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 the Work of Poets of the Ashram

Arjava (J. A. Chadwick) [4]

Your scansion of the poem The Valley of the Fleece is on the whole correct, I think, although in one or two places — especially the two you select — there might be a difference of opinion. But it seems to me the classical short long is not a sufficient notation for the intricate stress + quantity system of the English rhythm. There are several syllable values intermediate between the long and the short and these count very much in the management of a line or a series of lines. Much of the subtler effects in the beauty of rhythm of an English poem is due to a skilful though often not quite intellectually conscious handling of these intermediate values — it is often in the hands of a born harmonist more an instinctive or an inspired than a deliberately purposeful skill. But for a conscious handling I should like to see a system of weightage (to take a word from current politics) allowed for syllables that are not pure longs and shorts or are not used as such in the line. One could possibly invent three additional signs  ,  ,  , the first for longer, the second for shorter intermediates, the third for pure shorts weighted by a meeting of several consonants after them. To give some examples from your poem — rockrose and wheel a(loft), present two different cases, both trochees, equal in metrical, but not equal in rhythmic value. Again sandmartin has the same metrical but a different rhythmical value from back to the (day-break); the second is a pure dactyl, the first I would call an impure, mixed or weighted dactyl. Again eastern marked by you as a trochee, I would almost mark as a spondee — certainly even, if I had to use it in one of my hexameters; but we can compromise the difference by marking it in my proposed notation as an impure or weighted trochee. The most striking example however is in the line,

Watching day’s | goblet | quaffed, |

so marked by me, not to complicate too much, but it could also be notated:

Watching day’s | goblet | quaffed. |

Here most people would take the first foot as a dactyl and I did so myself when I read it, assuming it to be identical in metrical, though not in rhythmic value with the preceding line. But your scansion also is defensible and legitimate; it depends upon the intonation one gives to the line. For that is another (very useful and valuable) complication of English rhythm, the part intonation plays in varying lines with an identical metre or even modifying the metre. All these differences (and the multiple possibilities that go with them) arise from the play of the language with these weighted syllables which can be made long or short according to the distribution of the voice — this foot being at will a dactyl or anapaest but a very impure dactyl or a very impure anapaest. I don’t know if I have made myself clear,— perhaps more examples would be needed to justify my system,— but I lay stress on it because I have found the recognition of these weighted syllables and their importance for rhythmic variation, an indispensable aid (not the notation but the mental feeling of them) in evolving in my later (unpublished) poetry a new distinct individuality in blank verse and the very possibility of a successful English hexameter. It is their non-recognition and the clumsy use or misuse of weighted dactyls and false spondees that seems to me to have been at the root of the failure to evolve a sound English hexameter; all that has been achieved is a make-believe or a clumsy makeshift.

To return to your poems — I may say that The Valley is a very remarkable poem from the rhythmical point of view, quite apart from the exact scansion one gives to it, by the free and always felicitous use of the many elements of variation possible in the language, metrical variation, intonation, weightage, with others more unnameable and subtle. I find that in lyrical poems your inner ear which determines these things, seems to be — at least has been in the poems you have yet written — most felicitously infallible. It is only in the less lyrical metres that you have a less inborn gift and made mistakes at the beginning. Even if you do not find models, I imagine that this inner ear in you will find its way if you go on experimenting under its guidance.

Incidentally, I quite approve of your first suggestion about “a dream-la|den wind.” I have often thought, why not make some more liberal use of classical feet like the cretic, dochmiac combination etc. (I have tried to do so occasionally to vary my latest type of blank verse.) Here to speak of the first foot as a spondee is to force things a little. To treat it as a dochmiac movement at once puts it on the true footing — or so it seems to me.

I have written nothing about the other poem yet, because I was perplexed a little by the choice between two systems of scansion. In the old style metrics it would be:

Red la|dybird, | black la|dybird,

Ladybird | sable a nd | gold,

Lowly you | swing, | flutter yo ur | wing,

And | fare to the | fete o n the | wold.

Yours is more new and in consonance with the modern way of looking at lyrical movement. But whichever way you take it, the melody is exquisite — and the language and substance also.

17 December 1931