Two Packets of Poetry and a Prose Cutting

Two slim packets of poetry have been put in my hands by a friend - one in typescript, the other in print - both re-comended with warm admiration; while a prose cutting from The Times Literary Supplement has been given me with disgust and disapproval.

The printed booklet is entitled "Magnificat" and its writer is S.I.M., a woman. It makes pleasant reading. The general poetic atmosphere is good - the sentiment in which the verse lives and moves is touched with the mystery of life's birth and growth and of the one Force variously creative everywhere. I think it is this general atmosphere, this prevailing sentiment that stirred my friend so much. But I must warn him against taking these things as themselves poetry. There are certain ideas towards which an imaginative man always feels a good deal of warmth; when, however, we appreciate poetry we must not transfer that warmth which is our own to the stuff of words we are considering and cover this stuff with a sort of enchanting haze. Even if the author has felt the same warmth and his ideas have stirred him deeply, it does not follow that all he writes is high poetry. Poetry is, in the last analysis, expression - not what is felt or seen or thought. Of course sincerity and intensity of mind are essential - still, they are not per se poetry: one must consider the measure of beauty in the utterance of these essentials.

"Magnificat" has some fairly good passages, some rather fine lines, but I fail to discover any sustained effect. Its general tone is sufficiently lyrical: the fault lies in insufficient crystallisation of the lyrical impulse. I notice in its "thoughtful" parts a too facile turn - in its "emotional" parts an excitement which is born more of pseudo-mystic fancy than profound and soul-lit imagination. My remarks apply to the poem regarded as a whole: I admit that on several pages there is the throb of true poetry, though that throb does not fill any complete page except perhaps the first which pro-

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mises much and the fourteenth where the expression is not as intense as elsewhere yet is charged with enough felicity throughout.

Let me illustrate my comments with some quotations. Perhaps the lines most beautifully moving and suggestive are —

O womanhood whose principle is one

With the great planets, that adoring wheel

Around the central sun,

and

She who has looked on her Beloved's face

Irradiated into precious line,

and

Mary, the Mother of Jesus, when the Unborn

enlarged her,

Made her Magnificat, singing of Love, and an Order new.

In the last quotation it is the phrase "when the Unborn enlarged her" that is the transfiguring touch: the rest is good but gets its meaning and depth of emotion from this hint at the same time of the outer physical phenomenon of pregnancy and the inner psychological experience of mystical wideness - a hint which also renders apt the accumulation of so many syllables in each line. In all the three instances I have cited, the thought plunges below the surface or lifts above it: one or two others equally brief can be added where also the poetic consciousness is quickened to a like beauty. A more frequent type of poetry, however, in the book is a simple lyricism seeing things vividly without seeing far into them -

Here in the grass at my feet

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Tiny lives fuse and meet

Working Love's will

or,

The springtime lark

Shrills out my secret melodied.

(O hark! O hark!

She tells how sweet and strange

Is the love-change.)

But when there is an attempt to express what the author considers to be a great thought, a flash of grand philosophic or mystic insight, she fails because her intellect has not the needed energy or penetrativeness, and no amount of capitals can give her expression weight of significance or luminous amplitude. The warning I uttered at the beginning applies to all this ambitious "grandeur" which is wanting in true power, genuine sweep of passion, revealing light of imagination. I do not say there is no touch at all of vibrant vision; I just say that it is not kept shining clean of exclamatory rhetoric and misty sentimentalism... S.I.M. has, I am certain, the stuff of inspiration in her, but the babe of beauty is not fully born yet.

The typescript I have been handed is captioned "An Old Man's Songs". The poet is no other than that versatile personality well-known in Bengal to-day - Sir Sahed Suhrawardy. I am not sure these poems have been published, but several deserve to be. It seems they were written a long time back, for the typescript is stained with age. Their dramatic effect is considerable and in one or two places remarkable, but that is not the same thing as saying that the poetic effect is throughout satisfying. I record this impression with regret because the poetry too in some places is really remarkable and there is scarcely a poem in which a few lines of suggestive delicacy of power are not present. No greater praise in this 'genre' is possible than that one is reminded of

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the new style W.B. Yeats fashioned for himself in mid-career after wearying of Celtic wizardries and incantations; but the besetting danger of the new Yeats was either a too intellectual or on the rebound an over-colloquial cast of phrase. Again and again in "An Old Mart's Songs" the genuine poetic utterance in which a simple directness rises to inspiration or a complex beauty of passion starts glowing is interrupted by prosaic turns and weak rhythms. The sentiment is rarely at fault and I dare say it would make appealing literature if a prose form and rhythm were adopted, but in the form chosen it tends to be flat when it is not supported by that subtle keenness of word and of metrical movement which is the life and soul of poetry. Perhaps it will be argued that in speaking of trivial things a trivial tone has to be employed and poetising would mean pompousness and falsetto. But what is really wanted is the poetic vision of trivialities. Take the line,

Odol and powder before going out to friends,

with its telling mockery but not telling poetic mockery such as we find in

Lips painted to the crimson of a wound.

With these two instances from the same passage it is not hard to see what I mean by poetic vision - a quality which can find expression in various styles and not necessarily always in a highly colourful one, but in some form or other it must be present if a poem is to be through and through a success. Certain poems in the series are a success of this kind, though perhaps not the most beautiful or forcible kind of success, for the finest lines occur in pieces which are rather unequal. All the same, it has been a pleasure to come across those memorable lines: it is not every day that one chances upon gems like

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Beware, my Love, beware,

Lest in your riotous hair

There might not be a dream of mine that sighs

or,

at rest

In the crystal halo of your years

or,

I stretch torn hands to reach your piteous hands;

I seek through tattered space your ample eyes.

I come now to the cutting from The Times Literary Supplement. It is a few months old but it calls for comment, for it is concerned with one of our most gifted wielders of the pen both in prose and poetry. The part about his prose is mostly appreciative: the remarks on his poetry are really a "shock". I am in full sympathy with my friend's disgust and disapproval. Listen to this sentence - a veritable masterpiee of inept judgment: "It cannot be said that Aurobindo shows any organic adaptation to music and melody. His thought is profound, his technical devices are commendable but the music that enchants or disturbs is not there. Aurobindo is not another Tagore or Iqbal or even Sarojini Naidu." I confess the words fairly take my breath away. They deny inspiration altogether and in all its forms to Sri Aurobindo's poetry. For, evidently, music in poetry does not stand just for one particular form, a liquid leaping dancing movement or a movement of resounding richness, less light but equally swift, or a slow grave movement or the unrhymed un-stanzaed enjambed movement of blank verse. It can be anything and it is born fundamentally of kindled emotion and imagination setting language astir and aglow so that words and phrases become intense and harmonious in a vital suggestive way and fall into appropriate metrical patterns

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that ring significant changes on a recurrent base. In short, it is inspiration metrically expressing itself.

Is Sri Aurobindo wanting everywhere in that expression? Look at his blank verse. Only a deaf man with his whole aesthetic being grown numb can refuse to find "the music that enchants or disturbs" in a passage like the following from an early narrative, Love and Death, where a lover is represented as searching the underworld of departed spirits for his prematurely lost mate:

...O Miserable race of men,

With violent and passionate souls you come

Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days

In fear and anguish, catching at stray beams

Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;

Then from your spacious earth in a great horror

Descend into this night, and here too soon

Must expiate your few inadequate joys.

O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads

Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,

The naked spirit here. O my sweet flower,

Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?

Ah me! But I will haste and deeply plunge

Into its hopeless pools and either bring

Thy old warm beauty back beneath the stars,

Or find thee out and clasp thy tortured bosom

And kiss thy sweet wrung lips and hush thy cries.

Love shall draw half thy pain into my limbs;

Then we shall triumph glad of agony.

From the point of view of the inner music - that is, the thrill of the inspired consciousness - creating the outer music that embodies it, the lines are some of the most perfect in literature, with a sustained exquisiteness of the mot juste and the outer music is of such a markedly euphonious Virgilian type as to leave no excuse whatever for overlooking it. And again and again in Love and Death the music rises to the same

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pitch and carries the same tone. Nor, whether this tone be at play or a more austere one like

Long months he travelled between grief and grief,

Reliving thoughts of her with every pace,

Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind

occur instead, is there any lack in any blank-verse narrative by Sri Aurobindo of beautiful music organically adapted to the feeling and the vision. How is it The Times Literary Supplement critic got aesthetically so obtuse? And does he not realise that blank-verse music is the hardest to produce and therefore most clinchingly proves the inspired poet? Sri Aurobindo's being very strikingly successful in it gives the lie, with quintessential force, to the charge that he is less a poet than Tagore or Iqbal or even Sarojini Naidu.

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