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. J. Turner

The Word made Flesh?

How often does a man need to see a woman?

Once!

Once is enough, but a second time will confirm if it be she,

She who will be a fountain of everlasting mystery,

Whose glance escaping hither and thither

Returns to him who troubles her....

No light travelling through space-time immeasurable

Has leapt so great a distance as their eyes;

Naked together their spirits commingling

Stir the seed in their genitals —

Like a babe never to be born that leaps up crying,

A voice crying in the wilderness....

The head of Satan is curled

Close, crisp, like the Gorgon;

They are the serpents of the spirit

Curled like the hair of the chaste body,

Emblem of the God who is not creative,

Who has not made the heavens and the earth,

Nor from an Adam of dust

Took that white bone, woman....

This it is to be excluded from the bliss

Of the angels of God,

And of the men and women that He made in His image;

The joy of making images in the image of his maker is not his,

But his are the children of the spirit:

Sweeter and fairer are they than the children of the flesh,

But they are born solitary

And agony is their making-kiss.

Is there any justification for my impression that this was a ghost of the nineties (the meretricious “diabolism”, cult of the bizarre etc.) that had gone to a Fancy Dress Ball in the clothes of 1934? There seemed to be a certain slickness in achieving the fashionable formula of today — and of course the inevitable sop to the anti-Victorian Cerberus, the introduction of something to offend the conventions of last century.

But I did not feel any inevitability behind it all. Some “modern” verse is perverse but powerful; these lines seemed just built up by an adroit mind that knows how to tickle the modern fancy.

I think your criticism is very much to the point. The writer is a very clever manipulator of words, but he is dressing up an idea so as to catch the surface mind — there is no sincerity and therefore no power or conviction or poetical suggestion. Such made-up stuff as

The head of Satan is curled

and the rest of it has no real significance and is therefore rhetorical, not poetic. The rest is no better — there is no single line that carries conviction, not an image or a phrase or a movement of rhythm that is inevitable.

There is room for sex poetry if it is felt as truth and rendered either with beauty or power, but this crude braggadocio of the flesh is not telling nor attractive. The diabolism and cult of the bizarre in the nineties had a certain meaning,— it was at least a revolt against false conventions and an attempt to escape from the furbished obviousness of much that had gone before. But now it has itself become the obvious and conventional — not it exactly in its old form but the things it attempted to release and these are now trying to escape from their own obviousness by excess, the grotesque, the perverse. The writer brings in or brings back Satan (for whom there is no longer any need) to give, I suppose, a diabolical thrill to that excess — but, as poetry at least, it is not successful. Satan and sexual realism (e.g. the “spirit stirring the genitals”) do not match together.

1934