its triumph, straight from its very resplendence. And the imagery, while being ex-quisitely precise, has what I may term a universal vagueness that makes it not only multi-suggestive but the symbol of an unap-peasable world-woe. What exactly is this "brightness" in the "air"? It may be a rose in all its tremulous uplifted glory. It may be a meteor swift and silvery on high. It may be the sun itself at the zenith of noon. Or it may be a human face aglow with both grace of feature and grace of fortune. We have a generality concrete with the living essence of the uncertainty of all earth-bliss. And the rhythm has an airy delicacy fused with a helpless falling move-ment. This extremely appropriate movement is due to the first two feet being a succession of trochees, the weak syllable coming after the strong in either foot —

The airy delicacy is due to the texture of the verse, the r at the beginning and the middle and the end, the sibilance at the end of

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the first foot and in the middle of the second, the f combined with l and m in the middle foot. Note also that while the right types of consonants echo one another no vowel-sound is repeated, even "falls" and "from" have different nuances of vowellation: thus the open sounds are a music without emphasis. All round, no more felicitously rhythmical pattern could be woven to support, strength-en and quicken the significance of the verse.

In the next line the poetic intuition, which has proceeded from the particular flower-vision and acquired a new meaning and grown universal, comes to focus again in a particular vision — that of "queens" — and there it gains clarity with the words "young and fair" associated with the act of dying. The line in itself is not extraordinary: it is almost as if from a child's book of stories, but, even apart from its simple charm, what saves it from being hackneyed in sentiment and even endows it with positive freshness is its organic connection with the preceding line and the succeeding, which have extraordinary magic and evocativeness. Those lines and this are one tissue. And a subtle relation it keeps with them, as well as with what goes still before, by picking up the f of "flower" and "falls", the k of "wrinkles" and the d of "devour" and anticipating with the d and the k the "dust" and the "closed" of the next line.

The particularity and clarity of vision at which we arrive in the "Queens"-phrase become rich and intense in the poignancy of the next verse where we have on the one side the dark concreteness of blind dust and on the other the luminous concreteness of the life-kindled eye not only in general but with a special directness and fullness because the eye is of the most perfect face in human history, the face of Helen. Mark how effectively from the brightest of all faces the brightest feature is selected, concentrating beauty and thereby concentrating too the dullness of death. This dullness is communicated by the massed dentals in the three opening words — "Dust hath closed" — just as the loveliness extinguished is hinted by the l-chime in "closed" and "Helen". The h in "hath" and "Helen" suggests a repeated sigh, while the occurrence of the s three times, with slight variations of sound, orders a delicate hush in our being to match the silencing of a rare life's happy throb by death. But do not forget that the exquisiteness of the hush would be totally ruined if we were to read "has" instead of "hath". Just the difference in one consonant and the line would be not a

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deeply moving masterpiece of many sound-suggestions but a hissing horror. See it for yourself by saying, "Dust has closed Helen's eye." So much depends on so small a touch of mere sound.

In passing, I may remark that in the last line "dust" throws our attention back not only to the third line's "brightness" but also to its "air" — the throw-back serving to emphasise the magnitude and the depth of the fall: the creature or object whose natural element is a high rarity, an ethereal continuity, descends suddenly to the lowest level of being and the most common, the most crumbled state. Again, the long o of "closed" strikes a note of profound finality and perpetuity, and the note is clinched, so to speak, by the packing of two consonants on either side: the doom of closure is all-pressing, all-blocking.

Lastly, I should like to point out a certain rounding-off in the imaginative process of the whole passage. Nashe started by identifying beauty with a flower: he concludes on a phrase that brings up a picture once more of that identification — Helen of legendary loveliness summed up in the most flower-like feature of her body, the small colourful softness that was her eye.

Before we leave Nashe we may reflect for a moment on a scholar's suggestion that originally the terminal word of the third line was not "air" but "hair". This is possible and perhaps makes for greater consistency: the wrinkle-devoured skin, the brightness-losing hair, the dust-closed eye — a poetic vision all of one piece and referring exclusively to the human face. But Emerson would be proved right in saying: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." If Nashe thought of achieving a marked unity by means of "hair", he was sacrificing the poet in him to the rational syste-matiser. The poetic pattern is not woven by the outer intelligence: it has a unity created by magic rather than logic, though the magic need not be quite defiant of analytic understanding. "Air", by its unfixed yet many-sided generality, brings in a world-cry: "hair" limits the imagination to one single phenomenon. It takes away the Virgilian "tears of things". Besides, there is actually no compulsion in the first line to conjure up just the skin of a face. The skin is certainly implied, but only by inclusion in a wider class, and what we have before us is the picture of a flower. The flower-metaphor holds a lovely generality within its particularity and what We may call the logic of magic is best satisfied by the wide prospect opened up by "air". From this prospect we come to "queens" as a

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fine discovery, whereas "hair" would render "queens" not so revelatory a fineness but something more rationally expected. In short, Nashe's passage would lose its perfection and what precedes as well as succeeds the third line would be somewhat dulled, apart from this line itself turning rather trite, though still pretty, instead of being the ever-bright beauty that it is in its present form.

Now I shall return to a point made earlier: the poet, though the most natural part of your being, is yet the part most to be watched, most to be carefully kept alive. Poetry as an art is older than prose because the emotional and the imaginative in man is older than the intellectual, and the moment the more deeply established part of us is stirred the impulse to poetry is there. But mere expression of emotion and imagination is not poetry: shudders and screams, fantasies and nightmares do not immediately make art. The aesthetic instinct and the intuitive sense have to work, at once intensifying and chastening emotion and imagination. Nor can we, who are not primitives, not Australian blackfellows, bypass the intellect: we have to be both finer and subtler with its aspirations and acutenesses, even while avoiding its dry breath of abstraction. Otherwise we shall let loose only a barbaric cleverness and perpetrate modernist poetry. I for one prefer the Kangaroo-cry to much of this kind of verse which is trivially violent and effectively queer. How necessary it is to be vigilant over the poetic impulse can be realised if we look at the outburst that comes naturally to many modernist poets. Let me offer you a specimen to carry home with you as a warning:

I can take my shirt and tear it

And so make a ripping razzly noise,

And the people will say,

"Look at him tear his shirt!"

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TALK TWO

It seems that last time my stick was lying across the table. God knows how it came to be there. But a teacher passing by, after the bell had rung, noticed it and said to me later, "Better not keep the stick there." I asked him whether it had looked too aggressively evident in that place, as if I had been about to violate the rule that has been set up for all the teachers. He nodded. Well, I have no intention to break the rule, even if the parents or guardians of all of you wrote to me as the parents of a certain boy once wrote to a teacher: "Please don't whack our son. He is very delicate and at home we never beat him except in self-defence."

Yes, my intentions are perfectly peaceful. We may therefore forget the physical stick. But the mention of it serves to remind me to put before you a piece of mental beating done by a famous American writer — a heavy beating of poets and poetry, a wholesale downright castigation. The writer's name is H. L. Mencken. His attack runs thus:

"On the precise nature of this beautiful balderdash you can get all the information you need by opening at random the nearest book of verse. The ideas you will find in it may be divided into two main divisions. The first consists of denials of objective facts; the second, of denials of subjective facts. Specimen of the first sort:

God's in His heaven —

All's right with the world.

Specimen of the second:

I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul.

It is my contention that all poetry (forgetting for the moment its possible merit as mere sound) may be resolved into either one or the other of these frightful imbecilities — that its essential charac-ter lies in the bold flouting of what every reflective adult knows to be the truth."¹

What have we to say against Mr. Mencken while admiring the

1. Selected Prejudices, p. 7.

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pungency of his style? The very first thing is: he misconceives poetry by believing that "mere sound" is added to "balderdash" to make the beauty of poetry. Not to know the vital importance of form is not to know what poetry is doing. And the ignorance of this vital importance comes because one fails to realise the inwardness of form. Form is not something added from outside to create "possible merit" by beautiful vibrations in the air. The beautiful vibrations result by virtue of an inner harmony seized by the poet, a special thrill of experience, a special movement of the being in the shape of inner vision and inner emotion: that thrill and movement translates itself, in a successful poem, into the sound-arrangement of words, the powerful yet measured music of verbal rhythm. If poetry says anything, the substance cannot be cut asunder from the way it is expressed. Of course, there is an intelligible statement by the poet, but the verbal rhythm carries and conveys what cannot be put into an intelligible statement and it is only when we take the intelligible statement in the very sound-body the poet has given it that we receive what he wants to give. The accessible meaning is a kind of clear centre around which there is a huge halo of splendour and of mystery with marvellous suggestions. It is because of this halo that we can say about poetry, adopting a phrase of Meredith's about the Spirit of Colour:

Its touch is infinite and lends

A yonder to all ends.

A paraphrase will give us what the intellect can make of the poetic significance — and this will often be sufficiently valuable; but if we accept it as the message of a poem or of a phrase of poetry we may slip into committing the second folly which we can charge to Mencken: the folly of believing that poetry should aim at giving an objective truth or a subjective truth such as every reflective adult can recognise.

Mind you, I am not saying that every objective or subjective truth is bypassed by poetry on purpose. I have mentioned Mencken's "reflective adult". This phrase stands for the average grown-up person whose thought, whose reflective activity is concerned with the obvious world of common sense. If we turn such a person into a supreme standard we shall overlook three-fourths of the valuable activity of the human consciousness. The reflective

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adult could never be a Plato considering the obvious world of common sense as no ultimate reality but the poor image of an eternal and ideal Beauty that one can grasp only by a slow graded progression of both love and logic in a sort of philosophical ecstasy. The reflective adult could never be the hero gladly throwing away his life for the sake of a Cause that is most sacred to his inmost heart though most intangible to the sober mind: a Bharat Mata, a Mother India — not the monthly review of culture whose editor I am but the ageless Goddess who is the Nation-Soul enkindling all our culture, the Mother India of whom I try to be not too unworthy a son. The reflective adult could never be a Buddha renouncing all the possessions and advantages of worldly life in order to gain a divine desirelessness that is a plenitude of peace, an illimitable freedom which to the ordinary man he could describe as only a universal Zero. The reflective adult could never be even an Einstein rejecting the evident world as the basis of the ultimate theory of physics and constructing by what he calls an intuitive act a four-dimensional continuum of fused time and space as the foundation for all practical calculation. The poet, or in general the artist, can never be the reflective adult: he would regard such a person as not the pure stuff of what humanity should be but something sullied: the adult of this kind would be to him adulterated stuff. The word "reflective" does not impress him: the adult is reflective only in the sense of mirroring what is in front of his nose, his mind reflects like a looking-glass the surface of existence and never penetrates beyond.

Poetry goes beyond the usual knowledge acquired by looking outward or inward. It plunges farther than the objective or subjective surface of being — without really rejecting this surface. It sees the surface as constituting symbols of a hidden reality and, at its intensest, it lays a hand however lightly on the body of that reality itself. In various ways it uses the surface of being, objective or subjective, as pointers, peep-holes, glimmerings of a secret Splendour or a magnificent Mystery. It is this activity of poetry that we call its magic. Sometimes the magic is not intense enough and then it can mislead us into thinking that the poet is trying to talk common sense but merely succeeding in talking nonsense.

The two quotations which Mencken has offered may strike us as by themselves not magical enough and therefore somewhat easily made a target of criticism. But the second specimen, even from the

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standpoint of common sense, is surely no imbecility. Do we not all feel that we have some freedom of choice in our actions and some power to rise above our circumstances? Did not Mencken feel that instead of coming down with a big stick on poetry he could have observed mentally the non-caning rule of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education — or that if an idea of his were severely criticised by a Poetry teacher of that Centre he could still keep a smile on his stolid face? Surely, in however small a field, we can achieve mastery over our fate and captaincy of our soul. Perhaps the poet has cast his perception into a very resonant form and this resonant form annoyed Mencken until he felt that he was only using his stick against the delicate poet in sheer self-defence, only withstanding the attack of a sweeping dogmatic generalisation. But I think he is not giving fair play here — and certainly not giving it in the case of the first quotation. At times a poetic phrase can be severed from its context and still remain effective; at other times it cannot. Poetry creates a mood of insight not always in a single phrase but often by a cumulative, a collective effect. And if we want to receive the real impact of those two lines,

God's in His heaven —

All's right with the world,

we should look at the whole piece of which they are the conclusion.

Perhaps you will remind me of Sri Aurobindo's characterisation of these lines as being couched in "a sprightly-forcible manner".¹You may tell me that this is a bit of condemnatory criticism and no excuse should be found for its object. But let, me draw your attention to the context of Sri Aurobindo's observation. He is speaking of the kind of poetry he calls "adequate" or "effective", and he points beyond it to a finer grade of poetic style. He regards even that grade — which can be exemplified from Chaucer, Milton, Shelley, Keats — as still not the ultimate. Sri Aurobindo is writing from a comparative vision. That is my first contention. The second is that when he further talks of Browning's "robust cheerfulness of temperament"² giving rise to the language of these lines,

1.The Future Poetry (1972 Edition), p. 26.

2.Ibid., p. 27.

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and adds that "an opposite temperament may well smile at it as vigorous optimistic fustian", he takes the two tripping lines in absolute isolation while evaluating their message and manner. It is quite legitimate for the purposes of critical illustration to do such a thing, and nobody can find fault with Sri Aurobindo's judgment here. But Heel sure that, in another frame of reference, he would pronounce differently. Besides, his phrase — "vigorous optimistic fustian" — is not his final sentence in persona propria upon the contents of the Browningian sprightly forcibleness. The phrase is what "an opposite temperament", going to its own extreme, would exaggeratedly condemn.

With this courteous bow of elucidative understanding in Sri Aurobindo's direction I may proceed to my own task.

The whole piece which concludes with our lines is from Browning's play Pippa Passes and is the song of a simple young girl going to her work. It is small enough for Mencken to have quoted in full:

The year's at the spring,

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn;

God's in His heaven—

All's right with the world!

This is not sublime poetry, not great poetry, but surely it has a delicacy of mood and movement that is faultless with a rare economy. Let us see briefly what it does. It has the sense of a time when the ordinary world is at its loveliest, its youngest, its freshest — the spring-season full of colour and fragrance, the break of day with the few first enchanting touches of light on the long darkness, the early hour of seven when we are sufficiently awake and yet not too glaringly exteriorised but keep a mixture of dream and common sense. Secondly, there is the brief selective vision of those features of the ordinary world which are either a thing at its most exquisite or a thing in its most right place. What can be more exquisite than a combination of pearly dewdrops with a purple hillside, or a lark lifting its wings and breaking free of the earth?

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And can the lark be more appropriately placed than in the sky, winging upwards its small body of song within a vast silence, or can the snail be more appropriately situated with its spiral protective shell and its two tiny searching horns than on the shrub or tree which is spikey and serves a snail with juts on which it can rest again and again and from which it can safely proceed to look for its flowery food? We have on the whole the suggestion of a perfect moment in a world which Browning knew very well to be in many respects an imperfect one. Yes, he was no blind fool — but he could see, as Mencken cannot, that certain combinations of phe-nomena can give a feeling as if for a while the imperfect world were disclosing a Divine Presence and becoming the glimpse of a supercosmos in which everything manifests a flawless Beauty. This visionary moment has been embodied by Browning in his little lyric with a sensitive choice of word-pictures and word-rhythms. When we take his poem from start to finish, we do feel that he is justified in saying that God's in His heaven and all's right with the world. The conclusion is the conclusion of a mood-formulation, it is not philosophy, not science, not common sense pronouncing an opinion for all time. It is the culmination of a shimmering insight and comes to the rightly responsive reader as something indisputable — not a frightful imbecility but a revelation on a miniature scale.

We have to know what poetry is trying to do and then be in a receptive state in order to appreciate it. The consideration of Browning's lyric as a whole proves Mencken to be mistaken in still another way. Every line, except the last two, states nothing but objective facts. Will Mencken deny that the year is recurrently at the spring, or that the sun rises again and again to make daylight, or that seven o'clock strikes every day? The poet does not always fly away from objective facts. But surely he does not stay locked up in them. As I remarked, he takes them as symbols — pointers, peep-holes, glimmerings of a greater concealed Reality — and he drives home, mightily or softly, to our souls his symbol-sense of that Reality and occasionally his touch on it. And the means by which he drives them home are a felicity of vivid phrase and a felicity of harmonious rhythm.

Even the other quotation which in itself may be felt as dogmati-cally resonant becomes a natural cry of triumph in its proper context. As far as I recollect, the piece in which the lines occur was

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written by William Ernest Henley in hospital after a serious acci-dent which fobbed him of one of his legs. It is entitled Invictus, which is the Latin for "Unconquered". Listen to all the stanzas:

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

We can see clearly that Henley is not declaring himself to be possessed of a power that can do anything and everything. He does not boast that he can alter the whole world's course or make his soul accomplish whatever it wants with events or people. He is simply putting on record in the midst of appalling misfortunes the courage within him. Whether any gods have infused this courage into his being or whether it is something that is his own he does not know, but if it is a gift he is grateful for it. All that he knows is that nothing can make him afraid or break down in spirit. External Nature may be cruel, the path of his life may be full of blows, the hidden Powers beyond life and Nature may have decreed difficulties and dooms for him: all these things still leave him with his own self under control. Neither painful life nor grim death, neither present troubles'nor future tribulations can take away from him his self-mastery, the resolve not to lament, the refusal to fear, the ability to command his own response to adverse circumstances.

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And the manifesto of his courage is worked out in a series of progressive affirmations. When we come to the end we feel the conclusion as a correct summing-up with no unnatural flamboyance or brag: it is a strong simple straightforward statement that has no false note or any ring of fatuity. The suspicion of a touch of arbitrary absoluteness in it disappears when we reach the closing lines through the imaginative and rhythmic logic of the brave beauty lifting its voice in the preceding four stanzas.

But perhaps the quarrel between Mencken and poetry is a matter of two different tempers, two different views of the function of speech. Whatever poetry might say would be taken in a different light by a man who did not see or feel poetically from inside him. He and the poet talk dissimilar languages, and the poet's purport, the spirit in which he has spoken are as if in a foreign tongue whose inner nuances and significant turns are missed by one who approaches it with half-knowledge as well as with another bent of mind than the speaker's. Do you know how a certain Armenian interpreted the famous Biblical phrase that reads in English: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"? This foreigner expressed his understanding of it thus: "The whiskey is good but the meat is rotten."

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TALK THREE

In the last two talks we touched on the poetic mood and the poetic process from various sides and gave them a high significance and value. Today I wish to quote a few lines from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, which sum up, as it were, the psychology and metaphysics of poetry. But before I do so I must notice a possible objection to the spiritual view we have taken of the poetic process. We may be told: "All fine poets do not offer us spiritual matter. They speak of all sorts of earthly things and some of them are even disbelievers. Lucretius, the great Roman poet, scoffed at religion, and said that the gods were created by human fear: he was a materialist and atheist by intellectual persuasion."

This is quite true but what it means is simply that a lot of poetry does not directly refer to any divine reality. It does not prove poetry to be non-spiritual in its origin as well as in its process. The spirituality lies fundamentally in the Form and not in the Sub-stance — or, rather, since we have defined Form as really an inward thing exteriorising itself, poetry is spiritual by the manner in which any substance is inwardly experienced and explored and then outwardly expressed in a rhythmic Form answering to the thrill of the experience and exploration. Poetry, whatever its subject, communicates a sense of perfect beauty by its absolute and unimpeachable expression. All that it says comes with the faultless face and gait of a godhead. How even materialism and atheism could come like this is well suggested by a phrase of Elizabeth Browning about Lucretius. She writes in a poem that he "denied divinely the Divine".

This intrinsic divineness should provide us with a safe passage everywhere in the world of poetry and also steady us against any wavering in our appreciation on account of themes not usually associated with the pleasant, the agreeable. Poetry is of an endless diversity and we shall lose much if we are too choosy. But, of course, first we must learn by sympathy something of the poet's aesthetic mode: without it we shall pervert the drift of his art. The poet has an acute universal aesthesis, he can discover the essence of beauty in what others may pass by as plain or even condemn as ugly. He is not guided by the conventional idea or feeling of the beautiful. He can take up for poetic expression anything that catches his mind. By a subtle transmutation he reveals in the most

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unpromising subject the significant form which is within or behind it and which, in however weird or bizarre or grotesque a fashion, comes through it under the intensity of the poetic process. The student of poetry should be ready to respond even to what Flecker calls a monstrous beauty

Like the hindquarters of an elephant.

Do not be shocked by this phrase. There is a paradoxical perfection of cumbersome ease in the movements of an elephant's posterior parts, and the poet would be unworthy of the name if he failed to thrill to it and make us light up in response by his word and rhythm. Mark, in passing, how expressive in technique the line is: two initial monosyllables followed by a trisyllable between which and another such word there are again two monosyllables, a symmetrical swaying of two equally long words with short equal intervals, a slow ponderous double movement interspersed with, and thrown into relief by, a pair of small gaps.

Now we may turn to Sri Aurobindo's lines. They occur in Book V, Canto 3, of Savitri, where he is describing the early life of Satyavan. In Canto 2 Satyavan is called

A wanderer communing with depth and marge.

This is itself a suggestive summary of the poet's mood.in its basic orientation. The poet moves among a diversity of things but every-where he gets into living touch with what seems to overpass the limits of life, he is in his mood always at the edge of things, communing with the beyond and experiencing profundities in all with which he establishes a contact of consciousness. Yes, this line is a good hint of the poetic process. But it is not what I specifically wish to put before you. The lines I want to quote are some others — six in all, not occurring immediately after one another, but presenting in the combination I have made of them a brief yet precise picture of what I have termed the psychology and metaphysics of poetry. Mind you, I am not saying that Sri Aurobindo is exclusively describing the poetic mood and process: I am adapting to my own purposes some phrases of his that can be taken to describe them because they occur in a context where the inward soul-development of Satyavan is described in relation to his ex-

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perience and exploration of Nature, a soul-development on a broad scale that does issue also in art-activity on Satyavan's part. Here are the lines:

As if to a deeper country of the soul

Transposing the vivid imagery of earth,

Through an inner seeing and sense a wakening came...

I caught for some eternal eye the sudden

Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool,...

And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity.

In the first three lines we have the indication of a new awareness which is not on the surface but in the depth of our being, the depth that is our soul. On a hasty reading, we may be inclined to think that the word "soul" is here used in a general way for our self and that several countries are ascribed to it, some shallow and some deep, and that the reference is not so much to the soul in a special connotation as to "a deeper country". Such an interpretation would be a mistake, The soul is not here a generalisation, it is acutely contrasted to "earth": the two phrases — "of the soul" and "of earth" — are balanced against each other: there are only two countries implied, the country of earth and the country of the soul, the former a surface territory, the latter a "deeper" domain. And by "earth" with its "vivid imagery" is meant the contents of our normal waking consciousness packed with thousands of observations, whereas the "soul" stands for a consciousness other than the life-force and mind operating in conjunction with a material body and brain. This consciousness is ordinarily like a dream-region, but the poet undergoes there a novel "wakening" by which he reinterprets in a different and deeper light the earth-experience. Nor is that all. His reinterpretation involves the experience of new things in the soul's depths, things which are as if earthly objects "transposed" into them but which in reality exist in their own right, native to those depths and constituting the originals whose copies or representatives are earthly objects. The quality of the experience of these originals is to be gauged from the use of the word "sotd". Poetry is primarily a speech of the soul - not the mind's exclamation, not the cry of the life-force, not the lifting of the body's voice. All of them are audible too, but in tune with a central' note that is the soul's, a note charged with some divine

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presence. It is because the soul finds tongue through the poet that there is a light in poetry, a delight in poetry. Light and delight are the soul's very stuff, and by virtue of them the poetic expression which fuses the "vivid imagery of earth" with the soul's "inner seeing and sense" is not just a fanciful entertainment but a kind of revelation. Of course it is not directly a spiritual, a mystic movement: it is only indirectly so and even when its subject is spiritual or mystic the poet does not necessarily become a Yogi or a Rishi. But the soul-quality ensures, as Sri Aurobindo puts it in The Future Poetry,1 that the genuine poetic expression is not merely a pastime, not even a godlike one: "it is a great formative and illuminative power."

The psychological instrument of this power is defined by the phrase: "inner seeing and sense." Here the stress is not only on the inwardness: it is also on sight. The poet is fundamentally concerned with the activity of the eye. When he turns to the phenomena of earth, what he busies himself with is their "vivid imagery". An image is primarily something visual. A keen experience of shapes and colours is the poet's speciality and it is this that is conveyed in the words: "seeing and sense". "Sense" is a term suggesting at once perception and feeling and understanding, a contact of consciousness with an object; but the main channel of the contact here is the sight. The perceiving, feeling, understanding consciousness of the poet comes to an active point, an effective focus, through the function of seeing: his the concentration and merging of all sense in vision. "Vision," says Sri Aurobindo in The Future Poetry,² "is the characteristic power of the poet, as is discriminative thought the essential gift of the philosopher and analytic observation the natural genius of the scientist." A very acute and felicitous statement, this. Note first the noun "power" in connection with the poet. It recalls to us De Quincey's division of literature into the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. Philosophy and science are the literature of knowledge while all prose and poetry that are pieces of art fall under the category of literature of power because they affect the emotions and change attitudes and remould character. Note next the adjective "essential" in relation to the philosopher's gift. Philosophy is supposed to make clear the basic principle of reality, the essence

1. P. 10. 2. P. 29.

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of things. Then note the epithet "natural" apropos of the scientist's work. The scientist cuts into the physical universe and reaches down to its system of laws — his field is what commonly passes as Nature. A born master of words has made the statement, instinctively using the most expressive turns'. But we are not at the moment concerned so much with the art of the statement as with its isolation of the poet's function from the functions of the philosopher and the scientist: this function is primarily neither to think out reality nor to dissect phenomena but to experience the play of light and shadow, fixity and flux, individual form and multiple pattern: the poet may have a philosophic or a scientific bent (Lucretius had both), but he must exercise it in a glory of sight, set forth everything with intimate image, evocative symbol.

The ancient Indian word for poet is Kavi, which means one who sees and reveals. Of course the revealing, the making manifest, the showing out is an inevitable part of the poet's function, and it is this function that is stressed in the Latin term poeta from the Greek poetes, which stands for "maker", "fashioner", "creator". But the whole labour of formation lies in rendering visible, in making us see, what has been seen by the one who forms. The vision is the first factor, the embodiment and communication of it is the second. The Indian name goes to the root of the matter in speaking of the seer who reveals instead of the revealer who has seen. Shakespeare — the greatest poetic phenomenon in English history, poetry incarnate if ever such a thing has happened — bears out the Indian characterisation by the famous passage describing what the poet does. In picturing the poet's activity he speaks of "the poet's eye" —

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Yes, the poet is primarily a seer, but we may remember that he does not stop with mere sight of the surface of reality: his is not sight so much as insight: he sees through, behind, within, and he bodies forth the forms of things unknown, and there is always

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something unfathomable about his vision — a distance beyond distance, a depth beyond depth: this constitutes the transcendence of the intellectual meaning by poetry.

Ultimately the transcendence derives from the Supreme Spirit, the Poet Creator whose words are worlds. The human poet's vision has a contact, remote or close, with "some eternal eye," as the phrase runs in the fourth line of our quotation from Savitri. Sri Aurobindo has written in The Future Poetry:¹ "The intellectual, vital, sensible truths are subordinate things; the breath of poetry should give us along with them or it may even be apart from them, some more essential truth of the being of things, their very power which springs in the last resort from something eternal in their heart and secrecy, hrdaye guhayam, expressive even in the mo-ments and transiences of life." Mark the words: "something eter-nal". In another place in The Future Poetry² we read that the poet may start from anything, "he may start from the colour of a rose, or the power or beauty of a character, or the splendour of an action, or go away from all these into his own secret soul and its most hidden movements. The one thing needful is that he should be able to go beyond the word or image he uses or the form of the thing he sees, not be limited by them, but get into the light of that which they have the power to reveal and flood them with it until they overflow with its suggestions or seem even to lose themselves and disappear into the revelation. At the highest he himself dis-appears into sight: the personality of the poet is lost in the eternity of the vision, and the Spirit of all seems alone to be there speaking out sovereignly its own secrets." Note again the turn: "the eternity of the vision." The Eternal Eye is at the back of all poetic perfection, and what this Eye visions is the Divine Presence taking flawless shape in a super-cosmos. To that shape the poet, in one way or another, converts the objects or events he depicts.

This conversion is the act put before us in the fourth and fifth lines. Every word and turn in them is worth pondering. "I caught," Sri Aurobindo makes Satyavan say. There is implied no mere touching, no mere pulling, not even mere holding. Nothing tentative is here: we have an absolute seizure, a capturing that is precise and complete. The poet gathers and grips a thing un-erringly and for good. Such a gathering and gripping suggests to us

1. Pp. 219-20. 2. P. 35.

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a shade in the adjective "eternal" which is not directly mystical but still very pertinent to the artistic process. Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine1 talks of timeless eternity and time-eternity - an eternity which is outside or beyond the time-movement and an eternity which is constituted by time itsel( going on and on without end. This latter kind - indefinitely continuing world-existence - poetry achieves for whatever it catches. The perfection of phrase in which it embodies its vision makes that vision memorable for ever: it confers immortality on its themes by expressing them in such a way that the expression gets imprinted indelibly on the human mind: it eternises for all future an occurrence or an object of the present or the past. As Landor says:

Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives,

Alcestis rises from the shades;

Verse calls them forth: 'tis verse that gives

Immortal youth to mortal maids.

Shakespeare in several places in his Sonnets declares that his powerful verse shall outlive marble and the gilded monuments of princes. In one sonnet he asks: who or what can save you, my lover, from being destroyed or forgotten? And he gives an answer paradoxically pointed:

O None unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Of course, the black ink here is not any and every writing fluid of a dark colour but the content of the ink-horn in which the quill of Shakespeare got dipped in order to trace on paper the quiverings of his poetic imagination.

Now to the rest of the quotation from Savitri. But before we proceed, let us hark back a little to observe an unconscious yet highly relevant pun. A pun, you know, is a play on words, either a use of the same word to suggest different meanings or a use of different words with different meanings but the same sound. A wit at the court of Louis XIV claimed that he could make a pun on any subject. Louis asked him to do so on Louis himself, the king. The

1. P. 324 (American Edition, 1949).

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pun-maker refused, saying, "Sire, the King is no subject". Here the same word "subject" is employed in the two different meanings of "theme" and "one who is ruled by a king". The second kind of punning word-play finds an excellent example in Hilaire Belloc's epitaph for himself:

When I am gone, let this of me be said:

"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

That the habit of punning is not unworthy of even great poets may be established from the practice of Shakespeare himself. He never misses an opportunity for a double-entendre. Three whole sonnets of his are devoted to turning to all possible uses the word "Will", including the use of it for his own name William. Sometimes in the midst of the most serious writing he indulges his pun-mania, so that his poetry is at once godlike in greatness and devilishly clever. One of the most famous instances is the sonnet-beginning,

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action,

which is perhaps too naughty to be explained by me in this young Class and luckily too much of a complex knot— too knotty — for you to unravel on your own. Of course punning goes back to a time far earlier than Shakespeare's. Even the Rishis of the Rig-veda were in a special sense pun-makers. According to Sri Aurobindo, there was throughout the hymns an esoteric cult and an exoteric religion, a hidden spiritual meaning and an outer secular suggestion. Go — wait a minute, I am not asking you to take a holiday. I am not using an English word. It is an instance of what the Rishis did: they employed the Sanskrit word Go to signify both a ray and a cow. To the ordinary primitive Aryan of the time it stood for a very useful milk-yielding animal but to the initiate it spoke of the pure white light of the Divine Knowledge. The habit of punning which the Rishis started went down as a legacy to later days and reached very ingenious forms in Classical Sanskrit literature where the slesha was to be met with at every step. The Classical Sanskrit scholars would have been delighted with Shakespeare and if they had known English they would have paid a compliment simultaneously to his vast learning and to his inexhaus-

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tible employment of that learning in the interests of the slesha, the pun: they would have called him a real pundit!

Even things like Shakespeare's "his eye I eyed" would have been admired by them. And it is from this bit of somewhat excessive punning that I wish to lead you on to the unconscious yet deeply significant double-entendre that has occurred in Sri Aurobindo's lines. Mark the phrase: "I caught for some eternal eye..." The first personal pronoun with which it starts may be taken to suggest that the catching for some eternal eye is done by the poet's own visual organ, his own faculty of sight, his own eye. The whole personality of the poet, his total self or "I", is summed up in his visual organ: the essential poetic part of a poet's being is his faculty of seeing. And it is through this faculty that he proceeds to discover in all things the significance and value these things could have or should have or do have for the Eye of the Divine Creator.

We are all the more emboldened to point out this pun because in a certain sense all poetry is punning. When we designate it as symbolic what do we mean except that through one thing which is apparent we are pushed on to another which is concealed? The same image, the same word, has a surface suggestion and a depth suggestion. And in the rest of the passage which I have built up from Sri Aurobindo I am going to read depth suggestions through the surface ones, depth suggestions which are warranted because of the adjective "eternal" which is central to the passage.

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TALK FOUR

Now in the lines of Sri Aurobindo's we have put together for study —

I caught for some eternal eye the sudden

Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool,...

And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity —

we come, from the poet who is the vision-catcher and from the eternal eye for which he acts the visionary, to what is caught, the thing visioned. It is "the sudden kingfisher". Technically we cannot help being struck by the way the adjective stands — at the end of the line. In poetry, lines are either end-stopped or enjambed. Enjambment (a French word) connoted originally the continuing of the sentence of one couplet into the next instead of stopping short. In general it connotes the running on of the phrase of one line into another instead of ending with the line's end or at least pausing there as a sort of self-sufficient unit. "Sudden" makes an enjambment and it makes it by what is termed a feminine ending. Lines have either masculine or feminine endings (rhymed or un-rhymed): the former close the line with a syllable that is stressed (heavily or lightly), the latter carry it beyond the stressed to an unstressed syllable. I do not know why this kind of termination is dubbed "feminine". Perhaps it is a hint of the feminine propensity not to stop speaking when one should stop, but to continue past the right limit! The phrase "feminine ending" would then be a sort of paradox, a sarcasm as if to say that such an ending is really no ending except in feminine eyes. Enjambment itself may be desig-nated as a feminine ending of another type — the line refusing to cease where it technically terminates but overflowing into the next.

Milton's blank verse is full of enjambment though not of un-stressed syllables hanging out at the ends of lines. May we connect his line-overflows with the fact that he had several wives (in succession, of course) and many daughters — all of them rendering his house a place of interminable babble and by their overflow of talk setting him a pattern of blank verse in which the lines very often push on and join up instead of properly pausing or concluding? At least we know that when Milton went blind he taught

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his daughters to read Greek and Latin to him without understanding what these languages said. He did not teach them the meanings of Greek and Latin words nor their syntactical structure but only how to pronounce them. The poor girls were bored with long hours of gibberish recitation to their papa. They must have frequently protested, but Milton was adamant. When one of his friends asked him why he had not taught them Greek and Latin properly, he tartly replied: "One tongue is sufficient for any woman."

He meant, of course, that a woman makes more than enough use of even one language and if she had more than one at her command she would — to employ a coinage of Milton himself — turn a house into a Pandemonium ("an abode of all demons, a place of lawless violence or uproar, an utter confusion"). One may wonder whether Milton's celebrated laments over his blindness did not have an unexpressed undertone of regret that he went blind rather than deaf. According to Herbert Grierson, his most moving — that is, most tragically poignant — line is the one in which the blind Samson under the open midday sky cries out:

O dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon!

Well, if Milton had been deaf and not blind, his most happy line would have been an utterance under his own roof when his women-folk got up at sunrise:

O calm, calm, calm amid the uproar at dawn!

In the interests of literary history I may say that Milton's women-folk must have themselves had a trying time with the poet. One of his wives is reported to have run away from him. He was not exactly an amiable person. He had the typical Puritan's low opinion of human nature (other people's human nature) and the censorious lip and even the heavy hand. He was a lifelong believer in the birch for young people.

Enjambment and the feminine ending have taken us a little off the track. Let us return to our "sudden". The positioning of it at the end of an enjambed line carries a host of suggestions far subtler than any to do with feminine talk. The first effect is to startle us by the occurrence of an adjective without its noun, an

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occurrence besides at so marked a place in the line as its very close. Technically the meaning of this adjective is reinforced by its separated terminal position. But there are still other effects. One is in relation to the verb "caught". Suddenness suggests a quick movement which takes one by surprise and which may be thought uncatchable. So we have here the unexpected event of the almost uncatchable being caught, a tribute to the catcher, a hint of the the mobile miracle that is the artist mind, a mind that can overtake anything and make an imaginative capture of it. You may remember —

The Kangaroo ran very fast,

But I ran faster.

Well, here you may read between the lines:

The kingfisher was sudden,

But I outsuddened him.

How sudden the bird was is told us in the next line where it is said to be "flashing". Even something as rapid and fleeting and momentary as a flash can be seized by the poet's pursuing eye. And a further shade of the miracle comes out with the word "eternal". We took this word to mean both an eternity of time and an eternity of timelessness, the memorable everlasting value poetry gives to a mortal thing as well as the value which a Divine Consciousness holds as the eternal archetype of a thing that happens in the movement of time. The poet seizes flash-like objects for ever: once seized, they are never submerged — if we may cite a Shakespearean phrase —

In the dark backward and abysm of time.

Also, the contrast between the Divine Consciousness and the time-process is brought out by "sudden". The character of time is transitoriness, momentariness: nothing stands still, all life is a succession of infinitesimal brevities, a series of suddennesses. This constant evanescence is vividly counterposed to Eternity by the concrete figure of the sudden kingfisher. The kingfisher in its incredibly swift flight is a symbol of all time. A slower-moving

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object would have failed to drive home both the perpetuation that the poet achieves and the archetypal divinity he serves, and his service of that eternity is struck out most clear for us by the marked terminal position of "sudden".

We may add that if "sudden" had come in the next line, the poetic stroke would have been diminished. Suppose Sri Aurobindo had written:

I caught for some deep eye that is eternal

The sudden kingfisher's flash to a darkling pool.

Here we have eternity in one line and time in another. Do we not blur their contrast a little by this sheer division? Have you heard of Kohler's experiments to ascertain the psychology of apes? One experiment puts a banana outside a chimpanzee's cage, exactly in front of the animal but beyond his arm's reach. To the right of the chimpanzee, outside the cage, a stick is put. The ape looks straight at the banana and then turns his head to look at the stick. The means of getting at the banana and drawing it into the cage is there but it needs another look than the one which takes in the banana. The animal is found unable to co-ordinate the two looks and arrive at a logical procedure for getting hold of the fruit, as it would if the stick were alongside the banana or in a line with it. We feel rather like the chimpanzee if "eternal" is in line one and the expression suggesting the temporal is in line two. The needed contrast which would kindle up the significance of the poetic vision gets a trifle weakened: there is a slight loss of immediacy, a slight failure in the meaningful fusion of the objects presented: the revelatory intuition is retarded and we have to reach the revelation by a bit of thought-effort: the technique is not fully co-operative with the vision.

We may draw attention to some other defects also. At first sight one may feel that the whole phenomenon of the kingfisher is shown in its completeness in a single line, the second, and that this is a poetic gain. But consider the metrical rhythm of the line. Too many syllables — 12 in fact — are crowded together, creating a dancing wavering rhythm which serves ill the simple straight swift motion of the bird. Again, what stands in central focus now is the flash and not the kingfisher. Many different things may be said to give a flash: a sort of generality is caught through the flashing, a

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less distinct less individualised and hence less concrete symbol is conjured up. The mention of the kingfisher seems hardly significant and inevitable: this particular bird with its special size, shape, colour, gesture appears somewhat wasted and correspondingly wasted is the pool which can have vital importance only if not the flash but the kingfisher with its habit of food-hunting in watery spots holds the chief place.

This point, as well as to some extent the point in regard to the metre, would be valid even if Sri Aurobindo wrote:

I caught for some eternal eye the flashing

Of the sudden kingfisher to a darkling pool.

The sole advantage over the other version would be that the contrast between eternity and time would be more forceful by the retention of a word charged with momentariness in the very line where "some eternal eye" figures. But then force would be lessened in the intended contrast between "flashing" and "darkling". Besides, to put the "flashing" before the "sudden kingfisher" is not so logical or so artistic as the other way round. The adjective for the kingfisher becomes unimpressive and almost superfluous after the intensity of "flashing": also the act of flashing and the quality of suddenness grow two separate things instead of the former emerging from the latter and being the latter itself in an intense manifestation. The alliteration of the f-sounds and the sh-sounds in the two words "flashing" and "kingfisher" loses its expressive inevitability. In the phrase "kingfisher flashing" the alliteration in the second word brings out a power already there in the bird so that the act of flashing is the natural and spontaneous flow of the kingfisher's being and is prepared, rendered unavoidable, made the true gesture of it. If "flashing" precedes "kingfisher" we have something blurted out before its time, and if the precedence is too far ahead the alliteration itself goes to waste.

Sri Aurobindo's arrangement of all the words is the most felici-tious and the sort of enjambment he achieves is also happier than any other; for no other can be so marked as an adjective divorced from its noun — "sudden" poised for the fraction of a second apart from "kingfisher" — but carrying us on imperatively to what it qualifies. This enjambment suggests that, though momentariness is here, there is no cessation of the movement itself: we are hurried

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forward, pressed onward to the next line, so that we have a continuous movement of momentarinesses. Such a movement serves Sri Aurobindo's subject very appropriately, since the subject is not the kingfisher sitting out on a tree its series of moments that follow one another, but the kingfisher in motion in the time-flux, the kingfisher flashing. The suggestion of "flashing" is anticipated and prepared by the enjambed technique working through "sudden". Further, the whole last foot in which the adjective stands is what is called an amphibrach: the foot consists of three syllables — "the sudden" — with only the central syllable stressed. Metrically it is like the last foot of the Shakespearean verse already quoted:

The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling...

Sri Aurobindo¹ has called Shakespeare's last foot "a spacious amphibrach like a long plunge of a wave" and remarked about the entire line's structure of four stressed intrinsically long vowels and one stressed vowel that is intrinsically short, all of them forming a run of two iambs, a pyrrhic, a spondee and an amphibrach: "no more expressive rhythm could have been contrived to convey potently the power, the excitement and the amplitude of the poet's vision." Our amphibrach is not spacious: its vowel is not quanti-tatively long like the o in "rolling": the vowel here is a short u and even the final syllable "en" is almost a half-syllable. The amphi-brach is a rather compressed one, but there is enough of the unstressed third syllable to make with the stressed one preceding it a falling movement. Here too is a plunge, though not of a high-risen wave: it is a packed rather than a spacious plunge and as such it is quite in conformity with the small bird that the kingfisher is, and the falling movement is in perfect tune with the kingfisher's act of flying down from a tree to a pool. "Flashing" here implies not only a swift movement but also a downward one and, just as the enjambment anticipates and prepares the former, the feminine ending anticipates and prepares the latter. However, the swift downward movement of the small kingfisher would hardly be hinted so well by the amphibrach enjambment if the last two syllables of the foot were not the significant word "sudden". Now we reach the kingfisher itself. We shall not dwell on the

1. Collected Poems (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. 1972). p. 35 1 .

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metrical technique of the line given to its activity — except to make two remarks. The word "kingfisher" at the start of the line has two stresses, a main on "king" and a minor on "fish", but both fall on short vowels, and both the vowels are the same short i. So we have a suggestion at once of brevity and force, insignificance and insistence, a bird small but dynamic, an object tiny yet attention-gripping — in sum, the diminutive diver and hunter with the little body and long beak and bright plumage and proud crest. At the end of the line we have the word "pool", a word with a long vowel-sound which especially evokes a sense of something significant deep down to which the kingfisher dives. So much for the purely metrical technique. Now for a few aspects of the verbal technique.

"Darkling" after "flashing" and before "pool" is an interesting effect in the picture of the kingfisher. It means being in the dark, being hidden, and its immediate function is to tell us that the pool was in a place of shadows, that it was a sort of secrecy. but the sound of the word , the combination of r and k and /, calls up the vision of a liquid glimmer-gloom and makes the word the most apt adjective for a hidden or shadowed thing which is a pool . And then there is the play it makes with the preceding present participle "flashing" . "Flashing" in itself blends the impression of lightning with the impression of a sweep and swish of wings through the air again the aptest term for the rapid leap of colourful bird-life . But its connection with "darkling" presents our thought simultaneously with two facts that go beyond the mere account of a bird diving for its fishy food. We see something intensely luminous dropping into something mysterious. It is a vision of keen beauty disappearing - but not to be swallowed up and lost. A sense we get as of a. masterful plunge of brightness into a dark profundity. There is not exactly the. exquisite casualty of Nashe's

Brightness falls from the air

but a sort of dangerous adventure in which life laughingly dares darkness and plucks its prey from it. There is evanescence, no doubt, the time-touch, yet within the evanescence beats a triumph. This vision of life arises as though we were being shown what the phenomena of ordinary existence would look like when they are caught by the poet for some eternal eye and given their ultimate

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interpretation — or rather we have at once those phenomena and the deeper version of them that is their truth in eternity.

Further, you may notice that the whole event described here is so much like the essential poetic experience itself. An airy colour-fulness drops with a winged burst of revelatory light into a hidden depth in order to bring up from this depth some life-nourishing secret. We have the poetic intuition falling into the poet's inner being and capturing its contents for the poet's self-expression. And just remember that a darkling pool closely resembles an eye wait-ing with in-drawn expectant stillness for a shining disclosure from above which will lay bare to that receptivity what lies within the dreamer's own vigilant soul, what hides there to feed with its mysterious life the light that fell from on high.

Indeed a many-aspected statement is present in Sri Aurobindo's picture, and its relevance to the poetic process is completed by the next line which I have joined on to these two:

And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity.

The poet is primarily a seer, but his instrument for seizing his vision and communicating it is the word: it is by the inspired sound that he creates a form for his intuitive sight. The full Vedic des-cription of the poetic tribe is kavayah satyasrutah, which Sri Aurobindo elucidates as "seers and hearers of the poetic truth and poetic word".¹ The inspired sound is implicit in the poetic act — and, just as the poet's vision must ultimately have behind it the working of some eternal eye, the poet's word must ultimately have behind it the working of some eternal ear. The ultimate home of the poetic process is the spiritual Akash, the Self-space of the Spirit, the Divine Consciousness's infinity of self-extension. And this infinity has its creative vibrations that are at the basis of all cosmos. These vibrations are to be caught, however distantly or indirectly, by the sound of poetry. In terms of our own quotation, what the poet metricises when he captures in his verse. the king-fisher's downward flight and its descending wing-wafts, its plung-ing beat of pinions, is the rhythm-beats of the spacious ether of the Eternal Being who is the secret substance, one of whose vibrant materialisations is the kingfisher.

1. The Future Poetry, p. 30.

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We may, however, question the verb "metred". Modernists believe that metre is an artificial shackle on poetry from which they want to escape into what they call "free verse". But actually no verse can be free without ceasing to be verse: if there is no regulating principle of a discernible kind, however subtle be its regulation, we have the laxer movement of prose, and if that laxer movement tries to pass off as poetry by some device like cutting itself up into long and short lines and sprinkling a few out-of-the-way locutions on a run of commonly turned phrases, then we do not have real verse but a pretentious and ineffectual falsity, about whose relation to prose we shall have to say, even at the risk of an atrocious and well-worn pun, that it is not prose but worse! Poetry must have not only intensity of vision and intensity of word: it must have also intensity of rhythm. And how is rhythm to be intense without having a central cadence in the midst of variations, a base of harmonic recurrences over which modulations play, a base which is never overlaid with too much modulation but rings out its uniformity through the diversity. In the older literatures, metre tended to be of a set form. But to be of set form is not the essence of metre. It was so because thus alone something in the older consciousness, the strong sense of order, of dharma , got represented in art. When the consciousness changes and becomes more individualised, more complex, as in modern times, the metre may follow suit. Every age can make its own metrical designs and our age may devise or discover less apparent regularities and complicate or subtilise its schemes of sound. There is no harm in that, though in an epoch of individuality we cannot insist that an individual who still finds something of the older metres a natural mould of his mood-movements should mechanically conform to the new non-conformity! All must have a right to be individual and if people want to be boldly experimental in prosody they may do so, but the soul of metre must not be lost - or else poetry in the truest connotation will get lost with it. Even what is termed "free verse" is, when it is still true poetry, a broad pattern of returning effects, a pattern rounded off and swaying under a dextrous disguise as a single whole - and it is true poetry precisely by being not really free but just differently bound than the older poetic creations.

My own penchant is for metre and I grant some point to an amusing exaggeration by George Gissing. Gissing expressed hor-

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ror of "miserable men who do not know — who have never even heard of—the minuter differences between Dochmiacs and Antis-pasts". If you happen to be those miserable men I may tell you that a Dochmiac is a five-syllabled Greek foot composed of short-long-long-short-long and an Antispast is a four-syllabled Greek foot consisting of short-long-long-short. But I am afraid I cannot tell you more minute differences than that the former has one final long in excess of the latter, and if there is yet minuter difference I myself shall have to live in the misery of ignorance. What, how-ever, I do know I may concretely impart to you by illustrating a Dochmiac and an Antispast through a compliment to our horror-stricken ecstatic of metre:

Perhaps the compliment seems too high-pitched. But that there is an essence of truth in it will be conceded if we track metre to its origin in the Divine Ananda, the Delight of the All-wise. Sri Aurobindo has stated very well the truth about metre. "All crea-tion," he writes,¹ "proceeds on a basis of oneness and sameness with a superstructure of diversity, and there is the highest creation where is the intensest power of basic unity and sameness and on that supporting basis the intensest power of appropriate and gov-erned diversity. Metre was in the thought of the Vedic poets the reproduction in speech of great creative world-rhythms; it is not a mere formal construction, though it may be made by the mind into even such a lifeless form: but even that lifeless form or convention, when genius and inspiration breathe the force of life into it, becomes again what it was meant to be, It becomes itself and serves its own true and great purpose. There IS an intonation of poetry which is different from the flatter and looser intonation of prose, and with it a heightened or gathered intensity of language, a deepened vibrating intensity of rhythm, an intense inspiration in the thought-substance. One leaps up with this rhythmic spring or flies upon these wings of rhythmic exaltation to. a higher scale of consciousness which expresses things common with an uncommon power both .0f vision and of utterance and things uncommon with their own native and revealing accent; It expresses them, as no

1. Collected Poems, pp. 368-69.

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mere prose speech can do, with a certain kind of deep appealing intimacy of truth which poetic rhythm alone gives to expressive form and power of language: the greater this element, the greater is the poetry. The essence of this power can be there without metre, but metre is its spontaneous form, raises it to its acme. The tradition of metre is not a vain and foolish convention followed by the great poets of the past in a primitive ignorance unconscious of their own bondage; it is in spite of its appearance of human convention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest speech-nature."

The verb "metred", therefore, in the last line of our quotation may be held to be perfectly in order, especially in a context where infinity is said to be the visioner of the finite and the creator of poetry through the human soul.

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TALK FIVE

We have now completed, with the help of Sri Aurobindo's lines, our summing up of the psychology and metaphysics of the poetic mood and process. Now I may sound a note of warning to budding poets. Our lines speak of the Eternal, the Infinite. These are terms that would spring easily to one's lips when one essays poetry in an Ashram of Yoga, but we have to be careful about them so long as we do not constantly live in the eternal and infinite Consciousness. Even if we do live in that Consciousness we must see that the poet in us speaks out of the man who has realised the presence of the Supreme and is not merely an outer person who wants to put to the uses of art the inner person's experience. In Sri Aurobindo the great words occur organically, as a living self-expression charged with truth. But we, who are not Sri Aurobindo nor sufficiently Aurobindonians even, have to be on guard against a facile indul-gence in them. We cannot avoid them, we have to bring them in at times in the context of our aspirations or intuitions, but let us bring them in when we really are compelled to do so by the necessities of the inspiration. Let us do our utmost to resist their outleap and yield to them only when they overwhelm us. When the Inspiration just says "Hullo" to us from a distance, let us not immediately respond by crying out, "Infinite! Eternal!" The Inspiration must take us by the throat and press out of us such ejaculations. They must come churned up from our depths at a sort of life-or-death moment and not fall tripping from our tongues every now and then.

Merely their occurrence in the midst of high thoughts and lofty phrases does not prove them to be inevitable there. For it is possible to have high thoughts and lofty phrases without creating anything except resonant rhetoric. The rhetorical element is not in itself an enemy to poetry — Milton is often rhetorical in the best sense, Byron is frequently rhetorical in a fairly good sense, but theirs is a rhetoric natural to a certain genuine mood and springs from within. False rhetoric is what attempts to swell out something which is not intrinsically great or something which though great has yet come forth not in its original form but in an imitation by the outer mind.

Both the manifestations we find in the French poet Victor Hugo. Hugo had a remarkable capacity for powerful expression in

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which the imagination could soar high without having sufficiently gone deep. Hugo did not properly fathom his subjects, he caught hold of some large surface-impressions and tried to carry them up into heavenly air, but the higher they went the more vacuous they became, for it is only when you have seen and felt things pro-foundly that you can discover divine meanings in them and attune them to the illimitable empyrean. Hugo seems to have believed that a constant scattering of words like "eternite, infinite divinite" were enough to ensure profundity. This was a mistake in artistic method. But behind it was also a psychological flaw in the poet. Hugo had a lot of self-conceit. To a youth who said to him that he had been reading Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe, Hugo said sharply: "Mais a quoi bon? Je les resume tous."¹ The colossal confidence with which he thought he summed up all the poetic giants of the past and with which he went on pronouncing like Lord God Himself on cosmic themes was his own undoing. He remains a great poet in spite of his faults, but the status he reached was quite disproportionate to his promise. More self-criticism, more resistance to his own gifts would have intensified and en-riched his utterance.

We may make the same observation about another European poet, the modern Italian Gabriele D'Annunzio. His work is per-haps the most wealth-burdened so far as the use of words is concerned. But he has not enough wealth of substance to go with the verbal luxuriance and incandescence. The Italian language lends itself easily to musical polysyllabism, the poet has almost his poetry half made for him in the sound and texture of the language. Restraint, the shaping stroke, the selective capacity are therefore all the more required. D'Annunzio appears deficient in them. Not that he has mere word-prolificity everywhere: at times he brings wonderful imagination-shot ideas and then his poetry is pure glory. But, like Hugo, he overwrites and is not self-critical, not patient to match depth with height, subtlety: with .splendour.· He too had a mighty notion of himself. All great poets are perfectly aware of the divine afflatus ,blowing through ,them and know very well that they are great. Yet all are not carried off their feet by the afflatus nor do they allow its passage through their minds· to give them a swelled head. I recollect an anecdote about D' Annunzio

1. "But what is the good? I sum them all up."

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which shows the extent of its swelling in him. It concerns a most enjoyable incident. Once he was introduced to the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt. He stood at a little distance with en-raptured eyes and, with a broad sweep of his right arm, exclaimed: "Belle! Magnifique! D'Annunzienne!" — and then came closer and said, "Bonjour, Madame." He had such a personality that he made his hearers accept his identification of the beautiful and the magnificent with the d'Annunzian, and many a woman, especially if she was a susceptible artiste, fell a victim to his Charm and verve. But his belief that whenever he was D'Annunzian he was achiev-ing beautiful and magnificent poetry played the deuce with him on numberless occasions. A poet can surely be conscious of his own greatness and let himself go in poetic creation without a critical back-look, when he happens to be what I may term an avatar of poetry rather than a vibhuti of poetry. Shakespeare is reported to have blotted not a single word of what he wrote; but he could afford to do that without serious damage to his own quality be-cause he happened to be a poetic superman, a poetic avatar. Neither Hugo nor D'Annunzio was anything more than a big-size vibhuti in the poetic world. Hugo, I believe, was the bigger of the two and with a little more sense of Hugo being not so much of a Victor as his name suggested, he would have qualified for the company that Sri Aurobindo has noted as the sheer first class.

Sri Aurobindo. sets up five criteria: imaginative originality, expressive power, creative genius, scope of interests, scale of work. Poets stand higher or lower according as they satisfy these criteria in a greater or smaller measure. Sri Aurobindo chooses eleven poets for the sheer first class, but even these he distributes into three rows. In the top row he puts Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer and Shakespeare as equals. In the middle' row come Dante, Kalidasa; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton. In the third stands in solitary grandeui:Goethe.1 Those in the first- row have supreme imaginative originality and expressive power and creative genius, the widest scope and the largest amount of work. Those in the second are a little wllnting in cine or other of the required qualifications. Dante and · Kalidasa. would have gone into the first row if they had possessed the elemental creativity as of a demigod that

1. I believe that Firdausi, author of the Persian epic Shah-nameh , is omitted altogether because Sri Aurobindo did not read Persian and was judging by his own direct knowledge of poetic works in the original.

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characterised its occupants. They have instead built their worlds and peopled them by an energetic constructiveness of the personal poetic mind. Aeschylus is a seer and creator but his scale of creation is much smaller: the same may be said of Sophocles. Virgil and Milton command a still less spontaneous breath of creative genius, though their expressive power is immense. Where in their works do we meet a teeming world like that of the Shakes-pearean plays? Milton has his fallen archangel Satan coming alive, and Virgil his heroic Aeneas and his tragic Dido — but most of the other characters are a little wooden. Among those who have just missed entering the third row are the Roman Lucretius, the Greek Euripides, the Spanish Calderon, the French Corneille and Hugo, the English Spenser.

While mentioning the various names I noticed one of you trying to anticipate the roll by whispering "Wordsworth". Well, Sri Aurobindo has said that Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats have been left out of consideration not because their best poetry falls short of the finest ever written but because they have failed to write anything on a larger scale which would place them among the greatest singers. Apart from their deficiency in creating a living world of their own, what was wanting in them was sustained volume. None of them gave us as much of supreme poetry as even those who have just missed stepping into the third row. They have not lacked in quality: their defect was in quantity of quality. A poet who pens a few supreme lines cannot be put on a par with one who pours out hundreds. There is, for instance, the poet — Bur- gon, I think — who has become unforgettable for just one line about the ancient city of Petra discovered by archaeologists:

A rose-red city half as old as time.

Surely he cannot be made a peer of Gerard Manley Hopkins who has not only the highly original evocation of Oxford —

Towery city and branchy between towers —

but scores of other verses capturing with crowded yet precise imagery and with strong yet nervous rhythm a diversity of what he called "inscape" and "instress".

Diversity — this in itself is also a desideratum: the poet's scope

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has to be wide if he hopes to claim the sheer first class. He must take as his province multitudinous Nature and multifoliate Life and multifarious Mind. His interests should not be such as might find complete cover under a title like the one intended for a book of verses published some years ago: A Country Muse. I say "inten-ded" because actually, thanks to a printer's howler which by a master-stroke of unconscious insight exposed the smallness of the poet's scope, the book came out under a different caption: A Country Mouse (The printer's hand has tried its tricks with me also in the course of editing Mother India. In reprinting some words of Sri Aurobindo on the spiritual visions of the past, the phrase "Buddhism was only a restatement of Vedanta" was saved at the last minute from appearing with "restaurant" in place of "restatement".)

If even Hugo with his wide scope and large scale has to be left with one foot across and one foot outside the threshold of the sheer first class how can we admit Wordsworth or Shelley or Keats? A Frenchman, of course, would not easily accept the non-inclusion of any French poet at all when India and Greece get three, Italy and England two, and even Germany One. Perhaps what keeps France out in poetry of the supreme order is just the fact that France is supreme in prose: the prose-mind has reached in France such pervasive perfection that the visionary mind of poetry is interfered with by the logicality and lucidity that are the gods of prose-literature. I do not think Frenchmen will quite agree. How-ever, they are not likely to wrangle over Hugo so much as over another poet who is their darling. They will jump up and protest: "What about Racine, the divine Racine?" And if there were a Frenchman here to see me look at Racine with unworshipping eyes, I might be in danger of savate. Do you know of savate? It is French boxing, in which feet and head are used as well as fists. It is a most fascinating game — provided you are not involved in it. Do not ever get into a brawl with a Frenchman without keeping his savate in mind. Before you can put your fists up for attack or defence you may find a terrific kick landed in your stomach or you may get a broken nose under the impact of your opponent's skull. The famous English king of the ring, John Sullivan — in the good old days when gloves were regarded as effeminate —went through a hell of a bad time in France when a Gallic champion challenged him to a boxing bout. Sullivan was surprised at receiving furious

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yet most skilfully placed kicks all over his body-not only into his. tummy but also into his ears and his mouth. Ultimately he managed to drive a solid punch home to his challenger's chin and brought the non-stop flurry of flying feet to undignified rest flat on the floor. I do not know if Sullivan provoked the fight by sneezing at the name of Racine. It is not likely, for Sullivan may not have been aware that a dramatic poet named Racine existed or perhaps even that a dramatic poet like Shakespeare existed. But Frenchmen are more conscious of their own literature . than Englishmen and it would be risky to be lacking in sovereign respect for Racine in front of any son of Ia belle France. Since I cannot suspect any of you to be a Frenchman in disguise I may make bold to construct a brief dialogue between a Frenchman and myself.

Frenchman: "Mais vous avez oublie notre cher Racine! C'est intolerable.

Myself: "Excusez-moi, Monsieur — je n'ai pas oublie votre Racine, je l'ai ignore."

Frenchman: "Ignore? Sacre nom de Dieu! Ma foi! Zut alors!"

Myself: "Mais permettez-moi, mon ami, d'expliquer un peu ma petite insolence. Vous parlez de Racine. Oui, il y a beau-coup de racines, mais une plante doit avoir non seulement des racines souterraines mais aussi des fleurs au-dessus de la terre. Ou est la efflorescence de Monsieur Racine comparable a celle de Mr. Shakespeare?

Frenchman: "Bah! ce gros barbare de poesie, Meester Shake-speare! Vous etes impossible, une ame insensible. Allez yous-en!"¹

1. An English version of the dialogue:

Frenchman: "But you have forgotten our dear Racine! That's intolerable."

Myself: "Excuse me, Monsieur — I haven't forgotten your Racine, I have ignored him."

Frenchman: "Ignored? Confound it! To be sure! Be blowed!"

Myself: "But allow me, my friend, just to explain my wee bit of insolence. You speak of Racine. Well, Racine means root. Yes, there may be a lot of roots, but a plant ought to have not only roots underground but also flowers rising above the earth. Where is the efflorescence of Monsieur Racine like that of Mr. Shakespeare?"

Frenchman: "Pooh! that gross barbarian of poetry, Meester Shake-speare! You are impossible, an insensitive soul. Off with you!"

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I should thank my stars that I got only a verbal kick. But even otherwise I could console my ame insensible with the thought that Sri Aurobindo is on my side and rates Corneille above Racine, and Hugo above Corneille, but keeps even Hugo out of the sheer first class. In ranking Hugo as tops in French poetry but not tops enough in world-poetry, Sri Aurobindo is supported by one of the acutest minds of France herself, the Nobel-Prizeman Andre Gide. When Gide was asked by an interviewer, "Qui est le poete su-preme en Francais?", Gide said, "Victor Hugo, helas!"

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TALK SIX

We spoke of Hugo soon after discussing, the value of metre. Apropos of Hugo I may continue my remarks on metre by a brief consideration of how metre operates in English and French and some other languages. Let me give you, as a short guide, a piece of verse composed by Coleridge and adapted in some places as well as enlarged at the close by Amal — not exactly rendered, as I would believe if I were of D'Annunzio's temper, belle or magni-fique by being made Amalienne. At the same time it tells us the characteristic of each important metrical foot and illustrates in the greater part of the line the very foot which is being spoken of. Coleridge is employing the old terminology of long and short for what we now call stress and slack.

Thus far Coleridge adapted. Now the enlargement. Trochees and Iambics (or Iambs) are opposites, so are Dactyls and Anapaests, Amphibrachs and Amphimacers (or Cretics). But Spondees are left unopposed. So I have to round off:

After the "giant racer", "a tail-end" is quite in place, you will agree. The Pyrrhic is a pretty common foot in English, but, unlike the others, it must always be followed by some other foot and cannot repeat itself. If you put even two Pyrrhics in succession —

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that is, four shorts in two pairs — you will come in for as much criticism from Prosodists as this Ashram of Yoga has incurred from Puritans by its group on group of girls in "shorts".

When somehow four shorts (or slacks) do happen in succession; as in the second line of the three —

With the brief beauty of her face drunk, blind

The song-impetuous mind? —

what are we to do? The way out is the foot named tribrach: three slacks. The first two feet of the line in question would be scanned as a tribrach and an iamb:

In earlier days the poet would have solved the problem by putting an apostrophe after th and contracting the three slacks to two: "To th' in..." A sort of solution is also possible by giving the opening syllable of "inexhaustible" a minor accent and converting the tribrach into what is termed a glide-anapaest — an anapaest in which a syllable (here the third) starts with a vowel almost merging with the vowel-end of the preceding syllable. (The last foot — "... tuous mind" — of line 3 is also a glide-anapaest.)

Now you are technically equipped to meet every situation. Pope, in his Essay on Man, wrote:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is Man.

But if you know your feet you can even attempt the scansion of the poetry written by an Avatar, the poetic work of Sri Aurobindo whom we regard as the Incarnate Divine: you can flout Pope's warning and presume to scan God! But before you disobey that Papal injunction against sacrilege, I should advise you to add to your technical equipment some understanding of the metrical needs of the inspiration. About this, anon.

English metre is based on stress. Let us not forget that the English language is a language of stresses. It is never enough to know the correct pronunciation of English words in order to speak

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English with an English intonation. We must deliver hammer-strokes upon certain syllables. This hammer-striking is at a fixed place in a word and unless we know the place we shall commit a lot of awkwardness in metricising our phrases and composing poetry; for, what we think to be correct metre will turn out to be a chaos of stresses to the ear that knows where the hammer-strokes should fall. There is, of course, another point to bear in mind in the speaking of English. It is something that in an exaggerated form gave to the traitor Englishman who used to broadcast over Berlin Radio during World War II the name "Lord Haw-Haw". English is to be haw-hawed to a certain extent — a bit of extra breath, a bit of special throat-work and a bit of stylishness in the enunciation add the last touch of Englishness to "the tongue that Shakespeare spake". Not that all Englishmen themselves know how to use their own tongue well. Bernard Shaw has remarked that no Englishman can open his mouth to speak his own language without your learning to hate him. This piece of typical Shavian paradox means that even Englishmen must consciously train themselves to speak if they are to achieve English worth hearing.

Shaw is famous for his neat inversion of common opinion in order to shake us up from conventional thinking. He sometimes hits on truths whose presence people do not realise. I remember what he said apropos of the result of the Suffragette Movement of nearly fifty years ago. The Suffragettes were the women who under leaders like Mrs. Pankhurst claimed the right of suffrage, the right to vote. In the first decade of the present century Englishwomen woke up to a sense of inferiority because men could go to the polling booth and women could not. In England today women can influence elections by their votes and even sit in Parliament. In France women have had no suffrage up to now. They evidently feel not the slightest need to go to the polling booth in order to influence the election of ministers or the trend of politics. Frenchwomen are quite confident of their hold on the minds of their menfolk — perhaps through both the hearts and the stomachs of the males. If the Frenchman votes for a candidate or takes to a political action unapproved by his better half, he may get a frigid look at night and a rotten breakfast in the morning — two things he dreads very much. Englishwomen did not feel so sure of their grip on their menfolk and they organised groups of resolute skirted fighters for the right to vote. Demonstrations were held in public

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and women brandishing their umbrellas went about clamouring for justice and equality. They would, for instance, confront a police-man and ask him if he was for granting the vote to women. If he did not say "Yes" he would get his moustaches twisted. Even the King became a target for criticism and opposition. Indeed, as the chief male in the United Kingdom he was held especially respon-sible for the deaf ear turned by men to the Suffragettes' clamour. Once at the Derby the King's horse was in the lead near the winning post. A Suffragette rushed out to the course and tried, as it were, to twist the horse's moustaches. She was knocked down but the animal too had a toss and the King lost the race. Soon after, World War I broke out. At once the Suffragettes laid down their militant umbrellas and threw themselves whole-heartedly into co-operation with their men. What the twisting of moustaches had failed to do, this generous gesture achieved. Immediately after the War the women were given access to the ballot-box. What was the comment of Bernard Shaw? He said, "Thank God women are at last equal to men. I can now kick a woman with impunity." This hits us in the eye with the truth that being officially equal is not an unmitigated advantage for women and can in fact rob them of certain privileges and superiorities enjoyed by them in private.

Shaw's itch to kick an Englishman as soon as he spoke his own language is a reminder all the more pointed for us who are not even Englishmen and yet use their language for our creative as well as practical purposes. We must try our best to give the language its true sound, and so far as metre is concerned it is the attention to the strong stresses that matters most. German too builds on stress. But French does not. French words have a kind of tone-accent on the last syllable. This naturally does not play a determinant role in the metre. French metre consists of counting the number of syllables. Each foot consists of two syllables and a certain number of such dissyllabic units make a line. Purely metrical beauty is thus debarred. You cannot have a variety of metrical patterns as you can in English with the possibility of disposing variously the stress and the slack in a foot. But, as a critic has observed, English on the other hand cannot approach the wonderful effects produced in French by diphthongs, nasals and long syllables. The critic goes on to say that the wretched indeter-minate vowels in English and the English tendency to pronounce clearly just one syllable, in every polysyllabic word or word-group,

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cut English off from such effects as Hugo's

Comme c'est triste voir s'enfuir les hirondelles, (How sad to see the swallows fly away,)

Puisque j'ai vu tomber dans l'onde de ma vie Une feuille de rose arrachee a tes jours, (Since I have seen upon my life's wave fall One rose-leaf that was torn out of thy days,)

Et venger Athalie, Achab et Jezabel.

(And to avenge Athalie, Achab and Jezabel.)

A language which goes by hammer-strokes is incapable of getting the full value out of words like "Jezabel". Sri Aurobindo has somewhere mentioned that an Englishman, when he wants to say "Strawberries", seems just to say "Strawbs", because the syllables that are unstressed tend to get slurred over. Similarly an English-man. would make "Jezabel" sound like Jezz'bl. His language can-not produce the same effect as the French which makes each of the three syllables distinct with its proper vowel-length: Je-za-bel.

English differs from French in also being less inflected. For instance, French adjectives as well as past participles have a mas-culine and a feminine gender and therefore different endings, while in English the same adjective-sound or participle-sound does duty for both the genders and the neuter gender into the bargain. The inflection in French is not sufficient to allow a large freedom in word-arrangement as in Latin or Greek, and whatever freedom it does allow is not very deliberately exploited: I know of only one great poet who exploits it to a marked result — Mallarme. Latin simply invites you to virtuosities of word-arrangement. In English the words are related to one another by their order in a sentence and not by inflections. Therefore one single order, with minor exceptions, rules the English sentence. Latin and also Greek are so inflected that they can vary the order as they please: the word-endings immediately denote the proper connections of the words. Words which the writer has married in his mind can stand quite separate in his sentence without the reader ever being fooled into thinking they have obtained a divorce. If a Latin poet were to translate Sri Aurobindo's

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I caught for some eternal eye the sudden

Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool

and if he thought that a finer Latin rhythm would be got from the words by completely breaking up Sri Aurobindo's order he could go even to the length of rearranging them in such a manner that a step-by-step translation back into English might read:

Kingfisher some eternal pool the sudden

I to a darkling flashing caught for eye.

What would be gibberish in English might be marvellous literature in Latin. The words in the above lines would in their Latin forms indicate with perfect precision how they were to be mentally combined in order to make the intended sense. The highly inflec-ted character of Latin, like that of Greek, enables this language to achieve countless delicate beauties of rhythm which are impossible in English.

Another difference of Latin from English is that metre in Latin is based on the lengths of vowels, the time taken by the voice to pass over a long vowel or a short one — and in Latin the time is determined not only by the intrinsic length or shortness of a vowel but also by the presence of consonants coming after the vowel, consonants of the next word no less than the same word since in Latin, unlike in English, the words do not stand out in their individuality as separate units but tend to join up with each other in a general flow. Stress is not the principal determinant. The metres of all ancient languages, including our Sanskrit, are not accentual but quantitative. The quantitative metres wove delight-ful patterns which the poets never broke, and the attention to proper quantities brought out the full value of a vowel — as French does also by its lack of stress.

Not that in English no vowel can get its full value. It can but only when it is stressed and acquires importance by the voice-weight on it. Of course, among the unstressed vowels, the ear has to distin-guish between the intrinsic long and the intrinsic short. Part of the subtly expressive power of a line of poetry depends on the distinc-tion. But normally the intrinsic long does not come into its own in the full sense, even when it contributes to a line's expressive power. To make it acquire its full value we should have to establish

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a new principle of metre or rather to develop a principle which is latent in the language and unconsciously operative on many occa-sions yet not openly recognised. The development has been made by Sri Aurobindo in what he calls "true English quantity" as contrasted to the quantity of the old languages transferred un-naturally into English. Some day I shall elaborate on this matter. At the moment we are concerned with English metre as it stands.

A few words now about practical scansion. We have spoken of the basic beat and the modulations. In English, a lot of modulated movement is the rule, but sometimes we have a choice between one such movement and another. There can be, technically, alter-native scansisons. But I believe there is always one scansion which is of true help to the significance and the feeling of a line. The critic Chapman has instanced the opening of Sarojini Naidu's Flute-player of Vrindavan as posing us a small problem in scansion. Technically both the following lines —

Why didst thou play thy matchless flute

'Neath the Kadamba tree? —

have a trochee as their first foot: "Why didst", "Neath the". But if the second line is given a trochaic start the effect is flat and artificial in rhythm, not expressive of the delicate sentiment, with its warm unexpressed shades. This line should be scanned:

A single stressed syllable standing at the beginning of a line as here is known as a truncated foot. It may be compensated, as here, by an extra syllable in the next, but at times there is no compensa-tion: take Marlowe's famous bombast —

On rare occasions a truncated foot comes elsewhere than at the beginning to make what may be called syncopation, a term which in regard to language means really the shortening of a word by dropping a letter or a syllable, as "symbology" for "symbolology". (If some day the oddities of your own professor come in for serious study, we may get the syncopated coinage: Amalogy.) Shakes-

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peare has even that rarer phenomenon, double syncopation:

The last two feet have only one syllable each — a long stressed syllable which we are supposed to lengthen out and weigh down heavily to make up for the missing part.

Lines with a truncated first foot or syncopation elsewhere are not hard to scan, for the abnormal movement is apparent. Diffi-culty comes in when a line like Sri Aurobindo's

Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind

is met with in a blank verse of pentameters on an iambic base. We may scan it, a little awkwardly, as

where the prominent feature is an inverted third foot, a trochee in place of the expected iamb: the initial trochee is too frequent to be notable. Or we may scan the verse as

where there are two feet with minor accents: the second takes the major on "pain" and the minor on "vast", the third has only one accent and that a minor on the usually unaccented "his" in order to help out the rhythm. Or else we may adopt the scansion:

where the first foot is a dactyl and the second a spondee.

As a foot consisting of one slack and two stresses is not part of normal English prosody but as the adjective "vast" is too impor-tant to be slightly slurred over with a minor accent, the second way of scanning disqualifies itself. The first gives "vast" its due weight, but divides it from "pain" and confers on the latter an extra impor-tance by making it start an inverted foot; and the scansion breaks up, just as the second scansion does, the present participle "Measur-ing". One feels that no special need exists to stick out "pain" so

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much and that "vast pain" loses its true effect if divided and that the suggestive power of "Measuring" is also maimed when the word is broken up. The third scansion allows the second foot its full force by making a spondee of "vast pain" and, by dactylising the first foot, renders the participle "Measuring" a strong and deep metrical movement which answers to the psychological act ex-pressed and which strikes one as most apt vis-a-vis the spondaic massiveness of the next foot whose verbal significance — "vast pain" — is intended to be both balanced and combated by the verbal significance of "Measuring". Evidently the third scansion is the sole one in tune with the inspiration and also with the natural reading of the line. In dealing with the metrics of a poet like Sri Aurobindo we have to be careful in particular about what I have designated as the inner form: we must see closely to its needs when we scan the outer.

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TALK SEVEN

I have already brought to your notice the many kinds of feet which go into a metrical line. There are also many possible lengths of such a line. We have a dimeter (a line of two feet), a trimeter (a line of three), a tetrameter (a line of four), a pentameter (a line of five), an alexandrine (a line of six), a heptameter (a line of seven), an octometer (a line of eight). You must have marked the absence of the word "hexameter" for a line of six feet. I have put an alexandrine instead, because the series I have listed is composed of the feet which are the most common in English — iamb, trochee, anapaest. The iamb is the commonest. And the usual six-foot line of iambs is called the alexandrine. The hexameter has Greek and Latin associations and is based on the ancient model of five dactyls and a closing spondee (or trochee):

Tumtiti tumtiti tumtiti tumtiti tumtiti tumtum (or tumti).

Of all the line-lengths the pentameter is the staple one in English, whereas the staple in French is the alexandrine and that in Latin or Greek the hexameter. This difference has its raison d'etre in one of the problems of poetic expression — namely, to find a line-length in which a significant phrase can reach its most telling stature, a self-sufficiency and completeness combined with rich-ness. When a language has not a great many words of one syllable, it needs a longer line for such a phrase than where monosyllabic words abound. French is more polysyllabic than English, and Greek and Latin have words of greater length than French. It is natural then that the staple line in Greek and Latin should have the hexameter's fifteen syllables, and that French should have the twelve-syllabled alexandrine as the staple line and English the ten-syllabled iambic pentameter. Homer has an average of five words to his hexameter, which means that the average length of a Greek word is three syllables. The same can hardly be said of an English word. There are thousands of lines in English which are most effectively monosyllabic. There is Shakespeare's:

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain —

in Hamlet's last words to Horatio, a line which is one of the glories

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of poetic expression, summing up a universal experience in the simplest words whose metrical scheme of pyrrhic, spondee, spon-dee, iamb and iamb causes with two units of massed stresses on words carrying peculiar accumulations of consonants an actual difficulty to the vocal breath. Shakespeare has also three consecu-tive lines in Lear, thirty-two monosyllabic words in a row:

And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? O thou wilt come no more —

lines of a predominantly iambic metre which are followed by one of five trochees

Never, never, never, never, never —

which buttress up the sense of the phrase "O thou wilt come no more" by not only a repetition of hopelessness but also an inver-sion of the metre as if to press home the negation of life and to utter through the falling movement of the foot at once the absolute drop into the death spoken of and the irreversible collapse of the speaker into despair. Wordsworth has two of his finest lines totally monosyllabic:

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,

and

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.

The second quotation is considered by Sri Aurobindo a sheer Mantra, a phrase embodying a state or event of the profoundest consciousness in a rhythm arising out of the very thrill of that state or event: it hails from the same supreme source called the Over-mind as the greatest expressions from the Rigveda and the Upa-nishads. Once Sri Aurobindo had put its source a little lower — in the Intuition-plane which is third in the "overhead" levels from the Mind proper, the intervening two being the Higher Mind and the Illumined Mind; but later he raised its origin to the Overmind, saying that since his first judgment he had himself moved more

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intimately in "the fields of sleep". Sri Aurobindo can create unfor-gettable effects with monosyllables:

It bore the stroke of That which kills and saves,

With the Light that dwells near the dark end of things,

The One by whom all live, who lives by none,

or that tremendous statement of Savitri's whole dynamic being against the argued sophistries of Yama, the God of Death, that passionate refusal to be overwhelmed by the mere Reason which can destroy but cannot build:

I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.

Effects like these are as good as impossible in French or Greek or Latin and, we may add, Italian. Even an alexandrine in English can be made immortal poetry with monosyllables. Already the third line of the citation from Lear was an alexandrine. Here is another from a sonnet of Phillip Sydney's in which the poet, casting about for matter to communicate to his beloved and unable to do anything genuine, ends with an intense guiding word from the Muse:

Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write!

An almost complete hexameter too can be monosyllabic. Take from Sri Aurobindo's Ilion the verse about Troy and the aged messenger from Achilles —

Filled with her deeds and her dreams her gods looked

out on the Argive —

or the other in which the Amazon Queen Penthesilia recalls her younger days —

Once when the streams of my East sang low to my ear,

not this Ocean —

or that on Achilles as figured by his messenger —

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Swift as his sword and his spear are the speech and the

wrath from his bosom.

In each of these examples the last foot can easily be turned from a trochaic dissyllable to a spondee of two monosyllables: "grey Greek" can substitute "Argive", "loud sea" replace "Ocean", "deep heart" stand instead of "bosom".

Yes, English can give fine effects by monosyllables and uniquely wonderful ones in a pentameter. But the monosyllabic character of much of English, plus its Teutonic base, has its disadvantages too. Sometimes the combined simplicity and splendour that are natural to Greek and Latin, even when they are talking of the commonest things, is difficult in English. Professor Campbell has somewhere drawn our attention to Homer's phrase about the dog Argos which, old and uncared for, is lying at the doorstep when Ulysses returns home after his long wanderings. Homer says of the dog: "enipleios kynoraisteon." The first word has four syllables, the second has five scanned as four. Considering their reference to a common thing, the English translation which would correspond to the spirit of the phrase would be: "full of lice." But how flat and unmusical the English turn is! We may essay a polysyllabic version less crude: "swarming with parasites." Here we have some grace and rhythm, yet hardly the richness and delicacy of the Greek original, and there is a soupcon of the pompous and artificial if we attend not to the sound alone but also to the significance. Perhaps the best echo and equivalence to the original would be a mixture of the polysyllabic and the monosyllabic: "swarming with lice". Even then the words "with lice" have not one shred of the unpretentious beauty of "kynoraisteon".

I may tell you, however, that several words which have common-ly no dignity (whether monosyllabic or polysyllabic) can in the hands of an inspired poet kindle up with a peculiar charm or force. Take the word "shop", give it to Milton and see what he does:

And set to work millions of spinning worms

That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk.

A most original surprise suggestive of exquisite industry springs at us here. Now take the word "digestion" and see what Shakespeare can make of it as compared to what it may be in the mouth of a

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doctor. He turns it to vigorous and vivid use when he speaks of lives and fortunes consumed

In hot digestion of this cormorant war.

A cormorant is a voracious sea-bird, three feet in length and its three-syllabled name can strongly suggest rapacity of any kind, by the combination of its vowels and consonants, but the living touch of war's large-scale terrible destructiveness will hardly be commu-nicated without the support to the adjective "cormorant" by the direct physiological phrase "hot digestion". Then there is the word "business" with its prosaic commercial associations. Stephen Phillips, a poet with whom Sri Aurobindo had some acquaintance in his college days at Cambridge because Sri Aurobindo's brother Manmohan and Phillips were great chums, brings it in when he talks of the underworld, Hades, during Christ's alleged brief visit to that place of shadows and tortures:

Dreadful suspended business and vast life

Pausing....

Sri Aurobindo introduces an almost direct commercial combina-tion or partnership when he writes in Savitri:

Then shall the business fail of Death and Night.

"Business" here conveys to us certain aspects of the cosmic deal-ings of the Spirits of Destruction and Ignorance: the sharpness, the assiduous cunning, the greedy competition with God's work in the world, the alert exploitation of man's folly and frailty. The term "frailty" recalls to me lines of another poet, indicative of God's work through the cosmic process:

There is no haste in heaven, no frailty mars

The very quiet business of the stars.

I used to quote fairly often from this poet during the first year of my professorship and give his name as Narik Lama. The name intrigued a Dutch lady who was attending my lectures, a highly

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educated person interested in English poetry. She could not trace this poet anywhere. She must have consulted Indo-English antho-logies and then looked for Tibeto-English ones, if any. I may provide you with a clue to the poet's identity. Read his name from the wrong side — from right to left.

To ears not sensitive to English poetic sound-values and haunted much by non-English word-music, many English words, especially when monosyllabic, are bound to be somewhat undignified, if not actually crude. There was the Spanish Ambassador in the days of Elizabeth who felt highly offended on being offered as assistant a man of the name of Cuts. How can the bearer of so plebeian and abbreviated an appellation impress an ear accustomed to grand things like "Don Quixote de la Mancha"? And I must admit that Spanish names have a very satisfying emotional effect. Some years ago I came across the name of a contemporary Spanish writer, an exile from Franco's Spain who had settled to a professorship at Oxford: Salvador de Madariaga. As soon as I found this name I felt it could not be bettered as an ejaculation in moments of annoyance or anger. I needed no swear-words any more. When-ever worked up and irritated I would explode into "Salvador de Madariaga" and get complete relief and satisfaction. Some time after my discovery I attended at Bombay a Congress for Cultural Freedom to which several eminent men of letters from England and elsewhere had been invited. During a preliminary discussion I got riled and burst into my "Salvador de Madariaga". A very intelligent-faced old man whose brainy aspect was enhanced by his. almost total baldness came up to me and inquired with exquisite manners whether he had offended me in any way. I was taken by surprise. "But why do you ask me, sir?" I queried. He bowed and introduced himself as Salvador de Madariaga! We became great friends and I was charmed by his constant wit and admired his acute intellect and his fund of knowledge. Before I came away to Pondicherry that year — it was 1951 — to attend the All-India Convention for the Sri Aurobindo International University I got Don Salvador to send a Message to the Convention.

Don Salvador who knows several European languages besides his own Spanish is a master of English and fully appreciative of English sound-values. But in the seventeenth century an English scholar of Italian — a man named Pinkerton — felt so keenly the lack of dignity in English as compared to Italian that he made the

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proposal that English words should be provided with Italian end-ings and thus rendered more aristocratic. The idea did not catch on. I suppose Englishmen felt affronted and also realised that the whole genius of the language would be vitiated and its special possibilities spoiled by such an artificial grafting of foreign termina-tions. De Quincey summed up very tellingly the failure of Pinker-ton's Italianising fantasy: "Luckilissime this proposalio of the ab-surdissimo Pinkertonio was not adoptado by anybodyini what-everano."

Great English poets have been happy enough with the rhythmic resources of their language. But there have been periods when small poets believed that common words should never be admitted into their verse. In France, after the heyday of Classicism, there was such a period almost down to the time of Hugo. Hugo brought about a number of revolutions in the poetic world. On the one side he was the King of the Romanticists — introducing the titanic and the grandiose and the mysterious into the French poetic imagina-tion. Up to his time, except for certain tendencies in Corneille, the balanced and the beautiful and the bright were the Gods of poetry. Hugo poured the limit-breaking imperious ocean, thrust up the rugged and monstrous mountain, pushed the savage and shadow-haunted forest into the well-measured, shapely, lucid domain of French literature. Before him Rousseau had brought the essential energy of Romanticism, but Hugo swelled and solidified and spread it in all directions. On the other side, he touched with pleasure the ordinary things of life on which the Classicists had looked down their refined noses — noses which, I suppose, had never been common enough to catch a cold and sneeze. If sneeze they did, it was with the finest fragrant snuff, and Oh the sneezing was done most artistically so as to make a symphony out of the ordinary "atishoo". I don't know how a sneeze can be made symphonic. Perhaps Ravibala there amongst you — a born singer — can tell us. She won't? Well, then I must hazard that it was done with something like "a-a-a-ti-shoo-oo". And when the noses were wiped, it was with a piece of cloth which their owners dared not call a mere handkerchief, a mouchoir. But Hugo introduced into a poetic drama of his the wretched plebeian word "mouchoir". It was flung impertinently into the face of cultured Paris. That was in 1830 on the night of November 25 when his play Hernani was first performed. Instantly there was a commotion in the theatre.

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Threats and insults were hurled, blows were exchanged, sticks thudded down on heads and shoulders. The Classicists and the Romanticists were at open war. Through the melee of bloody brows and broken bones the Romanticists won and Hugo set free, as he said, "tous les vieux mots damnes" — "all the old con-demned words."

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TALK EIGHT

We have said that Victor Hugo made history by using the word mouchoir (handkerchief) in a poetic drama. By the way, I myself made a bit of history last time by using not the word but the thing itself in an extraordinary context: absent-mindedly I wiped the blackboard with my mouchoir. I would have made still more history and, while being historical, made you hysterical if I had wiped my face afterwards with the chalk-powdered handkerchief. Well, something like acting so queerly was what the poetic pundits of England thought the first practitioners of Romanticism were doing: they were shocked at the manner in which the Romanti-cists were trying to change the whole face of poetry.

In England Romanticism started less violently than in France. There was no fighting except in black and white — but tempers ran quite as high as on that fateful night in the Paris Theatre, and pretty deep cuts were made by the vigorous play of polemical pens. The central figure in the Romantic Movement in England was William Wordsworth, though Burns and Blake may be consi-dered the pioneers in a general sense. You might think Words-worth was rather a contrast to Hugo. We have been accustomed to picture him as a sedate and philosophic solitary of Nature. But we must not allow our notion of him in middle or old age to colour or discolour the reality of him in his youth. Wordsworth learned his lesson in Romanticism not in England but in France. He was there just after the outbreak of the Revolution and had already tasted the intoxicating doctrines of Rousseau, the father of Modern Romanticism, both French and English. Wordsworth would even have been guillotined and lost his head if he had not taken it away from France in the nick of time. But, though he took his head away, he left his heart behind — and not exactly with any political party but with a very young person. Himself very young, he seems to have mixed up Romanticism with Romance. Some years ago it was discovered that the Archbishop-like Wordsworth of old age had in his youth a love-affair with a French girl named Annette Vallon and, just as Rousseau was the father of Anglo-French Romanticism, Wordsworth the Romanticist was the father of an Anglo-French baby.

I hasten to add that to my mind this love-affair had no significant bearing on either the development of Romanticism or the deve-

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lopment of Wordsworth. I mention it in order only to contradict the importance attached to it by some critics in connection with the sudden decline in Wordsworth's poetic powers a little past his middle age. Herbert Read is the chief exponent here, and he takes his cue from the fact that, although Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy did all they could to help Annette and the baby-girl, Wordsworth instead of marrying Annette moved away from her more and more and throughout his life concealed the early ro-mance from the world's eyes and never referred to it in his Prelude which is a poetic autobiography of his mind. Read argues that the poet refused to come to terms psychologically and morally with his feelings for Annette and thus created in his personality a split leading to loss of the emotional spontaneity which is essential for poetic health. According to Read, the emotional being was wil-fully ignored and hypocritically covered over and its conflict sub-merged, in order to achieve some sort of harmony in the surface consciousness: the submerged conflict took its revenge by drying up the fountains of poetry.

This theory is psychoanalytic. Psychoanalysis is the investigation into one's suppressed impulses and the interpretation of all phases of one's mental life in terms of what is thrust into or lurks in the subconscious. Psychoanalysis even goes further and traces all the higher mental manifestations to the mind's interest in one's physio-logical processes. I believe that it overshoots the mark a great deal and, in its preoccupation with the underworld of the subconscious, misses the in-world of the subliminal and the over-world of the superconscious which are the true sources of art and philosophy and religion and mysticism, however crossed here and there these things may be by miasmas from the subconscious.

Much folly is committed by the psychoanalytic approach. A recent book, written in all seriousness, by a thinker named Wisdom is foolish enough to account for the Idealistic philosophy of Berkeley by the state of his bowels! Berkeley's Idealism holds that matter is not a reality independent of mind but a phenomenon of mind itself and that it is ultimately composed of perceptions from which it is logically impossible to disengage a material world in its own right. Wisdom studies the medical reports about Berkeley and sums up the whole problem by saying in effect: "Everybody is intensely interested in the movements of his bowels, especially in the impressionable period of childhood. Poor Berkeley, ever since

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his childhood, suffered from looseness of bowels and from an early age was deeply imbued with the discovery that nothing solid came out of his system. As a result the philosophical system he built up could not admit anything so solid as an independent material world. Everything was liquidated into the subtle flux of mental experiences."

The eagerness of psychoanalysts — or, as the fashionable term goes, psychiatrists — to find concealed complexes and hidden disorders in the mind lands them at times in sheer fantasy. There was a boy who was thought by his parents to be acting rather oddly. I suppose he was not conforming very much to their de-mands or expectations; talented children, no less than young ruffi-ans, are often like that. The mother of this boy took him to a psychiatrist. The mighty man of mental science wanted to get the spontaneous response of the boy's subconscious. So he fired at him the startling question: "What would happen if I cut off your right ear?" The boy at once replied: "I would hear everything half." Then the psychiatrist asked: "What would happen if I cut off your left ear also?" The boy unhesitatingly answered: "I wouldn't be able to see anything." "Ah, there you are," muttered the psychiat-rist with grim pleasure and a knowing look at the parent. He took the mother aside and whispered: "We shall have to examine this matter very deeply. Something abnormal is evidently at work in a hidden way. We'll gradually bring it up to the surface and effect a cure." The boy and his mother went home. The lady was as puzzled as the psychiatrist by the boy's answer. But she was not entrenched in psychoanalytic pseudo-profundity. So she did the most natural thing and directly asked her son: "Johnny, why did you give that queer reply — that if both your ears were cut off you wouldn't be able to see anything?" Johnny smiled and said: "Why, mamma, if both my ears were cut off, my cap would come down over my eyes. How would I then see anything?"

It goes without saying that there was no return next day to the psychiatrist's clinic. But let us return to Wordsworth. I consider Read's reading Of Wordsworth's poetic decline to be far-fetched. There were seeds of the decline from the very beginning. For one thing, Wordsworth began under the influence of the 18th century and broke off from it under the influence of the new ideas that were sprouting in France, new ideas that had nothing directly to do with having a romance with a mademoiselle of Paris or any young

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lady. And he lost his Romanticism when he lost his ideal of political liberty and his intuition of the One Spirit within the physical universe as well as within the mind of man and mani-festing its presence through both Nature and life.

This intuition was the deepest essence of Wordsworth the poet: when we think of him it is always lines like those in the Tintern Abbey poem that come up to us —

...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,

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

I may remark, en passant, that Tennyson considered the phrase,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

the grandest line in English poetry. It is, at least, one of the grandest and as long as Wordsworth was alive to the feeling it expressed he kept in touch with his own genius and the genius of Romanticism. His decline started when he moved away from the two persons who were most responsible for keeping alive in him this feeling: his friend Coleridge and his own sister Dorothy. The mind of Coleridge, at once soaring and systematic, quicksilvery and mountainous, sensitive and poised, was a great help and so too was Dorothy's intense happy Nature-insight and highly imagina-tive human sympathy. An unfortunate series of incidents sepa-rated Wordsworth from Coleridge. Wordsworth was not physically separated from Dorothy, but his marriage with Mary Hutchinson withdrew him psychologically from her. Besides, he had always a dry intellectual in him plus a prosaic moraliser, and this part of his personality which had been fused with the visionary poet and Nature-lover in his early days got the upper hand as he became increasingly obsessed with his own importance as a Teacher and as

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he got further and further drawn to the Orthodox Christian Church after falling away from the beautiful blend of Pantheism and Transcendentalism that had grown in him from his own perso-nal mental-spiritual experiences.

The ideal of political liberty which had been like a golden flame in both his heart and mind, broadening his vision and sharpening his sympathies and nobly humanising his "sense sublime" of the Universal Spirit — the ideal of political liberty, he lost when he found that the overthrow of the old order in France by the intellec-tual and emotional earthquake of the Revolution gave a chance to a man like Napoleon to get the whole country into his grip and to menace the independence of neighbouring nations in Europe and even the security of insular England. Wordsworth became a stern Tory and a supporter of Puritan institutions: he even went to the extent of devoting several dull sonnets to the theme of Capital Punishment! His change of mind is a little complicated. We can, of course, understand his anti-Napoleon attitude. Perhaps the strong-est single factor here was Napoleon's treatment of the Negro who liberated Haiti from French rule — Toussaint L'Ouverture. Tous-saint is a figure worth a small digression. So I'll tell you something about him.

Haiti, also known as Santo Domingo, was a French possession in the West Indies. The influx of the new ideas about liberty, whose fount was the work of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists and Rousseau, was as much French as was the actual sovereignty that denied liberty to this colony of Negroes. So at the spur of French ideas Toussaint led an insurrection against the French. This re-minds us of what happened in our India. Our democratic inspira-tion, our desire to be free from British Rule drew strength from the same source — England — from which hailed the Imperialism that held us subject. With the growth of the English language in India there grew in Indian minds the liberalism of English political thought. It is Wordsworth who opens a sonnet with the thrilling phrase:

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

That Shakespeare spake...

Well, when educated India adopted the Shakespearean tongue, the seeds of the country's freedom got sown and the grave of

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British Imperialism began to be dug. India could say cheekily to her rulers:

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

Your Shakespeare spake....

There could be no possible reply to such a demand: all replies would be self-contradictory. France too of 1791, France of the Revolution, could not logically oppose Toussaint's insurrection. The new regime in the mother-country liberated the slaves. And then Toussaint reciprocated by accepting French rule and the office of Commander of Santo Domingo. But Napoleon, on rising to power, sought to re-enslave the colony. Toussaint resisted him, and with his small army of ill-fed ill-clad ill-armed Negroes he humiliated every force sent to subdue him. The pick of the French army he foiled by his military genius. Once when the French had driven his ragged troops into the hills, he had the brain-wave to make them sing La Marseillaise against the enemy. What French-man could fight La Marseillaise! The French soldiers were be-wildered and unnerved and Toussaint drove them into the sea. Not only was he a leader of extraordinary gifts: he was also a man of spotless character, the utmost integrity. To all lovers of liberty in Europe as well as to all admirers of greatness he shone out from the small island of Santo Domingo, a rival of quintessential quality to the great Napoleon. Napoleon who could stand no rivals planned to ruin him. All the more a cause of annoyance to the mighty Emperor was this Negro because he had styled himself "Bona-parte of Santo Domingo". Napoleon sent an offer to discuss terms, guaranteeing safe conduct. Toussaint who never broke his word put absolute trust in the Emperor's offer and went unprotected on board the French ship where the conference was to be held with the Emperor's representatives. As soon as he sat down at the table he was declared prisoner. Without any trial he was thrown into a dungeon near the French Alps, a dungeon so miserable that when a model of it was once shown to Napoleon he shut his eyes and ordered the model to be taken away. Toussaint was allowed to rot in captivity. Once his gaoler forgot to give him food for some days! Starved and chilled, Toussaint was found dead. Wordsworth was so moved by the heroism and martyrdom of this Negro that he wrote one of his finest sonnets to him, a poem ending with the immortal cry:

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Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man's unconquerable mind.

From his championship of Toussaint we might expect Words-worth to have strengthened all the more his old ideal of political liberty. But the growing resentment he felt against Napoleon led him to believe that a phenomenon like Napoleon would have been impossible if the French Revolution had not occurred and under-mined the ancient order of feudal Europe. Liberalism he saw as a danger everywhere, a potential mother of revolutions and a poten-tial grandmother of Napoleonic despotisms. So all liberal move-ments were to be checked and democracy kept at bay.

Wordsworth could not comprehend the paradox that was Napo-leon. All Europe was against the France of the Revolution. All Europe was planning to crush the new movement. Napoleon rose as the organiser of his country. France had initiated a liberal order but could not hold it together. The forces of the French Revolu-tion were in practice more destructive than constructive: they could make their hatreds take effect but not their loves get rea-lised. The slogans of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite were a divine music hanging over a human chaos. If Napoleon had not come with his Titanic genius and gripped the country for his own ends, the old Europe would have swamped the new France. Napoleon by compelling his country into a unity enabled it to stand against the united onslaught. By the endless campaigns of his military ambition he not only kept France going but broke the back of the opposition. The new France could thus have an opportunity to get organised as a force for the future. Sri Aurobindo, in an early article, has well hit off the role of Napoleon by calling him "the despot of liberty, the imperial protector of equality, the unprin-cipled organiser of great principles". A man like Napoleon is born to carry out a certain vast work: true to some unplumbed instinct in himself he sweeps on, careless of human codes and inhibitions: he can be egotistic and cruel, committing a number of actions which could have been avoided but were not avoided because the energy at work was no human consciousness but an elemental agent from beyond the earth sent in a human form to achieve a great end. Of course such an energy may outlive its usefulness and Napoleon did so and had to be eradicated. But he was not merely a colossal self-aggrandiser: he was a formidable instrument of the

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Spirit of Progress. And if Wordsworth had possessed sufficient insight he would have at the same time sung the praises of Tous-saint and recognised the Vibhuti, the man of a superhuman mis-sion, in the destroyer among whose victims Toussaint unfortunately figured. France herself had the needed insight, though uncon-sciously, and by putting herself under Napoleon's spell she got reborn, however imperfectly, as the home of the progressive mind of man, the centre of free civilisation in Europe.

Wordsworth, by falling out of tune with the France for which he had been so enthusiastic as a youth and by making a political volte-face, helped to finish digging for the Romanticist in him the grave which his loss of Nature-mysticism was fast preparing. The eighteenth century returned to him, and his sense of self-impor-tance hardly noticed the uninspired revenant, the ghost come back. Long-faced sermonising and flat philosophising, which had been visible without being predominant in even the grand days of his Romanticism, asserted themselves and they justify on a broad survey of both his early and later work the satirical sonnet written by J. K. Stephen. Wordsworth himself has an excellent sonnet, beginning:

Two voices are there; one is of the sea,

One of the mountains: each a mighty Voice...

Stephen sums up Wordsworth's double poetic character thus:

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;

It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,

Now roars, now murmurs with the changeful sea,

Now birdlike pipes, now closes soft in sleep:

And one is of an old half-witted sheep

Which bleats articulate monotony,

And indicates that two and one are three,

That grass is green, lakes damp and mountains steep,

And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times

Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes

The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:

At other times — good Lord! I'd rather be

Quite unacquainted with the A B C

Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.

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It is interesting to note that the central figures of both English and French Romanticisms were very flawed poets, superb on one side, dreary or windbaggy on the other. And the reason why so much of the dreary remains in Wordsworth and so much of the windbaggy in Hugo is the same: a huge conceit that led them to overwrite themselves. Hugo was a more tempestuous person, hence his conceit is louder in accent. Wordsworth was a more reserved man, hence his conceit is quieter in tone. But there is in both the conviction that everything they uttered was a revelation and that consequently the more things they uttered the luckier the world would be. The conviction came all the easier because in fact many of their utterances are revelatory. Hugo was the less mystical of the two and, from our standpoint, his revelations are the less precious. But to be precious as spiritual effects does not imply from the poetic point of view the superiority of these effects to others. As poetry, Hugo's less mystical verses are of equal value as Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey lines or the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. That is why the greater mass of excellent Hugoesque poetry makes its author stand very close to the sheer First Class in Sri Aurobindo's eyes while the smaller corpus of excellent Wordsworthian poetry keeps its author at a further distance.

The first of the two poems of Wordsworth just mentioned formed part of the book named Lyrical Ballads which came out in 1798, much before Hugo's splash into poetry, though not earlier than Rousseau's famous Romanticist books in prose. Lyrical Ballads was the joint work of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Cole-ridge had The Ancient Mariner in this publication and it was as organic to the new Romanticist Movement as that other of Wordsworth's. But Wordsworth was the more powerful, more comprehensive, more harmonised poet and he is the more central figure and it was his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads that constituted the first Manifesto of English Roman-ticism. Like Hugo's championship of common words, Wordsworth had his demand for normal speech in poetry instead of what had been practised in most of the eighteenth century, an abnormal speech trying to be poetic by avoiding straightforward and simple expression. You must have heard of Poetic Diction. Well, it is true that poetry has at times a special speech, words and phrases not easily usable in prose discourse; for poetry brings into action a

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higher range and pitch of vision and emotion than does prose, and certain subtleties and profundities and splendours of that higher range and pitch have a spontaneous language more delicately multicoloured or rainbowlike on the one hand and more richly dazzling or sunlike on the other than the spontaneous language of the philosophic or scientific intellect's conceptual clarities on the one side and common life's unchiselled simplicities on the other. But there is a true Poetic Diction and there is a false Poetic Diction. I shall illustrate both. But let me finish first with the fight over Wordsworth's innovation in poetry and over Romanticism in general.

Lyrical Ballads was attacked in the periodical which was then pontificating on poetic values, the periodical entitled The Quarter-ly Review. A very dogmatic and downright reviewer, one Francis Jeffrey, started to hit out even more in The Edinburgh Review when Wordsworth published his Poems in Two Volumes in 1807. How wrong-headed was the hitting can be realised if we observe that some of the best poetry of Wordsworth was slashed the most. Over the Immortality Ode Jeffrey shook his head and passed the damning sentence: "This will never do." But neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth was chicken-hearted. They went on in their Romanticism, and Wordsworth by sheer persistence created the new taste by which he and Coleridge subsequently came to be enjoyed.

Many, however, were the battles the enemies waged, and one of the fiercest was against the young John Keats. Keats's Endymion was torn into ribbons. Not that this poem was blameless. It had immaturities, and Keats was fully aware of them, but the imma-turities were closely intertwined with genuine poetic expression, and on the advice of his friends as well as on his own judgment Keats chose to let the poem go out into the world.

The bell has rung. So we must leave the classroom and also go out into the world — some of us, let us hope, like Indian Endy-mions, or perhaps I should more imaginatively say: "like Indymions".

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TALK NINE

The critic of Keats's Endymion in the Quarterly Review, for all his show of learning, might as well have been the young lady who has become memorable with the question: "What are Keats?" The ignorance displayed of the world of poetry could have been com-pared also to that of the old lady who went to a lecture on Burns and came back disappointed that the lecturer throughout shot away from the subject and, instead of giving advice on how to treat the effects of flame-heat or of boiling water on the skin, kept talking of some Scottish poet. Today we look far more appre-ciatively at Endymion than did the eye of the notorious Jeffrey. It is a wonder how the very first touch of the poem with its glorious opening line —

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever —

did not stir his imagination to sit up and take sensitive notice and get ready to respond to the authentic beauties that play in and out among the immaturities of that lushly lovely allegory.

If Jeffrey had possessed the slightest discrimination he would hardly have picked out for ridicule some of the finest things in Endymion together with its several lapses of poetic taste — splen-did things like the "Hymn to Pan" in which we find the Forest-Spirit addressed:

Be thou the unimaginable lodge

Of solitary thinkings such as dodge

Conception to the very bourne of heaven,

Then leave the naked brain...

Jeffrey could make nothing of this: all in his mental world was evidently conceivable and formulable, there were no gleams or shadows of the unknown and the mind-transcendent. Jeffrey even went out to criticise the choice of words. "Dodge", to him, was a most inappropriate undignified verb in poetry, dragged in merely to supply a rhyme to "lodge". We nowadays consider it a vivid borrowing from common speech. It is a word without determined etymology: nobody can say where it hails from. It seems to have neither a Latin root nor an Anglo-Saxon. But it is alive with the

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suggestion of quick yet skilful and persistent evasion or escape, and has in the present context a directness which is admirable. There are other effects of a similar kind in Endymion, but Jeffrey lumped them with whatever faults of taste he could spot, and he exploited to his own advantage the fact that Keats came from a humble family and was a Londoner who had never had higher education but was a mere physician's assistant. Jeffrey's verdict was that Keats the illiterate Cockney compounder should stick to his master's dispensary and not dabble in the making of poetry: the dictations of the Muse could not be followed by an intelligence fit only for the apothecary's prescriptions.

Jeffrey's attack was in such ferocious and venomous terms that all readers thought it would drive Keats to abandon poetry for good. But Keats was a tough little fellow who had quite a self-critical mind that knew both his own defects and his own finer possibilities: he never swerved from his sense of poetic destiny, any more than Wordsworth gave up his poetic career as a result of Jeffrey's "This will never do". A belief, however, continued that Keats's early death by tuberculosis was caused by the psycho-logical wounds inflicted by the Quarterly Review, and Shelley's elegy on him, the celebrated Adonais, is written under the impres-sion that he fell a victim to the malevolence of critics. Shelley, himself one of the pioneer Romanticists in England, had been attacked too, for his high-flying lyricism as well as for his sup-posedly loose morals: so his heart went out in greater sympathy to Keats, and his own resentment at the bitterness of non-Roman-ticists against the new poetry lent itself easily to the idea that Keats had been mortally hurt by the injustice and abuse of Jeffrey and his crew. Shelley also did not live long, but nobody could imagine he died of a heart broken by book-reviewers. The story of his drowning can, however, break our hearts and I shall not recount it to you lest you should drown in tears and make my lecturing impossible. To make you laugh is a safer course. So let me switch back to Wordsworth who could never have been suspected of having died from any Critic's onslaught, for he outlived all his critics and went on into a serene and even stolid old age filled with the acclamations of a new epoch of critics and crowned with the Poet-Laureateship. Nobody could say any more that in his Lyrical Ballads there was not a word's worth of poetry!

There was also acceptance of the contention in his provocative

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Preface that the worth of a word did not lie in its being remote from common speech. No premium was put any longer on false Poetic Diction. Poetic Diction is false when archaic words are unnecessarily dragged in, allusions to Classical mythology indis-criminately made, and roundabout ways adopted in order to avoid a common expression. Always to employ "quoth", for instance, instead of "said" or "spoke" is false Poetic Diction. In the eighteenth century many poets could not refer to the breeze except as the "zephyr". A girl could not be termed a girl: she had to be a "nymph". Woman had to be called "the fair". Sheep were "the fleecy care". Fish as human food entered poetry only as "the finny prey". And, as for rats, their mention was thought to be something like a hydrogen bomb which would explode to bits the whole world of poetry. They had to be brought in by a detour as "the whiskered vermin race". Suppose Shakespeare had subscribed to this me-thod: how would he have written Lear's question over Cordelia's death? —

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all?

Wordsworth swept away all the artificial conventions. But he went at times to the other extreme and became so bald in his diction that merely the metrical form-remained in his poetry to mark it out from prose. At his best he blends a naturalness with elevation and poignancy to practise a direct style which is almost unique. The other Romanticists were not as careful as he to avoid the heady effects of some of the springs released by the new movement. They fell into vague colourfulness or high-faluting volubility or a too precious artistry. But the revolt against pseudo-Classicism created room again for not only simplicity and straight-forwardness but also genuine splendour.

In the true type of Poetic Diction the words are meant to convey a sense of realities not ordinary, not accessible to everyday con-sciousness, or to bring out the inner nature of a situation with the help of highly-coloured or polysyllabic phrases which would throw it strongly upon the outer eye and ear. An excellent example of the latter purpose is in Shakespeare's Macbeth, in the scene where Macbeth's wife has left him with an injunction to remove the filthy evidence of his misdeed, the blood-stains on his hand after the

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murder of the sleeping King Duncan. Macbeth soliloquises:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

You might think that here is only a memorable purple patch. But you will be mistaken if you think so. The purple patch is organic to the idea: without it the logic of the poetic moment would be absent. Let me dwell a little on the meaningful artistry of these lines.

The unusual verb "incarnadine" is, of course, the centre-piece here. It signifies: "to dye flesh-coloured or crimson." It has a strongly melodious effect on the ear and creates a vivid impression on the eye. But its purpose goes far beyond all this. Macbeth has let his imagination soar. He has put, in rivalry with the bloodiness of his human hand, the power of "all great Neptune's ocean", and he has increased the audacity of his counterpoise by throwing into relief the greatness of the ocean with the help of the thirteen-lettered epithet "multitudinous": the challenge, as it were, of Neptune's washing vastness has been openly accepted by Macbeth in order to suggest the enormity of his own crime, an enormity against which the combined cleansing powers of the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans would not avail. But the suggestion would remain abstract — merely conceptually forceful — unless the enormity were somehow brought out to the senses and rendered concrete. He has made one side of the competition very concrete by the epithet "multitudinous": it must now be balanced by a concreteness on the other side. Only a strikingly big word with a rich resonance can prove competent to match that word in which the ocean-idea comes to its full. "Incarnadine" rises to the occasion with unerring success. We at once feel that the evil which stains the hand is vast enough to pollute with its indelible heinous-ness the whole world of waters. The logic of the counterpoise is complete and, as if to proceed systematically no less than to produce a surprise and to lay special emphasis, the order of the words is inverted and instead of saying,

Incarnadine the multitudinous seas,

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Macbeth is led to say

The multitudinous seas incarnadine.

The most important word is put at the end, effecting a grand finale.

When we have reached this grand finale we have illustrated true Poetic Diction, but not appreciated totally the artistry of Shakes-peare in the passage. Shakespeare could very well have stopped when his initial purpose had been served. Having accomplished what was psychologically required he could have done without the three-foot line which prolongs the sentence by a participial clause. Lady Macbeth who now re-enters does not even finish it with the remaining two feet of the necessary pentameter, and Shakespeare by omitting the clause would have got an obvious climax. We know from Ben Jonson's famous dictum that Shakespeare never blotted a word he had once written. But he never blotted anything because mostly he wrote the perfect, the inevitable poetry which called for no correction or omission. And here too, after having penned the three-foot phrase, he failed to run his quill through it in the interests of a resounding climax, because he was a poet-dramatist beyond the ordinary: his imagination had often a com-plex logic and felt at this place that while the immediate necessity of expression was answered at the end of the line couched in markedly Poetic Diction a deeper and subtler need remained un-satisfied. Shakespeare divined that, since the hand that had com-mitted the murder was a small thing in itself though its offence was tremendous, the implication of the tremendousness of the offence by an unusual and ringing polysyllable was not enough while treating the ocean-idea: the sea in its turn must somehow appear small and become capable of being stained by a human limb. Hence the sonorous is succeeded by the simple and, even as "multitudinous" was matched by "incarnadine", "green" is coun-terpoised to "red". It is a device that at the same time stresses more explicitly the colour-contrast between sea-water and blood and pulls Macbeth's soaring and widening imagination back to the reality before his eyes — to a mood expressing, without oblitera-ting his great inner sense of guilt, his desire to deal practically with the limited outer symbol and evidence of his crime: the stained human hand.

By the way, you should catch properly the function of the word

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"one" in the phrase: "Making the green one red." You may be inclined to take "one" as the noun to which "green" forms the adjective. All the force of the phrase would then be lost. "One" is itself an adjective and qualifies "red": both together connote "a whole, total, single, undifferentiated, all-through redness." A simi-lar connotation is there in Browning's

Sunset ran one glorious blood-red reeking into Cadiz Bay.

Another instance of true Poetic Diction may be studied from Keats. It too introduces the seas. Keats has felt, in the nightingale singing one night, the essence of an immortal music that has been haunting human hearts throughout history, a music that has also haunted not only the crowded passages of man's life but also far-away places and has often

Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

If you put "windows" instead of "casements" you do not disturb the rhythm by the non-poetic diction, but the spell is broken. Windows are too much of earth's daily life: the rarer word "case-ments" brings just the suggestion of remoteness and strangeness which could accord with "magic" and lead on to the picture of faery lands. Likewise, to substitute "dangerous" for "perilous" would be no rhythmic fault, yet the light of common day would at once be reflected by the seas upon the magic casements. A corres-pondence between-the former and the latter has to be maintained, and this is done, I may add, not only by the less prosaic word "perilous" but also by the echo of the letter p in it to the p which is in the present participle "opening" that shows us what the case-ments are doing in connection with the seas foaming under them. Again, the l in "perilous" makes a sympathetic music with the l's in "lands" and "forlorn", just as the r does with the r's in both "faery" and "forlorn". Further, the combination of r and l and s in "perilous" makes more liquid and sibilant music suitable to "seas" than merely the r and s of "dangerous".

I may mention that originally Keats had put "keelless" where now "perilous" stands. "Keelless" is good poetic diction and makes with unusual means the suggestion of seas that are solitary,

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over which no ship's keel has passed. A keel is the lowest timber-piece on which a ship is built, and in poetry the word "keel" does duty for the ship itself. "Keelless" coming with "seas" which are touched by the lowest timber-piece of a vessel is quite appropriate and would make the right music by its l-sound and carry on by its A:-sound the initial note of the hard c in "magic" and "casements". But somehow the long e of "keel" does not harmonise with the long e of "seas": it does not harmonise precisely because the very identity of the two sounds prepares us to think of a sea full of keels, so that to say "keelless" is to violate the logic of the poetic rhythm. Besides, the movement of the word is metrically flat: the seas seem to be undisturbed, an unbroken surface of water — a very apt suggestion in itself if the purpose is to bring home the picture of a sea uncrossed by any ship. But Keats felt that though the faery lands have to be forlorn their forlornness can be brought out without saying that no ships sailed over them: it can be brought out simply by saying that the seas were so full of dangers that no ship could sail. In addition, the natural movement of the seas is left unpictured by "keelless" and the visual hint in "foam" of the effect of the natural movement is left unsupported by it, even contradicted. The second and third syllables of "perilous" make with "seas" what is called a glide-anapaest: there is a "glide" because the "i" is half-articulated but the half-articulation is enough to create a tremble in the metre and import the vibration of the water. Moreover, this vibration answers in terms of metrical motion exactly to the vibration connected with "opening", the word with which "perilous" has already a relation by its p-sound. There too we have almost a glide-anapaest, for the word "on" which is usually unstressed carries a small stress here and takes the weight of the voice in the foot whose first two syllables are the closing two of "opening".

The terminal phrase "faery lands forlorn" is another master-piece of Poetic Diction. Not only does the slight unusualness of "faery" and "forlorn" make it so. It is also the inversion, the adjective "forlorn" coming after "faery lands", that takes us away all the more from lands that are not faery — and then there is the final drawn-out mournfulness of this adjective's sound, holding dis-tances of a poignant dream in it and dying away on a deep yet delicate bell-like note.

We may, with this note, await the far-from-delicate ringing of

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our School bell and, concluding our morning's literary luxury, return to the workaday world and our common natures. It will be in tune with Keats's own attitude to that adjective: for the very next stanza opens — a bit too self-consciously, according to many critics —- with the lines:

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self....

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TALK TEN

Last time we caught hold of true Poetic Diction with the help of Macbeth's seas-incarnadining hand and had also an appreciative look at genuine Poetic Diction through Keats's magic casements. Today we shall make a few more quotations. No, I shall not start commenting on them in detail — banish that wrinkle of anxiety from your brows. After the magic casements of Keats, Sri Aurobindo's gate of dreams will be the proper thing to show you first. The hour is of dawn-break, when the mind hovers as if on a meeting-point of the physical world and some wonderful Beyond whose secret seems to shine upon us for a while till common day glares out again. Sri Aurobindo describes the slow tentative pro-cess of light taking a revelatory shape in the dim sky:

A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That moved along a fading moment's brink

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

The Poetic Diction here unerringly communicates the reality of a phenomenon at once spiritual and physical — a movement of fire and ether, which makes all the more intense the strange and the supreme by catching up from the familiarities of earth-life the figures of hand and hinge and gate. No other kind of language would have done the work so well.

Before moving to the dawn-break Sri Aurobindo dwells upon the depths of the darkness. One phrase from the opening lines of the long account of those depths I shall cite as authentic Poetic Diction in another style. But I shall lead on to his phrase of mystical grandeur by way of some lines from other poets turning your eyes to the nocturnal sky with a more naturalistic and less supernatural touch, though with a grandeur poetically as memo-rable. Here is a poet named Beddoes speaking:

Crescented night and amethystine stars.

Just take in the picture for a moment. The crescent moon has grown, through the bold conversion of a noun into an adjective by a past-participial termination, a dynamic decoration of the dark-

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ness, a decoration which is not added to the darkness but brought forth by it as if from its own self: the night and the crescent are one fused presence. Also, the starlight is endowed with a precious magnitude by being not compared with the violet-hued pieces of quartz known as amethysts but packed with the very quality of these valuable stones by means of a majestic adjective. I may add that the adjective functions appropriately by its majesty: a short form like "amethyst" instead of "amethystine" would not have reflected in its metaphorical work the high nature of starry exis-tence. How poor, though not quite unpoetic, would the line have been if Beddoes had not kindled up to an imaginative synthesis and a sensitive insight but written:

Night with her crescent and the stars like amethysts.

Night in another mood, equally regal, appears in a sonnet-close of William Watson:

...and over me

The everlasting taciturnity,

The august, inhospitable, inhuman night

Glittering magnificently unperturbed.

That is a high-water mark of power and bears a semi-mystical suggestion. The word "taciturnity" means "reserve in speech", "aversion to communication" — it derives from the Latin "taci-turnus". which again comes from "tacitus" in the same language. "Tacitus" means "silent". A famous Roman historian has the name Tacitus — a writer of forceful brevity who, by not uttering everything, filled a few words with penetrating substance. Hear the phrase in which he castigated Roman imperialists: "Solitu-dinem faciunt et pacem appellant" — "they make a desert and call it peace." It was bold indeed of Tacitus to show up as destructive pretentiousness the ambitions of generals who were his own countrymen and contemporaries. The brevity of Tacitus had very often a bite in it.

The proverb goes that a barking dog seldom bites. Tacitus may be termed, because of his sharp yet controlled expression, a biting dog who never barked. Don't think there is any insult in being termed a dog. The term is not exactly a bit of true Poetic Diction,

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but if a certain beautiful wild flower growing in hedges can be called the Dog-rose and the brightest star in the sky, namely Sirius, can be called the Dog-star, surely Tacitus would not mind my doggy description of him — particularly as it is not quite far from his own kind of style. Besides, I am an incurable lover of the tail-wagging species, as an eighteenth-century practitioner of false Poetic Diction would have put it, and so my phrase is intended to be a tremendous compliment. I believe that if the Supramental fulfilment were not in store for humanity what T. Earle Welby has said would be the last word possible in man's favour: "The only incontrovertible argument for the continuation of the human race is that a world without men would be intolerable to dogs." And let us not forget that even the Supramental destiny which Sri Aurobindo holds out for us can be felt by us as a possibility if our imagination expresses the gripping Grace of God in a language reminiscent of the dog-world: that gripping Grace without which none can hope to be even within ten thousand miles of the Supermind can best be designated, after the poet Francis Thompson, as the Hound of Heaven, a Power which is all the time after us with a hound's tenacity in order to save us in spite of ourselves! More prosaically but still pointedly we may declare that we shall reach the Super-mind because of being dogged by divinity. And what is wrong with associating divinity itself with a doggy movement? Where we read "Dog" an Arab or a Persian who reads not from left to right but from right to left would say "God". More philosophically we may crystallise the whole involutionary and evolutionary process by the formula: "A dog is really a god seen from the other end." You see how easily we can plunge into mystical thought if we possess a dogged mind and can push into mysticism anyhow.

And now that we are back to where we started from after quoting Watson's "everlasting taciturnity" we may appositely finish our examples of true Poetic Diction with Sri Aurobindo's visionary penetration of the night's darkest phase:

Almost one felt opaque, impenetrable,

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite.

The last line is a masterpiece not only of Poetic Diction but also of spiritual poetry, a Mantra in the profoundest sense, words born

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from the very reality of the Supreme rather than found by the human intelligence about a superhuman condition.

Apropos of a special diction in poetry I may sound a note of warning. One should never go in for a rich attractive word without getting down to its meaning. One must never rest with guess-work from certain surface suggestions. There is the story of a budding poet who once read the word "carminative" on a bottle of cinna-mon. He was very much taken up with the beauty of the word and saw in it affinities to words like "carmine" and the Latin word "carmen" which connotes "song". He wrote a love-poem and sent it to his girl-friend with one line reading:

My passion carminative as wine.

The lucky lady was non-plussed by the new word and consulted her dictionary. Imagine her surprise and horror when she read that "carminative" means "tending to reduce windiness in the bowels"!

During my school-days I wrote an essay in verse on a Library and wanted to speak of the heaps and heaps of books there on diverse subjects. But I looked out for somewhat uncommon words for my idea. My dictionary gave me "mound" for a heap and I went from "mound" to other words and produced the couplet:

O there were mounds of metaphysical mystery

And poetry-piles and haemorrhoids of history!

I felt I had achieved the grand style, especially with the last phrase. I showed my work to my father who happened to be a doctor. He burst into devastating laughter and made me sink into the ground for shame by informing me that haemorrhoids were small bleeding boils so placed in the body that it would be difficult for one to sit down comfortably. It was the word "pile" with a sense other than "mound" that had made an utter fool of me. When I found "haemorrhoid" for "pile" I should have looked up that impressive polysyllable in my dictionary.

Talking of my essay on a Library I am reminded of two notices put up in a South-Indian library. One ran: "Loose dogs not allowed." The phrase "loose dog", which was intended literally, suggests half-jocularly half-contemptuously a person of lax mora-lity. The second notice, somewhat in contradiction to the first,

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said: "Only low conversation permitted." Evidently what was intended was a prohibition of loud talk, but in English "low conversation" signifies talk which is coarse Or vulgar, the likely conversation of a loose dog!

We Indians have to be wary of the traps of English idiom. Thus, outside a chemist's shop in Bombay, you will read: "We dispense with accuracy." "To dispense" means "to make up and give out medicines," but "to dispense with" means "to do without". A chemist whose job it is to provide you with medicines according to a doctor's prescription would be a terrible danger if he neglected accuracy. Sometimes mistakes occur by a wrong combination of words in a foreign language: two words that are clearly known by themselves may constitute a howler when wrongly combined. In the days when I was in charge of the Ashram's furniture depart-ment — yes, strange as it may seem, I had to furnish rooms with tables and chairs and beds instead of sitting quietly in my own and writing poetry — in those days I once got a note from a European but non-English resident: "Will you please send four wooden blocks to understand my table?" I wrote back: "Certainly — since luckily you haven't asked for four blockheads." Sometimes it is the pronunciation that plays havoc. When Pavitra¹ was here in the early days he used to pronounce English in a Frenchier way than now. His "r" was very French indeed. The French "r" is from the throat and to a non-French ear it may be almost inaudible. Now Pavitra said very often to a Bengali sadhaka who had become friendly with him: "I am a brother to you all." The friend always heard, "I am a bother to you all". And naturally he said with emphatic politeness, "Oh no, no!" and Pavitra would feel such an outcast on being refused to be considered a brother. He thought the Indians so very peculiar. You will find this story told by Sri Aurobindo in his correspondence with Nirodbaran.

The mispronouncing or mishearing of words in other languages has sometimes a farcical effect. The first Indian baronet was a Parsi, a man named Jamshedjee Cursetjee Jeejeebhoy. When he went to England he was invited by Queen Victoria to a party. A grandly attired butler stood at the door of the reception hall and announced the names of the visitors as they came. When the Parsi baronet arrived, the butler inquired his name. He got the answer:

1. Originally Philippe Barbier St.-Hilaire.

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"Jamshedjee Cursetjee Jeejeebhoy." The butler was a little puz-zled but he kept his aplomb and, looking at the Queen, announced in a loud voice: "Damn says he. Curse says he. She's a boy."

Certain mannerisms are also to be avoided. We get into the nervous habit of inserting "You see" or "You know" into our sentences every now and then. A lecturer could very well waste ten minutes out of his fifty by "you see"-ing and "You know"-ing. Another mannerism is "what's called". I have heard a great Bengali scholar in philosophy, now dead, use it with outrageous results. He once visited the Ashram and lectured on the progress of Indian thought in the world. And this is one of the sentences with which he developed his subject: "Then what's called Viveka-nanda sailed away and after many what's called hardships reached Chicago and there at the Parliament of Religions he at last what's called appeared." I simply had to get up and what's called run away in order to avoid an explosion of laughter.

I have quoted this learned professor as using the word "hard-ships". He used it correctly though comically, but I had at College a Science teacher who, knowing that a difficulty is a hardship, would ask about the text which we were studying and in which several points were often hard to grasp: "Have you any hard-ships?" Another misuse of the language, rather a creative one this time, was by a Japanese Consul who visited the British Consul without an appointment. His wife had done the same the day before. This Japanese had always imagined the word "encroach" to be "hencroach". So with the intention of being logically correct in English he bowed and said: "Sir, yesterday you were kind enough to let my wife hencroach upon your time. May I today be allowed to cockroach upon it?".

Often a foreign word casts a spell on us. The name of a vil-lainous character in a famous Russian novel is Raskolnikov. It has all sorts of sinister suggestions for an English ear. But to a Russian it is just. what to an Englishman would be a name like Higgin-bottom. A Russian once remarked that to him the most musical word in the English language was "coal-scuttle", which stands for a pail to carry coals in. All the more if we do not know a language well we fall under the spell of certain sounds. That reminds me in general of the magical effects of incomprehensible words. A name, in ancient thought, was a clue to the nature of a thing. In the Atharva Veda we find a Rishi saying: "O fever, I know thy name.

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Thou shalt not escape me." The practice of modern doctors, in order to create impressive authority for themselves, is to employ names not as revealers of the secrets of diseases but as dumb-founders of the diseased persons visiting them. They substitute a mysterious term for a commonplace one which all their patients understand. When the mysterious term is employed the patient experiences great relief as if he felt the doctor knew the occult evil causing the suffering and therefore possessed the power to deal with it. In a scene in a play of Moliere's we find this practice illustrated:

Patient: I suffer with my head,

Doctor. Doctor: Oh I know. That's Cephalalgia.

Patient: My digestion is also bad.

Doctor: Don't worry at all. I know what it is. It's Dyspepsia.

Now Cephalalgia means Headache, and Dyspepsia means Indiges-tion. The doctor, by merely employing Greek terms, brought instant confidence to the patient. By the way, if I did not know English and went only by my ear I should almost declare the most musical English word to be Dyspepsia and I would imagine it to be the name of a flower!

We have also to guard against certain peculiarities in the saying of names in a foreign language. Words starting with "pneum" do not sound their "p". "A-s-th-m-a" is better pronounced "azma" or "asma" than "asthma". Some English proper names are a devil of a problem. Thus what is written as Marjoriebanks is pro-nounced Marshbanks. What is written as Cholmondeley is pro-nounced Chumly. Once the well-known journalist Horatio Bottom-ley went to interview Lord Cholmondeley. Not being intimate with aristocratic nomenclature he asked the butler whether Lord Chol-mon-de-ley would be good enough to give him a few minutes. The butler politely but with a superior air said, "I shall ask Lord Chumly about it. What name shall I give him as yours, Sir?" Horatio Bottomley handed his visiting card to the butler, and when the latter was looking at the word "Bottomley" the journa-list said with great hauteur: "Please tell Lord Chumly that Mr. Bumly has come to see him."

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TALK ELEVEN

I find on my table two books that look like the collections of my own poems. Who has placed them here? Oh, the lady on the last bench? Well, what am I supposed to do with my own books? Do you want me to read some poems out of them? I don't know whether I can do so — but we shall see. All depends on whether I can show modesty convincingly enough and then overcome it entirely for your sake!

This morning I must be very very very serious to balance the light-heartedness of last time. I must be so long-faced that I can't even say, "Good morning." But if I said "Bad morning" you'd again start laughing. So I'll just keep a solemn countenance and mournfully sigh out the morning's goodness. But, really speaking, laughter is the most natural accompaniment of study in a Poetry Class. No doubt, Arnold has said that great poetry carries a high seriousness with it. But poetry's high seriousness has behind it a creative Ananda. Poetry, says Sri Aurobindo, repeats in its own way and on a small scale the original universal Delight with which the Supreme Soul created all things and set the cosmic rhythms going. Now, it should be very natural for Ananda both to smile and to laugh. Of course there can be a quiet or dumb happiness — a happiness which is ineffable. And poetry, with its burden of unspoken magnitudes, has to do with an ineffable bliss, but its work is to convey that bliss by means of wonderful speech just as the Supreme Soul is believed to have set the World-Word vibra-ting. And if sound is permitted — nay, demanded — in connection with the spiritual Ananda that is at the heart of poetry, a legiti-macy is given to express this Ananda by laughter also while we are dealing with the work of poets. Even the Gods are said to laugh — they who are the masters of the Spirit's Delight. Kalidasa charac-terises the whiteness of Mount Kailasa as the eternal laughter of a God. And Homer's Gods are constantly breaking into laughter over the follies of men. Aeschylus, one of the greatest of the Greek poets, saw Neptune laughing in that immortal line:

The innumerable laughter of the waves.

Sri Aurobindo's vision of the Kingdom of God does not banish laughter, though it agrees with the Christian notion that in Heaven

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there is no giving or taking in marriage. Perhaps it is particularly the absence of marriage in Heaven that makes laughter possible there — marriage is a pretty serious affair. Sri Aurobindo remarks too that humour is the salt of life. Well, it is at least one of the salts. There are many kinds — bathing salts, smelling salts, somer-saults. I suppose humour should be considered somersaulty!

Well, let its somersault land us back into our subject: Poetic Diction. Poetic Diction is not to be avoided like the plague, but aspirants to poetry should be careful about it just as much as about Proselike Diction. Otherwise they will perpetrate poems like the one that was sent to an editor, bearing the title: Why do I live? The editor replied under the title: "Because you sent your poem from a safe distance and did not personally hand it to me." I don't know whether this particular poet enjoyed the joke at his expense. But poets, as a rule, are not dull fellows. They have a fund of humour which comes out at times at the most odd moments. Don't you know what Campbell once did? He took his poem on the Battle of Hohenlinden to a publisher. Its first stanza runs:

On Linden when the sun was low

All bloodless lay the untrodden snow

And dark as Winter was the flow

Of Iser rolling rapidly.

After handing the piece to the publisher, Campbell whose head was still humming with poetry stepped out to the stairs but missed his footing and went tumbling down. The publisher rushed to the landing and asked: "What's happening?" Campbell shouted back in the midst of his tumble: "I, sir, rolling rapidly."

The line so wittily used by Campbell is not a piece of marked Poetic Diction. But it is a well-turned thing. And even very good lines can be written without Poetic Diction and with words of the most simple and ordinary character. We have already illustrated how even words like "shop" and "business" and "digestion" can be rendered most effectively poetic. But the majority of such miracles depend on a context of marked Poetic Diction , charming or dynamic . What I want to give you now are lines of a Prose like Diction without being prosaic, lines observing too an almost prose- order in the run of their words and yet achieving .poetic distinction because of a subtle power of rhythm and intensity of form which

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convey an emotion or an idea in a manner beyond prose. There is the line Shakespeare has put into Hamlet's mouth —

To be or not to be, that is the question —

perhaps the most famous question asked in all poetry. There is also the query of Shakespeare's Lear, which we have already quoted:

Why should a horse, a dog, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all?

There is Donne's impatient protest to his girl-friend:

For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.

There is Sri Aurobindo's line:

All our earth starts in mud and ends with sky.

We have cited Beddoes at a moment of high polysyllabic Poetic Diction. Here he is at a moment of ordinary speech, completely monosyllabic which yet is poignant poetry:

I shall see him

No more. All hell is made of these two words.

The poetic form which brings the two words concerned just at the start of the second line contributes to the piercing effect of this proselike poetry.

I have referred to a subtle power of rhythm and an intensity of form as differentiating such poetry from prose. Rhythm and form can be very open and evident at times and produce a poetry of marvellous word-music. This word-music is often produced with the help of Poetic Diction. But it does not necessarily depend on it. Let me give you some lines with a distinct musical effect. Herrick has one on music itself:

Melting melodious words to lutes of amber.

The musicality of Milton's

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And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay is undeniable. Sri Aurobindo's

O my sweet flower,

Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?

has a remarkable music, at once relentless and mournful in its mood. The hard consonants — the r's and d's — communicate a sense of relentless doom, while the m in "whelmed", pressed between two other consonant-sounds and involving a shutting of the lips, suggests the flood's dense massive flow as well as its absorptive power. There are other effects too, but perhaps the arrangement of the vowels, long or short, is the principal factor in the musicality of the rhythm. Their arrangement, in combination with the right kind of consonants, is also responsible for Shake-speare's enchantment of the ear in that verse on Autumnal trees:

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

The mellifluousness of the birds is brought by the repeated trill of the r and it deepens in the mind the pathos of the absence which is spoken of and which is rhythmically suggested by the moan of the n in "ruined" and "sang". The first spondee and the last spondee — "Bare ru..." and "birds sang" — play with their heavy insis-tence the part of beginning and completing the sense of an un-endurable burden of sadness. About the melody of birds there is another phrase equally musical — it is Keats's — where the poet speaks of their presence and not their absence:

And hearken to the birds' love-learned song

The dewy leaves among.

The words "bare" and "ruin" which are so effective in Shake-speare's line recur in one of Milton's, which has led a critic to aver that it is the most musical in the English language:

To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.

Nothing of paramount importance seems said here, though "Athe-

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nian" has considerable associations in the European mind. What confers poetic immortality on the line is its pattern of assonances and long vowels. There is no Poetic Diction present, unless we count the inversion "ruin bare" to be constituting it. Nor is Poetic Diction, except again by one inversion, at play in the second of the following two verses of Milton's —

And saw the Ravens with their horny beaks

Food to Elijah bringing, Even and Morn —

yet this line is a source of endless pleasure to the ear by its ringing of bells. In itself — that is, if we omit the work of the Ravens — it tells of an extremely commonplace act. But the rhythm breathes magic into it.

We shall pause a little. Since one of you has taken all the trouble to bring my books of poems here, I should not leave them quite unopened. What poem would you like me to read? Triumph is AW. Very well. It is the poet's Credo, his confession of faith. People believe in the Divine on the strength of the happiness they get or the beauty they see around, but that would be to depend on conditions and, when those conditions on which they have reared their confidence are shaken or removed, what happens?... This poet is an absolutist: he makes his position independent of this or that reason. He will feel and love and declare the Divine Presence in joy and sorrow, light and shadow, youth and old age, life and death. Now listen:

I build Thee not on golden dreams

Nor on the wide world's winsomeness;

Deeper than all I set my love —

A faith that is foundationless!

Not only where Thy silver steps

Twinkle a night of nenuphars,

But everywhere I see Thy heaven:

I love the night between the stars.

O mine the smiling power to feel

A secret sun with blinded eyes,

And through a dreaming worship bear

As benediction wintry skies.

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For ever in my heart I hear

A time-beat of eternal bliss.

White Omnipresence! where is fear?

The mouth of hell can be thy kiss.

The whole world is my resting-place;

Thy beauty is my motherland:

Sweet enemies are wounds of age —

My body breaks but by Thy hand.

Triumph is all — as though beneath

An unseen flag of rapture's red

A beating of great drums went on

With every giant drummer dead!

I shall say a few explanatory words, especially about the last stanza which may seem a little bewildering. In the first stanza there is "a faith that is foundationless"; this may appear disparaging to the faith, but really it strikes home by an extreme statement the absoluteness of the faith, its disdain of being erected on anything that may be regarded as its justification, its foundation; in other words, its raison d'etre is in itself. But being "foundationless" is not to be without depth: rather, all foundations are too shallow. In the second stanza we have two lines of Poetic Diction — the word "nenuphars" being the most notable instance of it. This word means "water-lilies". The Divine's luminous steps are pictured as kindling in the depths of the night the stars looking like water-lilies in a dark pool. The result — "a night of nenuphars" — is to be contrasted to "the night between the stars", the sheer darkness which too the poet visions as the heaven of the Divine. The verse,

I love the night between the stars

is a favourite of mine — just as it is of a friend who remarks that it has struck on an originality of substance brought out movingly in simple and common words uncommonly combined to suit that substance without yet losing straightforwardness. In the third stanza we get a hint of what this night really is. An inner eye that needs no proof of the Divine is suggested: a happy dreaming worship that can feel the Divine's splendour although the outer

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sight is lost in total darkness. Further, the arch of the sky is seen as a curved palm held over the head and even the gloomy sky of winter is felt by the poet-dreamer's worshipping face as if he were receiving a blessing under that curved palm. The fourth stanza has a poetic pun in "time-beat": on the one hand eternity and time are juxtaposed and the bliss of the former is said to be experienced in the movements of the latter — on the other hand music has always a "time", a certain "tempo", and since here something is heard in the heart the term is apposite to the idea that eternal bliss has grown the very sound of the heart. The sense of eternity-in-time links up with the "White Omnipresence" and the banishment of all fear, while the sense of eternal bliss in the heart connects with the feeling of the kiss of the Divine Love in even the crudest, cruellest and most calamitous touch of experience. I may mention for your interest that a businessman almost jumped up with pleasure on reading:

White Omnipresence! where is fear?

The mouth of hell can be thy kiss.

No doubt, he is an Aurobindonian, but such a strong response to poetry I had never expected him to give. Maybe his business was in a terrible slump and he had got into nasty holes and these lines cut across his depression, lighting up the fact that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were always there to help if one could fill one's mind and heart with aspiration for their Grace. Stanza five applies the idea of omnipresence concretely to the world we live in: peace and security can be felt in every place, every country, because of the enfolding and sustaining love of the Spirit, a love as of a mother for her child: there is the mother-suggestion in the use of the term "motherland" for the Divine's beauty present secretly in all parts of the earth. The two closing lines of this stanza apply to the process of time what has been just applied to the extension of space: all periods of one's life, even old age with its infirmities, become full of the Divine's contact, the Divine's gracious action. From "the wounds of age" as "sweet enemies" the transition is made by imaginative logic to the idea of death and there the climax is worked out of the poem's central theme: triumph is all. This theme recalls a phrase like "ripeness is all" in Shakespeare, which too is joined with the death-idea:

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Men must endure

Their going hence even as their coming hither:

Ripeness is all...

But the death-idea in the present poem is not necessarily confined to the actual cessation of life: it creates a symbol and the symbol is worked out by a paradoxical picture. Think of a band of giant drummers in an army. They are all killed and the flag under which they had lived and drummed has fallen also: Yet there is a victo-rious action: an invisible flag, red with the flush of rapture, is flying and beneath it great drums are still heard beating. This mighty miraculous drumming, in the midst of complete apparent defeat and death, symbolises the supreme achievement of faith. Note the sound-effect of the last two lines. The r's of "rapture's red" in the second line of the stanza are taken up in both these lines and combined with repeated t's and d's around n's and m's to build a sound-picture of resonant and insistent triumph.

There you are! I hope the lady on the last bench is satisfied. What else, madam?... Oh the word "madam" reminds me of something. I once told you that poetry goes as far back as the most primitive times as a natural expression of whatever means most to the hoping, striving, aching or exulting self in us. I quoted to you the Australian blackfellow's Kangaroo-cry. I may add now that we may regard poetry as the very first self-expression of man. Do you know what the first words of Adam to Eve were in the Garden of Eden? According to the Bible, Eve was created from one of Adam's ribs while he was asleep. What the Bible forgets to tell us is that as soon as he woke up and found her in front of him he bowed and introduced himself to her with the couplet:

Madam,

I'm Adam.

Here from the sheer beginning of human life you have poetry with not only reason in it but also rhyme. And there is even more to it. You may remember my pointing out to you that Shakespeare never lost a chance to be devilishly clever at the same time that he was godlike in greatness. Adam summed up in brief all the clever-ness to come in the tribe of poets. His small sentence is what is called a palindrome, a phrase that reads the same whether you

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say it forward or backward. Read "Madam, I'm Adam" from right to left and you will have the same thing as from left to right.

Perhaps the most famous palindrome is a statement put into the mouth of Napoleon. Napoleon, before he was banished to the God-forsaken island of St. Helena far out in the southern wastes of the Atlantic ocean, had been exiled to the frequently man-visited isle of Elba in the Mediterranean. This happened after the Battle of Leipzig, known as the Battle of the Standards because the flags of five or more nations were flying in it against Napoleon who had returned very much reduced in strength from Moscow. But, al-though he was defeated and put away on Elba, he was hardly the man who could stay put, as the Americans say. The explosive energy that was in him sought every chance to get out of Elba. And he did manage an escape under the very noses of his captors. While sailing under disguise out of the island, his boat was crossed by a British steamer. The captain of the steamer put his horn to his mouth and asked, "What news of Napoleon?" Napoleon himself answered back from his boat, "The Emperor is in excellent health." Yes, the Emperor was in high spirits and fighting fit, but his stay in Elba had altered a good deal of the European situation. A Bourbon had been placed on the French throne, the Army had gone over to the new king, the British and the Prussians had consolidated their positions. Napoleon, of course, made a great bid for power, took over the Army again and valiantly met the British and the Prussians at Waterloo. But to no avail — he lost the battle and his military career came to an end. Somehow Elba had prepared his undoing, it had undermined his ability. During his reminiscent spells at St. Helena he is supposed to have said to the British attendant there: "Able was I ere I saw Elba." Here you have a palindrome of seven words.

Now, if we have still a few minutes to go, I'll open the other of the two books on my table and satisfy you with one more recita-tion. Let me read This Errant Life. It is a poem written in a mood of half-dejection half-wistfulness. One morning the poet felt very much the pull of human things in the midst of his spiritual aspira-tions. All that attracts the heart of a mere man came up before his vision and he expressed the deep draw of it in spite of the tran-siency with which it is associated. But his spiritual yearning too remained. So he declared that the human cannot become the divine unless and until the divine becomes the human and answers

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as the Avatar the heavenward longing of earth:

This errant life is dear although it dies,

And human lips are sweet though they but sing

Of stars estranged from us, and youth's emprise

Is wondrous yet although an unsure thing.

Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness,

I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above;

Temper the unborn Light no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow;

For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.

The poem is simple enough not to call for much explanation. And your looks tell me that you already are familiar with it somehow. Oh you have been made to study it in the past by two professors? I did not know it had become as famous as all that. But Sri Aurobindo has given it rather high praise and it has been translated into both Bengali and Gujarati. It has, I supose, what one may term a poignantly profound sweetness. But by an irony of fate the way it was printed opposite its Gujarati translation knocked some of its high seriousness out by a printer's slip. I hope this mistake does not accidentally happen to be a shrewd comment on the poet's character: in the phrase,

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings...

the printed version misread "mortal" as "moral"!

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TALK TWELVE

We gave — before a bit of digression -some instances of markedly musical lines of poetry.

Now I want to recall you to the fact which my quotations prior to the musical lines may have served to spotlight — namely, that lines with no particular music can be great in poetic effect. Let me cite some more to render that fact vivid. I shall take instances picked out by a critic whose name I forget and I shall add one or two the critic seems to have forgotten. On several occasions we have drawn on King Lear's speeches. Here are three lines at almost the beginning of his speech in the midst of the storm on the heath. He is contrasting, in relation to himself, the unruly elements to his ungrateful daughters. After challenging Nature's forces to do their worst he cries:

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters:

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,

I never gave you kingdoms, called you children . . .

There is not much melody here, but the emotion very forcefully comes through and its especial means is the feminine ending of each line, the unstressed extra syllable falling over: the very move-ment of the speech gets charged with an emotion that breaks down with the completion of every significant phrase, and the breaking down occurs strikingly at a word — "daughters", "unkindness", "children" — reminding Lear of his own tragedy.

Wordsworth packs a world of pathos in the plain line about the old farmer Michael who, after a life of labour and loving hope, was heart-broken because of his wastrel son. No complaint did he utter, but often to the unfinished sheepfold, which he and his son had started building together, he went

And never lifted up a single stone.

The deep dejection of the brave man is piercingly imaged with masterly restraint through the fact that not even a tiny piece of matter could be raised from its dead passivity. And the pathos is intensified by the collocation of "never", with its background of long time, and "a single stone" which brings our mind to a pin-

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point of space: even though hours and hours may elapse, all their duration cannot help the doom by which an infinitesimal object will remain unmoved. A play of antithetical imagination involving the fundamental framework of physical existence cuts to our hearts.

Sri Aurobindo, in Baji Prabhou, grips us with many lines that have no special music yet are of notable poetic quality. I give a few from a speech of Baji himself:

God within

Rules us, who in the Brahmin and the dog

Can, if He will, show equal godhead...

A dog-lover, I feel a little hurt by the contrast which the dog will be understood by all readers as making to the Brahmin. But one is at liberty to read the contrast as one likes: Sri Aurobindo provides no direct hint as to whether the Brahmin is the higher pole or the lower. At least in South India at present the Brahmin will certainly be regarded as lower than the dog. I for one would adapt Shakespeare's Brutus and say: "Not that I love the Brahmin less, but that I love the dog more." So I would choose to take the two as contrasts in kind rather than contrasts in quality.

Finally, the opening line of a sonnet by Drayton:

Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part...

We have a mixture of the homely and the intense, a mixture of hopelessness and tenderness, and it is all the more effective because of the line's total run in monosyllables. There seems to be no fuss in the statement, yet a catch in the heart again and again. This double play is brought about, on the one hand, by the simplicity derived from the homeliness of the language as well as from its monosyllabicism and, on the other hand, by the stopping not only at four significant points — "Since there's no help, / come, / let us kiss / and part" — but also a little with each syllable since each syllable is a word by itself.

To throw into relief the poetic nature of all these lines, however unmarked they may be in musical rhythm, let me throw at you two lines by two famous poets. One is by Meredith: Arthur Symons thinks it the ugliest in English poetry:

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Or is't the widowed's dream for her new mate?

The rhythm here is harsh and halting without serving any purpose, and the expressions "is't" and "widowed's" are acmes of awkward-ness. The substance is itself not unpoetic, but the language is hardly appealing. If the dream were conveyed like this to the new mate dreamt of, he might run away. At least I would: I may be the widowed's dream but the widowed will appear to me like a night-mare through such a line. I have no prejudices against widows, unless my wife wants to become one — though I am not as fond of them as is a Bengali poet who is everywhere dragging in the word bidhava. If the day comes to an end, the earth is widowed of the sun. If a flower is plucked from a plant, the plant becomes a widow. I suppose if a banana were picked off a plate, the plate would be a widow too.

This topic reminds me of an incident in a law-court. The ac-cused, who had a pretty flimsy case, protested to the judge: "My Lord, I have not said a single false word. Everything I have said is true. I have always been wedded to truth." The Judge dryly remarked: "Very likely. But the point is: how long is it since you have been a widower?"

The second line I wish to quote for comparison with the truly poetic though apparently proselike is Wordsworth's notorious:

A Mr. Wilkerson, a clergyman...

Its rhythm is pleasant enough - a foreigner may even delight in its m's and r's and n's, but the sheer prosaicality of its meaning makes the technical chime and the metrical swing go waste on anybody with a rudimentary knowledge of English. It proves how humour-less Wordsworth could sometimes be, obsessed as he was with the momentousness of his own message.

Here I may touch on a point once raised by the critic Middleton Murry. He said that what offends us as bad poetry is not really lines like the one on Mr. Wilkerson, which is quite evidently empty of poetic quality. What offends us, in Murry's view; is falsetto. Falsetto means literally a forced shrill voice above one's natural range and we may in our context understand it as a use of poetic-sounding language to cover up mere fancifulness. One of the worst lines of poetry, to Murry's mind, is this from Stephen Phillips's Marpessa:

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The mystic yearning of the garden wet...

Let us reflect on the verse. Is Phillips indeed pretentious? The feeling that he records seems to have nothing false in it. When a garden is wet with either dew or rain, a fine aroma wafts out and if one believes that plants and trees are alive and can have blind longings one can regard that exquisite freshness of scent as the yearning of a soul-element in them towards some unknown Power — and especially if it is night-time the darkness itself may serve to represent the Power that is unknown. Yes, the feeling behind Phillips's line is not illegitimate. What about his expression of it?

I remember a passage in the French writer Proust expressing very well a slightly different form of this feeling. It runs: "The ecstasy of breathing, through the sound of falling rain, the per-fume of invisible and everlasting lilies." Here there is a wet gar-den in a darkness — the rain-washed lilies are "invisible"; but the ecstasy is of the man and not of the flowers. Where the flowers are concerned, the adjective "everlasting" transfers the man's mystical feeling to them, yet the flowers become not exactly practi-tioners of mysticism but themselves objects towards which the man's practice is directed: their natural aspect is shown under the shadow of the supernatural. And this transformation is begun by the presence of the rain which permeates them with a sky-quality and it is more intensely prepared by the epithet "invisible" which has not only the immediate suggestion of being hidden in dark-ness, in night, but also the remote suggestion of belonging to another order than the visible universe. There is also the piquant felicity of matching a sound with a scent.

Phillips, if his line is taken by itself, has no preparatory finesse: he just blurts out that the wet garden is mystically yearning. Proust's account is more delicately, more skilfully tuned: Phillips's is more matter-of-fact in its mysticism, taking miraculous things for granted. This mode of expression is not necessarily faulty: to put before us straight away an occult or spiritual phenomenon without any opening ceremony can be deeply effective provided the vision has been deep enough to catch the very pulse and posture of the phenomenon presented, and provided the expres-sion is sensitive and precise enough to convey the concreteness of the depth-vision. But Phillips thrusts into the phrase "garden wet" something more than it can hold. Merely by being called wet a

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garden does not come home to us as capable of mystic yearning. Hence the adjective "mystic" seems too facilely introduced: it does not get the support it needs in what follows: it remains a tantalising decoration instead of being a satisfying disclosure. Phillips's phrase, though beautiful at first glance, is found to be too much a thing of light-and-shadow surface when the promise it holds out is of a glimmering profundity. Perhaps Murry is over-critical, but there is sufficient truth in his remark to keep us aware of the obligations of poetic speech. Phillips stands convicted, even though we may not condemn him very harshly.

However, while finding Phillips guilty under the conditions im-posed by Murry, we must not fall into the mistake of passing final judgment on his line until we see it in its own context. Taken in isolation I may say that the somewhat vaguely pretentious epithet "mystic" should be replaced by the more general yet not intrin-sically less suggestive "nameless" — the only substitute which keeps to the idea of an attribute transcending the concerns of the natural world. Still, before we accept the version —

The nameless yearning of the garden wet —

let us look at the original line in the company of those preceding and succeeding it:

Wounded with beauty in the summer night

Young Idas tossed upon his couch and cried,

"Marpessa, O Marpessa!" From the dark

The floating smell of flowers invisible,

The mystic yearning of the garden wet,

The moonless-passing night — into his brain

Wandered, until he rose and outward leaned

In the dim summer; 'twas the moment deep

When we are conscious of the secret dawn

Amid the darkness that we feel is green.

This is how Marpesa opens. Idas is a youth who has fallen in love with the wonderful beauty of the girl Marpessa. She is wooed also by the God Apollo and has to choose between a mortal lover and an immortal. Idas has been restless through the night of summer with his own yearning for the perfection of Marpessa, a perfection

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worthy of even a god's love. But he has kept to his couch. Now in the darkness before dawn, a darkness of surrounding greenery, a poignant sweetness floats to him from the garden that is hidden from sight. Mark that, interestingly enough, Phillips too speaks of "flowers invisible", rich yet innocent entities kin to Proust's invi-sible lilies. Phillips, like Proust, prepares for turning his flowers into mystical presences: the only difference is that he pictures them as mystically yearning instead of being mystically yearned after. But this difference does not invalidate his introduction of mysticism. Besides, the word "mystic" is rather general, though intense, and if the intensity gets justified by the context, it can pass all the more easily and claim the excuse of generality. After the lines before this word, it seems a natural intensification of what is suggested by "invisible" just as much as "everlasting" appears such in Proust. And in the lines which follow it we have the "moment deep" no less than the "secret dawn" to lend it sus-tenance by a throw-back affinity. Further, all that is without is attuned to all that is within: Idas and the garden, sharing the same summer night, are permeated with the same delightful ache for a distant flawlessness, an unattained beauty haunting them. And it is the strengthening of his own longing by the corresponding sweet-ness and poignancy around him that draws him from his couch: they enter his brain and grow one with him and call him forth. What is outward goes inward into him and what is inward in him leans outward. And all that is both inward and outward not only supports the term "mystic" but demands it for its own revelation: the term lights it up and gives it completion.

Perhaps "nameless" may be still recommended as doing the needful without committing the poet so much. But note the metri-cal place where it stands. One syllable of it concludes the first foot, the other initiates the second. Now, in the next line, "moonless" stands exactly in the same metrical place. "Nameless", therefore, may be thought on a back-look to be a small defect disturbing the balance of the rhythm by imparting a sense of monotony to "moonless" without sufficient justification. Moreover, "nameless" in the full context of Phillips's passage is a little colourless, missing the focal point the vision requires. Perhaps Phillips, for all the beauty of his passage, is on the whole less poetic in substance than Proust, even less bold in his mystical evocation, but he does manage to ring true in that line.

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We may dismiss Murry's charge. Ladies and gentlemen, Phillips is acquitted. The case is closed.

I have brought in this discussion to train your critical faculty. When judging poetry you must look at it from various sides and seek for parallel expressions which may throw light on a particular phrase. This discussion is one of the many ways in which I have been trying to make you face poetic speech. Unless you learn to turn a thing this way and that, you cannot be said to have acquired the familiarity which, unlike the proverbial kind which breeds contempt, breeds deeper love, for our aim is to come to grips with poetry in its single intuitive act which has a myriad manifestations not only dealing with a diversity of objects and states but also displaying a many-sidedness of approach and manner, quality and source of inspiration. Shelley has spoken of understanding that grows bright, Gazing at many truths.

I want your understanding, which I may take as bright already, to grow yet brighter by coming into contact with more truths than it has done so far.

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TALK THIRTEEN

Last time I spoke of falsetto, something forced in sound-expres-sion, something that is not the natural body of a keen musical feeling. Falsetto in poetry can come not only when a poet indulges in polysyllables that have an imposing air. It can come even when he is monosyllabic and apparently unpretentious. Monosyllables and polysyllables can both be at fault and can both serve as a legitimate means.

We have several times mentioned them: Let us now ask: What functions in general do they perform? Some special func-tions we have already touched upon. But in general we may say that their functions are according to the nature of the language they derive from. Polysyllables in English poetry derive mostly from Latin and Greek which have resonance and weight. The work they do, therefore, is to vivify things in their aspect of stability and wideness and splendour. Monosyllables in English poetry derive mostly from Anglo-Saxon which has an intimate ring and a lightness about it. The work they do, therefore, is to vivify things in their aspect of mobility and particularness and poignancy. Of course Anglo-Saxon speech is not exclusively monosyllabic, it is dissyllabic too and can even produce polysyllables; but it does so mostly by combining a couple of words, either monosyllabic or dissyllabic. Thus in the Watson line already quoted,

The everlasting taciturnity,

"everlasting" is an Anglo-Saxon derivative while "taciturnity" is a Latin one. The former falls only one syllable short of the latter — it has four syllables as against the other's five — but evidently two words, "ever" and "lasting", go to the making of it — the first a true dissyllable, the second such by forming a present participle from the monosyllabic verb "last". And we see, in the effect which the Anglo-Saxon adjective and the Latin noun produce together, part of the typical functions of Anglo-Saxonisms and Latinisms. "Taciturnity" provides the weight and the durableness and the amplitude of the night-sky's indifference- and it does this with a suggestion of the inscrutable, the unseizable, because Latin words have an abstract atmosphere in English, something we cannot catch and examine with the outer mind. "Everlasting", with its

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greater nearness to our understanding, renders the taciturnity intimate to us so that, strangely enough, we come intimately to know how very indifferent to us the night-sky is! If, instead of an Anglo-Saxonism, a Latinism long in its singleness or by a combina-tion of two words had been used to convey the same meaning, we might have had a touch of ponderosity, an overdone and artificial effect. See how a wholly Latinised version of Watson's phrase would work:

The sempiternal taciturnity.

It is too stony. The taciturnity, instead of being a remote living presence, grows an aloof deadness, and we feel oppressed rather than awed. The pairing of an Anglo-Saxon word with a Latin gives Watson's original version its true grandeur. Some of the best English lines depend on this kind of pairing for their excellence. Shakespeare often uses even for the same sense two words, one Anglo-Saxon, the other Latin —as in: "the head and front of my offence."

There have been enthusiasts of Latinity and there have been extremists of Anglo-Saxonry. Leigh Hunt has written a condemna-tion of Latin derivatives in English and a recommendation for the employment of the Anglo-Saxon element alone. But the brief passage in which he has done so contains no less than thirty-five words of Latin extraction, making about one-half of the passage! This shows how impossible at present it is to sift the language of either the one element or the other. Barnes, carrying the Anglo-Saxon mania to its climax, believes that we should do the sifting at all costs. He rejects the Latin term "adjective" for a word showing the quality of a thing and suggests the Anglo-Saxonism: "mark-word of suchness." Degrees of comparison he would like to re-chxisten "pitchmarks", and quite seriously he tells us that "pitch-marks offmark sundry things by their sundry suchnesses." He also offers Anglo-Saxon alternatives to several words. "Carnivorous" must become "flesh-eatsome"; "butler" change to "cellar-thane"; "electricity" convert into "fire-ghost'; "criticism" be purified into "deemsterhood". "Syllogism" also is taken up for transformation. You know what a syllogism is. It is a logical process consisting of three steps — the first is called the Major Premise, the second the Minor Premise and the third the Conclusion. Example:

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A peacock has two legs.

A poet has two legs.

Therefore a poet is a peacock.

Of course this is a fallacy, but the form can be illustrated by it just as well as by a correct argument: besides, the conclusion though logically fallacious is not psychologically quite absurd. Now Barnes replaces "syllogism" by "a redeship of three thought-puttings".

The English language does not appear to gain much by this kind of roundabout awkwardness. But the pairing of a Latin with an Anglo-Saxon word is not the only happy result of the two ele-ments. Sometimes a number of Latin words more or less in succes-sion can constitute an especially expressive unit if this unit is succeeded by another in which Anglo-Saxon words make the whole sum or at least predominate. I have already cited the Hamlet-line,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

a line which gives us an actual difficulty in breathing by its packed stresses and consonants. This line is preceded by a predominantly Latinised verse which again comes after an Anglo-Saxonised one. The entire speech addressed to Hamlet's bosom-friend Horatio is:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity a while

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To tell my story...

The first line is direct and touching. The second has a serious sonority matched with a splendid smoothness and brings home to us by its temper and tone and texture the sense of the serene beatitude from which Horatio is asked to stay away for a short duration as well as the sense of the calm dignified Stoical resolve by which the staying away is to be accomplished. But the actual state of staying away, the suffering and sorrow which are the consequences of Horatio's refraining from the self-slaughter which would make him follow Hamlet out of the world - these things are not driven into us: they come in the next line with an intimate

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acuteness which is the special power of well-chosen Anglo-Saxon speech. In the fourth semi-line we have an Anglo-Saxon verb with a Latin noun as its object. This verb has a directness, that noun has a dignity. Both are appropriate. What Hamlet has done in his lifetime is no small or trivial matter: it deserves to be called a story and not a tale: "to tell my tale" sounds somewhat ridiculous if not quite like "to pull my tail"! But this story must be given to mankind in all its living glow and gloom, so that their hearts may be moved to understanding and not only their minds interested to examine the significance. The Anglo-Saxon "tell" has a straight-forward heart-to-heart emphasis which could not be bettered.

I may quote an instance in which the word "tale" rather than "story" is the inevitable expression. In Macbeth Shakespeare has some lines etching out a desperate pessimism. Towards the close of the passage Macbeth says about life:

it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

"Story" would have been quite in the wrong taste and spoiled the passionate contemptuous immediacy of the utterance. It would also have made a semi-rhyme with "fury" and brought in a sort of jingle entirely out of place in that moment of Macbeth's despera-tion. But the Latinism "Signifying" in the final two-word phrase is in the correct taste, particularly in conjunction with the Anglo-Saxonism "nothing". The long and impressive "Signifying" sug-gests the fullness that is spoken of in the previous line: of course sound and fury constitute life's tale, but there is a lot of them and the tale is long-drawn-out with empty noise intensely made, and this fullness without any point in it is hit off by combining the impressiveness of the long-drawn-out present participle with the blunt homeliness of the noun that is its object — the Anglo-Saxon noun "nothing" which serves as a fit anti-climax to the expectation raised by "Signifying". Reverse the places of the Latinism and the Anglo-Saxonism and see what a poor effect you get. If the verb were short and Anglo-Saxon and the noun lengthy and Latin, the intense and moving "Signifying nothing" would be replaced by the flat and almost facetious "Meaning a nullity".

I shall now point your attention to some other modes of kindling

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to the poetic wonder. Coventry Patmore — who perhaps has not received the praise which he deserves and which perhaps his very name shows him as desiring ("Pat more") — distinguishes the poetic phrase under three heads: piquancy, felicity, magnificence. And he remarks that the supreme phrase of poetry mingles all these qualities in various measures. Let us briefly define these terms. Piquancy in poetry is an agreeable sharpness, a pleasantly disturbing irritant, a sort of fine paradoxicality. "Felicity" is a term very often used for all kinds of appropriate poetic expressions. In a special sense distinct from what the other two terms connote, felicity in poetry is a strikingly apt delightfulness which does not stimulate as piquancy does but which, even when ingeniousness is present, causes a deep satisfaction with the keen beauty-part of the utterance. Magnificence is a power widening and enriching the vision: it has an overwhelming rather than a stimulating or a delighting loveliness, it is a bold lavishness though what is lavished is yet well-organised.

Piquancy operates its fine paradoxicality most often by a trans-ference of function between two things, achieved either in a simple manner or by a complex vision. Most directly it takes the form of an epigram with a puzzling point to which it comes from a certain depth of significance. A well-known case is Wordsworth's

The Child is father of the Man,

telling us that the psychological developments in our life have their origin in the nature of the temperament and the mode of inner response we had in our early years. It is a case of true poetic piquancy, for it is not there just to amuse or even dazzle: it sums up in a sharp statement a lifetime's continuity of Nature-love at once happy and reverential, a Nature-love vivified for us at the very beginning of the short poem where that continuity is put before us:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky.

The epigram is poetically piquant also because it is not involved in an elaborate cleverness overdoing the effect. An elaborate clever-ness is not in itself reprehensible: the seventeenth-century poet

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John Donne succeeds often by a curiously worked-out wit which is still poetry by being charged with a fine feeling. But I may here illustrate what piquancy should avoid being. I shall offer an example in which it runs riot, almost goes mad.

Sidgwick has imagined what Swinburne with his complicated and musically repetitive style would have made of Wordsworth's straightforward paradox. Swinburne would have excitedly pro-duced a sort of rapturously ridiculous riddle:

The manner of man by the boy begotten

Is son to the child that his sire begets

And sire to the child of his father's son.

At first look I got quite bewildered when I struck upon this. Working out family-relations is always a hard job for a mere man. Women are experts at it and I had to consult my wife in order to get the right hang of the branches in Swinburne's family-tree. It seems one can find one's way through the tangles if one fastens on the meaning of two expressions: "his sire" in the second line and "his father's son" in the third. The former signifies the man's father: the child that the man's father begets is the man himself in his childhood. The latter expression signifies the man himself: he is said to be the father or sire to his own child. Untwisted, the Swinburnian statement amounts to this: the kind of man whose father is the child that he himself once was is the son whose father is that very child of some years ago and this man is also the father of his own child. In other words, while physically a man is the child of his own father and the father of his own child, psychologically the child that he himself was is the father of the man that he now is. I hope I am not making the confusion worse confounded. It is much easier explaining what piquancy is than illustrating it a la Swinburne.

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TALK FOURTEEN

We have illustrated piquancy epigrammatic, both in its sober and in its drunken forms — or, more piquantly put, both in its Words-worthy and in its Swinburning manifestations. We shall now cite a less pointed example where the inversion of function which consti-tutes the fine paradoxicality of piquancy is illustrated with a more pictorial turn. W. H. Davies, a modern poet, speaks about the sea trying

With savage joy and effort wild

To smash his rocks with a dead child.

We would expect a smashing and killing of a child with the help of rocks. But that would not convey the vehemence of the hurling waves, the blind ferocity of the breakers. They are so blind in their force that although the child is already dead they are still bent on smashing it, and their force is so impetuous that it cannot feel spent or exercised on a small soft thing like a child's body but only on the hardness of huge rocks, and yet the means they employ is such that one almost laughs at the childishness that takes a child as a hammer to hit at stony opponents. The savagery is not only blind and vehement: it is also naive, without preconceived malice. This last aspect comes out in a verse of W. B. Yeats:

The murderous innocence of the sea.

Here too is piquancy, almost an epigram, but it is mixed with a strong felicity, a packed beauty verging on magnificence. We have clear-cut magnificence with a turn of piquancy towards the end in Sri Aurobindo's simile:

As when the storm-haired Titan-striding sea

Throws on a swimmer its tremendous laugh

Remembering all the joy its waves had drowned...

A touch of sardonic wit is in the laugh of the sea rising high all the more because of its memory of submerging very often with its mightiness the small happinesses of human beings.

In a line of Matthew Arnold's, we have three adjectives each of

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which may be considered as bringing in one of the three qualities, though not in the order given by Patmore. Arnold refers to his separation, real or imaginary, from a French girl named Margue-rite, a separation brought about by various unfortunate factors that are symbolised by the world of waters which he calls

The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

"Unplumbed" with its suggestion of depth on sonorous and dread-ful depth has magnificence. "Salt" carries piquancy in an unusual manner. To term the sea "salt" is apparently a truism; but, in English, "salt" means a lot of things. For one thing, it means "piquant" itself, as in the phrase: "a salty anecdote." It also means "stinging", "bitter", and it characterises the quality of tears. It suggests, in addition, the "sterile" and "frustrating", as in the line from Sri Aurobindo's early verse:

And salt as the unharvestable sea.

The piquancy, therefore, of Arnold's epithet lies in that epithet's signifying not at all what it obviously, superficially, literally con-notes. The poet here saturates the sea with a power of frustrating sorrow which, as the first adjective tells us, is profound, myste-rious, unmasterable. The idea is the same as in some other lines of Sri Aurobindo's early poetry:

What a voice of grief intrudes

On these happy solitudes!

To the wind that with him dwells

Ocean, old historian, tells

All the dreadful heart of tears

Hidden in the pleasant years.

Summer's children, what do ye

By the stern and cheerless sea?

Arnold's third adjective — "estranging" — becomes, with the combined meaning of the first two colouring it, extraordinarily felicitous: it has a piercingness beautifully presented. "Estran-ging" connotes alienating a person in feeling from another — distancing two hearts. The sea, a deeply mournful and embittering

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mass, has put a gulf between hearts that loved — it has washed away their intimacy and left them on two shores far apart as if unknown to each other. I cannot think of a finer, more expressive culmination to the adjectival inspiration of the line than this in-tense "estranging", with its sound suggestive of the signified sepa-ration by that voice-lengthening as well as semi-sibilant cluster of consonants — str — and that intrinsically long a. Neither "divi-ding", "disjoining" nor "dissevering" could have done the work with anything of the felicity brought by this word in several ways.

We can watch piquancy gathering force- and passing into a wonderful felicity in Dryden's characterisation of what we may call the pleasures of the pains of hell:

In liquid burnings or in dry to dwell

Is all the sad variety of hell.

If we go by his name, I suppose the poet himself would prefer a dry den in Inferno. Each of us is offered by him a choice. If you are in hell, you can always amuse yourself by getting out of boiling water which makes you howl and sitting on red-hot coals which make you scream. But wit is raised to a sort of diamond point of world-pathos in that second line, at once subdued and penetrating, tender and torturing.

Milton expresses the substance of the first line with some magni-ficence in one of his descriptions of the different regions making up Hell: he speaks of Satan moving

O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp.

Sri Aurobindo reaches an extreme of felicity with a piquant thrust in it when he comes to the third line in the following passage about the God of Love who does not hesitate to lend Himself to worlds of suffering:

His steps familiar with the lights of heaven

Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell:

There he descends to edge eternal joy.

"To edge eternal joy" is to render more intensely keen the bliss of paradise. Ecstasy is not sufficiently ecstatic until it can take the

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experience of calamities cutting like swords, and such calamities have no power to diminish the Divine's rapture that dares every-thing because it carries in itself the assurance of its own eternity as well as the yearning to impart itself to everything painful and terrible— the Divine's rapture that becomes all the deeper by descending triumphantly into the sharp hazards of undivine dark-ness. Perhaps we have a moment of magnificence capping a move-ment of piquancy in the two lines of a poem of Narik Lama already quoted:

White Omnipresence! where is fear?

The mouth of hell can be thy kiss!

The very name "Narik Lama", inverting the actual state of affairs, is an example of poetic piquancy — poetic in the extended sense of referring to a poet! And inasmuch as it gives the sugges-tion of a Tibetan monk, we may say the mere piquancy of inver-sion changes into the felicity of conversion of the quite unmonk-like and decidedly non-Tibetan Amal Kiran into what Shake-speare would have called "something rich and strange". If we start picturing the conversion — yellow robe, shaven head, monastic aloofness — we shall even see the professor-poet acquiring some magnificence, what I may term the magnificence of superhuman poverty, and fitting into the powerful word-painting we find in a verse of J. C. Squire from his poem Rivers:

And that aged Brahmapootra

Who beyond the white Himalaya

Passes many a lamissery

On rocks forlorn and frore,

A block of gaunt grey stone walls

With rows of little barred windows

Where shrivelled young monks in yellow silk

Are hidden for evermore.

It is an impressive and vivid stanza, not all of it reaching the perfect intensity but at least one line of it leaving us in no doubt that imaginative magnificence has been achieved:

On rocks forlorn and frore...

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We have also undoubted piquancy in the phrase:

Where shrivelled young monks in yellow silk...

Note the contrast between "shrivelled" and "young" and the support to the first word by the epithet "yellow" with its implica-tion of age and the support to the second by the noun "silk" designating the rich stuff from which the dress is made and answer-ing to the lovely quality of youth.

We may end our differentiation of the three kinds of poetic phrase pointed out by Patmore, with three brief examples from Sri Aurobindo which may fix each kind clearly in your heads. For piquancy, take:

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep.

For felicity, have:

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

For magnificence, accept:

I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.

The first line hits off with a profound cleverness the stupidity of so-called wise men where the manifestation of the Divine such as Sri Aurobindo has in mind is concerned. The wise men will chatter away, discussing the pros and cons of the Life Divine. I shall not be surprised if some of them, who may be married and harried men, turn round and say: "Why all this bother and exertion about the Life Divine when our urgent need is really the Wife Divine?" But even if they are not so foolish they will still be too much lost in intellectual hair-splitting and abstract logic to note the growth of God going on under their very noses. The only growth which they can note under their noses is their own moustaches. And perhaps there too they do not see that the moustaches are often shockingly untrimmed. Then there is the word "sleep". After their barren discussion they are contented enough to go to sleep — or perhaps each of them is already asleep during the logic-chopping by the others, and certainly all of them, even while jabbering away, are

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all the time asleep to the fact of God's increasing manifestation. The word "sleep" picks out with devastating brevity both the complacence and the unconsciousness of those who wag their tongues in a merely mental way about occult and spiritual pheno-mena.

If we look a little closely at the two parts of the piquant state-ment we shall observe a number of important implications. When God's growing up is contrasted to wise men's talking and sleeping we should understand that the former activity goes on in a great silence and that this silence differs radically from the quiet into which the wise men fall by slumbering. The difference is precisely that the wise men fall into a dark quiet whereas God grows up in a peaceful perfection of light: the adverb "up" is significant, show-ing the progressive direction of the evolving divinity, a direction opposite to the downward movement, the sinking and submer-gence of awareness, that is the sleep of the mere mind after its bouts of pretentious philosophy about things beyond its ken. I may also mention a touch of the inevitable, a touch of the sponta-neously organic in the alliteration of "God" and "grow", as if to grow up were an act of the very nature of God. The presence of the same vowel o, though first in a short sound and then in a long one, strengthens the touch. The only other pointed, even though not absolute, alliteration is of "while" and the opening word "wise" of the second half of the statement. This, together with the assonance the two words make by their long i, renders it subtly appropriate that God's growth should take place during the period when talking and sleeping are carried on by wise men.

So much for the piquant line. We have not time enough for the others this morning. We shall deal with them on the next occasion. In the few minutes left, I may set right whatever disparagement of wives was there in the dissatisfaction I hinted the wise men as having with their spouses. Lest you should think they felt the need of the Wife Divine because wives fall short badly, I would like to attest that there are many good partners to men — wives who are devoted companions, wonderful home-managers, worthy respec-ters of their husbands' rights: they can be so scrupulous as never even to open letters addressed to their husbands' names — unless, of course, the letters are marked "Private". We must give every-body their due.

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TALK FIFTEEN

Like the bell that has called us to the commencement of our class, a deeply melodious ring starts the felicity of phrase in Sri Aurobindo's

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

Before I say anything, let me observe that it is uncertain whether Sri Aurobindo means a capital G in the seventh word. It may prove on manuscript evidence that a small g is intended. Then a generalisation would be made, pointing to the realm or plane of the many divine cosmic workers whom the one Supreme Divinity has put forth as expressions of His various powers. Not the Supreme Divinity directly but any spiritual entity that comes as a representative of Him with an ability far beyond the human or that of any occult being who is not the immediate image of the Highest in one or another aspect of Him — such would be the suggestion of a small g. What we would have is the sense of godly or godlike. The difference would be that God is spoken of in a broad connota-tion instead of in a specific one. But since there would be nothing short of the godly or godlike we may for the practical purposes of poetic elucidation and appreciation proceed on the basis of the current reading of a capital G. There will be no essential impreci-sion in the drift of our comment.

A grand announcement is made by Sri Aurobindo with a con-trolled power of musical language. But the line is felicitous not only because it is beautifully moving in a poised potent way: it is felicitous also because it has a subdued piquancy exquisitely held in the contrast between "AH" and "touch". It says that everything is possible — and the omni-possibility is said to be compassed by nothing more than a touch of God: one finger of light brought by the hand of His Grace can dissolve adamantine difficulties, ages of massive darkness. And observe how the vowel-quantities help out the significance. The smallness required of the miraculous agency is conveyed by the short though stressed vowels in "God-touch" —, while the bigness of what is miraculously conquerable is there in the long stressed vowel of "AH". But the conquest of the appa-rently big by the apparently small is shown by the stressed yet short vowel of "done" which anticipates and prepares the quanti-

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ties of "God-touch". And a further expressiveness is achieved by the repetition, in "touch", of the very sound that is short in "done". We may even see the intuitive work of the poet's art in the fact that the same sound which is long in "All" is repeated in a short form in "God" as if to render the latter word capable, in its own terms, of matching the former whose meaning is to be met and coped with by its meaning.

If there is any line in European literature of which I am most reminded, both as regards sound and substance, by this of Sri Aurobindo's, it is Dante's famous

E'n la sua volontade e nostra pace.

Sri Aurobindo's line rivals Dante's as well as being affined to it in what I may call the art no less than the heart. Before I proceed, let me tell you that in Italian the c is always ch (while ch is always k) and the e is always pronounced when it is an end-vowel, except when it gets merged in another vowel immediately following it. To begin the comparison: there is here also the note of a deeply melodious bell, though now with l's as well as n's, in the opening: "E'n la sua volontade". Literally, the whole line may be Eng-lished: "And in His Will is our peace." Such a translation has an admirable directness, but the majesty of the original is absent. And absent too is the note we have spoken of. To catch this note as well as something of the polysyllabism which gives the Italian that majesty, a translator has written:

His Will alone is our tranquillity.

An excellent line, this, but a little different in its total effect from Dante's. It has the resonance, yet not the directness of the ori-ginal. And the sense of cessation of unrest brought by the s and ch sounds of "nostra pace" is lacking. I think this sense will come out if we write:

His Will alone is our serenity.

Then we shall have three sibilances — those in "His" and "is" and "serenity" — answering to the three related sounds, sibilant or semi-sibilant, of the Italian "sua" and "nostra" and "pace". Going back to Sri Aurobindo's line, I may draw your attention to the fact

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that my comparison of it with Dante's in the original does not end with the bell-rhythm. The s and ch of "nostra pace" are also almost exactly present here, though in a reverse order, in "touch" and "is".

So much for the art of the two lines. What about the heart? I suggest that the same heart is in both, approached and traversed from two opposite sides. In the Dante line we may read a profound faith in the rightness of God no less than in His almightiness - against which nothing can prevail. Only God's- Will is the ultimate determinant, and whatever He wills is right. A full acceptance of His omniscient decisions, a total surrender to His omnipotent acts - in short, an utter love which wants nothing except what He in His wisdom and power gives - is the sole road to attaining peace. This means a humility before the afflictions and adversities of life, a resignation to the blows of circumstance, a devotion that never doubts in the midst of doom - because all unpleasant happenings are seen to be the workings of God's inscrutable hand which nothing can stop and which even through the worst has to be taken as doing the best for us. To illustrate most acutely what is meant, we may look at a stanza from a French poem of the sixteenth century, Malherbe's celebrated Consolation a M. du Perrier sur la Mort de sa Fille. In this stanza, which is the final one, Malherbe, after saying that the rich and the poor alike are subject to the law of Death, La Mort, tells the grieving and inconsolable father:

De murmurer contre elle et perdre patience

Il est mal a propos;

Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science

Qui nous met en repos.

In the last two lines we have Dante's simplicity of penetrating intuitiveness transposed into a moving clarity typical of French verse at its finest. John Chadwick whom we Aurobindonians know as Arjava has rendered Malherbe most sensitively throughout the poem and especially in the closing verse (where the pronoun "her" in his version refers, of course, to Death):

Impatient murmur or embittered turning

Against her, deem not best;

Save willing the thing God wills, no other learning

Shall bring us to our rest.

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The religious quality recommended is a mixture of what Indian Yoga terms samata, sraddha and bhakti, a mixture of equanimity, faith and devotion to be practised vis-a-vis all occurrences and conditions; and the result is spiritual calm. Sri Aurobindo's line also involves God's Will, for it speaks of things being done with the help of the God-touch and wherever there is a conscious doing there is will. Here too we have the idea that God's Will is almighty and that it is the most right force — yes, right, since surely the "AH" that can be done is not anything mean or cruel or depraved: Sri Aurobindo is not saying. "You can succeed in being a thorough devil if you call God's touch to your aid." The thing which ought to be done, the action which would lead to the true, the beautiful, the good is intended — though not in a conventional sense which shies away from the bold, the grim, the stormy — and we are told that no matter how difficult or impossible-seeming such right action may be, we shall be victorious by having on our side the power of God in even a small measure. But the lightness and the power of God are visioned here primarily not as the establishers of things as they are: they are visioned primarily as the changers of established things. Of course, God is both. He has brought forth an imperfect universe, but only in order to make it perfect. And, since He has brought it forth, even in the most imperfect state of affairs His Will towards perfection must be at work, so that what-ever imperfection is present is perfectly in place and carries His Will in itself. The universe therefore is a paradox. It is at the same time God's Will manifest already and a mass of difficulties and darknesses in which this Will has to manifest progressively and create bliss and light. A single truth with two faces is before us and the Dante-line shows one face which has to be seen if we are to achieve spiritual peace and the line of Sri Aurobindo shows the other face which must be seen if we are to transform earth-existence into the Life Divine.

Even Death need not be accepted as an irrevocable decree of God. Just as ignorance in the mind has to be removed, just as misery in the emotional being has to be abolished, just as incapa-city in the life-force has to be eradicated, so also death in the physical form has to be conquered. "A tall order," the sceptic may sneer — but to grant that God's perfection awaits to be manifested is logically to imply this extreme triumph, though the triumph can be got only after a colossal travail. An unavoidable part of the

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instrument for that triumph is "willing the thing God wills" and taking with love the varied operations of the Universal Spirit in its drive through our little likes and dislikes. Then only can we build on a solid foundation — the foundation of a supreme peace — the hope and aspiration and effort of transfiguring the scheme of the universe with the fiat of the Transcendent Spirit that awaits with its archetypes to remould man and evolve even in man's body the Immortal. So we may bring the Aurobindonian idea to some kind of expository focus of relation with the Dantesque by picking up again in verse the theme of Death from Malherbe's poem and writing over against Arjava's translation of his final stanza the following:

Impatient murmur nor embittered turning

Against Death wins escape:

Only the God-touch on man's body burning

Calls forth the immortal shape.

(The use, as here, of "nor" in poetry confers the negative on what precedes no less than on what follows. The sense in the above is that we certainly have to start with the Dantesque attitude: we must stand imperturbable, since neither complaint nor resentment can free us from mortality. The sole help lies in receiving the luminous touch of God more and more upon our physical sub-stance and converting the clay-sheath into the concealed divine original of it.)

Now for a few words on the magnificence of that third line from Sri Aurobindo:

I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.

I must clear immediately a possible misunderstanding. In the very first Talk I described the poet as, among other things, a dreamer. I meant that the poet looks beyond the actual and thrills to a hidden perfection, to the Transcendent Spirit's veiled archetypes and to the Universal Spirit's secret omnipresent beauty. God the Dream in this sense must never be rejected and should be cherished if God the Fire is to come into play. In fact, the two are fused — and in poetry itself the reverie and the realising rapture are indis-

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soluble. Has not Gerard Manley Hopkins characterised the very activity of the poetic imagination as deriving from this rapture, in that phrase of his? -

Sweet fire, the sire of Muse...

The Dream against which Sri Aurobindo makes his Savitri pit herself is an indulgence in high visions accepted as wonders that cannot take birth — wonders about which he writes:

Behold this fleeting of light-tasselled shapes,

Aerial raiment of unbodied gods;

A rapture of things that never can be born...

Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom

Leans sweetly, sweetly is clasped or sweetly chased...

The mysticism which Sri Aurobindo-proclaims through Savitri's lips is a dynamic mysticism opposed to lying content with a Divine Perfection shining in some ever-aloof ether, a beautiful but issue-less splendour. It holds God to be a power of self-effectuation in the world of men, not merely a Light but also a Fire, the Truth that conquers by consuming our imperfections. Nor is the Fire-idea confined to the Power-aspect of God. Dreams such as Savitri abjures have a far-awayness that can never be palpable to the heart. Fire is the very inhabitant of the heart — nay, it is the heart's own substance. When God is Fire, He is an intense inti-macy — a supreme Love close and all-consummating. With His centre in the seat of longing, He becomes a rapture that can radiate forth into the physical World and make it rich with a wide and wonderful communion, a manifold infinite oneness. To approach and call into ourselves and treasure as our xielight a Godhead conceived and felt as what Patmore in a magnificent phrase of his own has termed a "crimson-throbbing Glow" - to do this is to make possible God's incarnation in each of us, to do this is to bring the God-touch that can do all and to help God grow up in the midst of the foolish wise men of the world. Thus Sri Aurobindo's magnificence· of phrase reveals the pure yet passionate Yoga that is the secret of the irresistible divine potentiality asserted by his felicity of phrase and the ground of the spiritual evolution that his piquancy of phrase prophesies.

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We may close with two points about the technique of the line. First, the three parts of the verse — "I cherish/God the Fire,/not God the Dream/" — are held together in a subtle roll of continuity by the occurrence of r in each. Secondly, the word "cherish" is most effectively in tune with the positive content of the statement carried by the word "Fire" as distinguished from the negative content in the word "Dream". For, "cherish" means, according to the Oxford Dictionary, not only to nurse, foster, cling to, hold dear but also to keep warm — and its very sound suggests the peculiar substance and activity of fire: the rich delicacy that is a scorching softness, the childlike quiver that is a rapture-rush.

As a Parsi, I find Sri Aurobindo's magnificent phrase especially appealing. The Parsis are known as Fire-worshippers. Their temples hold God's presence in the symbol of Fire. Day and night, the flames are fed on sandalwood and what burns in every Parsi temple today is a fire lit from the one which the Parsis brought, guarded most loyally, most lovingly, from Iran when the Arabs overran that country and threatened to kill or convert. The faithful few sought refuge in India after toiling across the sea in small boats, cherishing God the Fire. And this beloved glory had come through long ages of sandalwood-sustained force from the great golden presence kindled by the prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster to the Greeks) in remote antiquity. The self-same Fire that was set burning thousands of years ago has burned without a moment's cessation right up to this day, thanks on the one side to the zeal of the Zarathustrians and on the other to the tolerance of the Hindu faith that sees a myriad ways to reach the Divine and finds no way alien to its own essence. And perhaps it is because the Parsis made their home in the midst of India's multi-minded aspiration and realisation that they have developed a receptivity to all kinds of cultures — easily assimilating various values, eastern or western — and that some of them have become Aurobindonians as if they were born to be such.

It may be interesting to remember that at two points of history Zarathustrianism had the possibility of becoming in some form or other the religion of Europe. Darius the Great of Persia invaded Greece and fought her armies at Marathon in the very heart of their country, but suffered a defeat. After his death, his son Xerxes led another attack, cut down the heroic Spartans at Ther-mopylae, conquered Athens itself and offered it to God the Fire,

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yet with its blaze behind him he met with a check in the naval battle at Salamis and had to retire from Greece. If the tide of war had moved a little differently and Greece had fallen to the Per-sians, the rest of south-eastern Europe would have been at their mercy. Then, according to scholars like Max Muller, Zarathus-trianism rather than Judaeo-Christianity would have been pro-gressively the prevailing religion of Europe and finally also America. Fire-temples would have sprung up where now Churches abound.

Even after the setback to the military and imperial ambition of Darius and Xerxes, there arose the prospect of the West turning Zarathustrian. The old religion in the new garb of Mithraism — the cult of the Iranian Sun-god Mithra akin to the Vedic Mitra — grew a keen rival to early Christianity. Mithraism spread Fire-worship wherever it went. And by its dynamic character it appealed to the Romans. The Roman soldiers took Mithra as their deity and carried his cult to all the countries subjugated by the legionaries. Recently a temple of Mithra was unearthed in the heart of London! This shows how far and wide was the establish-ment of Fire-worship at the time when Christianity was struggling for a hold on the minds of men. Mithraism ran neck and neck with the new creed and, if some of the Roman Emperors had not been converted to Christianity and stamped out all other cults, what had remained undone by Darius and Xerxes would still have come to pass.

Would the West have been vastly different as Zarathustrian rather than Judaeo-Christian? At least with regard to theology and the ethical code, Dr. Spiegelberg does not think so. He believes that much of Judaeo-Christianity itself is Zarathustrian in origin. Some points of important affinity are quite clear between the ancient religion of Iran and the Christianity that flourished later. The former, like the latter, believed in a loving Father-God who is omniscient and concerned with His children's welfare. Zarathu-shtra, though not considered the unique Son of God, was yet regarded as God's messenger par excellence on earth and, like Jesus, was said to have been born miraculously of a sexless con-ception. The righteous were asked to look forward to "the King-dom of God". There was sharp prolonged conflict between God and Satan and there were the regions of Light and Darkness, Heaven and Hell, for the future life of human beings. Angels and

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demons were ranged on opposite sides. Also, there was to be a final resurrection of the dead similar to what is envisaged in the Christian Bible. The general mind of the West in its religious outlook would have been the same as now.

Would poetry have differed greatly? Shakespeare is little con-cerned with religion; so he could not have been unShakespearean in the essence of his poetry without Christianity. Dante's Divine Comedy would have changed in details but the broad scheme, except for his "Purgatory", would have remained identical in the spirit of its theology and in its picture of the Hereafter. (The very word Paradiso derives from the Persian Pairidaeza.) Milton too would have written of the war between God and Satan, angels and devils, though the story of the Garden of Eden might have differed. Goethe also would have thought of his Mephistophiles the Devil tempting Faust.

We are thinking of might-have-beens. As things are, ho more than a lakh of people survive to follow in the most literal sense God the Fire. In their own homeland, their glory is as good as extinguished. Well does Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam lament with both piquancy and felicity:

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

The Court where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:

And Bahram, that great Hunter — the Wild Ass

Stamps o'er his head, but cannot break his sleep.

The theme of the Fire-worshippers has attracted several English poets. In the hills of Persia they were known in Moslem times as Guebres or Gebirs, and Landor has a long poem on one of them. Moore has versified a story about a Fire-worshipper who was hounded by the fanatics of Allah, and in his poem are words that can apply not only to the Zarathustrian remnants in Persia but also to the Parsis of India:

Is Iran's pride then gone for ever,

Quenched with the flame in Mithra's caves?

No — she has sons that never, never

Will stoop to be the Moslem's slaves,

While heaven has light or earth has graves!

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But, though Moore says that Iran's surviving sons will never sub-mit to the Moslems, he nowhere puts a bar to their Indianising themselves and surrendering to India's greatest spiritual figure and becoming devotees of the Master who has written the poignant poem called Bride of the Fire, the splendid poem named Bird of Fire, the book of Vedic translations entitled Hymns to the Mystic Fire and put into the mouth of Savitri the magnificence of the line that has fired me to all this heated digression.

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TALK SIXTEEN

Early this morning I ran across one of our students, who had been absent last time. I naturally said, "How are you keeping?" It was a minute later that I thought I should have put the question in the typical South-Indian way. In South India many English-fancying people fuse several phrases into one and ask: "How are you, I hope?" And the general answer is: "Somewhat, I am afraid." Don't ask me to explain these compact sentences. But surely I can appreciate their piquancy. I'll tell you some other things also, equally worth remembering.

Once at a railway station a chap was trying to enter a crowded third-class carriage. He had all sorts of bundles under his arms and an umbrella slung over his shoulder and there dangled from one hand a cage with a parrot in it. Somebody who had secured a place near the carriage-entrance tried to dissuade him from inflicting such an assortment of luggage plus himself on the already bursting compartment. The man with the parrot-cage got indignant and exclaimed: "You think you are a who?" Immediately the other fellow retorted: "Well, if I am a who, then you are a no doubt!" I am sure the squabblers understood each other and we can also intuit the drift of their squabble. Perhaps some day these delicious Indianisms will get into the English language.

And why not? English has several oddities of its own already and Americanisms are fast making headway. At least many Indian words have become current coin in England. There is, chief of all, the great word "Avatar". In English it has come to connote not only an incarnation of God but also, in a general sense, a manifestation or display as well as a phase. I can speak of somebody's business-avatar, meaning that personality of his which tackles business. One can also speak of Yeats's two avatars as a poet — his early phase and his later. There is then the word "bobbery" in English meaning "disturbance, row, fuss", from the Hindi "Bap-re" — "O father!" (an interjection of dismay). The word "bungalow", meaning a lightly built one-storeyed or temporary house, comes from the Indian "bangla" meaning "belonging to Bengal". "Cot", a light bedstead, is the Indian "khat". "Cushy", standing for "easy, pleasant, comfortable", is the Indian "khush" ("pleasant"). Occasionally an Indian word entering English re-tains its exact original form but undergoes a change in pronuncia-

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tion or accent. Thus when an Englishman of Oxford says "Parsee" he makes an actual Parsi sit up and take notice, because the name falls a little oddly on his ear with the Englishman's lengthen-ing of the second syllable and his accent on it. Similarly, Buddha becomes "Booda", accented on the first syllable and with the double o pronounced short as in "book".

I have wondered whether "veranda" is an Indian word. My dictionary gives it a Portuguese origin. But it is common across the length and breadth of India. Mentioning it, I am reminded of some provincial peculiarities here in pronouncing English. In Gujarat sh seems difficult: it lapses intos, English is called Inglis and "ocean" becomes "osun". Bengalis get all twisted up in differentiating between b and v. I had a Bengali friend who used to take lessons in English from me. He could not for the life of him pronounce "above". It became either "abub" or else "avuv". The Bengali language has, in fact, no v-sound. And that brings me to my "veranda". You know that at one time I was in charge of the Ashram furniture. Once I had to get a cot removed from the house of an Ashramite called Barinda. On my way I met an inmate of the house and asked where the cot exactly was. He said: "The cot is on Barinda." I was rather shocked. Barinda was a fairly old man and the idea of the cot lying on him was disquieting. I protested: "Surely, Barinda must be on the cot?" I got the reply: "No, the cot is on Barinda." I made haste to the house — only to find the cot on the veranda!

Enough of digression. Last time we closed with a digression and this time we have opened with one. Let's get to work. We have divided, a la Patmore, the poetic phrase into the piquant, the felicitous, the magnificent. Now I shall make another kind of division — three classes, each of which can hold all the three types of poetic phrase. I shall borrow it from the Anglo-American modernist poet Ezra Pound. I believe Pound was in a mental home — but not because he was a poet. Poets are already mad in a special way — they cannot go mad in the ordinary manner: it must be the non-poetic avatar of Pound that qualified for the mental home. Anyway, his classification of poetry which I am about to adopt hails from his early days when his was only the poetic madness which is well known from ancient times — the furor poeticus, as the Romans characterised it.

Pound offers us the three heads: Melopoeia, Phanopoeia, Logo-

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poeia. The first term is easily seen as the Greek for "Song-making", the third as the Greek for "Word-making". The second looks somewhat obscure,. but we may remember the last half of the word "epiphany" : this half connotes "appearing, showing, manifesting. " So Phanopoeia means vision-making. It is concerned with imagery. But we should not identify ''Image-making" with what is called Imagism. Imagism is the work of a particular movement or school of poetry which arose round about 1915 as a reaction against the vague emotional poeticism of the late-Victorian age and insisted on poetry with a clear outline and a hard core, generally one image set forth in objective language. Pound himself was among the leaders of this school and took it to be the best practitioner of image-making. We should not restrict our notion by his .early penchant.

Broadly speaking, all poetry is image-making, since the poet is primarily the seer, the artistic visualiser. But, while all poetry is based on sight and insight, not all of it has the image-aspect in prominence. The two other aspects that can stand out are Melo-poeia and Logopoeia. In the former we are impressed overwhelm-ingly by the music of the verse: often the very structure invites being set to music. Phanopoeia resembles not music so much as painting and sculpture. Logopoeia is a poetic play essentially of ideas: as Pound puts it, "it is the dance of the intellect among words" — it is the conceptive word as distinguished from the musical or the pictorial-sculpturesque.

We have already quoted lines that were markedly musical — melopoeic lines. Long passages, even whole poems, can be melo-poeic — for example, the song which Milton has put into his Masque called Comus. I have selected this song because it has nothing momentous to say, no great theme is here, no high thought or sentiment is turned into verse-music: a mere picture with some feeling behind it is presented, the picture of a Lake-Goddess to whom an appeal has been made to come to the help of a maiden lost in a wood and exposed to a satyr's lust. By having nothing momentous said, the song yields pure melopoeia:

Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of Lillies knitting

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The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair,

Listen for dear honour's sake.

Goddess of the silver lake,

Listen and save.

This is word-music of the most beautiful order, made not only by the sound-texture within each line but also by the varying pattern of short and long line-units and by the skill in disposing the rhymes, some of which are close to each other and some distanced. Two pairs of rhyme-lines have actually three lines intervening in one instance and even four in the other. Between "fair" and "hair" we have "sitting", "wave" and "knitting". Between "wave" and "save" there are "knitting", "hair", "sake" and "lake". But even here no dissatisfaction of the ear is felt and, when the delayed rhyme comes, it is not as if a fault were set right at last but as if a new delight beyond the ordinary were created. This is so because the intervening words "knitting" and "hair" are themselves rhymes to previous words and fall on the ear with accomplished pleasure, and "lake" and "sake" by their immediate rhyming fill very markedly whatever gap may be dug by the delay in rhyming "wave" to "save". The distance between "fair" and "hair" is shortened by the word "where" in line 2, occurring without stress and hence getting somewhat subdued yet contri-buting to the rhyme-effect in a subtle fashion. The subdual itself is artistic because otherwise a slightly cheap impression would be produced — a clear rhyme sticking out in the middle of a line to the end-word of the line preceding. As regards "wave" and "save", note how many times the long a occurs in the lines be-tween those that have these end-words. I shall string all of them together: braids, train, sake, lake. Out of these, "sake" and "lake" are themselves end-words and constitute assonantal or vowel rhymes directly to "wave" and "save". The running of the long a through the second half of the poem is a very musical element weaving it into one piece. The short i is also a cohesive force — perhaps "force" is hardly the right word, so let us say: the short i is also a cohesive charm; it is present in every line, and almost in the middle of the poem — line 4 it is gathered up in a striking profusion:

In twisted braids of Lillies knitting,

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as if to wake the ear to the leit motif, the dominant note.

Another cohesive charm is the way the two halves of the lyric are formed. The first half is from the line ending with "fair" to the one ending with "hair": the second from the line ending with "wave" to that ending with "save". Now, certain rhymes — "fair-hair", "sitting-knitting", "wave-save" — are so placed that one partner of each pair comes in either half. This makes the halves overlap. Further, the only line in the first half that remains un-rhymed — namely, the "wave"-line — rhymes with the closing line of the second half: conversely, the sole line remaining unrhymed in the second half — namely, the "hair"-line — rhymes with the-opening line of the first half. This binds together the very begin-ning and end of the lyric, beginning and end which are also linked musically by both of them being not only the same metrical length (a dimeter of two syllables to a foot) but also the only two lines in the poem that have this length. Set over against all these connec-tive factors is the sheer variety of the distances at which the rhymes are put. There are four rhyme-pairs, all formed at different inter-vals. We have already noted how "fair-hair" gets formed with three lines separating the partners and "wave-save" with four, while "sake-lake" is immediate: we may add that "sitting-knit-ting" takes a single line between. Thus on the one hand we have extreme diversity and, on the other, a many-moded integration: the poem is tightly twined in the midst of its multiple liquidity. If we may borrow some suggestions of the poem itself, we may say that the technique has the soft slipping quality of Sabrina's "amber-dropping hair", but still holds together the "loose train" of this loveliness in "twisted braids of Lillies".

Of course it is not merely the general or detailed music and the structural artistry that immortalise the poem. The language itself is sensitively, delicately, picturesquely chosen. Can, for example, the stuff of lake-water be better conveyed than by the words no less than the sounds —

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave?

"Glassy" gives the water's shining and mirroring smoothness, "cool" its freshness and soothingness, "translucent" its deepness at the same time gleaming and mysterious. The l sound is in each of the adjectives, making the water-stuff glide through all and run

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them together. The third adjective "translucent" — possessing the length of the other two combined — carries also sounds related to the a of "glassy" and the oo of "cool", so that the sense of connection tends to get cumulative and clinched. This line, no less than the fifth —

The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair —

is a full pentameter and joins up with the bulk of Milton's poetic creation which is in Paradise Lost and both of them by being somewhat far from their rhyme-partners bear just a touch of the blank-verse constituting that epic. They suggest to us a transition from the kind of melopoeia here practised to another which we may find there. Milton has not only song-music, he has also sym-phony-music and we should be doing injustice to the total con-notation of "melopoeia" if we failed to put under this term the symphonic splendour of Paradise Lost. In that epic, Milton hears in remarkable rhythm the grand events he visualises as happening in Heaven and Hell and Earth. Sound bearing out the sense, not with an obvious echo but with a power of stirring the mind to the magnitude of the events related, meets us in a passage like:

Him the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,

With hideous ruin and combustion, down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.

As in the Sabrina-lyric we have various phrase-lengths con-cealed within the pentametrical uniformity of appearance — a changing artistry of pauses lends both diversity and aptness to the musical motives. Written out according to this artistry, the passage would read:

Him

The Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,

With hideous ruin and combustion,

Down

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To bottomless perdition,

There to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.

Even in the lines that demand to be set forth as full pentameters we have a difference of movement. The penultimate line —

In adamantine chains and penal fire —

makes a faint division into three feet and two feet because of the conjunction "and", while stretched out inexorably to a length which is the total of those divisions is the second line —

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky —

as well as the last —

Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.

And the inexorableness of utter pentametrical length is most ap-posite just in these two verses — the initial suggestion of the absolute doom of downfall when the hurling from Heaven is done and the final suggestion of it when the plunging into Hell is accomplished. The two verses are also subtly affined by the "sky" of the one getting its rhyme in the "defy" of the other.

In a different but equally significant way the last line links up with the very first word of the passage. This line is, grammatically, the relative clause going with that word, but between "Him" and "Who" there are four and a half lines. Both the connection and the separation are meaningful. Mark first how by putting "Him" at the very start of the passage Milton not only emphasises the being who falls ever downward through the lines but also indicates the sheer top from which the prolonged falling takes place. Mark then how by suspending the connection of "Who" with "Him" Milton suggests forcibly not only the prolongation of the fall through depth on depth of space but also the abysmal end of the very same being who was at the ethereal top. Syntax was never mani-pulated in the whole world's poetry to such an expressive effect. I may further point out how the phonetic note struck at the begin-

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ning in common for both the superhuman antagonists — the labial consonant of m accompanied by p — rings all through the passage (here and there the p replaced by its fellow-explosive b) sustaining the sense of the fierce duel and repeats in the last line the exact occurrence in the first of m twice and p once, thus again vivifying the two extremes of the downfall-drama as well as rounding off the passionate yet controlled grandeur of the music let loose. Do not forget, finally, that, just as "Him" is recalled once more in the last line by "Who", the "Almighty Power" is recalled there — and there alone in the entire passage — by the synonym "the Omni-potent" — a further touch of coordination and completion.

All these, of course, are details of the sound-art wedded to the structure. What envelops us most unforgettably is the ensemble of the melopoeic symphony, the superb sonority of the polysyllabism punctuated at suitable places by the dynamic directness of mono-syllables especially at the end of each line and with its acme in that emphatic "down" after both a trisyllable and a pause. But here too, as in the Sabrina-lyric, it would not be correct to aver that the masterly effect is due to the sound-art alone and not to the word-craft. Sri Aurobindo has well remarked with reference to the epic melopoeia of the passage: "the sound, the rhythmic resonance, the rhythmic significance is undoubtedly the predominant factor; it makes us hear and feel the crash and clamour and clangour of the downfall of the rebel angel: but that is not all, we do not merely hear as if one were listening to the roar of ruin of a collapsing bomb-shattered house, but saw nothing, we have the vision and the full psychological commotion of the hideous and flaming ruin of the downfall and it is the tremendous force of the words that makes us see as well as hear."

We have now hardly any time to proceed in our general treat-ment of poetry as melopoeia. I have some other quotations to give, illustrating what I may call Intonation or Incantation. But with Milton's symphonically suspended melopoeic sentence we shall suspend our discussion for the present.

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TALK SEVENTEEN

We were speaking of musical poetry of two kinds — lyric melo-poeia and epic melopoeia. My mind now goes back to a reference I once made to musical Words — like "Coal-scuttle", according to a Russian, and "dyspepsia", according to myself. In the Sabrina-lyric we have quite a number of such words: the very name "Sabrina", then "translucent", "amber-dropping", "lillies" and "silver". But what the subject of musical words particularly sug-gests to me this morning is a word matching my old choice of "dyspepsia". The new word is "lumbago".

You know what "lumbago" means? The dictionary gives it as "rheumatic pain in the lower back and loins." The loins are the region between the false ribs and the hips. Get the word "loins" correctly: don't be like a friend of mine who always referred to his "lions" when he meant his "loins" —just as some people speak of quotations from Sri Aurobindo published in the Ashram Dairy when they mean Diary. Here perhaps the terms are imaginatively interchangeable not because our Dairy-chief Surendra is in any way responsible for the milk-white pages with the quotations at their heads, but because about Sri Aurobindo we can say in Coleridge's language:

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of paradise.

The paradisal milk runs in all of Sri Aurobindo's utterances — they may be said to stream from a Divine Dairy where Vedic cows are luminously fluent under the super-vision of a Surya-Surendra!

To return to "lumbago". Well, this morning I knew its meaning not quietly from any dictionary but growled out from my own lower back by my "lions." Yes, I have a touch of this rheumatic pain. But that does not spoil my pleasure in the name of the painful complaint. "Lumbago" — what harmonious power is there! "Dyspepsia" may be considered lyric melopoeia — "lum-bago" is surely melopoeia in epic form. And, I may add, the way to deal with it must also be epic. We must face it like heroes — but, in a spiritual Ashram, we have to be heroes of the inner being and use mind-force, if not soul-force. I shall tell you how I am going to make history by my battle with this hellish visitor whose

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sound entitles it to be almost a compeer of Satan. Satan is also known as Lucifer. Lucifer and Lumbago could very well be twin Archangels fallen from on high.

The history I shall make in dealing with this fiend will be in three dramatic stages. First, there will be a realisation of the full pre-sence of the dread torturer — full presence summed up by my thundering out the name as it is: "Lumbago!" Next, you will see me tackling the demon and sending him away by a mantric strategy of the resisting will. I shall shout: "Lumba, go!" The last stage will find me quite relieved, a conqueror wearing a reminiscent smile and whispering with a sense of far-away unhappiness the almost fairy-tale expression: "Lumb, ago!"

Talking of musical words, I should perhaps remark that a word which out-dyspepsias and out-lumbagoes everything is "Melopoeia" itself. Now, this word — but no! let me not digress, let me take it only as a musical warning and come back to the point where we stopped last time.

We were with Milton. Milton excels in both lyric and epic melopoeias; and, in either, he exploits to the full what I may term an earthly delicacy or richness: the moods he turns to music belong, for all their imaginative quality, to the outer mind sove-reignly inspired and he has complete grasp over the things he visualises: practically nowhere do we feel that he is in the midst of elusive presences — presences, of course, that are no less concrete for being elusive but that leave our outer mind incapable of enter-ing masterfully into the mood musicalised. It is quite different with Shelley. In him we get a more aerial than earthly melopoeia, either a quiet or a breathless intensity of it, luminous but rarefied. The quiet intensity we catch in a stanza like:

Though the sound overpowers,

Sing again, with thy dear voice revealing

A tone

Of some world far from ours,

Where music and moonlight and feeling

Are one.

Here we have melopoeia about melopoeia itself — song-making about singing, but, though an actual woman is the singer, the voice heard by the poet is not of the earth, and his own verse is also shot

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with an inner rhythm. Often the sign of Shelley's inwardness is the sense he conveys of a light that merges many realities into oneness. Even when he is not ostensibly referring to some world far from ours, even when he talks of this very world he is aware of such a light. Let me quote a few lines in which he is singing of an earth-scene:

When the night is left behind

In the deep East dun and blind,

And the blue noon is over us,

And the multitudinous

Billows murmur at our feet,

Where all earth and heaven meet,

And all things seem only one

In the universal sun...

This is breathless rather than quiet intensity of melopoeia, but the luminosity and rarefication of tone are the same, and the feeling of a radiant oneness — sun-washed instead of moon-bathed — is present. At the end of this passage, just as at the end of the other, the aerial music begins to be more recognisably of a kind which may be designated as Intonation or Incantation. Intonation or Incantation is a rhythm which does not arise so much from the words heard as from an echo they make in a mysterious dimension of our being. It has been created in the poet as if his eyes were turned inward and fixed on some occult or spiritual presence and then with the light of it on his consciousness his breath brings forth in sound the thrill of that light, making his words throw a spell on the hearer and plunge him to his own being's secret places. No doubt, all poetry has an inward-drawing force, but there is a mood and a rhythm that have it in a special degree and render poetic lines spell-binding. Those last two verses —

And all things seem only one

In the universal sun —

evoke, however faintly, however vaguely, the immensity of a Sun-self of the universe and set it making its own subtle all-harmonising sound. The inner music here is a rushing lyricism helped out by the predominantly trochaic metre, just as the inner music of the pre-

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vious quotation, which grows a spell-binder in the last four lines that waft towards us from some divine distance, was a dancing lyricism aided by the predominance of anapaests.

In both we have a sort of unpremeditated art, a simple direct spontaneity. There is a different art possible, a more conscious and deliberate craftsmanship, but it can be equally spontaneous. This may look like a paradox to those who think that spontaneity means something which comes in a single spurt and at the very first push. Budding poets are often indignant when they are criticised; they exclaim: "But it came like that! I did not manufacture it slowly. It poured out in an inspiration." Alas, this business of inspiration is much misunderstood. A poem, of course, is a failure unless it is inspired, a flow of sparkling spontaneity. Yet spontaneity means no more than that a poem has not been constructed but created and carries the language and rhythm of a hidden power beyond the labouring brain. Provided this language and this rhythm have been caught, it does not matter a whit whether a poem was written at one shot or after days and days, whether it came out easily or after much sweating. The sole important thing is to get the inner stuff. Even work of the outer mind such as Milton's is poetic precisely by the inner stuff, and it differs from Shelleyan poetry not by its lacking that stuff but merely by its getting it translated accurately into terms of the outer mind rather than appearing with some hues and harmonies of its own — and Milton's work is at times even greater than Shelley's despite the outer mind because of this mind's accuracy in translating the inner stuff instead of mixing, as Shelley occasionally does, the inner hues and harmonies with thin echoes of them in the external intelligence. Moreover, the inner stuff itself has either a simple direct look or an art-laden aspect, and the kind that seems unpremeditated may manifest after effort by the poet and the kind that seems deliberately set forth may burst out without a moment's thought. There are wheels within wheels in the poetic movement: spontaneity is to be measured only by the authentic touch in the finished product, not by the mode in which the product was finished or by the kind of product the finishing gives us.

Even the art-laden spontaneity is not of one type: it can itself be simple in attitude and motion or be "many-splendoured" and sinuous. The quality of being art-laden is felt in a certain selective-ness of phrase and structure: that is all. Intonation more art-laden

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than Shelley's, yet still simple in attitude and motion, meets us in Walter de la Mare's lyric, All that's Past, opening:

Very old are the woods;

And the buds that break

Out of the briar's boughs

When March winds wake,

So old with their beauty are —

Oh no man knows

Through what wild centuries

Roves back the rose.

The incantatory tone is unmistakable. Long vowels repeating themselves, especially the o's in the second half, and the recur-rence of spondees are the main outer instruments of the spell. But really it is a profound delicacy of feeling that makes its own haunting music from inside, carrying our imagination into some depth of the past so that life becomes not a matter of a few years but a secret continuity ageless with an eternal beauty — and the sense of this beauty takes on vividness through the mention of the rose, the time-honoured symbol of the ideally beautiful. De la Mare is not quite mystical here: he is only mysterious, and the natural rose is just dimly touched by the supernatural, but the exquisite intonation creates the spell as of a sacred chant; and the music gets charged, if not exactly with spiritual presences, at least with strange emanations of them.

To receive the full melopoeia of such verse we must read the lines in a special manner. I know that English poetry is not to be sung but spoken, yet a subtle chanting is not the same thing as sing-song and unless we indulge in it a little we do injustice to the special inspiration here. Most Englishmen would fight shy of the subtle chanting I suggest. Their external being is somewhat ashamed to be caught poetising. They have a matter-of-fact clipped way of speech on their common occasions and all poetic expression irks them as being rather dramatic. The Englishman as a type tends to be inarticulate in his day-to-day nature. When he becomes articulate, it is only by going to the opposite extreme and exploding into immortal poetry. Between the two extremes there seems to be not much connection. Hence when he recites poetry he feels it to be something foreign to his normal being. He almost

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blushes to bring out the imaginative and rhythmic rapture, he tries to pass off the highly expressive abnormality as if it were common-place. I once heard a British Consul in Pondicherry read poetry to me and Arjava (John Chadwick) during a visit by us to him. Knowing we were poets he thought politeness required him to read a poem from a book so that we might feel interested. Oh it was a terrible experience for me! He adopted a most businesslike look and flung out the wonderful words like a shower of stones at us. I don't know how I survived the pelting — or how he survived my indignant horror. Of course, all Englishmen are not so self-conscious about reading poetry: I am referring to the average person in whom the Teutonic element from the composite English being is on top. My fellow-poet in the Ashram, Norman Dowsett, is not so inhibited in this matter — maybe because the element on top in Dowsett is really Norman!

More even than de la Mare, W. B. Yeats in his early phase calls for a bit of chanting tone. There are two phases of Yeats. The later shows him a poet of the athletic intelligence and will, he is taut and powerful and deals with ideas though the ideas have always an occult or mystical background and his rhythm is invariably subtle. The earlier phase brings us a poet washed in the occult or mystical, steeped in strange mythological moods, coloured through and through with the vague depths of what is called the Celtic Twilight, the magic and mystery that were the past of the Celtic element in the complex English psychology, the element still openly at play in Wales and Ireland. Yeats the Irishman is unforgettably wistful and idealistic with Celticism in his early work and brings intonation almost everywhere. More mystically open than in de la Mare is the sense of eternal beauty communicated to us by the Yeatsian incan-tation in the two well-known stanzas knit together by a single rhyme-scheme:

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,

The cry of a child by the wayside, the creak of a lumbering cart,

The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,

Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;

I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,

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With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold

For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

Here the rose is clearly a mystical symbol. The poet is addressing his beloved, but the love in which he holds her is cored with the sense of some Perfection that is the ideal to which all outer things should conform. This marvellous inner reality, this flower of flaw-lessness rooted in a depth of dream and adoration, is hurt by the varied cruelty, clumsiness and carelessness marking so many processes of time. A child should be happy and at home, a cart should roll smoothly over the snows without violating their virgin expanse; but what does the poet find? The child is homeless, cruelly left in the open on the road along which a cart clumsily built is trundling· with harsh noises and a ploughman carelessly goes thumping with his hard boots the soft whiteness of winter and sending it shattered and scattered to all sides. The blissful and the beauteous, the harmonious and the whole, the considerate and the sensitive - these compose the world-vision that love longs for, in tune with the Ideality to which it awakens at the sight of the sweetheart. A Divine Presence glows within, an unwithering Rose whose eternity all time-movements should reflect instead of obscuring or betraying as again and again they now do. The pain of the obscuration or betrayal is untellable because what is obscured or betrayed is the Supreme whose loveliness is ineffable. With the lustre and colour of this loveliness kindled in the poet by the face of the beloved that seems at once a reverie and a reality, he cannot rest until he wins the power to refashion the world into a thing of richest light, "a casket of gold" which would serve as a fit shrine surrounding and enfolding with a divine earth and sky and water this reverie-reality where the human and the divine are blended.

The inner delight and the outer anguish felt by the idealist who wants to shape the things of time into a likeness of eternity have both been caught up by the poet into the poignant grace of a perfect lyric, the casket of a golden word-music. The Presence aglow within him is set alive for us by the peculiar artistry of the poem. Yeats breathes that Presence out to us in a stream of simple or opulent intonation filling the audible words with the inaudible rhythms of a mystical feeling.

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But those rhythms will fail to go completely home to us unless our voice attends to the vowellation and the consonance with a special modulation of tone answering to the inner idea-turn and theme-suggestion. Yeats himself always read his own verse with something of a chant. I am sure he avoided the sing-song mono-tony which goes ill with English poetry; but, aware of the pro-fundities whose echoes he was attempting to catch in his word-music, he sought to carry it as near as possible to the effect that sheer music of the wordless variety, has the privilege of producing — the immediate feeling of the soul's silence listening to its own eternal secrets.

I shall close with a brief account of how Yeats composed his work. It will serve to illustrate several points made in the course of our talk. Strange as it may seem, many poems of his were first written out in prose-form. As soon as he got a poetic stir in his being he put down on paper all the thoughts that the stir brought up in his mind. When he had got the several implications set out in any prose that came to him, he began to transpose them into poetry. The transposition was to be no mere metricising or beauti-fying of the prose-matter. A total re-creation had to be achieved. The earth and the sky and the water of common language were to be "re-made, like a casket of gold" before the true poetic harmony could emerge. Entering, beyond the surface-suggestions, into the depths of the ideas he had set forth, he would quicken up his imagination, bring out emotion-charged phrases, roll them on his tongue, keep humming them as he paced to and fro, sit down again and again as if "on a green knoll apart" and beat out on his knees the mysterious rhythms that were unfolding their wings within him. Often there would be a dead stop. The creative impulse would submerge itself The poet would labour and fail, put aside the unfinished work and wait for a more auspicious occasion. Bit by bit the wonder would grow under his hand.

This was quite opposed to the process by which his friend AE wrote his poems. To AE the poetic inspiration came in a straight flow from the recesses of his being, recesses he had visited in his trances. AE may have found it difficult to understand how Yeats could produce faultless poetry, astonishingly lyrical and sponta-neous, with so much labour. Yeats, on the other hand, disbelieved in any inspiration bringing to birth as by a divine afflatus a perfect piece of poetry. The layman would expect AE to have done the

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greater work under the compulsion of an uninterrupted impulse from inside. But actually Yeats is the greater poet, even greater as a creative force despite the apparent constructiveness of his me-thod of composition. Both AE and Yeats had perfect results to offer at the end of their poetic experience — results unimpeach-able in spontaneity. But Yeats was more aware of the poetic possibilities of language, more responsive to the turns of rhythm as enrichers of substance, more varied in his musical moods to em-body the diversity of dream-silences. He stands supreme in mo-dern English poetry and is the master par excellence there of incantatory melopoeia. In poetry written in English, though not necessarily in England, he is surpassed in this genre by Sri Aurobindo alone.

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TALK EIGHTEEN

Sri Aurobindo — we closed last time with this name after talking of Yeats's two incantatory stanzas on the Rose in the deeps of his heart. Especially apt is this name in the Yeatsian context because Sri Aurobindo is not only the sovereign artist of incantation but has also given us a climax of the incantatory art in a poem on the Mystic Rose itself. The most famous of mystical symbols he has steeped in the keenest inner light and lifted it on a metrical base of pure stress into an atmosphere of rhythmic ecstasy. To receive the true impact of this poem we have to read it with a mind held quiet and the voice full-toned; but we must be very clear in our enuncia-tion, not allowing any emotional fuzz to come between the poet's significant sound and the intuitive depths of our intelligence. It is not a mere emotional thrill that he is communicating — the thrill is of some experience in which the Divine is feelingly visioned and visionarily comprehended and comprehendingly felt. Our reading has to convey accurately the quiver and colour of sight, the lumi-nous structure of idea, the meaningful enthusiasm of emotion. A controlled intonation in which every word, while accorded its full music of vowel and consonant, stands out distinct and keeps clear-ly patterned in syntax its intuitive relation with its companion words — thus have we to make the Aurobindonian Rose of God paint and perfume our speech.

There are five stanzas, each conjuring up an aspect of the Epiphany which Sri Aurobindo poetises:

Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven,

Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven!

Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame,

Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name.

Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being,

Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing!

Live in the mind of our earthhood: O golden mystery, flower,

Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour.

Rose of God, damask force of Infinity, red icon of might,

Rose of Power, with thy diamond halo piercing the night!

Ablaze in the will of the mortal, design the wonder of thy plan,

Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in man.

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Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire,

Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colour's lyre!

Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical

rhyme;

Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the

children of Time.

Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,

Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!

Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss;

Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude's kiss.

At first glance one may get a little bewildered and think that here are splashes of oriental hues and a revel of decorative effects for their own sake. But really there is no riot in the splendour: we have a many-sided system in it, exploring the secrets of the Divine Rose. A mystical metaphysics and psychology, as it were, unfold before us in the succession of vibrant images. Let us view this metaphysics and this psychology from close quarters. But let me warn you that since they are mystical we cannot be very sure about everything we say.

There are two sides of spiritual reality presented in each stanza. The first two lines everywhere are charged with the Glory that is on high, the Reality above the human consciousness, ever perfect and ever manifest. In the last two lines the same Reality is invoked to reveal itself by evolution in the human consciousness and to become progressively a part of earth or, rather, to make earth progressively a part of it. What is eternally in bloom in the Divine is asked to blossom anew in our time and space — a Brightness that, unlike in Nashe's line, never falls from the air. The nature of this Brightness can be gauged by a brief review of the figures under which the spiritual Reality is shown. The basic figure is, of course, that which gives the poem its title. But here Sri Aurobindo has a surprise for us. Not only have we to turn away from the Yeatsian Rose with its suggestion of an ultimate Beauty: we have also to move beyond the Rose-suggestion in a canto of Savitri. There he has written of Being's "effulgent stair" climbing from the human mentality to "the Eternal's house" and he has put on either side of the steps of the journey upward through the mystical conscious-ness "the heavens of the ideal Mind." On one side are

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The mighty kingdoms of the deathless Flame

and on the other

The lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose.

Sri Aurobindo says further:

Above the spirit cased in mortal sense

Are superconscious realms of heavenly peace,

Below, the Inconscient's sullen dim abyss,

Between, behind our life, the deathless Rose...

World after coloured and ecstatic world

Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany.

Sri Aurobindo tells us that even in our mortal existence we can be visited by touches of those worlds, but the fullness of the Deathless Rose is beyond. This does not run counter to the suggestions in the poem we are studying. However, what we have in this poem is a certain sheer supremacy of the Rose: the "Rose of God" is the "far unseen epiphany" itself and not merely "the heavens of the ideal Mind". And we have also a fusion, as it were, of the death-less Rose with the deathless Flame whose kingdoms are said to be "mighty" as distinguished from those that are "lovely". Our poem, though presenting the Divine under the Rose-aspect, evi-dently exceeds the distinction drawn in the passages of Savitri: it takes us to a summit Reality which is the All — Eternity itself directly meeting us in the form of the Rose.

We should guess that metaphysically the Yeatsian Rose, whe-ther visioned in the deeps of the heart or elsewhere in a vaster pervasion —

Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!

in the poem "The Rose of Battle" and

Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose

in "The Secret Rose", cannot be the summit Reality. Beauty is not an Ultimate. Along with Love, it is an expression of Delight. Does

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not Sri Aurobindo say in The Synthesis of Yoga, "the general power of Delight is Love and the special mould which the joy of love takes is the vision of beauty."¹ Divine Bliss is the fundamental which can give rise to Beauty as well as to Love in their highest modes. Ancient Indian spirituality recognised three Ultimates fused into a unity: Sat-Chit-Ananda — Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Everything else arises as expressions of these three-in-one. No doubt, any expression of them can be figured as primal and final for a particular purpose. Poets would be naturally inclined to look on Beauty as the supreme, the Bliss seen as coming to a focus of perfect form, an eternal Rose, in relation to the created world of forms. But Sri Aurobindo has evidently not followed such an inclination. Even Bliss, which is one of the three Ultimates, has not been exclusively chosen for the Rose-vision, for we have altogether five divine aspects presented equally under the figure of the God-Rose.

What exactly Sri Aurobindo had in view is made clear in a reply to a sadhak's question. Parichand asked: "Does the rose of all flowers most perfectly and aptly express the divine ecstasies or has it any symbolic allusion in the Veda or the Upanishad?" Sri Aurobindo answered: "There were no roses in those times in India — roses came with the Mahomedans from Persia. The rose is usually taken by us as the symbol of surrender, love etc. But here it is not used in that sense, but as the most intense of all flowers it is used as symbolic of the divine intensities — Bliss, Light, Love etc." (2.1.1935)

It is in the fitness of things that, though in this poem Bliss is put on a par with other intensities, it is set first among them, for in Indian mystical thought Ananda is the fount of all creation. Not from any need, any lack, does the Divine manifest the universe, but from His fullness of joy and that is why the universe is re-garded as his lila, the play of His own creative possibilities. This Ananda at play, constituting the God-Rose, is vivified for us by Sri Aurobindo against a background which he terms "the sapphires of heaven". Try to visualise an illimitable stretch of unbroken bright blue — the supreme Ineffable shining far and aloof like a cloudless sky, the Absolute lost in the heaven of Its own self. Then see the burst of the primal Form like a flower out of formlessness, a

1. On Yoga, Vol. 1 , p. 675.

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vermilion Rose standing out in an incandescence of Bliss from the sapphires of that self-absorbed heaven and holding a multiplicity of self-expression. Seven are said to be the ecstasies blended in that Bliss and each ecstasy contributes to the Rose a tinge of its own. The sevenfold self-expression has a full flower-aspect and a growing bud-aspect. The flower-flush is the Nameless Absolute in its passion of manifestation in the superhuman azure above. The bud-glow is the same Absolute manifesting as the mystical Name, the Divinity relating its miracle-flame to the human heart and leaping up there, a progressive perfection, in answer to that heart's cry for happiness.

A semi-parallel to the two opening lines and to a couple of phrases in the rest of the stanza is found in a passage in Savitri:

An all-revealing, all-creating Bliss

Seeking for forms to manifest truths divine,

Aligned to their significant mystery

The gleams of the symbols of the Ineffable

Blazoned like hues upon a colourless air

On the white purity of the Witness Soul.

These hues were the very prism of the Supreme,

His beauty, power, delight creation's cause.

The background here is white and not blue, but all the rest appears to have an affinity to the overture of our poem and when the Bliss-revealed and Bliss-created hues blazoning forth the Ineffable are said to be the Supreme's very prism — that is, something which breaks white light into its component rainbow-colours — we seem to have a manifestation "fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven". Still, there is a dissimilarity. We must not only ask why the ecstasies are said to be seven: we have also to inquire what exactly they are. To a part of the second question Sri Aurobindo has given an answer, again elicited by Parichand who had thought in terms of different kinds of ecstasies. Sri Aurobindo wrote back: "No, it is not seven kinds, but seven levels of Ananda that are meant by the ecstasies." The nature of the levels remains unspecified. We are left to speculate about it no less than about the number.

Even as far back as the Rigveda we find seven a sacred number. It answers to a truth of mystical experience, a truth recorded in many languages and not just in Sanskrit. But the Rigveda, though

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giving prominence to this number, does not confine its numerology to seven: what is most often spoken of as seven is also at times counted as five, eight, nine, ten and twelve. So, whether we take up seven or another number would depend somewhat on our line of approach and our frame of reference. But perhaps the mysti-cism proper to Bliss demands seven rather than any other number. It cannot be for a merely poetic reason that both here and in the Savitri-passage about the spiritual Bliss this particular number is involved. However, I believe that over and above mystical truth there must be in poetry an artistic justification for such a choice. The mysticism of Bliss must be rendered artistically inevitable. In the Savitri-lines the prism-image is an inevitable felicity after the Witness Soul's "white purity". In our poem, what is the corres-ponding aptness of association?

The blue background hardly calls for a sevenfold spectrum. Though we may argue that a rainbow always hangs against the sky's blue, surely there is no necessary connection between this azure and that iridescence? Besides, there is a difference between the colour-suggestion of the Savitri-lines and that of ours. The ecstasies in the latter, though seven like the prism-hues, cannot be thought of as running into all the shades of the rainbow: simply vermilion is set before us against the sapphires and the seven tinges have to be fiery shades of this one single hue. So the background need not be the white which is required for the rain-bow-spectrum: the blueness of the background is no anomaly, and we must look for another artistic justification than that arising from the background colour. I submit that the justification is to be found in what the seven ecstasies vermilionly dynamise and what the sapphires hold static. Artistically, the ecstasies are inevitably seven because "seven" rhymes most proportionately with "heaven". "Eleven" too is a rhyme, but it is not quite propor-tionate: the word has an extra syllable at the start. Sri Aurobindo's context, from the purely artistic point of view, demands no more than a suggestion of mystic multiplicity, and the word he has employed serves best that suggestion. For, whatever truth shines out here from ancient esoteric vision in general and from spiritual Bliss-experience in particular becomes inevitable in terms of art by the logic of exactly proportionate rhyme.

Can we say with some probability what "seven" levels Sri Aurobindo may have meant? In reference to the ancient Indian

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scriptures, he has explained this number by a scheme of planes diversely distinguished at different historical periods. In the most popular version the number denoted the three transcendental planes of Sat (Being), Chit (Consciousness), Ananda (Bliss), the three cosmic planes of Swar (Mind), Bhuvar (Life), Bhur (Matter) and the intermediate plane of Vijnana or Mahas (Truth-Con-sciousness, Supermind, Gnosis) which links the higher triplicity to the lower and formulates in its own transcendence the archetypal cosmos. On every plane there is a sevenfold existence with one term or another in the forefront and the rest subordinate. The phrase "ecstasies seven" is itself Vedic (sapta ratnani) and perhaps the ecstasies in the poem are kindled by the characteristics of the seven planes. Then the principle of Bliss may be taken as holding quintessentially the sustaining rapture-throbs of all the six other principles in a hierarchy based on its own fundamental ecstatic nature. But the poem does not specifically build its significance on a sevenfold chord, it has a fivefold harmony, and the constituents of the harmony are not distinct planes of existence. So here it may be better for us to remain with the mysticism of the poem's metaphysics than to probe the metaphysics of its mysticism.

As regards the fivefold harmony, it is interesting to note that, while the Rose of God is addressed as Bliss, Light, Power, Life and Love, it is invoked first to "leap up in our heart of human-hood", then to "live in the mind of our earthhood", next to be "ablaze in the will of the mortal", still next to "transform the body of the mortal" and, finally, again to accomplish a leaping up connected with the heart, though now the appeal is:

Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss.

The heart is brought in twice: the poem opens with it and rounds off with it. One may object that the second heart is not the same as the first and that Sri Aurobindo means simply the very core of what the Rose of Love is asked to arise from. But is it possible to take this heart as a mere metaphor? Surely not. Love is too obviously a thing of the heart in a non-metaphorical sense. Be-sides, the first stanza and the last have too many resemblances for the second heart to be metaphorical. In the former we have "ecstasies", in the latter we have "rapture". Similarly, "fire-passion" corresponds to the earlier "fire-sweet" and "passion-

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flower". "Miracle" and "flame" are matched by "the home of the Wonderful" and "beatitude's kiss". The very word "beatitude" recalls the word "Bliss". And a general eye-catching sign of the essential affinity of the two and consequently of the two hearts is the opening line in either stanza: on the one hand the words about the Rose of Bliss —

... vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven —

and on the other the phrase about the Rose of Love —

... a blush of rapture on Eternity's face.

A blush can well be defined as a vermilion stain and when this stain is, as the next line shows, a tinge of ecstasy, it is nothing save a blush of rapture. Psychologically, Bliss and Love are connected with each other and both are connected with Beauty, as we have already seen from The Synthesis of Yoga. Sri Aurobindo also says: "Love is the power and passion of the divine self-delight and without love we may get the rapt peace of its infinity, the absorbed silence of the Ananda, but not its absolute depth of richness and fullness. Love leads us from the suffering of division into the bliss of perfect union, but without losing that joy of the act of union which is the soul's greatest discovery and for which the life of the cosmos is a long preparation. Therefore to approach God by love is to prepare oneself for the greatest possible spiritual fulfilment."¹ If Bliss is the fount of creation and is the immediate substance of Beauty, it is by the passion of Love that it creates the object of Beauty and, by loving this object, knows itself most intensely and most profoundly with the utter richness and fullness which the poem calls "ruby depth of all being". And, when it is self-expressed as a cosmic multiplicity, the play of Love is funda-mentally the secret of the self-expression, the secret which in our evolutionary universe emerges slowly and by degrees. Sri Aurobindo has written: "A supreme divine Love is a creative Power and, even though it can exist in itself silent and unchangeable, yet rejoices in external form and expression and is not condemned to be a speech-less and bodiless godhead. It has even been said that creation itself

1. On Yoga, Vol. 1, p. 623.

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was an act of love or at least the building up of a field in which Divine Love could devise its symbols and fulfil itself in act of mutuality and self-giving and, if not the initial nature of creation, this may well be its ultimate object and motive."¹ Bliss is the original movement of the Divine in which Love is implicit, Love is the Divine's final movement by which Bliss grows most explicit. They are essentially a single process with two actions: what is at work may be looked upon as the One whom Sri Aurobindo hails in Savitri:

O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the worlds,

Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride,

binding the Supreme to earth, and whom he also names

The Mother of all godheads and all strengths

Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme.

Not that the "heart" of the last stanza is exactly the same as the "heart" of the first: there is a shade of difference, and we shall deal with it. But the second heart is far from being just a metaphor and the poem does come full circle by beginning with the Rose of Bliss and concluding with the Rose of Love. Before we deal with the shade of difference we must understand why the Roses of Light and Power and Life are put in between. Originally, Divine Bliss brings forth the cosmos by a certain conceptive and regulative principle which converts the free multiplicity-in-unity of that crea-tive Ananda into an ordered pattern of what we may term idea-realities seen and selected out of it: a process of Knowledge and a process of Will, a Truth-vision and a Truth-organisation come into play in order to project and establish in various related centres and steady cosmic rhythms the contents of the All-Delight. Anything deserving to be termed a universe, whether it be an archetypal universe for ever perfect or one like ours in which perfection is hidden, needs a guiding Wisdom-sight and an executive Wisdom-force to guard it from lapsing into a teeming amorphousness. Thus there must be a Rose of Light and a Rose of Power. Conversely, when the creative Bliss has to blossom fully in a human existence

1. Ibid.

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which develops from an apparent absence of it, the budding of this Ananda in the heart of humanhood must call into play the Rose of Light, the great Wisdom-bloom, the golden Mystery, to act in our mentality as the Seer held like a guest in marvellous Yogic hours and directing with sunlike Truth-knowledge the growth of the supreme Ecstasy. But Truth-knowledge is not enough: the diamond-radiant Truth-power must be there within our will to organise what is luminously visioned and to set forth masterfully its own plan and to work out an image of the immortal Light by destroying the circumambient darkness of-Ignorance.

What about the Rose of Life? If we may go by the suggestions in the poem, it is not something unrelated to the Roses of Power, Light and Bliss. It is characterised as divine Desire that has a smiting drive and comes incarnate: it is also a multiform move-ment of colourful collectivity and a creator of concordances in a Time-existence made deathless. The smiting drive towards death-less incarnation connects up directly with the infinite force and might and the piercing diamond halo spoken of in the preceding stanza, about the Rose of Power, as well as with the "image of immortality" there. It joins up indirectly with the sun that is the Rose of Light, the intensity of gold inseparable from the mystery of Divine Wisdom and justifying the appeal to that Wisdom to "live" in our mind. The multiform movement of colourful collec-tivity and concordance harks back to the seven-tinged fire-sweet-ness of the Rose of Bliss. But what the Rose of Life brings is outward action, concrete achievement. It translates the Truth-will into the Truth-deed, the Truth-vision into the Truth-contact, the Bliss-passion and the Bliss-multiplicity into enjoyment of substan-tial grasp and embodied growth. The concretisation of various centres and the dense touching activity among them so that a complex cosmos may be most objectively real — these necessities are served only by the Rose of Life.

From this Rose to the Rose of Love the transition is natural. Desire, while on one side it is akin to Will-power, is on the other side akin to Love. It is not only a drive of outward achievement: it is also a longing to seize and possess with pleasure. But it knows only how to expand and take: the movement towards concrete growth of one centre in relation to other centres of being is incomplete if the expansion is not also by self-giving, a concrete happy growth by lovingly passing into others and achieving a

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multiple unification. The Bliss-passion and the Bliss-multiplicity are thus fulfilled and the original Ananda leads back with the Roses of Light, Power and Life to itself through the Rose of Love.

So we return to the problem of the two hearts — our heart of humanhood and the heart that yearns and sobs from the abyss of Nature until the Rose of Love arises from it to

Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude's kiss.

The former heart cannot be quite separated from the latter, since in us Nature herself has become human. The human heart is the top, as it were, of the heart whose bottom goes down to the darkest base of material existence. The abysmal heart must be some power of feeling that is not confined to man but resides as an upward-yearning ache in the very depths of Matter from which all living things have evolved — a power of feeling which is Nature's counterpart of Supernature's "ruby depth of all being" and which must be there in man's own depths and of which his heart of humanhood must be the frontal expression. The heart of human-hood, our emotional being, is in us the meeting-place between the mind-consciousness and the life-consciousness, it is the. centre of our normal nature: whatever individual self or soul we may have is likely to be seated hereabouts. Intellectuals may enthrone the mind as the individual self; but we may cheekily ask an intellec-tual: "Who says the soul is the mind?" He will answer, "I say so", and, while answering, he will thump the centre of his chest and never the middle of his forehead to indicate himself! Sri Aurobindo tells us that the true soul of us is hidden behind our emotional being whose physical counterpart is in the centre of our chest. He calls it the psyche or psychic being which is in its essence a spark of the Divine. This spark came originally from the highest world into the night of material Nature and from that abyss kept yearning towards God and rose through various organisations of matter to its present level where it has developed a human in-strument: it had during its lesser development in the past a sub-human instrument and shall have in its future greater development a superhuman one.

Its general character is "sweetness and light" and its natural turn is towards the Good, the True, the Beautiful; but, says Sri

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Aurobindo,¹ "it is the divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine that is its spur, its goal..." Sri Aurobindo² continues: "It lifts the being towards a transcendent Ecstasy and is ready to shed all the downward pull of the world from its wings in its uprising to reach the One Highest; but it calls down also this transcendent Love and Beatitude to deliver and transform this world of hatred and strife and division and darkness and jarring Ignorance. It opens to a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an intense and immense will for the good of all, for the embrace of the World-Mother enveloping or gathering to her her children, the divine Passion that has plunged into the night for the redemption of the world from the universal Ignorance." In the last phrase we have the rationale of the Love-Rose's arising from Nature's abyss: it is Divine Love, the "fire-passion of Grace", that has made a holocaust of itself by plunging into that abyss as the world-redeemer, and through the psychic being's yearning that has all the ache of this abyss within it the Rose of Love whose supreme existence is in Eternity shall manifest in earth and beatify no less than beautify our life.

Here two more quotations from Sri Aurobindo will be apt. "A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it. In that fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their grosser elements and those that are undivine per-versions are burned away and the others discard their insuffi-ciencies, till a spirit of largest love and a stainless divine delight arises out of the flame and smoke and frankincense. It is the divine love which so emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man and all creatures in an active universal equality, will be more potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be. It is this poured out into acts that could alone create a harmony in the world and a true unity between all its creatures; all else strives in vain towards that end so long as Divine Love has not disclosed itself as the heart of the delivered manifestation in terres-trial Nature."³ What "all else" — mind, life-force, physical con-sciousness — would do without the psyche is well driven home by Sri Aurobindo: "Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven

1.Ibid., Vol. I, p. 177.

2.Ibid., pp. 1 77-78.

3.Ibid., pp. 187-188.

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and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublima-tion to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital ima-gination and mental idealised chimera."¹

Mark that Sri Aurobindo begins by speaking of the Divine Name and ends with speaking of the rose and sapphire of Divine Love. With them we circle back to the Rose of Bliss and its "vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven" and its "passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name."

1. Ibid., p . 189.

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TALK NINETEEN

We have done our brief best with what I have called the mystical metaphysics and psychology of Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God. Let us now glance at the sheer poetic quality of its five incantatory stanzas.

In the first stanza the first outstanding effect is: "vermilion stain." The word "stain" is a happy violence showing the passion that bursts forth as if with God's own rich blood forced through the rapt distance of the Absolute. The suggestion of "blemish" in the word adds a sublime piquancy to the passion, as if Divine Perfec-tion were being divinely sullied in a spurt of-self-abandon and self-disclosure. The next effect to catch attention is: "fire-sweet." It is an unusual combination in which we have the passing of the seen through the touched into the tasted. And to get this combination needs not only a fusion of the senses but also their turning subtle to concretise the realities of inner experience. On the non-mystical level, that experience may be romantic fervour or idealistic enthu-siasm. Or it may be creative art-frenzy: have we not Hopkins writing of "Sweet fire, the sire of Muse..."? On the mystical level, it is the contact of the Divine, the communion with the Eternal, bringing an all-enkindling all-consuming joy in which the separa-tive ego is lost in an infinite radiance. Besides being remarkable in itself, "fire-sweet" is very much in place where it stands. It con-centrates at the same time the warm violence of the words "ver-milion stain" and the opulent ardency of the next phrase "seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven". It is a grip-point between the two and leads from the one to the other. This other phrase also is arresting. Here the operative term is "seven-tinged". If merely "tinged" were used, the "ecstasies seven" would surely indicate the variety of the tingeing, but the impression would miss the intense colour-impact as well as the intense multiplicity. Although only seven the ecstasies are said to be, we feel as if they were seven times seven and as many times flushed.

The entire last line,

Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name,

is splendid. As my remarks in the previous Talk must have made it clear, the designation "passion-flower" here has nothing to do

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with the genus of plants whose flower is taken in Europe to suggest the instruments of Christ's Passion — that is, Christ's suffering on the cross. I spoke of the flower-flush which is the Nameless Abso-lute in its passion of manifestation in the superhuman azures above and I contrasted it to the bud-glow which is the same Absolute manifesting as the mystical Name, the Divinity relating its miracle-flame to the human heart and leaping up there, a progressive perfection, in answer to that heart's cry for happiness. What endows the first half of the expression with a striking felicity is the linking of passion with the Nameless: we realise that the full flowering of the Absolute in the Rose of Bliss is only the bringing out of an intensity existing in some inconceivable manner in the very being of That which seems infinitely aloof. There is also a challenge to the imagination by the Nameless getting called a flower and the Name a bud. And in both halves of the line the use of "Nameless" and "Name" in connection with the floral image creates a rich yet elusive mysticism which is most haunting. The predominant lip-rhythm — p, m, b, m and again m — helps to suggest not only the opening of something closed but also the mouthlike objects that are the very theme — the vermilion flower and bud. In the second stanza, there are

Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing and

Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour —

two excellent lines in reference to the divine original whose imper-fect translation is our mental thought and which has to make this thought no longer a translation but a transparence of the "great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being" (another phrase which is excellent poetry conjuring up by its long ea and oo and e as well as by its heavy consonantal accumulations — gr, sd, mbl, ts, ng — the presence itself of the high-hung massive flower spoken of). The former line pictures very emphatically what Mind is in its origin. In its true form Mind is no mere thinker, no dealer in abstractions from outside the reality of things. The archetypal Mind is a self-existent Light, the clear and pure depth of a dynamic vision and, as

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shown by the succeeding phrase asking the Rose of Light to live in the mind of our earthhood, it is capable of palpitant activity. Both when it is called a Rose of Light and when designated a "golden mystery" and asked to flower in earth's mentality, we understand that it is a power of Truth that is also a power of Beauty. Coming as such, it enters the time-movement with the warmth and inti-macy of a beloved guest. The Divine Mind is Wisdom, an intuitive illumination measuring out and connecting rightly, happily, harmo-niously according to the essence of each detail and the essence of the ensemble without which the details have no final significance. That Wisdom is a great golden bloom of mystery — a sovereign and unerring insight is the mysterious gold of this great bloom, an intense loveliness and a creative artistry are the bloomed greatness of this gold that is a mystery. The Wisdom on the summits of being has all Plato and Hegel in it, every analytic acuteness, every synthetic sweep those master-philosophers possessed, but it has also a direct Seerhood far beyond their brains: it is free from the obscurities of the time-process, it is a head crowned with a Sun. The picture in the phrase about the head of the Timeless is start-ling in its splendour: the poetry of it brings almost a bodily feeling of a supraphysical yet not abstract or tenuous experience.

In the third stanza, the most gripping verbal turns in my opinion are "damask force of Infinity" and "thy diamond halo piercing the night". The adjective "damask" carries out a double function. Its obvious significance is "red" and it takes our thought to the variety of rose known as "Damask Rose" and thus proves itself apt for characterising the Rose of God. But it does not only mean "coloured like the Damask Rose". That variety of rose came originally from Damascus, a city especially celebrated for its steel sword-blade with a wavy surface-pattern in it, and the adjective also signifies a resemblance to such a blade. The extraordinariness of the Divine Force, its quality of being most beautiful and most cutting-keen, is caught in the adjective. The phrase about the diamond halo is extremely apt too. "Diamond" is suggestive both of sheer white luminosity and of intense pure strength that masters everything: the diamond is the most brilliant and the hardest substance we know of. Nothing can be a greater piercer of "night" than a diamond halo radiating from a Rose of Power. And we may fittingly visualise the piercing as made by rays like innumerable Damascus sword-blades shooting their sheen all around.

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The fourth stanza grips us first by "smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire". In the vivid violence of "smitten purple" we find the innate impetuosity of the divine Desire that is self-driven as by a torture of delight and we find the burning pressure and irresistible impact this Desire would bring in getting itself incarnated, becoming substanced and shaped into flesh. Purple, to occult sight, is the colour of the Life-Force, but the phrase under scrutiny has even a practical appositeness: if you smite any part of your body you will see a purple patch on the skin! The same stanza arrests us next with "colour's lyre", a turn of phrase suggestive of colour growing a sound-power, artistic vision growing a mantra, Divine Beauty capable of converting into a rhythmic whole whatever it touches and tinges with its passionate joy. The phrase prepares by a packed symbol the poetic ground for the appeal in the next line:

Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme.

Perhaps the word "rhyme" is meant to convey not only a rhythmic whole but also a harmony answering in the manifestation below to the epiphany above. And the position of the word at the line-end, where rhyming is done in poetry, endows it with a finely realistic gesture, so that the point is made with a recognisable concreteness and finality.

The last stanza gives three memorable locutions. First is "a blush of rapture on Eternity's face". The word "face" is the right expressive step forward after the poet has spoken in the fourth stanza of divine Desire becoming embodied, just as the word "incarnate" there is the right expressive step after the "icon" of the third stanza and just as "icon" is the right expressive step after the second stanza's "seeing" and just as "seeing" is the right expressive step after the "fire-sweet" self-experience with which in the first stanza ecstatic passion goes forth to create. A locution of great felicity also is "ruby depth of all being". The whole richness of mystical Love is in "ruby depth": the richness would not be mystical enough if "crimson" or "carmine" or "scarlet" or any other equivalent of "red" were used. There are three reasons why they would fall short. The first is phonetic and this itself has a threefold aspect. The initial vowel in "ruby" is a long oo-sound

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evoking a sense of inwardness in tune with the noun "depth" which is qualified by this adjective. The adjective has a labial consonant akin to the p of "depth" and identical with the b of "being": a unity is established by this triple consonance as if the depth of all being could be nothing so aptly as "ruby". Then there is the second syllable "by" with a short sound anticipating and preparing the long "be" of "being", thus relating the adjective to the very starting-point of the being whose depth it qualifies. All this is the phonetic felicity involved. The second reason is the concreteness given to the depth by an adjective made from the name of a precious stone: not merely redness is here but a tangible object saving the depth from striking us as an abstraction arti-ficially daubed over with a colour-epithet. Justice is done to the substantiality of spiritual experience. Thirdly, the ruby is a pre-cious stone found not on earth's surface but far underground: in addition to an inward-pointing sound harmonising with the rest of the phrase and in addition to a colourful concreteness true to spirituality, the adjective carries a direct association of depth.

Now we come to the final phrase that is outstanding in a poem of uninterrupted precision of imaginative language:

Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss.

An exceedingly moving expression is here, charged with a pro-found sweetness of pathos. The r common to "Arise" and "heart" and "yearning" make, in combination with prominent long vowels, the first half of the expression one whole of clear liquidity melodiously surging up: a sense of welling tears is exquisitely conveyed. The s

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

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and the art of Virgil's

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt,

which C Day Lewis has englished:

Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience.

But Sri Aurobindo has a language of profounder implication. Apart from that implication which we have already dealt with when expounding the mystical metaphysics and psychology of the poem, there are one or two points about the effective interplay of the meaning of certain words. "Arise" becomes intense by con-trast to "abyss"; and what is asked to arise — the rapture-blushed Rose of Love — gets its intensity from "sobs": a sob too arises, it is a sound that comes up from the heart's yearning, and now instead of it the God-Rose is asked to bring up its rapture-blush.

Everywhere in Rose of God we have a language that is not only profound but also life-packed, as language should be when it attempts the revelation of spiritual reality. It can be simple but with a direct stroke and not with an easy-going fluency, or it can be rich but with a density of semi-occult semi-physical vision and not with a loose decorativeness of intellectual or emotional stuff coupled with pleasing images. The spiritual style simple is in: "outbreak of the Godhead in man". Just one word is enough to bring a beautiful energy from within, going straight to its goal without. It is also in: "beatitude's kiss." Here too one word gathers up all the piercing intimacy of beatitude: a word like "touch" or even "clasp" would not give that intimacy. And, fur-ther, "kiss" is very appropriate because sobbing has been men-tioned before it: the mouth is involved in both sobbing and kissing: life which is a sob of Nature becomes a kiss of Supernature. The spiritual style rich is in phrases like "vermilion stain" and "Sun on the head of the Timeless", which exert an audacious pictorial pressure on us.

I may close my survey by saying that each of the two sides in every stanza — the high above that is for ever and the down below that has to be — imposes its significances upon our spiritual sense not only by vivid words mystically visionary but also by an inner

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tone massively musical. And it is because of this tone that we have brought in the poem under the class of symphonic melopoeia.

However, it is a poem which could easily be classed as phano-poeia because of the abundance of its imagery. And, as such, it would belong to the highest revelatory order, the phanopoeic counterpart of the highest incantatory in melopoeia. And its double nature may be said to be indicated by the very character and potency ascribed to the Rose of God. That Rose is apostro-phised as "red icon of might" and "image of immortality" as well as invoked to

Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme.

A comprehensive yet brief summing up of the simultaneously phanopoeic and melopoeic beauty of the piece is in the phrase already quoted: "colour's lyre."

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TALK TWENTY

We have regarded Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God as a symphonic masterpiece of the highest melopoeia — the acme of Intonation or Incantation. I want now to speak a little of what Sri Aurobindo has termed undertones and overtones — "speak a little" because I do not know much about the matter and Sri Aurobindo himself has provided us with only a few hints. He has not even defined "under-tone" or "overtone". He has just given a few examples of lines with undertones, lines with overtones, lines with both together and lines with neither. The last-named can be good poetry but in them the rhythm of the outer being is insistent and what impresses us is the admirable metrical music more than the play of an inner music moulding the metre. Of course the. inner music is always there: what we are considering is its marked presence.

I should like to point out that undertones and overtones due to this marked presence may not coincide with Intonation or Incan-tation. In the latter, some spiritual cadence comes to the ear. This cadence can never be without undertones or overtones, yet all undertones and overtones are not spiritual. The spiritual cadence can be reached as the result of some strong intensity of the sen-suous, the emotional or the intellectual tone manipulating the metrical rhythm: this is what mostly happens in poetry not drawn direct from mystical sources. Poetry direct from these sources carries the spiritual cadence clearly in itself and breathes it into the metrical rhythm. But undertones and overtones are in themselves simply the inner rhythm becoming prominent. Perhaps all melo-poeia may be said to have undertones and overtones as its basis.

Let me put before you Sri Aurobindo's examples. There is excellent metrical rhythm without any undertone or overtone in Shakespeare's

Journeys end in lovers' meeting,

Every wise man's son doth know.

(By the way, why the wise man's son and not the wise man himself? Perhaps only the son would be interested in lovers' meeting?) Now hear Shakespeare beginning to have undertones:

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

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Again Shakespeare's

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,

has admirable metrical rhythm, but Sri Aurobindo can catch no undertones or overtones in it. Undertones run exquisitely all through the same poet's

In maiden meditation, fancy-free,

while his

In the dark backward and abysm of time

is all overtones. Both undertones and overtones are present in those lines we have quoted from Hamlet more than once:

Absent thee from felicity a while

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain.

If I may pick a longer passage to illustrate an intermixture of lines with neither undertones nor overtones and lines with either, consider the famous soliloquy of Romeo by the body of Juliet whom he takes as dead. You know the story? Juliet had consulted her family's medico to give her a sleeping draught which might fool others into believing that she had passed away. Unfortunately she could not take Romeo into her confidence: so the poor lover is beside himself with grief and resolves to follow her into the un-known:

Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe

That unsubstantial death is amorous;

And that the lean abhorred monster keeps

Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

For fear of that, I will still stay with thee;

And never from this palace of dim night

Depart again; here, here will I remain

With worms that are thy chambermaids; O, here

Will I set up my everlasting rest;

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And shake the yoke of inauspicous stars

From this world-wearied flesh.

I think the first two lines have practically no undertones or over-tones. The third and fourth seem to me to have undertones quite audible. The fifth appears just to keep them going, but the next two are full of them. The phrase about the worms being Juliet's chambermaids strikes me as losing them somewhat. The remaining part of the passage comes to my ear surcharged with both under-tones and overtones, the latter predominating at the very end.

How shall we distinguish undertones from overtones? We may say in general that the former reach us with a music of intensity more than wideness, delicacy rather than power: where wideness and power are there the overtones rule the rhythm. But it is not always easy to draw a line. Is intensity or delicacy lacking in the following from Shakespeare?

Take, O, take those lips away,

That so sweetly were forsworn;

And those eyes, the break of day,

Lights that do mislead the morn;

But my kisses bring again,

Bring again;

Seals of love, but sealed in vain,

Sealed in vain.

Sri Aurobindo has declared that this whole lyric is all overtones!

Now some concluding remarks on melopoeia. In all melopoeia, language does what music is supposed to do: possess us directly with sound and enchant or elevate us. But I must emphasise that it is music transferred into terms of language. The two are different in their processes. Word-melopoeia need not always lend itself to being set to a tune. And it is a curious fact that some of the greatest melopoeics in verse have had very little ear for music — they were practically tone-deaf. Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne, Hugo, Yeats, though they have written about music itself, were all tone-deafs in more or less degree. Swinburne was such an extreme case that if he had heard the tunes, without the words, of "God Save the Queen" and "Bandemataram" played in turn to an audience of mixed Englishmen and Indians, he would have been

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able to distinguish the difference of tune only by watching whether Englishmen had stood up or Indians had done so!

If I may be permitted to be a little personal, I myself, though fairly capable of a bit of melopoeia in verse and acutely conscious of it when others create it, can scarcely be described as having in any technical sense an ear for music. Not that I run away from music — oh no, I do not share the opinion of the student who paraphrased most originally Keats's

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter...

Keats, as you must be aware, is referring to the engravings on a Grecian Urn, engravings of a procession in which musicians are playing on pipes. Their music is of course inaudible but therefore all the more enchanting to our spirit: it is filled with a sweetness to which we are constrained to put no limit or end such as sense-experience has to put to tunes actually heard. The student boldly produced the howler: "It's nice to listen to music, but much nicer not to." Well, I have in my time listened to most of the great compositions of Europe and several classics of Indian music and on a number of occasions let myself go in ecstatic "Wah-wah"'s. But never ask me to remember a tune and repeat it to you. If I try to reproduce it, I invariably create something else — a new com-position which most people consider a decomposition. My own poems, however, are saved to a great extent from being decompo-sitions by my not having enough of a melopoeic mania. Poets who are enamoured of sound run often the risk of trusting to the sound-effect to carry off a sense either trivial or thin or else prosaic. A chronic case of thinness of sense is Swinburne who in later life lost himself in complex eddies of sound with hardly perceptible mean-ing. Milton, on the other hand, had always substantial significance, but at times he permitted it to be prose set to organ music — grand resonance sweeping merely intellectual matter along. Tennyson suffered from triviality. He once declared to his friend Carlyle: "I think I am the greatest master, after Shakespeare, of the rhythmic phrase in poetry, but I have really nothing to say." I may add that Carlyle rated Tennyson highly and saw him as a mighty bard constantly "cosmicising the chaos within him". Perhaps what im-pressed Carlyle was not Tennyson's poetic speech so much as his

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frequent capacity for silence. Tennyson used often to visit Carlyle and they would sit at either end of the fireplace, smoking away. Two or three hours of an evening they would thus spend, each hidden in his own cloud of smoke and uttering not a word. At the close of the evening they would shake hands and say, "What a grand time we have had together!" Carlyle, as is well known, spent almost a lifetime of writing and lecturing on the virtues of silence. To him, Tennyson, no matter what he wrote, could not but be a sage because of those dumb evenings.

Here I may warn you against confusing Tennysonian triviality or Swinburnian thinness with what is musically elusive in verse. There are snatches of song in Shakespeare whose meaning cannot be caught in any sensible paraphrase but which produce no im-pression of being trivial or thin. On the contrary we are aware of an intensely significant emotion, but the emotion defies reason, so that to sober thought Shakespeare seems talking nonsense while actually there is a subtlety of mood seizable only by a sensitive intuition. An instance is the song from Measure for Measure which Sri Aurobindo has cited for overtones all through: "Take, O, take those lips away..." The poet Housman, in a critical lecture, asks how eyes could mislead the morn and how kisses could be brought again. He finds the notions nonsensical. But he is not foolish enough to condemn the song. Far from it. He considers it wonder-ful poetry. Only, he concludes that the function of poetry is to appeal to our solar plexus and that its essential work is not to say anything intelligible but to transfuse emotion. Here he is mis-taken. If Housman had said apropos of this lyric, "to transfuse emotionally a vision-mood beyond the mere mind", he would have hit the nail on the head: he would have made the head feel all intellectual sense knocked out by the hitting but he would have pierced through it to the thrilled dreaming heart of the matter and touched there something received from poetry's ultimate source which is overhead.

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TALK TWENTY-ONE

So the Quarterly Examination has come and gone, and we are together again. We were as if enemies for a while: now once more there is peace between us and we can look back calmly on wounds given or taken. But is it really a fact that you felt the Quarterly Examination as Keats had felt the Quarterly Review in which his Endymion had been attacked? Surely you can't picture me as a sort of Jeffreys exulting at the sight of your discomfiture? Besides, I was not solely responsible for the paper. The second question asking you to comment on the statement that "poets are born, not made" was neither born from me like a spontaneous sword trying to see how it could be borne by defenceless you, nor was it made by me with a devilish deliberation to watch how dismayed you could be. I merely assented to it. My hand in the business was directly confined to the first question:

"Write on the importance of Form in poetry and comment from the standpoint of Form as well as in general on the poetic qualities of:

(1)And on a sudden lo! the level lake

And the long glories of the winter moon.

(2)And mighty poets in their misery dead.

How would (2) strike you if it were rewritten? —

And mighty poets dead in their misery."

I found your answers a mixed affair. Some of you have tried your best to exercise the critical faculty, but as this faculty has not been active enough in the past its joints were somewhat creaky. Also, you do not have sufficient technical knowledge. And how indeed can there be the full necessary equipment when you are new to the subjects on which I am lecturing? I have no right to be disappointed if your answers to unaccustomed questions were not quite adequate. Many of you had the correct feeling about certain things in the two quotations, but you could not exactly give a living body to it. Well, both to set you on the right tack and to give you

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the consolation that I was not idling while you had to sweat, let me make a comment on the Tennyson lines as well as on the Words-worth phrase.

Face to face with the former, we have first to get an unthinking aesthetic impression by trying to enter into the general sense. Flung before us, revealed all at once and not by degrees, is a night-view of water and sky. At one moment, nothing; at the next, the full view: the white loveliness of the lake beneath the white beauty of the moon, both of them quietly shining in a clear immensity. The intuitive feeling we get through the visual impression is of a vast silence in which earth and non-earth are lying in a luminous harmony. Something sensitive in earth's being to the beyond, some capacity of answering to non-earth seems suggested in the vision of the lake at night, as if in the dull sleep of the earth-consciousness a secret eye got unexpectedly opened and was rap-turously responding to a never-sleeping eye in the ethereal dis-tances. As soon as we catch the imaginative turn of the lines, our outer eyes tend to shut and the inner consciousness starts enjoying not a landscape or waterscape or skyscape but a soulscape.

And the dominant aspect of this soulscape is a bright mono-tone: the lake and the sky and the moon are a spacious oneness of illumined mood. From that oneness the lines have arisen to lay out the contents of it in diverse related details of word-painting and word-music. That oneness is the inner form exteriorised in the form of two pentametric blank-verses achieving pictorial and melodious language.

Let us consider the elements of the melodiousness. All of you have noticed the recurrent l. If you had not noticed it I would have committed suicide in sheer heart-break over your lack of percep-tion. You have saved me from that fate and actually gladdened my heart by saying that the l produces a liquid effect which goes aptly with the lake-theme. But I should add that the repetition of l suggests not only water and water and water: it suggests also a certain uniformity in the state of the water — a certain continuous unchangingness. Of course, we can have unchanging mobility no less than unchanging stability. But when there is the word "level" the recurrent l is seen to be enforcing the suggestion of something that continues to be static, with no rise or fall, no sway or sweep, over a large area and through a protracted time. Here the art of the word "level" calls for a small comment. The word begins and

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ends with the same consonant l: it indicates a liquid sameness spread all through, and the two short e's bring a flatness of vowellation, adding to impress on our minds through our ears the straight unmoving surface of the water.

A further point in connection with the recurrent l is that its presence in "long glories" connects up the moonlight with the lake and immediately throws on us the steady sheen of the moon not only from the sky but also from the reflecting lake. This is an instance of what may be termed poetic logic. In poetry we do not always have clearly expressed connections, intellectually justified sequences. It is the way the words are used, the way the words sound, the way they are linked to one another that logicise a poetic statement. Tennyson does not tell us that since the lake is stretched out under the sky the light of the moon is both above and below: he simply takes the smoothly liquid consonant that has been associated with the prospect of the lake and puts it into the words he has employed for the moon's radiance: at once the intuition in us is touched through the aesthetic sense and we know what has happened by the collocation of moon and lake. Nor does the artistry of poetic logic end here. You will notice that in "long glories" we have on the one side the l which joins the words to what has gone earlier and on the other the consonants n

Between the loud stream and the trembling stars.

Here too a connection was to be established, making it perfectly natural that what applied to the river on earth applied also to the stars in the sky. Tennyson convinces us of the twofold application by so fashioning his phraseology that the same dominant consor nants occur in the words about the river and the stars. In "loud stream" and "trembling stars" we have in common the sounds: l, st, tr, m. The aesthetic intuition feels immediately convinced that the two things spoken of must be hanging together.

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Now for the role of vowels in our two-lined quotation. Many of you have considered this role, but you have not yet realised which vowels are long and which are short. Let me present you with some guidance in general. In the following list are words starting with the consonant most in evidence in the quotation and con-taining the long and the short versions of every vowel:

lake, lack.

lethal, letter.

light, lit.

lo, long.

lute, lug.

loot, look.

The first half of our opening line has short vowels: "And on a sudden..." Even the indefinite article "a" is a slurred sound, neither as in "lake" nor as in "lack" but somewhat like the u in "lug". Even if it were long, it would be unobtrusive because the indefinite article is a very minor word and here it becomes all the more so by standing where in a pentametric blank verse there is a natural slack, an unstressed syllable. Yes, two and a half feet of our line have short vowels — and then we have the exclamatory word "lo" with its long o. The impression is of a vision emerging abruptly into an openness, and the rounded sound of the long o suggests a kind of horizontal circling far and wide and a vertical circling far and high. The suggestion gets filled out when we have finished reading the two lines and realised that the scene includes the moonlit heavens as well as the broad lake. The suggestion of the far and wide horizontal stretch is supported by the very word "lake" with its long a, and that of the vertical breaking into farness and highness is supported by the semi-long o of "glories" and the long oo of "moon". I should say that when we have finished reading the lines and filled out the initial suggestion of "lo" we feel instinctively also that the moon could not be anything except at the full, a silver rondure. Our feeling is aided, of course, by the phrase "long glories" and the deep-toned noun "moon", but it would not be complete without that "lo".

Perhaps you will submit that the short-vowelled "long" is a slight slip on Tennyson's part and that an adjective like "large" with its vowel-length would have been more appropriate. But

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Tennyson was no slave to the craft of vowel-suggestion. "Large" has not the n needed for the connection with "winter moon" though it does bring the l which is significantly operative in "long". In addition, "large" has a reference only to space: it has no pointer to time. The nights of winter are a drawn-out stretch of time: during winter the moon shines for more hours than at any other season. How is the special span of time-sheen to be suggested together with the extended space-flush? No epithet except "long" will perform the twofold function. No doubt, it would have been better if the o here had possessed intrinsic length, but Tennyson has done his utmost to compensate for the missing effect by making the mot juste that is "long" a part of a spondaic foot — "long glo" — so that it is an element in a metrical movement creating by a pair of consecutive stresses an impression of mas-siveness and unbroken continuity: the shortness of the o is forgotten and transcended. I may observe that the spondee's impression is consummated at the line's end by the deep-toned "moon".

One or two of you have remarked that the lake must have been frozen since the season was winter. In the poem, Morte d"Arthur, from which the lines are culled, it was not frozen. But if the lines stand by themselves we have no indication against frozenness. You would be quite justified in choosing to take the surface of the lake to be a smooth expanse of gleaming ice.

Now for the second quotation, the Wordsworthian. I should say at the very start that in this line —

And mighty poets in their misery dead —

the word "dead" refers to "poets" even though it stands next to "misery". I found that one of you was misled by its position, as well as by the epithet "mighty" applied to "poets", into thinking that it is of dead misery, misery conquered and killed by "mighty poets", that the line speaks! Naturally, with this misconception one could say straight away that the changed version —

And mighty poets dead in their misery —

would turn the theme topsy-turvy. But Wordsworth actually means what the changed version makes perfectly clear: only, the

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way he puts things is deeply poetic while that version puts them in a manner clearly prosaic in spite of the metrical mould. We shall come to this difference. At the moment, let me say that the original line carries a tremendous pathos because it packs into a small space of accurately ordered words a lot of tragic significance. Each word is a world of meaning and the complete phrase is a powerful gloss on what may be called the meaning of the world.

Take the very first important word: "mighty". It connotes some-thing great, something sovereign, something grandly capable, and this connotation intensifies the contrast intended in the two later terms: "misery", "dead". Our world is such that even the mighty have to be miserable and to be so helpless as to die as a climax to their miserableness: nay, our world is such that especially the mighty ones have to suffer a dreadful doom. The absolute allitera-tion of the opening sound m, as well as the closing sound y, in "mighty" and "misery", the close alliteration of the dentals in "mighty" and its companion "poets" with those in "dead" — these enforce the sense of the special bearing of the Shakespearean "inauspicious stars" and the Hardyan "crass casualty" on the choicest beings upon earth. Here again we have the subtle yet irresistible play of poetic logic. Change the word "misery", put anything else without the twofold alliteration, or employ an epi-thet for poets without the strength of a dental letter in it to be echoed at the line's end: the picture and feeling of tragedy will not go home with so piercing, so profound a power.

Now we come to the noun "poets". It has a particular affinity with "mighty" and "misery" by its own labial, its lip-consonant p. All the three words hang together indispensably with a funda-mental poetic logic, as if nobody except poets could be utterly mighty and utterly miserable. And I may observe that the running of a lip-consonant through the three words contributes to the appropriateness of the term "poet" which implies one who speaks beautiful words, one who uses his lips in a mighty manner. But, of course, this term strikes the right note in the tragic message of the line for other reasons too. A poet is believed to bring us the light and the delight of a "world far from ours" by his inspired and revelatory art of language. His work is just the opposite of what is signified by "misery" and "dead". A divine Ananda makes him its mouthpiece: a secret realm of immortal beauty is expressive through his verbal creations, creations which are themselves un-

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dying. But, though his songs are heavenly, his life is a hell in a world unappreciative of his gifts. And, though his creations tower above the destructive touch of time, he himself is beaten down most ignobly by the neglect of his fellows and by the merciless march of selfishness and ugliness and cruelty — a march that hurts him all the more because his heart is sensitive with chords that vibrate at once — as keen to feel the smite of earthly sorrow as to feel the caress of unearthly felicity.

At the very head of European literary history we have Homer, a poor blind beggar wandering with his harp and dying without a home. After his death, seven cities disputed with one another to be considered his birthplace! Then there is Dante, exiled from his beloved Florence, homeless for nearly fifteen years, depending on the fickle favours of moody and even boorish patrons. Poignantly he has quintessenced the feeling of his humiliation in those lines:

Tu proverai si come sa di sale

Lo pane altrui e com'e duro calle

Lo scandere e'l salir par altrui scale —

lines which have been translated by Binyon:

Yea, thou shalt learn how salt his food who fares

Upon another's bread — how steep his path

Who treadeth up and down another's stairs.

There is a story that once the Abbott of a monastery was awak-ened in the middle of the night by a knock at the door. When he opened the door, he saw a gaunt old man with weary eyes, who, on being asked what he wanted, said just one word: "Peace." This man was Dante, the greatest poet of Mediaeval Europe. Not until he died did Florence wake up to his worth. And when he was gone it urged its claim for his body upon the city of Ravenna where he had been buried. Byron has referred to the poet's resting-place at Ravenna:

I pass each day where Dante's bones are laid,

A little cupola more neat than solemn

Protects his dust...

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Think, again, of Keats, the most extraordinary young genius in the domain of English poetry — Keats, attacked by brutal critics, loving in vain a woman who hardly realised either his love or his genius, suffering not only from heartbreak but also from con-sumption, spitting out in blood-clots the lungs which had breathed forth the passionate enchanted music of the Ode to a Nightingale and the serene yet intense symphony of the Ode on a Grecian Urn — Keats who died at the age of twenty-four and voiced the depth of his disappointment by offering for his own epitaph the sentence: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." In the eighteenth century, a little earlier than Keats, there was the English poet on whom Wordsworth himself has two touching lines, the youth who lived so poor and yet so disdainful of begging that he had to commit suicide:

I thought of Chatterton, that marvellous boy,

The sleepless soul which perished in its pride...

Even Shelley, though he did not die of physical misery or poverty, lived scorned by his fellows to whom he sang of light and love and liberty. Shelley died young too, by a mishap in the gulf of Spezia: sightless Nature-forces swept his life away at a moment when he was reaching his ripest poetic vision and expression. All who came into contact with him felt a radiant presence and yet he was reviled as atheist, corrupter of morals, enemy of mankind: he was denied even the custody of a child of his. No wonder Shelley never laughed: the load of a world of men blind to beauty lay too heavy on that heavenly heart — the heart which, when his body was burning on a pyre by the Italian sea that had drowned him, was plucked from the flames by a friend. Leigh Hunt, Moore, Byron, Trelawney were there on the beach. It was Trelawney who saved the heart from burning. But during the poet's life it had burned enough — at the same time with love for

The Light whose smile kindles the universe

and pain at the scorching abuse thrown on it by bigots. The remains of the author of Adonais, that superb elegy on Keats, were buried in the same cemetery at Rome where Keats had been laid earlier. Shelley's grave bears the most Shelleyan epitaph pos-

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sible: Cor cordium — "Heart of hearts". Byron, the poet doubled with a man of the world, the dreamer crossed with a cynic, could not help saying about his dead friend: "I do not know any man who would not seem to be a beast by the side of Shelley." Yes, the world has not been very kind to its poets and for the nectar brought by them it has often forced poison on their lips. This anomaly is penetratingly and puissantly uttered once for all by the closing cadence of Wordsworth's line. The word "dead" comes with a finality of climax and, by the same hard consonant at the beginning and at the end, conveys the dull-darkness of inescapable and everlasting loss of life. We almost hear a thud as of a body helplessly, senselessly falling. The device of putting at the end of the line the word indicating with such expressive conclusiveness the end of a poet's life renders any change of the position of "dead" a fatal flaw from the artistic standpoint. The variant —

And mighty poets dead in their misery —

is not unrhythmic or meaningless, yet all the subtle or forceful quality of the verse is gone. The distancing of "misery" from "mighty" weakens the alliterative suggestions on which we have dwelt. And the placing of "dead" right in the middle of the line robs the line of its prolonged pathos and mars the development of the tragedy: the phrase about misery seems tagged on, an after-thought if not even a superfluity. Besides, there is a weak trailing away of the metrical movement: the stress in "misery" is on the first syllable, the third which closes the verse takes only a minor accent which would be meaningful if one were talking of an indefi-nite process but is hardly right when death has already been mentioned: we are not referring to a continuous rotting away after death out of a grief and pain and privation preceding it and culminating in the agony of life's own end. A constructed instead of a created line is what we get by the shifting of Wordsworth's final word. The electricity of the inevitable expression is missing. You can see from this how important are the arrangement and the rhythm of words, how full of vital meaning is the form. Not a single syllable is altered and yet merely because a monosyllable that comes at the close of the fifth foot is placed at the close of the third, what strikes us is not the terrible irony of great singers falling into protracted suffering and irrevocable silence but the

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ironic phenomenon of a line about death failing to convey livingly its sorrowful substance and itself falling half dead upon our ears by using the word "dead" halfway through the run of the verse.

As metrical rhythm, the new line is quite harmonious, perhaps even more musical — but it is an empty music because there is an absence of inner form. The original line echoes or embodies Wordsworth's inner posture of vision, inner movement of feeling —it is true to the poetic intuition and becomes thereby a sovereign instance of a poet's expressive might and a devastating verdict on the crassness of our common world.

If this world is like that, surely a new light, a new life, is needed —a moon of Divine Ananda must shed its "long glories" here and a "level lake" of the soul in us must be rapt in them, covered over and permeated with the wonderful whiteness. Then there would be in the night of our Ignorance an image of what Sri Aurobindo has made King Aswapati vision in the Supreme Knowledge:

Rapture of beatific energies

Joined Time to the Timeless, poles of a single joy;

White vasts were seen where all is wrapped in all.

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TALK TWENTY-TWO

A song of Shakespeare's from Measure for Measure closed our discussion of melopoeia. Well, Shakespeare is just the poet with whom to start our discussion of phanopoeia. For, Shakespeare is the superman of imagery. But let us first say a few prefatory words on our subject. Just as the music of melopoeia must come fused with significance, though not necessarily significance acceptable to the reasoning mind, so also the Colour and shape, the contour and gesture brought by phanopoeia must come as organic part of the substance of poetry. By this I mean that true imagery is not something added to an idea or emotion, it does not serve simply as an illustration of either. It is such that the idea or emotion as a poetic entity lives only by it or at least draws its life from the core of it. But by imagery I do not here refer merely to a simile or metaphor. I include pure description which is charged with vision-intensity.

Intense description may pertain directly to the actual theme in hand or indirectly to it through a simile or metaphor which instead of being briefly etched is elaborated as so often in Homer. Homer, taking one or two main points in common between objects or situations or persons, launches again and again on long compa-risons which are themselves complete pictures — small dramatic scenes inset into the main visual reconstruction: the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's blank-verse narratives — particularly his Sohrab and Rustam — and in those early works of Sri Aurobindo: Urvasie, Love and Death, Baji Prabhou. We may cite one from Sri Aurobindo. He is describing the heavenly nymph Urvasie awaking from a swoon into which she fell under the abducting assault of a Titan. She awakes to the presence of her saviour, King Pururavas:

As when a child falls asleep unaware

At a closed window on a stormy day,

Looking into the weary rain, and long

Sleeps, and wakes quietly into a life

Of ancient moonlight, first the thoughtfulness

Of that felicitous world to which the soul

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Was visitor in sleep, keeps her sublime

Discurtained eyes; human dismay comes next,

Slowly; last, sudden, they brighten and grow wide

With recognition of an altered world,

Delighted: so woke Urvasie to love.

I shan't linger over the metrical qualities or the verbal, except to mark the phrase "sublime discurtained eyes". The first adjective does not only mean "exalted" by the wonder visited during slum-ber. I believe the literal Latin shade is present as in that phrase where, after saying that God made animals earthward-looking, Lucretius tells us: "os sublime dedit homini" — "He gave man an uplifted face." Sri Aurobindo's "child" awakes with her eyes physically uplifted, looking upward: a concrete pictorial touch goes with the general psychological suggestion. "Discurtained" has a twofold meaning in the reverse manner. It seems to signify more than just "opened by parting of the lids": here to the con-crete sense is added the idea that the earthly veil by which the eyes are shut off from the soul's world has been temporarily removed. Especially as this adjective follows "sublime", it yields that idea in sympathy with the psychological suggestion of the latter: the expe-rience of exaltation is accompanied by the experience of revela-tion.

Now to our business. One may think that such lengthy similes are mostly decorative, but in fact when the poet has worked with true imagination they throw a subtle light upon a situation and bring out some truth from behind the surface of things. Sri Aurobindo speaks of a child. Urvasie, by being compared to this child, is revealed as a soul of innocence: she is, after all, a nymph of heaven, an Apsara, and, as the poem says afterwards, the Apsaras remain ever pure, no matter what they do. The simile makes the child who has fallen asleep wake in the midst of moon-light and keep awhile the feeling of the supernatural felicity visited in dream. Moonlight here has a very significant role. The moon is an old Indian symbol of Divine Nectar, supernatural felicity. If, then, the child awakes into a world whose familiarity is found pervaded and altered by "a life of ancient moonlight", is it sur-prising that she should retain the "thoughtfulness" of the felicitous dream-world? Although "human dismay" comes for a moment, it is brightness that finally remains, and the last word of the simile is

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"delighted", a word which, as applied to the eyes that "grow wide" still in the moonlight, strengthens further the moon's sym-bolism and the continuity of its light with the atmosphere of the dream-felicity. All this illuminates the love-experience into which Urvasie woke. Just as the swoon into which she had fallen was due to a monstrous attack on her, comparable to the child's day of storm and "weary rain", Urvasie's love-experience, which is essentially one of bliss, is shown to be a white luminosity belonging to some ageless depth of mysterious being and beatitude, some depth into which she must have plunged during her swoon just as the sleeping child is said to have sojourned in a paradisal realm. The elaborate simile has indeed afforded us in a charming way an insight into Urvasie's life and love.

Shakespeare has very few elaborate comparisons. His mind is too active and darting for them. But almost every pulse and turn of the poet in him is phanopoeic. Images are the very stuff of his thinking and feeling and they are such in several modes. He does not just vivify abstract things, as in the sonnet-opening which depicts the condition or sense of ageing:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves or few or none do hang...

(Was he by any chance referring to his falling hair which left his head the monumental egg we see in his pictures?) He also makes the abstract possess concrete qualities as if it could do no other:

I have lived long enough: my way of life

Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf...

It seems the most natural thing for a way of life to do what it does here. Again, Shakespeare does not rest with activising concretely an observation of the misfortune suffered in a changing mortal existence such as all of us know: e.g.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time...?

He can also catch an awesome impalpable reality in its very es-sence of strangeness, as by that vibrant evocation which Sri Aurobindo finds full of overtones and has somewhere considered

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one of the rarest poetic revelations:

In the dark backward and abysm of time...

We may remark how Shakespeare gets his best effect frequently by a combination of the abstract with the concrete: "sere" with "yellow", "scorns" with "whips", "abysm of time" with "dark backward". Somehow the concreteness thus becomes both inten-sified and magnified.

Of course, the line about the "dark backward" is Shakespeare at an unusual occupation, almost an occupation that is mystical. At a more characteristic level he is a puissantly colourful metaphorist of the objects and scenes he finds around him and he employs all the resources of an abundant vocabulary, as in the apostrophe to Sleep by a troubled King, the apostrophe from which Sri Aurobindo has so often admired for image-vividness as well as for richness of word and rhythm those three lines:

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?

Shakespeare is not shy of double epithets nor of packing his rhythm with alliterative sounds — six r's from the end of the second line to the end of the third.

Sri Aurobindo has also commented on the verses in which Shakespeare, with his eye again on the "surge", commits a meta-phorical violence:

Or take up arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them?¹

Sri Aurobindo imagines what may be called the Johnsonian critical method vis-a-vis such poetry — "the method which expects a precise logical order in thoughts and language and pecks at all that departs from a matter-of-fact or strict and rational ideative cohe-rence or a sober restrained classical taste." Sri Aurobindo writes: "What would the Johnsonian critic say to Shakespeare's famous

1. Actually the lines start "Or to take arms" and not "Or take up arms". I am retaining the form commented on by Sri Aurobindo.

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lines? He would say, 'What a mixture of metaphors and jumble of ideas! Only a lunatic could take up arms against a sea! A sea of troubles is a too fanciful metaphor and, in any case, one can't end the sea by opposing it, it is more likely to end you.' Shakespeare knew very well what he was doing; he saw the mixture as well as any critic and he accepted it because it brought home, with an inspired force which a neater language could not have had, the exact feeling and idea that he wanted to bring out." I may add that a proof of Shakespeare's awareness is that he Skilfully eludes being caught by the Johnsonian critic's booby-trap: "Can one end a sea instead of being ended by it?" Mark that in the second half-line Shakespeare speaks not of ending the sea but of ending the troubles — he uses "them" and not "it".

We can gauge the wrong-headedness of Johnsonian criticism by referring to Johnson's own balancing against one of the most admired passages in Macbeth three couplets from Dryden's drama, The Indian Emperor. Dryden gives the stage-direction: "Enter Cortez alone in a night-gown" — and then the speech of the night-gowned hero:

All things are hush'd, as Nature's self lies dead;

The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head;

The little birds in dreams their songs repeat,

And sleeping flowers beneath the night-dew sweat:

Even Lust and Envy sleep; yet Love denies

Rest to my soul, and slumber to my eyes.

A contemporary of Johnson, Rhymer, singled out this passage as a touchstone of poetic taste. But Wordsworth calls it "vague, bom-bastic and senseless." I for one find it positively comic in parts and, on the whole, a poor play of fancy and sentimentalism.

However, in fighting free of Johnsonian criticism, which is sus-picious of imaginative audacity and partial to the softly pretty and superficially dignified, we must not fall into a penchant for the extravagant and the contorted which were very much in vogue in Shakespeare's day and which Shakespeare himself often dange-rously skirted — things like that outrageous distortion of Homer by Chapman in his translation of the Iliad:

And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know,

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When sacred Troy shall shed her towers for tears of over-throw.

The second line is what is called a conceit — something which, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, does not convey any true vision or emotion but is meant to strike and startle the intellectual imagination. Shakespeare, we said in an earlier Talk, has a strong tendency to be ingenious, but he mostly carries off his ingenuities by working not from the brain-mind but from some white-hot centre of mul-tiple sight in the depths of his passionate vitality. Even when he is not openly energetic, whatever apparent exaggeration he indulges in is supported by a true throb of feeling, a genuine imaginative tension. Thus, when Othello, in his speech before his suicide, tells us of himself as being one

whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinal gum,

we get a picture that, unlike Chapman's of tear-towers, has a pathos appropriate and keen at once by the extreme simile the speaker fetches and by the romantically pricking strangeness of the simile and by the tears' background of rugged restrained dignity which is hinted in the second line.

The vital depths and the keen eye drawing upon them save Shakespeare not only from fanciful falsities but also from the generalities, sedate or high-pitched, that we often encounter in the dramatic language of his contemporaries — even contemporaries who have something or other Shakespearean about them. The Cambridge History of English Literature says: "In the mechanical elements of poetic rhythm, Massinger comes very near to Shake-speare; but, when we look deeper, and come to the consideration of those features of style which do not admit of tabular analysis, we find the widest difference." This difference may be briefly shown to the best effect by a few passages. A. H. Cruickshank has juxtaposed some lines from Massinger with those from Shake-speare to which they have an affinity, and T. S. Eliot has made comments. Here is Massinger speaking —

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Can I call back yesterday with all their aids

Who bow unto my sceptre? or restore

My mind to that tranquillity and peace

It then enjoyed?

("Their aids" is equal to "the aids of those" or "the aids of them" — an example of a peculiar English turn adopted several times by Sri Aurobindo in his writings.) Now take Shakespeare in Othello:

Not poppy nor mandragora

Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world

Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep

Which thou owedst yesterday.

("Owe" in Elizabethan English connotes "possess", "own".) Eliot remarks: "Massinger'S is a general rhetorical question, the lan-guage just and pure but colourless. Shakespeare's has particular significance; and the adjective 'drowsy' and the verb 'medicine' infuse a precise vigour." Again, Massinger writes:

Thou didst not borrow of Vice her indirect

Crooked and abject means.

Shakespeare has:

God knows, my son,

By what bypaths and indirect crook'd ways

I met this crown.

Says Eliot: "Massinger gives the general forensic statement, Shakespeare the particular image. 'Indirect crook'd' is forceful in Shakespeare, a mere pleonasm in Massinger. 'Crook'd ways' is a metaphor; Massinger's phrase only the ghost of a metaphor." (Eliot's "forensic" I understand as "affirmative in a public legal-istic manner.") Once more, listen to Massinger:

And now in the evening,

When thou shouldst pass with honour to thy rest,

Wilt thou fall like a meteor?

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Then lend your ears to Shakespeare:

I shall fall

Like a bright exhalation in the evening,

And no man see me more.

("Exhalation" means a puff in the air, a short burst of something vaporous.) Eliot's comment: "Here the lines of Massinger have their own beauty. Still, 'a bright exhalation' appears to the eye and makes us catch our breath in the evening; 'meteor' is a dim simile; the word is worn." Finally there is Massinger's:

What you deliver to me shall be locked up,

In a strong cabinet, of which you yourself

Shall keep the key.

And there is Shakespeare's:

'Tis in my memory locked,

And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

Eliot has the verdict: "In the preceding passage Massinger had squeezed his simile to death, here he drags it round the city at his heels; and how swift Shakespeare's figure is!"

To put it broadly: everywhere it is the unfailing phanopoeic energy of Shakespeare — his sense of the concrete and his gift of sight — wedded to a supreme word-craftsmanship, that makes his significances leap alive. But perhaps the most characteristic Shake-speareanism is not a single throbbing comparison as in the above excerpts: it is a swift succession of independent metaphors linked only by some inner necessity and by their immediate relevance to the theme, as in Macbeth's appeal to his physician on behalf of his wife:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

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What physician would not be enraptured on hearing an appeal like this? I am sure our Dr. Nripendra or Dr. Gupta would feel like a god if asked to do such things in such language. Perhaps even our Dr. Sanyal and Dr. Satyabrata Sen, though they are more sur-geons than physicians, would thrill; for, Macbeth speaks of pluck-ing a rooted sorrow, razing out brain-troubles and cleansing the stuffed bosom — procedures that appear to call for deep-going operations, the surgeon's job.

But possibly Dr. Sanyal and Dr. Sen would respond more to a certain surprising image of Eliot's and at once brandish their knives in exultant appreciation:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table...

It almost sounds like one surgeon egging another on to take advantage jointly of a wonderfully opportune situation in Nature. To operate on an anaesthetized evening! By Hippocrates, that's a thing few Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons could hope to do — unless the sky falls and overwhelms them with grace. But, leaving aside acknowledged F.R.C.S.'s we may ask whether Eliot has produced here a true poetic image that could please this unconventional F.R.C.S. before you — this Fellow Researching in Comparisons and Symbols or, if you want to generalise, this Fellow Roaring to Cute Students. At once we have to admit that the image is extraordinarily clever. The question is: Is it poetic? Let us try to understand what is intended. Evidently an atmos-phere and a mood are sought to be suggested. When the time of evening is compared to a sick person put under an anaesthetic, ready in his submerged state of mind to be operated upon, and you and I are asked to go somewhere at that time, immediately the keynote of the poem is struck. You and I are going to visit a world whose mind no less than body is sick and has sunk in vitality and awareness. And we are going to perform the operation of probing the cause of this neurotic disease. But merely to strike the keynote successfully is not enough for poetic ends. A justification has to be provided for the comparison made.

The fact that evening-time is neither day nor darkness but the middle term that is twilight gives point to the image so far as the

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psychological element is concerned. The anaesthetised patient who represents the sick world is in a state of mind which is neither life's day nor death's night but a certain hovering mid-existence in which all purpose and drive have grown indistinct, leaving nothing more than an issueless self-absorption. There is also the fact that twilight is characterised by a diffusion of faint red colour: this connects it up with the bleeding which takes place under an opera-tion but of which the patient himself, in his fainted condition, is unaware. That unconscious bleeding may be taken to stand for the patient on whom the operation is performed: the patient is but one mass of unconscious bleeding matter. Then the evening which is composed of a dimness of diffused crimson against the sky can very well be called an anaesthetised patient spread out upon a table during an operation. Finally, we have the word "etherized". It comes from the noun "ether" which belongs to two spheres: the operation-theatre where we may go under anaesthesia, and the space above us which science terms etheric and poetry calls ethe-real. The use of a passive past participle derived from this parti-cular noun is sheer inspiration. The whole imaginative impact of the lines would have evaporated if "chloroformed" instead of "etherized" had been used: the patient and the evening would have missed the ultimate fusion. The case would have been worse than Massinger's "meteor" where Shakespeare has "a bright exha-lation in the evening". "Meteor" is at least a touch upon the eye, however dull. "Chloroformed" would touch only the brain-cells and make a merely ideative connection with the twilight in the sky. "Etherized" nearly evokes an opposite Shakespearean phrase, visual and vivid: "a dim inhalation in the evening".

I think that Eliot, no matter how curiously, has succeeded in making poetry of the kind we have designated as piquant. Ex-tremely piquant phanopoeia is created in the modernist mode which does not put a cordon sanitaire around usually prosaic departments of life but intrudes everywhere with a semi-satiric semi-morbid acuteness of sensation-seeking intellect. Shakespeare would have congratulated Eliot here — Shakespeare who could come out with realistic ingenuities like:

his brain

Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit

After a voyage.

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I suppose the etherized patient's brain must be similarly dry.

Actually, I should be able to decide the point. For, I have been on two occasions an etherized patient. It all happened in London where my father, a Bombay doctor, took me when I was about six years old. I had suffered an attack of infantile paralysis — present pet-name "polio" — and in those days India held out no hopes for a polio-victim. The heel of my left foot had got pulled up by the paralytic infection and the muscles around the left knee had be-come useless. I had to walk with a hand pressed upon my knee in order to force the up-drawn heel down to floor-level. The leg did not have strength enough to let me move like half a ballet-dancer, tripping on one toe! Today, though I still limp, I can walk without doubling up — thanks to the skill of Dr. Tubby, the surgeon under whose knife I lay in an etherized condition. But I don't remember whether my brain, on awaking from the effects of the ether-fumes, felt as if it had been dry like Shakespeare's remainder biscuit. Don't conclude that my forgetting is due to the fact that I was a tiny tot. I remember a host of other things connected with my trip to England. I'll tell you about them one day. I have forgotten simply because I was not interested in the matter. How could I be interested when I had not read Shakespeare and Eliot and when the experience of my etherization was one I wanted very much to raze out? Yes, it was an unpleasant experience. On the first occasion of the two, I hardly knew what was going to occur: so I breathed in the sickly-sweetish fumes like an innocent idiot. On the second occasion everything in me revolted and I endeavoured to get my face away from the mask through which the fumes were being passed into my nose. On failing to be effective with mere nose-movement I got one of my hands into action and pushed the mask off so violently that the anaesthetic liquid flowed over and streamed down my face. I started crying — but the anaesthetician burst out laughing. Oh how I hated the fellow! If Dr. Tubby could have lent me his knife for a second I would have tried to perform an immediate operation on the anaesthetician without bothering to etherize him!

When the liquid was spilt, I hoped that the surgeon would give up the job he had to do. But I was not to be spared. The mask was clamped once more upon my face and, although I still protested, I somehow inhaled the fumes and in a jiffy I — to invert Eliot's simile — was spread out upon the operation-table like an evening against the sky...

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TALK TWENTY-THREE

We have brought Shakespeare and Eliot together apropos of the latter's lines on evening as an etherized patient. But Eliot and Sarojini Naidu would indeed be strange associates, the one a sophisticated modernist, the other a romantic traditionalist, the one intellectually inspired, the other emotionally beauty-swept. Yet there are some tracks in my mind along which I must bring them together: perhaps the very ingeniousness of Shakespeare and Eliot drives me in this matter.

The lines we have quoted from Eliot I have considered the surgeon's delight. Well, the husband of the Indian poetess was a doctor and it is by marrying him that Sarojini Chattopadhyaya became Sarojini Naidu. Once an Indian admirer of hers made the fact of her marriage responsible for not only her new name "Mrs. Naidu" but also her original maiden name. At a public gathering which she was going to address, the chairman happened to refer to her husband as the eminent surgeon Dr. Naidu. A man in the audience turned to his neighbour and, with examples like Yogi and Yogini in his mind, said with an air of wonderful discovery: "Oh now I understand. It is because of being Surgeon Naidu's wife that she is called Surgeoni Naidu!"

What this "Surgeoni" does in her poetic capacity is to cut through conventional responses to life and Nature and reach a colourful novelty that can occasionally rival anything the clever-ness-wallahs can spring on us in phanopoeia. See her write about Indian Dancers:

And smiles are entwining like magical serpents the poppies of lips that are opiate-sweet...

To make a smile not only an entity by itself, independent of the lips' curvature — to make a smile also a magical serpent: this is surely a cleverly penetrating imaginative act in the context of the poem. If a smile is an expression of a mood, a magical serpent of a smile is a sinuous and swaying inner delight which is the enchanted source of the body's dance-movement: at once we are drawn from the physical to the psychological, from the outer to the inner form, the mind's way of feeling and seeing, the way which is the true stuff of art-expression. Sarojini Naidu is ingeniously phanopoeic

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also in that brief description of the crescent moon, where she discloses by a sharp gleaming touch the high and sacred sense her country's antiquity had of every detail of social custom and struc-ture: she calls the crescent

A caste-mark on the azure brows of heaven...

But, of course, this poetess is most notable for her emotional intensities or subtleties. An instance of the latter are those three lines from In Salutation to the Eternal Peace, which may be re-garded as the Indian religious transfiguration of the etherized evening-mood of introvert neurotic modernism:

What care I for the world's loud weariness,

Who dream in twilight granaries Thou dost bless

With delicate sheaves of mellow silences?

A surgeon like Dr. Naidu may not give a whoop of joy at this post-harvesting picture of meditation. But our Yogic surgeons may take an equally keen pleasure in thinking of the results of a heavenly harvester's scythe as in thinking of the results of an earthly F.R.C.S.'s scalpel.

Eliot himself is not incapable of a larger and intenser imagina-tion than the opening lines we have discussed of his poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, or that ironic summing up — in the same poem — of the entire triviality of modern life:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

The concluding phrase indicates, through the size of the object to which it refers, the smallness of our interests and motives and achievements. It also indicates the stuff of which our daily life is composed. What is measured out is like coffee, a common drink associated with routine mornings and afternoons and accompanied by issueless conversation. Something far other than a coffee-spoon existence is, however, within the range of Eliot's poetic phano-poeia, and he can rise though not very frequently to the grand style from the merely queer and recherche which modern poets affect. Look at him verbally vivify an adventure of the soul, dangerous and arduous:

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Across a whole Thibet of broken stones

That lie fang-up, a lifetime's march...

Fang means tooth and denotes here the cutting edges of the splintered stones. Imagining a whole Thibet of teeth, one thinks of a huge dragon's mouth; yet, thanks to the stone-picture, this subtle suggestion is held within the sense of physical reality, so that nothing flamboyant is said in spite of the passionate feeling and seeing. But, owing to the associations of the word "Thibet," physi-cal reality itself, without being obscured, is enveloped with a powerful aura of strange significances widening it out into an inner world of pilgrim vision and priestly aspiration endlessly forcing their way through unknown difficult elevations.

The image of the fangs reminds me of a picture in Sri Aurobindo which is a masterpiece of realistic mysticism. He is speaking of the "Bird of Fire" moving between some soul-depth in man and some spirit-wideness above of secret illuminations:

Rich and red is thy breast, O bird, like the blood of a soul

climbing the hard crag-teeth world, wounded and nude,

A ruby of flame-petalled love in the silver-gold altar vase of

moon-edged night and rising day...

This is what may be termed esoteric poetry presented in all its profound suggestiveness without the intervention of the interpre-tative intellect — phanopoeia in a sense which has already been illustrated with certain passages of Sri Aurobindo's incantatory Rose of God. There is also phanopoeic poetry which is mysterious rather than mystical or else is mystery hovering on the verge of mysticism. Look at Keats's description of the sea-bottom, taking us like Milton "under the glassy, cool, translucent wave" but showing us instead of a "Sabrina fair" in whom we may recognise just an imaginatively idealised human loveliness, a Nature-scene shot through and through with a delicately deep subjectivity:

... nor bright nor sombre wholly

But mingled up, a gleaming melancholy,

A dusky empire and its diadems,

One faint eternal eventide of gems.

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The subjective tone is set immediately by "gleaming melancholy" which tends to convert the next two lines into the reflection of a soul-domain as much as an image of the under-water world. In "a dusky empire and its diadems" we seem to have the gloom-glow of a realm of mysterious majestic beings held together by an un-named Overlord or Emperor, and this realm becomes in the last line a portion as if of some eternity of hidden lights whose reality is conjured up for us by an extreme felicity of phrase: mark the word "eventide" combining the suggestion of evening with that of tide, meeting the poetic demands of the occasion from the viewpoint of both colour and substance, implying both the subdued multi-lustre and the sweeping liquid mass and thus preparing for the glimmery water-wrapped jewels. I consider this line one of the most beauti-ful in all poetry — it is superlative at once as melopoeia and as phanopoeia. Milton's Sabrina-lines also are phanopoeic as well as melopoeic, but their quality is different: it is less penetrative.

We have mystery on the verge of mysticism in quite a dissimilar mode in another phrase of Keats's, which too has the sea for its theme. Now the mode is more intellectual than sensuous and we have not a mood-picture but the evocation of a strange presence pursuing a strange function. The evocation is achieved through the play of an imaginative profundity upon the bare fact of waves washing against land:

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.

It is impossible to think that the poet is no more than imaging with a mixture of simile and metaphor the physical purification of the earth by the sea. As soon as we think so we can give body to our idea only by ridiculously reducing, as C. Day Lewis has remarked, the image to a mere illustration of the problem of sewage-disposal! An unformulable spiritual potency is suggested in what the waters are doing: man's tainted earthly existence is felt as coming under the constant influence of fathomless forces from the vast depths of his soul-being which is purificatory with its ocean-like reflection of some immaculate heavenliness.

We have said that Keats phanopoeia here is more intellectual than sensuous — "priestlike", "pure ablution", "human" serve hardly a visual purpose. The only sensuous word is "moving". But

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there is nevertheless a general reminder, as also noted by Day Lewis, of the religious rite of asperges, an indirect vague picture of a priestly procession occupied with the work of sprinkling holy water. Phanopoeia of the mysterious that just peeps into the mystical is sovereignly brought us by Keats without any such description, any outlined image of this sort, in a line which is not even a mood-picture but only the statement of an emotional fact plus an intellectual conception: Keats does the miracle with the help of one indefinite colour-word:

I loved her to the very white of truth.

One feels immediately that some extreme of depth is expressed. But what is this depth? I have called "white" an indefinite colour-word not because the colour itself is in doubt but because no unequivocal clue is afforded us of the reality intended by the vision. One may interpret "white" in prime reference to either "I" or "her" or "truth". The first alternative would yield the idea: "I loved her truly." The second would give the notion: "I loved the true self of her." The third would frame the thought: "I loved the divine truth in her." By not tilting the expression in favour of any of the three concepts Keats fuses all of them and renders his vagueness many-meaninged: the vagueness arises not by a lack of ultimate clarity but by a denseness due to three clarities being simultaneously present. The word "white" itself may be taken as a pointer to a triplicity of significance-shade, just as actual sunlight holds fundamentally the three primary colours — red, yellow, blue. Red would here stand for the passionate intensity of "I loved her truly", yellow for the idealistic keenness of "I loved the true self of her", blue for the spiritual ecstasy of "I loved the divine truth in her" — and the basic original white for a pure infinite of mystery that is the truth of love and the love of truth.

The word "white" has been used by other poets also as part of memorable phanopoeia. Yeats has made a famous comment on some lines of Burns which he quotes as running:

The white moon is setting behind the white wave,

And Time is setting with me, O!

Yeats says: "Take from them the whiteness of the moon and of the

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waves, whose relation to the setting of Time is too subtle for the intellect, and you take from them their beauty. But, when all are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting Time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of colours and sounds and forms." Cleanth Brooks and R. P. Warren point out that though the picture would be more beautiful if we substituted "gold moon" and "gold wave", something would be lost: the beauty would not be organic to the theme, it would be too rich for the idea and emotion of "setting" which call for a paleness as of something waning or dying. What Brooks and Warren say is correct, but I should remark with a bit of kill-joy prosaicality that the symbolic effect seen in the lines and the "relation too subtle for the intel-lect" which is read there may be largely of Yeats's own making. Not that the lines as quoted by him are wanting in all that he finds in them. The trouble is that Burns who was a poet very far by temperament from being symbolically subtle does not seem to have written them as quoted. David Daiches, in a broadcast¹ on the bicentenary of Burns's birth on January 5, 1959, refers to the Scots singer's "magical use of symbolic colour which so impressed the poet W. B. Yeats" but quotes the version of the lines in the original Scots dialect thus:

The wan moon is setting ayont the white wave,

And time is setting with me, oh! —

a version which is indeed very finely atmospheric yet conveys the writer's mood with a distinct and intellectually seizable corres-pondence in Nature by describing the moon as "wan": "wan" means "pallid" and suggests waning or dying.

"White" is an absolutely vital term in Shelley's celebrated simile —

Life like a dome of many-coloured glass

Stains the white radiance of eternity —

but plays its role in a context of clear-cut spiritual thought-vision: the lines are luminous rather than mysterious. We have mystery

1. The Listener, January 29, 1959, p. 205.

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touching mysticism in a somewhat homely way in the modern poet John Wain's:

But she towards whom (though far) I softly cry,

When asked, immediately would find it out,

Swiftly as white intuitive pigeons fly.

The familiar pigeons become a symbol, though vaguely, of an inner revelatory power. "Intuitive" is indeed poetically apt and directly significant, but the essential suggestion is no less in "white". And, so far as the actual word is concerned, "white" is irreplaceable. One may hope to light upon a substitute for "intui-tive", but nothing can do duty for "white". Only the ascription of "whiteness" to the pigeons that seem to know their way by an infallible inner feeling can bring for us a quality of sheer truth-vision unclouded or unweakened by any tinge of complex and confused human nature.

Mysterious phanopoeic poetry of the kind we are illustrating can crystallise also by presenting clearly an unknown figure instead of vaguely a known one. This figure differs from the shapes of eso-teric poetry not as much by going above reason as by acting from behind it, so to speak. It differs from the poetry of Eliot's "whole Thibet" which does not baffle the reason but largens beyond it and provides a hold through which elusive suggestions may be groped for. The poetry presenting a finely realised figure of a mystery tends to break away from whatever hold reason lays upon it and even to escape from all intention the poet himself may have had. Eliot has almost a moment of such poetry in his Gerontion at the end of a passage which is a series of forceful poetic thinkings in which remorse is expressed at the waste of knowledge about the presence of Christ:

These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

Expositors of Eliot have tracked a clever connection between this line and what precedes the passage whose close it forms and Eliot must have been aware of that connection when, speaking of "de-praved May" and the springing in it of "dogwood and chestnut," he added the highly original expression "flowering judas" for one of the rank growths of depravity, a tree which symbolises betrayal

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and could come to bear the wrath of God. However, the line, on its own, appears to stand in a sort of independent life, making the tree itself both tearful and wrathful, and shadowing some cryptic reality intenser than anything the inspired intellect wanted to fashion.

In older poetry too we have similar figures. Perhaps the most famous short example of the baffling is in Milton's Lycidas. A passage there speaks of the greed of the clergy of Milton's day, the failure of the pastors to look after their flock of believers. After recounting this clergy's slothful wickedness Milton caps the des-cription of the harm done with the semi-mysterious lines —

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw

Daily devours apace, and nothing done —

lines which perhaps have the Church of Rome in mind: the word "wolf" may be an allusion to the legendary she-wolf which had suckled the founders of Rome. But the real "baffler" comes soon on the heels of these verses. Milton breaks out into a most sombre warning:

But that two-handed engine at the door

Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.

This is terrific. The presence of an unerring and inevitable doom as if from weird regions beyond the human confronts us. But what is the "two-handed engine"? Don't bring in anything like our steam engine. There was no such puffing monster in Milton's day; and it cannot be two-handed in any pertinent sense, though the engine-driver has two hands. The origin of the word "engine" is the Latin ingenium meaning "skill". So, in general, an engine is an instru-ment which is "something skilful". In Milton's lines, the image has a particular significance: it points to an instrument employed with skill by two hands to do a work of destruction. And it seems to acquire some precision in the light of a formidable phrase in Book VI of Paradise Lost. There the angel Michael, the leader of God's armies against Satan and his rebel hosts, is pictured fighting:

the sword of Michael smote and felled

Squadrons at once: with huge two-handed sway

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Brandished aloft, the horrid edge came down

Wide-wasting...¹

Then there is another passage in the same Book of Paradise Lost, in which Michael and Satan are pictured as opposed with their arms "uplifted imminent", aiming "one stroke... That might de-termine, and not need repeat..."² Here we have the exact equi-valent of

Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.

The "two-handed engine" is evidently a long heavy sword, such as was often in use in mediaeval times, allowing and requiring both hands to hold the hilt in order to do its work which was "wide-wasting" with even a single stroke. But is there a special meaning in such a sword being selected by Milton? Some critics opine that he is referring to Parliament with its two Houses — the House of Commons and the House of Lords. And indeed Parliament did behead the chief of the English clergy, Archbishop Laud. But surely Milton could not have foreseen this event which happened in 1645, eight years after the writing of Lycidas. Nor was the instrument of Laud's execution a sword: it was an axe. And, though the executioner's axe was operated with both hands to-gether and though Milton in his pamphlet Of Reformation in England does speak of "the axe of God's reformation", he no-where himself makes it "two-handed" as he makes Michael's sword, and the axe he mentions in his pamphlet has nothing to do with Parliament. Besides, Parliament as such is too poor an origi-nal for the engine-wielder of Milton's lines. Even if Parliament was in Milton's mind, it has somehow opened an inner eye in him to a supernatural power of judgment and retribution and overruling government that has a touch of the Omnipotent. The phrase "God's reformation" is a good hint to combine with the phrase about the "two-handed sway" of the sword of Michael, the divine warrior. Something archetypal, as it were, which goes beyond all earthly authority, has manifested through the poet's imagination: what is conjured up is God as righteous Wrath with full force and needing just one smite to end anything.

1. Ll. 260-63. 2. Ll. 3 17-18.

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An image that has sometimes been taken to represent this Wrath in a mysterious manner is the animal addressed by Blake in the poem he entitled: The Tyger. I prefer, for Blake's own pur-poses, this old spelling used by him of the animal's name: the y instead of an i adds visually to the challenge of that animal as a symbol, for a long threatening tongue seems to be thrust out. If I had my own way, I should respell the whole name and accompany the sense of tongue-thrust with a roaring onomatopoeia: Tygerrrh.

Before we touch upon the poem, let me make a few digressive remarks. In the popular mind the tiger is contrasted with the lion, though both are acknowledged to be beasts of prey and feared by most men. The lion is said to be a gentleman who never exercises his ferocity except when he is hungry: the tiger is regarded as a ruffian who delights in ferocity for its own sake and would display it at any time. This is a gross libel — and any self-respecting tiger would resent it. As the libel is almost as old as history, I wouldn't be surprised if the tiger has avenged it by attacking its calumniator whenever it has met him. But big-game hunters have testified that this animal too, for all its fiercer aspect, is no different from the lion. If it feels that you are out for its skin or that you will be a nuisance in some way or other, it will go for your blood; but if its belly is full and your mind is on your own business, it will not sidetrack to slaughter you. Of course, you must realise the tiger's idea of what minding your own business means. I gather that the main thing is not to make any movement which it may misunder-stand: this amounts practically to saying that you must make no movement at all if escape by movement is not possible. Animals, as you must have observed, are not interested in still objects: whatever moves is alive for them and may be considered a poten-tial danger. I have read of a hunter who came face to face unex-pectedly in an unarmed moment with a tiger. Instead of making any movement he just sat down on his haunches, still as a stone, looking straight at the carnivore. The tiger eyed him with uncer-tainty for a minute, then itself sat down and kept, looking at him coolly for a while, finally yawned with boredom and, swishing its tail a little contemptuously, turned away. Would you dub this a ruffian's behaviour? I would call it quite gentlemanly. I believe that the reason for our usual slander is that the tiger perhaps takes offence more quickly than the lion. There was a Frenchman who said about it: "Cet animal est tres mechant, il se defend quand on

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l'attaque!" ("This animal is very nasty, it defends itself when attacked!")

My own personal experience is more of lions than of tigers. On way to England at the age of six with my parents, I was taken by them to a friend of theirs at Aden when the ship stopped at that port for half a day. This friend had kept a lion as a pet. A year or so before our visit the animal seems to have outgrown the pet-stage and was put into a cage. We were taken to pay our respects to it. It was said to have lost its interest in life ever since it had been caged. As soon as it spotted me it appeared to find life most interesting. For, it followed my movements and glued its gaze very appreciatively to my limbs. I suppose I should have been highly flattered at such attention to my boyish juiciness.

Years later I came across another member of this species, which also got interested in me — but under different circumstances. I had a few hours in hand at Madras en route to Pondicherry; so I decided to visit the Zoological Gardens. There was a magnificent lioness in a big cage which, in addition to having its own bars, was surrounded by an iron railing at a distance of about three feet from them. I noticed that the lioness had thrown its tail outside the bars on to the space between them and the railing. The idea came to me that here was the tail of the grandest animal on earth within touching distance and that I would be the silliest animal on earth if I missed the opportunity. I leaned over the railing and put the palm of my right hand on the fine tuft of hair at the tail's end. As if a shaft of lightning from a sombre cloud had been drawn back into the louring darkness the tail was retrieved into the cage by the offended posterior of the lioness, and the beautiful body turned in an eye's twinkle and the glorious muzzle sent forth a thunder that fairly threw me off my balance. The next moment the animal lost its interest in me and walked away. But that violent volte-face had sent with its thunder a hexametrical line of Sri Aurobindo's into my mind: at the end of his Ahana the Goddess of Dawn tells the spiritual seeker that he surely would meet true Joy

When thy desires I have seized and devoured like a lioness preying.

If it had been a tigress whose tail-end I had known the unique honour of touching, I would have remembered another line of Sri

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Aurobindo's, which is perhaps the most poetic example of descriptive much-in-little phanopoeia about the creature whose image Blake has taken to symbolise his theme:

Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless paws of

grandeur and murder.

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TALK TWENTY-FOUR

I have been making for some time a daylong and occasionally even nightlong chase of Blake's "Tyger". Listen to the poem and tell me if the fiery fellow is not worth the chase:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water'd heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The various questions leaping out of the poem have drawn from my mind a multitude of answers. And it is a great temptation to lay these answers before you. But once I start I shall not stop for at least six hours. Let me keep away from you the endless fascination

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that those six stanzas have held for me. I shall content — or rather discontent — myself now with a few words.

To me The Tyger is not about a natural beast of prey standing as a symbol of all those forces in the world, including psychological ones within ourselves, that are at once destructive and admirable. Nor does it set out for me an earthly carnivore to symbolise a supernatural power which is either a grandiose Satanism or a wrathful Godhead. I believe this poem to be directly about a supernatural power and using only the form and name of a natural beast of prey and merely the semblance of world-forces. Blake's Tyger, in my view, is a bewildering projection, by Divinity, of a luminous anger, a beautiful violence, drawn from the highest light and the deepest mystery, against a Satanism of perverted brilliance — of armed rebellious stars — dwelling within an unearthly Night whose dense obscurity of entangling error is like a huge forest. The whole movement of creating the Tyger to oppose and defeat those stars and reduce them to throwing down their weapons and shed-ding tears — this movement to out-Satan Satan, as it were, in a divine manner takes place for me in Heaven. And it is really complementary though seeming contradictory to the other which made the Divine Lamb, the manifestation of perfect gentleness and peacefulness. It is part of a supernatural history prior to earth and its jungles and animals and men. Of course, what once went forth in Heaven would be ready to strike on earth if any being here repeated in its own way the starry perversion that occurred there. But basically the six stanzas are a poetic-mystic visualisation of a supra-terrestrial drama. And this drama, in spite of the poet's knowing the supreme hand or eye behind it, shakes his heart and mind and leads him to wonder whether the God who could be so tender could also be so terrible.

To elaborate and prove my thesis, with a close analysis of the poem's internal structure of idea, image, attitude and with a host of references to Blake's other works as well as to Christian reli-gious thought in general and Milton's Paradise Lost in particular, I shall prepare a special set of Talks which I may one day expand into a book for the scrutiny of Blake-experts.¹ Today we shall not go any further on a safari to hunt the ultimate significance of Blake's symbol.

1. PUBLISHERS' NOTE — K. D. Sethna has brought out by now a book on the the subject under the title, Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation.

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You may say: "Why bring in so much mystification? Is it not better to take the poem as a fairly simple though highly imagina-tive depiction of the physical Tyger as opposed to the physical Lamb and of the puzzled awe such an animal inspires about its Creator who is the Creator too of its mild opposite? Why not stop with letting this animal symbolise the great destructive forces of Nature? It is a pity to complicate matters instead of adopting a reading such as even an intelligent child may find congenial! After all, isn't this poem taught often at school?"

Well, I have much sympathy with the intelligent child and can enjoy several sallies of its mind. But its condition may be com-pared to that of a grown-up Indian with whom I once went to a Zoo. This chap had come from a village and knew elementary English, but he was a pretty bright person, though perhaps not "burning bright". We had a look at those interesting jumpy crea-tures with a convenient pocket in their tummies where they keep their young ones — the well-known creatures from Australia, the Kangaroos. My friend read correctly the board on which their name had been written. Then we moved to another part of the Zoo. Tigers were there, in a big area ringed with tall iron bars. This appeared a sufficiently safe arrangement, but the keepers had still felt obliged to put up a board near the area, warning the public not to go too near. The board said: DANGEROUS. My friend spelled out the word slowly, letter by letter, and very brightly exclaimed: "Oh, on that side we had Kangaroos and now here we have Dangaroos!"

My friend got hold of something, no doubt, to distinguish in his mind the striped carnivorous quadrupeds before him, but because of his imperfect acquaintance with English he did not catch the full fearfulness of their symmetry. Analogously, with regard to Blake's Tyger, if in spite of knowing English we are inadequately conver-sant with Blake's visionary symbolic mind and method of expres-sion and with the bulk of his poetic creation in which his highly original mythopoeic and occult-spiritual form of Christianity finds vivid and profound though also at times fantastic play, we shall fail to gauge the inmost light and might of the beast of prey he sets poetically before us.

Of course, the immediate charm that comes from the simplicity of the exoteric reading gets destroyed. But "immediate charm" cannot be the final criterion in the interpretation of poetry such as

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Blake's — or that of the ancient Indian Rishis. Many people have protested against Sri Aurobindo's interpretation of the Rigveda. For thousands of years a paradoxical situation has obtained in India. The very name "Rigveda" connotes "Poetry of Knowl-edge" and tradition has it that this Poetry is something heard from the mouths of the Gods. And yet the distinction has been made between the Veda's way of religion and the Upanishad's way of spirituality. The Veda is called the way of Ritual and Worship or of Ceremonial Works, while the Upanishads are the way of Inner Illumination and Knowledge. Curiously, this latter way is known also as Vedanta, which means the end or concluding portion of Veda. Yet people have held that the Rishis of the Veda were semi-barbarous priests chanting excitedly about the pleasure of having a large number of cows which would provide them with the ancient Indian equivalent of the American Milk Bar — the pleasure of having a lot of horses, especially a horse called Dadhikravan which had the peculiarity of being a marcher always towards the dawn — the pleasure of a drink known as Soma with which the semi-barbarian priests got so intoxicated that they thought they were partners of heaven with Indra and Agni and Surya — the pleasure of all kinds of wealth including a strange kind which was hidden within wonderful oceans and rivers — the pleasure of smiting dusky Dravidians whom they dubbed Dasyus and Dasas ("ene-mies" and "slaves") and even sometimes described as quite nose-less! This view of the ancient Rishis has satisfied Indians and, much more, Europeans who have turned scholars of Indian anti-quity. But surely there was something fishy in the contradiction between, on the one side, the age-old reverence in which the Rishis were held as well as the high repute the Veda had acquired and, on the other, the "immediate charm" of the simple terre-a-terre reading of the Vedic terms. Sri Aurobindo has come along and found that the cows and horses no less than the other themes of the Vedic hymns are deeply symbolic and all the elements of the Vedic life as depicted by the Rishis belong essentially to a super-nature and carry occult-spiritual significances. A genuine pity, this complicated esoteric explication by Sri Aurobindo. But what are we to do about truth?

One thing certainly we can blame Blake for — just as we can blame the Vedic Rishis. In The Tyger he has adopted a form which could tempt the unwary to take a non-symbolic view except insofar

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as the animal apostrophised may stand for Nature's destructive forces in general. Perhaps some friend of Blake's did blame him for it. He seems to have soon dropped being easy on the surface. He snarled and gnarled his surfaces so much in his later works that we are simply obliged to dig for meanings inside. If his Tyger was all that I have made it out to be, he should not have let the physical impression of the animal come fairly strong despite the teasing elusive terms round about and the challenging fifth stanza about the stars. What he should perhaps have done was to write a piece like the following by a contemporary poet. See whether you can make head or tail of it beyond that it deals with no fauna of our earth. It is called Green Tiger and runs:

There is no going to the Gold

Save on four feet

Of the Green Tiger in whose heart's hold

Is the ineffable heat.

Raw with a burning body

Ruled by no thought —

Hero of the huge head roaring

Ever to be caught!

Backward and forward he struggles,

Till Sun and Moon tame

By cutting his neck asunder:

Then the heart's flame

Is free and the blind gap brings

A new life's beat —

Red Dragon with eagle-wings

Yet tiger-feet!

Time's blood is sap between

God's flower, God's root —

Infinity waits but to crown

This Super-brute.

There you have supernatural symbolism with a vengeance . I shall leave you to tackle the Green Tiger as best you can. I shall

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only give you the comment Sri Aurobindo dictated on the poetic quality of it: "Very forceful and original poem. There may be some doubt as to whether the images have coalesced into a perfect whole. But it may be that if they did, the startling originality of their combination might lose something of its vehement force, and in that case it must be allowed to stand as it is. At any rate it is an extremely original and powerful achievement." (9-4-1950)

This poem lands us pat in the midst of two modern movements — Symbolism and Surrealism. The term "Symbolism" is here used in a special connotation: the adjective from it is not "Symbolic". What Blake's Tyger vividly anticipates and what Green Tiger exem-plifies is a particular way of being symbolic that has come to be known as Symbolist. The adjective is framed after its original from France, and Symbolism in the special sense is a mode of poetry consummated first in the France of the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It is associated with the names of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Valery and some others. But it is not exactly a single mode of poetry. There are varieties of Sym-bolism and not all continue or consummate the Blakean type. Let me give you the main four heads.

(1)Synaesthesis. This means union and fusion of sensations. Here colours, sounds, smells, tastes answer to one another and get interpreted in one another's terms. One sense evokes several others as though all were inextricably associated with it or actually implicit in it. That again points to a sixth sense beyond the five, a basic sense which has got differentiated into five kinds: the Manas of Indian psychology, the fundamental Sense-mind at the back of all sensation and independent of them and even capable of func-tioning without the sense-organs. Synaesthesis is Inter-sense Sym-bolism or Inter-sense Correspondence. Rimbaud is perhaps its most powerful practitioner. He set forth the doctrine of it in the famous words: "The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense and planned derangement of all the senses."

(2)Horizontal Harmony. This means that everything in the universe reflects every other thing. The reflection implies, on the one hand, that one object can stand for the significance of another: all similes and metaphors proceed on the assumption of a horizon-tal harmony, for they seek to illuminate each object in terms of an apparently different one. That points to a single manifold of form-activity — a universal Nature-force identical behind all objects

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and, while variously manifesting them, keeping a subtle or secret affinity amongst them, an affinity whose discovery enlarges or intensifies the quality of each. But Horizontal Harmony is more than Inter-object Symbolism or Inter-object Correspondence. It is also a harmony between Nature's scenes and man's moods, as if the objective and the subjective were two sides of the same ex-perience and all Nature were a condition of the poet's conscious being. Nature may thus be entered by a sort of empathy, in-feeling, and its shapes and hues read by an answering mood. Or else a mood may seize upon Nature's shapes and hues and turn them to a personal symbol. An Inter-object-subject Symbolism or Correspondence makes the complete Horizontal Harmony. Per-haps the most general doctrine of it, touching on the essential state of all poetry, is Valery's words on the "poetic emotion": "I recog-nize it in myself by this: that all possible objects of the ordinary world, external or internal, beings, events, feelings, and actions, while keeping their usual appearance, are suddenly placed in an indefinable but wonderfully fitting relationship with the modes of our general sensibility. That is to say that these well-known things and beings — or rather the ideas that represent them — somehow change in value. They attract one another, they are connected in ways quite different from the ordinary; they become (if you will permit the expression) musicalized, resonant, and, as it were, harmonically related." On the side of converting Nature into personal mood-symbolism, we may cite the statement of Verlaine who was the most sensitive practitioner of Horizontal Harmony: "The landscape is a state of the soul."

(3) Vertical Harmony. This means the presence of the physical universe as an emanation of a supraphysical. A higher world is reflected or imaged in earthly things. The originals or archetypes of what exists in our universe are beyond in a super-cosmos. "As above, so below" — thus runs the old Hermetic formula. The Platonic Ideas and the flux of phenomena — there you have another version of the same vision. Here we have a linking up of the Symbolist with the Symbolic of all poetry: all poetry, as we have often said, is full of image-pointers, direct or indirect, of some hidden multitudinous perfection of Beauty and Bliss. But there are certain differences or rather refinements and specialisa-tions in the Symbolist view, as we can readily see from Blake's Tyger. Whatever the interpretation of the poem, that which is the

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Tyger never gets mentioned in the poem. A strange animal is before us, though not quite different from the striped carnivorous quadruped with which are familiar - luckily not too familiar, for otherwise we would be fit to become the theme of some such intuitive piece of verse as the following, which recounts the sad story of a Gujarati named Mulji:

Mulji met a Tyger —

The Tyger was bulgy,

And the bulge was Mulji.

Such intimate familiarity would give us rather the horizontal har-mony than the vertical. At least, Mulji in the Tyger's lengthwise stomach would be horizontally harmonious with the digestive juices there. To return from Mulji to Blakeji, the Tyger symbo-lising something is alone presented. No comparison is directly made. Suppose we take Blake's poem to be about the Sher-e-Kashmir, Sheikh Abdulla, vis-a-vis the invasion by Afridi tribesmen whose spears he brought low and whose consequent tears fertilised the heavenly vale of Jammu. Nowhere are we told that we have a picture of the loud-laughing large-toothed Ex-premier of Kashmir, with his spectacles "burning bright" at us. Thus a characteristic of vertical Symbolism is that the object which is compared to another is itself suppressed and we have the metaphor only in evidence.

Another characteristic is that the expression is not explanatory and that, as far as possible, direct thinking is absent: pictures stand in front of us with suggestive outline and colour. A series of images makes the poem's significance. Blake's piece is not quite a sheer one of this kind of Symbolism: some intellectual questioning is earried on. But the overall impression is of sheer vision. We may note that Bowra calls it "pure poetry" . He means that the object of the vision is vivified straight away and is not mediated by any thinking terms, any explanatory matter. We shall, some time in the future, discuss the concept of "pure poetry": at the moment we may just observe that the poetry which does not think but sees and feels is called "pure" by some critics.

A third characteristic is that the central image is not quite of a physical reality. It bears some resemblance to it but has a strange-ness which marks it as supernatural or occult or spiritual: a mysti-

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cism of one sort or another is at play in the picture. The whole atmosphere is charged with the presence of a world beyond the one we know from day to day. A dream-reality seems to be at work — an unusual projection from an in-world or an over-world. In Blake's poem this is not overwhelmingly strong as in Green Tyger, but it is strong enough to hit our solar plexus in a queer way: we are not only afraid of his Tyger, we have the feeling to get down on our shaking knees and worship the creature as if it were a god-like terror manifesting in its colossal glory at which we dare not point any rifle but on the contrary feel like shouting: "Come, please, and gobble us up: thus alone our mortal weakness will cease and we ourselves shall be immortal Tygers far greater than any Sher-e-Kashmir who can be easily locked up by a Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed."

Vertical Harmony does not imply only a supercosmos reflected in our world. It implies also that the human being is a microcosm. In him the whole universe is summed up — or comes to a climax — and he corresponds most keenly to the Supercosmos. The Super-cosmos may be regarded as a Superman. Blake called the ultimate reality the Eternal Man or the Universal Man. A general way of defining this aspect of Vertical Harmony is that, just as in Hori-zontal Harmony the universe is a state of the soul, here the Trans-cendent, the Ideal Existence beyond, is a soul-state — but to get to this soul-state we have to pass with intense feeling and imagination to something which is neither the perceived object as we know it in our world nor the perceiving subject as we know it in ourselves. In its highest manifestation this Symbolism may be summed up in the words of its most subtle and sophisticated practitioner, Mallarme: "A supreme flash from which is roused That Shape which no one is."

(4) A multifoliate all-inclusive play of themes. This means that all varieties of subjects — good and bad, agreeable and horrid, edifying and sordid — could serve poetry and be part of its power-ful vision. No cordon sanitaire at all! Stars and slime, swans and maggots, Madonnas and harlots — every imaginable object may be laid hands on and converted into a symbol of the poet's grope for Perfection, a straight or curved or twisted path to his sense of the Ideal, his achievement of the flawless poetic form. Baudelaire is the intensest initiator of this Symbolism as well as of the em-bryos, so to speak, of the other types. Viele-Griffin, Laforgue,

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Stuart Merrill, Francis Jammes, Paul Fort carry it on in their own individual manners. Such symbolism takes up somewhat feverishly the happy hold of Wordsworth on common things and Whitman's exultant embrace of even the malodorous and the clinical as part of an epiphany. Was it not Whitman who said something like: "The odour of my armpits is holier than any prayer"? Perhaps the most comprehensive formulation of this Symbolism comes from a French writer whose name eludes me at the moment: "What characterises Symbolism is the passion of a moment whose gesture is infinite."

All the four kinds mix and mingle; especially the Mallarmean kind takes up all the others and puts them under its own Platonic-Swedenborgian light. It is Symbolism proper, Symbolism quintessential, and demands our attention most along the line from Blake.

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TALK TWENTY-FIVE

I feel I have almost lost the habit of lecturing. It is after three weeks that we meet again. You must have been wondering what could have put so long a stop to this endlessly wagging professorial tongue. One of you was curious or kind or bold enough to ask me. My reply was: "A sprain in the brain." A friendly visitor to the Ashram got the same reply. He became goggle-eyed with surprise and exclaimed: "Oh, I didn't know that such things could happen. Does one sprain the brain also?" I had no explanation to give. My phrase was not quite meant to be explained. It was a piece of mystic poetry, or at least of mystic verse, since it had rhyme but no reason. I wore a serene and far-away smile on my face instead of answering. Unfortunately the silent smile served as an answer which I had not intended. My questioner looked serious — very knowingly serious — and slightly shook his head. I knew what he was thinking: "Really, something has gone wrong with this poor chap's top floor."

I believe he felt what Anatole France had felt when he had met Einstein and the latter had spoken of his theory of relativity. Anatole France afterwards reported: "Dr. Einstein told me many strange things. I listened attentively to him. But when he started to tell me that light is matter, my head began to reel and I said 'Adieu' and took my leave."

My questioner also took his leave. By the way, attend to this phrase I have used. In India it is common to say, "May I take your leave?" That is incorrect. You can't take my leave. You can only take yours. If you wish to take mine instead of letting me do so, you will have to take me by the scruff of my neck and push me out of your presence. But your own leave you can take gracefully. Perhaps there is a mix-up in the Indian mind with the idea in some such phrase as: "Will you give me leave to go?"

To return to our story. My questioner went off. And, whatever he may have thought of me, I learned two things about his brain. It certainly had no sprain, but it was unimaginative enough to take me literally instead of figuratively, and it was incapable of under-standing such a self-expression as a silent smile. These two charac-teristics distinguish the typical prose-mind, however analytic or comprehensive it may be: it has not the leap of insight. How differently one of my students received my statement! She laughed

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and there was a gleam of appreciation in her eyes. Not that she could have understood what I had said — but that was because what I had said was not something meant to be understood as one understands a statement like: "I've sprained my ankle." The gleam in her eyes was distantly akin to the one which Wordsworth spoke of in a famous stanza. His phrase ran:

. .. and add the gleam

The light that never was on sea or land,

The consecration and the Poet's dream.

This wonderful phrase, I may tell you, Wordsworth himself in his later years, his "deadened years", changed to:

. .. and add a gleam

Of lustre, known to neither sea nor land

But borrowed from the youthful Poet's dream.

Mark what the change brings about. A critic has well pointed out the difference. In the original version we get the impression of some mysterious natural phenomenon. The gleam, the light is something objective, something intrinsic to the scene. The vision of a mystic reality hauntingly present in the very world is conveyed. In the revised version the words "a gleam of lustre" give us only a metaphor for a merely subjective impression "borrowed" elsewhere and superadded to the scene. Besides, the language has lost all magic. Even the idea sought to be communicated has become prosaic in expression. Surely Wordsworth could have written:

... and add a gleam

Of lustre strange to either sea or land

But captured from the Poet's youth of dream.

Wordsworth seemed too far gone for genuine poetry from his dreaming youth to his intellectualised dotage. Luckily, though he had weakened in his creative sense, he had not wholly lost his appreciative sense. He felt a little uneasy over the change — and again restored the original lines, so that the final form in which we have the stanza stands in its pristine revelation.

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Let me return once more to our subject. By the way, don't think I am just wandering on and on instead of continuing from where I broke off my Talks on Poetry three weeks ago. There is a direction in my digressions, a Hamletian method in my madness. Of course, it is a direction rather hidden, a method rather baffling: what else can you expect from one who has had a sprain in his brain? But they are both there, and you shall discover them, for there is also a brain in my sprain. Let me carry on for the present in the manner I am doing.

I was saying that my student received my remark as if Amal Kiran as a professor of Poetry and a student of Yoga could have made no other in order to illuminate her and as if a subtle sense were shining in the apparent nonsense, like Wordsworth's light that never was on sea or land. This concludes my first digression apropos of Symbolism. It is the first sign of the method in my madness.

I will now be a little sentimental. In the longish period during which, except by accident, we did not see one another, did we miss one another? Well, one may ask sentimental questions but should not always answer them. For, sentimental questioning, like all questioning, creates a healthy uncertainty. The answer may be Yes, the answer may be No. If we give a sentimental answer, we leap up to our chins into an emotional Turkish Bath. You know what a Turkish Bath is? You sit in a closed box with only your head sticking out and with your whole body submerged in hot steam which makes you sweat and sweat until every superfluous ounce is melted off your middle and off any other place where superfluous ounces have the habit of collecting. You emerge from the melting pot very smartly slimmed but rather weak and wan: it is an oozy and groggyfying luxury, just what indulgence in senti-mentalism would be.

The English people are to be imitated in the matter of senti-ment. I am sure they feel quite as acutely, even as lushly as we do, but they have the tradition of keeping a stiff upper lip. So, when the emotion is really strong, their faces do not disintegrate into whining and weeping but bear a keenly expressive sculpture-effect of creative feeling. There are even Englishmen who would show nothing on their faces, but that is the work of the prosaic and hard Teutonic element of their complex psychology. The all-round harmonious Englishman is not against expression of emotion. What

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he does is to wait till the emotion is truly strong and then he lets it express itself in all its strength — against an effort to check it. Strong emotion thus expressed becomes authentically poetic in its expression. Poetry of feeling is not an unrestrained force gushing and rushing and flushing and never hushing. It is extreme intensity becoming effective under the grip of a great control. If we may put the matter paradoxically, it is what would happen when an irresis-tible force met an unbreakable obstacle! The result is as if something that could never be uttered finds utterance. In other words, the ineffable seems to get said. This concludes my second digression apropos of the theme of Symbolism.

En passant, my query whether we missed one another reminds me of an editor's reply to a poet. He received a lengthy poem written on perfumed paper and tied with a pink ribbon — evidently from a lovely lady with a lovelorn soul. The title was: "I Wonder Will He Miss Me?" The editor read the piece, frowned and returned the material with a letter saying: "Dear Madam, if he does miss you, he should never again be trusted with fire-arms."

This editor's comment satirises the mistake people often commit of thinking that togetherness always shows or breeds fondness. Appearances can be quite deceptive. I remember the case of William Morris and the Eiffel Tower. I'll come to it shortly. You must have seen a picture of the Eiffel Tower. It is an all-iron structure rising 1000 feet in the air from the midst of Paris. I have actually been on top of the 1000 feet when I was myself about 3 feet high — which means 6 years old. Of course, if that ratio or height being, in terms of feet, half of what one's age is in terms of years were valid at all times, I would be at present quite a tall building — at least as high as this first floor on which we are holding our Class. Luckily, the ratio ends fairly early in life, and nobody is unfortunate enough to be the theme of a poem by Edith Sitwell, one of our most famous modern poets who early in her own life immortalised herself as well as a lady named Jane by writing the unforgettable lines:

Jane, Jane,

Tall as a crane.

I understand she did not have in mind the bird called a crane and was not referring to the height at which a crane might fly: she

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meant a machine for moving heavy weights. There is such a machine on the Pier of Pondicherry. Perhaps it

We went up a lift from floor to floor. The first floor was so large that — if my memory is correct — four restaurants', each bigger than our Ganpatram's, were situated on it — an English restaurant, a French, a German, an Italian, each with its own national edition of a laughing and welcoming Ganpatram, a Mister Ganpat-ram, a Monsieur Gannepatramme, a Herr Gaunpautraum, a Sig-nor Ganpatramo. From the very top floor I could see taxicabs looking as small as beetles. I have been on top of the Rajabai Tower of Bombay and the Kutub Minar of Delhi. This was long after I had stood at the Eiffel Tower's height of 1000 feet. When people were exclaiming at the sight they caught from the highest gallery of the Kutub Minar I dumbly and glumly turned my gaze away from such paltry exultations in altitude. Think of what Ten-sing would feel on top of the Eiffel Tower itself — he who had looked down on all the world from Mount Everest! He would just say "Pah!" or whatever else Nepalese people say with the same intention when they don't express their intention more eloquently by spitting. He would hardly feel hilarious. By the way, he didn't feel quite hilarious on Mount Everest, either. It was Hillary who felt hilarious, because he was the first to put his foot on those summit snows. There has been a lot of bad blood over this affair which threatened to develop into an international squabble. But Tensing has got over the ill-feeling and everybody has seen the

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problem in the correct light — that it didn't matter who stood first on the top of the world when it was not possible for the two sole conquerors of it to reach it gaily together arm-in-arm: they could pant and gasp up to it only on a rope one behind the other and the slightest personal competition would have sent them crashing to an Ever-rest below. The two, thus bound, were really equal to one man. Which half touched the peak first was of no consequence, no significance even. We might as well discriminatingly ask whether out of Hilary's two feet the left or the right foot stepped first on the untrodden ice 29,028 feet high. Whichever foot was in the lead, what was accomplished could only be termed "feat". So, truly speaking, we should hold that not Hillary or Tensing but Hillsing climbed up there and felt the hill sing his triumph.

Let me descend from Hillsing to my own Eiffel-Towerish self. I did not even feel like saying "Pah!" to the ecstatics of the Kutub Minar. I just recollected the view of tiny Paris years and years ago and kept quiet. William Morris must have known that view times without number there. For when he was in Paris for a fairly long stay he began to go every day to the Eiffel Tower and sit from morning to evening, perched high there. At last, after a month of daily visit, a friend said to him: "William, what makes you so fond of the Eiffel Tower?" Morris replied: "Fond? The blasted thing is so tall that it is forced on one's eyes in every nook and corner of Paris. I felt sick of it. So I have gone every day to the only place from which I can't see the monstrosity piercing into God's blue!"

The constant togetherness of Morris and the masterpiece of Monsieur Eiffel was no proof of attachment. Of course, I am not referring to our case of being together every Wednesday and Friday. I am just psychologically philosophising on a possibility often ignored, and making the point which concludes my third digression apropos of the Symbolist Movement. How shall I express my point? You know the saying: "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." Somebody has considered this an incomplete sentence and finished it thus: "Absence makes the heart grow fonder — of absence!"

Now let me sum up the various points I have made:

1) A subtle sense appears to shine in apparent nonsense — like a light that never was on sea or land. The very obscurity is strangely luminous. If we may pick out a phrase the poet Vaughan used about God, there is "a deep but dazzling darkness".

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2)The ineffable seems to get spoken. Or let us put it this way: silence appears to get sung.

3)Absence becomes, as it were, one's beloved. Let us say: Absence becomes a thrilling Presence.

These are three of the most prominent characteristics of the Symbolist poetry of Mallarme. Mallarme was perhaps the most astonishing phenomenon in poetic history up to the end of the nineteenth century. Sri Aurobindo has observed that he marks a new turn in European poetry, a turn which is the first step to what Sri Aurobindo has called the Future Poetry. All the more astonishing is Mallarme in the context of the poetry of France. We may even dub him the second French Revolution. The French spirit is the spirit of clarity — the lucid thought and the limpid word. I have mentioned Anatole France. Well, his name is most appropriate. Anatole France is in an important respect France personified. Or, if you like, la belle France turned into a man. This is not a statement that should surprise you in our times. Daily we read of women changing into men and men changing into women. Perhaps it is a perverted sign of the trend that is our spiritual movement towards men and women becoming supramentalised into neither men nor women but a new type that is complete in itself, superior to sex-divisions, sex-hungers, a being that holds the essential truth and not the accidental vitalism of both the sexes in a more than human consciousness lit up with an indivisible Ananda. Anatole France in his own non-supramental way sums up the soul of la belle France so far as literary expression is concerned. And Anatole France himself can be summed up in his literary quality by the rule he has laid down for writers: "D'abord la clarte, puis encore la clarte, enfin la clarte" — "Clarity first, clarity again, clarity at the end."

The English genius differs here from the French, perhaps because England has more mist and fog than the other side of the Channel. The English poet William Watson has said:

They see not the clearliest,

Who see all things clear.

And Havelock Ellis, looking at Anatole France's advice, has added his own comment of both agreement and disagreement: "Be clear. Be clear. Be not too clear."

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Now we must understand what clarity and non-clarity signify. Sri Aurobindo tells us that the aim of the highest spiritual poetry is not to be in itself unclear: "Its expression aims at a certain force, directness and spiritual clarity and reality. When it is not understood, it is because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the ordinary mind or belong to an untrodden domain or domains or enter into a field of occult experience; it is not because there is any attempt at a dark or vague profundity or at an escape from thought. The thinking is not intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a vision, a spiritual contact or a knowledge which has come by entering into the thing itself, by identity." But don't misunderstand the kind of clarity Sri Aurobindo ascribes to the highest spiritual poetry which is capable of expressing fully the supreme experience with which it deals. He says: "I meant to contrast the veiled utterance of what is usually called mystic poetry with the luminous and assured clarity of the fully expressed spiritual experience. I did not mean to contrast it with the mental clarity which is aimed at usually by poetry in which the intelligence or thinking mind is consulted at every step. The concreteness of intellectually imaged description is one thing and spiritual concreteness another."

Now, the Mallarmean poetry does not attain the spiritual concreteness, except perhaps rarely and by accident, but it goes beyond the merely intellectually imaged description. In fact, all genuine poetry goes beyond it, even Classical Poetry at its truest, in spite of having an intellectually lucid expression as its ideal; for, however intellectualised, it is Vision, inner Vision, that writes poetry, and when such Vision is on the scene the intellect is not the chief figure though its minor figure may be made to stand side by side with the chief: only pseudo-Classicism is poetry of the intellectual surface and hence not the genuine article. Yes, all genuine poetry goes beyond the mere intellectually imaged description. But there are two ways of its doing so. One is to draw down the supra-intellectual into the intellect and speak in the intellect's manner, but with a core of clarity around which an aura of mystery lingers. According as the core or the aura is bigger and according as the core influences the aura or vice versa, we have Classical Poetry or Romantic Poetry. Of course there are other distinguishing qualities too, but these are the relevant ones in our discussion. Most of the finest poetry of the world is of this kind. But mystic

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poetry tries to submerge the intellect in the supra-intellectual. And it does so not by attaining the supra-intellectual but by standing overwhelmed by the strange light and the strange shadow of what is beyond. A new mastery on another level is not reached: a new master from another level is accepted. And this level is the mid-world, the occult planes between the earth and the highest spiritual levels. Mystic poetry as distinguished from spiritual poetry is the poetry of the subliminal and not the superconscious. The subliminal is a vast untravelled country behind our normal consciousness. It is a wonderful territory, more intense, more immense and more capable even of receiving the messages of the superconscious. But if we give ourselves to its colour and shape and sound and allow them to find their own embodiment, either we have a vaguely profound utterance in which there is a kind of magical mist or else we have a strongly cut, vividly imaged utter-ance in which there is no mist but the connection between one chiselled strangeness and another chiselled strangeness is most confoundedly unchiselled. That is so at times because the revelation caught has not yielded its meaning to the catcher's language and suggests this meaning by brief glimpses and quivering snatches. But at times the revelation itself is such that in language presented to and seizable by the human mind it makes a pattern of shining fragments between which we have to leap not by thought or imagination so much as by inner intuition. The coherence of the subliminal is different from the coherence of earth-situations, earth-significances. Mallarme was the first to realise this truth and the need to project into speech the authentic realities of the beyond, the need to surpass the intellect's direct or indirect smoothing and linking hold on what comes from deeper or higher sources, a hold which falsifies or at least weakens their truth and robs them of their sheer soul-stirring force. Blake in England, nearly a hundred years earlier, was the only poet who was in several ways a Mal-larmean Symbolist.

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TALK TWENTY-SIX

Mallarme was the queerest bird in the sky of poetry. Many poets, almost all, are queer birds of one kind or another. Some of them have even been regarded as being off their chump: Blake was to most of his contemporaries a mad man. And two or three were actually inmates or at least temporary residents of Lunatic Asylums: Cowper, Christopher Smart and the Frenchman Gerard de Nerval. But in defence of the Poetic Art I may declare that in the case of these it was not poetry which drove them mad nor is it that they wrote poetry only in a state of madness. Nerval who was twice in and out of an Asylum made a memorably mysterious line for his experience. And if we examine it in the context of its two successors we shall perhaps guess what led to his madness and thus exonerate his art from the suspicion of having pushed him over the brink. The three lines close his famous sonnet El Desdichado, meaning in Spanish "The Disinherited", which seems to anticipate something of the crypticism of Mallarme's symbols. Here they are:

Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traverse l'Acheron:

Modulant tour a tour sur la lyre d'Orphee

Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fee.

(Twice Acheron I've crossed, victorious,

Modulating by turns on the lyre of Orpheus

The sighs of the saint and the cries of the fay.)

Acheron is a river of the underworld in Greek mythology. Nerval makes it stand for the crise de folie through which he passed twice before writing the poem. The legend of Orpheus trying to bring back his beloved Eurydice from the underworld becomes for Nerval significant of his own affaire du coeur. he pictures himself as having gone to the underworld in search of his own Eurydice. It seems Nerval was in love with two women — Adrienne who, becoming a nun (la sainte), died to the world and Jenny Colon, the actress (la fee), who actually died in 1842. His first spell of madness came in 1841 after 5 years of infatuation with Jenny and the sonnet was written in November 1853 just after emerging from the second lapse. The linking of Acheron with love-affairs is a pointer to the forces that unhinged his mind. His being a poet had nothing

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directly to do with the unhingement. I think anybody, poet or no, would lose his head if he lost his heart to two women!

The purely poetic madness is a thing apart and must not be confused with the common kind: otherwise I would have a chance only to address a Poetry Class in a Mental Home and not in this University. For I suppose I am thoroughly bitten with poetic lunacy. But my saying so is exactly the great difference between the loony poet and the loony non-poet. The former knows that he is mad, the latter believes that everybody else has a tile loose. I once visited a Lunatic Asylum to see if anybody really looked and acted like me. I was startled to find myself an object of ridicule and almost boycott except by one chap who condescended to come quite close to me and then gave a tremendous grunt like a super-pig! Perhaps it expressed more clearly than the behaviour of his friends the general opinion about me in that company.

Poetic madness is a certain state of hypersensitivity of imagination and of what I may call "word-sense". And this hypersensitivity does at times lead to a bit of unusual behaviour, like looking intently at things as if waiting for a door of light to open in them or as if they might start talking to one out of the very nucleus of their most central atom. It involves also occasionally humming to one-self, saying the same phrase over and over again to create a kind of magnetic field into which phrases with the same inspirational wave-length might be attracted from God-knows-where. In the matter of humming I think I was already poetically mad at the age of six when, as I have said, I was taken to Europe. Once, in Paris, we visited the famous Galeries Lafayette. What was to be seen there did not interest me much. But the name of the place haunted me for hours. My papa told me that at various times of the night he found me ecstatically repeating to myself, "Lafayette, Lafayette, Galeries Lafayette."

There are some words which either for their visual suggestion or for their sound-evocation keep recurring in the works of particular poets. "Ethereal", "pavilion" and "crystalline" are three of Shelley's favourites and you may note that he stresses "crystalline" rather unusually in the second syllable, instead of the first as your Dictionary does. For example,

Greece and her foundations are

Built below the tide of war,

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Rooted in the crystalline sea

Of thought and its eternity —

or the phrase from the Ode to the West Wind about the "blue Mediterranean as he lay"

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams.

By the way, the word "coil" which is used here is mostly misunderstood not only by Indians but also by Englishmen. They think it connotes here a winding or labyrinthine movement, and they think that in Shakespeare's line —

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

there is a reference to our body as being the earthly shell or cover in which our souls are enclosed. But "coil" in both the above quotations means nothing of the sort. It is an archaic and poetic term signifying "disturbance, noise, turmoil". Shakespeare's "mortal coil" means "turmoil of life" and Shelley's "coil of crystalline streams" means the insistent sound of limpid moving waters.

Mallarme was preoccupied with words more than any other poet and he was not just attached to a few special words, though he had his preferences: he was interested in words in a sense in which even poets in general are not. I shall come to this topic presently Let me first introduce Mallarme to you as a man. A contrast may immediately be noted between his works which most of his con-v temporaries regarded as the complicated mystifications of a madcap and his personal appearance and conduct. Let me begin with a rough sketch of him on the blackboard.... There he is, as he looked to his friends during those celebrated weekly evenings — Tuesday evenings — on the fourth floor at 89 rue de Rome. He was of middle stature, had greying brown hair, wide-opening brilliant eyes, a large straight nose, ears tipped like a Faun's, long but orderly moustaches, a short pointed beard, a refined gentle expression that yet had reserves of power, gestures graceful and precise, a voice trailing away at the end of a phrase, the whole face crossed by wisps of cigarette smoke by which, as he said, he put some distance between the world and himself. He used to stand with his back to the mantlepiece of his fireplace and with a che-

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quered shawl thrown over his shoulders. Among those who at-tended the Tuesday-soirees were the most famous or promising writers and painters of his day. Three-fourths of the time Mallarme talked — nearly three hours of the most wonderful monologue.

There have been very few talkers in literary history who left such a bespelled memory behind of their way with words and ideas. Socrates was the one who perhaps talked the most and his talk has also influenced the thought of Europe more than any other man's. It is embalmed for all time in the Dialogues of Plato. About the contents of these Dialogues it has been remarked that all subsequent philosophy is only a number of footnotes to what Socrates said. About their form, their style, it has been stated: "If Zeus were to speak in the language of mortals, he would do so in the Greek of Plato."

To find another colossal talker we have to jump over nearly two thousand years and come to Dr. Samuel Johnson of eighteenth-century England. He laid down the law in matters of literature and in all other matters brought up by his circle of eminent friends — Reynolds the painter, Burke the politician-orator, Sheridan the playwright, Garrick the actor, Goldsmith the poet, Boswell the future immortal writer of his friend's biography and the biggest fool of the company with the exception of Goldsmith who, Garrick reported,

Wrote like an Angel and talked like poor Poll.

("Poll" is the conventional proper name of the parrot — "Pretty Polly", as you surely know.) Johnson was a master of common-sense uncommonly expressed and of argument that was unanswer-able. He was a fighter who never let go: it was said of him that if he missed you with the fire of his pistol he would knock you down with the butt-end of it. And much of his argumentation was brought on by the questions of Boswell who at times did not refrain from even asking preposterous things like: "Sir, what would you do if you were locked up in the Tower of London with a baby three-months old?" Johnson would grow a trifle testy. And occasionally he would lose his temper. He was a somewhat irri-table old guy: he once knocked down a bookseller with a big Bible picked up from that chap's own counter. Socrates was just the opposite. He thought irritability the complete negation of the

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philosophic mood. The philosopher must be master of his nerves: circumstances belonging to the shadowy phenomenal world should never affect the poised intellect contemplating the Eternal Ideas of a world beyond time and space and mutability. Socrates was perhaps the most tested, though the least testy, of all philosophers. For he was married to a woman who has become as famous for her nagging ways as he for his equanimity. Her name was Xanthippe. I'll tell you of one incident in their eventful married life. Once Xanthippe, for some reason or perhaps no reason, started shout-ing at her husband. She made such a noise that Socrates went downstairs and out of the house and sat exhausted at his own doorstep. Just then Xanthippe emptied a bucket of dirty water over his head from the first-floor window. Socrates took the compulsory shower-bath quietly. A passerby who witnessed the ablution asked him: "Don't you feel annoyed?" Socrates replied: "Friend, we must accept Nature's phenomena with composure. After a lot of thunder such as I heard upstairs, what can one expect but a rain-storm?"

I don't know whether Johnson would have borne so patiently with his wife. Perhaps he would have — but only with her and never with anybody else. He chose his wife with great care. She was a somewhat tipsy widow of nearly 50 — 20 years older than Johnson himself! She could easily have called him with perfect appropriateness: "John-son." He very fondly gave her the name "Tetty". And all his friends were obliged for his sake to admire her non-existent beauty and her rather dim intelligence. But one thing may be said in her favour: she wasn't much of a talker and left tongue-wagging to Johnson who, as I have told you, wagged it wonderfully well.

To match him we have to go to another Englishman — the inimitable S.T.C.: Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was intoxicated with philosophical ideas and made of philosophical talk a poetic feast which Wordsworth and others enjoyed and which stimulated them in various ways. All the marvels and all the curiosities of knowledge were in his words, for he had read everything written by anybody of note. But occasionally he was difficult to endure because of his interminableness. Especially difficult was he when he insisted on discussing philosophy even when suffering from a roaring cold. He would keep chattering of "omjective" and "sum-jective" — which are "objective" and "subjective" spoken when

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the nose is completely blocked with mucous matter. He would also be somewhat of an embarrassment when you were in a hurry. Charles Lamb was once on his way to his office when Coleridge caught him and drew him to a quiet corner in the street. He started a brilliant discourse. Lamb was charmed for five minutes, tolerant at ten, impatient at fifteen, thoroughly fidgetty after twenty and absolutely bewildered and desperate at the end of twenty-five. The biggest trouble was that Coleridge had caught him by one of his coat-buttons and was holding forth on his interminable theme. Lamb was a Government servant and couldn't afford to be late. Already he was behind time. And there was no prospect of interrupting Coleridge and getting away. To attempt it was like trying to get a word in with the Niagara Falls in order to persuade them not to fall so much. So Lamb thought of a novel means of effecting his escape. He whisked out a pen-knife and cut off the button chaining him to Coleridge. Quietly he slipped away, leaving S.T.C. lecturing. An hour and a half later he left his office and was going home for lunch. There, at the quiet corner in the street, Coleridge was still standing, his eye rolling at the sky, his hand grasping the button, his lips spouting his poetic philosophy. Lamb went up to him and stood where he had been 90 minutes earlier and gently tapped his friend on the shoulder. Somehow the trick worked. Coleridge came out of his splendid soliloquy, smiled, looked at the button in his hand, apologised for unintentionally pulling it off Lamb's coat and assured him that he would have it restitched by his efficient wife Sarah. Lamb set his mind at ease, turned him round to face the opposite direction and ran off to his lunch.

The next talker in history is Oscar Wilde. It is strange that England should have supplied three of the greatest conversationalists of modern times. Of course Wilde was by nationality an Irishman, though domiciled in England; but Johnson and Coleridge were pukka English. The English people are rather tongue-tied and do not like to say anything more than "Yes" or "No" and the utmost eloquence they indulge in every day is a remark about the weather — more or less the same remark because English weather is fairly uniform — a uniform dullness just as English cookery is a uniform tastelessness. But you must be aware that though the Englishman is very non-communicative his literature is the finest in modern times in the matter of the most sustainedly

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sensitive communication, the communication of poetry. Once we dwelt on this peculiar paradox. We shan't repeat ourselves: digressions are strictly forbidden in this Class! Well, to come straight to Oscar Wilde. He was a friend of Mallarme's and even attended several of the Tuesday-soirees. He must have been rather young and raw at the time, for otherwise Mallarme would have got no chance to talk. Wilde would have flooded the company with his own witty and rainbow-tinted fancies. And he was a bit of a pushing fellow, quite unlike Mallarme who was timid in his manner, retiring in his disposition and did not have the quality of a conversationalist playboy that Wilde had in plenty. Many of Wilde's witticisms have become famous. Some of them must have been mighty disconcerting. When he was introduced in Paris to the Comtesse de Noailles who had a charming mind but a very far from charming face, the Comtesse remarked: "Monsieur Wilde, I have the reputation of being the ugliest woman in Paris." Wilde immediately bowed and with a most chivalrous wave of his hand said: "Oh no, Madame — in the whole world!" Wilde kept his wit even when he himself was in an unfortunate position. He had the ill-luck of being sent to jail for a social offence. A friend visited him there and found him stitching gunny-bags. He hailed Wilde with the words: "Oscar, sewing?" Wilde at once replied: "No, reaping."

I don't know whether Mallarme was as much of a wit as Wilde, but his talk was said to exert a deep influence on all his listeners. It is likely that the cult of the artistic which flourished in England during Wilde's day had a lot to do with Mallarme and his doc-trines, doctrines mostly inculcated in the Tuesday-talks. But Wilde and Mallarme were cultists of the artistic in rather different ways. Wilde was flamboyant: he wore strikingly coloured clothes, flaunted a huge sunflower in his button-hole and became a public figure in no time: he also believed in living unconventionally and shock-ing people. He made of Art a gorgeous public show. Something of his temper was in the pre-Mallarmean semi-Symbolist Nerval who became notorious for parading the boulevards of Paris with a pet lobster led on a crimson string. Mallarme dressed quite simply, behaved unobstrusively and had no love of the limelight. To him Art was a most serious vocation, he was like a high-priest dedicated to his Art and whoever came into contact with him thought that he incarnated the doctrine he talked about: he was Symbolism

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embodied: a mysterious atmosphere was round him without any showiness: his mind was steeped in and, as it were, radiated the incomprehensible, the ineffable, the invisible. These three things are what I arrived at last time as a result of my digressions. I'll take them up as I go along to Mallarme's Poetry. I summed them up as: Non-sense, Silence, Absence. At the moment I'll say a few things more on his life.

He was, like his intensest admirer in present-day India, a professor — but a professor whose work was really a burden to him, as no doubt it is to many professors. Oh, no, I am not meaning myself. I am rather happy, for I avoid giving homework and getting a heap of exercise-books to correct. But I know how such drudgeries make T sigh and N groan and R say "Ooff". They would have made me shout "Damn" in all the eight different notes of a musically frantic reaction. Mallarme must have had nearly fifty exercise-books to correct twice a week. He was teaching English — and he did not himself know the language any too well. Also, he was not cut out to be a teacher at school. His students were noisy and unruly and he could neither scold nor cane them and his voice too was not loud enough to rise above the clamour and shout down the shouters. It is a great tragedy that creative spirits like his should be tied to a job for which they have no aptitude and which stands so much in the way of their own true work. He was a most conscientious and slow worker at poetry. He believed also that most of the verse written by the world's great poets was superfluous stuff. Real poetry existed more or less in droplets, according to him. And he himself wrote very little, lest anything should be a mixture of poetry and non-poetry. You will be surprised to hear that his collected works comprise no more than about sixty poems, and only three of them go beyond a page or so. At all times he was a quintessentialist, a distiller of absolute nectar, and if he had not been hampered so much by compulsory schoolmastering he would certainly have given us at least ten or twenty little masterpieces extra. He died at the age of 51, which is just one year less than Shakespeare's age at the time of his death. The whole life-work of Mallarme is not equal in length to even half of a single play of Shakespeare's out of his thirty-six. But Mallarme's marvellousness lies precisely in the fact that in spite of so exiguous an output he ranks so high and in the fact that, while everything that poets had said in Europe up to the end of the

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nineteenth century could be found in some form or other anticipated by Shakespeare, Mallarme wrote a few things that Shakespeare never dreamt of. Shakespeare was the boldest poet in his handling of images as well as words. But Mallarme had a way with both images and words which, though not bolder than Shakespeare's, was stranger than the English poet's. When he writes, for instance —

Le chair est triste, helas! et j'ai lu tous les livres

(The flesh is sad, alas! and I've read all books) —

or,

Coure le froid avec ses silences de faulx

(Let the cold course with scything silences) —

or even,

Je suis hante: l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur!

(I am haunted: Azure! Azure! Azure! Azure!) —

he does not shoot beyond the world of Shakespeare's imaginative lordship over language, but a curious turn is felt of matter and manner which takes us to the verge of some new poetic sense. Shakespeare could have thought and felt along such lines if his interests had lain in that direction — the direction and not quite the mode of feeling and visioning seems novel. However, when Mallarme comes with a verse like

Pour la Rose et le Lys le mystere d'un nom

(For Rose and Lily the mystery of a name),

we are almost putting, for all the apparent simplicity of the statement, Shakespeare on his head, for Shakespeare spoke of the poet's pen giving

to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name,

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whereas Mallarme speaks of converting by means of a name a concrete something into an airiness without local habitation. All the more, unShakespeareanly enigmatic is Mallarme's:

Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui

(The transparent glacier of flights unflown),

and we are in a dimension utterly unknown to Shakespeare and fusing the mystical and the metaphysical when we hear Mallarme on the dead Edgar Allan Poe:

Tel qu'en Lui-meme enfin l'eternite le change...

(At last to Himself he is changed by eternity...)

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TALK TWENTY-SEVEN

We have already made the rather startling statement that Mallarme is best summed up as the Symbolist Poet of Non-sense, Absence and Silence. But so far we have dealt in generalities: now we must come to the particular face and form, as it were, of this Holy Trinity of his art. We must not only feel the dedicated distance, the aesthetic inwardness in which he seemed to carry on his life as a poet in the midst of the physical and intellectual activity of Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We must also examine the complex composition of his mind before we study the mind of his complex compositions.

In his day Science had assumed undeniable authority. To ignore it seemed sheer escapism. The great Newton had stated in mathematical formulas the fixed laws of the heavenly bodies. According to Newton himself, the grand determinism of the starry processions proclaimed a divine law-giver. But the scientists who came after him had not the same gravity of mind as the discoverer of the Law of Gravitation. They were more interested in physical things as such, and the discovery made by him led them on to another philosophy than his.

They did not begin with a sense of God as he had done: they began with the physical phenomena themselves. They found them acting with a vast regularity which they could predict by means of their mathematics. Matter was there in front of them — it was an imposing fact. And Matter had a certain nature, and this nature had a certain mode of operation. So far as the telescope gave evidence there was no break in the sequence of cause and effect which constituted- the history of Matter. No divinity seemed to have a hand in the course of things. If there was a divinity, it had started the universe on its way and then left it to run on by itself. But these later scientific thinkers felt that such a divinity was rather superfluous. It was as good as non-existent sd far as the actual working_ of Nature was concerned. Nobody could say anything about the beginning of the world. Why then burden oneself with the idea of a God who never intervened in the affairs of the universe? Perhaps you may know what Napoleon was told by the famous French physicist Laplace. When the latter was explaining to Napoleon his theory of the way in which nebulas cooled down and contracted into solar systems according to strict mathematical

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laws, Napoleon asked: "Monsieur Laplace, where does God come in?" The reply rang out: "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." La place de Dieu, for Laplace, was nowhere! By Mallarme's time the atheism of such men had become established in the educated French mind. It seemed intellectually dishonest not to accept a Godless universe.

What about man in this universe? The scientists saw that man was made up of the same sort of Matter as the rest of the world. No doubt, this Matter in man appeared to be not only alive but also thinking — two functions which even the biggest nebula in the sky never exercised. But when the anatomical knife and the magnifying microscope probed into man's material constitution they could discover no special and separate life-force or mind-energy: Matter itself seemed to exhibit life and mind as two unusual properties. So the scientists thought it reasonable to suppose that here was only a complex organisation of the same stuff which was lifeless and mindless in the stone. Only the complex manner in which the atoms were organised led to the behaviour which we associate with vitality and mentality. The theory of Evolution pointed to man's relation with the animals and his development from the lower forms of life. All the higher functions of man could have evolved from those of the lesser types of living organisms. And there was little reason to believe that the simplest of these types did not evolve from certain states of non-living Matter. Thus nineteenth-century science came to the conclusion that man had no Soul, nothing that existed independently of the complex material organisation that is the living and thinking body.

Once more it was a Frenchman who presented this conclusion most cogently. What Laplace had done with the scientist's cosmos, Lamettrie by his book L'homme machine did with the scientist himself.

Against the atheism and materialism of Science many a poet and many a mystic protested. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley — these were witnesses to a greater truth than that of Science. But in the eyes of common sense what were the results of the activity of poetic mysticism? Nothing comparable to the steam-engine, the telegraph, the mill-machinery or the system of mathematical laws by which everything could be predicted with amazing accuracy. Coleridge puffed a good deal, in talk after talk, but a steam-engine puffed better. Blake wrote several enigmatic books at a great

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speed, but the Morse code of dots and dashes was a better series of engimatic signs and a telegram sent in it went much quicker than Blake's pen tracing out poems. Shelley spun out a number of fine visions, but the Cotton Mills spun more durable stuff and at a faster rate. Wordsworth spoke sublimely of a single Being present everywhere, but most people could not get into touch with this Being, while the mathematical laws which claimed to govern both the stars and the stones could be learned by anybody and found applicable with a mechanical uniformity which was more impressive than the monotony of much of Wordsworth's poetry. Yes, there were protests against the spread of atheistic and materialistic Science, but they were rather unavailing in the opinion of intellectuals; and especially in France where the intellect was more at play than in the England of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, nobody with brains thought of doubting the pronouncements of Physics and Physiology.

What those brains forgot was that man was the only creature who thought of asking whether he had a soul or not, whether there was a God or not. And they forgot that man, a minute speck on a tiny planet in the immense universe, could sit in judgment on the universe itself. And this he did by means of something which he called his mind and which, in spite of seeming to depend on the brain for proper functioning, was not felt in any way like a physical process. His most direct experience of his most intimate and momentous self-activity gave him a sense of the non-material. The scientific thinkers forgot too that to imagine this strange entity called mind as evolving from merely a play of physical atoms, however much we may endow them with attraction and repulsion, was to accept a more impossible miracle than to accept a non-material or spiritual origin for the physical universe — a Divine Being hidden within or behind phenomena and gradually manifesting itself as Matter, as Life, as Mind and pushing towards Supermind through even an Age of Atheism and Materialism.

Indeed, the scientists did not attend properly to the nature of the very thought by which they became scientific thinkers. They looked outward and the scientific picture they had built up from observation seemed to them all-sufficing. Also, in those days, Science had not passed through such a crisis as it has done in our own century. The cosmos looked clear-cut, orderly, self-contained: the very nature of the physical world appeared to be

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revealed by Newton. Pope summed up Newton's achievement:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:

God said, "Let Newton be!" and there was light.

In our own day a poet has added:

But not for long. The Devil shouting, "Ho,

Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo.

Science in our day has become full of puzzling questions. Einstein's relativity theory and the quantum theory developed by Bohr and Heisenberg have made the physical universe so queer, so unpicturable in its ultimates that the mind gets almost a paroxysm in trying to conceive it.

In Mallarme's time things were different. The pronouncements of Science were in an absolutely assured tone. And Mallarme fell under their sway. But he did not set poetry at a discount. He felt that there was value in poetry and he felt that there was value in philosophy and he felt that religion had value. Still, according to him, philosophy could not stand in its metaphysical speculations against the concrete demonstrations of Science. Only one thing in Philosophy gripped him with an irresistible force. It was concerned with the problem of what are called Universals. It is a common-place that there are Universals and there are Particulars. Various objects confront us — a number of Particulars. Many of them resemble one another. Take flowers. Flowers are of various kinds that we term roses, violets, lilies. Looking at each variety, we make a generalisation: the rose, the violet, the lily. Each generalisation represents a Universal: that which makes every particular rose a rose is a Universal. A consideration of all possible roses leads us to what we label as the Rose. But while we know one rose or another and a collection of roses, what is this common essence of them all that is the Rose? Different roses have been in the past, are in the present, shall be in the future. There are roses in India and there are roses in England. Indian roses, like those elsewhere and at various times, have different shapes, different colours and different perfumes. Even the same rose is different in the morning, in the noon, in the evening. And yet all the different roses and the same rose in different conditions are called the Rose. Surely an

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odd thing, the Rose! It must be at the same time red and yellow and white, a folded bud and a crowd of petals and a fading fragrance. It must be something that Helen of Troy received from Paris — Homer's Paris, of course, and not Mallarme's — Paris the man to whom she was madly drawn and not Paris the city from which she might have run away frightened as if it had been her own husband Menelaus! And the Rose held in Helen's lily-slender fingers and watched by her violet-soft eyes must be the same as the Rose that suggested to the French poet Malherbe, when he wrote an elegy on the death of a friend's daughter, the two loveliest lines in French verse:

Rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses,

L'espace d'un matin —

lines exquisitely rendered into English by John Chadwick (Arjava):

A rose, hers was the roses' span of living,

Which one brief morn consumes.

And the Rose of Malherbe's inspiration must be the same as that which the Mother once gave me to paint when I rose from pranam at her feet to look at the smile whose radiant beauty surpassed all the flowers in the world. Again, the Rose I got must be the same as the one which on that very day the Mother put into the hands of a sadhak whose habit was to go into a corner after the pranam and chew up the Mother's gift and make it a part of himself instead of letting it droop and crumble in the neck of a vase! Well, the Rose that can be said to have existed in diverse ages and diverse states and diverse places (including this sadhak's stomach) is bound to be a most mysterious thing. Philosophers have exercised their wits in telling us what it could be.

Some of them say that it is just a general idea we form after scrutinising particular instances and that the Universal does not exist anywhere except in our minds. These philosophers are known as Conceptualists. Others say that we do not have even a general idea: we have ideas only of particulars but we employ one and the same name for things which look similar: a Universal is simply a bit of noise we make. These philosophers are known as

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Nominalists. Still others, who are known as Realists, say that a Universal is a fact apart from and prior to the Particulars. And among these philosphers the most celebrated is Plato who, finding the Universal capable of being at all times and all places, regarded it as a reality unbound by space or time — a spaceless and timeless reality existing in some secret realm beyond the world of particular instances. To Plato, these instances are merely approximations to the Universal: the Universal is a perfection which is never fully realised in the things we know on the earth, a perfection in a transcendental Overworld. And there is a final unifying principle, a Universal of Universals, in which all the perfections coalesce. Mallarme found Platonism the most congenial view. But how was he to accept the Platonic Overworld when Science had told him that nothing was real except Matter? That was a problem he had to solve.

When he turned to Religion he saw that the aspirations of the religious-minded, the sense the great mystics have of a supreme Godhead, a high Truth and Beauty and Goodness, a fundamental Sat-chit-ananda, a limitless and featureless Nirvana, were experiences which gave a wonderful richness to life. The very idea of a perfect Existence, Consciousness and Bliss, deep within or high above, flushes life with a golden glow. Science impoverishes life by banishing such experiences and ideas. Science keeps the mind of man from soaring. It loads it down to day-to-day needs, common-place objects. It confines and constricts the emotions and covers everything with a grossness, a drabness. This is intolerable. We must not ignore or brush aside the lofty feelings inspired by Religion. And when Mallarme looked at both Philosophy and Religion he found that the Platonic Universal of Universals and the Divinity of Religion were essentially related if not identical and were just two ways of approaching the same Marvel. But both Platonism and the religious outlook made a certain demand on the intellect. Platonism required the conviction of a transcendental realm's existence. The religious outlook insisted on a real God and called for belief in Him. The intellect's assent to the actuality of these things was part and parcel of Philosophy and Religion. Yet Science set its face like flint against such assent. The ideal, the spiritual, could not be accepted as truths. Mallarme could not pass beyond Science — and yet he could not give up what Science denied. He had to find a way to keep both.

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His solution was Art. Art, in his view, consists only of a keenly enjoyed state of awareness. The poet conveys what he has visioned and felt, and we receive his vision, his feeling, and keenly enjoy it because it comes with a satisfying finality of flawless form. That is all. Art does not raise the question whether the poet's vision is of reality, whether his feeling is the response to a truth physical or supra-physical. Art is a self-contained self-sufficient delight of perfect self-expression. At its extreme it puts us in touch with an experience full of a beauty that seems to shine out from everything, a bliss that imparts the sense of some absolute. But no dogma, no doctrine is needed. We are concerned with enjoyment, our minds are involved in thrilling to the play of imagery, rhythm, significant design. According to Mallarme, this play gives us in its own fashion all that the highest philosophy and the deepest religion can, and it does not demand intellectual assent and consequently it does not demand that we intellectually contradict the verdicts of Science. We can accept Atheism and Materialism and still avoid the dead hand of these "isms" upon our whole being: we can avoid it by plunging ourselves with care-free enthusiasm into Art — Art with its exultations and its ardours and its idealisms. To counteract the grossness, the drabness, the down-to-earthness of Science, Art is a necessity. If we abandon what Art offers we make life not worth living — in spite of the steam engine, the telegraph, the mill-machinery and the mathematical formulas of Physics.

Of course, a little more acuteness of mind would have led Mallarme to argue: "If the entire value of life is centred in what Science cannot give, then surely Science has not said the last word on life and on the world in which life has come to hope and yearn, to aspire and be idealistic." And if Mallarme had been a little more of a mystic he would have been enabled to hold against the so-called concreteness of the material results of Science the con-creteness of spiritual realisation. To the genuine mystic, God is a reality to be seen and touched and embraced with subtle senses which for all their subtlety put us in relation to some undeniable substance — to him there are worlds beyond the physical, which he experiences with more solid sensation than anything he can lay his hands on — say, the clothes he wears. In fact, his sensation of those worlds and of his soul is like his sensation of his own body, while his sensation of the physical world is as of the clothes he wears. An outer reality covers an inner reality — both are concrete

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and just as clothes are meant for the body and not the body for the clothes and just as the body is more vividly an experience to us than our clothes so the inner reality is more significant and important, more directly known and more intimately felt.

Mallarme was neither a very acute thinker nor a very intense mystic. But he was a very acute and intense knower and feeler of Art. The poet in him was the chief person: he ate and drank and moved and worked and slept as if by sheer concession to his neighbours: he wrote poetry and talked about poetry and meditated on poetry with the whole passion of his being. And it was this identification of himself with poetry that led him to reject Science as the sole sufficing activity and even led him to criticise it for its mechanisation, its lifelessness, its earthiness. But since Science had for him the monopoly of truth he had to regard the experiences of Art in a peculiar way. He could never entertain the possibility of their pointing to anything real. He could never ask himself: "Although Art in itself makes no demand for intellectual assent, may not its intensities and wonders yet be signs of the true, the real?" Art he summed up in the words Reve and Mystere: the artist's activity is a surrender to Dream, an absorption in Mystery. And since we. cannot put any substance into Art's Dream, give any reality to Art's Mystery, we must regard them not as an actual Presence but as an unreal Absence, not as Existence but as' Non-existence, a Nothingness, a Neant. But to say "Absence" and '"Nothingness" is not to employ negative terms. Art has the capacity to fill our being with its richness. The Absence haunts and enchants, the Nothingness appeases and liberates. They are positives, not negatives. They are an unreality, yet a divine one. And this divine unreality is more precious than anything we accept as actual. Mallarme speaks of poetry being concerned with fictions, phantoms, falsehoods, but he uses these words not in their ordinary meanings: these fictions are more worthy of pursuit than 'facts, these phantoms satisfy as no physical sensation can, these falsehoods are more life-giving than scientifically observed verities and the objects around us in our daily animal existence. Art is Mensonge, a Lie, but this Mensonge has a gloire that is missing from all the truths on the lips of Newton's successors. It deserves the whole-hearted and single minded devotion of a man. In fact, in Mallarme's view, we do not do justice to its value unless we dedicate ourselves to it.

So he became the high-priest of Poetry, the mystic of Aestheti-

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cism. And his Aestheticism, with its Reve that is Absence and its Mystere that is Neant or Rien, may be described as poetic expres-sion conjuring up a sense of two things. First, forms and figures, images and pictures emerge as it were from some secret ether of unearthly lights and shadows behind the world we know. Secondly, these forms and figures play beautifully and blissfully about against a background that is a void, an indeterminate infinity in which everything gets lost, an infinity of the inconceivable and inexpressible, an infinity of Silence. Those unearthly images and pictures are crystallisations of the formlessness of the supreme Silence. They are marvels absent from all terrestrial realities — for example, the ideal Rose that is never to be found in any conglomeration of petals we can see or smell or pluck — or devotedly devour! And these absent marvels are suggestive of the vacuous ineffable into which they are always on the verge of vanishing. This does not mean that Mallarme is vague in his visions. The idealities of Absence are well-defined in their strangeness, but the strangeness comes charged with a power that draws our mind into depth on depth of something for which no words can be found and to which no image can prove adequate. Mallarme thus is not a poet of the shimmering Shelleyan wash: he is very precise, but bewildering in what he makes precise. And through that bewilderment he wants to give us, as Shakespeare would have said, "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls" — or, as Mallarme himself would have put it in less intelligible language, he wants to knock queer image against queer image until from their shock a flash is born, revealing a Shape which no one in the world is and, through this Shape, the unworldly No-one that alone can take such a shape.

I suppose you are quite puzzled. That is just what Mallarme would have appreciated. If you could properly make out what he says he would consider himself to have failed. When a young person once told him that she had understood one of his poems after brooding over it a while, he exclaimed: "What a genius you are! You have so soon understood what I the author am still trying to understand after twenty years!" But if you said that he wrote Nonsense he would be happy, for Nonsense is the opposite of all that the reasoning intelligence can make head or tail of, the reasoning intelligence which is the chief power of Science as well as in one way or another the chief power of what we call Common-

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sense. Yes, Mallarme would have liked being called a poet of Nonsense — but he would not be Mallarme if he let you rest satisfied that you had got hold of him by the right end in saying so. Nonsense in Mallarmean poetry is not the meaningless: it is the Meaning which the reasoning intelligence cannot grasp. According to him, this intelligence grasps what really has no value — the world of physical events and all in the mind that is close to physical facts and correlates them in mathematical theory. Only that which is beyond the range of this intelligence is the truly significant, for it is the glow of the Dream that provides the raison d'etre to our eyes and it is the Mystery that supplies to our mouths the justification of speech.

We may now provisionally sum up. Mallarme's aim in poetry is to write such Nonsense as brings up to our vision exact yet enigmatic images that transcend our experience of the physical world and to combine these images in a manner baffling to the reasoning intelligence and by this combination instil in us the vivid feeling of a wondrous Void where world and thought seem beatifically extin-guished and even the most strange imagery dissolves and the most Mallarmean language dies away into the unutterable.

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TALK TWENTY-EIGHT

Let us continue from where we left off in the last lecture — or, if you think that what I said last time left you in a bewilderedly broken condition of mind, I shall refer not to the last lecture but to the last fracture. Perhaps my words now will set some of the broken pieces together.

Mallarme's is a mysticism of a very mystifying kind Before him there had been mystical poetry, but except for Blake it had not the quality of mystification which this Frenchman brought into play. His was a step necessary in the evolution of the poetic conscious-ness towards what Sri Aurobindo has called the Future Poetry, a poetry written not only with its substance drawn from beyond the mind but also with its very form, its very mode of expression drawn from there. Mallarme on the whole falls short of the Aurobindonian spiritual revelation. But that was to be expected. He is a transition-stage — perfect so far as he goes. And his success is all the more notable because he wrote in French. French is the speech par excellence of mental nettete and ordonnance, the clearness and orderliness belonging to the thinking mind. The French people, by and large, have not yet accepted Mallarme. We have a few critics who go mad over him but the majority of Frenchmen look on him as a sort of traitor to the literary genius of France and condemn his work as mostly a failure. But Mallarme's wrestle with a tongue such as French had its own advantages for his admirers. This tongue imposes certain restrictions on anarchy of expression. Its stress on shapeliness, its insistence on connectedness saved Mallarme from running riot in ambiguity. English lends itself far more easily to the ambiguous, so that English Mysticism often seems to deserve being spelt Misty Schism — Schism (pronounced Sizm) meaning in general a separation from the main body of a doctrine, especially a religious doctrine. The nature of the French language is ever a check against becoming involuted in idea and expression and construction. Thus Mallarme was forced, by the very medium in which he worked, to produce with each poem a systematic whole of enigmatic imagery.

Of course, it was because he was a true artist — unlike the Dadaists and Surrealists who came in the wake of his Symbolism — that he aimed at the significant form that goes with all Art; but

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if he had not worked in French his enigmatic imagery might have created much less of a perceptibly systematic whole: he would have been tempted to greater laxity in total contour. His achievement lay in making his imagery enigmatic not by a chaos of wandering phantasmagorias but by a cosmos of related figurative queernesses. He broke through the surface of intelligible statement not with a number of haphazard punctures but with a collection of piercing points which when added up constituted a big aperture sucking the reader into a world unknown to the thinking mind, particularly the French thinking mind. If we may indulge in a bit of punning, a poem of Mallarme's was at the same time a systematic W-h-o-l-e and a systematic H-o-l-e. His art may be described as a sort of camouflage by which you are made to see a well-built well-carved slab of stone and invited to step on it and the moment you step on it you find that what you took to be a stone is nothing save a grey gap with a sharp outline. Straight away you drop through the apparently solid into a depth where your mind can find no hand-hold or foot-hold.

Assiduously Mallarme took care to make his readers' hands grip emptiness and their feet dance in a vacuum. In this he differs from the poetry to which Sri Aurobindo points. That poetry is unclear, if at all, because it seeks to reveal what cannot be rendered quite discernible to the ordinary mind; it wants to reveal the ultra-mental to the fullest extent — without mentalising it but also without seeking non-clarity for its own sake or as if non-clarity were the very condition of spiritual speech. Mallarme had no notion that when you go far beyond the mind you enter into a realm where Truth can disclose itself massively as well as minutely. On the Spirit's Himalayan heights there is a divine power of expression by which what is divinely inexpressible by mental words stands internally self-lit in living language. Mallarme did not know the Everests and Kanchanjangas and Gaurishankers of the Spirit. His mystical domain — except on a few rare occasions when he touched the Aurobindonian light — was what Sri Aurobindo terms the middle worlds, the occult planes whose self-utterance is often in itself a crypticism, a baffling pattern. Mallarme is keenly conscious of this crypticism and sought always to avoid being clear though never falling into the chaotic. Obscurity he felt as the key to the mystery which he intuited beyond the thinking mind. And his preoccupation with the obscure is well hit off in an anecdote.

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Once he was lecturing. Looking at the faces of his audience he got the impression that they seemed to make out what he was saying. A member of the audience had taken notes for publication. At the end of his lecture Mallarme asked for those notes, saying: "I want to put some obscurity into them."

To make a fetish of obscurity in order to poetise the mysterious is to misconstrue the proper mode of poetic embodiment. In our own day we are frequently faced with amorphous stuff, shapeless disjointed descriptions, a jumble of phraseological fragments. And we are told that this kind of thing is necessary in order to convey vividly the broken state of the modern mind and the modern world. Our life is all in bits: our poetry about it should also be a splintered composition: how else can we faithfully transmit to the reader a sense of our subject? But such an argument is just like saying: If there is a heap of pieces and we want to reflect them in a mirror, the mirror should also be a broken one! The truth is that in order to reflect exactly and effectively a world in fragments and a life in splinters our art should be a very bright whole, a polished intact mirror. Art lies in communicating with a perfection of expressive form whatever it takes for its subject: intense skill of description, penetrative cunning of suggestion, synthesising genius of presentation, these are the artist's means of catching faithfully even the amorphous and disjointed, even the elusive and cryptic. Not that art should always be simple and immediate in its effects: it can be complicated and oblique, but whatever form it adopts in response to its theme and according to the temper of the artist must have a fundamental relatedness and an ultimate wholeness: , otherwise Form, which is the very mark of Art, would be lacking and there would be no Art but merely a spurt and splash of coloured convolutions.

Mallarme was too much of a genuine poet to lack Form. And, by its very nature, much of his Matter could not help looking cryptic. But within his subtly realised wholes he tended to go in deliberately for entanglements under the mistaken notion that thus alone could he represent what to the thinking mind would be an entangled domain of poetic reverie.

The two main means of the Mallarmean obscurity were the queer collocation of images and the queer collocation of words. Or, if by poetic words we understand sounds charged with sugges-

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tions of images, we may say that Mallarme's art was a new manner of employing words: to be more accurate, a new status given to the function of words.

Words are always of great importance to a poet. Now that the topic has come up I may as well treat it in general no less than in particular reference to Mallarme. Some of the things I shall say may look like a repetition of several points made at the beginning of our Poetry Class. But as these points are basic, a little repetition in a novel way will not do any harm. Besides, I count upon your having forgotten at least half of them.

Perhaps the best distinction we may draw between prose and poetry is that in prose the words are only a means to an end whereas in poetry they are as much an end as a means. Of course in prose too we have to attend to our language, but we attend in order that the thoughts we wish to express may get better clothed. And here we can always distinguish between the thought and the expression. The same thought can be expressed in prose in different ways. Poetry uses words with another spirit. Here words in themselves are the object of attention. Clearness and orderliness of language are not our whole aim. Colour, music, subtlety of suggestion, appeal to emotion, stir of imagination — all these are to be compassed by poetic speech. And, what is more essential, the words are to be not a clothing for whatever is to be said but themselves the very body of it. They cannot be cut apart from the substance as you can extract the substance of prose from prose-words or as you can take off your clothes and jump into your bath. Poetic words are not like a shirt which has some value for your social life but is not essential to your very existence. It can be pulled off and you will still be yourself, though perhaps not so smart to some eyes. Poetic words are not even like your trousers which are a somewhat more necessary part of civilised living. Poetic words, with their strong charge of beautiful emotion, can make you pant but cannot be equated to your pants! They are a vesture that is intrinsic to the body. This vesture is like your skin. I do not think that if you tried to take off your skin in order to get naked and enjoy a good bath, you would succeed famously. I am afraid you would be bathed in blood instead of in water. And most probably a thorough loss of skin will mean loss of life as well. Poetic substance and poetic words are joined together just as the limbs are joined to the skin: the two are inseparable and the

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moment you remove the words the substance is no longer what it was and may even suffer death.

If we may change the metaphor a little, the words in poetry are not transmissive as in prose but incarnative. They are not a jeep which you can jump into and drive to a place and then jump out of: they are like your legs with which you can go to places but out of which you can never leap. A further change of metaphor will perhaps bring more pointedly home the difference between mere prose, literary prose and true poetry. Mere prose is like the average man, either simple or clever. God has made him in His own image, but the human copy and the divine original are quite distinguishable. Literary prose is like those remarkable beings whom India describes as Vibhutis. They are human-looking, yet a breath of the superhuman animates and drives them. They act by inspiration. However, the inspiration is a power which gets into them without their being one with it. The two are still separable. Not so with those rare beings whom India knows as Avatars. The Avatar is the Divine incarnate: the Divine is fused with the human and it is impossible to say where the human ends and the Divine begins. The Divine is the human, the human is the Divine. Poetry is language in which the substance attains Avatarhood — in two senses. First, when you touch the limbs, as it were, of a poem you touch the very Spirit moving them: the words of poetry are the substance itself exteriorised: the substance cannot be what it is without the words being what they are. Secondly, the manner in which poetry lives and moves is as the manner of a god — the words make a totality faultless in the shape and rhythm of every detail. The quality of Avatarhood endows words in poetry with extreme importance. Not certainly words as sheer sounds, how-ever lovely. Words as living expressive units are poetic — and words particularly as expressive of something else than what is called an idea. Prose consists of using language as an instrument of ideas. Poetry consists of using language not as an instrument of anything but as the audible self of something else than ideas. Both these aspects come into a story told about Mallarme and the - painter Degas.

Degas was one of those who attended Mallarme's Tuesday-evenings and listened to his exposition of the Poetic Art. He was already an excellent painter, but now he was fired with the aspiration to write poetry. He made several attempts and found that they

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were unsuccessful. He was sufficiently a student of poetry to realise that he had failed. But he could not understand the cause of his failure. So he came to Mallarme and, scratching his head and making a sour face, said to the poet: "Cher Maitre, how is it that I have so many fine ideas and yet cannot write poetry?" Mallarme, gently putting one hand on the dejected shoulders of the painter and with the other caressing his own little beard, replied: "My good friend, poetry is not written with ideas: it is written with words."

What Mallarme meant was that poetry is an art in which lan-guage is a prime force and which has to do with deeper and subtler subjective processes than ideas. So long as ideas dominate one, one will only create prose. Only when one looks on the medium of expression with a particularly sensitive absorption in it, one can be in the mood to create poetry. And if one were genuinely open to inspiration and not just a windbag, one would employ words that manifest what lies beyond the range of the ideative intellect. This distinction between the windbag and the artist is significant. Other-wise the emphasis on words can lead to mere wordiness, a luxu-riance in language divorced from the supra-intellectual. To escape from mere ideas is not automatically to produce poetry: poetry is a matter of inwardness becoming outwardness. And the true inwardness holds in itself the words of poetry ready for outward pro-jection. Though, when we start writing, we may not be aware of their presence inside, the words of poetry are themselves from deep within. So an approach that is wholly verbal in the outward sense is not Mallarme's. What Mallarme intended is to shift the focus from ideas and to use the spirit of language, free from the idea-grip, as a mode of invoking the expressive activity of the supra-intellectual. A poet's interest in words is always such a mode of invocation. The poet lets the spirit of language haunt him and then his eyes become entranced and begin vaguely to turn words into vibrant conjurors of strange visions which stimulate the mind to peer into mysteries and bring from the dominions of dreams the passionate patterns of a life more dynamic, more meaningful than the movements of the waking world. Yes, a poet is always an invoker of the beautiful beyond through the magic of word-intoxication. But all poets do not aim at writing the kind of poetry that is Mallarme's ideal. And we may say that Mallarmean poetry is not the only type worth producing: la Rive et le Mystere can be

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sung forth in many tones. But this is a type eminently worth noting as a stage in the evolution towards the Aurobindonian Future Poetry. And in order to write from beyond the mind his advice about the importance of words is valuable. To still the ideative intelligence and concentrate on words with a will to make them reveal something which that intelligence cannot give: this is an aesthetic sadhana which is bound to be creative in the short or long run. And this is precisely the truth that is behind another saying of Mallarme's: "Yield the initiative to words."

You may ask: "Why bother about words? If we concentrate on what is beyond the intelligence, is it not enough?" No — we may get the touch of the supra-intellectual but not of its speech. The poet is one who approaches the supra-intellectual with a keen word-sense, an ear intent on expressive sounds. Without this move-ment towards the secret presence of pre-existent words in the Beyond, you can have Yogic sadhana but not the aesthetic sa-dhana necessary for poetry. You have to be an ardent lover of words, an audacious master of words, a sensitive and receptive slave of words — hearing at all times the vague wandering rustle of their wings in the profundities and the distances of your being. Words of light and power and sweetness already caught by past poets must float about you, tune your heart to their magic wafts until it is thrilled to a concentrated calling of luminous and lordly and lovely words still uncaught, still waiting for human seizure in the revelatory secrecies that wrap like some starry empyrean the ultimate hush where all splendours fall asleep. It is not enough to look inwardly upward to the constellate spaces: he who would be a poet has to strain his ear together with his eye and keep dreaming of the music of the spheres.

"Music": the term is most appropriate in a lecture on Mal-larm6's poetry. For the sort of poetry he wanted to write by yielding the initiative to words is perhaps best indicated in another saying of his, which his friend and semi-follower Paul Valery paraphrases: "Our object is to recover from Music our own right." This means that somehow Music has monopolised what should belong to Poetry also. But when Mallarme's dictum is quoted, people imagine that he wished to create very melodious verse: what we have called Melopoeia. Well, Mallarme did create certain wonderfully rhythmed lines, but if we wish to have Melopoeia in French we do not particularly go to Mallarme. We go more to

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Verlaine than to him — Verlaine with lines like:

Et O les voix d'enfants chantant dans la cupole!

(And O the voices of children singing in the cupola!)

Expressive rhythm, of course, Mallarme always aimed at, but he never tried to rival the melodiousness, the sheer sound-rapture of Music. In fact, no poet can; nor should any poet regret that he cannot. Poetry has another way with sound. But poetry is capable of a very marked richness of audible values: Mallarme is not especially after them — what he is after is a subtle movement of words. For, what struck him as the goal of Poetry is not musical sound but musical meaning. What would you say is the meaning of Music? How does Music convey its meaning? No words that you can understand are spoken. No ideas that you can formulate are conveyed. And yet you feel that something momentous, something significant is communicated. Of course, since poetry is written with words that have a certain connotation and not with mere independent sounds, musical meaning cannot be transmitted to the full in Poetry. But to achieve through Poetry as much as possible a catching up of our consciousness beyond formulable ideas, through Poetry to suffuse words as much as possible with the feeling of a wordless Beyond by means of a design of images accompanied by a minimum of directly intelligible discourse — this is to recover from Music the right that is Poetry's as well. And this is what Mallarme had in mind when he wrote in a sonnet that the ideal of the Poet is:

Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu...

(To give a purer sense to the speech of the tribe...)

Mallarme divided the use of words into two categories. One he designated Rapportage, the other Poesie. Under Rapportage he included all language that informs, describes, instructs, argues, explains: language whose principal motive is to make us understand something, and that goes about its business straightforwardly and with no special attention to rhythm. Poetry works by suggestion, allusion, evocation, and brings in both shadowiness of

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image and subtlety of rhythm. The more we divest speech of demonstrative intention, of rational content, the more poetic we are. Much of the world's poetic output, even at its greatest, is a mixture of Rapportage and Poesie. The lines, the passages of Poetry at its quintessential are very few. The ideal poet, in Mal-larme's opinion, should go on purifying further and further the speech of the race, the speech even of the poetic tribe, and arrive at a technique of shadowy representation, an art of haunting obscurity. Then he would produce Pure Poetry. And in doing so he would be the true Symbolist.

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TALK TWENTY-NINE

Mallarme, with precise yet puzzling image-combinations that would suggest a meaning as elusive as in wordless Music, sought to embody in poetic words a supra-intellectual sense of some perfect Beyond of Silence. His attitude to the work he had undertaken is stated by Stefan George (pronounced Gayorgay), one of his early admirers, in a forceful German phrase:

Und fur sein denkbild blutend Mallarme.

which means,

And bleeding for his ideal, Mallarme.

It is well known how whole-heartedly Mallarme dedicated his life to achieving his poetic object. But people who feel that he sought some Beyond mistake certain expressions in his poetry as giving the real mystic magnet to which his aspiration was drawn. Thus Robert Conquest, at the end of a sonnet, has very memorably but still mistakenly summed up Mallarme's search by a contrasting combination of him with another poet, the English Andrew Mar-veil. The sonnet-end formulates a general ideal for poetry:

Marvell's absorption into local green,

Mallarme's cry for supernatural blue.

These are splendid lines and by themselves they set up an ideal worth pursuing. Marvell, as you perhaps know already, was a poet of the time of Crabbe, Crashaw, Herbert, Donne, Vaughan: he belonged to the seventeenth century group which includes all these and whose members are called "the Metaphysicals". These poets carry that label not because they were all aching for some-thing mystical: their chief characteristic is a marriage of physical sensations with abstract ideas by means of imagery that is intellec-tually ingenious and drawn from subtle learning and scholarship and philosophical and scientific literature — imagery escaping, for all its cleverness and far-fetchedness, the charge of being mere fancy and stark conceit. Thus Donne in an inspired lyric compares himself and his sweetheart to a pair of compasses: whether the

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lovers are near to each other or removed and apart, their relationship is shown very acutely as the posture or play of the instrument for describing circles, with two legs connected at one end by a movable joint. Most of the Metaphysicals did have strong religious leanings. But, as the phrase quoted about Marvell makes it clear, Marvell was not quite mystical-minded: he was more interested in earth's beauty than in the beauty of an otherwhere, and he was interested in local settings — the particular things in front of us. Into these things however, he infused a very novel significance and expressed himself with a sensitive and subtle wit. Thus, in a famous poem, one on a Garden, he speaks of

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.

This is the couplet Conquest has in mind when he speaks of

Marvell's absorption into local green.

Marvell himself refers to a spot where trees make a shade over him, a green shade whose cool colour sinks into him, making him forget the entire world, mentally destroy as it were the whole of the creation and concentrate himself in just a delighful consciousness drenched in the sensation of greenness. But that is not all: there comes here, I believe, a bit of subtlety. The annihilation of all that's made does not only mean an exclusion of everything except a thought filled with the presence of the green shade: it also means a creation by the mind, of something of its own from the objects of the world, so that all that is physically sensed is submerged in a subjective vision, vivid and wonderful, at the same time centred in the immaterial and matching the objective environment. Marvell would not be a Metaphysical without such a shade within a shade. But the delight in the local earth-scene is definitely there despite the inner touch. And this delight is, according to our sonneteer, one of the two important functions of the poetic imagination: the poetic imagination must not lose hold on earth, the small limited objects before us, the elements of our immediate experience.

The other important function is to save us from being earth- bound: we should be able, while keeping our grip on the terres-

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trial, to soar to the utmost limits of perception and conception. Away to the farthest distance our mind must penetrate with an insatiable hunger for the Supreme — for the supernatural, the divine. This counterpoise to local interest is set forth in the mystical suggestion of the line:

Mallarme's cry for supernatural blue —

a line recalling the phrase I quoted to you some days back from Mallarme himself:

Je suis hante: l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur!

Evidently this phrase has haunted Conquest. It is also the phrase, by the way, with which the students at the school where Mallarme was condemned to teach English used to tease him. Every day they would scribble it on the blackboard. Poor Mallarme would look at the blackboard each morning, forgetting that the same words would be there. He must have got sick of seeing one of his most effective lines repeated endlessly. Yes, it is an extremely effective line and in itself sums up faultlessly the other extreme to what Marvell on the whole represents. A complete ideal comes in those two lines, very poetically worded. It is the same ideal that Words-worth embodies at the close of his lyric on the Skylark. The Skylark is a bird pictured by Wordsworth as enjoying "a privacy of glorious light" in the lofty ether where it wings and sings, but the poet makes it still no despiser of "the earth where cares abound." Even while it is musically ecstatic in the celestial heights its eyes are on the little nest down below in the local tree spoken of by Marvell — down below in the Marvellous green which balances the Mallarmean blue high above. Wordsworth puts the beautiful balance of extremes in the couplet calling the Skylark

Type of the Wise who soar but never roam,

True to the kindred points of heaven and home!

I wonder if this couplet could apply also to the spirit of my lectures? But it would perhaps be too much of a compliment. The more correct way to state the truth about the peculiarity of my twice-a-week speechifying would seem to be:

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Type of the Strange a-soar while being earth-rover,

Fixed on a point though wandering all over!

And the immediate point of my latest digression is that Mallarme's Beyond in the fullest, in the final sense is not any superhuman blue.

No doubt, as that line from him attests, our Symbolist poet was considerably concerned with the Azure. But if we understand exactly how he was concerned, we shall see that it was not the God of his ultimate aspiration. To begin with, we have to relate the Azure to what his mind was afflicted with from the very beginning of his poetic career: the state which he calls Ennui. There was always in the midst of life's movement and variety a gnawing boredom. This boredom, this Ennui had two shades. One came from the idealist in Mallarme: his impatience with ordinary day-to-day existence with its meaningless triviality set in the midst of a huge grossness, the fatigue of soul which, as he said Hamletwise in La Musique et les Lettres, "one feels with this too solid and heavy world". The other shade was connected with the artist in him. The artist, obsessed by the idealist's boredom with the commonplace and the average, sought to bring forth a poetry expressive of what is truly significant, something the commonplace and the average cannot give — what Mallarme terms "something other than the real". But this search for the right kind of poetic utterance was frustrated: the artist was unable to catch the truly significant to his heart's satisfaction: hence the fatigue of his mind under the load of the inexpressible. And behind this sterility there is a strange experience which overwhelmed Mallarme at a very early age.

Not knowing where to turn from the tiring banality of life, he had a yearning for some sort of self-annulment, a plunge into some sleep as it were of living death, a sleep which he at once dreaded and desired. This yearning seems to have become intense enough to bring about a subjective crisis. In his twenty-fifth year he had the experience that he was just an apparition through which a Void was somehow acting, that he was himself a Void strangely turned into name and form! In a letter to his friend Cazalis he said that while writing he had actually to sit before a mirror in order to mark his own body and reassure himself of his own existence: if the mirror were removed he would feel faded into a vacuity. The words he used remind us strongly of a few phrases in two sonnets

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of Sri Aurobindo's. Of course, there is a difference in the quality of the Aurobindonian experiences and that of Mallarme's, but the basic drive behind them seems identical. The sonnet called The Word of the Silence begins with the quatrian:

A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,

A world of sight clear and inimitable,

A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,

A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will.

And in the sonnet named Nirvana we have the lines:

...A Peace stupendous, featureless, still

Replaces all. What once was I, in It

A silent unnamed emptiness...

Mallarme writes to his friend: "Je suis maintenant impersonnel, et non plus le Stephane que tu as connu, mais une aptitude qu'a l'univers spirituel a se voir et a se developper a travers ce qui fut moi." ("I am now impersonal and no longer the Stephane whom you have known, but a turn which the spiritual universe possesses for seeing itself and developing itself through what was I.")

But there is no unmixed joy of release here: there is a delight but also a devastation, because Mallarme seems to have contacted something deeply superconscient through something abysmally inconscient. His letter, at the height of the crisis, says: "J'ai implore la grande Nuit, qui m'a exhauce et a etendu ses tenebres." ("I have implored the great Night, who has hearkened to me and spread out her darknesses.") When this experience of a painful paradise of self-erasure, behind which was active the truth stated by Sri Aurobindo at the close of another sonnet:

The darkness was the Omnipotent's abode,

Hood of Omniscience, a blind mask of God—

when this experience passed through the consciousness of the artist Mallarme trying to poetise "something else than the real", it assumed the character of an infinite ideality which refused to yield its secret in language. It got symbolised by the blank piece of paper before which he so often sat at night. In the inner room his wife

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would be in bed, with their little baby-girl, but in the outer room he would be sitting, all alone, a mirror on the opposite wall, a sheet of paper under his pen, his eyes gazing a while in the mirror and then fixing themselves on the whiteness. He would be unable, on the one hand, to lower himself by giving tongue to life's commonplaceness and, on the other, to heighten himself into the speech of what is free and pure from the taint of the trivial. This suspension, sometimes night-long, between two incapacities is well touched off in those lines of his:

...la clarte deserte de ma lampe

Sur le vide papier que la blancheur defend...

(...the lonely lustre of my lamp

On the bare paper guarded by its own white...)

This whiteness of the paper in front of him became a symbol at once of his sterility and of the dazzle of a Perfection he vaguely intuited. It is for the sake of that dazzle which was as yet no more than a delightful daze that Mallarme tells us he spent during his youth a period of bitter idleness, fighting with the difficulty of his poetic job and forsaking

l'enfance

Adorable des bois de roses sous l'azur

Naturel...

(The infancy Adorable of rose-woods with their crown Of natural azure...)

Here the Azure is recalled as if it were an Eden of young hopes and innocent hungers, an Eden of contentment with fresh in-experienced life, a self-contained felicity within Nature's own circle of flowers around and of the blue sky above — two realities that are often together and even merge in his moods.

But natural happiness, however sweet, was not for Mallarme. Within this happiness he felt a variety of shades that, even while attractive, crossed the crystallinity of the new vision that he was developing out of his self-lost and world-lost contact with a Pro-

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found simultaneously dark and divine, the new aspiration that he was cultivating by fusing this contact with the aesthetic Platonism growing from his dissatisfaction with all tangible forms and his ache for the ideal Form enfranchised from limits and changes. We shall mark all the shades felt by him within the Azure. At the moment I shall end with repeating that the Azure was not his final cry. On the one side he was being sucked up into an enormous Black: on the other he was drawn towards a vast White. Within him they appeared to mix in a most disturbing manner. Beyond him they were felt as one indefinable Mystery. Between that depth of divine distance and his own perplexed existence there hung the multifoliate Azure.

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TALK THIRTY

We have now to take a close look at Mallarme's Azure. We have already seen it as something of a lost Eden to which he has a nostalgic relation in the midst of his quest for a new kind of poetic utterance that keeps eluding him. You may note that the Azure makes here for Mallarme a joint reality with rose-woods. Flowers on the earth and the blue sky above fused in his mind and in an early reference to the latter he speaks of the former as having their origin in the Azure: he makes Mother Earth cull flowers

Des avalanches d'or du vieil azur, au jour

Premier...

(From the ancient azure's avalanching gold,

On the first day...)

The Life Force at its most delicately beautiful in an exquisite abundance is what the Azure in one aspect is. Just a shade different is the aspect in which the Azure is a source of vague desires for life's fullness. Mallarme writes of it as of a child's thirst in the morning for its mother's breast:

...des levres que l'air du vierge azur affame...

(...lips made hungry by the virgin azure's air...)

Like a Godhead hanging aloft in a lovely languor of illimitable ease the Azure calls and calls: the poet's soul fountains irresistibly to it:

Fidele, un blanc jet d'eau soupire vers l'Azur!

—Vers l'Azur attendri d'Octobre pale et pur...

(Faithful, towards the Azure, a white jet sighs!

—Soft Azure in pale pure October skies...)

Here we have an interesting combination of white and blue and we may also surmise the background which is a garden where the white jet is leaping upward. Out of Nature's tenderly thrilled

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prolificity the aspiration goes forth — a white aspiration feeling that the Azure above is the ultimate goal of this crystalline cry.

The Azure in all these lines is felt as a blissful creator — an effortless artist bringing out of himself the world of sensation, the world of plastic form and powerful scent and penetrating touch. The Azure is an inexhaustible spontaneous fecundity — all-creating, all-containing, all-constituting. But this fecundity is found by Mallarme to be not altogether a cause of innocent hunger in the human heart. There is a subtle sensuousness in the very essence of the Azure and it evokes a rapture of response in the depth of our flesh-built being. Mallarme figures a young girl stirred by it and saying:

le tiede azur d'ete,

Vers qui nativement la femme se devoile...

(summer's tepid azure,

To which a woman is born to unveil herself...)

Innocence and voluptuousness are thus blended in the omni-present blue. Yearning and love in terms of subtilised sensation, in terms of soulful sensuousness: that is what the Azure reveals itself to be when Mallarme the idealist answers to its call. It is at the same time wonderful and disturbing to him: the natural man in him enjoys its stimulus but the white jet at the centre of his being, though sighing towards it as towards the highest it can view, holds in its soupir not only a delicate idealistic ache but also a vague tremulous regret that it can do no other than thus move blueward.

The artist in Mallarme is also disturbed. Bent on creating some rare poetry and failing to do so he wanders amidst Nature's prolific domain of leaf and blossom and winged music, and nurses in his own breast a poignant ennui, a boredom and a fatigue with wasted effort so much in contrast to the ease with which the Azure conjures up the world around him by means of an entranced happiness as of an infinite overarching flower:

J'attends, en m'abimant, que mon ennui s'eleve...

— Cependant l'Azur rit sur la haie et l'eveil

De tant d'oiseaux en fleur gazouillant au soleil.

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(I wait, self-doomed, for boredom to lift up...

—But the Azure laughs above the hedge and the rush

Of bird on bird in bloom with the sun their cry.)

The intensest agony experienced by the artist Mallarme vis-a-vis the Azure finds tongue in the famous poem called L'Azur. There the disturbance caused in him by the sky-presence turns into a revolt. Under the gaze of the great Demiurge on high, the pro-ductive abundance at once sublime and soft; innocent and volup-tuous, sky-showered and earth-sprouted, the poet feels not only barren but also baulked and broken as if by a subtle mockery:

De l'eternel Azur la sereine ironie

Accable, belle indolemment comme les fleurs,

Le poete impuissant qui maudit son genie

A travers un desert sterile de Douleurs.

(The eternal Azure's serene irony

Crushes with its indolent beauty as of flowers

The impuissant poet cursing his genius

Through a sterile desert of despairing hours.)

He seeks to escape but in vain. Always the Azure is there, beautifully beyond all attainment and imitation and urging him to an ever-hopeless striving. Like an Ideal it shines, yet an Ideal that denies his fruition: it is a Divinity whose beatific omnipotence becomes a torturing obsession to him, a Devil that will not let him rest. It sends him flying to all sorts of endeavours to forget it, but everything reminds him of it. He even attempts to abolish its idealistic spur to him and turns towards the commonalty of men so that he may be lost in the human herd. Just then the Church bells ring their evensong, the Angelus, and he is pierced with a memory of the unattainable altitude and his own impotence tears at his heart again. His whole life becomes one cry, which we have already quoted, of helplessness bespelled by an Azure inescapable and everywhere.

Here Mallarme the artist finds his most bitter and passionate expression under the pressure of that baleful loveliness. Mallarme the idealist may be heard through the mouth of his dramatic character, Herodiade, the daughter of Herodias whom history

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knows as Salome. Salome was a dancer at the court of King Herod of Palestine. We are told by legend that she fell in love with John the Baptist, the holy man who preceded and heralded Jesus. On being repulsed by him she took a horrible revenge. When, after a marvellous dance, King Herod offered to give her anything she asked, she demanded the head of John the Baptist. The head was brought to her on a plate. She seems to have been a woman who fell passionately in love with the Baptist's purity: she would not yield to any man, she would live in seclusion from their attentions and be a sinner only with a saint! In Mallarme's poem she is pictured as living frigidly, all by herself, a bewitching woman who would not surrender her virginity to anyone. Through her mouth Mallarme expresses his sense of a strange hell in the glorious godhead of the Azure, a satanic sweetness whose allure has to be shunned, though seeming ever so heavenly:

...clos les volets, l'azur

Seraphique sourit dans les vitres profondes,

Et je deteste, moi, le bel azur!

Des ondes

Se bercent et, la-bas, sais-tu pas un pays

Ou le sinistre ciel ait les regards hais

De Venus qui, le soir, brule dans le feuillage:

J'y partirais...

(...close all the shutters, the seraphic

Azure is smiling through the panes profound,

I hate the beautiful Azure!

Lo beyond

Where in its cradle of billows the sea sways,

A land whose sullen skies bear the loathed gaze

Of Venus who, eve-long, in the foliage burns;

There will I go...)

No doubt, the Azure finds a natural echo in our heart, all our delight seems awaiting us in it, but the depth of rapture by which we are fascinated is a sensuousness, a voluptuousness to be sur-passed. We must shut our eyes to the beauty that glows out to us from that depth: then alone shall we discover the ultimate truth and, through it, the ultimate beauty. For, the ultimate beauty is of

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Eternity, not of Time, and the way towards it is not the way of the body-thrilled desire but the way of self-withdrawn virginity. Along a track of whiteness within us seeking a white felicity and no blue bliss, we have to move: our consummation is some vast Nirvana, an oblivion of the colourful storm that is Nature. Even though the track may seem to lie through a shadowy bleakness under "sullen skies" we must enter into their loathing of the Azure-lapped foliage-burning Venus and resolutely say: "There will I go."

Occasionally, just as the white jet sighs to the blue, the blue sends forth to Mallarme a glimmer of the Nirvanic peace and then we have a line like:

L'insensibilite de l'azur et des pierres.

(The insensibility of the azure and of stones.)

But mostly the Azure is a splendorous Time-God and, though invested with an ecstatic innocence at its high origin or in its flowery reflex below, its appeal and evocation is to a refined voluptuary in man, the sex-tinged lover of the beautiful. Enchanting as the Azure-steeped existence might be, Mallarme aches to transcend it. At first this ache finds no clear formulation. He just feels his own sterility as strangely elevating in the very moment that it is terribly depressing. And his innate ennui, at war with the sensuous stir in his heart, is driven under the Azure's multiform paradoxical presence to a desperate yearning for sleep, death, extinction. He feels that in them there is a secret of fulfilment which the Azure can never give to the deepest and highest in man.

As I have said in an earlier lecture, the sleep, death, extinction yearned for was to Mallarme not what is usually understood by these things. They were to be something queerly conscious. The experience which he had of the Superconscient through the In-conscient supplied the basis on which he built the idealism as well as the artistry of his later life. It set him pursuing the composition of enigmatic verse in which unearthly idealities figured as emerging from and hovering against an infinite White which is at the same time sterility and the Ineffable. The link between this sterility and the Ineffable is a virginity of being.

We may now look at Mallarme's White from several angles. From the viewpoint of Art, this White is, as we have observed,

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...le vide papier que la blancheur defend.

(...the bare paper guarded by its own white)

It is also the season of Winter, when the snow draws the mind away from sensuousness and puts it in tune with the far Ideal:

L'hiver, saison de l'art serein, l'hiver lucide...

(Winter, serene art's season, lucid winter...)

Mallarme's best work used to be done in the cold months. Here he is like Milton who has left it on record that his finest inspiration came between the autumnal equinox and the vernal equinox. Between September 21 and March 21 the old Puritan poet sat day after day in his favourite pose, one leg thrown over the arm of a chair, and dictated his magnificent thunder to his bored daughters or secretaries. There is something cold about Milton's splendour, but I wonder whether the quality of his verse can be described as snowy or crystalline. One may speak of a certain grey grandeur in him, but not anything in the Mallarmean mode. For one thing, he is not subtle enough, not inward enough. For another, though he is a scrupulous shaper of things, he is not enough of a purifier. No doubt a greater creator than Mallarme, but in terms of the Azure, however dulled by Puritanism in the midst of the sublime vitality that the Renaissance temper in him brought to his work. Mallarme's delicacy and depth are not in Milton, just as Milton's vibrant vastness is lacking in Mallarme. We cannot think of Milton raising the soul of Winter to that intensity of remote coldness we find in the phrase Mallarme gives to his Herodiade when she apostrophises the star-pierced night:

O toi qui te meurs, toi qui brule de chastete,

Nuit blanche de glacons et de neige cruelle...

(O you that die to yourself in chastity's glow,

White night of clotted ice and cruel snow...)

Here is a passion for passionlessness from which Milton's Puritanism of reasoned restraint is miles away. Even in a less pas-

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sionately passionless treatment of the stars we have a non-Miltonic sense of the virginal, the white — a sense that is aesthetic and mystic, not mental and moral. Here, as also in the previous vision, there is a merger of the Ultimate with the Ideal. The White is seen not as a formless infinity but as a pattern, and the pattern is given as caught in a reflective earth-mood. A glimpse of some chord of the Archetype-harmony in the rapt consciousness is suggested through the physical imaging of the constellation Great Bear, with its seven silver points, in a still mirror hung opposite a window in the poet's room:

...encor

Que dans l'oubli ferme par le cadre, se fixe

De scintillations sitot le septuor.

(...while yet

In the frame-closed oblivion is set

At once of scintillations the septet.)

The French word "septuor" is a term in music, meaning a piece for seven voices or seven instruments. So the suggestion here is of a sevenfold music that is yet a sevenfold silence.

The idea of whiteness and scintillation is presented in a different form in a poem about a Japanese fan in the hand of Mallarme's daughter. At the end of a whole series of intuitive fantasies whose central motif is "un pur delice sans chemin" — "a pure pathless delight" — the poet sees the Japanese fan folded up by his daughter and held against her braceleted arm as if it were a wing closed in a self-inwardness, and he discovers in that still attitude of cool colourlessness against cool colour a conjuration of dream-distances: a queenhood of virginal mystery calls up a magical sky filled with sunset-splendour: the shut fan is like a sceptre —

Le sceptre des rivages roses

Stagnants sur les soirs d'or, ce l'est,

Ce blanc vol ferme que tu poses

Contre le feu d'un bracelet.

(Sceptre of roseate shores that lean

Stagnant on depths of evening gold—

This flight of whiteness which you fold

To rest athwart a bangle's sheen.)

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You may mark here how Mallarme is able to take up any subject, be it ever so trivial, and use it as a means to his Reve and his Mystere. He has written memorably apropos of a glass-tube in a chandelier, the ash collected at the tip of his cigar, the lace-curtains on a window whose panes brighten with the dawn after the poet's night-vigil for the revelatory word and into whose brightness the curtains seem to dissolve by becoming translucent — curtains that are quite different in their function from those on a bed which shut one up into darkness:

Cet unanime blanc conflit

D'une guirlande avec la meme,

Enfui contre la vitre bleme

Flotte plus qu'il n'ensevelit.

This conflict of unanimous white,

Garland with garland-twin a-strain

And vanishing on the window pane,

Floats more than buries down the sight.)

In this vision, blessing with its poetic suggestion Mallarme's night-long search for self-expression, we have a symbol for Mallarmean poetry itself: the poet has to be like the white curtains and lose his own identity by turning into a diaphanous transmitter of virginal light like the dawn's — the poet has to carry the eyes of his reader towards free ethereal spaces as those curtains do and not submerge the consciousness into dense earthly comfort or pleasure as do bed-curtains.

The Mallarmean White comes also in the symbol of sailing beyond the temporal and terrestrial to some infinity and eternity. In one poem a young practitioner of verse-craft is hailed as a new Vasco da Gama whom no mere Orient can halt or satisfy: a salute is raised

Au seul souci de voyager

Outre une Inde splendide et trouble —

(To the lone will of voyaging

Beyond all Ind of splendour and trouble—)

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and in another poem we find this "seul souci" concretised at the end of another toast to the poet's goal of transcendence:

Solitude, recif, etoile

A n'importe ce qui valut

Le blanc souci de notre toile.

(Solitude, rocky reef and star,

To all that lures of high avail

The straining whiteness of our sail.)

Here, as in the preceding quotations, we are shown what we should strive to attain in the future. But Mallarme's conception of the supreme White covers life's beginning no less than life's end. This White is what meets us at very birth and if we go deeper than the high-hung Azure that seems to make the infant's lips thirsty for some ultimate happiness we shall discover the true source of that primal longing. In fact, the very line we have cited in this connection is preceded by a phrase pointing to the White rather than the Azure and leading on to the latter simply because Mallarme did not yet fathom profoundly enough his own poet-heart. Let us give now the total context:

...le sein

Par qui coule en blancheur sibylline la femme

Pour les levres que l'air du vierge azur affame...

(...the breast

Whence flows in sybilline whiteness woman bare

For lips made hungry by the virgin azure's air...)

"Blancheur sibylline" — that is the stuff of sovereign felicity. And even the "azur" which is taken for the top splendour drawing the idealist's vision is characterised as "vierge". The truth behind the aspiration of these lines stands out clear in some words Herodiade utters, Herodiade who has spoken of the burning fires of chastity in the heights of heaven: these words are her cry to her old nurse who suckled her as a babe and they convey the sense of a supreme purity merging childhood and sainthood in a mystic White:

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Je ne veux rien d'humain, et, sculptee

Si tu me vois les yeux perdus en paradis,

C'est quand je me souviens de ton lait bu jadis...

(Nought human I desire and if perchance

Thou seest me sculpture-still with paradised glance,

Know that I dream thy milk my child-lips drained...)

We may say that the Mallarmean poet awakes to his mission in the very moment he tastes for the first time the milk of his mother's or his nurse's breast. Behind that initial — or, shall we say, initiatory — gulp of life-nourishment is the primordial Mystery for whose service and revelation he is born. Has not Coleridge spoken of the essential poet as one who inspires "holy dread" by "his flashing eyes, his floating hair",

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of paradise.

It is this "milk of paradise" that Mallarme symbolises in those lines in the mouth of his Herodiade. And the nurse to whom they are addressed is a medium, as it were, through whom he throws out a shape-suggestion of the primordial Mystery about which he affords us a hint in a prose-phrase more poetic than the verse of many poets and brief-bright and sudden-white like the very lightning-burst it expresses: "Quelque eclair supreme ou s'eveille la Figure que nul n'est" — "A supreme flash from which is aroused that Shape which no one is".

Mallarme never faltered in his aspiration towards this Shape. But he never felt that he had achieved his aim. And it is true that time and again what he achieves is only an inner subtlety and not the mystic flash. But even in the midst of his greatest triumphs he rhythms forth a regret. I suppose the regret is due to the fact that though Mallarme the poet has found fulfilment in some poems Mallarme the idealist has not made his home in what these poems have sung. The fulfilment went no further than communicating a living sense of the wondrous White. But to be at all moments this Wonder itself and to let poetry issue from such an experience — "where," asked Mallarme, "where is this in my poetic life?" All his verses he regarded as mere preliminaries to some great Work

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yet undone. And even these preliminaries — how few were they! Not that he was unaware of the special quality of his exiguous production. He knew he had caught a small pure flame which grander poets had missed: particularly the grand poet Victor Hugo who had spoken so much about "infinite" and "eternite" and "divinite" seemed to miss that flame because he had no access to the inner secrecy in whose ever-present Absence Mallarme breath-ed and moved. Hugo, besides being led away by his rhetorical tendency from the true mystic articulation, was still subject to the intellectualism inherent in the French language as developed through the centuries: Hugo at even his best had but sublimated by an imaginative and rhythmic process the spirit of prose. It is with men like Nerval and Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, that the French Muse began to emancipate herself from prose, and in Mallarme she exceeded herself by partly becoming non-French. Mallarme was conscious of his own rare accomplishment, his distil-lation of poetry through a hushed inwardness. But he was con-scious also of the immensely more that remained to be accom-plished. His consciousness of his own rarity was just the strength with which he was able to resist all temptation to be popular, to write in the usual mode: it saved him from loss of his poetic virginity, so to speak, but it did not provide him with any self-satisfaction. The lack of self-satisfaction found speech in several fine poems, and once he uttered it with a masterly poetic art in a sonnet which he wrote in 1885 — a confession of failure which is one of his greatest poetic successes: Le Cygne (The Swan). It has a basis of personal poetic history, but it widens out into a soul-truth valid for Man in general.

I have analysed this Sonnet in a book I have written on Mal -larme. So I shall not repeat myself here. Sri Aurobindo's words on it should really suffice to bring home its crowning place in Mal-larme's ouevre. But let me preface the comment with the poem first in French, then in an almost literal translation and finally in a more or less free metrical and rhymed version.

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui

Va-t-il nous dechirer avec un coup d'aile ivre

Le lac dur oublie que hante sous le givre

Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!

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Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui

Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se delivre

Pour n'avoir pas chante la region ou vivre

Quand du sterile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.

Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie

Par l'espace infligee a l'oiseau qui le nie,

Mais non l'horreur du sol ou la plumage est pris.

Fantome qu'a ce lieu son pur eclat assigne,

Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mepris

Que vet parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.

The virginal, the vivid, the beautiful today —

Does it come to tear with a stroke of drunken wing

This hard forgotten lake which, under the hoar-frost, is

haunted

By the transparent glacier of flights that have not flown?

A swan of other times remembers that it is he

Who, magnificent but without hope, frees himself

For not having sung the region where one should live

When the boredom of sterile winter has shone forth.

All his neck will shake off the white agony

Inflicted by space on the bird which denies space,

But not the horror of the soil where the plumage is caught.

Phantom whom to this place his pure brightness assigns,

He is immobilised in the cold dream of contempt

That is worn, amid his useless exile, by the Swan.

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?

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A swan of the past remembers now his own

Splendour left hopeless even though flaming free,

Because he sang not life's dominion

Beyond dull winter's bright sterility.

His neck will shake off the white agony

Space-flung upon the bird denying space,

But the soil's horror grips his plumage down.

Phantom whose pure sheen fits him to this place,

He is stilled in the cold contemptuous reverie

That clothes the useless exile of the Swan.

Now for Sri Aurobindo's light on the poem. A disciple found the sonnet tortuous and unintelligible in parts. Particularly the verse about the hoar-frost, the glacier and the flights left him dazed. He wondered how the last two could fuse and he mixed up the first two as if the frost had turned into the glacier. Sri Aurobindo wrote: " 'Givre' is not the same as 'glace' — it is not ice, but the covering of hoar-frost such as you find on the trees etc., the congealed moisture of the air — that is the 'blanche agonie' which has come down from the insulted space on the swan and on the lake. He can shake off that but the glacier holds him; he can no more rise to the skies, caught in the frozen cold mass of the failures of the soul that refused to fly upward and escape. It is one of the finest sonnets I have ever read. Magnificent line, by the way, 'le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!' This idea of the denied flights (imprisoned powers) of the soul that have frozen into a glacier seems to me as powerful as it is violent. Of course, in French such expressions were quite new — in some other languages they were already possible. You will find lots of kindred things in the most modern poetry which specialises in violent revelatory (or at least would-be revelatory) images. You disapprove? Well, one may do so, — classical taste does; but I find myself obliged here to admire." When he was told that the poem was usually interpreted in terms of Mallarme's peculiar unfortunate inward check on poetic production, Sri Aurobindo replied: "The swan is to my understanding not merely the poet who has not sung in the higher spaces of the consciousness, which is already a fine idea, but the soul that has not risen there and found its higher

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expression, the poet, if Mallarme thought of that specially, being only a signal instance of this spiritual frustration. There can be no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned swan as developed by Mallarme."

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TALK THIRTY -ONE

We are ready to take up the third term of our scheme — Logopoeia which comes after Melopoeia and Phanopoeia. Let me remind you of what it stands for. In Melopoeia the prominent feature is the word-music. In Phanopoeia it is the word-imagery. In Logopoeia it is the word-thought — intelligible discourse, play of idea-power, language as a vehicle for reflection. Or, if we go negatively, we may say that Logopoeia means in poetry the expression where neither word-music nor word-imagery is prominent: these features may be there, indeed they have to be there if poetry is to exist at all, but whatever else than they is prominent determines Logopoeia. Since emotion is an indispensable ingredient of poetry and emotion does not need word-music or word-imagery in order to be present we may define Logopoeia as poetic emotion fused with thought-speech more appreciably than with music-speech or image-speech, though never without these last two in some form or other.

It is rather a ticklish job to decide the degree of music-speech or image-speech that would allow poetry to be called thought-speech instead of something else. Take the phrase, perhaps the most famous that Wordsworth has written and one which actually mentions thought itself:

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

This phrase relating to the face of Newton in the statue of him by Roubiliac at Cambridge — the statue bearing the inscription "New-ton qui genus humanum ingenio superavit" ("Newton who ex-ceeded the human race in genius") — is Phanopoeia of an extremely high order. The metaphor of "seas" is too open to let Phanopoeia become subdued. If only the word "voyaging" were there — a word which signifies in general English a travel over water — we should realise that seas were intended, but there would be no clear phanopoeic quality. If a less specific word like "travelling" were employed, the phanopoeic quality would be still less in view: a suggestion of concrete movement would be still unmistakable, but it would not call up any precise picture.

Such a suggestion we find in perhaps the greatest phrase Milton

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ever wrote, a phrase which too introduces the very word "thought":

...this intellectual being,

Those thoughts that wander through eternity.

The verb "wander" is absolutely vital here: take it away and the phrase will lose its sovereign character as poetry. Put "travel" and see how it reads:

Those thoughts that travel through eternity.

We have more alliteration, but the line moves less profoundly: vibrations are not set up in the deep layers of our receptive consciousness: they occur in a layer which is deep enough to be named, in Sri Aurobindo's terminology of "planes", Higher Mind, but the sense of space on widening space, expanse on expanse of mystery, continuity on endless continuity of conceptual explora-tion, is lost. "Wander" has a plunging rhythmic effect which in collocation with "thoughts" and "eternity" carries the language to the intense and the immense that are characteristic of what Sri Aurobindo, taking us past Higher Mind through Illumined Mind and Intuition, designates as the utterance of Overmind, the supreme Mantra. "Wander" has a central strength and weight in the letter d, a plumbing resonance in the n preceding and combining with it, a dynamic penetrative roll in the terminal r and what is perhaps the subtlest yet the most impressive thing is the initial w. The letter w has always an expansive touch. When we want to suggest spaciousness or massiveness, w proves extremely useful. Repeated, its quality becomes unescapable — as in Sri Aurobindo's line:

In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,

where spaciousness overwhelms us, aided by the continuity the three similar o's create. In Wordsworth's

...the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

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in the midst of several other technical points — the aspirated h, the reiterated y, the several l-sounds, especially when combined with other consonants, the long six-syllabled adjective "unintelligible" — the three w's create an extensive massiveness.

To return to our subject. The mantric quality is also supreme in the quotation about Newton's face and here too it is the rhythmic total which bears up the emotional idea and image to the divinely revelatory pitch. But the overall feature of the poetry is the metaphor "seas". In Milton's brief masterpiece the concrete suggestion of a passage through space and time and beyond space-time through an experienced eternity is not openly metaphorical and therefore we have Phanopoeia shaded off into Logopoeia: a concisely colossal creation of word-thought confronts us. To get this effect fixed in our mind, let us look at a phrase from Sri Aurobindo which too speaks of thought in a direct manner without being a creation of word-thought:

...the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge

Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.

Here we have two immensities at play — on the one side Nature's fathomless surge, the infinite Inconscient with its varied evolutionary unfoldment, and on the other the touches, the visitations from the Superconscient in the form of winged thoughts whose home is not Nature's vast flux but some ample stability concealed beyond her — the hidden shores that are domains of spiritual stillness. The Aurobindonian phrase — again, I believe, a Mantric utterance — is even more clearly phanopoeic than the Words-worthian: we have not only the images of "surge" and "shores" but also the very vivid image-activity of "wing". Of course, merely the mention of concrete things is not determinative of Phanopoeia. Poetry has always to make us see and in order to make us see it must deal in concrete suggestions. But there are several ways of dealing in them. Two broad categories would be: explicit and implicit. Sri Aurobindo in the lines cited above is sufficiently outside the borders of the implicit: Milton in his phrase on the intellectual being is not.

Wordsworth who with his thought-seas is explicit enough in the element of sight grows implicit with if at the end of his best short poem, the celebrated Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from

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Recollections of Early Childhood. Perhaps the longest title ever given to a poem is this, a title so long that some poeple's minds can get quite mixed up and a schoolboy has himself become immortal by mentioning the poem not as Ode on Intimations of Immortality but as Ode on Intimate Immorality! Well, this Ode ends with a highly moral idea beautifully vivified and movingly deepened beyond either morality or immorality into an intimate perception of truths behind what Virgil has called "the tears of things" . Wordsworth writes:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The idea here is very great, the expression is perfect, though the plane may be not quite Overmind so much as a mixture of Higher Mind and Intuition. These planes are not easy to distinguish: we shall one day talk about them and their typical utterances. At the moment we are concerned with drawing a line between Phanopoeia and Logopoeia. The idea Wordsworth has expressed here has strong concrete touches — the concrete "flower" is the focus of attention and "tears" is fairly vivid too, but neither simile nor metaphor disengages itself from the statement and the main "purport of the statement is to present not a picture but a thought about certain kinds of thoughts. I suppose you catch the meaning of the lines. Wordsworth is telling us that his perception has got so sensitively in touch with what lies behind phenomena and the vicissitudes of life and Nature that even the most insignificant-looking flower awakes in him a sense of an eternity, an immortality which stands free of all the pains and sorrows of this world of change: he reaches a level of thinking where an abiding peace envelops him and where the realm of tears, so to speak, does not extend. His is a profound philosophic poise that is conscious of mortality yet is conscious also of what can never pass away: the little flower that fades lets him as if through a tiny doorway into the Divine and Deathless, the Godlike and Griefless.

This is surely distinguishable Logopoeia. Still, it is not perhaps Logopoeic in a very positive form. To impress you with a very positive form I shall pick out two lines of Sri Aurobindo's in which this form is rendered all the more noticeable by being preceded by

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a very positive instance of Phanopoeia. Here are the lines:

Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in heaven,

The impossible God's sign of things to be.

Let me first explain the meaning. A chimera (pronounced kye-mere-a, accented in the second syllable) is a queer mythical creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail — and as if this combination were not enough, its mouth breathes fire. Milton has a line in which several mythological monsters run cheek by jowl:

Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire.

Sri Aurobindo has made the chimeras even queerer than they usually are: he has given them wings — with, I think, a purpose. He uses the word "chimera" for something fantastic in idea, and what he means to say in his first line is:

He uses the word "chimera" for something fantastic in idea, and what he means to say in his first line is: "All strange apparently unmaterialisable dreams in earth's mind, all fanciful seemingly unattainable desires in earth's heart — all these are not a mere imaginative play of impossibilities: already are they realities in the depths of the unknown Divine, realities as natural as horses, and they are heavenly originals, truths of God, whose distorted representatives on earth are the chimerical notions of man, notions which have some quality of aspiration about them as if they were cries sent up to the Supreme, as if they were set winging like prayers to the Omnipotent. Further, the realities existing in heaven, the original truths corresponding to the chimeras, are part of a plan for the earth. Just as steeds are part of the plan actualised in the earth's past and present, those original truths are part of a plan for the earth's future." Now, with the full meaning of the line before us, look at the next. It expresses the same essential idea without any image-colour — almost abstractly, one may say, but with perfect pointedness and faultless rhythm — that is, in a thoroughly poetic way yet by suppression of all imagery, except perhaps for a slight indirect touch of it in "Sign." Here is Logopoeia — poetic word-thought — in concentrated clarity matching exactly the compact picturesqueness of the preceding verse's Phanopoeia — poetic word-image.

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This concentrated clarity — taking almost an epigrammatic form — is intuitive in essence, though it may be intuition taking a mental shape and not acting in its own original body. All Logopoeia is not intuitive in a direct or a mentalised manner — at least nor markedly so. It can be a mental statement with greater or less felicity, pungency, magnificence. There is the couplet which the Greek poet Simonides composed as epitaph for the Spartans who died at Thermopylae. A band of three hundred under Leonidas were ordered by the State to delay the march of the thousands sent by King Xerxes of Persia. At the narrow pass of Thermopylae they fought for several hours, thus giving precious time to the Athenians to reach up from far away. Every one of them perished. The epitaph by Simonides is a short address by the dead to their countrymen of Lacedaemon, which is another name for Sparta: F. L. Lucas has englished it very well —

Tell them at Lacedaemon, passerby,

That here obedient to their laws we lie.

Heroic unadorned pathos wrought into a masterpiece of understatement in thought-form is here. The Greeks had a genius for straightforward writing which yet spoke volumes and was extremely poetic. The Indian genius is more rich: Phanopoeia rather than Logopoeia is the Indian tendency in poetry. I am sure there would have been quite an opulence of imagery in place of the bare statement of Simonides if Kalidasa had felt a rhythmic relationship with Leonidas and written the epitaph. Of course, Vyasa is an exception among Indian poets. Sri Aurobindo has considered him a great master of bare strength. Among European poets the most successful in chiselled Logopoeia after the Greeks was the Italian Dante. The Italians are not particularly distinguished for control over their emotions. Just as the Frenchman talks with his hands and his shoulders, the Italian carries on his conversation with a lot of gesticulation. But Dante was a severe nature and his style has a clear-cut restrained force: he is one of the few who have been sovereignly logopoeic in poetry. The natural medium for Logopoeia is prose, and therefore poets should not attempt it unless, like Dante, they can command a great intensity of expression with an intuitive drive behind their thought-movement or else a deep emotion charging the reflective attitude. There is a line of Dante's which Eliot has transposed to his own verse, a line with a catch in

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the breath and a tug at the heart without bringing in any extraordinary words, not even any glimmer of an image. The poet looks at the crowd of the dead in the circles of the Underworld and softly exclaims:

I had not thought death had undone so many.

The simplicity of pathos here could hardly be bettered. But a lesser hand would have spoilt the feeling by either too emptily brief a speech or a speech attenuated by being drawn out.

Thus Rupert Brooke in a sonnet which as a whole is a success and which has a splendidly phanopoeic sestet comes quite near to failure in four lines terminating the octave. He also is talking about the dead — the soldiers who fell in the First World War:

These had seen movement, and heard music; known

Slumber and waking; loved, gone proudly friended;

Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;

Touched flowers and fur and cheeks. All this is ended.

The rhythm is good, the stresses and pauses are cleverly and effectively varied, but intensity is absent. Although concrete suggestions are present, yet they do not flame up or shine out into real Phanopoeia. Merely tender talk seems to be made in order to create reminiscences of things dear and now lost; the sheer pang is not communicated. The ideas and the phrases are almost hackneyed: they are narrowly kept to the poetic by some sort of artistic arrangement of syntax and rhythm. But even the rhythm appears to go wrong in one place — the concluding words: "All this is ended." That feminine rhyme has hardly the suggestion of death's ultimate inexorableness. Possibly the extra unstressed hanging syllable is meant to give the impression of a decline and a fall of the life-force. But such an impression, apart from being indecisive in itself, is scarcely appropriate in a poem about young men dead in World War I: the sense of sudden violent death is not conveyed. If the previous rhyming phrase could somehow be managed in another fashion — say, "gone proud of friends" — the last line would close better with a finality of four stresses of varying weight, with the last stress the strongest in the phrase: "All this now ends." Brooke's quatrain is less true pathos than a kind of delicate

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pathostication, the semi-artificial though not quite unskilful stimulation of sad thoughts. Logopoeia, to be successful, has to come from stirred profundities of the reflective mind, no matter how light its touch may be. Of course, Phanopoeia can be a failure too if it is not the inner becoming the outer: no amount of imagery will save the poet from being a versifier if he uses his images with a superficial hand. Even Keats whose superb capacity for the phano-poeic we have observed can come out with a picturesque ludi-crousness in an imaged expression:

A bunch of blooming plums

Ready to melt between an infant's gums.

But the slipperiness of the phanopoeic path is not as full of banana-skins as that of the logopoeic. It is possible even to write effective Phanopoeia with a banana as part of the vision! There is a line by somebody — perhaps Roy Campbell:

Buccaneer the world to bring home a banana.

This is a vigorous poetic substitute for the well-known Latin phrase: "Montes parturiunt et nascetur ridiculus mus" — "Mountains are in travail and a ridiculous mouse will be born." Yes, successful Logopoeia is difficult to achieve. But when it is achieved it can be as memorable poetry as anything phanopoeic. No line, however astonishing in image, has surpassed the Dantesque assertion which we have quoted more than once before:

E'n la sua voluntade e nostra pace —

whose literal translation is: "In His Will is our peace." Or take the following five lines from Sri Aurobindo:

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.

There is a controlled power in the passage, achieving a refined

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sublimity that states in marmoreal yet living poetic language the final truth about all existence in the cosmos. One phrase in it —

Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;

A secret Will compels us to endure —

reminds me of some lines from Sri Aurobindo's early blank-verse narrative Love and Death: after lamenting the frustrating transience of life for human beings who come into birth with "passionate and violent souls", Ruru views their entry into the Underworld and cries:

... Death helps us not. He leads

Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,

The naked spirit here...

Very vivid and forceful Phanopoeia is in these lines. But the Logopoeia of the other lines is no less poetic in its own way, and the line following them —

Our life's repose is in the Infinite —

is one of the greatest — quite fit to rank beside the phrase we have culled from Dante. In fact, it is the articulation of an idea affined to the one in Dante. Both the verses speak of ultimate rest being found only in God: Dante refers to God in action, Sri Aurobindo to God in pure existence, but, as the next line makes it clear, this God-existence is in connection with a life ending not in a cessation of action but in a supreme living, a divine activity in the world as well as beyond. The repose is a consummation, not a quiescence, and in this consummation, according to Sri Aurobindo, there would be what in another peak-moment of spiritual Logopoeia he has described as

Force one with unimaginable rest.

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TALK THIRTY-TWO

We have remarked that Phanopoeia tends generally to be less a failure than Logopoeia. We may now glance at a case in which the latter surpasses the former. It is a case in which the technical device called Aposiopesis has play, though the actual determinant of the poetic quality is not this device. Aposiopesis means a sudden breaking off in speech. In Christabel Coleridge has written of a half-human half-demon creature, the outwardly fair Lady Geraldine. When describing the undressing of this woman before Christabel, he originally had the lines:

Behold! her bosom and half her side

Are lean and old and foul of hue.

This is not exactly open Phanopoeia, but its appeal is to the sight. It is an effectively repellent visual touch, the direct description of a preternatural horror. In The Ancient Mariner Coleridge has used this method very successfully — you may remember the glittering eye and the skinny hand of the old salt himself. Coleridge felt that Christabel was a more eerie poem and everything in it should be suggested rather than depicted. So he redid the lines with a break in the speech. Instead of finishing the sentence he took a new turn cutting out all direct description. The rewritten lines run:

Behold! her bosom and half her side —

A thing to dream of, not to tell.

This is pretty abstract as far as details go, but the removal of the state of Lady Geraldine's body from any this-world possibility to the possibilities of a world of nightmare confers extra effectiveness. When Shelley read the passage he fainted!

This incident is one of the two on record in which lines of poetry produced a bodily effect more serious than the usual ones mentioned by Housman: the standing up of the hair on the skin, the watering of the eyes, the tingling of the spine, the piercing sensa-tion in the solar plexus. Emily Dickinson speaks even of a feeling as if the top of the head were blown off. None of these effects, however marked, have caused any serious physical disturbance. What happened to Shelley is matched only by what happened to

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Blake. Once the passage was read out to him, in which Words-worth claims that the theme he has chosen for his song is the profoundest — namely, the human mind itself. Compared to the human mind, Wordsworth says, all high and even supernatural realities are nothing. He lists all that the human mind exceeds and in the course of listing them he writes:

Jehovah — with his thunder and the choir

Of shouting Angels and the empyreal throne —

I pass them unalarmed...

Hearing these verses, Blake turned pale and asked his friend: "Does Mr. W. think he can surpass Jehovah?" Then an acute colic set in, which went on increasing and almost threatened to kill Blake! And here too the disturbing phrase — "I pass them unalarmed" — is rather on the side of Logopoeia.

Talking of illnesses I am reminded of a piece of Logopoeia in Shakespeare which will give me a chance to complete the roll of medicos I started during my discussion of Phanopoeia. Apropos of Eliot's simile of the etherised evening and Shakespeare's passage beginning "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" I brought in a number of Ashram surgeons and physicians. The name of one doctor got left out. I shall do it honour now. Shakespeare, as you know, is a king of Phanopoeia, his very mind moves phano-poeically. Rarely is he markedly logopoeic. In one line he is logopoeic in perhaps the worst way in all poetic history. The correct description of the way is found in the very line, which reads:

In a most hideous and dreadful manner.

When Bernard Shaw once heard Mrs Patrick Campbell say this line he could not believe Shakespeare could have perpetrated anything so bad. He accused her of having improvised it to cover up a lapse of memory. Shakespeare is not such a terrible flop always. In fact, he has a few very successful Logopoeias. Many of his great speeches would be logopoeic by their argumentative trend but for his visual sense. His imagination is all the time breaking in. For instance, Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be" is a series of self-questionings in which a number of semi-philo-

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sophical issues are touched on. From the very start, however, images are crowding into the language. Still, in a few passages Shakespeare keeps up the true logopoeic level. I shall give you two examples. The first is of a less serious kind but quite poetic with its dry humour. It is a short passage Which calls up to our mind the Ashram-medico left out. Not the physicians nor the surgeons are our heroes on this occasion. Today we shall celebrate our dentist Dr. Patil. His job, as you must be aware,is to see that before we become supramental we do not become supradental! We may be inclined not to give his job the importance it deserves. But Shakespeare has a dig at the savants, the wise men, who look down their noses at it — until something goes wrong with their wisdom-teeth:

For there was never yet philosopher

That could endure the toothache patiently,

However they have writ the style of gods

And made a push at chance and sufferance.

In plain prose, philosophers may have high-falutingly made light of our mortal situation in which ill-luck and suffering have play, but let them get a cavity in their teeth and they will be jumping about with exclamations which, whether melopoeic or phanopoeic or logopoeic, would certainly not be philosophic.

Of course, all of you who are so very young cannot imagine the awful inferno that is toothache or the powerless purgatory that is toothlessness. Very few, out of the people who depend on false sets of teeth, cut heroic figures: evidently, artificial teeth do not do this kind of cutting very well. I have heard of one person only who, using such teeth, had yet the fiery spirit of a hundred-fanged dragon. It was an Arab chief, a Sheikh of the desert, who had joined hands with T.E. Lawrence when this Arabianised English-man rallied the Bedouins against the Germans and their allies the Turks in the First World War. That Arab chief was so angry with the Germans that, when he remembered that the false teeth which he had been wearing for years had come from a dental firm in Berlin, he pulled them out and, with a violent "Bismillah" from his gap of a mouth, smashed them on the ground. This was, I think, just before a battle. And not only through one battle but through many he went with an unabated "Bismillah" and won fame as the Toothless Terror.

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I knew another practically toothless man who was the exact opposite. His nerves were so shaky that he could never stand the sight of a drop of blood. Not only this: he even fought shy of red colour anywhere: it reminded him of blood and he would at once faint. Our Ashram Stores had to take care not to give him red hair-oil. Green oil was always given. If by any chance red was handed to him he would be all ready to collapse in Pavitra's arms! He even told me that to look at a red pencil was enough to make him dizzy. I do not know for sure that this ultra-sensitiveness was due directly to his nearly toothless condition, but it seems he had lost a lot of blood when some of his last few stumps had been pulled out, and ever since that operation he could not bear redness. I am sure he could never have stood the reading of the newspapers of today. The mention of Red China everywhere would have made him look like the victim of a Communist purge.

I suppose you know that it was in connection with dentistry that one of the most thrilling moments of medical history occurred — the first administration of a general anaesthetic. Nitrous oxide or "laughing gas" had already been discovered, but not applied to surgical cases before Dr. Riggs the dentist took Dr. Wells the physician in his hands. Dr. Wells had a bad tooth needing extraction. But it was a firmly rooted molar and it would have made the patient howl madly if pulled out in the old way. You must be aware what the old way was. The patient's chair was put against a wall and his hands strapped down to the arms of the chair. The dentist would stand before him with a huge forceps held in both hands. On grasping the tooth with the forceps the dentist would pin down the patient in the chair by planting his own right foot on the patient's chest. Then, with the foot pushing and the hands pulling, the tooth would be out of the patient's mouth accompanied by a hideous yell. All this was avoided by a few whiffs of laughing gas. Dr. Wells became a completely co-operative dummy. In front of hundreds of people the dentist extracted the physician's tooth and demonstrated the efficacy of general anaesthesia. Soon after the operation Dr. Wells opened his eyes and holding up from the tray on the table beside him the extracted molar shouted to the audience: "Here's a new era in tooth-pulling!" The next moment he took a look at the molar between his fingers. Dr. Wells went suddenly pale. It was a perfectly whole and healthy tooth. Dr. Riggs had extracted the wrong molar! The

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perfect co-operation of the unconscious patient unable to know which tooth was being painlessly pulled out had indeed ushered in a new era in erroneously effective dentistry! Dr. Wells went for Dr. Riggs and with one hefty punch on the nose knocked him senseless in turn. Luckily for our own day there has come the local anaesthetic — the injection of novocaine in the gums leaving the patient in full possession of his senses and even looking into a mirror to see that the dentist catches hold of the right tooth.

Dr. Patil and Shakespeare have led us into quite a digression. Let us return to Logopoeia, bidding adieu to our dentist but not to the poet. We have said that Shakespeare is constantly passing over from Logopoeia to Phanopoeia. But in a certain passage in Macbeth he keeps the true logopoeic level for several lines. There Macbeth is debating the murder of King Duncan who is a guest for the night at Macbeth's castle:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well

It were done quickly: if the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success, that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

We'd jump the life to come...

It is rather a complex passage. The first "done" means "ended", the second "completed", the third "performed". The sense is that if the murder can be regarded as a perfectly finished thing when it is carried out completely, then the best course is to commit it soon. This sense is elaborated in the next phrase. "Trammel up" means "arrest, bind up, entangle". Macbeth wishes that the murder should have no sequel, run no risk of later discovery and ultimate punishment: the fatal blow which would lead to the cessation of Duncan's life — his "surcease" — should be in the moment of that cessation a total success for ever and constitute in itself the whole history of the crime — the full being and the entire ending of the dark deed here upon the earth. If there were no after-effects, no possible results dangerous to the criminal, then Macbeth would consider the success sufficiently tempting for him to ignore the next life and risk whatever might be the consequences after his own death, whatever the punishment meted out by God in the

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other world. The passage is very effective in expression and is regarded as high poetry by the critics. But, as they have noted, it has a sibilant hissing quality rather than the quality of melody. It can certainly not be called melopoeic. But its broken rhythms and its tendency to harshness of sound are themselves deemed by criticism the master-means of poetically bringing about the communication intended by Shakespeare — the communication of desperate haste and breathless excitement. As Cleanth Brooks and R.P. Warren tell us, the lines give with their lack of ordinary melodious effects the impression of a conspiratorial whisper. Not only Melopoeia but also Phanopoeia is absent through most of the passage. Though the language is extremely vivid and has a seeing power in words like "trammel" and "catch", explicit imagery is wanting except towards the close where we have "the bank and shoal of time". A shoal is a place of shallow water in which there is a submerged sand-bank. It would seem that Shakespeare is imaging death as a strip of land between two seas — the one being time, the other eternity. Personally I do not quite grasp the appo-siteness of the metaphor, but Shakespeare's language is vigorous enough to make the picture of the bank and shoal, upon which the act of "jumping" the next life is to be done, a telling one.

The passage as a whole is intense Logopoeia of what we may term the vital mind at work: the nerves are at play, the sensations are astir all through the thinking process. In contrast see the working of the mind proper, the true reflective being drawing up the living energy into its own uses: here is a speech made by Milton's Satan at sight of the infernal regions to which he has been condemned:

Hail, horrors, hail,

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell,

Receive thy new possessor; one who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

What matter where, if I be still the same,

And what I should be, all but less than He

Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least

We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built

Here for His envy, will not drive us hence:

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Here we may reign secure, and in my choice

To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

A Titanism is articulate in the lines, but, however misdirected, the sheer sense of the mind's independence is magnificent: this independence is celebrated in language hailing from the mental plane itself. It would be difficult to excel the poetic quality of this passage where thought and not sight or music is the main feature. But we may observe that nothing is abstract: we feel a movement of concrete thinking: the very ideas are as if objects which the mind arranges and juxtaposes, and the language too is what I may call eyeful thought, though the eyefulness is not as marked as in Shakespeare. This eyeful thought may be contrasted to the thoughtful eye that is the character of Phanopoeia. The eye of course has always to be at work in poetry; but it can be either adjectival or substantive. The difference in the position it occupies may perhaps be illustrated most interestingly by two passages from Sri Aurobindo.

There is the sestet of the mighty Nirvana-sonnet:

Only the illimitable Permanent

Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still

Replaces all. What once was I, in It

A silent unnamed emptiness content

Either to fade in the Unknowable

Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.

The last line is phanopoeic, all the others are logopoeic. But here too we have no touch of dry intellectuality. All the less here because Sri Aurobindo, though couching his experience in terms of thought, is really writing what he has called "Overhead Poetry" — poetry breaking from secret planes of consciousness above the mind. It is Thought with a capital T. Not the vital mind, nor the mind proper, but the spiritual mind is vibrant throughout, with its touch on spiritual realities that are known by subtle inner senses or by direct identity through an extension of one's sheer self. Eyeful Thought uttering an experience that goes beyond all earth and all hell and even all heaven into a pure infinitude where name and form are effaced has been set artistically working by the realisation

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Sri Aurobindo had at Baroda in 1908. A further vivification, as it were, of the Unknowable spoken of is given us in some lines in Savitri where also the Overhead planes function but through an Eye with a capital E. The Thoughtful Eye is now at work to show us that the Unknowable is not an impotent void or a divine darkness: even when there is a negation of all that we can con-ceive, even when there is an emptiness of all intelligible positives, what remains is yet a plenary light: only, that plenitude is lost in complete mystery for our conception. This mystery, however, must not be named either Being or Non-being: beyond Being, it passes into Non-being — yet even to say Non-being is to define it too much and also to confine it too much. Observe how Sri Aurobindo compasses the mystery:

If all existence could renounce to be,

And Being take refuge in Non-being's arms

And Non-being could strike out its ciphered round,

Some lustre of that Reality might appear.

The terms are at once Yes and No. Existence is said to give itself up to non-existence, but the giving up is a refuge and what it gives itself up to waits as if with arms. The arms connect with the ciphered round: the ciphered round is, of course, zero, but the circle is suggested to be formed by the joined arms of Non-being around Being. And when Non-being is said to strike out its own zero, what do we understand? On the one hand, a deeper negation than Non-being, as if the zero were too concrete as well as too limited to indicate the supreme vacuity which the Ultimate is to our experience. On the other hand, to strike out the zero is to cancel the negation brought by Non-being and suggest a new positive which yet is not Being. The last line supports this suggestion, and, in the act of calling the Ultimate "that Reality", differentiates the Ultimate from both "existence" and its opposite. Further, a nameless thrill is hinted by all the lines in the process of the ever profounder immergence. Being lets itself be absorbed as though into an indescribable Lover and Non-being has a dynamism of self-denial, and what results and remains breaks out like light: a flush and a warmth no less than a vividness are present. Finally, I may ask you to note that after all the enigmatic Yes and No have been practised the realisation is just "some lustre": not

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the whole Presence of the final Absence but merely a bit of its all-swallowing glory comes into view. This stroke of "some"-ness is the crowning surprise: we think that everything that is possible in order to go from the deep to the deeper and to the deepest has been done and then we are told that the utmost we can do brings no more than a moiety of the sovereign secrecy to our realisation!

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TALK THIRTY-THREE

Your brains must have fairly reeled in an attempt to get into some sort of focus the "lustre" of the "Reality" Sri Aurobindo has shown in the lines I discussed in our last talk. Perhaps a reeling brain is the best help towards knowing such a Reality from within. What I mean is a condition of the sort the Zen Buddhists of Japan seek to impart or undergo. I don't mean the whack on the head which at times the Zen Master, in order to bring about Satori or flash of insight, gives to a disciple at the proper psychological moment, saying to himself, "Now for my stick to make a mystic of him!" I mean not the physical but the mental shock-system employing the method of what is called a Koan. A Koan is the statement of a problem insoluble by the intellect and pushing the intellect beyond itself when it sincerely and perseveringly broods on the problem in order to solve the insoluble. The statement takes usually a somewhat flippant form which yet is not devoid of a sense of crisis. Thus the Master may tell his disciple: "A man with two children holding on to his two hands slips over a precipice. His teeth get clenched in the branch of a tree hanging over the edge. He is too far from the precipice-face to get a foot-hold. His hands are still grasping the kids. A friend leans over the edge from above and asks him, 'What is Zen?' What answer would you make if you were asked?"

And now that we are on the topics of ultimate truth and the stunning of thought I may appropriately close my talk on Logopoeia by asking ourselves a few questions about a passage from Keats's famous Ode on a Grecian Urn where both these topics are involved. The passage has posed a textual problem too and critics have debated the reading ever since the time of Keats. We shall deal with all the difficulties.

Let me first outline to you the complex theme of the Ode. The poet takes the scenes and figures carved on a Grecian Urn and imaginatively reconstructs the life of ancient Greece through them — a life which is full of a surging activity in contrast to the stillness and immobility of the Urn itself. The first vision of that life is in the excited lines:

What gods or men are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

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But the carved state in which this life comes to the poet for reconstruction is an arrestment for ever of the surge of movement and music. Thus the theme is not only a contrast between the Urn and the life portrayed upon it: the theme is also the contrast between that life in itself and its state in the portrayal on the Urn. An ancient actuality, a varied pattern of vitality in times past has been taken up into sculpture: it has been caught into the stilled perpetuation which sculpture effects of what is transient by representing it in marble. The theme thus develops into sculpture's upliftment of an aspect of life into a posture of beauty above the changes of time — time which leads all human passion to sorrow and surfeit, and all human living to degeneration and death. This posture of beauty, at once expressive and immobile, acquires a definition in terms of inwardness in the lines where Keats dwells on the musicians carved as playing their pipes. Theirs is a music that is silent because the playing is depicted in silent stone. Yet this music is felt to be far superior to any that can actually be played; for, it is free from the limited and the temporary which all played music is — it is part of an infinite possibility, a limitless ideality. And the feeling of its magic and mystery is embodied in the quietly challenging and equably modulating lines which are some of Keats's best:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone...

It is in the last line that the sculpted posture of beauty gets an inward definition. The silent music provided by sculpture is rea-lised by the "spirit" to which the "ditties of no tone" are said to be played. Spirit now is contrasted to sense, "the sensual. ear" . The power of sculpture is suggested as belonging to the depth of spirit, a domain beyond the surface-sensations of life . .

Such, to my mind, is the shape of the complex theme of the poem as it proceeds towards its close. The equation of the art of sculpture to the spirit's depth is hinted as early as the second stanza out of the five that make up the poem. It is carried towards final illumination through the penultimate stanza. The vitality represented so far is of pleasure and desire: now it is concentrated in the worship-motif. Festivity and love that figure in detail at the

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end of the second stanza and at the beginning of the third are replaced by the ritual of religion. The stanza opens —

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

The procession is described — first the "mysterious priest" leading towards the "green altar" the garlanded "heifer lowing at the skies". Behind the sacramental victim is the rest of the crowd, the "folk" of the "little town" emptied for the ritual "this pious morn". William Walsh, a modern critic, has characterised the stanza as associating the natural and the numinous: that is to say, the familiar and the religiously solemn, the human and the superhuman, the material world and the mystery beyond. And, contemplating the blend of the natural and the numinous, the poet says:

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

After these lines the poet reaches the grand finale, The reintroduced motifs of "evermore" and of silence together with the worship-motif render the transition spontaneous to the stanza which culminates in the Logopoeia with which our discussion shall end, an example combining the finely reflective and the powerfully epigrammatic and constituting a problem of several sorts which is worth examining. The stanza is:

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

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

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

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The stanza begins phanopoeically: from the fourth line onwards it is logopoeic. Let us go over it slowly. "O Attic shape!" — the

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Urn is of course addressed and it is called by the adjective referring to Attica, ancient Athens. In being called Attic its artistic perfection is suggested: the adjective in phrases like "Attic salt" and "Attic wit" connotes exquisite refinement. Robert Bridges introduces a rather irreverent note by saying that Keats here stumbles upon a pun: the word "attic" in English means also the highest storey of a house, usually a room at the top where all sorts of odds and ends, old furniture, clothes, vases are stored. The Grecian Urn may be regarded as an object of that sort. Well, this notion was never in Keats's mind, I am sure, though double shades in general cannot be ruled out in his verse. What Keats intended is made clear by the second phrase: "Fair attitude!" A thing of poised yet expressive beauty is what he sets before us. Over the surface of this Urn the sculptor has wrought a fringe of human figures and natural objects in marble. "Brede" is archaic English for "braid" which, among other things, signifies border-decoration as in embroidery. Now we reach the logopoeic lines. Keats says that the Urn which is a silent form puts us in the frame of mind in which we would be if we contemplated the fact of Eternity — it creates a mystic mood in which we are carried beyond all thinkable things, all things that we can describe in intelligible speech: we are borne off towards an experience of the inconceivable, the ineffable. Here the theme of melodies unheard which led us to sculpture's essence of Spirit — essence later connected to religious mystery — finds intense though brief illumination. Then the Urn is again apostrophised. It is called "Cold Pastoral!" The meaning of the noun is: "a play, poem or picture portraying country life." Here there is a marble picture, as it were — a picture that is cold because marble is cold and also because there is no agitation of life-activity. The coldness, however, is not of death: it is not of life lost but of life transcended. And the portrayal coldly done is such that it shall survive the generation to which Keats belongs. The expression is somewhat similar to the line in the Ode to a Nightingale:

No hungry generations tread thee down...

When old age will take Keats's contemporaries to death, the Urn will stay unchanged. Free from precarious and frustrating life, it is free from all woe. Amidst the woe of Keats's time it stands as a

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reminder of the Eternal: after this time, when there will be other woe, it will yet be the same reminder. It will be a friend to man and give man a message of supreme significance.

Now we reach two puzzles discussed again and again by critics. One is: To whom or what are we to ascribe the words:

...that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

At first look Keats seems suddenly addressing his reading public and giving his own commendation of the phrase which the Urn is imagined as uttering to man: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Some critics opine that both the lines are the utterance of the Urn. A third alternative was proposed — for the first time, I believe, in the history of criticism — by one of you when I happened to mention the puzzle in private. It is that Keats is addressing not his reading public but the Urn itself after its message to man has been stated. What is the correct interpretation? The other puzzle is the sense of the philosophical epigram: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." The argument of those who make the Urn's message consist only of five words is that only these words are in inverted commas. Against the conclusion drawn from this limited use of the quotation marks, we may point to the poem as originally written. There is Keats's own autograph and there are the transcripts made by his friends Brown, Woodhouse and Dilke. Nowhere in these versions which are the earliest, the most foundational, are there any inverted commas. The whole statement after "say'st" is one piece, evidently the Urn's deliverance. Also, when in January 1820 the poem appeared in Annals of the Fine Arts XV, they are absent: the only difference from the unprinted text is that a new sentence begins with "That is all..." The difference cannot prevent the new sentence from being part of the Urn's message. The sole intention seems to be to separate with greater clearness two sections of a single pronouncement. If we keep this point in mind we shall be better equipped to face the fact which the five-word-wallahs flaunt before us — namely, that in the volume of poems Keats published in June of the same year he put those five words within inverted commas. We are told: "Here is Keats's definitive version." But let us ask: "Has he still kept the words apart by a full stop as in Annals of the Fine Arts? Or has he joined them to the remainder as in the

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original version, with just a comma and a dash? He has effected no radical distinction. Whatever separation was required has evidently been effected by the inverted commas. It would seem that the same distinction as intended by starting a new sentence after the first five words without putting the latter in inverted commas has been brought about by employing these marks and what has thus been brought about renders it unnecessary to use a full stop. The full stop did not introduce a new speaker: analogically, in view of the removal of the full stop, the inverted commas also do not introduce Keats in persona propria as distinguished from the Urn. So far as the speaker is concerned, the inverted commas are equivalent in function to the full stop.

Further, the word "ye" in Keats's own mouth in an address to his reading public would be at variance with the form of speech adopted in the phrases of the same stanza:

....tease us out of thought....

and

...in midst of other woe

Than ours...

Keats and his reading public are taken together by him as one group in the first-personal plural pronouns "us" and "ours": he does not stand over against it as "ye" would make him do. If he were directly speaking in his own person he would say:

that is all

We know on earth, and all we need to know.

"We" would be in accord with "us" and "ours" and at the same time serve for the poet's commendation of "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" if such commendation were intended. The absence of this natural "we" should indicate that Keats is not personally underlining anything addressed to his reading public and that "ye" is spoken by the Urn.

It may be asked: "Why should the Urn say 'Ye' instead of 'thou' when, as Keats tells us in line 8, it is addressing 'man'?" A con-vincing answer can be made in several steps. Keats had already

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used "thou" in reference to the Urn itself two lines earlier —

...a friend to man, to whom thou say'st...

The Urn employing "thou" again would constitute an artistic blemish, an awkwardness of language, even a confusion in meaning. It must employ either "you" or "ye". In general, "ye" was considered in the old days to have more poetic associations than "you". In the lines about unheard melodies "ye" is used — "therefore, ye soft pipes, play on" — where "you" could have done duty as well. Of course, "ye" there is in the plural number, but that is not the reason for rejecting "you" which too is legitimate for the plural: the reason is the better poetic effect to Keats's ear which more than the ear of other Romantic poets was influenced by Spenser. To justify "ye" in the poem's last line all we require to do is to ask whether "ye" may replace "thou" which is in the singular number. Surely it is known that "you" can replace "thou". I can give a very apt quotation in this matter —some lines of Otway in his drama Venice Preserved:

O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee

To temper man: we had been brutes without you.

Here "woman" is generically addressed just as "man" is generi-cally mentioned in Keats's line (as well as here): the only difference is that Otway says "you" for woman and Keats "ye" for man. In Otway's lighter context "you" is quite appropriate. The more exalted speech that is the close of Keats's Ode calls for "ye": this form brings poetically the right tone. The only doubt possible is whether "ye" can be in the singular just as "you" can. Its equivalence to it in the plural should itself tend to assure us here. And actually, among its uses, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of 1936 (p. 2465, col. 1) lists one in which it takes the place of "thou" in addressing a single person (originally as a sign of respect or deference). Today it is most frequent in familiar phrases like "How d'ye do?", "What d'ye think?", "Thank ye", "I tell ye". But poetry too is not devoid of instances which leave no doubt. When we read Scott's

Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye!

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or Tennyson's

'Damsel,' he said, 'ye be not all to blame',

the singular number is apparent.

At this place we may glance at the highly original proposition that Keats is addressing the Urn. Since he has been often addressing it in the course of the Ode and has started the poem with an address to it, there is no inherent implausibility in the proposition. Further, we have established that "ye" can stand for "thou". So, when we find Otway and some others using "you" for "thou", why could not Keats make "ye" do the same job? Linguistically, we cannot rule out the possibility that the poet is speaking to the Urn. However, we may question the occasion for the sudden shift from "thou" to "ye" — and not only one "ye" but two. Of course, if the shift is made once, we may expect it to be made twice for consistency's sake. But the very consistency here reminds us of Keats's sense of harmony. We feel that he would not change over from "thou" to "ye" in a capricious manner: he would do it only if the interests of significance or of style demanded it. Poets can be capricious, but Keats of the Ode-period especially was a scrupulous and controlled craftsman with a clear head. And there is no imaginative reason here why he should break into a repeated "ye" when "thou" would be the smoothest and most harmonious term. Besides, to say to the Urn that all it knows and all it needs to know is "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" does not add very much to the power of the poem: it sounds almost like a truism, a superfluous assertion: the words following those within quotation marks would be a meaningful and momentous endorsement if they were directed by the Urn to man or by Keats to his reading public which also is human. Again, the connection which the comma and the dash institute between these words and the five preceding them is not exactly favourable to the alternative my student has put forth. Appreciative though I am of its originality, I do not think we should go outside the two that have generally been discussed.

Now we may proceed from the points already considered for taking as the Urn's own utterance all that succeeds the first five words. Those points being settled, we may touch on some others. If the Urn's message ends with the first five words, we get Keats doing here what he usually does not: he seldom directly addresses

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his reader or readers. Also, we make him forget his keen artistic sense: a personal intrusion in favour of the reading public breaks the thematic unity of the poem by bringing in a jarring didactic note from outside: whatever lesson there may be should arise organically from the treatment of the subject and be, as it were, in character and not stick out by superimposition: the Urn itself expressing a message would be in tune with the treatment whereas the poet coming forward with a homily would be an inartistic jolt such as Keats would avoid. Some might even say, as C. M. Bowra does, that if he himself is talking, we get a statement from him which makes him "a ruthless aesthete" going against all that he has said elsewhere about the importance of human activities and relations: according to Bowra, what would be emphasised is the exclusive importance of Art and it would be natural for the Urn to lay stress on this importance but for Keats to say that nothing beyond Art matters would be something at odds with his general outlook at this period of his life as known from his letters as well as other poems.

Bowra's contention might hold if "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" had only an Art-connotation. But all the rest of the considerations we have advanced are enough to prove that the inverted commas are not meant to cut short the Urn's speech. What they do is to divide clearly the speech into two sections, the first presenting a sort of motto, an aphorism or piece of doctrine, a general and impersonal and universal text, and the second the Urn's own comment on it. The opening five words are as if a quotation, and the quotation marks serve to mark it off as such. Whether they have only an Art-connotation or no, they certainly do bear on Art in a momentous mode and thus it is natural that the Urn, as itself a piece of Art, should add its own endorsement.

Now we have to attempt an interpretation of the formula emphasised as all-important by the Urn. One interpretation is that beauty alone matters. But this ignores the double statement and the balance set up between beauty and truth. Another interpretation is that in Art there should be nothing merely beautiful. On the one hand, gross realism is to be avoided; on the other, ornament for ornament's sake must be eschewed. Realism without beauty cannot be Art: decorativeness without a basis of reality can also not be Art. Representation of brute fact is ugly whereas Art has to do with beauty: colour and image and sound without any

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touch on things felt and known is sheer fancy whereas Art deals with truth. Beauty and truth are both essential to Art and they do not exist apart from each other and outside of each other: nothing can be true unless it is beautiful and nothing can be beautiful unless it is true. This is taken by many critics as the significance of those five words. The words are regarded as a precept for Art-creators and a definition of artistic work for Art-appreciators.

No doubt, Art has neither to rest satisfied with brute fact nor to stay content with colour and image and sound for their own sake. But surely Keats shows the Grecian Urn to be doing more than avoiding gross realism or ornament for ornament's sake? And does not all Art bring a revealing vision, go beyond the surface of things, the mere existence of things as well as beyond the play of fancy and hence beyond the surface of the curious constructive mind? In doing this, what exactly does it achieve? Let us recapitulate our findings on sculpture from the poem before us. According to Keats, the Grecian Urn has brought a sense of something above the precariousness and frustration of ordinary life and this something is a wonderfully expressive stillness, an infinitely suggestive silence whose sweet plenitude goes deeper than the world of sense and is realised by the spirit: what the Urn brings is a revelation of the supra-sensuous to the depths of the spirit: it communicates a spiritual reality to the spiritual consciousness through a representation of beautiful form in which the changes of time are transcended. After saying this in effect, Keats reconstructs a scene of religious ritual from the Urn's figures and touches again on the motifs of perpetuation and silence. Then he introduces the word "eternity". The Grecian Urn with a perplexing exquisiteness bears us above the perceptive and conceptive powers and activities of thought as though towards a divine reality, a divine consciousness that is ineffably eternal. The statement — "beauty is truth, truth beauty" — comes on top of all that the Urn has already been said by the poet to do and gathers up and completes the significance communicated so far of the little master-piece from Attica: it "caps, crowns and clinches all". If it did not perform that function, it would be an anti-climax or pompous irrelevance. It may include the doctrine of eschewing both gross realism and ornament for ornament's sake; but it must contain a wider and deeper substance vibrant with the metaphysical and the mystical. And unless it did this, even the Urn's commendation of it

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as a message of paramount importance age after age to "man" in his state of "woe" would sound hollow.

To understand the beauty-truth equation in a metaphysical and mystical sense relevant to the Urn we must look for a mediating term between them provided by the poem itself. This term is "eter-nity". The general meaning of "eternity" we have set forth. But there is a particular shade which we must now note. The Urn teases us out of thought not only by its time-transcending and spirit-packed silence: it does so too, by its perfect form. It is the "silent form" that is said to "tease us out of thought/As doth eternity". Eternity is seen as manifesting somehow through the silent form shown by the Urn. It is thus a Reality in which a divine archetype of the Urn's silent form exists. We may say that it is the original Divine Form in which all that has a changing shape on earth is poised in a permanence of perfection: time with its mutability of contour and colour has a stop there and its essence is held immortally before the Supreme Sight of an Intelligence higher than discursive thought. The immutable truth of the world of phenomena, the basic and unmarred reality behind them, is held in that beatific vision; and this truth, by being the essential Form of earth's contour and colour, is necessarily and fundamentally Beauty. Eternity is essential Beauty that is essential Truth and it is both these by a perfect permanence from which the shortcomings due to change in a universe of finite objects have been exceeded and transfigured. Only to this understanding of beauty and truth can we be led through what Keats has visioned in relation to the Grecian Urn and its marble mouldings. It is the Platonic idea. And that the idea should be Platonic is but fitting in the context of an Urn which is Grecian.

Of course, this Keatsian Platonism emerges from the contemplation of a piece of Art, but it has not only an Art-connotation. It is not confined to what is usually taken as "aesthetic": it implies that Art is a medium of the Divine Reality and that this Divine Reality which Art reveals is the dispeller of human woe.

Hence, when the rest of the Urn's message endorses the Platonic aphorism, Art as such is not boosted as of sovereign importance. Sovereign importance is given to the bliss-breathing Divine Reality revealed by Art. Knowledge of its dual unity is declared to be the sole knowledge worth the name: every other kind of knowledge is trivial. The words — "that is all" — signify, as Walsh

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suggests, "that is the finally important thing". And this knowledge is not only the sole knowledge worth the name: it is also the sole knowledge necessary. The one sure and indispensable knowledge is of the Divine Reality which is the goal at once of our pursuit of the beautiful and our pursuit of the true and whose presence is suggested to us in the thought-hushed profundity of happy vision that is ours vis-a-vis the multi-carved perfection of the Grecian Urn.

This knowledge is akin to the jnana for which a mighty ardour runs through the Indian .Upanishads. "I would know That which being known , everything is known" - "What shall I do with the knowledge which will not bring me Immortality?" - such pronouncements carry the same rare atmosphere within which glow those five words of Keats in the context of his Ode.

All the seven lines beginning from "Thou, silent form" we have distinguished as Logopoeia. In their bringing to a culmination the metaphysical and mystical sense hinted in the rest of the poem they may be characterised as conveying the sense of what Greek philosophers called Logos in a special connotation. Logos literally means "thought-word", but the Greek philosophers came to define it as the Word of the Divine Reason, God as the Creative Idea-Expression. The Keatsian passage is therefore Logopoeia in a double manner: its inmost subject is the Logos and its turn of speech has the thought-element in predominance.

Perhaps I have talked a little above your heads. Now that we are about to close the talk and go our own ways I may part from you no less than from Logopoeia with a logopoeic passage which nobody can accuse of being "highbrow". I shall recite it to you with the Indian gesture of salaam which serves for parting as well as for meeting and I shall ask you to bear in mind the thought which its words convey. The lines were written by an uncommonly thoughtful I.C.S. Englishman for his fellow-officers in India and refer to a gesture connected with all kinds of brows and not only the high ones:

To passerby who makes salaam

Don't raise a finger meagrely,

With air of contumelious calm;

But with entire uplifted palm

Reciprocate it eagerly.

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TALK THIRTY-FOUR

"Pure poetry" — that is a phrase we have used once or twice in the course of our Talks. But so far we have put aside discussion of it. Now that we have talked of Logopoeia — poetic "thought-making" — the phrase becomes topical, for, though there are several schools of "pure poetry", they combine in ruling out logopoeic expression. Any kind of thinking, all reaching of conclusions moral or any other, they condemn as out of place in real poetic speech. They regard Arnold's formula — "criticism of life" — in relation to this speech as philistine impertinence. Poetry, they hold, produces a mood, but it does so in a direct fashion: it does not tell us to be glad or sad or mad or anything else. Thus when Hugo writes —

Comme c'est triste voir s'enfuir les hirondelles —

(How sad to see the swallows fly away —)

he is introducing a non-poetic element by those opening words. He should have presented just a picture of swallows flying away and presented it so that we would at once have felt sad. I suppose the direct mood-productive speech of "pure poetry" — not perhaps quite confined to the mood of sadness yet not very far from it — may be hailed in the lines of J. A. Chadwick ("Arjava" to our Ashram):

Drowsy pinions whitely winging

Smoulder dimly past the strand,

but the advocates of "pure poetry" would be disappointed to learn that these two lines are followed by:

Visionary trance-light bringing

From some strange remoter land.

"Pure poetry" should convey what it wishes to by a concrete image or symbol and stop there: it should be a poetry of sheer sight or at least bring before us colour and shape and gesture, and banish information or exposition.

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Symbolism, as developed by Mallarme, was perhaps the most famous school that laid claim to being "pure poetry". It did so, as we have noted, by distinguishing poetry sharply from prose: prose was called reportage, something intellectual and explicit and not particularly rhythmic, whereas poetry was assigned the task of creating with rhythmic language indefinite, non-intellecutal, mysterious effects by concrete suggestions that took the form of images without even mentioning what they might serve as similes or metaphors for and that conjured up by an almost abrupt succession of these images a significant vision which exceeded the picture of anything recognisable as a whole in the natural world. Thus Mallarmean Symbolism was not only mysterious but also mystical and to the ordinary mind it seemed to make some sort of superior non-sense which yet affected one with a profound though not clearly formulable meaningfulness, a meaningfulness such as music appears to have. To do in the highest degree what poetry alone could do was to produce "pure poetry", according to the Mallarmean definition.

This definition was accepted in general — nay, even actually framed — by Valery who was Mallarme's most gifted disciple. But Valery was not steeped in an atmosphere of the mystical as his master was in spite of being by intellectual conviction an atheist and a materialist. "Pure poetry", for Valery, achieves its absolute distinction from prose through a conscious deliberate construction upon a theme in itself utterly indifferent by a musical pattern of words which gives delight and communicates not anything intelligible on the whole but a subtle many-shaded state of mind. Valery even said that his best poems had their origin in an intense obsession by certain metrical forms which he afterwards filled out with words connected to one another by what he felt to be their inner suggestive affinities. But Valery was a marked intellectual and his work is not so much a sheer evocation from the depths of the being as a thought-scheme imaginatively complicated and rendered enigmatic. That is why the French people have recognised in him their own typical temper, however strange-hued, and accorded him a high place in their poetic pantheon, unlike Mallarme whom most of them deem an exotic growth and a fantastic failure rather than a sphinx-like success. Something of the subtlety of Mallarme's Symbolism merges in something of the clarity that is French Classicism's to make the "pure poetry" of Valery. An instance is the

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stanza from Le Cimetiere Marin (The Graveyard by the Sea), where a little after the start he is describing a moment of self-rarefaction as if anticipating, under the poised noonday glare which looks like a glimpse of Eternity, his own disappearance by death:

Comme le fruit se fond en jouissance,

Comme en delice, il change son absence

Dans une bouche ou sa forme se meurt,

Je hume ici ma future fumee,

Et le ciel change a l'ame consumee

Le changement des rives en rumeur.

C. Day Lewis has englished this example of what I may term clear-cut elusiveness:

Even as a fruit's absorbed in the enjoying,

Even as within the mouth its body dying

Changes into delight through dissolution,

So to my melted soul the heavens declare

All bounds transfigured into a boundless air

And I breathe now my future's emanation.

I think Valery here has a similarity in general spirit and art-attitude, though not in style, to the writing which a certain side of the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals practised — say, Marvell at his most delicate and most deep. I may quote a stanza from The Garden on which we once drew when speaking of Mallarme and of a modern English poet's ideal in which Mallarme was coupled with Marvell. Marvell also speaks of a dreamy luminous disembodiment anticipating the "longer flight" from the sense-world at time of death. His lines run:

Here at the fountain's sliding foot,

Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,

Casting the body's vest aside,

My soul into the boughs does glide:

There, like a bird, it sits and sings,

Then whets and claps its silver wings,

And, till prepar'd for longer flight,

Waves in its plumes the various light.

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Marvell is less sophisticated as well as less "vaporous" than Valery, his subtlety is simpler, as it were, yet there is an exquisite deliberate distillation of experience and expression marking the poetry very keenly off from any mere refinement of the prose-turn. Contrast Marvell's closing phrase —

Waves in its plumes the various light —

with one of Pope's on sylphs, air-spirits:

Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings.

Pope has effective sound-values supporting his expression. The three long a- sounds in "change", "they" and "wave" suggest a kind of repeated expansion — an expansion suggested further by the three w's with their propulsive openness of articulation. Then there is the tinkling n-sound three times, just as again the r occurs thrice and produces a whirr. All in all, we get a vivid impression of wings widening and beating the air and gleaming with each waft — and the threefold reiteration of each of the three significant letters makes us feel as if three colours were gleaming. A skilful line, this, but its deft representation of things differs from prose-style by a charm of rhythm more than by a special word-magic. Marvell's line has a more exquisite art which stirs us to sight on a deeper level of consciousness. His alliteration is not so open: the v in the midst of "waves" finds an echo in the v at the beginning of "various" and similarly the l combined with p in "plumes" tolls once more in the l at the opening of "light". There is the a assonance too, twice. Only the s is thrice sounded, twice as z and once with a clear sibilance. This play of s carries on the sound-effect of line 6

Then whets and claps its silver wings.

The light that diversely comes and goes is a shine and a shimmer slipping like strange water and suffuses the word "wave" with an extra overtone of liquidity on top of its direct sense of vibrating with a sinuous or sweeping motion: it is almost as if the verb meant "turns into waves". Not only are sounds employed more skilfully: a more direct connection is established between things. It is not

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plumes that are waved: the waving is of light itself. Thus light becomes a component of the wings. Also, light is not made various by the wing-waving: just as it is one with the plumes, the various-ness of it is one with the waving. Further, the light is already various but its variousness gets revealed when the light is waved — the waving breaks the uniformity of appearance and with that non-uniformity the variousness comes out. And the oneness of waving and variety, as well as the oneness of plumes and light, is brought out by the similarity of certain sounds we have already noticed in the words.

In Marvell's speech, poetry is as if washed clean of the presence of prose, the relationship between it and prose seems erased by a special novelty and sensitivity of vision and word and rhythm. "Pure poetry" of a phanopoeic kind is the result. But must poetry be phanopoeic in this way or even in a more cryptic way as in Mallarme and a more rarefied way as in Valery in order to be pure? And must it always be phanopoeic in order to ensure its purity? The Symbolists would return an emphatic Yes. So would the school known as the Imagists.

One of the founders of Imagism was the American-English poet Ezra Pound. Imagism is a revolt against the development of Romanticism into the vaguely and vastly emotional, the sense of at once the crepuscular and the cosmic, the mind twilight-blurry and tending to float away in what T. E. Hulme termed the "circumambient gas". Imagism demanded objectivity, clarity, exactitude, conciseness — it also recommended free verse as more suitable to the individuality of the poet — and above everything else it stressed the importance of the image, the focused picture rendering particulars and conveying the poet's state of mind without discussion or reflection. Imagism overlapped with Symbolism in several matters, but in its penchant for sharp and hard outlines it was inclined to fight shy of the mysterious, the ultra-natural, the dream-world and the world of interior vision. Yet its desire to cut the cackle and to short-circuit description led to a degree of compression which at times made the created poetic brevities fuse pictures and speak elliptically: thus the surface was occasionally a vivid entanglement without sacrifice of that precise definition, that Chinese quality of ching ming which Pound recommended and sought to practise as an indispensable mode of true poetry. In the eyes of Pound and his followers, "a poem is an image or a succession of images, and an

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image is that which presents an intellectual or emotional complex in an instant of time."

One or two examples of Imagist poetry may be offered. There is Pound's own well-known two-lined piece with a title half the length of the poem, In a Station of the Metro:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet black bough.

Imagist poetry of this kind harks back to Far Eastern models — Chinese and Japanese forms, particularly the latter. The shortest form of Japanese verse is known as the hokku or haiku, consisting of three lines, the first in five syllables, the second in seven and the third again in five — altogether seventeen syllables. Pound's piece just exceeds the limit by two syllables. If we elide the e in the opening "the" and slur the two words "in the" into one sound "inth" by another such elision we shall have an equivalent to the total length of the haiku. The three-line division, however, would not quite conform to the pattern of syllable-distribution. It would be:

Th' apparition

Of these faces in th' crowd;

Petals on a wet black bough.

But, interestingly, Pound's little poem — Pound's penny of a poem, if we may put it punningly — has in part of its mood an affinity to the very first extant haiku of Japan, dating from the early thirteenth century — namely, of Fujiwara no Sadaiye:

Chiru hana wo

Oikakete yuku

Arashi kana.

(A fluttering swarm

Of cherry-petals — then comes,

Chasing them, the storm!)

Like Fujiwara's petals, Pound's seem also to be blown ones, dislodged from the stems and flung by rain-sweeps to a black

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bough, just as the passing apparition-like faces in the crowd are separate units thrown somewhat helter-skelter yet shiningly hang-ing together inside a station in the dull weather against a background of dampened spirits. But there is perhaps more pleasure in the Japanese poet's attitude and more feeling too of the energy of Nature's life: the sense of mere apparition is absent.

If the minor scale of spirit were made major and the energy became more actively present and the joy grew mixed with a sense of awe and grandeur, Fujiwara may be considered as englished in the opening lines of Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, at the same time that a touch of Pound's "apparition" enters through the word "ghosts" in the Shelley-passage:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red...

The phrase that comes just after these lines —

Pestilence-stricken multitudes..

goes, of course, beyond both Fujiwara and Pound in its mood, but it remains Imagist poetry, and the ensemble, for all its more direct, more weighty tone, still satisfies the demands of the new school — the blend of the clarity and objectivity of the Greeks with the effective visual condensation of the Oriental miniature. The lines would be accepted by the Imagist as pure poetry. What, however, about the close of Shelley's Ode?—

...Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth;

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

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There is in this magnificent outburst too much statement, too much elaboration, too explicit a development of the idea and finally too clear a conclusion for the Imagist or Symbolist definition of the purely poetic. Also, the poet's attitude and interpretation are too much in evidence for this definition. Not that this definition insists on sheer objectivity. In fact, there can be no such thing. Always we have an attitude towards the material, always a selection of the details of the material: an interpretation, however hidden, is embodied in every poem. Subjectivity of even a more noticeable kind is accepted by the Symbolists; but it must be put forth pictorially with the utmost economy in connective tissue. Among the Imagists, though, there was a tendency to cut down subjectivity and most poets could not live up long to the Imagists' ideal either in this respect or in respect of brevity. So a modified conception of "pure poetry" grew out of the Imagist extremism. To this conception Pound's admirer and ultimately surpasser as poet, T. S. Eliot, gave critical formulation.

Here a premium was put on the contemplation of doctrine or of ideas without setting at a discount the cult of imaged moods: the comtemplation was to be done exclusively through imagery. The poet was encouraged to do a lot of thinking but a bar was placed against the intrusion of it in the poem. The ideas have to be squeezed out of the finished poetic product and the reader must supply them after receiving the sheer image-impact. Poetry resides, as Eliot said, in the "objective correlative". Here, as in Imagism, the emotion is not to be told us as this or that subjective condition of experience but must be communicated through "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." However, plenty of brain-stuff can and should go with the emotion, provided a symbol is discovered as a focal point of heightened consciousness and all that belongs to the conventional structure of a poem is removed: no connections, no transitions, nothing explicitly directing and explaining the heightened consciousness. The reason advanced by Eliot of such abbreviation of method is that "the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression". Naturally, this method conduces to an elliptical style with a lot of obscurity and ambiguity. It can take for its patron-saint, as it were, John Donne of the

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seventeenth century; but, to carry it off, the poet must have Donne's ecstatic intellect, Donne's analytic heart, Donne's mystic nerves of sensation; and even Donne with his extraordinary gifts often turns out untransformed stuff of a thought-emotion-sensation melange powerfully compressed yet not keenly crystallised. Our modern practitioners of the imaged ellipsis go astray deplorably because they do not tap the elemental forces within, forces without which no poetry can come to birth. A follower of Eliot who has made quite a name in our day, William Empson, offers us things like these six lines that open his poem Arachne:

Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves;

Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems;

Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.

King spider walks the velvet roof of streams;

Must bird and fish, must god and beast avoid;

Dance, like nine angels, on pin-point extremes.

I think it would be precious pretension if such products were passed off as "pure poetry". Imaginative intensity is wanting, though a few lines are well turned and even striking.

The want is of something considered indispensable by Gerard Manley Hopkins whom our Modernists look upon as their premature father — premature because he wrote in a period of poetic conventionalism pieces vibrant with a new vision and a new technique. "Sweet fire the sire of Muse" — so pronounced Hopkins in the midst of his newness. Like Donne with his high-pressure effects, Hopkins time and again overdoes his originality and gives us strained piled-up novelties instead of achieved and possessed audacities; but he has the true sense of the poetic — what he calls "inscape" and "instress", the inner significant pattern of things, the inner harmonious excitement of sight. I may illustrate his departure from poetic conventionalism by picking out, as a critic has done, a verse from him and a couple of lines from Crashaw, both on the theme of Christ's incarnation through the Virgin Mary. Crashaw refers to the heavenly babe:

Christ left his father's house and came

Lightly as a lambent flame.

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Here we have a good simile suggesting the soft secrecy of the Divine's entry into the human. The epithet "lightly", while meaning a movement delicate and refined, prepares the gentle light indicated by the closing phrase. Also perhaps in the adjective "lambent" we have a subtle allusion to the common phrase about Christ: "Lamb of God." But the cleverness is not obtrusive: it is assimilated into the fine taste of the whole expression. A variety of ideas and attitudes is smoothly packed into a couplet simple and sincere in a conventionally poetic manner. How different, how dynamically different, how directly suffused with the glory and profundity and awesome loveliness of the event are the words of Hopkins:

The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled

Miracle-in-Mary of flame...

The whole first line is adjectival and the noun it qualifies is the compound "Miracle-in-Mary". The words "of flame" go with "Miracle" and not with "Mary": the incarnating Christ is the "Miracle of flame" within Mary. The total expression in the two lines is repeatedly concrete in unexpected ways. We have not even distinct images, we have a picture in each phrase with an assimilation of whatever images are there. We see Jesus' origin in divinity from which he has come missioned as both force and grace, as both pressure of power and largesse of love; we see his love's acceptance of humanity and humanity's acceptance of him in love; we see his preciously secret birth through deeply and tenderly guarded virginity; we see the prodigious Godhead that was the unborn child lying with all its light and fire in Mary's quickened earth-womb. The representation of the theme by Crashaw has been compared to the chaste and lucid art of Raphael, that by Hopkins to the impassioned and complex art of Michelangelo. For our purposes the distinction would lie not only as between the chastely lucid and the passionately complex: it would lie also in the nearness of the Crashavian utterance to the prose temper and the farness of the Hopkinsian from it. The latter articulation has a subtlety and intensity quite foreign to the spirit of prose: the former has not the same sheer poetic enthousiasmos. Its rhythmic breath keeps it within the realm of poetry, but it is almost on the frontiers of that realm whereas Hopkins is right in the centre of it,

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in the royal visionary and rhythmic core. The poetry here has shed all prose-resemblances: it stands pure in its own essence. But, while differing from Crashaw, it differs also from Empson who for all his imaged ellipsis stands with one foot inside and one outside the poetic frontiers. This double nationality is what is wrong with most modernist poets, and no Imagist theory, no dogma of "objective correlative" or inexplicit concentration can save them.

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TALK THIRTY-FIVE

Emphasis on the pictorial element seems to have marked many definitions of "pure poetry". This element can be overdone. And there are many modes of overdoing it. The Symbolist and the Imagist modes are rather specialised ones. A general mode is evident in George Moore's Introduction to an anthology compiled by himself of English verse. Moore defines "pure poetry" as "born of admiration of the only permanent world, the world of things": it is poetry containing no hint of subjectivity, poetry "unsicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", as the greatest of the phanopoeists, Shakespeare, would have put it if he had had something to do not only with Othello, the Moor of Venice, but also with George, the Moore of London.

Typical instances would be Coleridge's lines on the "one red leaf" that could most easily be wind-stirred and that still hung motionless:

There is not wind enough to twirl

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,

That dances as often as dance it can

Hanging so light and hanging so high

On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky —

or, in a more subtle mode, Keats's passage with its breathlessness deepened by a triple negative:

No stir of air was there,

Not so much life as on a summer's day

Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,

But where the dead leaf fell there did it rest.

Perhaps the whole of Keats's Ode to Autumn would be acceptable. But the two other Odes, the one to a Nightingale and that on a Grecian Urn, would be considered somewhat mixed stuff. I have not seen Moore's anthology, but strictly from his view point lines like the following from the Nightingale Ode would not be poetically pure:

Darkling I listen; and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

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Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —

To thy high requiem become a sod.

And, of Course, the close of the Grecian Urn Ode would be sacrilege against the pure-poetry ideal a la Moore.

A less arbitrary definition than his, so far as the content or substance is conerned, is A. E. Housman's. Housman does not insist that we should adopt one theme or another, nor does he put a ban on subjectivity. Rather, he inclines to believe that subjectivity is the essential content of poetry; but subjectivity does not mean for him any idea. There he is one with Moore and all the rest whose conception of pure poetry we have glanced at. Housman, however, does not condemn ideas as vitiators of the poetic essence. He even goes to the extent of saying that poetry cannot be great without ideas and that poetry with great ideas will always be cherished most by mankind. But he points out that such poetry is not poetry because of these ideas. On the contrary he holds that there are no particularly poetic ideas: every idea can meet with justice in prose. What, in Housman's view, poetry does is to associate its ideas with emotion. Says Housman: "To transfuse emotion — not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer — is the peculiar function of poetry." Subjectivity in the form of emotion is the very stuff of poetry. But this emotional subjectivity has to be transfused by the words: so words have an important role. It is how they do their job that makes poetry or no poetry. "Poetry," Housman tells us, "is not the thing said but a way of saying it." The way, of course, has to be artistic — the expression must be precise and rhythmic, else no vibration would be set up in the reader nor would there be correspondence between what the reader feels and what the writer felt. But, given the precision and the rhythm, it is the emotion that turns the language poetic. Poetry is the emotive way of saying a thing. At this point Housman asks whether this way can be studied by itself, whether there is a poetry

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which transfuses emotion without introducing any idea-content, whether we can have poetry independent of meaning and consequently unmingled and pure.

His answer is Yes. And the very first example he offers is that song from Shakespeare:

Take, O take, those lips away

That so sweetly were forsworn,

And those eyes, the break of day,

Lights that do mislead the morn;

But my kisses bring again,

bring again,

Seals of love, but seal'd in vain,

seal'd in vain.

Housman comments: "This is nonsense; but it is ravishing poetry." I suppose by nonsense he intends a use of words whose power over us cannot be attributed to our recognising in them a communication of something directly applicable to life or coherently scrutinisable in thought. Reading the lyric, we may question: "How can eyes mislead the mom? How can kisses be brought again?" A fantasy of feeling is all that is there. But the mood is not quite alien to common human affairs and a general notion of the direction in which the poet's fantasy moves is not impossible. A betrayed lover is desiring to be utterly rid of the betrayer but wants at the same time that he should. become heart-whole again and no part of him should remain with the loved one who has proved false. The tragedy is that what has been handed over to the betrayer is irrecoverably· given and the only means of having it back is to have back the false lover. An acute emotional dilemma is caught in a paradoxical fancy whose terms appear to be self contradictory. Thus, one's kisses can be taken back only if the lips to which they were originally given were once more in touch with one's own lips. But such a situation would hardly amount to getting rid of the betrayer. Further, if the betrayer's eyes have a brightness that can even outdazzle day and lead it astray like one blinded, how should the cheated person hope for deliverance? The extreme loveliness of the cheat makes the victim's cry an impossible demand. It is this impossibility that is driven home by the puzzling fancy about the eyes. Somewhat akin to this fancy is the

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expression in Romeo and Juliet where Romeo, watching Juliet at the night-dance in the hall of the Capulet family, exclaims:

O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

The lyric we have quoted is indeed a kind of irrational fantasy, yet it is not too far from human experience: its nonsense shadows forth a general truth. Even more apt to Housman's thesis are some poems of Blake. Blake is to Housman the purest of poets because repeatedly he produces poems which, without some esoteric key, are no more than exquisite or sublime mysteries. A piece which also is spoken as if by a distressed lover is quoted from Blake by Housman:

My Spectre around me night and day

Like a wild beast guards my way;

My Emanation far within

Weeps incessantly for my sin.

A fathomless and boundless deep,

There we wander, there we weep;

On the hungry craving wind

My Spectre follows thee behind.

He scents thy footsteps in the snow

Wheresoever thou dost go:

Through the wintry hail and rain

When wilt thou return again?

Dost thou not in pride and scorn

Fill with tempests all my morn,

And with jealousies and fears

Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

Seven of my sweet loves thy knife

Has bereaved of their life.

Their marble tombs I built with tears

And with cold and shuddering fears.

Seven more loves weep night and day

Round the tombs where my loves lay,

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And seven more loves attend each night

Around my couch with torches bright.

And seven more loves in my bed

Crown with wine my mournful head,

Pitying and forgiving all

Thy transgressions great and small.

When wilt thou return and view

My loves and them to life renew?

When wilt thou return and live?

When wilt thou pity as I forgive?

Housman's observation on this lyric is: "I am not equal to framing definite ideas which would match that magnificent versification and correspond to the strong tremor of unreasonable excitement which those words set up in some region deeper than the mind." Sri Aurobindo agrees here that no formulable meaning could be offered by way of justice to the intention running through these stanzas. Of course no formulable meaning is ever totally adequate to any poetry; but some satisfying a peu pres is mostly possible. Here the expression comes, without the outer mind's touch on it, from an occult dimension of our being. Housman speaks of "unreasonable excitement" and would dub the poem meaningless. Sri Aurobindo would not employ the exaggerating term "non-sense": he would say that there is perfect sense but from a depth of our being where the thinking mind loses its grip. By an inner soul-perception, an intuitive consciousness, the passage is to be apprehended. To the outer consciousness it must appear to be what Housman calls it: "poetry with so little meaning that nothing except poetic emotion is perceived and matters." In relation to the outer consciousness he is also right when he remarks: "The verses probably possessed for Blake a meaning, and his students think that they have found it; but the meaning is a poor foolish disappointing thing in comparison with the verses themselves."

Poetry shot through and through with mystery by a movement of intense rhythmical feeling which weaves a word-pattern whose drift eludes the thinker in us: this is Housman's conception of "pure poetry". But he does not say that poets should aim at nothing except such a word-pattern. What he emphasises is that

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any poetic word-pattern is poetry by an element that, however mixed with thought, is really independent of it and can be best considered a stir of emotion. To touch us and move us is the function of poetry.

From this position a step is taken by some critics to a theory of "pure poetry" that cares only for word-texture — a fine music of language making suggestions that do not need to convey anything even emotionally important, leave aside anything intellectually significant. Thus they would relish the line from Racine which used to enchant Marcel Proust:

La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae.

(The daughter of Minos and Pasiphae,

(I think they would equally savour a line I might make about the sister of a Parsi student of mine:

The daughter of Minoo and Shirinbai'.)

Similarly they would turn on their tongues the phrases of Milton about all who

Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban,

Damasco, or Morocco, or Trebisond...

There is no intellectual content here, nor any emotional content to speak of. There is only a beauty of word-sound with just a touch upon our understanding. What does our understanding discover? As Middleton Murry tells us, we get a sense of the exotic, the out-of-the-way, the rich and rare — an exoticism soft and languorous in the Racine-line, martial and clangorous in the Milton-verses. A distinguishable sensation or perception is almost all we have. But if we are after such an effect in "pure poetry" we should go beyond even the little touch our understanding receives from the phrases we have quoted. To say "The daughter of Minos and Pasiphae" is surely to declare at least a fact with some directness, though we can make no judgment from it, much less draw any precept. Milton's joustings too convey a fact, however minimally and however drowned in the surge of golden-gonged geography. A more quintessential example of sheer sound would be Rossetti's fivefold symphony of names:

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Cecily, Gertrude , Magdalen,

Margaret, and Rosalys —

or Sri Aurobindo's recital of a yet longer liquidity of nomenclature:

Menaca, Misracayshie, Mullica,

Rambha, Nelabha, Shela, Nolinie,

Lolita, Lavonya and Tillottama...

Of course, Rossetti is speaking of the "five handmaidens" of "Lady Mary" in the heavenly groves and Sri Aurobindo is listing the apsara-companions of the peerless Urvasie, dancer in the courts of Indra. But without their contexts, the lines only suggest lovely things. An Indian ignorant of European names and with no knowledge of Christian religious legend will hardly catch the hint that Rossetti is referring to lovely women. A European similarly placed with regard to matters Indian will equally be at a loss in front of Sri Aurobindo. Lovelinesses of some sort will be all that can come home to the mind from the word-texture and the succession of separate words. But perhaps even here some slight significant clue is supplied: each is shown to be like its associates, all of them representing similar things: it is indirectly imparted that a row of things sharing a quality of beauty is drawn up. "Pure poetry" on the principle implicit in these citations should really have even this oblique information wiped off. And that is possible if wonderful-sounding gibberish is composed. But I am afraid no genuine poet ever deliberately went in for gibberish. It is only the school in France of what is called Dadaism that made gibberish its ultimate aim. A number of writers felt that they must have absolute liberty of expression and should not be asked to produce in the reader anything else than a bewildered agitation of word-impression. When they looked about for a name for themselves, one of them had the brilliant idea: "Let's open the Dictionary at random." The French Dictionary was opened and the first word that jumped to the eye was dada. This is a child's word and means "horse, cock-horse". Its English equivalent would be "gee-gee". Colloquially it means "hobby, hobby-horse". You have the phrases: "aller a dada" ("to ride a cock-horse"), "etre sur son dada" ("to indulge in one's hobby"). So l'ecole dada or dadaisme is a

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negative rebellion of childish whimsicality. One of its masterpieces is by the famous Tristan Tzara:

In your inside there are smoking lamps

the swamp of blue honey

cat crouched in the gold of a flemish inn

boom boom

lots of sand yellow bicyclist

chateaument des papes

manhattan there are tubs of excrement before you.

mbase mbaze bazebaze mleganga garoo.

Very expressive stuff, this, no doubt, but expressive only of chaos. And chaos can hardly be the source of art. Besides, even the chaotic expression is far from pleasing to the ear. Further, the gibberish is not complete: some of the individual units carry some meaning within the ensemble which is perfect chaos. More or less the same may be said of such work as Gertrude Stein's or Hugo Blumner's. But truly to fulfil the principle of the word-music school we should have verbal snatches falling musically combined upon the ear in a foreign tongue. It is then that we shall have total gibberish making pure poetry in its utmost essence.

To those who have no familiarity with Latin, the acme of pure poetry depending solely on artistically arranged word-texture would be lines like the one from Virgil which Arnold Bennett considered the most marvellously rhythmed in all poetic literature:

infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem...

But can anyone rest satisfied with such music without knowing that it conveys:

Words cannot utter, O queen, the grief you bid me

re-waken...

If one at all does remain content without the meaning, one would still automatically weave some meaning from the sounds by their associations with those already meaningful to one. As many Latin words have originated English ones, things like "renovare" and "dolorem" are likely to form a train of ideas in our minds. We may

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have also heard of "Victoria regina", Queen Victoria, and then we may think of some Queen and the renovation of dolour or sorrow. Perhaps German would provide more opaque lines of enchanting rhythm — say, Goethe's

Verweile doch, du bist so schon,

or else his

Das Ewig weibliche

Zieht uns hinan.

Even here the "doch" of the first quotation may suggest the abbreviation of "doctor": "doc." But how far from the truth we shall be! The line means:

Linger a while, thou art so fair.

I doubt if any doctor could deserve such an appeal. A lady-doctor once sent a marriage-proposal to a friend of mine who is now in the Ashram. He simply shuddered because he felt she would try all sorts of medical and surgical experiments on him. I am sure he would fancy the first two words - "Verweile doch" - to be ·an echo of "Fair wily doc" or, still more satisfyingly, "Farewell, doc." As for the other quotation, we may imagine the opening words " Das Ewig" - to stand for C. R. Das in a barrister's wig and we shall be surprised to learn that the lines -signify:

The Eternal Feminine

Is leading us onward.

Well, no matter how mistakenly, how hazily, some connotation is bound to attach to words: words cannot be sheer sound. Nor can they be supposed to have intrinsic meanings of their own by the differences they exhibit in their textures. No doubt, vocables like the old Sanskrit vrka which connoted "tearer" and hence "wolf" answered to a sensation of tearing and the English word "crick" also answers to the sensation of a twist or a tear, but no invariable suggestion can be associated with such sounds. The English "brick" which is very close to the Sanskrit "vrka" has quite a

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different suggestion, if at all there is any answer in the sound to the sense. A skilful writer would match sound to sense in a variety of ways and weave the meaning-units of his verse impressively together by phonetic effects — as does Shakespeare in the lines we have often quoted —

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity a while

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To tell my story.

After analysing the phonetic effects, M. L. Rosenthal and A. J. M. Smith remark in their Exploring Poetry (p. 36): "Sounds do not in themselves convey a meaning. Liquid sounds are lighter and more graceful than gutturals, and there are many other differences among sound-effects, but this does not mean that every l ox r carries a definite idea or feeling with it, or every k a harsher idea or feeling. However, in a passage with an unusual number of l's and k's we may find an underlying pattern of pure sound effects balanced against one another — an actual music of sounds. If we want to know the connection between this pure sound-pattern and the feeling and thought of the poem, we must note where the most important words fall. In a good poem, there will be a definite relationship between the points of emphasized thought and emotion and the pattern of sound. Unless we are dealing with nonsense rhymes or pure sound-effects, it is the thought and the emotion that give the sounds their meaning. The words in the Hamlet passage which we must emphasize because of their meaning are also the words in which the most important sound-effects are found. The h's, l's, and so on become associated with these words and take their emotional effect from their meaning. Thus, since 'hold' and 'heart' are strongly stressed, the vowels and consonants in them, when repeated in later words, recall them again: Without these important words, the alliteration alone — the musical effect gained by the repetition of sounds, particularly in stressed syllables — could not ordinarily stir us deeply."

Moreover, if words are taken as if they were nothing save a kind of music, how very poor their musical quality will prove side by side with actual music as heard in Bach or Mozart! As music, they can have no special raison d'etre. Valery who spoke of constructing

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musical patterns of words did not subscribe to the word-music school. Expressive rhythm is one thing — enchanting rhythm without significance is quite another story. Like Mallarme, Valery meant by poetic music not only a play of sound but a play of elusive meaning as in musical compositions. As to the stress on sheer sound in poetry, he was quick to observe: "The richest and most resonant harmonies of Hugo fall as music far short of Berlioz or Wagner."

This inferiority to real music is, of course, no argument against the value of harmonious utterance in the poetic art, provided there is no neglect of substance or matter. Verlaine, as we once said, is a great master of sound-effects and in a subtler fashion than the grandly orchestral Hugo. Also his sound-effects accompany a lyrical spontaneity of word-flow which is almost without a parallel in French poetry and which at times as good as rivals that in English. Apropos of him we could erect a much sounder theory of "pure poetry" on the basis of verse-music. Alan M. Boase writes: "It may or may not be vain to seek to distil 'pure poetry' by a process of patient poetical alchemy — such was Mallarme's method. But 'pure poetry' evokes for most of us some element of spontaneous song. It is this singing quality — perhaps the rarest of all in French poetry — which Verlaine possessed in a supreme degree." Of course, Boase himself points out that the impression Verlaine created of singing with "the simplicity of the bird on the tree" had behind it a sufficient mastery of verbal art, even a conscious virtuosity, but his central power was intuitive spontaneity, and craftsmanship helped it only to carry off complex undertakings with the same smiling certainty as his simple outbursts: nowhere does it replace the birdlike elan, all that it does is to make the bird in him accomplish what the mere bird would not.

Verlainian pure poetry is given a manifesto by the poet himself in the piece entitled Art Poetique. This manifesto lays down the fundamental principle in its opening line:

De la musique avant toute chose...

which may be translated a little freely,

Music above all, music first...

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This initial maxim is elaborated through a series of primarily technical precepts for an art of suggestion. Boase takes several of the subsequent terms and well sums up Verlaine's drift: "L'Im-pair, the source of subtle rhythmical effect; la Meprise, the choice of words in a derived or 'ambiguous' sense; I'lmprecis joint au Precis, the art of half-tones; the Nuance which achieves a unity of key or mood — these are all aspects of such an art. An over-intellectual and an over-facile poetry are equally, in his eyes, its enemies: on the one hand, wit, satire, the conceit, the midnight lamp; on the other, eloquence and empty rhyme." The first set of terms Verlaine employs here are: la Pointe assasine, the murderer Point or intellectual acuteness — l'Esprit cruel, the cruel cleverness or intellectual ironical artifice — le Rire impur, the low laugh or intellecutal levity going against the high seriousness of the poet's mission. The second set of terms are l'Eloquence, resonant rhetoric which, says Verlaine, has to be twisted by the neck; le Rime assagie, vacuous jingle, the sound-swirl of a run-away fancy in love with words.

Everything so far in the poem is concerned with the positives and negatives of the poetic method, the music is of the poetic manner. But towards the end of the piece Verlaine returns to his opening phrase and then he moves to quite a different plane:

De la musique encore et toujours!

Que ton vers soit la chose envolee

Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une ame en allee

Vers d'autres cieux a d'autres amours...

We may render the lines with some freedom:

Music again and music ever!

O make your verse the upsurging thing

Felt by the soul when, wide of wing,

It spans new skies to a new love's quiver...

Music now is a movement of feeling, an intense movement upward, part of the soul's aspiration: a mystical emotion that cannot be held back is revealed as the true power behind the technical music that has been set forth up to now: the aspiration of the heart is made the basic inspiration of the art. The next stanza which is

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the final one of the poem further accentuates the idea and puts it in opposition to what poetry is not. This stanza reads:

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure

Eparse au vent crispe du matin

Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym...

Et tout le reste est litterature.

Arthur Symons has a sensitive version of the lines, except for the second. There the epithet "crispe" is too prominent and unusual to be omitted. If the French sense were kept, it would mean "shrivelled" or "irritated". But that would be absurd. Evidently Verlaine who was fond of English has imported the English sense of "bracing", and in doing so he has committed the "M6prise" advised by himself. Symons's version of the stanza is:

Let your verse be the luck of the lure

Afloat on the winds that at morning hint

Of the odours of thyme and the savour of mint...

And all the rest is literature.

(I would render the second line:

Afloat on the crisp dawn-airs that hint...)

In this stanza poetry and literature stand as contradictory terms for Verlaine just as poetry and reportage do for Mallarm6. And, since everything except the music defined here is classed as literature, Verlaine seems to put under that category even the musical method of suggestion which the poem advises at the beginning — but the real drift is only that even this method would be cancelled out if there were not the music of the ethereal adventure the two closing stanzas hold as their message. An additional implication is perhaps that this inner music can at times run against the very techinque which is intended to support it: it is not restricted to set technical rules, it cannot be pinned down to any formula. But commonly the technique touched upon through most of the poem is the right one and Verlaine must be taken as merely negating self-sufficiency and unconditionality for it, not denying its extreme usefulness as a delicate mould in which the ethereal adventure can embody its floating soul. Haunting rhythm spontaneously subtle

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by being born of a mystical longing which achieves suggestive vision in an art-form delicately shaded: there you have the Ver-lainian pure poetry.

Already in these two stanzas we have an instance of this vaguely meaningful rhythm. But we may give a short piece of Verlaine's in its entirety. It is called La lune blanche:

La lune blanche

Luit dans les bois;

De chaque branche

Part une voix

Sous la ramee...

O bien aimee!

L'etang reflete,

Profond miroir,

La silhouette

Du saule noir

Ou le vent pleure...

Revons, c'est l'heure.

Un vaste et tendre

Apaisement

Semble descendre

Du firmament

Que l'astre irise...

C'est l'heure exquise.

A literal translation, line by line, has been made by one of my students, Bibhash:

The pale moon

Shines in the woods;

From every branch

A voice rises

Beneath the foliage... O beloved one!

The pool reflects,

Mirror profound,

The silhouette

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Of the dismal willow

Where weeps the wind...

'Tis the hour, let's dream.

A vast and tender

Tranquillity

Seems to descend

From the heavens

On which the star

Sheds iridescent lustre...

'Tis the exquisite hour.

Your professor has attempted — perhaps rather rashly — a free poetic equivalent of Verlaine's elusive magic:

The white of the moon

Glints in the wood;

Vaguely a tune

Wafts from each bole

That leaves overbrood...

O love of my soul!

The pool has set

A mirror deep

For the silhouette

Of willows that lour

Where the winds weep...

'Tis the dream-hour.

A tender and vast

Quiet has come,

Downward cast

From the star-lit

Opaline dome...

Hour exquisite!

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TALK THIRTY-SIX

The Verlainian "pure poetry" about which we have talked should satisfy the definition offered by the Abbe Bremond. Have you heard of the Abbe Bremond? It seems very few in India know that he existed. The only Abbes known here are the Abbe Faria whom Dumas made unforgettable by his Count of Monte Cristo and the contemporary Abbe Breuil who has made his name as an anthropologist. Bremond is not easy to come by in even our libraries and bookshops. I remember inquiring about him at a bookseller's in Bombay. The chap had a fondness for both French literature and Persian — possibly because the Persian language is considered the French of Asia. I asked him, "Have you heard of the Abbe Bremond?" he at once replied, "Oh, I haven't heard of such a river being in Persia. None of the poets have sung of it — as, for instance, they have sung of Rooknabad. You must be familiar with your Hafiz." And he began chanting:

Kinar e ab e Rooknabad, gulgushte Musullara.

I was a little puzzled, then I realised that ab in Persian means "water" and "Abbe Bremond" sounded similar to "Ab e Rook-ndbdd" — "the waters of Rooknabad" figuring in that line which signifies, if I am not mistaken,

The banks of the river Rooknabad and the rose-bowers of Musulla.

Years later, I discovered that even residents in French India were not familiar with his name. I looked up an old Indian Christian in Pondicherry whom I had known to be a book-lover. When I mentioned the Abbe Bremond to him he simply stood and gaped. I felt most self-conscious and began wondering whether I had committed some mistake in pronunciation. I remembered an incident mentioned by Bernard Shaw in the preface to his Back to Methuselah. Shaw was a small boy at the time it occurred. He was with his nurse who was buying something at a local bookstall. A fat elderly man entered, advanced to the counter and said pompously, "Have you the works of the celebrated Buffoon?" Shaw comments in his preface that his own works were at that time unwritten, or it

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is possible that the shop assistant might have misunderstood him so far as to produce a copy of his plays. What, of course, the solemn and weighty gentleman had wanted was the books not of any humorist but of the famous French scientific writer Buffon. When my friend stood staring I thought I had made some sort of Buffoon out of Bremond. But my fears were set at rest when the old fellow put a hand to his ear, bent that organ a little towards me and squeaked with irritation: "Vraiment? Mais quoi vraiment?" I knew he had turned half-deaf since I had last met him. But his conversion of Bremond into "Vraiment" and his firing at me that adverb in question-form were not quite uninspired. For, many a Frenchman must have disbelieved his ears and exploded into that one-word query — "truly?" — when first the Abbe put forward his surprising propositions on poetry.

I have not been able to get at the original of Bremond's thesis. But I remember its central idea. Long ago I gathered it from an essay by Middleton Murry on the Abbe's two little books: La Poesie pure and Poesie et Priere. With Ravindra Khanna's help I traced this essay in our library, but I feel that, excellent in his own way though Murry is, there are shades in Bremond which he strikes me as overlooking. So I shall present Bremond to you — briefly, of course, since I am cut off from the original sources — with a mixture of Murry and my own sense of the Frenchman's drift.

By the by, I may tell you that in France he has a title to fame which is more special in one sense than even the Abbe Breuil's. Whatever Breuil may be, Bremond is one of those whom the French people call "Immortals". In France an Immortal is he who is elected a member of the French Academy, that august institution which lays down the law on language and literature. There are only forty Academicians at any time and one cannot be an Academician, no matter how deserving, unless somebody who is already an Immortal obliges one by dying Well, Fate was kind to Bremond before he himself took his conge. But the speech with which he made his debut in the Academy was considered rather inconsiderate to the older members. He propounded a mystical theory of poetry that quite upset their rationalistic livers, and he paralysed their none-too-active brains by bringing to the aid of his mystical heresies a genuine knowledge of English poets and English art-critics. I don't know how many of the octogenarian Im-

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mortals got dangerously ill, but, as far as I remember, several French writers got a chance soon after Bremond's debut to enter the Academy.

Bremond discerns in Poetry "Magic recueillante... qui nous invite a une quietude, ou nous n'avons plus qu'a nous laisser faire, mais activement, par un plus grand et meilleur que nous. La prose, une phosphorescence vive et voltigeante, qui nous attire loin de nous-memes. La poesie, un rappel de l'interieur..." ("In-drawing magic... which calls us to a quietude, where we have nothing more to do than be carried, but actively, by one greater and better than we are. Prose, a lively and leaping phosphorescence which pulls us away from ourselves. Poetry, a reminder of the inward...") Bre-mond quotes the phrase of Keats about poems yet to come: "There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality." Then he comments: "Ce poids, ou veut-il nous preci-piter, sinon vers ces augustes retraites ou nous attend, ou nous appelle une presence plus qu'humaine? S'il en faut croire Walter Pater, 'tous les arts aspirent a rejoindere la musique'. Non, ils aspirent tous, mais chacun par les magiques intermediaires qui lui sont propres, — les mots, les notes, les couleurs, les lignes, — ils aspirent tous a rejoindre la priere." ("This load, where would it plunge us if not towards those august recesses where awaits us, where beckons us, a presence more than human? If one is to believe Walter Pater, 'all art aspires to the condition of music'. No, all the arts aspire, but each by the magic medium proper to it — words, notes, colours, lines — they all aspire to the condition of prayer.")

Bremond regards the poet as one in whom something that is bent towards mysticism has at the crucial moment taken the wrong turning. Instead of surrendering to the silent spiritual contemplation which is the supreme form of prayer, the poet's soul is lured by the demon of expression to attempt utterance of what can never be uttered. The poet in a man is a mystic manque, a spiritual seeker who on the very threshold of the Holy of Holies goes astray because he bursts into speech: poetry, being a way of speech, blocks the path to the Ineffable. But the poet's communication still seeks always to be mystical. Whether he intellectually admits it or no, all poetry tends to convey a mystical state of being. "Pure poetry" is the rhythmic language which allows or enforces this communication. A mystic manque, the poet as poet need be

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neither moral nor pious and he may not even strive to express anything directly spiritual; but the more perfect the poetry in its own right the nearer it comes by its own inevitable nature to a spell which produces a sense of prayer in the reader.

And how does it grow "prayerful", how does it approach the mystic's silent ecstasy? Bremond says that it cannot do so by its thought-content. The highest spiritual contemplation is a suspension of thought. So the rational or reflective or logopoeic part of poetry is not the true spellbinder, the pure poetic essence. Bremond tells us that Keats originally started his Endymion with the line:

A thing of beauty is a constant joy —

but later changed it to:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

I shall postpone at the moment my own opinion on the nature of the change. According to Bremond, the thought-content in both the versions is hardly distinguishable, but through the second "the current passes" while through the first there is no transmission. What has happened? Bremond opines that the mystical state which, known or unknown to Keats, was hiding behind Keats's poetic movement has communicated its prayerfulness by means of the rhythmic word-pattern constituting the music of poetry. Thus, though poetry does not aspire primarily to the condition of music but to the condition of prayer, it achieves its prayerfulness through a condition of verbal music. Of course, since, for Bremond, silence no less than thought-absence is the stuff of the authentic mystical rapture, the mysticism accomplished is indirect, yet it is mysticism all the same because its means is the inspired rhythmic quality of the verse acting independently of the thought-content. So, poetry may be defined a la Bremond as mystical music that does not depend for its absolute effect on the presence of any idea, the presence of even any recognisable mystical idea. What idea worth mentioning, at least what markable mystical idea, is in that line of Racine which we have already cited as a favourite of Proust's and which is also dear to Bremond:

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La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae

And yet, according to Bremond, it casts a spell by its rhythm and turns us mysteriously inward to the soul. If — prosody permitting — we changed the position of the words and wrote:

La fille de Pasiphae et de Minos,

we would have an ugly coughing phrase because of two separately sounded e's being jammed together — the one ending the fourth foot, the other starting the fifth. There would also be a lack of finality at the line's close because of the four-syllabled name coming before the two-syllabled. Rhythmical reasons would stop the "current" from passing although not only the idea but the words as well remained identical.

Bremond would not go to the extreme of saying that "pure poetry" is devoid of even the perceptional content found in the Racine phrase — the mental observation of a certain legendary child-parent relation. What he does urge is that the idea-factor can be reduced almost to the vanishing point without the poetry suffering in the least and that this is possible because poetry principally conveys an indirect mystical experience and conveys it essentially through verbal music.

Bremond seems in general the nearest to the principles which Edgar Allan Poe enunciated in 1850 and which led Baudelaire seven years later in his Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe to use for the first time in literary history the words "pure poetry". Poe's principles may be set forth under five heads:

1)Poetry is an elevating excitement of the soul — quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the heart, or of that truth which is the satisfaction of the reason.

2)Indefiniteness is an essential element of the true poetic expression, a suggestive indefiniteness answering by means of words to the mysteriousness of the soul's excitement.

3)The words of poetry, on the one hand, bring perceptible images to render vivid the mysterious and, on the other, they approximate to a musical effect not in the sense of cadence or lilt but in the sense of sounds that without intelligible words convey a meaning.

4)Both the imagery and the music must create a whole that is ordered despite being vague.

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5) The degree of soul-excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any length — a long poem being merely a number of short ones linked up by non-poetic matter camouflaged as poetry.

We may note that Poe, although emphasising mystery, does not extol crypticism: he does not make it a sine qua non that poetry should be like Mallarme's or even like Valery's. Also, he does not set expression loose from meaning or from achievement of a significant pattern: all that he wants the music of words to do is rhythmically to articulate vague soul-sensations to the understanding. Further, when he asks for perceptible images he does not exclude either connective transitions among them or the holding of them together in a picture whose wholeness can be seized: what he desires is that the poem should be short enough for the brief intensities possible to us of the soul, and that consequently it should be exclusive of non-poetic transitions and capable of a kind of poetic logic welding the parts subtly together by imaginative or rhythmic associations. There is a kind of rapture merged with sobriety in the poetry that Poe idealises and this is due to his moving away from intellectual discourse not to sheer emotion, much less to subconscious irrationality, but to the soul — something other than the truth-arguing reason or the feeling-intoxicated heart but not devoid of its own special luminosity or its own special excitement. The soul is other than the reason yet not blind or chaotic, other than emotions yet not cold or regimented. It is "elevating" and therefore a higher or deeper power than either the intellect or the heart, a power which does not suffer by being "independent" of them but escapes their limitations while possessing the essence of their virtues, their utilities, in a form beyond them and possessed of what they lack.

The only criticism we may offer of Poe's principles is that they make indefiniteness the general attribute of a whole poem in all its parts. Is there any such need in poetry? No doubt, the soul is the real poet, but is mysteriousness its only property? The mysterious-ness denotes the soul's transcendence of our ordinary faculties: these faculties cannot cope with the soul's experience. But to believe that the soul cannot communicate anything clearly to us is a gratuitous assumption and contradicts the soul's possession of the essence of all our powers. What is required is simply that the core of every poem must have the soul's mystery in it — the quality

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by which a poem exceeds whatever the understanding intellect can limit by its formulations. This need not exclude many things possible for the intellect to understand. Poetry wholly pervaded by the quality of indefiniteness is just one kind of soul-expression.

Poe himself, in some of his best work, did not adhere to his own principles in the narrow sense — indeed no poet ever does. Louis Untermeyer speaks of his having written "a few of the purest lyrics in the language", and continues: "I use 'pure' in Poe's limited sense; poetry, as opposed to science, being to him the communication of 'perceptible images with indefinite sensations to which music is an essential'. The deservedly famous and magical lyric 'To Helen', written in his early teens, is a proof." Here are the three stanzas making up the piece:

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore

That gently o'er a perfumed sea,

The weary way-worn wanderer bore

To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

To the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand,

Ah! Psyche, from the regions which

Are holy land!

The poem is particularly interesting by being "eclectic" — that is, by combining qualities which often fall apart. In the first stanza the theme — "Helen, thy beauty" — comes redolent of the legendary Helen of Troy over whom a nine-year war was fought as we learn from Homer. It comes also with an echo of Marlowe's great lines on that Helen:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

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The "thousand ships" join up with the "Nicean barks" here. But the barks of Nicaea, unlike those ships, are moving towards the "native shore", not towards a foreign land: happy rest is their destination after long labour. And the barks by their Trojan-War association recall to us the warrior who took the longest to return: not only the labour of war at Ilium but also the labour of an ill-starred voyage over unknown waters lay behind him. This was Odysseus who after the fall of Ilium was carried off his course and had to plough the seas for eleven years before reaching his native Ithaca. An Odyssean travail of the poet's being is what Poe's Helen puts an end to by her beauty. Poe's Helen is evidently not Helen of Troy, who was no cause of ultimate rest to Odysseus, yet the new Helen carries an aura of her, as it were, and becomes an ideal woman in whom legends of perfect loveliness are alive and by whom the trouble and the fatigue felt by man from the beginnings of history are relieved. Her ideal-real womanhood is conjured up in this stanza as an exquisite presence — the noun "beauty" of the opening line, the adverb "gently" of the second and the adjective "perfumed" of the third are the key-note to chords resolving the pressure of the phrase "weary way-worn wanderer".

In the second stanza another key-note is given to the theme. The remembrance of Helen, of the Greek warriors who besieged Troy for her sake, and of Odysseus who was one of them — this remembrance becomes the gateway to a sense of the temper, both in life and art, of the ancient world. The Woman addressed is seen as the embodiment of that temper which was behind the culture of not only Greece but also Rome. The poet is felt to be a stormy nature who, after inner dangers and difficulties, has now arrived — through the vision of her shapely mass of curling hair, her finely chiselled nobility of face and feature, her well-built yet supple and fluent body — at a calm assured elevated condition of mind as if at some safe and splendid port after a chequered voyage. The second stanza associates with the exquisite presence evoked in the first an air of serene majesty — the key-note here to chords resolving the pressure of the motif "desperate seas" is in the adjective "classic" in the second line and the nouns "glory" and "grandeur" in the fourth and fifth respectively.

In the last stanza the Helen-suggestion brings about another change of key-note. Now too the days "of yore" mix their light with the poet's life, but what shines out is not anything adequately

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expressible. The lovely woman is beheld against a bright open window that is as if a niche, a recess, to hold a statue, and she looks like a statue moulded by some Greek or Roman sculptor. Poised she still is, but there is a lamp in her hand, a lamp made of a precious stone, a lamp which may be fancied as catching for human guidance the brilliance beyond the window. And for this semi-enigmatic figure the one word that breaks on the poet's mind from the antiquity to which he has referred in the two earlier stanzas is: Psyche. The word means "Soul" and by itself designates the inmost essence of human existence, a spark of the Divine. But in Greek mythology it spells also the name of the girl who married Eros the God of Love, lost him by attempting to look directly into his face and won him back after undergoing various trials imposed on her by his mother Aphrodite. So there may be a hint that the woman who is "Soul" to the poet's longings and searchings has herself also suffered before becoming for him a joy from the depths of the being. But the immediate impact of his apostrophe brings less a mythological memory than a religious rapture. For, the ancient world from which the name "Psyche" is echoed he calls "holy land" and by that phrase he blends Biblical associations with a Graeco-Roman context.

The blending seems to have been facilitated by the influence of some lines from Keats's Ode to Psyche. Keats tells us that the story of Psyche was developed too late for her to be worshipped as a goddess and he promises to erect her a temple within him and be her priest:

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,

Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,

When holy were the haunted forest boughs,

Holy the air, the water, and the fire...

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new-grown with pleasant pain,

Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind...

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

To let the warm Love in!

In spite of difference of idea we have here most of the basic

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imaginative effects found in Poe's last stanza. The open casement of a fane in which Psyche might be thought of as installed in statue-form, the bright torch in her hand, herself drawing from the beholder the expression "O brightest!" and carrying into the regions of the poet's mind the holiness that is truly hers though unrecognised in ancient cults of the holy — all these elements assume a new yet recognisable shape when Poe writes:

Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand,

Ah! Psyche, from the regions which

Are holy land!,

Poe, however, has quite another temper of presentation than Keats. Keats here is earthly-concrete despite his reference to some "untrodden region" of his mind and to "shadowy thought". Poe brings that very region and that very thought into play without yet losing the vivid visual touch: as against Keats's earthy-concrete he is ethereal-concrete. And, by being so, he strikes a key-note varying from those of the first and the second stanzas. Just as the second associates an air of serene majesty with the exquisite presence conjured up in the first, the third penetrates this air with the intensity of a mysterious light — we get the key-note in the first line's adjective "brilliant", the fourth's noun "Psyche" and the fifth's adjective "holy" — the key-note to chords resolving the pressure of the motif concentrating sorrow and entreaty in just that interjection "Ah!"

The three diverse key-notes which throw into relief the eclecticism, the combination of qualities usually falling apart, may also be summed up in the several place-words in the poem: "Nicean" — "Greece" and "Rome" — "holy land". Each voices a distinct poetic mood. And if the whole piece is "pure poetry", "pure poetry" is shown to be many-mooded, capable of manifesting itself through either the enchantingly lovely, the tranquilly noble or the radiantly elusive. If we may take our cue from a word in the middle verse, we may distinguish the three moods and modes as Romantic, Classical, Symbolic. And each of the three verses can be a poem by itself: they vary even in the rhyme-scheme — ababb, ababa, abbab. The first verse has a rich particularity of speech wedded to a vague yearning whose fulfilment comes from a distant

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delight. The second carries an apt generality of language infused with an adventurous ardour reaching its rest in a magnificent security. The third breathes a strange suggestiveness of phrase that turns one inward or upward in a subtle seeking to be self-lost and self-found in a sacred or awesome secrecy.

Poe was by nature inclined to write the last type of poetry and it is through his work of this type that he most influenced the French poets who prepared or founded the school of Symbolism — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Valery. But in the three-stanza'd composition before us we have a complexity of consciousness poised in a catholic inspiration with no special bias towards the Symbolic or Symbolist except in so far as the end of the composition strikes a strange and sacred note. In this piece Poesque "pure poetry" is impartial and discloses more than one way of being: what is common to all the ways is a certain musical movement bearing a certain fineness of conception and perception and arising from what may be termed a thrilled intuition which appeals — as Poe would have put it — from the soul in the poet to the soul in us. This quality common to the three ways is the inner substance and form — the specifically poetic core which stands out from prose-expression. Around this core there is a changing colour-fulness in the Romantic stanza, a controlled yet cogent lucidity in the Classical, a figured and gestured mystery in the Symbolic: the difference in the environing expression makes no odds to the poetic purity.

Personally I would not rank this poem of Poe's extremely high, but there is no doubt of its inspired character and, as I have already said, its eclecticism makes it a good choice in a discussion that usually leans overmuch to one side or another. And we may observe that Baudelaire who apropos of Poe's work first wrote of "pure poetry" betrays also no narrow cult. He too distinguishes the essence of poetry from both truth and sentiment, from "la pature de la raison" ("the nourishment of the reason") as well as from ''l'ivresse du coeur" ("the drunkenness of the heart"), so that didacticism and discourse on the one hand and heated effusiveness on the other are both disqualified. And he stresses for "pure poetry" not any particular purity of language but the unimpeded play of the faculty we know as Imagination. Like Blake, Words-worth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, he considers Imagination as constituting poetry and as the queen of all the faculties. Imagina-

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tion to him is no wild instinctive force: it is a conscious power in which all the powers of the being fuse and come to a focus: it is the seeing and organising power of the spirit (l'esprit) by which the subtle patterns of life and Nature are discovered or created. Baudelaire in his own poetry expresses a special kind of mind — colour-fully semi-morbid, darkly semi-mystical, magically obsessed with modern motifs, heaven-haunted by the lights and shadows of sophisticated and decadent Paris — but he does not lay it down that poetry should be always Baudelairian, always curiously scented with "les fleurs du mal" To possess the specific quality that marks off poetry from prose he demands nothing more than the insight of Imagination rhythmically revealing hidden concords in things.

If this is "pure poetry," as Baudelaire understood it from Poe's "principles", it resolves itself into whatever is felt to be untranslatable into prose. We get a formula covering every sort of poetic phenomenon and asking only for a penetrating harmonious vision as the life of it. The formula emerges into a frankly and soberly universal air in A. C. Bradley's discussion, Poetry for Poetry's Sake. Bradley writes: "When poetry answers to its idea and is purely or almost purely poetic, we find the identity of form and content; and the degree of purity attained may be tested by the degree in which we feel it hopeless to convey the effect of a poem or passage in any form but its own. Where the notion of doing so is simply ludicrous, you have quintessential poetry." Bradley also remarks that in poetry "meaning cannot be expressed in any but its own words, nor can the words be changed without changing the meaning". This statement would contradict Bremond's contention that Keats's first version —

A thing of beauty is a constant joy

and his final one—

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever

are hardly distinguishable in idea. Bradley would see not only in the verbal music but also in the meaning musicalised just a difference which is crucial and renders the latter version, unlike the former, electric with inspiration. I agree with Bradley and, before we go further, I shall try to mark all the differences.

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TALK THIRTY-SEVEN

It was Keats's friend Henry Stephens who, on seeing the first draft of Endymion, remarked that its opening line —

A thing of beauty is a constant joy —

was good but still "wanting something". Keats pondered the criticism a little, then cried out, "I have it", and wrote:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

We can see at once that here, as the Abbe Bremond says, "the current passes". Inspiration has come through. But what exactly has happened?

Bremond declares that the inspiration is not due to a change of meaning, for, according to him, the meaning has not appreciably altered. I should think the correct view to be that the meaning has altered its shade in an important manner and yet the inspiration is not directly due to the alteration. If we bring a subtle scrutiny to bear upon the words we shall not fail to find the alteration of shade.

The first version speaks of an enjoyment that takes place with a prolonged consistency, while the second involves an absolute unconditional response that is perpetual. "A constant joy" has a somewhat restricted substance: it moves from moment to moment through one's life — steadily accompanying one, but not necessarily without beginning and ending somewhere. "A joy for ever" has a free triumphant flow as if from beyond one's birth to beyond one's death — the flow of a larger than individual consciousness, larger than even any time-consciousness, I might say. It is as if not merely our appreciation of an object but also our sense of an inviolable "archetype" of it on a divine plane were suggested. There is the hint of some endless and undying and godlike essence of beauty, existing and persisting behind earthly objects that perish and human experiences that pass.

Not to see this hint is to miss the final distinction of meaning in the line. And if Bremond does not see it he has not responded with the right alertness of mind. But, while such a hint may strike us as right and also as more in tune with the rest of the Endymion-passage, we shall mislead ourselves if we believe that the sheer

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meaning has metamorphosed Keat's line. Apart from the context of a line, the rightness or wrongness of meaning in poetry is irrelevant. A poet can hold any opinion and turn it to great verse. Though the meaning of "constant joy" does not accord so well with Keats's context, there is nothing in it to prevent a poet from making it memorable in a different context — if he knows how to do so: that is, if he knows how to give it a finer expression than Keats did. Indeed, that finer expression will hold a nuance which the original line lacks — the change will come about by the very recasting of it. Yet, in the overall aspect as distinguished from the detailed aspect, there can be some parity, such as does not exist between the original line and Keats's actual recasting of it. So from a general viewpoint we may aver that the meaning of "constant joy" fails in Keats's line because of a failure of inspiration and not by any intrinsic poetic defect. The meaning of "a joy for ever" can also from a general viewpoint make poorer poetry in spite of its being what we may call a greater thought and in spite of its according better with Keats's context. Its effectiveness comes from the way it has been expressed. Modify the expression in the slightest and it may fall flat. The form, therefore, and not the sheer significance of Keats's new line is the wonder-worker.

I may here throw your mind back to Mallarme's answer to the question of Degas the painter: "How is it that I have so many ideas, yet can't write poems?" Mallarme said: "My dear Degas, poems are not written with ideas — they are written with words." Mallarme surely did not refer to meaningless words: poems are not written with gibberish. Nor was he referring to intellectual formulation in language: poetry is not logic set to metre. He was simply stressing the importance of form. Perhaps a less epigrammatic manner of putting the matter would be that poetic form consists of inspired words that embody ideas imaginatively, emotionally, rhythmically. Any kind of idea will do, provided there is a certain choice of words and a certain ordering of the words chosen, creating an imaginative and emotional stir and bringing about a rhythm which reinforces revelatory word-suggestions with revelatory sound-suggestions.

How vitally the imaginative, emotional and rhythmical elements hold together can be easily shown. Mark what a world of difference there is if Keats's line, without any word being altered, suffers a slight change of word-order, thus:

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A thing of beauty is for ever a joy.

The overall idea remains the same — and yet that large, unobstructed, profoundly thrilling finality is gone. It is a fine thought but not fine enough feeling and not fine enough imaginative experience: the stirring of the consciousness does not occur in the depths and spaces of our being. A clipping and a jumping enter into the rhythm, and there is a slightly forced imparting of the emotion and the imagination instead of a natural release of them into us. Technically, one may say that the release is done by two means. First, the immediate following of "joy" by "for ever" in Keats's line concentrates, from the standpoint of grammar, a glow of eternity, of divineness, of archetypalness in the former: the reversed sequence, while logically leaving everything the same, seems to thin away the glow. Likewise, "for ever" gets more spiritually neutral, less positive and potent and vivid when it is not mixed and annealed in significance with "joy". To break up Keats's order of the two expressions is to interrupt their mutual enrichment. Secondly, a syllable hanging out in "ever" beyond the pentameter scheme gives by its unaccented extra sound the impression of indefinite continuation, the breaking through from the limited into the illimitable, the exceeding of confines and the emerging into freedom and fulfilment — in short, a reinforcing of word-suggestions by sound-suggestions. Yes, the technique has an effect, but the technique itself is the hand of an inner force fingering deftly its medium, guided by a light and rhythm of the being and not from without by mechanical skill. The mere technical effect could have been achieved by writing:

A thing of beauty is a joy unending

A thing of beauty is a joy that's endless.

These variants are no "duds"; however, nothing in them is so satisfyingly suggestive, so aptly vibrant as "for ever". They lack the perfect inevitability of inner and outer form possessed by Keats's phrase.

Going to the root of the question, we shall find this perfect inevitability to be a mystical value. Keats himself supplies a clue by the Platonic sense of beauty he has brought into his line. That "for ever" extends, as I have indicated, the joy of beauty to a divine

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ever" extends, as I have indicated, the joy of beauty to a divine and archetypal realm. The beauty, therefore, of a line of poetry as of any other thing can be seen to lie in its participation in this realm. Perfect inevitability of form, according to this view, springs from and manifests some supreme and flawless Creative Delight behind the time-process. Modern aesthetics fights shy of such a theory, but whoever interrogates clearly enough his experience of poetic or any other beauty at its intensest cannot put by the sense of the ultimate, the absolute, the Divine. It is not mere pleasure that is given us. Poetry does not end with causing a happy equilibrium, as I. A. Richards contends, between the diverse impulses at play in our nature. Pleasure is there and a happy equilibrium is there; there is also much else. What is basic is our recognition of an irreproachable finality, an utter perfection that confers on every poetic statement a godlike power. Various poets make various statements, they differ among themselves, but each of them seems to bring the compelling touch of the ultimate and the absolute. Though our intellect may not agree, we cannot help feeling that here is something unchallengeable, something that can stand like a deity and command our consciousness. We feel that it participates in a Being that is flawless and "a joy for ever". The participation is through form alone: that is why all kinds of statements are possible in poetry and the question of "truth" in the scientific, philosophic, religious or historical connotation does not arise. Perfect form or beauty is "truth", as Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn declared, in one connotation only: the Being in whose flawless and eternal beauty it participates is the basic reality, the fundamental archetype of all existence, so that whatever fails to manifest this Being is to the extent of its failure a falsity and not the truth.

Art is a wonderful effort to manifest it. Inspiration, that passing of "the current", is the artist's inner sense of it governing his medium. We can analyse the governing, study the elements of imagination, emotion and rhythm, but these elements fuse into a masterpiece because the touch of a mystical Power falls on them. Nothing save that touch metamorphoses Keats's original line and makes it dance through the ages on the lips of men.

Bremond is right in making much of mysticism in relation to poetry. His error lies in making it a direct operator. It is easy to criticise him and show that many poets have no mystical bent, no mystical substance as such. Middleton Murry labours to point out just this fact and thereby convict Bremond of confusion. He coun-

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ters both the propositions of Bremond — that there need be no thought at all in poetry and that poetry expresses a mystical experience sidetracked. On the first point his position, in effect, is: "True poetry always contains thought, but thought can vary from a comprehensive declaration like Shakespeare's 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on' to the most tenuous apprehension of a quality physical, or spiritual, or both, as in 'the plainsong cuckoo gray.' " Here he is right. But afterwards he falls short and betrays inconsistency. On the second point I shall read out to you his position: "What is essential is that the 'thought' should be an intrinsic part of an emotional field in the poet's mind, and that a corresponding emotional field should be excited in ourselves. No deus (ex machina or immanent) has any aid to give. Some poets may think about God — perchance they may experience Him — but other poets have done neither one nor the other; but all are poets if they have the power so to mate the word to an entire mental experience that its similar is aroused in their readers. By virtue of that power alone they are 'pure poets' and their words 'pure poetry'. Bremond speaks of 'un plus grand et meilleur que nous': the one who is greater and better than ourselves is not God, he is simply the poet who communicates to us the unity of his own inward experience which is indefeasibly our own. At the touch of the poetic experience we become that which we are and which we were not — momentarily whole. Intellect and emotion, mind and heart, regain their lost unity within us. We gain a positive enrichment and integration; we might say, if the phrase were not hampered with theological and psychological obligations, that we are put, if not in possession of, at least into touch with our souls. To avoid those obligations, we must be content to claim a momentary union of thought and feeling. This union is not mystical but it is religious. All great poets must be religious. For high poetry and high religion are at one in the essential that they demand that a man shall not merely think thoughts, but feel them — that his highest mental act be done with all his heart and with all his mind and with all his soul."

We have here a peculiar exhibition of taking away with one hand and giving back with the other. While refusing to grant a mystical quality to poetry Murry is yet driven to talk of soul and religion. But is it not rather ridiculous to boil soul down to a union of thought and feeling — as if "a momentary union of thought and feeling" could create that deep or exquisite sense of the flawless

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that poetic expression gives? It is the research into this sense that takes one to the threshold of the mystical. And what a poor definition of religion we have in the formula: "not merely think thoughts, but feel them"! Is it because Shakespeare felt his thoughts that we have that passage over which Murry exults, the passage whose thought is the futility of human existence? —

Tommorow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

On the thought in this, Murry comments: "It is one which the well-tuned man would rather not believe to be true; and yet, when he has listened to Macbeth, something is changed. There are undreamed-of riches, it seems, even in ultimate despair; a glory is shed over the road to dusty death. This despair is not despairing, because it is complete. The act of the poet's mind has thrilled the poet's heart." May we ask Murry why a glory is shed? Can the thrilling of the poet's heart by the poet's mind shed it? No. It is because the lines have the gait as of a god. Perfection is somehow abroad. Shakespeare's heart-beats, when Shakespeare expressed his thought, became the footfalls of that Perfection: some haloed power walked out from the poet's depths into his poetry and stamped on it its unimpeachable faultlessness of form. And it is the striving for and the vague receptivity to this power that constitutes religion. Murry is made to introduce terms which he finds unavoidable but which he attempts to water down. The impression that all poets do not believe in or sense God has covered his eyes to the fact that poetry cannot be unless the mystical presence acts in its intensity and converts it to an aesthetic form of the absolute. If we have to speak of soul and religion, let us plumb the true implications of our necessity. Mysticism, rightly understood, is the real maker of "pure poetry".

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TALK THIRTY-EIGHT

Today we may round off our discussion of Pure Poetry — with a remark of Sri Aurobindo's. Speaking of the poets of the early nineteenth century and comparing as well as contrasting these voices of the New Romanticism shot with a spiritual aspiration, particularly in alliance with a Nature-mysticism, Sri Aurobindo pairs Wordsworth and Byron on one hand and, on the other, Shelley and Keats. Then he remarks about the two latter: "They are perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus."¹

In this matter of pure poetry, we may cite a couple of other observations by Sri Aurobindo. About Shelley he says: "Shelley uses language throughout as a poet; he was incapable of falling into the too hard and outward manner of Byron or yielding to the turn towards mere intellectuality which always beset Wordsworth. The grain of his mind was too saturated with the hues of poetic vision, he had too splendid and opulent an imagination, too great a gift of flowing and yet uplifted and inspired speech for such descents..."² Apropos of Keats he declares: "Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, — not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era."³

To get all this into proper focus we may note further that, although Shelley and Keats are called the most purely poetic minds, Sri Aurobindo does not rank them on the whole as high as Milton, much less Shakespeare. Even Spenser he puts above them in a total view. Thus, relating them to the Elizabethan Age, he tells us: "They have a greater thing to reveal than the Elizabethan poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare and Spenser."⁴ After marking the frequent poetic perfection not only of the great Elizabethans but also of Indian poets of a similar inspiration of the Life-spirit, like Kalidasa, Sri Aurobindo puts his finger on the weak spot in the new manifestation: "A poetry of spiritual vision and the sense of things behind life and above the

1. The Future Poetry, Ed. 1972, p. 129. 2. Ibid. , pp. 1 26-27.

3. Ibid. , pp. 1 29-30. 4. Ibid. , pp. 1 1 1 .

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intellect must similarly develop from its essence a characteristic voice, cry, mould of speech, natural way of development, habits of structure."¹ Shelley and Keats, like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, "were embarrassed by the same difficulty of a time which was not ready for work of this kind, not prepared for it by any past development, not fitted for it by anything in the common atmosphere of the age.... Each besides had an immense development of that force of separative personality which is in art at least the characteristic of our later humanity. There is nothing of that common aim and manner which brings into one category the Elizabethan dramatists or the contemporaries of Pope and Dry-den."²

This means that, in spite of their supreme poetic gifts, Shelley and Keats fell short of complete fulfilment because they erupted as it were, into an age which was not organically ready for spiritual self-expression, and because there was no pervasive awareness of the sort of revelatory work they had to do. But this also means that, if their age had been ready and they themselves had possessed more insight into their general destiny, Shelley and Keats, on account of their supreme gifts, could have stood higher than Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser so far as "fullness of native utterance" and "perfect correspondence between substance and form" are concerned. Neither of them had the capacity to create living characters: so they could not have competed with Shakespeare in what may specifically be termed creative genius and perhaps even Milton's solitary creation, Satan, would have breathed more life than anything in Shelley and Keats. But they would have equalled and excelled Spenser all-round. Spenser has "more of a descriptive vision than of the larger creative power or narrative force"³ and so his human figures through whom he works out his scheme of a romantico-ethical story stand as the "allegorical body" of the powers of Good and Evil rather than as these Powers' "expressive opportunity of life."⁴

What made Shelley and Keats hold the promise of surpassing all English poets in the matter of expression is picked out by Sri Aurobindo under a different aspect in either of them. As we saw, Shelley he distinguished for the freedom his language had from a hard and outward manner as well as from a manner merely intel-

1 . Ibid. , p. 1 13. 2. Ibid. ,

3 . Ibid. , p. 75. 4. Ibid. , p. 77.

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lectual: this freedom made him use language always as a poet and, on the positive side, it lay in his mind being deeply hued with poetic vision, splendidly charged with imagination and greatly gifted with a high and intense fluency of speech. A radiant spontaneity of rhythmic utterance is the essence of Shelley.

Keats brings a power of extreme originality in choice of poetic words. An acute sense of beauty is ever at work in his compositions: beauty sensuous, beauty imaginative, beauty intellectual, beauty mystical is the very soul of him and he is in possession of an expressive instrument alive to the demands of the inner ear which is the true maker of poetic rhythm. Sri Aurobindo has well said in general how the inner ear's action takes place. "Technically, we may say that this comes in when the poet becomes, in Keats' phrase, a miser of sound and syllable, economical of his means, not in the sense of a niggardly sparing, but of making the most of all its possibilities of sound."¹ He further explains: "...every sound is made the most of, whether in its suppression or in its swelling expansion, its narrowness or its open wideness, in order to get in the combined effect something which the ordinary flow of poetry cannot give us."² Here we may touch on another side of the perfecting of the poet's means. Keats, adapting Spenser, used in a letter Of his the phrase: "fill every rift with ore." This implies an enriching of every step of the poetic expression — enriching not in the sense of a glaring ornamentation but of picking and choosing one's words with a view to bringing out the finest suggestion of a thing, the finest shade of an idea, the finest stir of an experience and not allow anything commonplace, anything already used, anything easily found: it is not enough that the conception should be subtle or great in a broad manner, it must be expressed in the most artistically original mode. A radiant artistry of rhythmic utterance is the essence of Keats.

Poetry is an art, and so every poet is an artist. But the poet is he who sings, the artist is he who makes the song. In Shelley it is the singing impulse that is predominant, in Keats the impulse by which the song is made. Shelley is busy primarily with the soul that is to be embodied, Keats with the body that is to be ensouled. But both of them at their best have equally the soul and the body. The difference of stress brings, of course, a difference in the texture of their work. Shelley's work is not so attention-drawing in details as

1. Ibid., p. 2 1 . 2. Ibid. ,

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is Keats's: it has more a general sweep of lustrous language, while Keats's has a specific, a distinct, an individualised sparkle in almost each step of the movement. There is no essential loss by him of wholeness, just as with Shelley there is no essential loss of particularity; yet the eye and ear of the one are more in love with the parts while those of the other are more enamoured of the ensemble. It is rather a question of temperamental variation than of variation in poetic quality. In Shelley the poet as such is more audible, in Keats the artist as such is more visible; but, in both of them, the poet and the artist function with a sheerness and purity that are unique in English.

What we have called temperamental variation in the midst of their equal uniqueness as pure poets is formulated by Sri Aurobindo in more significant and comprehensive terms when he tells us that Shelley sings from the skies earthwards, Keats looks from earth towards Olympus. Shelley is fundamentally aware of the spiritual, though it is never the exclusively spiritual: his three godheads — celestial Light, celestial Love, celestial Liberty — he always tries passionately to bring down to earth without losing their intrinsic shape and colour. People often picture Shelley as a being who is entirely absorbed in the ethereal and who, when he touches the earthly, does so with a lesser poetry. Going by this idea, I once set out to purge his famous Ode to the Skylark of what struck me as comparatively grosser and hence unShelleyan ingredients so that the whole might be of one shimmering iridescent piece. Sri Aurobindo pulled me up short and in a masterly letter showed me that earth is not intrinsically less divine than the ether and that to forget Shelley's constant endeavour to marry the two because he saw the same divinity within them is to cut out from him a most meaningful and characteristic element. However, it must be granted that the spiritual and not the physical held his gaze first and foremost: from there he looked downwards with the eyes of the rapturous reformer.

Keats is aware, first and foremost, of the physical, the sights and sounds and scents and touches of the earth, the shapes and energies that achieve a concrete beauty, a beauty living to the senses. Yet he is not confined to sensuous wonders. His heart aches for the divine originals of them and he moves intensely through his imagination and his thought to see and feel within terrestrial shapes and energies the Gods and Goddesses breathing and moving. No

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doubt, he frequently lingers overmuch with the delights of the earth, but never with them in their crude forms, and his deepmost endeavour is, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, "the discovery of the divine Idea, Power and living norm of Beauty which by its breath of delight has created the universe, supports it and moves towards a greater perfection, inspires the harmonies of inward sight and outward form, yearns and strives towards the fullness of its own self-discovery by love and delight."¹

Shelley and Keats stand side by side with an apparent antinomy but with an essential identity. Not that they realised this identity at all when they came into contact with each other: Keats was a less out-raying personality than Shelley and he found Shelley's work not sufficiently alert to the needs of craftsmanship as he understood them, and he felt that he would best develop if he did not get too much into Shelley's floating aura of magnanimity with its streamers of a world-message. Shelley saw in Keats a soul exquisitely struggling for expression within an entanglement of hypersensitive art-conscience, and he was eager to impart to him all the elan and speed through the ether that were his own speciality. When, however, Keats died, Shelley wrote the superb Adonais, in which he recognises and proclaims his own essential oneness with all that Keats stood for and strove after. It was in the fitness of things that one out of the two most purely poetic minds in English literature should write the greatest of all elegies on the other, affirming with him his unity in death when the unity in life remained unrealised and seeing in a final vision his own death soon following that of Adonais as if in answer to a call and joining them both together in the Vastness and Light that were the inner essence of either one's poetry. Do you remember the closing stanza of Shelley's poem? —

The breath whose might I have invoked in song

Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

The massy earth and sphered sky are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the Abode where the Eternals are.

1. Ibid., pp. 1 30-3 1 .

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Now that we have started quoting we may continue with some characteristic passages and appreciate the pure poetry which habitually ascends from "massy earth" and that which mostly descends from "sphered sky." Here is Shelley apostrophising Emilia Viviani, the Italian girl whom he found immured in a convent by a tyrannical father and who seemed to the young English poet the embodiment of everything celestial:

Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,

Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman

All that is insupportable in thee

Of light and love and immortality!

...the brightness

Of her divinest presence trembles through

Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew

Embodied in the windless heaven of June,

Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon

Burns inextinguishably beautiful.

Here again is Shelley describing, in the song of the Fourth Spirit in the First Act of his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, the poet:

Nor seeks or finds he mortal blisses,

But feeds on the aerial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.

He will watch from dawn to gloom

The lake-reflected sun illume

The yellow bees in the ivy bloom,

Nor heed nor see what things they be,

But from these create he can

Forms more real than living man,

Nurselings of immortality!

Here finally is Shelley in a moment of unsurpassable aspiration — simple, direct, penetrating to the core of the mystical sense:

I loved — oh, 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

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And all that it contains contains not thee,

Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.

Now look at Keats. When we think of him we think of phrases like: "the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings" or "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" or "From silken Samarkand to cedar'd Lebanon", or, at a deeper level, "The journey homeward to habitual self — phrases in which every word counts in its individuality and every sound fills out the sense with what the words themselves cannot hold. Keats comes to us with packed yet subtle pictures —

But here there is no light

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

Words carry in such lines the very texture of things, but their function is also to suggest and not merely express: how perfectly the phrase about the light being blown from heaven with the breezes conjures up the sense of glimmers falling upon the forest-depths by the soft swaying of the thick foliage hung above. Keats is a master too of objective fidelity touched with subjective significance:

A little noiseless noise among the leaves

Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.

Or else we have the poignantly human leading on to the en-chantingly visionary, as in the great passage where the Nightingale's song becomes the music of an Immortal Bird binding together the perishing ages and the severed areas of existence:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

I do not know whether criticism has noted the subtle artistry of this

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passage which has striking felicities enough. The sad heart of Ruth admits of a path, while the faery lands forlorn are rendered difficult of access by perilous seas — Ruth is sick for her own home, while those magic casements are in dream-distances — she stands in tears that are the common lot of humanity, while they look out on waters that human labour can hardly cross — everywhere we have a lovely contrast and yet the intimate and touching human picture prepares the remote and exquisite snatch out of gram-marye, for Ruth is away from her home, a great gulf divides her from her heart's vision, and those tears of hers are salt and shining as the seas and the corn may be waving in the wind before her wistful gaze like the heave and fall of the foam-flecked surf and the bending swaying ears of the harvest are alien, a grievous strangeness secretly sister to the bewitching unknown that pierces the heart with the beauty caught through those windows that are the eyes of eternal reverie.

From the Nightingale's Song let us turn to an even deeper spell that Keats can cast with a merging of sight and sound, sound and silence. Recollect those lines on the carvings upon the sides of the Grecian Urn:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

We verge on the mystical in such visions that carry us into a world-effacing trance, as it were. And a remarkable mixture of the mystical and the morbid, a picture of divine distress we come across in a passage that Graham Hough has called "verse of a sere, burnt-out splendour that exceeds anything else in Keats":

Then saw I a wan face,

Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd

By an immortal sickness which kills not,

It works a constant change, which happy death

Can put no end to; deathwards progressing

To no death was that visage; it had past

The lily and the snow...

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We may now sum up from Sri Aurobindo's view of Shelley and Keats what pure poetry amounts to. It is poetry in which the outward manner does not predominate. It is poetry which is not mere intellectuality decked out and metricised. It is poetry which is a-thrill with something inward and has concrete vision and marked rhythm. It is poetry lifted far beyond prose by a perfection of form, either with details prominent yet harmonised or with details hurried and washed into oneness. It is poetry where the substance is steeped in the depths of one's being and the form is touched by the sense of some nameless perfection. It is poetry in which this kind of substance and this kind of form are so fast a unity that any attempt to separate them changes the very life of the joint creation.

Mind you, though Shelley and Keats were both haunted by a mystic hunger, they are not pure poets because the mystic element is explicit in their best work. If mystic explicitness were the sine qua non, Shakespeare who has little of it would not be so supreme. But a mystic implicitness is indispensable. For, without it ordinary things and themes and emotions and ideas of the human situation could not have reached the acme of expressive form that Shakespeare shows again and again and again. This acme is impossible unless one lives aware of what I have called a nameless perfection whose presence is in the depths of one's being. Poets achieve pure poetry of various types by a kind of aesthetic spirituality which need not even believe openly in Soul or God. But the fact that spirituality, even if under an aesthetic aspect, is necessary is important and significant. And it is also important and significant that the two most purely poetic minds who have used the English language were openly lit up with a sense of the spiritual, however mentalised and not directly Yogic that sense might have been. Perhaps here we have a pointer that supreme work on a supreme scale is possible more to those who have such a sense not only implicit but explicit. Let me repeat that Shelley and Keats are not greater than Shakespeare, or even than Lucretius who was an avowed atheist and materialist. But they could have been greater in poetic expression if they had found the right milieu and consciousness and manner for the spiritual bent of their true selves and thus fulfilled the gift they had of extreme and all-pervading poetic utterance — the most abundant gift of pure poetry.

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TALK THIRTY-NINE

We have finished our discussion of pure poetry. We gave the subject the broadest definition possible and made pure poetry depend not on the kind but on the quality. All kinds can be "pure" and the purity is determined by the distance from prose— distance in terms of intensity of vision, intensity of word, intensity of rhythm and not in terms of what is popularly thought of as poetic — namely, a special vocabulary and an unfamiliar theme. Pure poetry thus becomes co-extensive with life itself, but life in its inner nature: as Nirodbaran has put it in a line which is poetry at its purest —

Life that is deep and wonder-vast.

"Inner nature": that is a phrase which we can make our point of departure into a talk on what Sri Aurobindo calls Planes of Poetry. And the talk would not be irrelevant to pure poetry, for poetry can be pure not only with any vocabulary and with any theme but also from any plane. According to Sri Aurobindo, man lives on several planes, and Existence is a manifold chord of powers, each power constituting a plane on which there is a universal play and within this universal Nature a large number of individual natures. People do not always realise that there are other worlds than the physical: they consider all the powers of our being as merely different aspects of bodily activity or else, if distinct from that activity, effective only through centres in the body — the brain, the heart, the solar plexus and the less solar and more lunar or lunatic centres below. The play of different centres in us is felt in a general manner by most people; and a hint, through such a feeling, at Sri Aurobindo's "planes" is very well given in a semi-doggerel a poet once composed in connection with his lady-love:

I put my hand upon my heart

And swore that we should never part.

I wonder what I would have said

If I had put it on my head.

The question, of course, is whether when one puts one's hand

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upon the heart, one is at all conscious of a head to which the hand may be transferred: as commonly expressed, one loses one's head. But we cannot perhaps totally deny the co-presence and interaction of head and heart. Do you remember the lines I once quoted to you from Housman?

If men were drunk for ever

With liquor, love or fights,

Lief would I rise of mornings

And lief lie down at nights.

But men at times are sober

And think by fits and starts,

And while they think, they fasten

Their hands upon their hearts.

Thinking and feeling take place simultaneously in the Housmanian situation. But one may argue that thinking itself takes place in various centres and not always in the head. Did I never tell you what Aristotle took to be the seat of thought? If ever there was a sheer intellectual, an intellectual whose work is abstract and even at times dry-as-dust, it was Aristotle. Quite a contrast to Plato whose mind was not only a light but also a fire, one in which intellect was married to imagination and made the philosopher a poet even if he did not fulfil the poetic element in him through any substantial body of verse proper. Chesterton has wittily hit off the difference between Plato and Aristotle and summed up the qualities of their thinking:

Said Aristotle unto Plato:

"Have another hot potato.

" Said Plato unto Aristotle:

"No, thank you, I prefer the bottle."

I suppose Aristotle had finished talking to Plato and was offering to continue. He must have asked Plato's permission because Plato was his teacher. But one hot potato of sober and earth-heavy intellectualism from the pupil was enough for the teacher who loved a soar, with all the being a lightness in the high heavens drenched with the luminous wine of the sun-god. The bottle sym-

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bolises the holding, by man's mind, of the fire and ether of inspired supra-intellectual vision. We may say the bottle stands for individual expression and the wine in it for the stuff of poetry shaped according to the form of the individual's being. But just as bottles vary in shape as well as volume, so also the wine itself varies. The variety we can describe in several ways. At present we shall describe it in terms of planes.

However, before we come to planes, let us finish with Aristotle. I said that Aristotle was brains incarnate. And yet when he wrote of the functions of the human system he said that the brain had the function merely of regulating the temperature of the body: some sort of balancing of our hot and cold sensations was the work of the grey matter of our cerebrum! Imaginatively, we might state that when things got very white or very black the brain mixed a compensating hue and endeavoured constantly to make everything grey like its own matter! Aristotle never thought that his own thought was working through his brain. When he got very cold-blooded with abstractions the brain added a bit of warmth and saved him from freezing to death by his own intellectualism: it could not change his potato to anything else but could make it hot. Or, looking at Plato, he must have believed that when Plato got too fiery with his famous allegories and myths and metaphors illustrating philosophical doctrines the brain manufactured an amount of ice and spread it in Plato's body in order to save him from internal combustion: his bottle might contain "fire-water" but it could come iced to the thinker's palate. Aristotle, locating the movement of thought itself, fixed upon the heart as its seat.

Perhaps Plato would have done the same and with more reason. Aristotle's attribution of thinking to the heart provides us with an insight into the Greek nature. The Greeks are often regarded as intellectuals out and out, but when we closely examine the character of their intellectuality we see a certain instinctive trend in it, a fine feeling for truth. It is not without significance that the Greeks identified the highest Truth with the highest Beauty and defined Virtue itself as the courage to live and die for the highest Beauty. But what is this Beauty? It is not appearance, it is essence — not beauty of body but beauty of being. We have ordinarily set up the figure of Apollo or of Aphrodite as representing the Greek ideal of Beauty. But actually this ideal was caught in the pug-nosed, stumpy, pot-bellied satyr of a man that was Socrates! He

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was Beauty incarnate because his very being was saturated with a sense of the supreme Beauty that was Truth. The mere physical looks did not matter in the ultimate judgment, the ultimate grading. Here we discern a premium put on Character, on Goodness. But one thing we must remember: a puritan virtue, a self-torturing ethicism, a bigoted and persecuting morality was never what the Greeks meant by Goodness. Greek Goodness had a grace about it, a wideness about it, a balance and harmony about it. The Greek ethical sense was fused with the Greek aesthetic sense just as the Greek sense of truth was always charged with a sense of proportion and symmetry and a lucid shapeliness as if truth could never be true unless it came living either in visible loveliness or in loveliness of moral nature and action.

All this complexity-in-unity of the Greek mind expressed itself in Greek poetry which, according to Sri Aurobindo, dealt with life from one large viewpoint, that of the inspired reason and the enlightened and chastened aesthetic sense. Mark the epithet "inspired" affixed to "reason". Not reason in its own right but with an influx of something that is both more luminous and more sweet than itself — something that yet keeps the swabhava of reason unspoiled and allows a bright order, an exquisite inter-relation and wholeness. Mark also the epithets "enlightened" and "chastened" for "aesthetic sense". Beauty is indeed the guiding deity for the Greeks but upon it falls a light and on it works a refining power, the beauty is not blind, the beauty is not uncontrolled and licentious. Even in Aristotle, despite his apparent dryness, one feels a certain height and depth: his style is abstract but his substance is concrete and is not of a flat and level world of thought. Now and then the inner height and depth break through the style, as when he speaks of the Immortal within the mortal or when he seeks to characterise the nature of the original Divinity who is the Prime Mover. Apropos of motion, Aristotle says that it cannot be explained in terms of causality by saying that one thing moves another. What moves another is itself in motion and, like that, we have an infinite regress with nothing static to start from. Only that which is unmoved, eternally at rest, immutable, can be the cause of motion: it must stand outside the time-process which is motion endless and everywhere. However, how shall we conceive of the unmoved Mover's effect of endless and ubiquitous motion? How is this motion caused without any movement on the

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part of God? Aristotle struck out the wonderful explanatory phrase: "He moves all things by being their beloved." This is thought working through the heart, and the inner heart besides, not the merely emotion-flushed heart but the heart in which, as Sophocles puts it, are engraved those eternal laws whose home is the high ether.

By the way, the famous last line of Dante's Divina Commedia, which we once translated with a slight freedom at the end—

The love that moves the sun and all the stars—

is Aristotelian and not Romantico-mystic. It is not the doctrine that God is the Love by which things in the world are set moving to their proper goal. Dante does not deny that God is Love, though his equation could permit certain things that would shock us out of our skins, as when he makes everlasting Hell declare:

I too was created by Eternal Love.

But what Dante in that terminal line of his masterpiece meant was the love inspired in all created things by God's Beauty and guiding each to its fulfilment which is ultimately that Beauty itself.

Yes, the Greeks made the heart the seat of thought, though it was rather the aesthetic than the emotional heart: they were not drowned in emotion, they were quickened into artistic harmony. Aristotle would have been surprised at being called "brainy". But if he had met an African Hottentot in the act of thinking, the Hottentot would have been surprised at Aristotle's calling him "hearty". When the psychologist Jung had a talk with the African aborigines and advised some of them to think more and use their brains, they looked at him as if he had himself been what we should term "brainless". They would have used another expression with a reference to a part of the body far below the cranium. They told Jung politely that the seat of thought was not up there in the skull but right down here inside the belly. Don't think the Hottentot is quite off the mark. The Mother has told us that thinking can be done through even one's little finger: in fact, wherever one's consciousness chooses to poise itself. I suppose that, though the person himself may not be conscious of it, the fingers of the writer, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, even

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the cricketer, always think — and often think more quickly, more efficiently than their owner does with his brain where he is com-monly poised.

We have talked of thinking on various levels and parts — we seem to have digressed in doing so; but the apparent digression is really relevant to our theme. And it is relevant not only because several levels and parts are involved. It is relevant also because what is involved is thinking. Man, full-fledged man, man of the historical times as distinguished from the prehistoric Homo Nean-derthalensis and the like, is labelled zoologically as Homo Sapiens, "Wise Man", "Man the Thinker". Of course each of us considers himself wise and considers every other person otherwise, but all distinctions here too are made in terms of more wisdom, less wisdom, no wisdom. Thought is our main characteristic, and when we speak of poetic planes we may broadly speak of poetic thinking from this plane or that, from the brain-level or the heart-level or the belly-level, etc. But we should specify one thing: the multi-levelled poetic thinking occurs from inside the levels and not from their surface.

This specification takes us back to the phrase with which we commenced our lecture: inner nature. Poetry, like all art, like all worthwhile expression, comes from the inner nature of man. Speaking of planes, we should declare that the outer physical plane is never the source of poetry. To look at the world without any insight is not poetry: our physical eyes image things without looking into them. A photographic expression will not be poetry or any literature: it will be expression in which aspiration and dream and desire and understanding have no part: a bare description will be all we get. To the outer eye of man things are as they were to Wordsworth's Peter Bell:

A primrose by a river's brim

A yellow primrose was to him

And it was nothing more.

We may say: "A yellow primrose is a thing interesting enough. Why can't it be made poetry?" Well, it can't if in speaking of it we stop with the words "yellow primrose" and don't associate the object with any gleam in our gaze, any stir of our pulse, any thrill in our brain, any figurative view of it as in the Porter's

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expression in Shakespeare's Macbeth: . . . go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire" or else as in Ophelia's speech to her - : brother Laertes in Hamlet:

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,

Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,

Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,

Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,

And recks not his own rede. (I.iii.50)

Even the word "primrose" has something of attitude and judgment mixed with it, for it derives from the Mediaeval English "primrose" which itself is from the Mediaeval Latin "prima rosa", literally, "first rose". We do not know why this rose was called "first"., but some sort of grading in quality or time seems involved and that means attitude and judgment. Perhaps we have a clue in Milton's line:

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies...

("Rathe" means coming or blooming early in the day or the year.) Even to feel the yellow primrose to be beautiful is to bring in more than a mere perception. Emotion, imagination, understanding — all these things make of the primrose something beyond just a perceived object. Surely poetry exceeds the bare act of perceiving. It is sight plus insight, and to have insight an eye other than the outer comes into operation. Our inner nature begins to act.

That is why, when Sri Aurobindo speaks of the poetic phenomenon, he refers always to the "subtle" planes and not the gross external physical. Thus he says in general: "Poetry, if it deserves the name at all, comes always from some subtle plane through the creative vital and uses the outer mind and other external instruments for transmission only." In all poetry, the creative vital is necessary, for else there can be no manifestation on earth. The creative vital is required even for the manifestation of the Super-mind in the world. And to let the work of the creative vital come into the physical plane, the outer mind and other instruments enter the field. The best poetry is produced when the vital force of creative beauty allows itself to respond faithfully to the inspiration and the outer consciousness remains entirely passive and transmits

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what the inspiration has formed with the vital substance and impetus without being mixed or altered. The inspiration itself can hail from any one of the following planes:

1)The Subtle Physical.

2)The Vital.

3)The Creative or Poetic Intelligence.

4)The Inner Mind, with its four domains:

a)The inner Mind Intelligence.

b)The Intuitive Intelligence.

c)The Mystic Mind.

d)The Mind of Dynamic Vision.

5)The Psychic.

6)The Higher Mind.

7)The Illumined Mind.

8)The Intuition or the Intuitive Mind.

9)The Overmind, with its four domains:

a)The Mental Overmind.

b)The Intuitive Overmind or the Overmind Intuition.

c)The Overmind Proper.

d)The Gnostic or Supramentalised Overmind.

The Inner Mind Intelligence is the Inner Mind acting not in a special field of its own but in the same field as the Creative or Poetic Intelligence, though with a different power. The Intuitive Intelligence is the Inner Mind receiving from the plane of the Intuition a light not its own and adapting itself to it: the pure intuitive play is here mixed with the functioning of the mind and diminished or coated with something less luminous. The Mystic Mind works amidst occult formations belonging to another field than the one in which the Creative Intelligence operates. The Mind of Dynamic Vision is a power that has tremendous force, usually of a packed kind in which occult symbols and visions weave a pattern baffling to the reason and the logical faculty yet impressively ordered in its own way. The planes starting with the Higher Mind are all "overhead": they have no organised centre in the human system. The Psychic is also not exactly a part of the gradation below the head: it is our inmost, our deepmost being and stands behind the planes of the subtle physical, the vital and the mental, even the inner mental: its station is at the back of the centre, represented by the heart, where the vital and the mental interplay as emotion. It can open more easily than any other to the

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Overhead, but its own function is not directly to open to it: it has a divine sweetness and light without the powerful amplitude that belongs to the overhead levels. The Overmind's four domains are the highest levels of poetry. When the Overmind lifts into itself the Creative Intelligence, the Higher Mind and the Illumined Mind and in the process modifies itself to suit the new working it forms the Mental Overmind. When it takes up the Intuition together with these powers into itself and again gets suitably modified, we have the Intuitive Overmind or the Overmind Intuition. Perhaps the Overmind Proper and the Gnostic Overmind may be regarded as one whole, but it may be useful to distinguish them in the sense that the former may be conceived as employing whatever* gnostic light it has in its own nature due to the Overmind being a delegate of the Supermind, whereas the latter may be conceived as admitting a new influx from the Supermind in the process of its own transformation into the Supreme Truth.

At a later stage we shall exemplify the poetic creations of the hierarchy of planes and distinguish each plane's way of creating. Now we are presenting only the broad prospect.

You may ask: "Why is not the Supermind listed among the planes of poetry?" Sri Aurobindo has said that the Supermind has never directly worked in the world in the past. The Overmind has been the top power so far. Possibly some influence from the Supermind has made itself felt: just as the idea-substance of the Overmind can come into mental poetry and yet the word and the rhythm may be of the mind, so also the idea-substance of the Supermind may drop into the Overmind and still the resultant poetry may have the typical Overmind word and rhythm. The best passages of the Gita, many passages in the Upanishads and a good deal of the Rigveda are Overmind poetry: the Rigveda is also likely to have some idea-substance from the Supermind. Where the Supermind is sure to have worked most abundantly, infusing even more than its idea-substance, is of course Sri Aurobindo's own Savitri. Savitri is wholly charged with the Supermind vision and experience: the general expression in it has been said by Sri Aurobindo in private letters to be of the Overmind either sheer or lifting into itself the planes below it.

I am not competent to pronounce on what the sheer Supermind poetry would be like. It might even alter the structure and texture of human language, just as the structure and texture of the human

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body would be altered by the transformation effected in Yoga by the Supermind. Something of the present formation will remain, but the change will be pretty radical and much more than what the Overmind can do. The Overmind is indeed a delegate of the Supermind, yet a crucial change takes place when it is projected from the sovereign Gnosis. It is the perfect Mind, the global Mind: it is not the Beyond-Mind. The Supermind is the Divine in His own immediate being: the Overmind is the Divine as He would be in the Mind tuned into utmost closeness to that immediate being. In relation to ourselves, the Overmind converts to its extreme spiritual form the humanity of the human body, it makes our body divinely human. The Supermind reverses the relation and makes our body humanly divine. Not the human but the divine is the supramental basis: in terms of the divine the human will stand, unlike with the Overmind where the divine will stand in terms of the human. Another way of putting it is that the archetype of the human is the Overmind while the archetype of the Overmind is the Supermind. The difference between supramental poetry and over-mind poetry is the same, roughly, as between the poetry of the Overmind and that of the Mind. That is at least how I understand things — from what the Mother once told us. She said in effect: "The gulf between the Overmind and the Supermind is just like the gulf between the Overmind and man's mental consciousness." I recollect lines in Savitri where the Supermind is said to be seen like a faint star in a remote distance of night from the top ridge of the Overmind. So you can imagine the difference. A sort of divine darkness divides the one from the other or, if you like, we may say that the Supermind is to the Overmind — in Miltonic phrase — "dark with excessive light": Sri Aurobindo would perhaps describe it as veiled by a Ray no eye of the Gods can bear.

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TALK FORTY

Between my last lecture and this, quite a gap has fallen. And in that gap I fell down! Yes, I had a nasty toss some days back and had to stay at home for a time. What happened? you will ask. Well, as your Professor of Poetry I may say that my life has a poetic rhythm — a falling movement and a rising movement. Also, I am very much like a simile — very much like what I am doing just now, for I am giving you a simile in comparing myself to one. The Romans had the phrase: Omne simile claudicat — "Every simile limps."

One may understand this in two ways. A simile may limp because it may not come up to the reality: unable to keep pace with the actual, it may fall short of conveying a true idea of what a thing is: one makes a comparison in order to express some quality in a thing, but the comparison may prove to be merely a suggestive statement which cannot bring out the essence of the matter. I consider this view a piece of ineptitude. To my mind, a simile extends and enriches an object, reveals an object's overpassing of its common appearance, establishes its connection and even its oneness with objects beyond itself and makes it part of an under-lying reality wider than individual things and holding the identical essence of a multitude of them. If the simile limps it is because the object fails to measure up to it: the limping comes not because the simile-leg is shorter but because it is longer. To take the most ordinary instance: "This man is like a lion." Do we extend and enrich the man or do we cramp and impoverish him? And do we not hint at something in which man-nature and lion-nature fuse in a kind of world-nature common or basic to both?

The second interpretation is: a simile fastens on a few important features of semblance and ignores others which differ. So no simile copes with an object with completeness. The incompleteness creates the limp. Here too we may argue that if the simile is meant to show something that else would not be revealed in an object the points of difference do not diminish the simile but are neutral inasmuch as they stand outside the purpose of it: some of them may even outshine what is proper to the object. Thus, to revert to our example, a lion has four clawed feet which do not resemble a man's two hands and two feet with their fairly harmless nails. But, in regard to the courage and strength prompting the comparison,

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those four paws are far more effective instruments. I have a high opinion of the illustrative function of a simile. This need not imply a high opinion by myself of my own person, though, of course, some great persons have limped. There was Scott the novelist, there was Byron the poet — and in our times Davies, some of whose verse we have quoted. Timur the terrific conqueror was lame — and Marlowe in his Tamburlane made the Tartar look even more terrific by some of his similes. The Greek god Hephaestus had also an abnormal leg, but Sri Aurobindo in his Ilion brings out his godhead all the same when he describes how from the conference of the deities before the final battle at Troy he descended to take his particular secret station among the fighters:

Down upon earth he came with his lame omnipotent motion.

To return to my not so omnipotent movements, let me wind up by quoting two pieces of advice I have received on the subject of falling down. One is from the English allegorist Bunyan. He said:

He that is down need fear no fall.

But this would mean an extreme "Safety First" measure. I would have to keep sitting on the ground for ever and a day, or else walk on all fours. I prefer what the Chinese sage Confucius has to offer me. He wrote: "Our greatest glory lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall."

You can't deny that I have risen and I shall try to rise also to the occasion of our present theme: the planes of poetry. I shall begin at the beginning, the foot of the "World-stair": the subtle physical plane. Here it is the outer activities of man and Nature that pass through the poetic imagination and acquire an inwardness which reveals the psychological or even superhuman powers at work in the world. The poet's preoccupation, however, is now not with these powers in their intrinsic quality but with them as completely externalised and seen as physical movements and interrelations. In English the outstanding example is Geoffrey Chaucer, the so-called Father of English Poetry. The adjective "outstanding" is very apt, for his mind stands out rather than in. The designation "Father of English Poetry" is perhaps less apt. Not because there is any poet of considerable stature preceding him, but some critics

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protest that by using this phrase we make Chaucer look as if he were responsible for the birth of something named English Poetry without himself being English Poetry personified. Suppose we speak of the father of Shakespeare: we only make the old man responsible for a birth that is quite different in essential quality from himself. The father of Shakespeare could be a man like any of his son's creations but not at all like his son. He could be like Hamlet or Macbeth or Falstaff or Romeo — at least some sort of Romeo he must have been if Shakespeare was at all to get born — but we do not imagine that Shakespeare's father was like Shakespeare who was the literary father of Hamlet and Macbeth and Falstaff and Romeo. So when Chaucer is described as the Father of English Poetry he may be thought to be anything except English Poetry itself. This is declared to be an erroneous suggestion. If the usual designation has to be applied, then Chaucer was a part of what he made: the first child he had was his own self or, let us say, the born poet in him.

In the eyes of some judges of literature, this first child is also the highest form reached by the English poetic genius except for just two who overpass the maker of it: Shakespeare and Milton. Sri Aurobindo, when he wrote The Future Poetry, did not hold Chaucer in very high regard: he was of one mind with Matthew Arnold who found Chaucer lacking in what he called "high seriousness" as well as the "grand style". Only in a few phrases here and there did Matthew Arnold see these properties of what he considered, supreme poetic expression come into the Chaucerian speech — a line, for instance, like:

O martyr souded in virginitie

which, by the way, Arnold with his flair for misquotation changed a little by substituting "to" for "in". "Souded" is the same as the modern "soldered", meaning immovably fixed — here in the virginal consciousness, in the purity of the deep soul. Sri Aurobindo says in The Future Poetry that Chaucer was content to note outward life with chiefly a stir in himself of "a kindly satisfaction..., a blithe sense of humour or a light and easy pathos." The apparent traits of character are described with aptness and vividness, but mostly no phrase probes into the profundities of them. Chaucer's job is to present life interestingly, not to interpret

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it. Ease, grace, lucidity, a fluent yet compact expression adequate to the manifold impression of human nature and earth-nature in a mirror-mind that has no marked depth of its own but has an individual colour, as it were, so that what is imaged is not a mere "yellow primrose" but a thing made yellow and primrosy by a life materialising itself to the vision of a particular temperament. We do not always feel that the medium of verse was absolutely necessary to Chaucer: well-tempered limpid prose could have done almost as well, and actually some of his "Canterbury Tales" are in prose. But now and again among his 17,000 and odd lines there occur passages that exceed the superficial charm possible to rhymed and metred expression and stay with us as precious possessions, even though the place where they stay is not always very profound.

I mean, the poetry is authentic and memorable. The authenticity we can at once recognise by contrasting this poetry with what a well-known later writer has done with it in the attempt to modernise Chaucer and make him presentable to a more cultured sense. Dryden, seeing the archaic and often childlike form in which Chaucer's work stood, tried to put him in the garb of eighteenth century language — and, in doing so, brought about often just a garb without any body inside. Take these lines of Chaucer's — having at least something of high seriousness and achieving a rather striking pathos:

What is this world, what asketh man to have,

Now with his love, now in his colde grave,

Allone withouten any companye?

See what Dryden makes of this naive yet touching world-cry:

Vain man! how various a bliss we crave,

Now warm in love, now withering in the grave!

Never, O never more to see the sun!

Still dark, in a damp vault, and still alone!

Dryden is obviously "arty". He gets out as much alliteration as possible. Chaucer too alliterates, but his effects are natural and organic: there is no effort to produce an impression. In line 2 the only marked alliteration is with n — it is something inevitable in

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the very sturcture of the phrase and too straightforward to be "arty". And his most effective alliteration is not apparent but subtle. In line 3 the same n-sound, becomes a subtle undertone with the effect as of a deep secret moan of all mortality. Dryden brings, in addition to his two "now" 's and two "never" 's "vain" and "various" in line 1, "warm" and "withering", and is similarly deliberate in his art in the last line. In this line he wants to drive home the pathos with the gong-note of a terminal "alone". Many masterly lines in English poetry have this ending. I may quote a few. There is the Wordsworth line with its fathomless suggestion of daring some unknown wondrous in-world:

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

There is the vivid vision of savage bird-life in Tennyson's

...let the wild

Lean-headed eagles yelp alone...

Then there is another glimpse of bird-life, happily haunting as opposed to fearsomely remote — Housman's

The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing

In leafy dells, alone.

We get the sense of a deeply felt hollowness even in the richest human experience and the vibrant hint of a religious fulfilment carrying us beyond all tragedy when Dunbar writes:

All love is lost but upon God alone.

Finally, there is Sri Aurobindo's revelation — as superb as Words-worth's and more precise in spiritual substance — of a transcendental reality:

The superconscient realms of motionless peace

Where judgment ceases and the word is mute

And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.

But Dryden, to my ear, falls flat: his line is constructed, not created. You feel the forced accent — the two "still" 's, the

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"dark" and the "damp", all hammer away at our ears instead of taking them captive by a spell. In the whole passage, only the second verse —

Now warm in love, now withering in the grave —

strikes me as genuinely moving, yet how far is its polished and elaborate achievement from the simple subtlety of Chaucer's

Now with his love, now in his colde grave,

where by just calling the grave "colde" the heat of a thousand suns is packed by silent contrast in the one bare unqualified word "love". It is a little masterpiece of reticence and understatement. Dryden, as if not content to associate love explicitly with warmth; goes out of his way to add a line of his own where he introduces the sun and spoils the line completely by overloading the tragic accent. Those two "never" 's should never have been there. He seeks to pack the very essence of the joie de vivre in the sensation of sunlight, but the thought has no depth of feeling in it. Arnold has done in a positive way what Dryden fails to do in a negative:

Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun?

Dryden, however, fails not simply because his way is negative: he fails because the negativeness is underlined too ostentatiously. In the right context and in the right manner one can kick against all limits and come out with a marvellous dramatic impression as does Shakespeare's Lear when he stands before the dead Cordelia:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life

And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never!

Five consecutive trochees — a falling movement — with the same word, and what a climax just by the excess and by the antithesis to the iambic metre!

The lines, apart from illustrating the work of genius as against the work of artificial labour, illustrate also a plane different from the creative intelligence as well as from Chaucer's subtle physical:

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the Vital plane, the plane of the Life Force. A vibrant vigour is here which is missing in Chaucer no less than in Dryden. Poetically Chaucer has in his passage something equally good, but the quiver of the nerves of sensation is absent. And this quiver will be realised by us all the more if, beside Chaucer's lines on the emptiness and transience of the world, we set the famous Macbeth-passage, on a part of which we have already commented elsewhere and which again triumphantly employs a repetition, a triple one this time at the very start:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,

Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

This kind of vigorous many-motioned passionate language was beyond Chaucer: a complexity is present, yet not mere complexity differentiates the Shakespearian cry from the Chaucerian: this complexity is not a quiet one, it is tempestuous, a surge of wide waves, each wave leaping with a sharp zest and pushing its fellow and mixing with it to create a further movement: the imagery is dynamic and multiple. If Shakespeare is like the sea, Chaucer is like terra firma, solid earth: a certain simplicity, a suave temper carry him on. Mostly he has charm yet rather an obviousness, as when he speaks of the "very gentle parfit knight" 's noble deeds:

At mortal batailles hadde he bene fiftene

And foughten for our faith at Tramissene

In listes thryes, and ay slain his fo...

Put beside these lines Othello's account of his military life:

Of moving accidents, by flood and field;

Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach;

Of being taken by the insolent foe...

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Chaucer's eye looks a little below the shaken surface of things and his words give us a just and pleasing expression. Shakespeare's words, as Sri Aurobindo points out,¹ with quite as simple a thing to say and a perfect force of directness in saying it, get, as we might put it, into the entrails of vision and do not stop short at the clear measure of the thing seen, but evoke its very quality and give us immediately the inmost vital fibre and thrill of the life they describe and interpret. No doubt, a greater poetic capacity is at work in Shakespeare than in Chaucer, at least on the whole. But the difference we are out to mark is not so much between the poetic geniuses of the two writers as between the planes from which they write.

From his own subtle physical, Chaucer too can produce supreme effects. Let me quote what seem to me the most pathetic lines a lover ever spoke, pathetic by a heart-breaking homeliness verging on naivete. You may have heard of Troilus and Cressida. Troilus was a Trojan, a brother of Hector, and Cressida was a Greek girl. She had sworn fidelity, and Troilus had given her a brooch as a sign of his love. Once he sees on the coat of Diomedes this very gift of his to Cressida. He says to her:

Through which I see that clene out of your minde

Ye hen me cast, and I ne can nor may,

For all the worlde, within my herte finde

T' unloven you a quarter of a day.

Now listen to Othello expressing his love. He thinks Desdemona is false to him, but he cannot change his heart — though it does drive him to kill her. Here he is giving tongue to his desperate attachment to her beauty:

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul,

But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,

Chaos is come again.

Mark the energetic thrust of the language, the grandiose passion in the words. The same thrust, though a little less emphatic and also a

1. The Future Poetry, p. 1 69.

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little less verbally grandiose and with a more imaginative vein, we find in another speech of Othello's —

Had she been true,

If heaven would make me such another world

Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,

I'd not have sold her for it.

Judging from the example of Chaucer we might be inclined to believe that except for occasional outbreaks the poetry of the subtle physical plane is condemned to lack elemental energy and must fall short of dazzling glory. But we should be off the mark very much indeed in believing so. For, among poets of this plane, we have no less a figure than Homer. Homer has shown to what heights the poetry of the subtle physical can rise. Like Chaucer he too is preoccupied with external life, but his vision is vast and his eye is interpretative and not only representative. Sri Aurobindo writes: "Homer gives us the life of man always at a high intensity of impulse and action and without subjecting it to any other change he casts it in lines of beauty and in divine proportions; he deals with it as Phidias dealt with the human form when he wished to create a god in marble. When we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are not really upon this earth, but on the earth lifted into some plane of a greater dynamis of life, and so long as we remain there we have a greater vision in a more lustrous air and we feel ourselves raised to a semi-divine stature."¹

But how shall we have an idea of Homeric poetry? It is in Greek and to translate great poetry we need a great poet in the new language. Also, Homer wrote in quantitative hexameters and unless we translate him in hexameters of a genuine inspiration and with something of the same sound-spirit we shall miss the final touch of his oceanic verse. One of his most famous lines comes at almost the beginning of the Iliad. Agamemnon has captured Chryseis, the daughter of the high-priest of Apollo. The high-priest approaches him and pleads for the return of his daughter. Agamemnon insolently refuses to hand her over. Then the old man goes home along the Trojan beach, and Homer has the line:

Be d'akeon para thina poluphlois boio thalasses.

1 . Ibid, p. 6 1 -62.

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Sri Aurobindo renders it:

Silent he walked by the shore of the many-rumoured ocean.

Here apparently is nothing more than a physical scene serving as the background to a simple psychological state accompanying a bodily human movement. The sounds of the sea are mentioned and the man is described in what modern parlance would call "behaviouristic terms" — his outward condition and activity, his body in motion, his face unspeaking. But what an effect is created! There is the contrast between a moving silence and a moving sound, but a small human silence set against a huge natural sound, and just by the human smallness remaining silent the natural hugeness which is full of sound becomes the voice of that silence and we realise the immensity of the sorrow and the anger the small human figure is feeling, a sorrow and an anger to which the voice proper to that figure could never give true expression and which gets expressed for all time by that multitudinous rumour, that mighty roar of the waters.

To get an effect of a similar greatness in connection with the sea we have to recall that phrase of Shakespeare's in Henry IV's soliloquy on Sleep:

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?

Now too the human and the elemental are joined, though in a different way: the very roughness and rowdiness of the ocean is converted into a lulling power by the cradlelike swaying of the waves in their rise and fall, and a tiny human figure is served by a monstrous natural force to find peace.

I said that Homer needs an English master of expression and technique to do him justice. You can see for yourself what a world of contrast is there between Sri Aurobindo's rendering of that line and Alexander Pope's in the eighteenth-century pentameter:

Silent he wander'd by the sounding main.

Not that Pope's line is a pure "flop": he has tried to get something

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of the boom of the waters by his n and m resonances, but I feel that the boom is more nasal than natural: the sea-god seems to have a roaring cold and to be speaking through his many-nostrilled nose. Whatever effect is still on the positive side strikes me as somewhat contrived: the inevitable art of the Homeric utterance is lost.

I shall give you another instance of Homer's greatness and two versions of it, neither of which is a failure but each a semi-success. I do not remember the Greek original. But Homer is describing in one of his lengthy similes (limping all over, I am afraid) a night-scene in which there is a flash of lightning in the deep cloudy darkness and as a result a sudden clearing up and a revelation of the whole starry sky. Tennyson thus translates the phrase in well-modulated and expressively enjambed blank verses:

...the immeasurable heavens

Break open to the highest and the stars

Shine...

I believe Homer puts everything into one single line and naturally the effect is fuller and finer, more faithful to the amplitude laid bare at once. But Tennyson shows great skill managing his translation, with the "heavens" a feminine ending suggestive of continuity and then the first foot of the next line a quantitatively long and strongly stressed spondee and the same line holding poised at its far end the noun "stars" and quietly yet by the syntax intrinsically urging us on to the prominent wide-toned verb "Shine" in the next. I think a truer Homeric version is the result, especially as the whole tone is a controlled majesty and drive, than the version made by Chapman in Elizabeth's time:

And the unmeasured firmament breaks to disclose its light.

The expression is very fine, though a little more generalised than Tennyson's: what stamps it as inferior to the latter is the rhythm. Sri Aurobindo considers the rhythm here not equal to the poetic occasion: it is rather jerky, rather explosive, more violent than powerful: it is ballad rhythm camouflaged as a fourteener — two separate bits of four feet and three feet are put together to look large and fluent, a rolling and sinuous and splendid length is not

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there, the fourteener does not get naturally born.

How important the rhythmic life and the life of the verbal arrangement are to the Homeric expression may be judged from a hexametrical translation by an Englishman named Cotterill of a phrase from the Odyssey. Cotterill has done the whole poem into accentual hexameters and off and on he achieves grand effects, but sometimes at the peak-points of Homer he fails in poetic sensitiveness, both in rhythm and word. Here is Homer, godlike yet direct:

Zenos men pais ea Kronion autar oixun

Eikhon apereisien.

Here is Cotterill:

Son of Cronion, of Zeus the Almighty was I, but afflictions

Ever-unending I knew.

The translator has knocked half the world-cry out by a somewhat pompous and cluttered and ill-balanced turn at the end. He has also padded out the line with "the Almighty" which is not in the Greek. I think a more moving approximation of the Homeric afflatus can be struck upon by something like:

I was the child of Zeus the Kronion, yet have I suffered

Infinite pain.

("Kronion" means "one who has Kronos for his father" — Kronos who is known in English as "Saturn".)

Homer is always simple even in his profundity, straightforward even in his subtlety, natural even in his majesty. A typical instance of this style is at the very beginning of the Odyssey. Odysseus has lost all his companions — most of them because they slew the oxen that were sacred to Helios, the sun-god, who in return brought about their death. Homer says, as F. L. Lucas has pointed out, no more than: "He took from them the day of their home-coming." And in this unassuming phrase he packed a whole world of pathos, touching the most sensitive, the most intimate strings of the human heart. Some of the typical Homeric effects you will find again and again in Sri Aurobindo's Ilion which is not a translation but a new vision of the last day of the siege of Troy, long after Homer has

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finished with his story. Sri Aurobindo is more complex, more rich, more spiritual than Homer, yet he has always Homer's ocean-rumour, Homer's eye on clear-cut shape and gesture and attitude and motion, the subtle physical plane taken up into the Aurobindo-nian universe. And throughout there is the right rhythm, the soul of the Greek quantitative hexameter has been caught without sacrificing the stress-genius of the English language.

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TALK FORTY-ONE

In talking of poetry from the subtle physical plane we took care to point out that the apparent lowest position of this plane in the hierarchy of worlds did not preclude its producing the greatest poetry. The excellence of poetry as such does not depend on the position of a plane: it depends on the intensity of vision and word and rhythm and on the faithfulness with which we transmit this intensity from whatever source.

Today, before proceeding to the next plane, I may point out that even mystical and spiritual poetry does not need to be from planes which seem proper to mysticism and spirituality: the Psychic and the Overhead. If there is a turn towards the Infinite, the Eternal, the Divine by a poet drawing upon any source for his inspiration, spiritual poetry will break forth. If one goes below the surface of things into the inner consciousness, mystic poetry will emerge with its subtleties and shadows from any level. No doubt, the Psychic will yield the sweetest secrets of the spiritual and the mystic, and the Overhead the amplest. But genuine stuff of intense mystic or spiritual power is possible to every plane.

The poets of the Rigveda drew their inspiration from the Overhead — often the highest Overhead from where the Mantra in its most divine form hails. But you must be aware that many Indian interpreters have had a very curious attitude to them. The Rigveda has been regarded as a sacred book and its hymn-makers as Rishis — that is, seers and hearers of Truth, Yet these seers and hearers of Truth have been taken to be concerned all the time with material things. A ritual of sacrificial prayer to mighty supra-terrestrial Gods for the sake of cattle and gold and children and intoxicating drinks and the defeat of enemies: this is the essence of the Rigveda for Sayana and his school. On the basis of the word "pusti", a Rishi has even been taken to have prayed: "May I grow fat!" Sri Aurobindo has swept away all this nonsense as well as the nonsense of the European scholars who look on the Rishis as mostly a crew of semi-barbaric Aryan priests deifying natural objects like the sun, moon, sky, water, fire and invoking them for physical benefits and for victory over Dravidian aborigines who are said to be "noseless", anas, which is taken to be an exaggeration for "flat-

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nosed". Sri Aurobindo understands the epithet as an-as, meaning "without the force of breath" to utter sacred words and has proved the hymns to be the speech of an occult tradition and experience which veils its spirituality and mysticism with symbols that convey their true meaning only to the initiate. But, mark you, the symbols are such that the most external objects seem to attract the Rishis — objects that would bulk in the mind of a poet writing from the subtle physical plane. If there had been less externality in the symbolism, Sayana's interpretation would have been impossible.

In a letter to me, dated 20th October 1936, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The Vedic times were an age in which men lived in the material consciousness as did the heroes of Homer. The Rishis were the mystics of the time and took the form of their symbolic images from the material life around them." What are we to conclude from this? We may be sure of one thing: the Vedic poets, if they had not been mystics, would have written with the subtle physical plane as their common poise of expressive consciousness. From this we may hazard the guess that when the luminosity of the Overhead heights which Sri Aurobindo has found in them became vocal in their poetry it took up at times the same plane and transmuted its turns and tones into channels of revelation from those heights. We may also declare that if the Overmind luminosity had not worked directly in the mystics of the Vedic times, their mystical poetry itself would have grandly expressed occult realities with the inspiration of nothing else than the subtle physical plane, though certainly in a style different from Chaucer's or Homer's.

Just as mysticism can throb out from the subtle physical, so too it can erupt from the next plane, the vital. One of the literary prodigies of our Ashram, Nishikanta, is in his Bengali work a mystic poet par excellence of the vital, and in the boldness of his imagination he can match any Vedic seer just as in pure poetic quality he is not to be outdone by any Vishwamitra or Vasishtha. But his astounding apocalypses are not Overhead like theirs. Although these apocalypses pass over the head of many a reader they do not come directly from over the head of Nishikanta himself. When the Gods speak through him, it is through his beatific belly. Don't fancy that because you have to lower your eyes a little in looking at this belly, you can afford to look down on it. The poetry that comes from this particular paunch and knocks you out by a blow on your solar plexus is not only wonderful mysticism but a

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most original and powerful literary creation. In sheer quality if not yet in quantity and in organised universality it can bump with absolute right against the creation by that most famous of belly-bards who is also the world's greatest poetic dramatist, Shakespeare!

We have already compared Shakespeare's speech of the Life Force with Chaucer's of the subtle physical and, en passant, with Dryden's of the poetic intelligence, but not with the last-named at its best, nor with the best the poetic intelligence itself is capable of. A time was when Shakespeare himself was hailed as a mighty thinker, a paragon of the poetic intelligence, because again and again he starts reflecting on things: the quotable passages in his work, serving as appropriate "messages" for life's various occasions, impressed the critics with what came to be called Shakespeare's "myriad mind". And with extreme reverence he was spoken of not as a bard but as The Bard. Perhaps the one man who brought about a reversal of the common verdict on him as a thinker is that other celebrated name in the English theatre — G. Bernard Shaw.

Not that Shaw can stand anywhere near Shakespeare as a creator of character or as a maker of imaginative literature. I would call him more playwright than dramatist, thus distinguishing his versatile cleverness and effective constructiveness from Shakespeare kaleidoscopic vision and organic elan. But Shaw's plays and Shaw's personal criticism threw into clear relief Shakespeare's lack of intellectuality. Picking up the title "The Bard", he coined the contemptuous term "Bardolatry" to designate the blind worship accorded to Shakespeare. Of course, Shaw never denied that the Elizabethan dramatist was a lord of language and a creator of figures charged with overabundant vitality. But Shakespeare's deficiency in thought as such was hammered into Bardolaters by Shaw through a piece of jocular impudence. He said: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his."

Instead of accepting some amount of truth in the statement while deprecating its cheekiness, Englishmen fell upon Shaw much more indignantly than they had done when he had flouted their conventional religious notions about God. They exclaimed: "This fellow was bad enough when he criticised Jehovah and his thunder

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and brimstone, but Blake and others had done similar things and in any case we can't exactly say that God is an Englishman. Nobody has uttered a cross word about Old Shakespeare, our English Shakespeare. This Irish heretic is going too far!"

We may smile at such a reaction as we may smile at Shaw's own exaggeration of Shakespeare's intellectual inferiority to him. But we must try to understand it no less than the provocative heresy. Shakespeare is both Godlike in his own self and Godlike in relation to the Englishman. Sri Aurobindo has remarked: "More than any other poet Shakespeare had accomplished the legendary feat of the impetuous sage Vishwamitra." You may recall that Vish-wamitra, in a fit of rage against Indra, created a rival universe. Well, the English dramatist has done something of the same sort. To quote Sri Aurobindo again: "His power of vision has created a Shakespearian world of his own." Not only that; this world is in a sense superior to the world which the Bible makes God create in seven days: it is, as Sri Aurobindo says, "a world of the wonder and free power of life and not of its mere external realities, where what is here dulled and hampered finds a greater enlarged play of beauty, curiosity and amplitude." Of course, this world of the wonder and power of life derives from the plane of the Life Force which no less than the material plane is the work of the Divine. But the average Englishman cannot be expected to look into the hierarchy of planes: to him the earth is the most concrete, almost the only, reality and Shakespeare seems to have made a more vibrant, more life-thrilled universe where even clowns have genius just as in the novels of Balzac even cooks have it. Shakespeare and Balzac are colossal creators — equal in so far as the putting forth of living beings in a complicated pattern of interrelations is concerned. But while every Frenchman, though excited about Balzac's creativity, does not feel entirely happy over this novelist's multifarious "Comedie Humaine", every Englishman is carried off his feet by Shakespeare's tragi-comic-melodramatic pageant of humanity. And there is a sound reason for it.

The typical Frenchman is a blend of warm sentiment and cool intellect: a clear-seeing, accurately organising idea-force is an important part of the Frenchman's nature side by side with emotional enthusiasm and aesthetic feeling. So Balzac does not answer the whole or even the central need of the Frenchman's being. The typical Englishman in the matter of coolness is not guided by

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intellect but by a commonsense hold on solid earth: his extravert disposition gives him a kind of balance. In the matter of warmth, what leads him is not so much the heart's sentiment as some dynamic expansive life-instinct. And as the characteristic of instinct is to be at the same time forceful and practical, swift-flashing and concretely effective, it stands in very good relation to the extravert disposition, and even naturally produces it out of itself, so that we may consider the life-instinct the central thing in the Englishman. You must have recognised in the two elements the face of Chaucer and the face of Shakespeare and realised that Shakespeare can take up Chaucer into himself and serve as the one sufficient face. The life-instinct can even lose itself in externalities as it does often enough in much of Elizabethan drama outside Shakespeare. Shakespeare keeps the extravert disposition in its right place and sits in the life-core to create. He is the Englishman in the finest essence and because it is he who makes the Englishman's essence the Englishman has always the potentiality of a supreme poetry behind the rather stolid appearance of John Bull. But on the average it is not the poetic potentiality that distinguishes the Shakespearian Englishman: it is the sovereign life-instinct. This sovereign life-instinct has helped him to create the greatest empire the world has known and to be a success in various spheres of activity not by a planned methodical manoeuvre but by a subtle energetic tact of things and of movements — a masterful muddling-through which produces, to the producer's own surprise, admirable structures by an almost magically thoughtless sweeping together of a multitude of striking separate parts: in short, as Shakespeare himself seems to build up his dramas. So Shakespeare answers almost the whole, at least the central, need of the Englishman's being, and any attack on him is tantamount to an attack on Englishness itself, and on Englishness too as seen in its aspect of Godhead.

Naturally, Shaw's "debunking" of the Bard was much resented, and there is indeed a touch of wrong-headedness in the importance Shaw attached to what he called the realistic and intellectual drama, the drama of social problems and their discussion. Ibsen and Strindberg were to Shaw more momentous dramatists than Shakespare because they challenged conventional values and dealt with situations that could occur in contemporary life, whereas Shakespeare was a romanticist. The drama of ideas applied to

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problems of society was Shaw's ideal, and he exemplified in his own long string of plays what exactly he meant by it, plays in which every character — be it man, woman or child — is G.B.S. himself talking brainily in various voices. Extremely stimulating these plays are, for the brain finding tongue in them is an extremely brilliant one. But they have neither the imaginative adventurous-ness nor the verbal splendour nor the bursting vitality of the Shakespearian drama. A good deal of Shaw's braininess is rather cocky, too self-confident, as if he alone knew what was wrong with the world. There is also a fine and acute humbug-proof element in his cleverness, and this is excellent and salubrious, but the other thing — the "sab-janta" ("all-knowing") attitude — is somewhat jading. The Bardolaters would be pleased to hear of a little passage of arms between Shaw's cockiness and his own wife's quiet irony. Once he was holding forth to a company of friends on the comparative merits of man's mind and woman's. The argument had arisen from a remark of his wife's. At the end of a coruscating monologue Shaw said that male judgment was always superior to female judgment. "Of course," Mrs Shaw coolly replied, "after all, you married me and I you." It was the one time the old battering-ram was silenced. As Shakespeare's Hamlet would have put it: the engineer was hoist with his own petard.

It is doubtful whether Ibsen and Strindberg will last as long as Shakespeare: it is certain that Shakespeare will outlast Shaw. But Shaw is perfectly correct in thinking himself superior to Shakespeare in intellectuality. And this is not because Shakespeare is a poet and intellectuality has no place in poetry. The point is whether he has an intellectuality to leave out of his poetry. Men with intellects can be intense poets if they know how to put into their poems not their intellectuality but the passion of thought that often goes with it. Lucretius and Dante were such men, Milton also in his own manner. Shelley was another. Wordsworth too. In them thought was passionate, in Shakespeare passion was thinking. He seems time and gain to set up fireworks of ideas, but actually we have ideas thrown up by a seethe of sensation and emotion, the Life Force surging heaven-high and catching on its crests the light of the sky of mind. Sri Aurobindo well observes: "While he has given a wonderful language to poetic thought, he yet does not think for the sake of thought, but for the sake of life; his way indeed is not so much the poet himself thinking about life,

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as life thinking itself out in him through many mouths, in many moods and moments, with a rich throng of fine thought-effects, but not for any clear sum of intellectual vision or to any high power of either ideal or spiritual result." Even when there is ostensibly a judgment on life such as a reflective intellect might pass, it is not really a product of the thinking mind at work in its own right: it is really a throw-forth from the passionate being. Sri Aurobindo has instanced that "thought" which we have already cited from Macbeth. He picks out its most pronounced ideative phrases:

Life's but a walking shadow;...

...it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Then he sets it beside Shelley's voicing of a kindred idea of transience:

Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments...

Sri Aurobindo's comment is: "The one has the colour of an intuition of the life-soul in one of its intense moods and we not only think the thought but seem to feel it even in our nerves of mental sensation, the other is the thought-mind itself uttering in a moved, inspired and illuminative language an idea of the pure intelligence."

You may say that Macbeth is a character of storm and stress and is not meant by Shakespeare to be philosophic. Well, let us turn to Hamlet. Here surely Shakespeare tries to mirror the intellect. Hamlet is his closest vision of the thinking mind. Critics have declared that the whole tragedy of Hamlet's irresolution comes of his thinking too much. I do not deny that Hamlet thinks in a manner and to a degree that no other character in Shakespeare does: he thinks puissantly, curiously, multifariously, yet always through the Life Force. To realise the dissimilarity of note in the very stuff of the utterance we have only to compare Hamlet's

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Who would fardels bear

To grunt and sweat under a weary life?

with Worthworth's

The heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world.

Worthsworth is speaking, as it were, from the grey cells: they are changing the urgencies of an oppressed existence to philosophic values. Shakespeare is speaking from his guts: they stir the brain only to render coherent the being's instinctive shout of recoil and rebellion. Again, Hamlet talks of passing away from the turmoil of life:

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil...

A quiver of the entrails is felt in the midst of the idea. How different is the accent of Keats talking of dying away with the nightingale's song a final music falling on deaf ears:

To thy high requiem become a sod.

Once more take Hamlet on release from the obstructive tangibilities of earth-existence by a dissolution of the body:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Respond now to Shelley's utterance of the thought of reaching safety from life's ravage:

From the world's bitter wind

Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.

Perhaps we can mark the most sustained distinction between the creative Life Force and the creative Intelligence in their intensities of reflection if we first tune in to two soliloquies from Shakespeare and then get the wave-length of a passage from Milton. Hamlet's most celebrated speech, out of which we have already detached that verse about "this mortal coil", contains the lines:

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To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There's the respect, That makes calamity of so long life... The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of! Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...

A vivid speech on death and after-life occurs also in another play: a character named Claudio is speaking:

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 thrillling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendant world.

Keep the typical turns and vibrations of these two speeches in your mind and appreciate their difference from those in the oration of Belial, one of Satan's followers, in Paradise Lost:

Our final hope

Is flat despair; we must exasperate

The Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,

And that must end us; that must be our cure,

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

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In the wide womb of uncreated Night,

Devoid of sense and motion?

Apropos of Shakespeare's repeated victorious seizure of the intuitive word with the leap of the elan vital in a vast variety of moods and situations, we may touch on a problem that has long vexed his scholars: "Was Shakespeare the real author of the dramas that now pass under his name?" I believe that the solution can be found if we keep steadily our sense of this elan vital that is the creator of those dramas.

Let me sketch to you the problem in general terms and introduce the most notable name put up as a rival. We are told: "Shakespeare was comparatively an uneducated man. He had little Latin, less Greek and not much schooling even in his own language. He was also a man who never travelled abroad. At home he had no special occasion to be familiar with the higher circles of society. How then are we to explain not only the quality of supreme literature in his dramas but also their teeming versatile learning? When we look around in the Elizabethan world there is just the man there who has a very powerful expressive genius, a consummate education and scholarship, a familiarity with all kinds of superior vocations: Francis Bacon. He is the author of Essays, The Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum and several other works. He was Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, parliamentarian and statesman, Lord Chancellor in Elizabeth's Government. If Shakespeare the man as we know him is unlikely to be the author of such dramas as are before us, nobody can be a better claimant to their authorship than this outstanding literary figure of the times."

Against this argument we have only to drag Bernard Shaw in. Not that Shaw has written on behalf of Shakespeare as the author of the dramas. But Shaw in his own way is precisely what Shakespeare could have been. Shaw has himself said that he had no proper school-education, leave aside a university degree. In fact, when he was once invited to lecture at Oxford he said that the best suggestion he could make was the total demolition of the University and the use of the building-stones for a better purpose. Without academic training Shaw has shone out in the field of

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letters. Furthermore, he has not only written plays which are the delight of all acute minds: he has expressed himself scintillatingly as well as learnedly on an abundance of subjects. Playwright, dramatic critic, judge of the fine arts, authority on Socialism: all these roles he has filled with credit. He has also shown keen insight into the medical psychology, assimilated with a fine force biological science into his world-message, and even discoursed in a most competent vein on Education itself. Why should we refuse to Shakespeare a possibility that Shaw has proved under our very noses? We know that Shakespeare had long experience of stage-life, and this could easily put him into contact with fellow-craftsmen acquainted with Classical tags and themes. The same stage-life could also make him rub shoulders with money-grubbers and their calculating clerks who were haunting theatre-land: from traffic with this group he could pick up all sorts of legal points and write knowingly about them. In addition, he was an Elizabethan in the heart of London where the very air was astir with thoughts of colonial adventure, where all eyes were coloured by the constant processions of picturesque heroes and glittering courtiers, where every head was humming with diplomatic questions raised by unsettled thrones and touch-and-go balances of power in a Europe torn between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, well-established Spain and ambitious England. There was every opportunity for him to get an understanding of military science and court-life and political practice. Given an all-absorbing curiosity and an extraordinary genius, both of which any man could be born with if the Gods are kind to him, Shakespeare could undoubtedly develop into what the dramas prove their author to be. There is absolutely no inherent impossibility in his penning them.

On the other hand, there are three strong points against Bacon. He is well known to have felt extremely apprehensive about the lasting value of English: he wished all his works to be written in Latin. How then could he have spent years creating masterpieces in a tongue he underrated and even half-despised? A more decisive and perhaps the strongest point is the difference of psychological make-up and of style-vibration. Shakespeare is, as we have seen, termed myriad-minded: he wrote like a book-worm, a lawyer, a commander-in-chief, a courtier, a politician: he wrote, it is said, even as if he were a woman! But the one thing he could not do was to introduce into his work the genuine philosophical ac-

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cent. Vital gusto and ingenuity are his characteristic, while, if Bacon was anything, he was an intellectual. Shakespeare put into his dramas all that he was or knew: why is the typical Baconian note utterly absent, the note of intellectual contemplation, the note of philosophico-scientific thinking? Surely, a writer creates out of himself: how is it that Bacon in writing Shakespeare left his own essential nature out? Some pressure of the truly detaching intellect or of the search for a world-view through the eyes of the inspired reason should inevitably have got into the dramas. The absence of such pressure rules out Bacon completely.

The third and final argument is related to the second and it is phrased by Sri Aurobindo himself. "There is," he begins, "often more thought in a short essay of Bacon's than in a whole play of Shakespeare's." Then, referring to a poem that is known to have been composed by Bacon, Sri Aurobindo remarks: "As he showed when he tried to write poetry, the very nature of his thought-power and the characteristic way of expression of the born philosophical thinker hampered him in poetic expression." The clear indication from the one poem admittedly from Bacon's pen is, according to Sri Aurobindo, conclusive evidence against his authorship of the dramas. As Sri Aurobindo is so very positive, let us glance at Bacon's un-Shakespearian perpetration in verse:

LIFE

The World's a bubble, and the Life of Man

Less than a span:

In his conception wretched, from the womb

So to the tomb;

Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years

With cares and fears.

Who then to frail mortality shall trust,

But limns the water, or but writes in dust.

Yet since with sorrow here we live opprest,

What life is best?

Courts are but only superficial schools

To dandle fools:

The rural parts are turn'd into a den

Of savage men:

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And where's a city from all vice so free,

But may be term'd the worst of all the three?

Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed,

Or pains his head:

Those that live single, take it for a curse,

Or do things worse:

Some would have children: those that have them moan

Or wish them gone:

What is it, then, to have, or have no wife,

But single thraldom, or a double strife?

Our own affections still at home to please

Is a disease:

To cross the sea to any foreign soil,

Perils and toil:

Wars with their noise affright us; when they cease

We are worse in peace:

What then remains, but that we still should cry

Not to be born, or, being born, to die?

The last two lines of stanza 1 have a somewhat imaginative turn, and the closing couplet of the final stanza has some power, but the whole of its second line is virtually borrowed from a famous passage of Sophocles and cannot be credited to Bacon. In the rest we have two phrases of a slight felicity: "Curst from the cradle" and "To dandle fools." In a couple of places there is a weak wit. All else is coinage of the reflective prose-mind, a sort of poor anticipation of eighteenth-century semi-didactic verse. Not a trace of the vivida vis that breathes in any pronouncement on life and death we may pick out from the Shakespearian corpus.

Sri Aurobindo, in drawing his conclusion against Bacon, says that not even a hundred cryptograms could counterweigh it. This brings us to a species of argument that some Baconians have indulged in to the bewilderment of most readers. They have traced in the works of Shakespeare various hidden messages, several declarations of Bacon's authorship put in the form of ciphers. One cryptogram proved this authorship perfectly — except that by ill luck it did so in nineteenth-century English! Recently a book by two professional cryptologists, William and Elizabeth Friedman,

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went into a thorough examination of all the claimed ciphers and cryptograms and proved them spurious. Reading the reviews of this book I wondered if one particular cyptogram had been commented upon. At least no reviewer specifically alluded to it. It is the shortest of all and is evolved directly from a word occurring in Shakespeare. The word is "honorificabilitudinitatibus."

In Love's Labour's Lost, Act V, Scene 1, you will find this verbal whale. In the Oxford edition it is in line 45. It is the semi-jocular form of a word which actually exists in English, though it is archaic now: honorificabilitudinity. (The accent is on "-di-".) It means "honourableness". The semi-jocular form comes from the ablative plural of the Latin original of the English term. It occurs not only in Shakespeare but in another Elizabethan dramatist: Nashe. By the way, among monosyllabic words in English, the longest are: "strength" and "straight". Both have eight letters. Among polysyllabic words, the longest is "honorificabilitudinity" — twenty-two letters. The form used by Shakespeare has been pounced upon by the Baconians and they have juggled out of its twenty-seven letters a variety of Latin sentences, the most plausible of which is: "Hi ludi orbi tuiti F. Baconis nati." The sentence translates: "These plays preserved for the world (are) born of F. Bacon." The Shakespearians are expected to be impressed into dumbfounded defeat.

Unfortunately, they are not so easily cowed down. They may well ask: "What about the word's occurrence in Nashe? Should we make Bacon the author of all of Nashe's plays?" I suppose the Baconians would gnash their teeth on hearing this impertinent query. But there is more unpleasantness in store for them. The Latin form "Baconis" is the genitive case of "Baco". Now it is an extremely inconvenient fact that Bacon never wrote his name in Latin as "Baco": he always wrote "Baconus", whose genitive form would be "Baconi". So there will be an s going a-begging in the interpretation offered us.

All cryptograms are reeds to lean upon: they are bound to break in some part or other. But they make a fascinating game. I myself am tempted to set before you a cryptogram I have traced in Shakespeare. It definitely shows that those great dramas could never have been written by Shakespeare for the simple reason that they do not belong to the time of Elizabeth. So Bacon too is put out of court. My cryptogram confers an unsolicited honorifica-

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bilitudinitatibus on a writer who would have protested vehemently against it.

I shall pick out a small set of plays and arrange their titles under each other according to a coherent plan. An arbitrary hotchpotch cannot be called a cryptogram in any sense. I'll start with four titles and follow up with half that number. In the first four consisting of a couple of tragedies and a couple of comedies, their fourth letters will count as significant. In the last two, comprising a single tragedy and a single comedy, the second letters, will be taken as meaningful. I'll write the whole list on the blackboard with the important letters standing out from the rest. Read off all that falls in vertical line with the big letter of the first title:

KING LEAR MACBETH

MEASURE FOR MEASURE MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

HAMLET

TWELFTH NIGHT

Isn't the result a bit of an eye-opener? So cryptograms can prove anything. And to this over-ingenious sample, even more than to any other, the most appropriate response from us should be the dismissive interjection: "Pshaw!"

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TALK FORTY-TWO

We have now to comment critically on the poetry of the thought-mind and on the poetry of the planes beyond it. We have already had a taste of the Miltonic version of "the poetic intelligence" as well as obtained a glimpse of Dryden's exercise of the same poetic agency in dealing with Chaucer's lines on life. While Milton, compared with Shakespeare in two of his splendid bursts of the vital mind, fared very well in his own domain, Dryden came a bit of a cropper, rhetorically artificialising what was spontaneous and moving in the Mediaeval singer. It may be tempting to aver that Dryden failed because he wrote in an age when the Poetic Intelligence acted from its surface part — the part which put into verse-form the reasoning faculty skilfully expressing itself in measured language. Indeed this faculty exposes itself to the danger of an inadequate transmutation of prose into poetry. But the failure is not intrinsic to it. Every faculty in us is capable of being inspired and the surface part of the mind can also catch the Muse's breath. Let me pick out from the age in which Dryden flourished a passage which exemplifies a successful employment of the sheer reason in a poetic shape. My passage is from Dryden himself and is concerned with the very reason we are speaking of with a comparison of its range to the range of what was known as revealed religion which appealed to faith and not to logic. The passage from Dryden's Religio Laid runs:

Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars

To lonely, weary, wandering travellers

Is reason to the soul: and as on high

Those rolling fires discover but the sky,

Not light us here, so reason's glimmering ray

Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,

But guide us upward to a better day.

And as those nightly tapers disappear

When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere,

So pale grows reason at religion's sight;

So dies and so dissolves in supernatural light.

I have always regarded these couplets as poetic inspiration flowing through the movement of the pure intellect. I am sure Dryden,

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living in a period when wisdom was expected to be allied to wit, would have been pleased if someone had told him: "Starting with the belief that not only the moon but also the stars shine by reflection, the couplets point the particular limited utility of the intellect's characteristic function — its play of seizing life's meaning in thought, its constant reflective activity." The language of the couplets is of an argument carried out in a sustained manner, and there is a clarity and directness of expression everywhere: the mind is bent on making its point as lucidly and effectively as possible. But everywhere too are a stirred imagination, a deep emotion — and the initial metaphor is kept right up to the end, while the argument is so phrased as to thrill the heart at each turn of thought. The step-by-step progression of the idea, the slow patient working out of the theme, the recurrent tendency to make a straight statement — these are typical intellectual traits. Yet we have in the piece as a whole a most coherently built picture that makes a careful delicate impact on some profound part in us which immediately feels the truth of what is gradually unfolded. And how apt is the finale of six feet to the preceding pentameters! The sheer length of this verse and the penultimate five-syllabled epithet — "supernatural" — which is the longest and most impressive word in the passage clinch the thesis of religion's superiority by a subtly powerful dialectic of rhythm, structure and style. They demonstrate it to our grey cells by proving it on our senses and pulses.

When we pass beyond the Poetic Intelligence we enter either the Inner Mind and the Psychic Consciousness or rise into the "overhead" hierarchy. It will be enlightening no less than interesting to take one particular word and see how poets have woven it into their work in various manners moulded by diverse planes. I choose the noun "face". There is the simple emotional pull with a faint soul-tinge in the language of the Poetic Intelligence in Aldington's dedicated desire:

She is as gold

Lovely, and far more cold.

Do thou pray with me,

For if I win grace

To kiss twice her face

God has done well to me.

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An inward-moving ingenuity with a vague romantic-spiritual touch upon mental speech meets us in Donne's

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest.

Typical of this "Metaphysical" poet is the tension not only in the idea with its tug this way and that but also in the metrical craft with its unusual play of stress in both the lines.

In contrast to Donne's little picture of hearts in harmony through a mutual mirroring of faces by the eyes, here are lines by an Ashram poet about a state of discord which yet is turned by an inner wisdom's brave front into a spiritual gain:

O face of scorn, you winter not my will:

This heart grew brighter when your breath's proud chill

Flung my diffuse life-blood more richly in!

From the rude love-lacking visage we may slide into a vision of occult abnormal life brought by an inspiration of the Inner Mind guided from above the mental plane to a clear discernment of dreadful details:

A march of goddess figures dark and nude

Alarmed the air with grandiose unease;

Appalling footsteps drew invisibly near,

Shapes that were threats invaded the dream-light,

And ominous beings passed him on the road

Whose very gaze was a calamity:

A charm and sweetness sudden and formidable,

Faces that raised alluring lips and eyes

Approached him armed with beauty like a snare,

But hid a fatal meaning in each line

And could in a moment dangerously change.¹

At the other pole of the entities vivified by Sri Aurobindo is the Master himself as seen by a disciple-poet:

1. Savitri (Birth Centenary Edition, 1972), pp. 205-06.

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All heaven's secrecy lit to one face

Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry —

A soul of upright splendour like the noon!

Here we are straining beyond the Poetic Intelligence and even the second tier of the overhead ascent, for the Higher Mind which has seized the mental imagination is itself linking its largeness of thought to a wideness of sight proper to the Illumined Mind.

Sri Aurobindo has read a capture of the spiritual-mental Illumination and its domination by the inmost being, the Psychic Consciousness, in the last eight lines of the same disciple's poem with which you are all acquainted:

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn Light no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.

For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.

Please excuse the intrusion of my own work on you, but it comes handy at times because Sri Aurobindo has taken the trouble to distinguish its sources in terms of planes. Thus some lines of "The Sacred Fire" he characterises as felicitously intense with an intuitive edge — an outflow from the inner being not only uttering the psychic truth but also bearing "a fine psychic touch". The second of the two stanzas I am excerpting from this poem of nine stanzas may well represent this touch which is spread over more than sixteen of the lyric's thirty-six lines:

Breathe tenderly your love:

Feed the pure flame

By secret offerings

Of one far Name

Whose rhythms make more rich

That smiling face

Of angel glow within

The heart's embrace...

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Now I should like to bring before you an expression subtly suggestive of an exquisite inwardness inspired by outward Nature-feeling. It is the famous stanza in what is perhaps the finest and most moving lyric in English — Wordsworth's "Three years she grew":

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.

If I were to comment in the style of Sri Aurobindo I should say: "The Inner Mind where sight and insight happily blend, but making contact with the sweetness and light of the inmost secrecy which is the Psychic Consciousness, and catching a delicate intensity from the plane of sheer Intuition which is spontaneously intimate from its height with the depth of things." Actually, the stanza itself may be said to evoke covertly a sense both of the height and of the depth by beginning with "the stars of midnight", which are, in Sri Aurobindo's vision, symbols of the sheer Intuition-plane, and moving on to explore hidden recesses of the earth with a downward turn of the being, the act of leaning the ear to the mysterious message of little spurts of free-flowing and variously curving water.

Something akin in delicacy of expression as well as in sensitivity of feeling may be traced in a couple of lines from, again, an Ashram-poet:

The sole truth my lips bear is the perfume

From the ecstatic flower of her face.

Here the suggestion is that the poet draws his entire revelatory inspiration from a relationship of pure love to the beauty of a countenance in which a profound bliss of the innermost self has found a rapt outer expression.

The word "rapt" puts me in mind of another line, now by Vaughan, in which too the same ingredients from "overhead" can be spotted though in different proportions:

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Rapt above earth by power of one fair face...

Sri Aurobindo has opined about its mixed source: "Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else — but something of illumination and intuition also." I should point out that in reading this line one has to pronounce the preposition "above" with a shift of its usual accent. Instead of stressing the second syllable we have to put some weight on the first, though hardly such as on the opening past participle "Rapt". Or else we have to make the first foot a truncated one and scan the next with three words in a somewhat unusual way — a slack followed by a light pressure and then a strong ictus: "above earth." But the psychology, so to speak, of the line — its raptness — would be vitiated by that unusual trisyllabic skip. It is best to take the first foot as a semi-spondee, anticipating the full spondee with which the verse concludes: "fair face." There are several prepositions or adjectives in English poetry which allow a change of accent as here. To mention a few: "among", "upon", "beyond", "between", "occult", "divine", "extreme", "supreme". Consider for an example the fifth line at the beginning of Savitri, where "the huge foreboding mind of Night"

Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.

The metrical movement would be disturbed if we stressed the preposition in the normal way as in the second line of those two occurring later in Savitri:

A colloquy of the original Gods

Meeting upon the borders of the unknown...¹

In the poems of Swinburne we have two interesting accent-inversions. Look at the couplet:

And strewed one marriage-bed with tears and fire

For extreme loathing and supreme desire.

The epithets "extreme" and "supreme" are of the same kind and yet the first is stressed abnormally on the opening syllable and the

1. Ibid., p. 12.

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second on the closing as in normal pronunciation. But elsewhere we have the blasphemous phrase,

The supreme evil, God,

where the accent of the second epithet too is reversed.

To go back to our "face"-motif. I would place on the farthest borders of the unknown, neighbouring the Overmind if not even living in it, that picture of the Dawn-Goddess appearing on the last day of Satyavan's life and almost presaging the ultimate epiphany which would crown earth's evolutionary history:

Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm

Parted the eternal lids that open heaven;

A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.¹

On the same level, the sheer Overmind, we have those unforgettable lines of Marlowe on Helen of Troy, which, according to Sri Aurobindo, manifest the Overmind afflatus more on the emotional or descriptive side than on the ideative:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

If we want the ideative side in prominence, we shall be very well served by Wordsworth's response at Cambridge to the statue of

Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

A masterly art is here, inspired and revelatory. While the "prism" shows an outward orientation of the great scientist, the "silent face" evokes a sense of inwardness, a concentrated mood, and the next line suggests how such a face fits perfectly the sculpture-medium in whose stillness its possessor's genius is caught for all time as if in a superb trance. Again, the impression of all time for the marble image is matched by this image's pointer to the endless exploration of the hitherto unknown which preoccupied Newton's

l . Ibid . , p. 4 .

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mental powers. The inward absorption carries a secret dynamic drive. There is a crescendo in the uplift of the expression. The opening phrase may be considered the Poetic Intelligence's forceful clarity bordering on the Higher Mind's expansive vision and then the Higher Mind itself comes into full action with its wide rhythmic sweep breaking, as it were, beyond into something yet intenser by means of the last word — "ever" — which exceeds the pentameter span by a syllable. With this technical excess we are led on most naturally to the culminating scene — the movement of a unique adventure of speculation across distance after uncharted distance towards Nature's supreme truths. I employ the term "truths" rather than "facts" both because Wordsworth's picture has an aura of philosophical elevation and because Newton's own penetration of Nature was covertly suffused by an intuition of Supernature. For instance, his concept of uniform absolute space in which there was one absolute time at every point had for its background his notion of God's omnipresence and omniscience. If we wish to cull from the work of Wordsworth himself a hint of this hidden all-pervading divine sensorium of all-knowledge in a visible form, we should cite two other lines from the same poem, The Prelude, conjuring up a play of the aurora borealis:

Space like a heaven filled up with northern lights,

Here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once.

The technique of

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone

is worth noting in brief. The initial trochee of "Voya-" serves to represent the impulsion of the explorer's daring plunge forward. That long-sounding "through" rather than the short-sounding "in" or even the slightly lengthened "o'er" is the mot juste, especially as it is stressed, for introducing the league on league of uncrossed water which is suggested by the drawn-out vowel-value no less than by the strong stresses of "strange seas" and by the sibilant alliteration as if waves were splashing around the ship's career. The irregular metre straightens up in the last two feet which are iambs mirroring, so to speak, a steady course towards a goal. But each iamb takes its accent on a vowel over which the voice gets stretched, so that the suggestion of a continuous oceanic vastness

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is sustained. An extra effect which seems to sum up the boldness and uniqueness of the enterprise is the last word "alone" which actually stands by itself, after a comma, separate from the entire preceding phrase. Simultaneously, however, there is an undercurrent of connection between this last word and the very first one: "Voyaging". Thus the beginning and the end of the line are joined so as to build, in our aesthetic perception, a single whole despite the extensive intervening division which induces "alone", in that terminal position, to make a special disclosure of its significance.

Sri Aurobindo¹ characterises the line as being "wonderful" with its "fathomless depth" while regretting that such triumphs of poetic inspiration should occur in Wordsworth quite often in the midst of verse that is flat. What He calls "fathomless depth" is achieved not only by the idea getting an intuitively guided expression but also by — to use his own term — a "spiritual intonation", an inner rhythm, a mysterious sound as though the word-music were a snatch from some reverberation of godlike activity that has no end.

After quoting this line along with Milton's

Those thoughts that wander through eternity

which, by the way, presses into service the preposition "through" in affinity to Wordsworth's use of it, Sri Aurobindo² says: "In fact, the word-rhythm is only part of what we hear; it is a support for the rhythm we listen to behind in 'the Ear of the ear', srotrasya strotram. To a certain extent, that is what all great poetry at its highest tries to have, but it is only the Overmind rhythm to which it is altogether native and in which it is not only behind the word-rhythm but gets into the word-movement itself and finds a kind of fully supporting body there." It is because of that "Ear of the ear" that the Rishis of the Rigveda took it as their poetic function to be "hearers" of the Truth no less than "seers" of it, kavayah satya-srutah, in their aspiration to utter what is designated the Mantra, the supreme creative speech, the direct declaration of the Overmind. To employ about them some lines from Savitri:

1.The Future Poetry..., p. 1 2 1

2.Ibid., p. 369 .

3.Ibid., p. 363.

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They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers

In metres that reflect the moving worlds,

Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.

The last line here is a veritable Mantra crystallising the nature of the true Mantric articulation. If we may apply Sri Aurobindo's own description¹ of those two great lines from Wordsworth and Milton: "one has the sense here of a rhythm which does not begin or end with the line, but has for ever been sounding in the eternal planes and began even in Time ages ago and which returns into the infinite to go on sounding for ages after." And indeed it is of rhythm that the line speaks most prominently. Every truth-sight has its inherent truth-intonation and this intonation is like a radiant multitude of waves that come into view from what the Rigveda terms hridaye samudra, the immense sea of the inmost heart. The very vibration of that sea — the audible movement as of some mighty peace going forth to drown all the little voices that mislead the mind of man — creates in their place a unifying chord by which every genuine cry of earth would feel soothed and fulfilled. The Mantra, with its haunting thrill of a sovereign revelation, brings an all-harmonising calm: it is — in the accents of another Mantra from a short poem by Sri Aurobindo —

Force one with unimaginable rest.²

A remarkable technical trait of the phrase about "sight's sound-waves" is that seven out of the ten syllables making up the line are intrinsically long vowels and bear massed stresses, four consecutive ones in the first two feet and three such in the last two. I do not know of any other line in English poetry that has so much weight of music as well as of meaning and yet possesses a spontaneous mobility. No completer example can be offered of what these talks have sought to disclose: the heart and the art of poetry.

1.The Future Poetry..., p. 369.

2.Collected Poems (Birth Centenary Edition, 1972), p. 575.

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STRAY TALKS

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POETS, POEMS, POETRY

I have been given a sort of carte blanche — told that I should read any poem of my choice or else write one myself and explain where the poetry of it lies. Since the subject is poetry as exemplified by a poem, I may be excused a few general introductory remarks on the cause of this whole beautiful business: the poet.

There's the old Latin tag: Poeta nascitur, non fit. A schoolboy has made the startling translation: "Poets are nasty, but don't you get a fit!" Another intuitive youngster has the rendering: "Poets are born, but they are not fit to be!" Well, both the howlers have some sense, though far from the literal one, which is: "Poets are born, not made." The howlers are not quite off the mark because poets are often nasty. Horace has the phrase: vatum irritabile genus, "the irritable tribe of poets"; and it is also a fact that they are born but that many people, especially those to whom they go on spouting their verse, find they cannot be borne any more after birth.

What is forgotten in the midst of the anti-poet protest is, in the first place, that the mere man must not be mixed up with the poet-self even though both are in the same being who confronts the world. In judging the poet we must look at his poetry, the four or five or six metrical feet on which it runs, and not at the feet of clay with which the mere man walks or tries to kick. In the second place, we may attempt to understand how the presence of the poet in the composite being which contains also the mere man could make the latter over-sensitive to the common circumstances of life — circumstances so out of step with the enchanted inner tempo set by the poetic consciousness. Naturally there is a lack of rhyme between the poet-man and his prosaic fellows, resulting in his irritated response.

To revert to the literal sense of the Latin tag: it is true that in the usual course of things a poet, if not born, cannot ever be trained

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into poetry, but there can be true poets who are made in a way which the maker of that saying never dreamt of. This phenomenon has come about in that unusual course of things which we term spirituality. Take Nirodbaran, for instance, or Arjava (John Chad-wick), two of the poetic luminaries of our Ashram. Arjava was a professor of mathematical or symbolic logic — a mind moving among abstractions: he became a first-rate bard under Sri Aurobindo's touch. Nirodbaran was trained to be a doctor, but his aspiration was towards Apollo, not Aesculapius. He wanted to write sonnets, not prescriptions. He yearned to dispense not medicines but Coleridgean "honey-dew". Here, too, Sri Aurobindo did the trick. Sri Aurobindo knew how to give a poet birth in one who was not born a poet. That is the master art of Yoga — to bring the subtle planes into re-creative action.

The example of a born poet may be given from an incident in the life of Alexander Pope, the 18th century classic. From his very childhood he made poems. He has autobiographically written:

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

But his father was extremely displeased with this waste of time as he considered it, and so he took little Alexander to task rather severely. He often scolded him and once put him across his knees and administered a good whacking. Poor Alexander cried and cried, and promised his father he would not indulge in that waste of time. But the promise he sobbed out ran:

Papa, Papa, pity take!

I will no more verses make.

Now we have come to the subject proper that has been in my mind. It is whether verses are at all worth making. Poetry consists, as you know, of words, words in a certain rhythmic order with an intensity of vision and emotion infused in them. I shall read to you not one poem but in fact three, showing various sides of the art of poetry. Two of them are written by women.

Women are supposed to be expert at tossing words about. But here is a woman who writes against indulgence in words. She is herself a poet and in order to show the uselessness of words she writes a poem. Which is, of course, a paradox, and we shall dilate

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upon it after you have heard the poem. The piece is called "Words":

Words — what are words? I, who have drunk my fill

Of sudden joy, of love, of youth, of spring,

I, who have stood like God upon a hill

And thrilled to see a whole sky blossoming,

Never have found one word with half the ache

And wistful wonder of a moon-swept lake,

Nor any loveliness of phrase to show

The delicate drifting miracle of snow!

Words are the fragile ghosts of things that die

In being named. I tell you that the sight

And sting of beauty are enough delight

To close the lips with wonder, and to start

A wild and wordless singing in the heart!

He squanders joy who draws back from the brink

Of beauty for some silly song. I think

God never made a single flowering tree

For poet's babblings — but for ecstasy!

The author is Stella Kobrin. What she wants to convey is that the experience which usually is made to overflow into words by poets is such that words cannot do justice to it. Not only are they inadequate to it; she says they distort it, they turn it into a thing not of true beauty. Something silly, something trivial, something superficial results if expression is given to your thrill at the sight of beauty.

In the second line she mentions the usual themes of poetry, as she conceives them. Sudden joy, love, youth and spring — they are mostly the themes of lyric poetry. And she says that when she has stood upon a hill like God she has seen things which are inexpressible in language. Her central contention is: language cannot cope with exalted inner experience. The implication of "exalted" is important, she says she has stood like God; that conveys the intensity and the immensity of the experience of which she is speaking. It is as if she saw, for the first time, something which had come out of the mind of the Supreme Creator. In the Bible, God is declared to have made the world, looked at it, found it good and then smiled. So it is a wide-ranging and completely

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satisfying response to the world of beauty that she is trying to communicate to us. And she also implies that whenever we see and feel great beauty we participate in an experience that is divine. Such experience falls into a category which we can consider mystic or spiritual.

There seem to be several shades of meaning in this expression, and we may note that when she says she has "stood upon a hill" the hill itself is suggestive of a height of being — a state not belonging to the common lowlands of life. And then, standing upon a hill, what does she see? She thrills to see the whole sky blossoming. There is a cosmic expanse opened up in front of a lover of beauty. How is all that to be caught in words? It is too vast, it must overflow language, it must break through expression and so poetry must prove insufficient to contain and therefore to convey the glowing plenitude of the experience of nature's beauty.

At this point the writer makes a little shift. She is looking at the sky blossoming but when she is standing on the hill and watching the whole expanse overhead the conviction comes to her that she could

Never have found one word with half the ache

And wistful wonder of a moon-swept lake,

Nor any loveliness of phrase to show

The delicate drifting miracle of snow!

Within the sky she is evidently thinking of the moon as well as of snow falling — two immaculate phenomena — and she thinks of the moon reflected in a lake but she doesn't use the word "reflected" or any analogue of it: she speaks of "a moon-swept lake", a stretch of water that itself is, as it were, washed with moonlight, stirred with moonlight, filled with moonlight and excited with something from above within its depths. That is the suggestion and she speaks of two psychological reactions or responses: ache and wistful wonder. Both of them are intended to be in the looker-on as well as in that which is looked on. The lake itself, in being called moon-swept, is given an ache, a longing and, along with that longing, a wistfulness, the longing for something afar, and in that wistfulness there is a wonder, a startle, a surprise at such a thing happening as a moon sweeping the surface of a lake. And the very

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sight of this experience attributed to the lake creates in oneself also the ache and the wistful wonder. The expression is such that the preposition "of" which comes after "wonder" can apply to both the experience and the thing experienced. It's an experience of the lake as well as of its beholder. That is the skill with which the language is used. An additional conviction of the insufficiency of poetry is couched in the next two lines about snow.

You can make words as lovely as you like but they will never capture such a miracle as snow delicately drifting. In the course of telling us of both the lake and the snow the poet seems to contradict herself; of course, women are used to self-contradiction, so I don't think she has any scruple about it. She contradicts herself because the words she has used are so emphatic, so expressive of the reality of nature's beauty; she has chosen not the approximate but the exact words, words which can actually catch, reflect, echo the phenomenon; you might call them intuitive words. But, mind you, she uses on both occasions synonymous terms: "wonder" on one occasion and "miracle" on the other. By this she wants to convey, even while she herself is adequately giving tongue to the beauty which she sees, the surpassing quality, the transcendent attribute, of that beauty. A wonder breaks the sun of common processes, it is an exception by which you are baffled. A miracle is something which you cannot explain by natural means, it cannot be achieved even by natural means. Words she considers to be the things used by a human being, the "moon-swept lake" and the "delicately drifting snow" she takes to be things done by a Divine Being and therefore there is an incompatibility between words and nature's beauty — though, if we said "nature's beauty", it would bring in the suggestion of the natural. You might protest that, just like words which are the natural means used by human beings, a lake and snow are things which are equally natural because they belong to the same vast domain of nature to which man himself belongs, But this is a little queerness which we have to overlook; what the writer seeks to drive home is that human beings have not the power to express the divine, the supernatural, the power that the phenomena of the physical world of beautiful things have. No doubt, this is a proposition open to debate, but as a "poetic truth" it has to depend only on the way it is rhythmically felt on our pulses.

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Words are the fragile ghosts of things that die

In being named....

She means that when you try to express a thing in language the thing does not exist any more. It loses its genuine inner life, it dies, and when it dies all that you catch is only a ghost of it. By the use of names, by the use of words, you never catch the reality of a thing. You get something out of it which is not its true life, it is just like a spectre, a phantom. And it is an obvious fact that when you say something about something what you catch is not the thing itself; it is an echo, an image, a kind of duplication of the thing. But whether to call it a ghost or to call it a soul is an important point. If you call it a soul you mean that you have somehow transmitted by your language the essential life of a thing. If you call it a ghost you suggest what is attenuated, diminished, deprived of true vitality. And I suppose the difference according to us between true poetry and mere verse lies precisely in that. Sri Aurobindo has said that the true intuitive word of poetry catches the inner life-thrill of an object, a person, a situation and embodies it in terms of sound and it is that life-thrill which gives us the true rhythm, the rhythm which is expressive and not just decorative, the rhythm which is born of an inner sympathy and gives the intuitive word which is most exemplified, according to Sri Aurobindo, in Shakespeare. The frequency of the intuitive word in Shakespeare is unsurpassed. Sri Aurobindo says there are only one or two poets who have this intuitive word in extreme abundance. He mentions Shakespeare but who the other one or two may be is anybody's guess. I do not know and I cannot think of anyone else who has written like Shakespeare. In Stella Kobrin's view, even Shakespeare would be a failure, capturing in the words of his poetry not a soul but merely a ghost.

She continues:

...I tell you that the sight

And sting of beauty are enough delight

To close the lips with wonder, and to start.

A wild and wordless singing in the heart!

Very interesting lines, these. She asserts her conviction and in asserting it gives us two characteristics of the experience which

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poets endeavour to embody in verse: "the sight and sting of beauty." Poetry is most deeply definable as the harmonious self-expression of a thrilled seerhood. The "seerhood" is the "sight" that seizes "beauty". The "sting" of "beauty" corresponds to the "thrilled" state: something smites you, even makes you suffer, but with a certain piercing to the heart which awakens you to your true being, the spark of the Divine in you. Kobrin, however, declares that this double experience of sight and sting gives such an access of "delight", such a spell of "wonder", that you feel they are something impossible to express and all that they do is to create a sort of singing within the heart, a wild singing which you cannot tame, cannot order out in metrical expression; it has to be left a grand, colourful, self-fulfilled chaos, out of which no cosmos of a small song can emerge. It has to be left "wordless", but she uses the locution "wordless singing". "Singing" means the huge rapture which becomes a rhythmic experience, but that has to go on in the recesses of the heart, it cannot and should not be given expression in the form of language. Language constricts its immense spirituality. As soon as language is used the true singing is marred, the presence of the infinite is violated. Perhaps somebody might say: "What about music then? Pure music is wordless singing. Can it express all that poetry, as Kobrin holds, fails to communicate?" There is something in wordless music, according to Sri Aurobindo, which fills us with an almost immediate sense of the infinite. Poetry too can convey the infinite but not perhaps with the same directness; yet poetry is an art which carries the quintessences, as it were, of all the arts: of painting by giving us imagery and pictorial touches, of music by giving us inwardly expressive sounds and patterned accords that lift the sense beyond limited definitions, of sculpture by giving us concentrated moments, carved and chiselled felicities standing out from the general flow like poised attitudes of soul with the suggestion as of archetypal mood-forms. Even quintessential architecture is there in the way these felicitous fixities combine to build up a multitudinous whole of magnificent mystery. But, for Kobrin, poetry cannot seize the wonder that is within, and I suspect she would include music too in the same category as poetry. What she is telling us is that all art-expression is not only futile but a desecration of the experience of beauty in God's world.

She continues:

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He squanders joy who draws back from the brink

Of beauty for some silly song....

She means that somebody who has the idea of writing a poem cannot fully enter into the experience of beauty. He goes to the brink of beauty to drink the nectarous waters but if he has it in his mind to write a poem about it, he is divided in his experience and cannot really enjoy the full intoxication or, if he halts to write a poem and express what he is experiencing, he spoils the magic by interrupting it. The fullness of the delight will fail to be his and if that is so how is he ever going to embody his experience in poetry? Unless you have got something which brims you, you cannot give a just expression to it. But if you let it brim you, you can't at the same time stop anywhere to write anything. The author doesn't, of course, consider the case of having the full experience and then turning to poetry. Perhaps she would ask: "If you have the full experience, where the hell is the need to say anything? You've got everything, and writing is superfluous, not to speak of its being superficial." In any case, she refers to "silly song", silly because the attempt is to utter the unutterable, to attempt what was never meant to be done:

...I think

God never made a single flowering tree

For poets' babblings — but for ecstasy!

This reminds me of the end of a poem by another poet, a young man who died in the First World War: Joyce Kilmer. He has a whole poem on a tree. It concludes:

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

The same idea as Kobrin's is here, but there is in her lines the additional shade that God never made a tree for men to be foolish enough to write a poem about it. God made a tree, a flowering tree, in order that there might be an ecstasy within us, a sense of the Divine. "Ecstasy" — the word in its etymology signifies "standing outside", you are beside yourself, as we say, and when you are beside yourself you are in no condition really to do anything but be

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beside. You cannot write poetry in that condition: this is Kobrin's final contention.

We have come to the end of the poem. We have already made some critical comments by the way. What would one say of this piece at the close of its argument? I would say first of all that it is meant to be an argument and there lies its defect. The fact of its being an argument, something mentally conceived and put forth with a view to impress and convince us, is proved by several words in the composition itself. The most typical are "I think". The theme is thought by her, she is reflecting and making a case. If, instead of thinking about poetry, she spoke about it from the very heart of the poet in her, she would not give expression to such an idea. But the idea is correct in the sense that mostly we fail to express what we set out to. The majority of poems are failures, they fall short. The phenomenon of first-rate poetry is a very small one. It's true that there are lengthy epics, but how rare they are! Hundreds of long poems are attempted but most of them come to nothing. It is once in a thousand years that there arises a Homer. Once in another thousand years or so a Virgil comes on. Then after a millennium a Dante appears, and centuries pass before a Milton and a Sri Aurobindo work poetic miracles. The number of epic poets is such that we can count them on the fingers of one hand. Similarly, even writers of short poems, those who have written successful verses again and again, are also just a handful. Most poets who turn out hundreds of pieces succeed in creating a masterpiece just a few times. The difficulty of expressing beauty is certainly a formidable one and, if we understand Kobrin in that sense, we may say her thesis has a truth in it. But she makes her thesis a very sweeping one. It's not exactly a "moon-swept-lake" of a thesis, for it's not a very beautiful one in itself. Yet she has expressed it with a good deal of beauty and by doing so she once more contradicts herself. There is a self-refutation in the whole poem; for her to be effective in saying that poems are ineffective, she has to compose an effective poem! That is the paradox of the whole situation. Otherwise not a shred of conviction would come to us. And again and again we find in this composition memorable utterance — the empathic, the intuitive movement of what we consider to be true poetry comes in. And that is why this poem is worth reading, worth commenting on, worth drawing some lesson from. It does what she says no poet can ever do!

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Q. So would you call it a wholly successful poem?

Not quite — I would rather call it a success on the whole. I wouldn't call it a poem which is equally successful in every line. And it is successful as a poem, not as a thesis, because by being a poem it confutes its own thesis. I may add that its success is only on a certain plane — a rich mental plane. The intuitive stabs are not very frequent, yet the expression is quite competent almost throughout. Of course, mental poetry can be full of inspiration. I don't see why just by being an expression of the mind a poem cannot have inspiration.

Q. Would you call it thought-out?

I would call it thought-out in the sense that it has a design on our minds. It wants to convince us, it has a theme which the writer wants to establish — rather a thesis, a proposition, which she wants to prove to us. But what it does is not done in an intellectual way. It is done in an inspired mental way. And in being done so, it proves to us that even ideas can become the springs of poetry. A poet can even be highly philosophical. Kobrin is not a poetic philosopher, she just touches the core of an argument and moves on, she makes it tremble and thrill and tingle in our minds and goes on with some suggestive phrase here and there, like that about God never making anything for us to talk about. There you have the profound implication that things have a divine content and because they have a divine content this content cannot be expressed in any form except the form which God has given it. That implication is the real argument, it is not set forth in so many argumentative words but she suggests it every now and then, and by suggesting it with some real poetic force she succeeds in making a poem. It is after all like all poetic truths, something which holds on certain occasions and for a certain number of cases and there is a general suggestion of the frequent if not constant inadequacy of language to give proper shape to that which we feel and that which goes home to our hearts from this marvellous creation of the Divine. Up to that point she sets a poetic truth vibrating in us.

I should like to mention a few technical effects. The piece is in pentameters and the base is iambic - a rising foot, the stress on the second syllable. But the first line starts with a trochaic foot, the

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stress on the first syllable. And this syllable answers pre-eminently to the poem's subject: "Words". It is a hammer-stroke to drive into our minds the theme. If there had been an iambic foot in this place, the poet could not have produced that specific effect. Of course, any trochee would have served the purely technical purpose of an initial push — but the push is most significant with the chosen word: "Words". And in genuine poetry, technique and significance always coincide.

The third line has again the emphasis on the opening syllable: "I". By putting that emphasis Kobrin creates in us a Subtle confidence, that the person talking to us has had some definite convincing experience which we should accept. Then there is the line:

Never have found one word with half the ache...

We have the same technique, the first syllable accented to enforce the sense. Repeatedly by means of this device the poet tries to create the faith in us that there is someone who speaks with authority and the authority is of experience. The continuation of the phrase leads us to another aspect of inspired technique: alliteration. We have "wistful wonder". Close upon its heels is "delicate drifting" and finally "wild and wordless". This last alliteration, like that of "wistful wonder", plays upon the letter w which is always felt to give an expansive effect, the suggestion of widening out. Look at Wordsworth's

the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world.

There the sense of an immense burden which baffles the mind is clinched by those three w's of "weary", "weight" and "world". And this effect comes most convincingly to us in that line of Sri Aurobindo's where the suggestion of wideness is part of the expressed content of the line:

In the wide workshop of the Wonderful world.

You have four w's there and the expansive effect is tremendous and it is made most acute and conscious for us by the use of the very word "wide".

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Now we come to the next poem. It is written in short lines, unlike the iambic pentameters of the previous one. It is also by a woman, as I have already said. This woman gives a reply, you might say, to the other woman. But at the same time there is an element of agreement. She doesn't say that no poetry should be written but she says that poetry should be written only under certain conditions. So she corrects the imbalance of the other one's poem which is categorical in saying that poetry should never be written. This new piece is called: "Advice to Would-be Poets." All of you, I think, are would-be poets; so it should prove useful to all except for Nirod and me who are supposed to have fulfilled ourselves and are now have-been-poets. Well, what does Mary Sinton Leitch say?

Would you be a poet,

Be silent till you drink

Deep of a rainbow

At a brook's brink!

You shall tread deftly

Lest beauty be bereaved

By bruising of a flower.

Your spirit shall be grieved

When a bough is broken,

Else from your lips shall come

No elegy, no idyll,

Or prothalamium.

When you hear the world's laughter

And feel the world's grief

In the wash of a wave,

In the stir of a leaf;

When there shall fall upon you

The shadow of a wing

Though never a bird is in the sky,

Then sing!

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You may remember that the other poem had, towards its end, the phrase: "He squanders joy who draws back from the brink of beauty." Now here we begin with that theme:

...drink

Deep of a rainbow

At a brook's brink!

Kobrin has said that "at the brink of beauty" you must be silent and Leitch says the same thing: "be silent." Yet there is a vital difference. The former wants us not to draw back from its brink and start poetising; the latter wants us to stay by the brink and poetise, but not until we have had the full experience: we must be in no hurry to express ourselves. And here the brink is made the bank of a brook: the brook is a symbol of something which is flowing, it is a symbol of the flux of existence. As old Heraclitus said: Panta rhei, "Everything flows", and Heraclitus is supposed to have added to the flow of things by being, as we are told, "the weeping philosopher", just as Democritus is called "the laughing philosopher". But the flux-symbolism is not all we have here. We are asked to drink deep of a rainbow. This is a peculiar expression. How can you drink deep of a rainbow at the brink of a brook? It suggests that the brook is a tremble and a quiver of many colours and also that it is reflective. There is something marvellous above, which the brook catches in its lucidity, its crystalline quality. Or it can mean, if we think of this verse in the light of the very last verse of the poem, that when you are drinking of the brook you have not just to drink what is there in the brook: you have to feel something which is not there, something which is beyond the brook itself, something which is haunting it in some way: a rainbow presence — that is what you have to get, a beauty that belongs to the world of the imagination, the world of inner vision.

Then the poet gives a second piece of advice:

You shall tread deftly

Lest beauty be bereaved

By bruising of a flower....

There again you have the play of alliteration: "beauty" and "bereaved" and "bruising". This kind of repetition of sounds some-

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times takes the place of logic in poetry. Instead of trying to prove a point we are given a sort of inner connection, a consistency of expression by means of alliteration. The idea is that in the world of nature there is a living spirit. Beauty is conceived as a living spirit capable of feeling. If you tread in an unskilled, gauche, insensitive way, you will hurt the spirit of beauty which is there and which wants to keep her own manifestations or creations as beautiful as she can, as truly expressive of herself as possible. A flower is not meant to be hurt, its petals to be torn apart or its stalk to be broken. Its delicate poise should be left untroubled, and that is why we are asked to be very careful, very conscious of the world spirit, which is the spirit of beauty. A poet has always to feel that there is a living being in the world, a cosmic consciousness, a vast soul of the universe. A poet cannot be a poet unless, whether openly or not, he is both a pantheist and a polytheist over and above whatever other brand of theist he may be. He feels that there are gods Or

Your spirit will be grieved

When a bough is broken...

Not only must you avoid grieving the spirit of nature, you must also yourself be so sensitive that in case you have not trodden deftly and have done something to bruise a flower or break a bough you will be grieved as if you have done a horrible deed, committed a heinous crime. You must have such sensitivity that

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every time you do damage to the smallest piece of beauty you feel as if you should fall on your knees and beg forgiveness from the little thing which is hurt as well as from the great thing which has given birth to it. Unless you feel thus, you will never be a true poet, never give tongue to an elegy, an idyll, a prothalamium. An elegy is a composition which expresses a sad experience, it may not be a lament but there is a sense of the Virgilian "tears of things", a mortality-moved melancholy. An idyll is a poem which expresses a romantic figuration of life, a Shelleyan world "where moonlight and music and feeling are one". A prothalamium is a preliminary to a marriage song. Edmund Spenser of the Elizabethan Age coined the word and made it famous by a poem of his to go with another entitled "Epithalamium", the Marriage Song. This means a poem which expresses joy. Not only the romantic imagination, not only the feeling of "the heartbreak at the heart of things", as Wilfred Owen puts it, but also the common happinesses of earth-existence — nothing deep-delving or high-flying or wide-running is possible unless the poet is super-sensitive.

Next we come to more positive directions for the poet. Here the author puts forth one of the pre-conditions of bursting ihto poetry. When should you really take to singing? She gives an example of what you should do in the first place. The smallest thing holds for you immense significances, as if all mankind were finding tongue in the most tiny and trivial phenomenon you witness. The least occurrence of the objective universe is packed with the drive of all human history on the face of the earth, the whole world's movement through space and time with its million vicissitudes of evolutionary struggle — a struggle carrying tones of both laughter and grief, recurring fulfilment and recurring frustration. Perhaps the rejoicing and suffering of the totality of life and not merely of human history are the tones you have to feel. And the feeling is not to be confined to great events: it has to extend even to infinitesimals like the soft foam-burst of sea-water along the beach and the faint quiver a breath of air makes in delicate foliage. In these small events you have all terrestrial life happy or sorrowful in a low key — low yet with the entire essential meaning of the experience couched there. Before you are able to catch that entire essential meaning at every point of the cosmic scene you must not try to write poetry. That is one pre-condition.

Now we come to another, which is even more profound:

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When there shall fall upon you

The shadow of a wing

Though never a bird is in the sky...

You feel as if a great presence, a wide-spread presence from something very high were there. You are being haunted by it. There is an intense movement going on far above you, and you are aware of it when you are standing on the earth. You have a sensation not only of wideness, of a cosmic being, but of something very elevated far beyond, something transcendental, and you feel there is a supreme being high above who is attracting you. You are with the universe still, but you have the sense of a sort of sky and not only the horizon. And it is as though the feeling that you have were of the shadow of great wings and you look up to see if there is anything really there, but you see nothing. The world you see, the cosmos you see, but here is something not contained within them. It is something supreme but invisible. As Shelley says,

Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.

You look up and there is nothing there except the world you know, which lis a very grand world no doubt and has to be a very active force in you, yet now you are aware of an invisible reality which is outside this world. There is nothing to the physical eyes, and still you feel something. When you feel it, a kind of supernatural, a kind of divine, a kind of supracosmic movement is held by you in your heart. Then you are in a condition to give utterance to poetry,

Then sing!

There comes a definitive command at the end: you are fit to be a poet. This last verse is very intuitively suggestive and profound. One can write a whole essay on it. The last two stanzas could form the core of a whole theory of poetry which would be very much in tune with Sri Aurobindo's version of the poetic phenomenon. Mark how effectively Mary Sinton Leitch closes the poem. The fourth lines in all the stanzas have several words: "At a brook's brink", "Your spirit shall be grieved", etc. These are either two

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feet or three feet - four syllables or six. But in this last line of the poem there are only two short words:

Then sing!

They fall like great hammers and strike home the central theme in a way which the previous poem fails to do. I should think this piece is more successful than the other because whatever the writer wants to say, even if it be not the totality of what can be said on the subject, is given a certain completeness which is satisfying.

Q: Would you call it didactic?

Yes, in the sense that advice is given on what we should do, but it is not didactic in the ordinary sense of the word because it is full of imagery, full of inner feeling and is not just a number of thoughts arranged effectively to teach us a lesson. In the last verse the poet escapes into a sheer ether of intuitive vision, and what is hinted is deep and the lesson is lightened up as well as lighted up, it becomes air-borne by the form chosen. There is no heaviness about the movement, not even the weightiness which would be impressively associated with a didactic poem. There is a certain springyness, a certain wingedness and all that suggestion of winged-ness ends with the mention of a wing in the end!

Q: Which poem is greater in the beauty of expression?

That is a ticklish question because some would think that where the expression is rich we have the greater beauty, but there is a supreme beauty also in the absolute economy of phrase. So how are you going to define "beauty of expression"?

Q: Suggestiveness?

Suggestiveness can come from both styles. If you take Shakespeare you most frequently find in him a wealth of words. Instead of saying one word he says five. Similarly in Milton you have a plethora of words, art which is enriched, art which is abundant. But sometimes even in Shakespeare you come across very bare lines which are just as effective as his wealth-burdened move-

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merits. Milton too has such effects. In Dante you have, according to Sri Aurobindo, a perfect example of poetry where richness and restraint are fused. There are poets who are restrained rather than rich yet they achieve supreme effects. So it is difficult to say where beauty is more present. All that you can ask is: "In the type of expression selected, which poem succeeds more?" There we have some ground for discussion.

Q: Which poem would you say is more successful by your criterion?

I give my verdict in favour of the second piece. In the genre chosen, the beauty of expression is more here. In its class of poetry it succeeds better than the other does in its own class. But there the judgment is a little complicated since what makes the difference is that the argument of the second poem is not mental as is that of the first. In the first the process of the argument peeps in, while the process is completely concealed or transfigured in the second. The discursive intellect shows itself in the other poem, there are even the very words "I think". But here is no question of thinking: here are diminuitive visions given to us as parts of the argument. Though there is a leaping forward, a process, it is a process of the intellectual imagination more than of the imaginative intellect. The intellect is more prominent in the first poem than here. The imagination is more in evidence here than there. In that sense, though the two poems have something in common, I consider the second to be more successful.

Now, if you still have time to hear me, I'll read you a third poem, with only a very short comment. It's called "Soul of Song." The two other poems have spoken of keeping quiet: one poet says, "Shut up", the other says, "Hold your tongue for a while." The present poet says, "I have shut up, I have held my tongue sufficiently and so I have the right to say something." And, because of the silent inner preparation, what he says answers to all the definitons of poetry which one may briefly essay. I once defined poetry as "Sight and Insight, Light and Delight." I should add a third pair: "Passion and Peace." Let me elaborate the three pairs just a little. The poet has to respond to the colourful surface of the world and at the same time pierce through to catch the response to him of a hidden World-Life. Again, he has to bring a visionary

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understanding upon a surge of creative rapture echoing in some manner the rapture of the Spirit that has created the world. Finally, he has to embody an intensity, a vivida vis, a force of thought and feeling that builds up both detail and totality, but the pulsating dynamic structure should convey a sense of completion, fulfilment, reposeful roundedness, as if an eternal pattern of beauty and truth were progressively caught for ever in the point-instants of time. Now for the poem:

I have been quiet a long while

To fill my singing smile

With a magic beyond the lips of man,

And very quiet will I be

After the burst of minstrelsy

To find at the close

The light with which my tune began.

Glowing behind

The singer's mind,

A mystery journeys forth to meet

Across the rapture of rhyming feet

Its own unplumbed repose.

Come then, O listeners, with a tranquil mood

To feel far more than the loud heart knows,

Or else the King who moves through the common word

Shall never be heard

And keep unseen the strange infinitude

He bears above our mortal woes,

The purple of his dream divine.

Look deep for his true royalty's sign:

Haloed with hush he enters, coronaed with calm he goes!

"The purple of his dream divine": that is the truth at the back of all poetic beauty. But the expression naturally differs from poem to poem. In "Soul of Song" there is what you may call "intonation". This intonation you do feel also in the last verse of "Advice", but here the whole piece is filled with it. We may speak of its intonation more descriptively as a play of undertones and overtones, the vibrations of the being both behind and beyond the mind. But they still leave it a clear-cut disclosure of that being: it is

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not something that is mystery-remote, much less something that is mystery-entangled. What it does is to suggest a mystery with a kind of lucid spontaneous ingeniousness. This does not prevent it from mentioning physical objects and sensations — as in

Across the rapture of rhyming feet

and

...the King who moves through the common word.

Yes, you have imagery in full swing, yet all of it is wrapped and illumined by the atmosphere of the suprasensuous and of the inward. You hear all the time a traffic of depths within and heights above. The poet has stationed himself in those depths, with a keen hushed receptivity to those heights, so that he may be in tune with the mantra, as the Vedic Rishis put it — the Divine Word. Having done this he feels his own readiness for expression, and he looks at the outer world, picks out a few concrete impressions and with their help bestirs himself to poetic speech. At the end of his song he feels again the great silence that has given birth to it and he is able to convey to others the Master-Presence whose home is that silence. It is the communication of that Presence with the very life-sense of it in his music that we hear in the last line:

Haloed with hush he enters, coronaed with calm he goes!

I think, my friends, you also should go now with at least a glint of the same corona.

Such a glint should be natural to you who are all Aurobindo-nians; for if this line points to any earthly counterpart of the Presence it evokes, it is to Sri Aurobindo.

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A BACK-LOOK AT MACBETH

I was not given a theme in advance. Nirod has just now said, "Talk about Macbeth — or, if you like, about the Sonnets. After all, it doesn't matter because it's the same genius who wrote the play and those poems." Perhaps he should have added, "It's the same non-genius who is going to talk." Well, as he has mentioned Macbeth first, I take it that his preference is for the play. The only trouble is that all of you have studied it very lately whereas my memory of it goes back by several decades. So, naturally, it's a little hazy. Still, it is not difficult to say a few things by way of introduction.

There has been a controversy as to what can be called Shakespeare's masterpiece. Most people plump for Hamlet. Some are devotees of Lear and some favour Othello. My grandfather was all for Hamlet and my father swore by Othello. And I believe Sri Aurobindo chose Lear on the whole. My leaning is towards Macbeth as Shakespare's top reach in dramatic art. I use the word "art" advisedly because I cannot really say that Shakespeare has written greater poetry in Macbeth than in those three other plays or several others which have not run in any competition to be his chief work — though just now I remember that Frank Harris took Antony and Cleopatra to be Shakespeare's richest creation. Although Macbeth's poetry is not any greater than that in the rest of Shakespeare's mature works, the Mount Everests here come very close together. The gaps between them are not so wide as those in the other dramas. This is a very compact and concentrated product of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry and that is why from the point of view of art I regard it as his magnum opus.

It may be that the Everests come so close together because Macbeth, with perhaps the exception of Julius Caesar, is the shortest play Shakespeare ever wrote. But that does not quite explain the recurrence of his poetic heights at such close quarters, since even if a play is short the usual range of his best and his second best and his average can continue. Why should he be in such a hurry to pack his heights together? So I conclude that it must be that he wrote Macbeth at a sort of fever pitch or concert pitch of poetic utterance. His genius reached its fullest and most abundant maturity in this drama. That is by way of introduction and by way of personal estimate of the play.

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Now there is the topic of Shakespeare expressing the various parts of himself. You know that he has been honoured with the epithet "myriad-minded". The "Bardolaters", as Bernard Shaw dubbed those who blindly worship Shakespeare's genius and assign to him evey possible capacity of mind, extol him as not only the greatest dramatic poet, which he certainly is, but also as a profound thinker and even as a mystically inclined seer. Sri Aurobindo has remarked that Shakespeare lacks the true philosophic turn of thought and that is why all attempts to ascribe his plays to Bacon who was a thinker on philosophical lines are as futile as attempts to show Bacon to be poetically gifted. Sri Aurobindo sees more thought-power in a single essay of Bacon's than in a whole drama of Shakespeare's and he marks how Bacon, in his one authenticated experiment in writing poetry, is sadly hampered by the born philosopher's characteristic way of unimaginative expression. According to Sri Aurobindo, the so-called thinking in the great plays consists of a number of vivid ideas thrown up by the response of emotion and passion to particular life-situations. The pure detached intellect is nowhere in evidence.

As to the mystic seerhood attributed to the Bard, we may grant that on occasion he comes out with astonishing insights. Thus he makes Hamlet declare:

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we may.

He has also that superb phrase in one of his sonnets:

the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

This has a certain vibrancy which to an ear attuned to the subtle music of poetry sounds almost "Overmindish". It is as if something from the Overmind plunging into the throbbing universe of the Life-Force which is Shakespeare's sovereign domain had emerged successfully. But such things are as a saying Sri Aurobindo quotes in another context in The Future Poetry, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, "rare swimmings in a vast gurge". The phrase about the "prophetic soul" is my discovery for Sri Aurobindo's consideration. He himself discovered another which occurs in The Tempest:

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In the dark backward and abysm of time,

and which he traces to the Overmind. But these snatches of mystical perception are quite untypical of Shakespeare and, on the strength of their flashes few and far between, we can hardly spell out a mystical aspect of him.

I once tried to make him a kind of mystic thinker by quoting a long passage from The Tempest to Sri Aurobindo: Prospero's famous speech which begins,

Our revels now are ended...

and finishes with the words:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

In this speech we are told that everything will vanish and "leave not a wrack behind." Sri Aurobindo says there is no mysticism of outlook here at all in the sense that Shakespeare does not have any expression of something surviving the universal dissolution. It is wrong to believe that he imagines there is a universal sleeper or dreamer behind the sleep or the dream. Such a notion is not really couched in his lines. What is shown is simply the dream-like quality of things which strikes one at times and the only conclusion is that everything is ephemeral, everything is transitory, there is no substantial reality remaining behind the appearance and disappearance of phenomena. This was what Sri Aurobindo tried to make me realise, that you cannot read such things into a poet. You can say, if you like, that behind the poet there was some inspiration which tried to make him a medium and failed so far as the mysticism was concerned, though it succeeded so far as the poetic expression of something or other was concerned.

Now, as regards the perception of things unseen, what Words-worth calls "unknown modes of being", there are two compartments: one is the pure mystical, and the other is the sheer occult. Can we say that Shakespeare, even if he may not be a mystic properly speaking, has some familiarity with or understanding of the sheer occult?

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In the Middle Ages the presence of devils and angels was an accepted fact. People even claimed to meet angels and devils. Martin Luther records his own experience. Once at midnight when he had fallen asleep over his writing-table, a slight noise disturbed him. Waking up, he saw the devil standing in one corner of his room. Luther picked up his ink-pot and threw it at the devil, and the devil vanished. I suppose the devil didn't want to be painted blacker than he was!

So you see, all these things were taken to be there and the medieval philosophers speculated on how many thousands of angels by means of their subtlety and their insubstantiality could dance on the point of a needle. The tradition of presences behind the physical scene persisted down to Shakespeare's day although by then the great movement which swept the Middle Ages off had already come to pass, the Renaissance. The Renaissance had a great vital gusto and a sense of things of the earth and also a humanist enthusiasm which refused to take interest in religious things or in things which could not be seen and touched. Naturally, devils and angels were not very popular with the typical Renaissance thinkers. But the artists carried on the religious tradition and we have angels still in Raphael and Michelangelo though Michelangelo gave them a statuesque and sculptured quality and his God himself seems to be a very muscular man instead of a God: even his beard seems to be full of muscles the way it flies like a torn banner!

In Shakespeare's day England was unusually uneducated as compared to the Continent. Spain was considered a civilised country and so was Portugal. Many consider them backwaters at present, but in those days they were in the front rank of civilisation and Elizabethan England was pretty barbarous in the matter of education, in the matter of manners, and the English were a rough people and even the amenities of life were not so abundant. They were not abundant anywhere in fact, but in Elizabethan England they were even less so. You can imagine the condition of amenities when you know that even at the time of Louis XIV, a little after the Elizabethan Age, the Great Palace of the Roi Soleil, the Sun-King, had not a single bathroom anywhere. And all the people, the cavaliers, the musketeers, the foreign emissaries, the people's representatives, who came to wait in the beautiful hall hung with tapestries and paintings, did not know what to do when they had to

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answer nature's call. They answered the minor part of it, there and then, in corners of the huge apartment. Not much later in time, Frederick the Great of Germany had to send for a bucket of water from a well half a mile away whenever he felt like having a bath, which was not very frequent. Louis XIV never had a bath except once when he was born and once when he was dead. On both occasions others washed him. He used to pour Eau de Cologne every time he felt himself not quite royally odoriferous.

Coming back to Shakespeare and the dirt and crudity of his day, we may say the superstitions of Medieval Europe lasted a little longer in Elizabethan England than they did elsewhere. So thoughts of angels, devils, gnomes, witches persisted very much. A lot of witches were burnt in England even after the time of Elizabeth. In France I think Joan of Arc was the last witch burnt. They burnt her as a witch, you must realise. So we may expect Shakespeare to have catered to the popular taste for so-called occult phenomena. Shakespare was a great one for catering to fads and fancies and tickling the ears of the groundlings. The groundlings were the people who squatted on the stage itself while the drama was going on. They ate oranges and threw orange peels about and made all sorts of ex tempore remarks in the middle of the play's speeches. It could be that some most unShakespearean patches in the dramas have come because of these remarks which afterwards got incorporated along with the replies the actors gave to the groundlings. We shall be justified in expecting a smear, a superficial scatter, of occult elements in the Shakespearean drama and we do hear talk of agencies behind the scenes doing things. But in the plays themselves the occult activity is very seldom shown.

Othello was accused of using witchcraft in winning Desdemona. The Venetian Senate couldn't imagine how a Moor, a dark man, who could have said, like the King of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice,

Mislike me not for my complexion,

The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,

had fascinated a girl, a beauty besides, who was snow-white both in complexion and in morals. How could she ever fall for a savage like Othello? Hence they thought he must have mixed some magic potions and made her drink them. But actually it was she who used

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to bring him drinks because he was a guest at her father's house. He had no chance to give her anything like a drug to set her imagination ablaze with Othello-dreams. So he defended himself when he was impeached for witchcraft, saying that he only told the thrilling story of his life to Desdemona and she sighed and she moaned and she said in effect, "Well, if ever I were to marry somebody, I think that somebody would be a soldier like you." It was almost an indirect proposal, of which Othello with his military strategic mind took due advantage.

There are, as I have said, references to subtle and occult agencies at work in the dramas of Shakespeare. Whether Shakespeare himself had any belief in them it is difficult to say. In one passage somewhere somebody says,

I shall call spirits from the vasty deep.

Another fellow retorts, "Yes, you may call but will they answer you?" It seems to reflect Shakespeare's own scepticism. But it is very difficult to know whether Shakespeare believes in any blessed thing, because he seems to be just a vehicle, a mouthpiece, of poetic inspiration and it didn't matter one jot what he believed and what he himself thought and what he did — and he hardly seems to have done anything worth recording. Just to steal a deer in the countryside or to come to London to hold the heads of horses outside theatres or even become an actor and then, as Sri Aurobindo reminds us, be a money-lender and buy the best house in Stratford-upon-Avon are hardly incidents to give you any keys to Shakespeare as a man, much less to his mind. There are no incidents in his life that we can really fasten on. Only his Sonnets seem to be some sort of key, but even they are debated. Some people say they are just like his dramas. And the three famous unknown quantities — the "Fair Youth", "the Dark Lady" and "the Rival Poet" — are dramatis personae like any others, however vivid and particularised they may seem, as if they were reflections of real characters. All the dramas of Shakespeare are full of such reflections and he doesn't seem to have lived his life at all unless we regard his Sonnets as some sort of autobiography. So whether Shakespeare believed in Occultism or not we do not know and it is a question which is practically irrelevant, because actually he was not concerned with what he wrote! That is why he took no

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interest even in his own plays, he never revised them, he never brought out any of them in book-form, much less did he collect them, he just made his pile and retired to Stratford and lived there as the richest man in the county. Apparently, that was all his ambition.

However, in two or three of his dramas we do find a marked stamp of occult action and the two most outstanding of these dramas are Macbeth and Lear. In Lear it seems the gigantic powers, which move human beings and make them their puppets, come out in a most notable, conspicuous, gross and colossal form. Goneril and Regan, two daughters of Lear, are real devils incarnate, Cordelia the youngest is just the opposite, an angel incarnate, you might say. But those two are awful creatures. And Lear makes himself a prey to their machinations; he opens himself to them and he was a little off his chump already in giving all his kingdom to both of them and giving nothing to Cordelia and calling her ungrateful. His words were a favourite of my grandfather: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!" Just because she said she couldn't love him best, as she would love her husband best, the old man got highly enraged and said in effect, "You are a rotter and I'll disinherit you." The two other women were already married and Cordelia was not even engaged at that time, so she was just honest and the older pair who had left Lear for their husbands said, as it were, "We adore you. Our husbands are all in the background." Lear gave away his whole kingdom to them and made himself so helpless that they took advantage of their position and completely neglected him. Naturally through that crack in his brain which he already had, he admitted all kinds of perverse powers and became really a lunatic. And there in the midst of his lunacy you have the great storm on the heath and that great storm makes also Lear explode in storms of language — a manifestation of the gigantic evil force that was at work in the entire drama. It tries to find expression in dramatic situation and dramatic interplay of character and you have the real sense of agencies from behind the scene taking charge of the world-stage and naturally the Elizabethan stage too. That may be why Sri Aurobindo, being sensitive to and so aware of all these forces, ranked Lear as the greatest of Shakespeare's creations.

Now these occult agencies are also at play in Macbeth and from the first you have the keynote set with the witches and their

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mumbo-jumbo and abracadabra, their "Fair is foul and foul is fair." Macbeth is shown to be in subtle tune with these witches: he has an urge to rise in life, an unexpressed ambition at the back of his mind and the witches have an intuition of what he is thinking. because the witches and he are in tune somewhere in their psycho logies, they come along in the same direction and cross each other. That, you might say, is Shakespeare's preparation of the action of the occult powers, and Macbeth is greatly stimulated by what the witches say. He has a faith in them, and they know how to create faith by telling him what he did not know but what had already occurred — an event which they could find out, namely, that he, already "Thane of Glamis" had been made "Thane of Cawdor". The witches are naturally aware of this, I mean they should be aware of such things — otherwise what's the fun in being a witch? So he was very much struck and quite convinced that they had the power of prophecy. They also told him he would be king.But they made a faux pas by foretelling the future of Macbeth's comrade-in-arms, Banquo. They said Banquo would be "father to a line of kings." Macbeth was so convinced of their truthfulness that somehow he couldn't get it out of his mind that his own children would not be kings and thus his own dynasty, if ever he wore a crown, would come to an end. This complicated the whole situation terribly. Perhaps if he had not known the future of Banquo as predicted by the witches, he would not have muddled up his life so much by trying to have Banquo murdered, and thus given Banquo's ghost a chance to appear at the table and expose Macbeth's conscience and frighten him almost out of his wits. Anyway, we have there the occult power set at work and we have more than once again the manifestation of the same agency.

An instance is when Macbeth hears a voice after he has killed the sleeping king Duncan: "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep," and he tells of the lovely nature of "innocent sleep" at some length. When Lady Macbeth asks him what he meant he answers:

Still, it cried, "Sleep no more!" to all the house:

"Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor

Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!"

But here we have, we might say, the opposite of the power which

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works for evil, because there is a retribution at work on the occult plane, be it vital or any other. You don't have powers working only for evil. Some work also for good and avenge evil doings. Just as they try to confuse the results of good deeds, so also they strike at excesses of evil-doing. Through the extreme action which Macbeth precipitated by becoming, along with his wife, the murderer of Duncan and taking the movement of things into his own hands and forcing results, he oversteps the mark, you might say. When we say "oversteps the mark" we have to think of two things. There may be certain ideals we may set up for a human being. That is what the Greeks believed. They held that man should not go beyond a certain limit. There should not be hubris, overweening pride or ambition. And man must observe his own human measure. That by the way is the interpretation some Hellenists give of the two great aphorisms that have come to us from Greek times: "Know thyself" and "Nothing too much." These Hellenists say you must act moderately, not cross the limits and "Know thyself means to them that you must understand what you are, you are human and that is why you must not cross limits but do everything in moderation.

We Aurobindonians don't agree with these interpreters. We think "Know thyself means what Socrates had in mind: you must know your true being which is more than human, your soul which is divine. Ours is exactly the opposite of the other interpretation. Of course with our interpretation we would not be able to syn-thesise the two aphorisms. If you know that you are divine, why should you observe the other rule of "Nothing too much", unless we take the words to mean "Don't do too much evil." But then it might mean we can do small evil! So there is an inconsistency there. But we can keep the two sayings quite apart and take it that in one of them some sort of moderation in life in general is recommended, not because man is man and has limitations but because moderation is itself a virtue We can interpret the adage in the light of Greek Art. There also you have a fine restraint, you don't have abundance as you have in Oriental Art. You have a chiselling of lines and everywhere a kind of divine perfection limited or moderated to human terms. You can consider the meaning of "Nothing too much" to be: however divine you may be, you should still remain a humanist and not forget the human life that you have to lead in the world. That would be something

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almost Aurobindonian. Here we have to think of human limits as such. The human temperament, the human sensorium is so balanced that it can stand a certain amount of pressure and no more from occult forces. Even spiritual forces at times send people crazy. In the Ashram itself I have known some people becoming quite irrational, to say the least. Not so much of late but in the early days when the Yogic pressure seems to have been much more, people used to lose their heads quite often either temporarily or permanently, until they were packed off from here and then they regained their heads. Here they were asked to keep their minds aside, so they did it very literally and lost them actually. If even spiritual powers, which have some concern, or some conscience you might say, for the human organism, can drive people crazy, how much more craziness can we not expect from sheerly occult forces? They don't care a fiddlestick whether a man goes mad or stays sane or does good or does evil; but a certain pitch of power from behind the scenes can steal away a man's wits or bring about calamities in his life and upset his life altogether if he oversteps purely human bounds.

There is also another consideration. Every man has got his own little limit. If you are a person of a particular type with a particular cast of mind, with a particular type of nervous system, you can't stand the pressure of forces beyond a particular pitch. Macbeth is considered to be a man of very sensitive feelings, he had even an artistic side, it seems, and he was full of the milk of human kindness. If left to himself, he would not do anything to hurt anybody. That was one part of him; another part of him was ambitious. And when that ambition took charge, all the lactic litres of benevolence would not have much weight and, in case of a conflict, we don't know which part would come out on top. Perhaps it would depend on Lady Macbeth being present or not, because she was a very powerful personality who could influence him with her iron will. He was always irresolute, but she knew her mind, whatever she wanted to do she went straight to the mark. Yet even her we cannot consider absolutely an incarnation of evil because she too talks of some aspect of herself which is quite human, she talks of her having given "suck" and known how tender it is to love the babe that milks one. She also feels a restraint when she goes to kill Duncan in his sleep but finds him looking like her father. In her state of somnambulism she remarks:

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"Who could have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" There are some sensitive reactions in her and actually if there had not been this element she would not have become half crazed towards the end. And in the somnambulist scene she would not have been rubbing her hands and trying to wash them. Nor, if she had been a born murderess, would she have exclaimed that all the perfumes of Arabia would not sweeten the little hand that had once the smell of blood on it — that is, when she had gone into Duncan's chamber to smear with his blood the faces and clothes of the grooms sleeping there so that they might be suspected of murdering the king in their drunken state.

So both of these characters have something in them which is open to good influences, Macbeth much more than Lady Macbeth; that is why Lady Macbeth who goes to the limit of wickedness with hardly a care in the world is the greater sufferer because we must remember how the forces which are occult are also retributive forces; they can avenge an evil action which has been caused by an intervention of evil occult forces, and it is they who rob Macbeth of his sleep and it is they who make Lady Macbeth a sleep-walker, the very opposite of Macbeth. Macbeth, poor fellow, had to pace up and down because he couldn't sleep: he was very restless. She had to pace up and down because she couldn't wake up and rest! So these are sort of balances and the retribution is according to the amount of evil resolution in either. So we find on more than one occasion these occult forces at work and it is they that give the play a weird glow, that strange intensity which is sustained and comes out even in the poetic quality because here you might say that some occult force is behind Shakespeare, goading him on, intensifying even his capabilities so that he is all the more Shakespeare than he usually is. Hence the constant occurrence of his ne plus ultra of poetic effect in Macbeth, and many of the passages which reach the height of Shakespeare's poetic bent are precisely passages which have to deal with these occult forces.

Now. that passage about a voice crying that Macbeth has murdered sleep — Sri Aurobindo considered it to be an expression which belonged to the highest range of poetry. When here we talk of the highest range we don't mean the Overmind as such, which is the home of the Mantra. Sri Aurobindo is here talking of the various styles of poetry, and the perfection possible in them. They differ one from another in a certain intensity of speech. You have

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the adequate style in which something is said in a happy manner which just suits the occasion. There is no special flight of imagination, there is no special movement of rhetoric, there is no special inwardness of expression. But something is said smoothly, beautifully, with some kind of general light in it. The blithe sunshiny style of Chaucer, for instance. That is the adequate style. Then you have the effective style when something is said with force, a passion comes in and becomes quite prominent, rhetorical effects are there — not necessarily false effects; they are very genuine effects, you have figures of speech and you have a compact, concentrated, quick expression such as we find mostly in Shakespeare. Shakespeare's style is very often effective in the true sense of the word but Shakespeare has also another side in which he is full of similes and metaphors and lights and glimmers and picturesque phrases. That is what you may call the illumined style in a semi-decorative form; the illumined style as such in its proper functioning is something which is beyond both the vital being and the mental being. You have some inward glow of things by which you feel the hidden significance of objects and of persons and of occasions. You have the illumined style wherever imagery is at play but the true illumined imagery is revelatory. It doesn't merely paint pictures and spread colours, however beautifully. Beyond the illumined style you have what Sri Aurobindo calls the inspired style, and there you have a kind of rapt attitude in the utterance, the poet is as if in a trance and he speaks from a depth or a height which is beyond himself. In each of the styles at its top you have that inevitable pitch where there is poetic perfection past which you cannot go, on a certain level, so that, poetically speaking, you have the utmost. But there is a fifth style which breaks completely out of this fourfold classification. To this you cannot give any exact name at all. Sri Aurobindo designates it the "sheer inevitable" or "the inevitable inevitability". Inevitability you can have in all the styles but here is inevitability in itself — the pure poetical style, if you like. The archetypal poet would always talk in that style and of this style you get very few examples. Few comparatively, of course, because even Shakespeare has quite a number, but as compared to the number of his examples in the effective, illumined and inspired styles, these are few. Sri Aurobindo has given some other examples than the sleep-murder lines — examples from Latin and from Greek as well as from English. Three of the

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English instances are:

...magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep

and

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone

are from Wordsworth. The last two verses are at the same time Overmind lines. But nowhere has Sri Aurobindo clearly indicated whether the levels of style correspond to the levels of inspiration in the sense of planes. He touches on the idea that the adequate style might be said to be the mental style, the effective the style of the Higher Mind, the illumined the style of the Illumined Mind, the inspired the style of the Intuition, and the sheer inevitable the style of the Overmind. But he adds that it is not always possible to affirm this, because on each level there could be the sheer inevitable and hot only the inevitable proper to that level. For instance, in Shakespeare, King Henry the fourth's question to sleep —

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? —

is, according to Sri Aurobindo, from the Illumined Mind and yet it belongs to the inevitable inevitability. Thus some research in aesthetics remains to be done in order to arrive at a conclusion in the balancing or coinciding of the planes of inspiration and the levels of style-perfection.

Just as what I regard as one of the top peaks of dramatic poetry in Macbeth comes with the expression of the retributive occult forces, so too the whole invocation by Lady Macbeth to occult evil is Shakespeare at his most wonderful. There are those terrific unforgettable phrases —

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts! unsex me here,

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And fill me from the crown to the toe top full

Of direst cruelty —

and the culminating appeal, a veritable spell of devilry:

You murdering ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

To cry, "Hold, hold!"

This, to my ear, is a sustained piece of the sheer inevitable style. It is created not only with a burst of mighty language but also with a rhythm that evokes by a brief yet tremendous alliteration the sinister invisible presences and renders, by foot-variations as well as by metrical movement and retardation, the future event a vivid overwhelming imaginative present.

To match all this dumbfounding hubbub of inspiration with what I may term a quiet soul-piercing exquisiteness reaching an equal supremacy of poetic speech, a level of pure inevitability, I would choose that single line about Duncan being in his grave:

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.

Simplicity of expression and subtlety of suggestion could not go further — art and insight attain here their climax within Shakespeare's psychological dimension. By means of apt sound and image a vision of the trouble and uncertainty of life is coupled with a profound sense of release and salvation.

We may take leave of Macbeth now, remembering its most powerful moment and its moment of deepest peace.

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Talks on Poetry

Poems by Sri Aurobindo

Spiritual Significance of Flowers

Disciples / Seekers

Sri Aurobindo's Works

The Mother's Works

Satprem's Books

Works by Disciples / Seekers

Guidance

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