Sri Aurobindo

The Future Poetry

CWSA.- Volume 26

Part One. The Future Poetry

Chapter XXII. Recent English Poetry – 3

The rhythmic change which distinguishes the new poetry, may not be easy to seize at the first hearing, for it is a subtle thing in its spirit more than in its body, commencing only and obscured by the outward adherence to the apparent turn-out and method of older forms; but there is a change too, more readily tangible, in the language of this poetry, in that fusion of a concentrated substance of the idea and a transmuting essence of the speech which we mean by poetic style. But here too, if we would understand in its issues the evolution of poetic speech in a language, it is on the subtler things of the spirit, the significant inner changes that we must keep our eye; for it is these that determine the rest and are the heart of the matter. We take little account of the psychology of poetic genius and are content with saying that the word of the poet is the speech of the imagination or that he works by an inspiration. But this is an insufficient account; for imagination is of many different kinds and inspiration touches the mind at different levels and breaks out through different media before it issues through the gates of the creative imagination. What we mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the ordinary mentality, so that what is written seems not to be the fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign breathed or poured in from above. That is the possession by the divine enthousiasmos of which Plato has spoken. But it is seldom that the whole word leaps direct from that source, that cavern of natal light ready-shaped and with the pure stamp of its divine origin,— ordinarily it goes through some secondary process in the brain-mind itself, gets its impulse and unformed substance perhaps from above, but subjects it to an intellectual or other earthly change; there is in that change always indeed some superior power born of the excitement of the higher possession, but also some alloy too of our mortality. And the character, value and force of the word of the poet vary according to the action of those parts of our mentality which dominate in the change,— the vital mind, the emotional temperament, the imaginative or reflective intellect or the higher intuitive intelligence. The Tantric theory of Speech, the inspired seeing and creative goddess enthroned in our various soul-centres in her several forms and with her higher and higher stations, becomes here an actual and luminously perceptible truth of our being. But also there is in us a direct medium between that divine and this human mentality, an intuitive soul-mind supporting the rest, which has its share both in the transmission and the formal creation, and it is where this gets out into overt working, discloses its shaping touch or makes heard its transmitting voice that we get the really immortal tones of speech and heights of creation. And it is the epochs when there is in the mind of a race some enthusiastic outburst or some calm august action of this intuitive power, intermediary of the inspirations of the spirit or its revelations, that make the great ages of poetry.

In English literature this period was the Elizabethan. Then the speech of poetry got into it a ring and turn of direct intuitive power, a spontaneous fullness of vision and divine fashion in its utterance which it had not at all before and has hardly had afterwards. Even the lesser poets of the time are touched by it, but in Shakespeare it runs in a stream and condenses to a richly-loaded and crowding mass of the work and word of the intuition almost unexampled in any poetry. The difference can be measured by taking the work of Chaucer or of subsequent poets almost at their best and of Shakespeare at a quite ordinary level and feeling the effect on the poetic listener in our own intuitive being. We take Chaucer with his easy adequate limpidity,—

He was a very parfit gentle knight,

and then pass on to Shakespeare’s rapid seizing of the intuitive inevitable word and the disclosing turn of phrase which admits us at once to a direct vision of the thing he shows us,—

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth scapes in the imminent deadly breach,

where with quite as simple a thing to say and a perfect force of directness in saying it, it is yet a vastly different kind of directness. The one speaks from the poetic intellect and satisfies by a just and pleasing expression, in the other the words get, one might say, into the entrails of vision and do not stop short at the clear measure of the thing seen, but evoke their very quality and give us immediately the inmost vital fibre and thrill of the life they describe and interpret. It is not merely a difference of the measure of the genius, but of its source. This language of Shakespeare’s is a unique and wonderful thing; it has everywhere the royalty of the sovereign intuitive mind looking into and not merely at life and in this most myriad-minded of poets it takes like life itself many tones, but that intuitive readiness to get through, seize the lurking word and bring it out from the heart of the thing itself is almost always its secret. From that, he might have said, could he have given a better account of his own working, and not by any mere mirroring of things in Nature,

It was my hint to speak, such was the process.

We are most readily struck in Shakespeare by the lines and passages in which the word thus seized and brought out is followed swiftly on the heels by another and another of its kind, many crowding together or even fused and run into each other in a single phrase of many suggestions,— for this manner is peculiarly his own and others can only occasionally come near to it. Such passages recur to the mind as those in the soliloquy on sleep or the well-known lines in Macbeth,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart.

His is often a highly imaged style, but Shakespeare’s images are not, as with so many poets, decorative or brought in to enforce and visualise the intellectual sense, they are more immediately revelatory, intimate to the thing he speaks and rather the proper stuff of the fact itself than images. But he has too a clearer, less crowded, still swifter fashion of speech in which they are absent; for an example,

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word,—

which has yet the same deep and penetrating intuitive spirit in its utterance. Or the two manners meet together and lean on each other,—

I have lived long enough; my way of life

Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf,

or become one, as in the last speeches of Antony,—

I am dying, Egypt, dying; only

I here importune death awhile, until

Of many thousand kisses the poor last

I lay upon thy lips.

But all have the same characteristic stamp of the intuitive mind rapidly and powerfully at work; but always too,— and this is the important distinction,— that mediator between the secret spirit and our ordinary surface mentality works in him through and behind the life vision to give the vital impression, the vital psychology, the life-burden of the thought, the emotion, the act or the thing seen in Nature.

The movement that immediately followed, abandoned this power which Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had brought into English poetry; it sought after a language cut into the precision or full with the suggestions of the poetical intellect, and it gained something by its sacrifice; it purified the language, got rid of Elizabethan conceit and extravagance, laid a clearer basis of thought, went back to ordinary speech and raised it into a fit instrument of the poetical imagination. But it lost this Shakespearian directness of intuitive vision and spontaneous power of utterance. Gray in a notable passage observes and laments the loss, without penetrating into its cause and nature, and he tried sometimes in his own way, within the cadre of an intellectualised language, to recover something of the power. The later poets get a compensation in other directions by a heightening of the clarified thought and imagination, but the basic substance of the speech seems to have irrecoverably changed and its more tenuous spirit and make impose on the searching audacities of the intuition the curbing restraints and limits of the imaginative intelligence. Shelley’s

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,

Keats’

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,

or his

To that large utterance of the early Gods,

or Wordsworth’s

the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

give the force and pitch and measure of this often clear, strong, large and luminous, but less intensely surprising and uplifting manner. English poetry has got away from the Elizabethan outbreak nearer to a kinship with the mind and manner of the Greek and Latin poets and their intellectual descendants, though still, it is to be noted, keeping something, a subtle and intimate turn, a power of fire and ether which has become native to it, a legacy from the Shakespearian speech which was not there in its beginnings. This imaginatively intellectual basis of speech remains constant down to the end of the Victorian era.

But at the same time there emerges, at times, a certain effort to recapture the Shakespearian potency and intensity accompanied by a new and higher element in the workings of the poetic inspiration. When we try to put a name on it,— a thing which the poet himself seldom does successfully, for the creative instinct does not usually care to burden itself with a too intellectual self-consciousness,— we can see that this is an attempt to return to the fullness and the awakening turn of the direct intuitive expression on a subtler and more ethereal level. The clarified intellect observing life from above is in itself a higher thing than the vital and emotional mind which responds more immediately and powerfully to life, but is caught in its bonds; and if the direct intuitive power can be got to work on the level just above the ordinary thinking mind where that mind opens through the full intuitive intelligence to a greater supra-intellectual mass and subtlety of light, it will bring in the revelation and inspiration of mightier and profounder things than when it works from behind the mind — even the vividly thinking mind of life and its vital sight and feeling. For here, on the lower level, we get at most, as in Shakespeare, at the spirit in life with all its power of vital thought and its potency of passion and emotion; but there we shall get the greater spirit which embraces life, but shows us too all that is behind it, all that it dimly means and strives in embarrassed act and thought to bring into expression. Of this effort and this new thing we get magical first indications in the pre-Victorian poets, as in Wordsworth’s

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face,

or see the first motion towards it, the first seeking for a suitable style, as in Keats’

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

Far from the fiery noon and eve’s one star,

but also though less often, a sudden leaping out of the thing itself,—

Solitary thinkings such as dodge

Conception to the very bourne of heaven,

or

The journey homeward to habitual self.

These lines of Keats are Shakespearian in their quality, they have recovered the direct revealing word and intimate image of the full intuitive manner, but they enter into a world of thought and inner truth other than Shakespeare’s; by the passage through the detaching intellect and beyond it they have got to the borders of the realm of another and greater self than the life-self, though there we include and take up life into the deeper self-vision. In the Victorian poets we get occasionally the same tendency in a stronger but less happy force; for it is weighted down by an increased intellectuality, in Browning by the robust strenuousness of the analytic intelligence, in Tennyson by the tendency to mere trimming of expression or glitter and wealth of artistic colour; but we have its voice sometimes, as in this line of the Lotos-Eaters,—

Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

But it has not yet arrived, it is still seeking for itself, beating fitfully at the gates of the greater intuitive vision and expression.

But in more recent work it is precisely the recovery of this supreme power of speech on that loftier and subtler level which to one who comes freshly to this poetry breaks out with a sense of satisfying surprise and discovery. It is not complete; it is not everywhere; it is only just rising from the acquired basis of the previous heights of expression to its own realm; but it is there in a comparative abundance and it is the highest strain of its intensities. We find it in Meredith; when he writes of “Colour, the soul’s bridegroom,” he has got the intimate revealing image of this fuller and higher intuitive manner, or in his lark’s

silver chain of sound

Of many links without a break:

when he writes, again,

Nor know they joy of sight

Who deem the wave of rapt desire must be

Its wrecking and last issue of delight,

he has got the perfected turn of the direct intuitive word of thought in its more crowded manner of suggestion,— the kinship in the last line to the Shakespearian manner is close,— as too its more clear and limpid speech in other turns,

The song seraphically free

From taint of personality;

and in the lines,

Dead seasons quicken in one petal spot

Of colour unforgot,

he has it ready for an intuitive and vivid spiritual interpretation of Nature. We find it in Phillips’

Dreadful suspended business and vast life

Pausing,

or in his trees

Motionless in an ecstasy of rain.

In the Irish poets it comes with less of the Shakespearian kinship, though Yeats has often enough a different but corresponding manner, but most characteristically in a delicate and fine beauty of the word of vision and of an intuitive entrance into the mystery of things, as in lines like A. E.’s

Is thrilled by fires of hidden day

And haunted by all mystery,

or passages already quoted from Yeats, or, to give one other instance, his

When God goes by with white footfall.

This is a style and substance which recovers something that had been lost and yet is new and pregnant of new things in English literature.

It is sufficient at present to indicate this new power of language. But we must see whence it arises and to what possibility it points in the widening of the realms of poetic interpretation. It points to a greater thing than has yet been achieved and it is itself a higher achievement,— apart from all question of the force and genius of individual poets. Shakespeare is still — though need he be always? — immeasurably the largest name in English poetry; but still, however preeminent his genius, there remain greater things to be seen by the poet than Shakespeare saw and greater things to be said in poetry than Shakespeare said,— and here we have an indication of the way on which they lie and of the gates which open to their hiding-place and own home of light and self-revelation.