-15_The Poet and the Critic.htm

READING AND POETIC CREATION AND YOGA

 

for the expression can be used and perhaps has been used in verse as merely equivalent to "shining swords"; but for anyone with an alert imagination it can mean in certain contexts something more than that, swords that emit brilliance and seem to be made of light. X says that to use this turn in any other than an adjectival sense is unidiomatic, but he admits that there need be no objection provided that it creates a sense of beauty, but he finds no beauty in any of these passages. But the beauty can be perceived only if the other sense is seen, and even then we come back to the question of personal reaction; you and other readers may feel beauty where he finds none. I do not myself share his sensitive abhorrence of this prepositional phrase; it may be of course because there are coarser rhetorical threads in my literary taste. I would not, for instance, shrink from a sentence like this in a sort of free verse, "Where is thy wall of safety? Where is thy arm of strength? Whither has fled thy vanished face of glory?" Rhetoric of course, but it has in it an element which can be attractive, and it seems to me to bring in a more vivid note and mean more than ‘-’thy strong arm" or "thy glorious face" or than "the strength of thy arm" and "the glory of thy face".

I come next to the critic’s trenchant attack on that passage in my symbolic vision of Night and Dawn in which there is recorded the conscious adoration of Nature when it feels the passage of the omniscient Goddess of eternal Light. Trenchant, but with what seems to me a false edge; or else if it is a sword of Damascus that would cleave the strongest material mass of iron he is using it to cut through subtle air, the air closes behind his passage and remains unsevered. He finds here only poor and false poetry, unoriginal in imagery and void of true wording and true vision, but that is again a matter of personal reaction and everyone has a right to his own, you to yours as he to his. I was not seeking for originality but for truth and the effective poetical expression of my vision. He finds no vision there, and that may be because I could not express myself with any power; but it may also be because of his temperamental failure to feel and see what I felt and saw. I can only answer to the intellectual reasonings and judgments which turned up in him when he tried to find the causes of his reaction. These seem to me to be either fastidious

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and unsound or founded on a mistake of comprehension and therefore invalid or else inapplicable to this kind of poetry. His main charge is that there is a violent and altogether illegitimate transference of epithet in the expression "the wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind"¹. A transference of epithet is not necessarily illegitimate, especially if it expresses something that is true or necessary to convey a sound feeling and vision of things: for instance, if one writes in an Ovidian account of the dénouement of a lovers’ quarrel

 

In spite of a reluctant sullen heart

My willing feet were driven to thy door,

 

it might be said that it was something in the mind that was willing and the ascription of an emotion or state of mind to the feet is an illegitimate transfer of epithet; but the lines express a conflict of the members, the mind reluctant, the body obeying the force of the desire that moves it and the use of the epithet is therefore perfectly true and legitimate. But here no such defence is necessary because there is no transfer of epithets. The critic thinks that I imagined the wind as having a winged body and then took away the wings from its shoulders and clapped them on to its voice or hymn which could have no body. But I did nothing of the kind; I am not bound to give wings to the wind. In an occult vision the breath, sound, movement by which we physically know of a wind is not its real being but only the physical manifestation of the wind-god or the spirit of the air, as in the Veda the sacrificial fire is only a physical birth, temporary body or manifestation of the god of Fire, Agni. The gods of the Air and other godheads in the Indian tradition have no wings, the Maruts or storm-gods ride through the skies in their gallop­ing chariots with their flashing golden lances, the beings of the middle world in the Ajanta frescoes are seen moving through the air not with wings but with a gliding natural motion proper to ethereal bodies. The epithet "wide-winged" then does not belong to the wind and is not transferred from it, but is proper to the voice of the wind which takes the form of a conscious hymn of

 

¹Savitri, p. 4.

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aspiration and rises ascending from the bosom of the great priest, as might a great-winged bird released into the sky and sinks and rises again, aspires and fails and aspires again on the "altar hills". One can surely speak of a voice or a chant of aspiration rising on wide wings and I do not see how this can be taxed as a false or unpoetic image. Then the critic objects to the expression "altar hills" on the ground that this is superfluous as the imagination of the reader can very well supply this detail for itself from what has already been said: I do not think this is correct, a very alert reader might do so but most would not even think of it, and yet the detail is an essential and central feature of the thing seen and to omit it would be to leave a gap in the middle of the picture by dropping out something which is indispensable to its totality. Finally he finds that the line about the high boughs praying in the revealing sky does not help but attenuates, instead of more strongly etching the picture. I do not know why, unless he has failed to feel and to see. The picture is that of a conscious adoration offered by Nature and in that each element is conscious in its own way,  wind and its hymn, the hills, the trees. The wind is the great priest of this sacrifice of worship, his voice rises in a conscious hymn of aspiration, the hills offer themselves with the feeling of being an altar of the worship, the trees lift their high boughs towards heaven as the worshippers, silent figures of prayer, and the light of the sky into which their boughs rise reveals the Beyond towards which all aspires. At any rate this "picture" or rather this part of the vision is a complete rendering of what I saw in the light of the inspiration and the experience that came to me. I might indeed have elaborated more details, etched out at more length but that would have been superfluous and unnecessary; or I might have indulged in an ampler description but this would have been appropriate only if this part of the vision had been the whole. This last line¹ is an expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry not only in the dawn but at other times and I am unable to find any feebleness either in the experience or in the words that express it. If the critic or any reader does not feel or see what I so often

 

¹The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky. — Ibid

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felt and saw, that may be my fault, but that is not sure, for you and others have felt very differently about it; it may be a mental or a temperamental failure on their part and it will be then my or perhaps even the critic’s or reader’s misfortune.

I may refer here to X’s disparaging characterisation of my epithets. He finds that their only merit is that they are good prose epithets, not otiose but right words in their right place and exactly descriptive but only descriptive without any suggestion of any poetic beauty or any kind of magic. Are there then prose epithets and poetic epithets and is the poet debarred from exact description using always the right word in the right place, the mot juste? I am under the impression that all poets, even the greatest, use as the bulk of their adjectives words that have that merit, and the difference from prose is that a certain turn in the use of them accompanied by the power of the rhythm in which they are carried lifts all to the poetic level. Take one of the passages I have quoted from Milton,

 

On evil days though fall’n, and evil tongues…

 

Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides

And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old,

 

here the epithets are the same that would be used in prose, the right word in the right place, exact in statement, but all lies in the turn which makes them convey a powerful and moving emotion and the rhythm which gives them an uplifting passion and penetrating insistence. In more ordinary passages such as the beginning of Paradise Lost the epithets "forbidden tree" and "mortal taste" are of the same kind, but can we say that they are merely prose epithets, good descriptive adjectives and have no other merit? If you take the lines about Nature’s worship in Savitri, I do not see how they can be described as prose epithets; at any rate I would never have dreamt of using in prose unless I wanted to write poetic prose such expressions as "wide-winged hymn" or "a great priestly wind" or "altar hills" or "revealing sky"; these epithets belong in their very nature to poetry alone whatever may be their other value or want of value. He says they

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are obvious and could have been supplied by any imaginative reader; well, so are Milton’s in the passages quoted and per­haps there too the very remarkable imaginative reader whom X repeatedly brings in might have supplied them by his own unfailing poetic verve. Whether they or any of them prick a hidden beauty out of the picture is for each reader to feel or judge for himself; but perhaps he is thinking of such things as Keats’ "magic casements" and "foam of perilous seas" and "fairy lands forlorn", but I do not think even in Keats the bulk of the epithets are of that unusual character.

I have said that his objections are sometimes inapplicable. I mean by this that they might have some force with regard to another kind of poetry but not to a poem like Savitri. He says, to start with, that if I had had a stronger imagination, I would have written a very different poem and a much shorter one. Obviously, and to say it is a truism; if I had had a different kind of imagination, whether stronger or weaker, I would have written a different poem and perhaps one more to his taste; but it would not have been Savitri. It would not have fulfilled the intention or had anything of the character, meaning, world-vision, description and expression of spiritual experience which was my object in writing this poem. Its length is an indispensable condition for carrying out its purpose and everywhere there is this length, critics may say an "unconscionable length" — I am quoting the Times’ reviewer’s description¹ in his otherwise eulogistic criticism of The Life Divine — in every part, in every passage, in almost every canto or section of a canto. It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or some brief narrative poem, but of the longer epical narrative, almost a minor, though a very minor Ramayana; it aims not at a minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation. One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that to say only what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination or understanding of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness:

 

¹The Times Literary Supplement,  January 17,1942.

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that is the method I have chosen in Savitri. But X has understood nothing of the significance or intention of the passages he is criticising, least of all, their inner sense — that is not his fault, but is partly due to the lack of the context and partly to his lack of equipment and you have there an unfair advantage over him which enables you to understand and see the poetic intention. He sees only an outward form of words and some kind of surface sense which is to him vacant and merely ornamental or rhetorical or something pretentious without any true meaning or true vision in it: inevitably he finds the whole thing false and empty, unjustifiably ambitious and pompous without deep meaning or, as he expresses it, pseudo and phoney. His objection of longueur would be perfectly just if the description of the night and the dawn had been simply of physical night and physical dawn; but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the canto clearly suggests, a symbol, although what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the "day" of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. The whole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol and this opening canto is, it may be said, a key beginning and announcement. So understood there is nothing here otiose or unnecessary; all is needed to bring out by suggestion some aspect of the thing symbolised and so start adequately the working out of the significance of the whole poem. It will of course seem much too long to a reader who does not understand what is written or, understanding, takes no interest in the subject; but that is unavoidable.

To illustrate the inapplicability of some of his judgments one might take his objection to repetition of the cognates "sombre Vast", "unsounded Void", "opaque Inane", "vacant Vasts" and his clinching condemnation of the inartistic inele­gance of their occurrence in the same place at the end of the line. I take leave to doubt his statement that in each place his alert imaginative reader, still less any reader without that

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equipment, could have supplied these descriptions and epithets from the context, but let that pass. What was important for me was to keep constantly before the view of the reader, not imaginative but attentive to seize the whole truth of the vision in its totality, the ever-present sense of the Inconscience in which everything is occurring. It is the frame as well as the background without which all the details v/would either fall apart or stand out only as separate incidents. That necessity lasts until there is the full outburst of the dawn and then it disappears; each phrase gives a feature of this Inconscience proper to its place and context. It is the entrance of the "lonely splendour" into an otherwise inconscient obstructing and unreceptive world that has to be brought out and that cannot be done without the image of the "opaque Inane" of the Inconscience which is the scene and cause of the resistance. There is the same necessity for reminding the reader that the "tread" of the Divine Mother v/as an intrusion on the vacancy of the Inconscience and the herald of deliverance from it. The same reasoning applies to the other passages. As for the occurrence, of the phrases in the same place each in its line, that is a rhythmic turn helpful, one might say necessary to bring out the intended effect, to emphasise this reiteration and make it not only understood but felt. It is not the result of negligence or an awkward and inartistic clumsiness, it is intentional and part of the technique. The structure of the pentameter blank verse in Savitri is of its own kind and different in plan from the blank verse that has come to be ordinarily used in English poetry. It dispenses with enjambment or uses it very sparingly and only when a special effect is intended; each line must be strong enough to stand by itself, while at the same time it fits harmoniously into the sentence or paragraph like stone added to stone; the sentence consists usually of one, two, three or four lines, more rarely five or six or seven: a strong close for the line and a strong close for the sentence are almost indispensable except when some kind of inconclusive cadence is desirable; there must be no laxity or diffusiveness in the rhythm or in the metrical flow anywhere, — there must be a flow but not a loose flux. This gives an added importance to what comes at the close of the line and this placing is used very often to give emphasis and

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prominence to a key phrase or a key idea, especially those which have to be often reiterated in the thought and vision of the poem so as to recall attention to things that are universal or fundamental or otherwise of the first consequence — whether for the immediate subject or in the total plan. It is this use that is served here by the reiteration at the end of the line.

I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced; if, for instance, I indulge in the wealth-burdened line or passage, it is not merely for the pleasure of the indulgence, but because there is that burden, or at least what I conceive to be that, in the vision or the experience. When the expression has been found, I have to judge, not by the intellect or by any set poetical rule, but by an intuitive feeling, whether it is entirely the right expression and, if it is not, I have to change and go on changing until I have received the absolutely right inspiration and the right transcription of it and must never be satisfied with any à peu près or imperfect transcription even if that makes good poetry of one kind or another. This is what I have tried to do. The critic or reader will judge for himself whether I have succeeded or failed; but if he has seen nothing and understood nothing, it does not follow that his adverse judgment is sure to be the right and true one, there is at least a chance that he may so conclude, not because there is nothing to see and nothing to understand, only poor pseudo-stuff or a rhetorical emptiness but because he was not equipped for the vision or the understanding. Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch; as I have pointed out, there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry. Moreover if it is really new in kind, it may employ a new technique, not perhaps absolutely new, but new in some or many of its elements: in that case old rules and canons and standards may be quite inapplicable; evidently, you cannot justly

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apply to the poetry of Whitman the principles of technique which are proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of the old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We have to see whether what is essential to poetry is there and how far the new technique justifies itself by new beauty and perfection, and a certain freedom of mind from old conventions is necessary if our judgment is to be valid or rightly objective.

Your friend may say as he has said in another connection that all this is only special pleading or an apology rather than an apologia. But in that other connection he was mistaken and would be so here too, for in neither case have I the feeling that I had been guilty of some offence or some shortcoming and therefore there could be no place for an apology or special pleading such as is used to defend or cover up what one knows to be a false case. I have enough respect for truth not to try to cover up an imperfection; my endeavour would be rather to cure the recognised imperfection; if I have not poetical genius, at least I can claim a sufficient, if not an infinite capacity for painstaking: that I have sufficiently shown by my long labour on Savitri. Or rather, since it was not labour in the ordinary sense, not a labour of painstaking construction, I may describe it as an infinite capacity for waiting and listening for the true inspiration and rejecting all that fell short of it, however good it might seem from a lower standard until I got that which I felt to be absolutely right. X was evidently under a misconception with regard to my defence of the wealth-burdened line; he says that the principle enounced by me was sound but what mattered was my application of the principle, and he seems to think that I was trying to justify my application although I knew it to be bad and false by citing passages from Milton and Shakespeare as if my use of the wealth-burdened style were as good as theirs. But I was not defending the excellence of my practice, for the poetical value of my lines was not then in question; the question was whether it did not violate a valid law of a certain chaste economy by the use of too many epithets massed together: against this I was asserting the legitimacy of a massed richness, I was defending only its principle, not my use of the principle. Even a very

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small poet can cite in aid of his practice examples from greater poets without implying that his poetry is on a par with theirs. But he further asserts that I showed small judgment in choosing my citations, because Milton‘s passage¹ is not at all an illustration of the principle and Shakespeare’s^² is inferior in poetic value, lax and rhetorical in its richness and belongs to an early and inferior Shakespearean style. He says that Milton‘s astounding effect is due only to the sound and not to the words. That does not seem to me quite true: 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 angels: 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 naming ruin of the downfall, and it is the tremendous force of the words that makes us see as well as hear. X’s disparagement of the Shakespearean passage on "sleep" and the line on the sea considered by the greatest critics and not by myself only as ranking amongst the most admired and admirable things in Shakespeare is surprising and it seems to me to illustrate a serious limitation in his poetic perception and temperamental sympathies. Shakespeare’s later terse and packed style with its more powerful dramatic effects can surely be admired without disparaging the beauty and opulence of his earlier style; if he had never written in that style, it would have been an unspeakable loss to the sum of the world’s aesthetic possessions. The lines I have quoted are neither lax nor merely rhetorical, they have a terseness or at least a compactness of their own, different in character from the lines, let us say, in the scene of Antony’s death or other memorable passages written in his great tragic style but none the less at every step packed with pregnant meanings and powerful significances which would not be possible if

 

‘With hideous ruin and combustion, down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire.

 

²Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the shipboy’s eyes and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge?

it were merely a loose rhetoric. Anyone writing such lines would deserve to rank by them alone among the great and even the greatest poets.

That is enough for the detail of the criticism and we can come to the general effect and his pronounced opinion upon my poetry. Apart from his high appreciation of Flame-wind and descent, Jivanmukta and Thought the Paraclete and his general approval of the mystic poems published along with my essay on quantitative metre in English, it is sufficiently dam­ning and discouraging and if I were to accept his verdict on my earlier and latest poetry, the first comparatively valueless and the last for the most part pseudo and phoney and for the rest offering only a few pleasant or pretty lines but not charged with the power and appeal of true or great poetry, I would have to withdraw the Collected Poems from circulation, throw Savitri into the wastepaper-basket and keep only the mystical poems, — but these also have been banned by some critics, so I have no refuge left to me. As X is not a negligible critic and his verdict agrees with that of the eulogist of my philosophy in The Times Literary Supplement, not to speak of others less authoritative like the communist reviewer of Iyengar’s book who declared that it was not at all certain that I would live as a poet, it is perhaps incumbent on me to consider in all humility my dismal position and weigh whether it is really as bad as all that. There are some especial judgments in your friend’s comments on the Collected Poems but these seem to concern only the translations. It is curious that he should complain of the lack of the impulse of self-expression in the Songs of the Sea as in this poem I was not busy with anything of the kind but was only rendering into English the self-expression of my friend and fellow-poet C. R. Das in his fine Bengali poem Sagar Sangit. I was not even self-moved to translate this work, however beautiful I found it; I might even be accused of having written the translation as a pot-boiler, for Das knowing my impecunious and precarious condition at Pondicherry offered me Rs. 1,000 for the work. Nevertheless I tried my best to give his beautiful Bengali lines as excellent a shape of English poetry as I could manage. The poet and littérateur Chapman condemned my work because I had made it too

English, written too much in a manner imitative of traditional English poetry and had failed to make it Bengali in its character so as to keep its native spirit and essential substance. He may have been right; Das himself was not satisfied as he appended a more literal translation in free verse but this latter version does not seem to have caught on while some at least still read and admire the English disguise. If X is right in finding an overflow of sentiment in the Songs, that must be my own importation of an early romantic sentimentalism, a contribution of my own "self-expression" replacing Das’s. The sea to the Indian imagination is a symbol of life, — one speaks of the ocean of the samsāraand Indian Yoga sees in its occult visions life in the image of a sea or different planes of being as so many oceans. Das’s poem expresses his communing with this ocean of universal life and psychic intimacies with the Cosmic Spirit behind it and these have a character of grave emotion and intense feeling, not of mere sentimentalism, but they come from a very Indian and even a very Bengali mentality and may seem in translation to a different mind a profuse display of fancy and sentiment. The Songs are now far away from me in a dim backward of memory and I will have to read them again to be sure, but for that I have no time.

Again, I am charged with modern nineteenth-century romanticism and a false imitation of the Elizabethan drama in my rendering of Kalidasa’s Vikramorvasie; but Kalidasa’s play is romantic in its whole tone and he might almost be described as an Elizabethan predating by a thousand years at least the Elizabethans; indeed most of the ancient Sanskrit dramas are of this kind, though the tragic note is missing, and the general spirit resembles that of Elizabethan romantic comedy. So I do not think I committed any fault in making the translation romantic and in trying to make it Elizabethan, even if I only achieved a "sapless pseudo-Elizabethan" style. One who knew the Sanskrit original and who, although an Indian, was recognised as a good critic in England as well as a poet, one too whose attitude towards myself and my work had been consistently adverse, yet enthusiastically praised my version and said if Kalidasa could be translated at all, it was only so that he could be translated.

This imprimatur of an expert may perhaps be weighed against the discouraging criticism of X. The comment on my translation of Bhartrihari is more to the point; but the fault is not Bhartri-hari’s whose epigrams are as concise and lapidary as the Greek, but in translating I indulged my tendency at the time which was predominantly romantic: the version presents faithfully enough the ideas of the Sanskrit poet but riot the spirit and manner of his style. It is comforting, however, to find that it makes "attractive reading",—I must be content with small mercies in an adversely critical world. After all, these poems are translations and not original work and not many can hope to come within a hundred miles of the more famous achievements of this kind such as Fitzgerald’s splendid misrepresentation of Omar Khayyam, or Chapman’s and Pope’s mistranslations of Homer which may be described as first-class original poems with a borrowed substance from a great voice of the past. X does not refer specifically to Love and Death to which your enthusiasm first went out, to Poems, to Urvasie and to Perseus the Deliverer though this last he would class, I suppose, as sapless pseudo-Elizabethan drama; but that omission may be there because he only skimmed through them and afterwards could not get the first volume. But perhaps they may come under his general remark that this part of my work lacks the glow and concentration of true inspired poetry and his further judgment classing it with the works of Watson and Stephen Phillips and other writers belonging to the decline of romantic poetry. I know nothing about Watson’s work except for one or two short pieces met by chance; if I were to judge from them, I would have to regard him as a genuine poet with a considerable elevation of language and metrical rhythm but somewhat thin in thought and substance; my poems may conceivably have some higher quality than his in this last respect since the reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement grants deep thought and technical excellence as the only merits of my uninspired poetry. It is otherwise with Stephen Phillips: I read Marpessa and Christ in Hades, the latter in typescript, shortly before I left England and they aroused my admiration and made a considerable impression on me. I read recently a reference to Phillips as a forgotten poet, but if that includes these

two poems I must consider the oblivion as a considerable loss to the generation which has forgotten them. His later poetry disappointed me, there was still some brilliance but nothing of that higher promise. The only other poet of that time who had some influence on me was Meredith, especially his Modern Love which may have helped in forming the turn of my earlier poetic expres­sion. I have not read the other later poets of the decline. Of subsequent writers or others not belonging to this decline I know only A.E. and Yeats, something of Francis Thompson, especially the Hound of Heaven and the Kingdom of God, and a poem or two of Gerald Hopkins; but the last two I came across very late, Hopkins only quite recently, and none of them had any influence on me, although one English reviewer in India spoke of me in eulogistic terms as a sort of combination of Swinburne and Hopkins and some have supposed that I got my turn for compound epithets from the latter! The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not at all admire. Still it is possible that the general atmosphere of the later Victorian decline, if decline it was, may have helped to mould my work and undoubtedly it dates and carries the stamp of the time in which it was written. It is a misfortune of my poetry from the point of view of recognition that the earlier work forming the bulk of the Collected Poems belongs to the past and has little chance of recognition now that the aesthetic atmosphere has so violently changed, while the later mystical work and Savitri belong to the future and will possibly have to wait for recognition of any merit they have for another strong change. As for the mystical poems which your friend praises in such high terms, they are as much challenged by others as the rest of my work. Some reviewers have described them as lacking altogether in spiritual feeling and void of spiritual experience; they are, it seems, mere mental work, full of intellectually constructed images and therefore without the genuine value of spiritual or mystic poetry.

Well, then, what is the upshot? What have I to decide as a result of my aesthetic examination of conscience? It is true that

there are voices on the other side, not only from my disciples but from others who have no such connection with me. I have heard of individuals nameless or tameless in England who chanced to come across Love and Death and had the same spontaneous enthusiasm for it as yourself; others have even admired and discovered in my earlier work the beauty and the inspiration which X and the Times reviewer find to be badly lacking in it. It is true that they have differed in the poems they have chosen; Andrews cited particularly the Rishi and the epigram on Goethe as proof of his description of me as a great poet; an English critic, Richardson, singled out Urvasie and Love and Death and the more romantic poems, but thought that some of my later work was less inspired, too intellectual and philosophical, too much turned towards thought, while some work done in the middle he denounced altogether, complaining that after feeding my readers on nectar for so long I came later on to give them mere water. This critic made a distinction between great poets and good poets and said that I belonged to the second and not to the first category, but as he classed Shelley and others of the same calibre as examples of the good poets, his praise was sufficiently "nectarous" for anybody to swallow with pleasure! Krishnaprem (Ronald Nixon), Moore and others have also had a contrary opinion to the adverse critics and these, both English and Indian, were men whose capacity for forming a true literary judgment is perhaps as good as any on the other side. Krishnaprem I mention, because his judgement forms a curious and violent contrast to X’s: the latter finds no overtones in my poetry while Krishnaprem who similarly discourages Harm’s poetry on the ground of a lack of overtones finds them abundant in mine. One begins to wonder what overtones really are, or are we to conclude that they have no objective existence but are only a term for some subjective personal reaction in the reader ? I meet the same absolute contradiction everywhere; one critic says about Perseus that there is some good poetry in it but it is not in the least dramatic except for one scene and that the story of the .play is entirely lacking in interest, while another finds in it most of all a drama of action and the story thrilling and holding a breathless interest from beginning to end. Highest eulogy, extreme

disparagement, faint praise, mixed laudation and censure — it is a see-saw on which the unfortunate poet who is incautious enough to attach any value to contemporary criticism is balanced without any possibility of escape. Or I may flatter myself with the idea that this lively variation of reaction from extreme eulogy to extreme damnation indicates that my work must have after all something in it that is real and alive. Or I might perhaps take refuge in the supposition that the lack of recognition is the consequence of an untimely and too belated publication, due to the egoistic habit of writing for my own self-satisfaction rather than any strong thirst for poetical glory and immortality and leaving most of my poetry in the drawer for much longer than, even for twice or thrice, the time recommended by Horace who advised the poet to put by his work and read it again after ten years and then only, if he still found it of some value, to publish it. Urvasie, the second of the only two poems published early, was sent at first to Lionel Johnson, a poet and littérateur of some reputation who was the Reader of a big firm. He acknowledged some poetic merit, but said that it was a repetition of Matthew Arnold and so had no sufficient reason for existence. But Lionel Johnson, I was told, like the Vedantic sage who sees Brahman in all things, saw Arnold everywhere, and perhaps if I had persisted in sending it to other firms, some other Reader, not similarly obsessed, might have found the merit and, as romanticism was still the fashion, some of the critics and the public too might have shared your and Richardson’s opinion of this and other work and, who knows, I might have ranked in however low a place among the poets of the romantic decline. Perhaps then I need not decide too hastily against any republication of the Collected Poems or could even cherish the hope that, when the fashion of anti-romanticism has passed, it may find its proper place, whatever that may be, and survive.

As regards your friend’s appraisal of the mystical poems/ I need say little. I accept his reservation that there is much inequality as between the different poems: they were produced very rapidly — in the course of a week, I think — and they were not given the long reconsideration that I have usually given

 

¹ See Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972), pp. 557-569.

READING AND POETIC CREATION AND YOGA

 

to my poetic work before publication; he has chosen the best, though there are others also that are good, though not so good; in others, the metre attempted and the idea and language have not been lifted to their highest possible value. I would like to say a word about his hesitation over some lines in Thought the Paraclete¹ which describe the spiritual planes. I can understand this hesitation; for these lines have not the vivid and forceful precision of the opening and the close and are less pressed home, they are general in description and therefore to one who has not the mystic experience may seem too large and vague. But they are not padding; a precise and exact description of these planes of experience would have made the poem too long, so only some large lines are given, but the description is true, the epithets hit the reality and even the colours mentioned in the poem, "gold-red feet" and "crimson-white mooned oceans", are faithful to experience. Significant colour, supposed by intellectual criticism to be symbolic but there is more than that, is a frequent element in mystic vision; I may mention the powerful and vivid vision in which Ramakrishna went up into the higher planes and saw the mystic truth behind the birth of Vivekananda. At least, the fact that these poems have appealed so strongly to your friend’s mind may perhaps be taken by me as a sufficient proof that in this field my effort at interpretation of spiritual things has not been altogether a failure.

But how then are we to account for the same critic’s condemnation or small appreciation of Savitri which is also a mystic and symbolic poem although cast into a different form and raised to a different pitch, and what value am I to attach to his criticism ? Partly, perhaps, it is this very difference of form and pitch which accounts for his attitude and, having regard to his aesthetic temperament and its limitations, it was inevitable. He himself seems to suggest this reason when he compares this difference to the difference of his approach as between Lycidas and Paradise Lost. His temperamental turn is shown by his special appreciation of Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore and his response to Descent and Flame-Wind and the fineness of his judgment when speaking of the Hound of Heaven and the

 

¹ Ibid., p. 582.

Kingdom of God, its limitation by his approach towards Paradise Lost. I think he would be naturally inclined to regard any very high-pitched poetry as rhetorical and unsound and declamatory, wherever he did not see in it something finely and subtly true coexisting with the high-pitched expression, — the combination we find in Thompson’s later poem and it is this he seems to have missed in Savitri. For Savitri does contain or at least I intended it to contain what you and others have felt in it but he has not been able to feel because it is something which is outside his own experience and to which he has no access. One who has had the kind of experience which Savitri sets out to express or who, not having it, is prepared by his temperament, his mental turn, his previous intellectual knowledge or psychic training, to have some kind of access to it, the feeling of it if not the full understanding, can enter into the spirit and sense of the poem and respond to its poetic appeal; but without that it is difficult for an unprepared reader to respond, — all the more if this is, as you contend, a new poetry with a new law of expression and technique.

Lycidas is one of the finest poems in any literature, one of the most consistently perfect among works of an equal length and one can apply to it the epithet "exquisite" and it is to the exquisite that your friend’s aesthetic temperament seems specially to respond. It would be possible to a reader with a depreciatory turn to find flaws in it, such as the pseudo-pastoral setting, the too powerful intrusion of St. Peter and puritan theological controversy into that incongruous setting and the image of the hungry sheep which someone not in sympathy with Christian feeling and traditional imagery might find even ludicrous or at least odd in its identification of pseudo-pastoral sheep and theological human sheep: but these would be hypercritical objections and are flooded out by the magnificence of the poetry. I am prepared to admit the very patent defects of Paradise Lost: Milton’s heaven is indeed unconvincing and can be described as grotesque and so too is his gunpowder battle up there, and his God and angels are weak and unconvincing figures, even Adam and Eve, our first parents, do not effectively fill their part except in his outward description of them; and the later narrative falls far below the grandeur of the first four books but those four books stand

for ever among the greatest things in the world’s poetic literature. If Lycidas with its beauty and perfection had been the supreme thing done by Milton even with all the lyrical poetry and the sonnets added to it, Milton would still have been a great poet but he would not have ranked among the dozen greatest; it is Paradise Lost that gives him that place. There are deficiencies if not failures in almost all the great epics, the Odyssey and perhaps the Divina Commedia being the only exceptions, but still they are throughout in spite of them great epics. So too is Paradise Lost. The grandeur of his verse and language is constant and unsinking to the end and makes the presentation always sublime. We have to accept for the moment Milton’s dry Puritan theology and his all too human picture of the celestial world and its denizens and then we can feel the full greatness of the epic. But the point is that this greatness in itself seems to have less appeal to X’s aesthetic temperament; it is as if he felt less at home in its atmosphere, in an atmosphere of grandeur and sublimity than in the air of a less sublime but a fine and always perfect beauty. It ;s the difference between a magic hill-side woodland of wonder and a great soaring mountain climbing into a vast purple sky: to accept fully the greatness he needs to find in it a finer and subtler strain as in Thompson’s Kingdom of God. On a lower scale this, his sentence about it seems to suggest, is the one fundamental reason for his complete pleasure in the mystical poems and his very different approach to Savitri. The pitch aimed at by Savitri, the greatness you attribute to it, would of itself have discouraged in him any abandonment to admiration and compelled from the beginning a cautious and dubious approach; that soon turned to lack of appreciation or a lowered appreciation even of the best that may be there and to depreciation and censure of the rest.

But there is the other reason which is more effective. He sees and feels nothing of the spiritual meaning and the spiritual appeal which you find in Savitri; it is for him empty of anything but an outward significance and that seems to him poor, as is natural since the outward meaning is only a part and a surface and the rest is to his eyes invisible. If there had been what he hoped or might have hoped to find in my poetry, a spiritual vision such as

that of the Vedantin, arriving beyond the world towards the Ineffable, then he might have felt at home as he does with Thompson’s poetry or might at least have found it sufficiently accessible. But this is not what Savitri has to say or rather it is only a small part of it and, even so, bound up with a cosmic vision and an acceptance of the world which in its kind is unfamiliar to his mind and psychic sense and foreign to his experience. The two passages with which he deals do not and cannot give any full presentation of this way of seeing things since one is an unfamiliar symbol and the other an incidental and, taken by itself apart from its context, an isolated circumstance. But even if he had had other more explicit and clearly revealing passages at his disposal, I do not think he would have been satisfied or much illuminated ; his eyes would still have been fixed on the surface and caught only some intellectual meaning or outer sense. That at least is what we may suppose to have been the cause of his failure, if we maintain that there is anything at all in the poem; or else we must fall back on the explanation of a fundamental personal incompatibility and the rule de gustibus non est disputandum, or to put it in the Sanskrit form nānārucirhi lokaḥ. If you are right in maintaining that Savitri stands as a new mystical poetry with a new vision and expression of things, we should expect, at least at first, a widespread, perhaps, a general failure, even in lovers of poetry to understand it or appreciate; even those who have some mystical turn or spiritual experience are likely to pass it by if it is a different turn from theirs or outside their range of experience. It took the world something like a hundred years to discover Blake; it would not be improbable that there might be a greater time-lag here, though naturally we hope for better things. For in India at least some understanding or feeling and an audience few and fit may be possible. Perhaps by some miracle there may be before long a larger appreciative audience.

At any rate this is the only thing one can do, especially when one is attempting a new creation, to go on with the work with such light and power as is given to one and leave the value of the work to be determined by the future. Contemporary judgments we know to be unreliable; there are only two judges whose joint verdict cannot easily be disputed, the World and Time. The

Roman proverb says, securus judicat orbis terrarum; but the world’s verdict is secure only when it is confirmed by Time. For it is not the opinion of the general mass of men that finally decides, the decision is really imposed by the judgment of a minority and élite which is finally accepted and settles down as the verdict of posterity; in Tagore’s phrase it is the universal man, viśva mānava, or rather something universal using the general mind of man, we might say the Cosmic Self in the race that fixes the value of its own works. In regard to the great names in literature this final verdict seems to have in it something of the absolute, — so far as anything can be that in a temporal world of relativities in which the Absolute reserves itself hidden behind the veil of human ignorance. It is no use for some to contend that Virgil is a tame and elegant writer of a wearisome work in verse on agriculture and a tedious pseudo-epic written to imperial order and Lucretius the only really great poet in Latin literature or to depreciate Milton for his Latin English and inflated style and the largely uninteresting character of his two epics; the world either refuses to listen or there is a temporary effect, a brief fashion in literary criticism, but finally the world returns to its established verdict. Lesser reputations may fluctuate, but finally whatever has real value in its own kind settles itself and finds its just place in the durable judgment of the world. Work which was neglected and left aside like Blake’s or at first admired with reservation and eclipsed like Donne’s is singled out by a sudden glance of Time and its greatness recognised; or what seemed buried slowly emerges or re-emerges; all finally settles into its place. What was held as sovereign in its own time is rudely dethroned but afterwards recovers not its sovereign throne but its due position in the world’s esteem; Pope is an example and Byron who at once burst into a supreme glory and was the one English poet, after Shakespeare, admired all over Europe but is now depreciated, may also recover his proper place. Encouraged by such examples, let us hope that these violently adverse judgments may not be final and absolute and decide that the wastepaper-basket is not the proper place for Savitri. There may still be a place for a poetry which seeks to enlarge the field of poetic creation and find for the inner spiritual life of man and his now occult or mystical knowledge and

experience of the whole hidden range of his and the world’s being, not a corner and a limited expression such as it had in the past, but a wide space and as manifold and integral an expression of the boundless and innumerable riches that lie hidden and unexplored as if kept apart under the direct gaze of the Infinite as has been found in the past for man’s surface and finite view and experience of himself and the material world in which he has lived striving to know himself and it as best he can with a limited mind and senses. The door that has been shut to all but a few may open; the kingdom of the Spirit may be established not only in man’s inner being but in his life and his works. Poetry also may have its share in that revolution and become part of the spiritual empire.

I had intended as the main subject of this letter to say something about technique and the inner working of the intuitive method by which Savitri was and is being created and of the intention and plan of the poem. X’s idea of its way of creation, an intellectual construction by a deliberate choice of words and imagery, badly chosen at that, is the very opposite of the real way in which it was done. That was to be the body of the letter and the rest only a preface. But the preface has become so long that it has crowded out the body. I shall have to postpone it to a later occasion when I have more time.

4-5-1947

Q: In that long letter on your own poetry, apropos of my friend’s criticisms, you have written of certain influ­ences of the later Victorian period on you. Meredith’s from "Modern Love" I have been unable to trace con­cretely — unless I consider some of the more pointed and bitter-sweetly reflective turns in "Songs to Myrtilla”¹ to be Meredithian. That of Tennyson is noticeable in only a delicate picturesqueness here and there or else in the use of some words. Perhaps more than in your early blank verse the Tennysonian influence of this kind in general is there in "Songs to Myrtilla". Arnold has influenced

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your blank verse in respect of particular constructions like two or three ^buts" as in

 

No despicable wayfarer, but Ruru,

But son of a great Rishi,

 

or

 

But tranquil, but august, but making easy…

 

 Arnold is also observable in the way you build up and elaborate your similes both in " Urvasie" and in "Love and Death". Less openly, a general tone of poetic mind from him can also be felt: it persists subtly in even the poems collected in "Ahana", not to mention " Baji Prabhou". I don’t know whether Swinburne is anywhere patent in your narratives: he probably does have something to do with "Songs to Myrtilld". Stephen Phillips is the most direct influence in "Urvasie" and "Love and Death". But as I have said in my essay on your blank verse he is assimilated into a stronger and more versatile genius, together with influences from the Elizabethans, Milton and perhaps less consciously Keats. In any case, whatever the influences, your early narratives are intensely original in essential spirit and movement and expressive body. It is only unreceptiveness or inattention that can fail to see this and to savour the excellence of your work.

 

A: The influences I spoke of were of course only such influences as every poet undergoes before he has entirely found himself. What you say about Arnold’s influence is quite correct; it acted mainly, however, as a power making for restraint and refinement, subduing any uncontrolled romanticism and insisting on clear lucidity and right form and building. Meredith had no influence on Songs to Myrtilla; even afterwards I did not make myself acquainted with all his poetry, it was only Modern Love and poems like the sonnet on Lucifer and the Ascent to Earth of the Daughter of Hades that I strongly admired and it had its effect on the formation of my poetic style and its after-effects in

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that respect are not absent from Savitri. It is only Swinburne’s early lyrical poems that exercised any power on me, Dolores, Hertha, The Garden of Proserpine and others that rank among his best work, — also Atalanta in Calydon, his later lyrical poetry I found too empty and his dramatic and narrative verse did not satisfy me. One critic characterised Love and Death as an extraordinarily brilliant and exact reproduction of Keats: what do you say to that? I think Stephen Phillips had more to do with it.

7-7-1947 

SYMBOLISM OF THE TALE OF SATYAVAN AND SAVITRI

 

The tale of Satyavan and Savitri is recited in the Mahabharata as a story of conjugal love conquering death. But this legend is, as shown by many features of the human tale, one of the many symbolic myths of the Vedic cycle. Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes; Dyumatsena, Lord of the Shining Hosts, father of Satyavan, is the Divine Mind here fallen blind, losing its celestial kingdom of vision, and through that loss its kingdom of glory. Still this is not a mere allegory, the characters are not personified qualities, but incarnations or emanations of living and conscious Forces with whom we can enter into concrete touch and they take human bodies in order to help men and show him the way from his mortal state to a divine consciousness and immortal life.

CREATION OF "LOVE AND DEATH"¹

 

Q: As "Love and Death" I have long since adopted as my poetic Bible owing to the consummate beauty of its

 

¹See Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972), pp. 231-257.

inspiration and art, and as now I am just awaking to a capacity in myself for blank verse, I shall be really happy if you will tell me the way in which you created this poem — the first falling of the seed of the idea, the growth and maturing of it, the influences assimilated from other poets, the mood and atmosphere you used to find most congenial and productive, the experience and the frequency of the afflatus, the pace at which you composed, the evolution of that multifarious, many-echoed yet perfectly original style and of a blank verse whose art is the most unfailing and, except for one too close repetition of the mannerism of the double "but", the most unobtrusively conscious that I have seen. In my essay, in "Sri Aurobindo — the Poet", I tried to show the white harmony, so to speak, of "Love and Death" in a kind of spectrum analysis, how colours from Latin, Italian, Sanskrit and English verse had fused here together with an absolutely original ultra-violet and infra-red not to be traced ^anywhere. Among English influences the most outstanding are, to my mind, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and Stephen Phillips. In my essay I dwelt at length on the first two and on the magic way in which the passage about Rum’s sail along the Ganges and subsequent sea-plunge into Patala combines at the same time the early and later Milton and, with that, something of Shelley and Coleridge. Keats and Stephen Phillips I did not specially deal with. Keats seems to have added to the element of supple strength in your poem, while Phillips has tinged it with a certain poignant vividness and colourful delicacy. More fundamental, however, than the effect of his manner was, I think, the spell cast by certain moods, as it were, of his "Marpessa"…. But all this is guess-work — correct maybe in some respects, but I should like very much to have your own illuminating account of the matter, as well as your answer to the other points in my question at the beginning of this letter.

 

A: I cannot tell you much about it from that point of view;

I did not draw consciously from any of the poets you mention except from Phillips. I read Marpessa and Christ in Hades before they were published and as I was just in the stage of formation then — at the age of 17 — they made a powerful impression which lasted until it was worked out in Love and Death. I dare say some influence of most of the great English poets and of others also, not English, can be traced in my poetry — I can myself see that of Milton, sometimes of Wordsworth and Arnold; but it was of the automatic kind — they came in unnoticed. I am not aware of much influence of Shelley and Coleridge, but since I read Shelley a great deal and took an intense pleasure in some of Coleridge’s poetry, they may have been there without my knowledge. The one work of Keats that influenced me was Hyperion — I dare say my blank verse got something of his stamp through that. The poem itself was written in a white heat of inspiration during 14 days of continuous writing—in the mornings, of course, for I had to attend office the rest of the day and saw friends in the evening. I never wrote anything with such ease and rapidity before or after. Your other questions I can’t very well answer — I have lived ten lives since then and don’t remember. I don’t think there was any falling of the seed of the idea or growth and maturing of it; it just came, —from my reading about the story of Ruru in the Mahabharata; I thought, "Well, here’s a subject", and the rest burst out of itself. Mood and atmosphere ? I never depended on these things that I know of — something wrote in me or didn’t write, more often didn’t, and that is all I know about it. Evolution of style and verse ? Well, it evolved, I suppose — I assure you I didn’t build it. I was not much of a critic in those days — the critic grew in me by Yoga like the philosopher, and as for self-criticism the only standard I had was whether I felt satisfied with what I wrote or not, and generally I felt it was very fine when I wrote it and found it was very bad after it had been written, but I could not at that time have given you a reason either for the self-eulogy or the self-condemnation. Nowadays it is different, of course; for I am conscious of what I do and how things are done. I am afraid this will not enlighten you much but it is all I can tell you. 

                            3-7-1933

There was no trial or experiment — as I wrote, I did not proceed like that, — I put down what came, changing afterwards; but there too only as it came. At that time I had no theories, no methods or process. Bat Love and Death was not my first blank verse poem — I had written one before in the first years of my stay in Baroda which was privately published, but afterwards I got disgusted with it and rejected it.¹ I made also some translations from the Sanskrit (in blank verse and heroic verse); but I don’t remember to what you are referring as the translation of Kalidasa. Most of all that has disappeared into the unknown in the whirlpools and turmoil of my political career.

4-7-1933

MADAN’S SPEECH IN "LOVE AND DEATH"

 

Q: The other day X told me that he considered the long speech of the Love-God Kama or Madan about himself in "Love and Death’ one of the peaks in that poem—he as good as compared it to the descent into Hell about which I have raved ever since I read the poem some years back. He added that the Mother too had been very much moved by it. Somehow I couldn’t at the time wax extremely enthusiastic about it. I found it moving and excellent of its own kind, very powerful and displaying great psychological acumen; but, except for the opening eight or ten lines and some three or four in the middle, I couldn’t regard it as astonishing poetry — at least not one of the peaks. What is your own private opinion ? I need not of course, quote it to anyone. Here is the passage, to refresh your memory:

 

¹ The poem in question is Urvasie, a long narrative which some critics are inclined to consider the best of Sri Aurobindo’s early blank verses. The reaction in himself against it which Sri Aurobindo speaks of in this letter persisted for many years during which he had no opportunity to see the poem again. On 5-2-1931 he wrote to a Sadhak-poet: "I don’t think I have the Urvasie, neither am I very anxious to have the poem saved from oblivion." Later when he saw it he found it not at all a thing to be thrown away and allowed its inclusion in Collected Poems and Plays (First Edition, 1942). Subsequently it has been included in Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, 1972), pp. 189-228.

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But with the thrilled eternal smile that makes

The spring, the lover of Rathi golden-limbed Replied to Rum, "Mortal, I he;

I am that Madan who inform the stars

With lustre and on life’s wide canvas fill

Pictures of light and shade, of joy and tears,

Make ordinary moments wonderful

And common speech a charm: knit life to life

With interfusions of opposing souls

And sudden meetings and slow sorceries:

Wing the boy bridegroom to that panting breast,

Smite Gods with mortal faces, dreadfully

Among great beautiful kings and watched by eyes

That burn, force on the virgin’s fainting limbs

And drive her to the one face never seen,

The one breast meant eternally for her.

By me come wedded sweets, by me the wife’s

Busy delight and passionate obedience,

And’loving eager service never sated,

And happy lips, and worshipping soft eyes:

And mine the husband’s hungry arms and use

Unwearying of old tender words and ways,

Joy of her hair and silent pleasure felt

Of nearness to one dear familiar shape.

Nor only these, but many affections bright

And soft glad things cluster around my name.

I plant fraternal tender yearnings, make

The sister’s sweet attractiveness and leap

Of heart towards imperious kindred blood,

And the young mother’s passionate deep look,

Earth’s high similitude of One not earth,

Teach filial heart-beats strong.These are my gifts

For which men praise me, these my glories calm:

But fiercer shafts I can, wild storms blown down

Shaking fixed minds and melting marble natures,

Tears and dumb bitterness and pain unpitied,

Racked thirsting jealousy and kind hearts made stone:

And in undisciplined huge souls I sow

Dire vengeance and impossible cruelties,

Cold lusts that linger and fierce fickleness,

The loves close kin to hate, brute violence

And mad insatiable longings pale,

And passion blind as death and deaf as swords.

0 mortal, all deep-souled desires and all

Yearnings immense are mine, so much I can."

 

A: My own private opinion agrees with X’s estimate rather than with yours. These lines may not be astonishing in the sense of an unusual effort of constructive imagination and vision like the descent into Hell; but I do not think I have, elsewhere, surpassed this speech in power of language, passion and truth of feeling and nobility and felicity of rhythm all fused together into a perfect whole. And I think I have succeeded in expressing the truth of the godhead of Kama, the godhead of vital love (I am not using "vital" in the strict Yogic sense; I mean the love that draws lives passionately together or throws them into or upon each other) with a certain completeness of poetic sight and perfection of poetic power, which puts it on one of the peaks — even if not the highest possible peak — of achievement. That is my private opinion — but, of course, all do not need to see alike in these matters.

10-2-1932

APPRECIATION OF "LOVE AND DEATH"

 

Q: A.E. has made a few interesting remarks on some of my poems — remarks curious in some places while fairly perceptive in others. He warns against frequent use of words like "infinite’", ”"eternal", "limitless". The difficulty about such words has struck me before —frequent use of them gives a not altogether agreeable Hugoesque flavour to mystic Indian poetry; but I wonder whether I have cheapened or misused them. At least you have never taken me to task on that score.

As regards those two poems of mine which you have

liked immensely, he notes with pleasure only one phrase in "Ne Plus Ultra" — "the song-impetuous mind" — and has nothing to say about "This Errant Life". Isn’t that strange?

By the way, the copy of your "Love and Death" is ready to go to England. I wonder how the critics will receive the poem. They should be enthusiastic. It is full of superb passages. Do you remember Ruru’s going down to Patala, the underworld? I have commented on its inspiration in my essay "Sri Aurobindo — the Poet". I can never stop thrilling to it. Here are the lines:

 

In a thin soft eve

Ganges spread far her multitudinous waves,

A glimmering restlessness with voices large,

And from the forests of that half-seen bank

A boat came heaving over it, white-winged,

With a sole silent helmsman marble-pale.

Then Ruru by his side stepped in; they went

Down the mysterious river and beheld

The great banks widen out of sight.

The world Was water and the skies to water plunged.

All night with a dim motion gliding down

He felt the dark against his eyelids; felt,

As in a dream more real than daylight,

The helmsman with his dumb and marble face

Near him and moving wideness all around,

And that continual gliding dimly on,

As one who on a shoreless water sails

For ever to a port he shall not win.

But when the darkness paled, he heard a moan

Of mightier waves and had the wide great sense

Of Ocean and the depths below our feet.

But the boat stopped; the pilot lifted on him

His marble gaze coeval with the stars.

Then in the white-winged boat the boy arose

And saw around him the vast sea all grey

And heaving in the pallid dawning light.

Loud Rum cried across the murmur: "Hear me,

0 inarticulate grey Ocean, hear.

If any cadence in thy infinite

Rumour was caught from lover’s moan, 0 Sea,

Open thy abysses to my mortal tread.

For I would travel to the despairing shades,

The spheres of suffering where entangled dwell

Souls unreleased and the untimely dead

Who weep remembering. Thither, 0 guide me,

No despicable wayfarer, but Ruru,

But son of a great Rishi.from all men

On earth selected for peculiar pangs,

Special disaster. Lo, this petalledfire,

How freshly it blooms and lasts with my great painF

He held the flower out subtly glimmering.

And like a living thing the huge sea trembled,

Then rose, calling, and filled the sight with waves,

Converging all its giant crests: towards him

Innumerable waters loomed and heaven

Threatened. Horizon on horizon moved

Dreadfully swift; then with a prone wide sound

All Ocean hollowing drew him swiftly in,

Curving with monstrous menace over him.

He down the gulf where the loud waves collapsed

Descending, saw with floating hair arise

The daughters of the sea in pale green light,

A million mystic breasts suddenly bare,

And came beneath the flood and stunned beheld

A mute stupendous march of waters race

To reach some viewless pit beneath the world.

 

A: I did not object to your frequent use of "infinite", "eternal", "limitless", because these are adjectives that I myself freely pepper over my poetry. When one writes about the Infinite, the Eternal and the Limitless or when one feels them constantly, what is one to do ? A. E. who has not this consciousness but only that of the temporal and finite (natural or occult) can avoid these words, but I can’t. Besides, all poets have their favourite words

and epithets which they constantly repeat. A. E. himself has been charged with a similar crime.

If you send your poems to five different poets, you are likely to get five absolutely disparate and discordant estimates of them. A poet likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament or taste, the rest he condemns or ignores. Contemporary poetry, besides, seldom gets its right judgment from contemporary critics, even. You expect for instance Love and Death to make a sensation in England—I don’t expect it in the least: I shall be agreeably surprised if it gets more than some qualified praise, and if it does not get even that, I shall be neither astonished nor discomfited. I know the limitations of the poem and its qualities and I know that the part about the descent into Hell can stand comparison with some of the best English poetry; but I don’t expect any contemporaries to see it. If they do, it will be good luck or divine grace, that is all. Nothing can be more futile than for a poet to write in expectation of contemporary fame or praise, however agreeable that may be, if it comes: but it is not of much value; for very few poets have enjoyed a great contemporary fame and very great poets have been neglected in their time. A poet has to go on his way, trying to gather hints from what people say for or against, when their criticisms are things he can profit by, but not otherwise moved (if he can manage it) — seeking mainly to sharpen his own sense of self-criticism by the help of others. Differences of estimate need not surprise him at all.

 

2-2-1932

I am afraid you are under an illusion as to the success of Love and Death in England. Love and Death dates, — it belongs to the time when Meredith and Phillips were still writing and Yeats and A. E. were only in bud if not in ovo. Since then the wind has changed and even Yeats and A.E. are already a little high and dry on the sands of the past, while the form or other characteristics of Love and Death are just the things that are anathema to the post-war writers and literary critics. I fear it would be, if not altogether ignored which is most likely, regarded as a feeble and belated imitation of the literary model exploded and buried

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READING AND POETIC CREATION AND YOGA

 

that form. I myself have not yet found another metre which gives room enough along with an apposite movement — shorter metres are too cramped, the longer ones need a technical dexterity (if one is not to be either commonplace or clumsy) for which I have not leisure.

5-3-1932

AIM OF QUANTITATIVE EFFORTS IN ENGLISH POETRY

 

X’s poem in laghu-guru is splendid. But perhaps Y would say that it is a pure Bengali rhythm, which means, I suppose, that it reads as well and easily in Bengali as if it were not written on an unusual rhythmic principle. I suppose that must necessarily be the aim of a new metre or metrical principle; it is what I am trying to do with quantitative efforts in English.

THE LOOSE ALEXANDRINE

 

Q: Robert Bridges has invented what is called the loose Alexandrine. Lascelles Abercrombie explains its principle thus: "The novelty is to make the number of syllables the fixt base of the metre; but these are the effective syllables, those which pronunciation easily slurs or combines with following syllables being treated as metrically ineffective. The line consists of 12 metrically effective syllables; and within this constant scheme the metre allows of any variation in the number and placing of the accents. Thus the rhythm attained is purely accentual, in accordance with the genius of the English language, but a new freedom is achieved within the confines of a new kind of discipline.^ What do you think of the principle ?

 

A: I do not understand how this can be called an accentual rhythm except in the sense that all English rhythm, prose or verse, is accentual. What one usually means by accentual verse is verse with a fixed number of accents for each line, but here accents can

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be of any number and placed anywhere as it would be in a prose; cut up into lines. The only distinctive feature is thus of the number of "effective" syllables. The result is a kind of free verse movement with a certain irregular regularity in the lengths of the lines.

1936

THE PROBLEM OF BLANK VERSE QUATRAINS

 

Q: I have begun a poem on Parvati in blank verse quatrains. Here are the first five stanzas. If at all you think I should continue, will not the closed stanza plan adopted so far prove monotonous?

 

Men dreamed of her strange hair and saw it fall

A cataract of nectar through their sleep,

Crushing the soul with sweetness — and woke a-dread,

In all their limbs a speechless heaven of pain!

 

Her voice reached to Creations highest peak,

And though a music most delicate its rapture

Swept through the seven worlds and found the gods

Helpless like flames swaying in a huge wind!

 

A terror beautiful were those dark eddies,

Her fathomless vague-glimmering pure eyes,

Wherein the spirits that rashly plunged their love

Whirled through a lifetime of bewildered bliss!

 

But all in vain her voice and gaze and hair

Before the snowy calm immutable

Of Shiva’s meditation, a frozen fire

Of omnipotence alone with its self-splendour!

 

Like an immortal death his far face glowed—

Inaudible disclosure of some white

Eternity of unperturbed dream-vast

Behind the colour and passion of time’s heart-beat!

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A: It looks as if you were facing the problem of blank verse by attempting it under conditions of the maximum difficulty. Not content with choosing a form which is based on the single-line blank verse (I mean, of course, each line a clear-cut entity by itself) as opposed to the flowing and freely enjambed variety you try to unite flow-lines and single-line and farther undertake a form of blank verse quatrains! I have myself tried the blank verse quatrain; even, when I attempted the single-line blank verse on a large scale in Savitri I found myself falling involuntarily into a series of four-line movement. But even though I was careful in the building, I found it led to a stiff monotony and had to make a principle of variation — one line, two line, three line, four line or longer passages (paragraphs as it were) alternating with each other; otherwise the system would be a failure.

In attempting the blank verse quatrain one has to avoid like poison all flatness of movement — a flat movement immediately creates a sense of void and sets the ear asking for the absent rhyme. The Fast line of each verse especially must be a powerful line acting as a strong close so that the rhyming close-cadence is missed no more. And, secondly, there must be a very careful building of the structure. A mixture of sculpture and architecture is indicated — there should be plenty of clear-cut single lines but they must be built into a quatrain that is itself a perfect structural whole. In your lines it is these qualities that are lacking, so that the poetic substance fails in its effect owing to rhythmic insufficiency. One closing line of yours will absolutely not do — that of the fourth stanza — its feminine ending is enough to damn it; you may have feminine endings but not in the last line of the quatrain, and its whole movement is an unfinished movement. The others would do, but they lose half their force by being continuations of clauses which look back to the previous line for their sense. They can do that sometimes, but only on condition of their still haying a clear-cut wholeness in themselves and coming in with a decisive force. In the structure you have attempted to combine the flow of the lyrical quatrain with the force of a single-line blank verse system. I suppose it can be done, but here the single-line has interfered with the flow and the flow has interfered with the single-line force.

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In my version—

Men dreamed of her strange hair; they saw it fall

A cataract of nectar through their sleep,

Crushing the soul with sweetness; they woke from dread,

With all their limbs a speechless heaven of pain!

 

Her voice soared to Creation’s highest peak,

And that most delicate music with its rapture

Sweeping through seven worlds found out the gods

Helpless like flames swaying in a huge wind!

 

A beautiful terror were those dark conscious eddies,

Her pure vague-glimmering and fathomless eyes;

Therein the spirits that rashly plunged their love

Fell whirled through lifetimes of bewildering bliss!

 

But all in vain, her voice and gaze and hair

Before the snow-pale and immutable calm

Of Shiva’s meditation, a frozen fire

Of lone omnipotence locked in self-light!

 

His far face glowed like an immortal death:

The inaudible disclosure of some white

Eternity, some unperturbed dream-vast,

It slew the colour and passion of time’s heart-beat! —

 

I have made only minor changes for the most part, but many of them in order to secure what I feel to be the missing elements. I have indicated in the places where my reasons for change were of another kind what those reasons were;¹ the rest are dictated by the two considerations of rhythmic efficiency and quatrain structure. In the first verse this structure is secured by putting two pauses in the middle of lines, each clause taking up the sense

 

¹Line 3: "’A-dread’ seems to me rather feeble."

 Line 5: " ‘Reached’ is very weak."

 Line 17: "Why this inversion? It spoils the power and directness of the line."

 Lines 18 & 19: "The double "of is very awkward and spoils both force and flow."

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from there and enlarging into amplitude and then bringing to a forceful close. In the second verse and in the fourth I have attempted a sweeping continuous quatrain movement but taken care to separate them by a different structure so as to avoid monotony. The third is made of two blank verse couplets, each complementary in sense to the other; the fifth is based on a one-line monumental phrase worked out in sense by a three-line development with a culminating close-line. The whole thing is not perhaps as perfect as it needs to be, but it is in the nature of a demonstration, to show on what principles the blank verse quatrain can be built if it has to be done at all — I have founded it on the rule of full but well-sculptured single lines and an architectural quatrain structure: others are possible, but I think would be more difficult to execute.

I had half a mind to illustrate my thesis by quotations from Savitri, but -I resist the temptation, warned by the scowling forehead of Time — this will do.

 

P.S. I don’t consider the proximity of the closing words "light" and "white" in the last stanzas an objection since the quatrains stand as separate entities — so I did not alter; of course in continuous blank verse an objection would be.

8-7-1933

REGULAR AND IRREGULAR SONNET RHYMES

 

The two regular sonnet rhyme sequences are (1) the Shakespearean ab ab cd cd ef ef gg — that is, three quatrains with alternate rhymes with a closing couplet and (2) the Miltonic with an octet abba abba (as in your second and third quatrains) and a sestet of three rhymes arranged according to choice. The Shakespearean is closer to the natural lyric rhythm, the Miltonic to the ode movement — i.e. something large and grave. The Miltonic is very difficult, for it needs either a strong armoured structure of the thought or a carefully developed unity of the building which all poets can’t manage. However there have been attempts at an irregular sonnet rhyme sequence. Keats tried his hand at one a

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century ago and I vaguely believe (but that may be only an illusion or Maya) that modern poets have played loose fantastic tricks of their own invention; but I don’t have much first hand knowledge of modern (contemporary) poetry. Anyhow I have myself written a series of sonnets with the most heterodox rhyme arrangements, so I couldn’t very well go for you when you do the same. One who has committed many murders can’t very well rate another for having done a few. All the same this sequence is rather—a Miltonic octet with Shakespearean close would be more possible. I think I have done something of the kind with not too bad an effect, but I have no time to consult my poetry file and am not sure. In the sonnet too it might be well for you to do the regular thing first soberly and well, and afterwards when you are sure of your steps, frisk and dance.

22-2-1936

SOME VERBAL SUBTLETIES AND TECHNICAL POINTS

 

Q: I should like to know what exactly the meaning of the word "absolve" is in the following lines from your "Love and Death". I have been puzzled because the ordinary dictionary meanings don’t seem to fit in.

But if with price, ah God! what easier! Tears

Dreadful, innumerable I will absolve,

Or pay with anguish through the centuries…

 

There is another passage a few pages later where the same word is used:

 

                For late

I saw her mid those pale inhabitants

Whom bodily anguish visits not, but thoughts

Sorrowful and dumb memories absolve,

And martyrdom of scourged hearts quivering.

 

A: In the second passage it is used in its ordinary sense. "Absolution"

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means release from sins or from debts — the sorrowful thoughts and memories are the penalty or payment which procures the release from the debt which has been accumulated by the sins and errors of human life.

In the first passage "absolve" is used in its Latin and not in its English sense, — "to pay off a debt", but here the sense is stretched a little. Instead of saying "I will pay off with tears", Ruru says: "I will pay off tears" as the price of the absolution. This Latinisation and the inversion of syntactical connections are familiar licences in English poetry — of course, it is incor­rect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some others, likes, as Stephen Phillips used to say, to have liberties taken with it. But, of course, before one can take these liberties, one must be a master of the language — and, in this case, of the Latin also.

1931

Q: In my lines—

 

This heart grew brighter when your breath’s proud chill

Flung my disperse life-blood more richly in —

 

a terminal "d" will at once English that Latin fellow "disperse”¹, but is he really objectionable? At first I had "Drove" instead of "Flung" — so the desire for a less dental rhythm was his raison d’être, but if he seems a trifle weaker than his English Avatar, he can easily be dispensed with now.

 

A: I don’t think "disperse" as an adjective can pass—the dentals are certainly an objection but do not justify this Latin-English neologism.

12-6-1937

Q: Why should that poor "disperse" be inadmissible

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when English has many such Latin forms — e.g. "consecrate", "dedicate", "intoxicate”? I felt it to be a natural innovation and not against the genius of the language: I discover now from the Standard Dictionary that it is not even a neologism — it is only an obsolete word. I have a substitute ready, however:

 

Flung my diffuse life-blood more richly in.

 

But is not "disperse" formed on exactly the same principle as "diffuse"? By the way, does "dispersed" make the line really too dental, now that "Flung" is there and not the original "Drove"?

 

A: I don’t think people use "consecrate", "intoxicate" etc. as adjectives nowadays — at any rate it sounds to me too recherché. Of course, if one chose, this kind of thing might be perpetrated —

 

O wretched man intoxicate,

Let not thy life be consecrate

To wine’s red yell (spell, if you want to be "poetic").

Else will thy soul be dedicate

To Hell—

 

but it is better not to do it. It makes no difference if there are other words like "diffuse" taken from French (not Latin) which have this form and are generally used adjectives. Logic is not the sole basis of linguistic use. I thought at first it was an archaism and there might be some such phrase in old poetry as lids dis­perse, but as I could not find it even in the Oxford which claims to be exhaustive and omniscient, I concluded it must be a neo­logism of yours. But archaism or neologism does not matter. "Dispersed life-blood" brings three d’s so near together that they collide a little — if they were farther from each other it would not matter — or if they produced some significant or opportune effect. I think "diffuse" will do.

13-6-1937

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Q: What do I find this afternoon ? Just read:

 

                Suddenly

From motionless battalions as outride

A speed disperse of horsemen, from that mass

Of livid menace went a frail light cloud

Rushing through heaven, and behind it streamed

The downpour all in wet and greenish lines.

 

This is from your own "Urvasie", written in the middle nineties of the last century! Of course it is possible that the printer has omitted a terminal "d"—but is that really the explanation ?

 

A: I dare say I tried to Latinise. But that does not make it a permissible form. If it is obsolete, it must remain obsolete. I thought at first it was an archaism you were trying on, I seemed to remember something of the kind, but as I could find it nowhere I gave up the idea—it was probably my own crime that I remembered.

29-6-1937

Q: The English reader has digested Carlyle and swallowed Meredith and is not quite unwilling to reJOyce in even more startling strangenesses of expression at the present day. Will his stomach really turn at the novelty of that phrase which you wouldn’t approve: "the voice of a devouring eye"? "The voice of an eye" sounds rather idiotic, but if the adjective "devouring" is added the phrase seems to become effective. "Devouring eye" is then a synecdoche — isolating and emphasising Shakespeare’s most remarkable quality, his eager multitudinous sight, and the oral epithet provides a connection with the idea of a voice, thus preventing the catachresis from being too startling. If Milton could give us "blind mouths" and Wordsworth

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Thou eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, readst the eternal deep,

 

is there very much to object to in this visioned voice ?

 

A: Can’t accept all that. A voice of a devouring eye is even more re-Joycingly mad than a voice of an eye pure and simple. If the English language is to go to the dogs, let it go, but the Joyce cut by the way of Bedlam does not recommend itself to me.

The poetical examples have nothing to do with the matter. Poetry is permitted to be insane — the poet and the madman go together: though even there there are limits. Meredith and Carlyle are tortuous or extravagant in their style only — though they can be perfectly sane when they want. In poetry anything can pass — for instance, my "voice of a tilted nose":

 

O voice of a tilted nose,

Speak but speak not in prose!

 

Nose like a blushing rose,

O Joyce of a tilted nose!

 

That is high poetry, but put it in prose and it sounds insane.

5-5-1935

Q: In the lines,

 

O Grace that flowest from the Master’s Will,

How fondly thou dost mitigate the power

Of utter summit for our volleyed sake…

 

What do you think of the turn "our volleyed sake" ? Can it pass ?

 

A: "For our valleyed sake" is a locution that offers fascinating possibilities but fails to sound English. One might risk, "Let fall some tears for my unhappy sake" in defiance of grammar or

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humourously, "Oh shed some sweat-drops for my corpulent sake"; but "valleyed sake" carries the principle of the ārṣa prayoga¹ beyond the boundaries of the possible.

 

Q: Is there any advantage in changing the phrase —

 

as though a press

Of benediction lay on me unseen —

 

to

as though the press

Of a benediction lay on me unseen ?

 

A: No, no. The first was immeasurably better. "A press of benediction" is striking and effective; "the press of a benedic­tion" is flat and means nothing. Besides, it is not good English. You can say "a press of affairs", "a press of matter"; you can say "the pressure of this affair", but you cannot say "the press of an affair".

1931

Q: Here is a sonnet for your judgment. It deals with the massive spiritual light descending into the brain like an inverted pyramid. The final phrase has a historical allusion:

 

…a conscious hill

Down-kindled by some Cheops of the skies

To monument his lordship over death.

 

You must have heard of Cheops, the Egyptian King who built the Great Pyramid at Gizeh ?

 

A: Of course I have heard of Cheops, but did not expect to hear

 

¹ Rihi’s licence.

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of him again in this context. Don’t you think the limiting proper name brings in an excessive touch of intellectual ingenuity, almost as if the poem were built for the sake of this metaphor and not for its subject? I would myself prefer a general term so as to prevent any drop from sublimity, e.g.

 

Down-sloped by some King-Builder of the skies.

 

But it is a good sonnet and there is certainly both vision and poetry in it.

 

25-9-1933

"Revealed her mateless beauty the true paradise" is not permissible in prose, but it is one of those contracted expressions which are allowed in poetry and it is quite intelligible.

8-10-1934

Q: In your sonnet "The Human Enigma^ occurs the magnificent line:

 

His heart is a chaos and an empyrean.

 

But I am much saddened by the fact that the rhythm of these words gets spoiled at the end by a mis-stressing in "empyrean". "Empyrean" is stressed currently in the penultimate syllable, thus: "empyre’an". Your line puts the stress on the second syllable. It is in the adjective "empyreal" that the second syllable is stressed, but the noun is never stressed that way, so far as I know. Perhaps you have a precedent in the Elizabethans? Or have you deliberately taken liberty with the accentuation? The same mis-stressing occurs also in Book II, Canto 11, of Savitri¹: page 270, line 6:

 

Surprised in their untracked empyrean.

 

¹ Centenary Edition, 1972.

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But you certainly do not always stress the noun like the adjective. In Book I, Canto III, line 5 from below on page 25 is the splendid verse:

 

An empyrean vision saw and knew.

 

Here the penultimate syllable gets the ictus. May I have some explanation? Perhaps there are acknowledged alternative accentuations and I am just ignorant? I really hope so, for otherwise, while the line from Book II of ‘Savitri’¹ can easily take a noun after "empyrean" or get its "empyrean" changed to "empyreal" and then take a noun, the sonnet-line will not have the same absolute grandeur of phrase as now if it is rewritten:

 

His heart is a chaos and an empyreans span.

 

If it is to rhyme with "man", "plan" and "scan" in your sonnet-scheme it must bring in "span" — mustn’t it?

 

A: I find in the Chambers’s Dictionary the noun "empyrean" is given two alternative pronunciations, each with a different stress,—the first, "empyre’an" and secondly, "empy’rean". Actually in the book the accent seems to fall on the consonant "r" instead of the vowel. That must be a mistake in printing; it is evident that it is meant to fall on the second vowel. If that is so, my variation is justified and needs no further defence. The adjective "empyreal" the dictionary gives as having the same alternative accentuation as the noun, that is to say, either "empyre’al" with the accent on the long "e" or "empy’real" with the accent on the second syllable, but the "e" although unaccented still keeps its long pronunciation. Then? But even if I had no justification from the dictionary and the noun "empy’rean" were only an Aurobindonian freak and a wilful shifting of the accent, I would refuse to change it; for the rhythm here is an essential part of whatever beauty there is in the line.

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P.S. Your view is supported by the small Oxford Dictionary which, I suppose, gives the present usage. Chambers being an older authority. But Chambers must represent a former usage and I am entitled to revive even a past or archaic form if I choose to do so.

4-8-1949

Q: As between the forms — "with a view to express" and "with a view to expressing" — the Concise Oxford Dictionary calls the former vulgar.

 

A: I don’t agree with Oxford. Both forms are used. If "to express" is vulgar, "to expressing" is cumbrous and therefore inelegant.

 

Q: The Oxford Dictionary seems to leave one no choice as regards counting the number of syllables in the word "vision" and its likes. I quote below some of the words explained as monosyllables in the same way as "rhythm" and "prism":

 

Fa’shion (-shn)

Passion (pa’shn)

Prison (-zn)

Scission (si’shn)

Trea’son (-ezn)

Vi’sion (-zhn)

 

As X would say, qu’en dites vous? Chambers’s Dictionary makes "vision" a dissyllable, which is quite sensible, but the monosyllabic pronunciation of it deserves to be considered at least a legitimate variant when H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler — the name of Fowler is looked upon as a synonym for authority on the English language — give no other. I don’t think I am mistaken in inter-

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 preting their intention. Take "realm", which they pronounce in brakets as "relm"; now I see no difference as regards syllabification between their intention here and in the instances above.

 

P.S. I must admit, however, what struck me after typing the preceding. In the preface to the Oxford Dictionary it is said that it has not been thought necessary to mention certain pronunciations which are familiar to the normal reader, such as that of the suffix "-ation (ashn). Does this mean that a word like "’meditation" is to be taken as three syllables only ? According to my argument there seems no alternative; and yet the example looks very much like a reductio ad absurdum.

 

A: You may not have a choice — but I have a choice, which is to pronounce and scan words like vision and passion and similar words as all the poets of the English language (those at least whom I know) have consistently pronounced and scanned them — as dissyllables. If you ask me to scan Shakespeare’s line in the following manner to please H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler,

 

Ĭn māī|děn mēd|ĭtatīōn | fān|cў frēē,

 

I shall decline without thanks. Shakespeare wrote, if I remember right, "treasons, strategems and spoils"; Shelley, Tennyson, any poet of the English language, I believe would do the same — though I have no books with me to give chapter and verse. I lived in both northern and southern England, but I never heard vision pronounced vizhn, it was always vizhun; treason, of course, is pronounced trez’n, but that does not make it a monosyllable in scansion because there is in these words a very perceptible slurred vowel sound in pronunciation which I represent by the ‘; in poison also. If realm, helm etc. are taken as monosyllables, that is quite reasonable, for there is no vowel between "1" and "m" and none is heard, slurred or otherwise in pronunciation. The words rhythm and prism are technically monosyllables, because they are so pronounced in French (i.e.

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that part of the word, for there is a mute "e" in French): but in fact most Englishmen take the help of a slurred vowel-sound in pronouncing rhythms and it would be quite permissible to write in English as a blank verse line, "The unheard rhythms that sustain the world".

This is my conviction and not all the Fowlers in the world will take it away from me. I only hope the future lexicographers will not "fowl" the language any more in that direction; otherwise we shall have to write lines like this —

 

O vizhn! O pashn! m’d'tashn! h’rr’p'lashn!

Why did the infern’l Etern’l und’take creash’n?

Or else, creat’ng, could he not have afford’d

Not to allow the Engl’sh tongue to be Oxford’d?

 

P.S.I remember a book (Hamerton’s? some one else’s? I don’t remember) in which the contrast was drawn between the English and French languages, that the English tongue tended to throw all the weight on the first or earliest possible syllable and slurred the others, the French did the opposite — so that when an Englishman pretends to say strawberries, what he really says is strawb’s. That is the exaggeration of a truth — but all the same there is a limit.

27-9-1934

Q: Of course a language is not made altogether according to logical rules. Originally, or aboriginally, it came, I suppose, out of the entrails and in spite of all Volapuks and Esperantos natural languages will flourish. But I should like to ask you a few questions suggested by your falling foul of the Fowlers. The poetic pronunciation of words cannot be accepted as a standard for current speech — can it ? On your own showing, "treason" and "poison" which are monosyllables in prose or current speech can be scanned as dissyllables in verse; Shelley makes "evening" three syllables and X has used even "realm" as a dissyllable, while the practice of taking

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"precious”¹ and "conscious" to be three syllables is not even noticeable, I believe. All the same, current speech, if your favourite Chambers^ Dictionary as well as my dear Concise Oxford is to be believed, insists on "evening’"’, "precious" and "conscious" being dissyllabic and "realm" monosyllabic. I am mentioning this disparity between poetic and current usages not because I wish "meditation" to be robbed of its full length or "vision" to lose half its effect but because it seems to me that Shelley’s or Tennyson’s or any poets practice does not in itself prove anything definitely for English as it is spoken. And spoken English, very much more than written English, undergoes change; even the line you quote from Shakespeare was perhaps not scanned in his time as you would do it now, for "meditation" — as surely "passion" and "fashion" also and most probably "vision" as well— was often if not always given its full vowel-value and the fourth foot of the line in question might to an Elizabethan ear have been very naturally an anapaest:

 

In mai\den me\dita\tion fān\cy free.

 

When, however, you say that your personal experience in England, both north and south, never recorded a monosyllabic "vision", we are on more solid ground, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary is specially stated to be in its very title as "of Current English": is all its claim to be set at nought ? It is after all a responsible compilation and, so far as my impression goes, not unesteemed. If its errors were so glaring as you think, would there not be a general protest ? Or is it that English has changed so much in "word of mouth" since your departure from England? This is not an ironical query—I am just

wondering.

 

P.S. Your exclamatory-interrogatory elegiacs illustrating the predicament we should fall into if the Fowlers

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were allowed to spread their nets with impunity were very enjoyable. But I am afraid the tendency of the English language is towards contraction of vowel-sounds^ at least terminal, ones; and perhaps the Oxford Dictionary has felt the need to monumentalise — clearly and authoritatively — the degree to which this tendency has, in some cases more definitely, in others less but still perceptibly enough, advanced? The vocalised "e" of the suffix "-ed" of the Spenserian days is now often mute;the trisyllabic suffix "-ation" of the "spacious times" has shrunk by one syllable, and "treason’" and "poison" and "prison”¹, all having the same second-vowel sound if fully pronounced as in the second syllable of "-ation", are already monosyllables in speech — so, if "passion" and "fashion" which too have lost their Elizabethan characteristic like "meditation" should contract by a natural analogy, carrying all "ation"-suffixed words as well as "vision" and "scission" and the like with them, it would be quite as one might expect. And if current speech once fixes these contractions, they will not always keep outside the pale of poetry. What do you think?

 

A: Where the devil have I admitted that "treason" and "poison" are monosyllables or that their use as dissyllables is a poetic licence? Will you please quote the words in which I have made that astounding and imbecile admission? I have said distinctly that they are dissyllabic, — like risen, dozen, maiden, garden, laden and a thousand others which nobody (at least before the world went mad) ever dreamed of taking as monosyllables. On my own showing, indeed! After I had even gone to the trouble of explaining at length about the slurred syllable "e" in these words, for the full sound is not given, so that you cannot put it down as pronounced maid-en, you have to indicate the pronunciation as maid’n. But for that to dub maiden a monosyllable and assert that Shakespeare, Shelley and every other poet who scans maiden as a dissyllable was a born fool who did not know the "current" pronunciation or was indulging in a constant poetic licence

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whenever he used the words garden, maiden, widen, sadden etc. is a long flight of imagination. I say that these words are dissyllables and the poets in so scanning them (not as an occasional licence but normally and every time) are much better authorities than any owl — or fowl — of a dictionary-maker in the universe. Of course the poets use licences in lengthening out words occasionally, but these are exceptions; to explain away their normal use of words as a perpetually repeated licence would be a wild wooden-headedness (5 syllables, please). That these words are dissyllables is proved farther by the fact that "saddened", "maidenhood" cannot possibly be anything but respectively dissyllabic and trisyllabic, yet "saddened" could, I suppose, be correctly indicated in a dictionary as pronounced "saddnd". A dictionary indication or a dictionary theory cannot destroy the living facts of the language.

I do not know why you speak of my "favourite" Chambers. Your attachment to Oxford is not balanced by any attachment of mine to Chambers or any other lexicographer. I am not inclined to swear by any particular dictionary as an immaculate virgin authority for pronunciation or a papal Infallible. It was you who quoted Chambers as differing from Oxford, not I. You seem indeed to think that the Fowlers are a sort of double-headed Pope to the British public in all linguistic matters and nobody could dare question their dictates or ukases — only I do so because I am antiquated and am living in India. I take leave to point out to you that this is not yet a universally admitted catholic dogma. The Fowlers indeed seem to claim something of the kind, they make their enunciations with a haughty papal arrogance condemning those who differ from them as outcasts and brushing them aside in a few words or without a mention. But it is not quite like that. What is current English? As far as pronunciation goes, every Englishman knows that for an immense number of words there is no such thing — Englishmen of equal education pronounce them in different ways, sometimes in more than two different ways. "Either"-"neither" is a current pronunciation, so is "eether" "neether". In some words the "th" is pronounced variably as a soft "d" or a soft "t" or as "th" — and so on. If the Oxford pronunciation of "vision" and "meditation" is correct

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current English, then the confusion has much increased since my time, for then at feast every body pronounced "vizhun’\ ‘"meditashun", as I do still and shall go on doing so. Or if the other existed, it must have been confined to uneducated people. But you suggest that my pronunciation is antiquated, English has advanced since then as since Shakespeare. But I must point out that you yourself quote Chambers for "vizhun" and following your example — not out of favouritism — I may quote him for "summation" — "summashun", not "shn". The latest edition of Chambers is dated 1931 and the editors have not thought themselves bound by the decisive change of the English language to change "shun" into "shn". Has the decisive change taken place since 1931? Moreover in the recent dispute about the standard Broadcast pronunciation, the decisions of Bernard Shaw’s Committee were furiously disputed — if Fowler and Oxford were papal authorities in England for current speech (it was current speech the Committee was trying to fix through the broadcasts), would it not have been sufficient simply to quote the Oxford in order to produce an awed and crushed silence?

So your P.S. has no solid ground to stand on since there is no "fixed" current speech and Fowler is not its Pope and there is no universal currency of his vizhn of things. Language is not bound by analogy and because "meditation" has become "meditashun" it does not follow that it must become "meditashn" and that "tation" is now a monosyllable contrary to all common sense and the privilege of the ear. It might just as well be argued that it will necessarily be clipped farther until the whole word becomes a monosyllable. Language is neither made nor developed in that way — if the English language were so to deprive itself of all beauty by turning vision into vizhn and then into vzhn and all other words into similar horrors, I would hasten to abandon it for Sanskrit or French or Bengali — or even Swahili.

 

P.S. By the way, one point. Does the Oxford pronounce in cold blood and so many set words that vision, passion (and by logical extension treason, maiden, garden etc.) are mono­syllables? Or is it your inference from "realm" and "prism"?

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