Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)

Shakespeare [4]

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

The meaning, on the surface, is that for each of us life will pass away as if it were a dream and what will remain is the sleep of death, an undetailed everlasting rest.... But from the fourth line onward the language and the rhythm serve to evoke by a certain large and deep suggestiveness an intuition of some transcendental God-self ... We are reminded of the Upanishad’s description of the mystic trance in which the whole world fades like an illusion and the individual soul enters the supreme Spirit’s unfeatured ecstasy of repose. Shakespeare’s intuition is not pure Upanishad, the supreme Spirit is not clearly felt and whatever profundity is there is vague and unintentional; still, a looming mystic light does appear, stay a little, find a suggestive contour before receding and falling away to a music sublimely defunctive.

I don’t think Shakespeare had any such idea in his mind. What he is dwelling on is the insubstantiality of the world and of human existence. “We are such stuff” does not point to any God-self. “Dream” and “sleep” would properly imply Somebody who dreams and sleeps, but the two words are merely metaphors. Shakespeare was not an intellectual or philosophic thinker nor a mystic one. All that you can say is that there comes out here an impression or intimation of the illusion of Maya, the dream-character of life but without any vision or intuition of what is behind the dream and the illusion. There is nothing in the passage that even hints vaguely the sense of something abiding — all is insubstantial, “into air, into thin air”, “baseless fabric”, “insubstantial pageant”, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on”. “Stuff” points to some inert material rather than a spirit dreamer or sleeper. Of course one can always read things into it for one’s own pleasure, but —

8 March 1935