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 Examples of Twentieth-Century Poetry

W. B. Yeats

Dectora:

No. Take this sword

And cut the rope, for I go on with Forgael....

The sword is in the rope —

The rope’s in two — it falls into the sea,

It whirls into the foam. O ancient worm,

Dragon that loved the world and held us to it,

You are broken, you are broken. The world drifts away,

And I am left alone with my beloved,

Who cannot put me from his sight for ever.

We are alone for ever, and I laugh,

Forgael, because you cannot put me from you.

The mist has covered the heavens, and you and I

Shall be alone for ever. We two — this crown —

I half remember. It has been in my dreams.

Bend lower, O king, that I may crown you with it.

O flower of the branch, O bird among the leaves,

O silver fish that my two hands have taken

Out of the running stream, O morning star,

Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn

Upon the misty border of the wood,

Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair,

For we will gaze upon this world no longer.

Forgael [gathering Dectora’s hair about him]:

Beloved, having dragged the net about us,

And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal;

And that old harp awakens of itself

To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams,

That have had dreams for father, live in us.

Forgael might be the Yogin in the act of the irrevocable and immediately effectual renunciation of a life in the world and entering into his kingdom, having found and been accepted by the individual divine within him.

It is certainly a very beautiful passage and has obviously a mystic significance; but I don’t know whether we can put into it such precise meaning as you suggest. Yeats’ contact, unlike A.E.’s, is not so much with the sheer spiritual Truth as with the hidden intermediate regions, from the faery worlds to certain worlds of larger mind and life. What he has seen there, he is able to clothe rather than embody in strangely beautiful and suggestive forms, dreams and symbols. I have read some of his poems which touch these behind-worlds with as much actuality as an ordinary poet would achieve in dealing with physical life — this is not surprising in a Celtic poet, for the race has the key to the occult worlds or some of them at least — but this strange force of suggestive mystic life is not accompanied by a mental precision which would enable us to say, it is this or that his figures symbolise. If we could say it, it might take away something of that glowing air in which his symbols stand out with such a strange unphysical reality. The perception, feeling, sight of Yeats in this kind of poetry are remarkable, but his mental conception often veils itself in a shimmering light — it has then shining vistas but no strong contours.

1 September 1932