Science, Culture and Integral Yoga :: Prose and Poetry: The Essence of Poetry. Sri Aurobindo

We may usefully cast a glance, not at the last inexpressible secret, but at the first elements of this heightening and intensity peculiar to poetic utterance. Ordinary speech uses language mostly for a limited practical utility of communication; it uses it for life and for the expression of ideas and feelings necessary or useful to life. In doing so, we treat words as conventional signs for ideas with nothing but a perfunctory attention to their natural force, much as we use any kind of common machine or simple implement; we treat them as if, though useful for life, they were themselves without life. When we wish to put a more vital power into them, we have to lend it to them out of ourselves, by marked intonations of the voice, by the emotional force or vital energy we throw into the sound so as to infuse into the conventional word-sign something which is not inherent in itself. But if we go back earlier in the history of language and still more if we look into its origins, we shall, I think, find that it was not always so with human speech. Words had not only a real and vivid life of their own, but the speaker was more conscious of it than we can possibly be with our mechanised and sophisticated intellects. This arose from the primitive nature of language which, probably, in its first movement was not intended,—or shall we say, did not intend,—so much to stand for distinct ideas of the intelligence as for feelings, sensations, broad indefinite mental impressions with minute shades of quality in them which we do not now care to pursue. The intellectual sense in its precision must have been a secondary element which grew more dominant as language evolved along with the evolving intelligence.

For the reason why sound came to express fixed ideas, lies not in any natural and inherent equivalence between the sound and its intellectual sense, for there is none,—intellectually any sound might express any sense, if men were agreed on a conventional equivalence between them; it started from an indefinable quality or property in the sound to raise certain vibrations in the life-soul of the human creature, in his sensational, his emotional, his crude mental being. An example may indicate more clearly what I mean. The word wolf, the origin of which is no longer present to our minds, denotes to our intelligence a certain living object and that is all, the rest we have to do for ourselves: the Sanskrit word vr.ka, “tearer”, came in the end to do the same thing, but originally it expressed the sensational relation between the wolf and man which most affected the man’s life, and it did so by a certain quality in the sound which readily associated it with the sensation of tearing. This must have given early language a powerful life, a concrete vigour, in one direction a natural poetic force which it has lost, however greatly it has gained in precision, clarity, utility.

Now, poetry goes back in a way and recovers, though in another fashion, as much as it can of this original element. It does this partly by a stress on the image replacing the old sensational concreteness, partly by a greater attention to the suggestive force of the sound, its life, its power, the mental impression it carries. It associates this with the definitive thought value contributed by the intelligence and increases both by each other. In that way it succeeds at the same time in carrying up the power of speech to the direct expression of a higher reach of experience than the intellectual or vital. For it brings out not only the definitive intellectual value of the word, not only its power of emotion and sensation, its vital suggestion, but through and beyond these aids its soul-suggestion, its spirit. So poetry arrives at the indication of infinite meanings beyond the finite intellectual meaning the word carries. It expresses not only the life-soul of man as did the primitive word, not only the ideas of his intelligence for which speech now usually serves, but the experience, the vision, the ideas, as we may say, of the higher and wider soul in him. Making them real to our life-soul as well as present to our intellect, it opens to us by the word the doors of the Spirit. Prose style carries speech to a much higher power than its ordinary use, but it differs from poetry in not making this yet greater attempt. For it takes its stand firmly on the intellectual value of the word. It uses rhythms which ordinary speech neglects, and aims at a general fluid harmony of movement. It seeks to associate words agreeably and luminously so as at once to please and to clarify the intelligence. It strives after a more accurate, subtle, flexible and satisfying expression than the rough methods of ordinary speech care to compass. A higher adequacy of speech is its first object. Beyond this adequacy it may aim at a greater forcefulness and effectiveness by various devices of speech, by many rhetorical means for heightening the stress of its intellectual appeal. Passing beyond this first limit, this just or strong, but always restrained measure, it may admit a more emphatic rhythm, more directly and powerfully stimulate the emotion, appeal to a more vivid aesthetic sense. It may even make such a free or rich use of images as to suggest an outward approximation to the manner of poetry; but it employs them decoratively, as ornaments, ala ˙ nk¯ara, or for their effective value in giving a stronger intellectual vision of the thing or the thought it describes or defines; it does not use the image for that profounder and more living vision for which the poet is always seeking. And always it has its eye on its chief hearer and judge, the intelligence, and calls in other powers only as important aids to capture his suffrage. Reason and taste, two powers of the intelligence, are rightly the supreme gods of the prose stylist, while to the poet they are only minor deities.

If it goes beyond these limits, approaches in its measures a more striking rhythmic balance, uses images for sheer vision, opens itself to a mightier breath of speech, prose style passes beyond its normal province and approaches or even enters the confines of poetry. It becomes poetical prose or even poetry itself using the apparent forms of prose as a disguise or a loose apparel. A high or a fine adequacy, effectivity, intellectual illuminativeness and a carefully tempered aesthetic satisfaction are the natural and proper powers of its speech. But the privilege of the poet is to go beyond and discover that more intense illumination of speech, that inspired word and supreme inevitable utterance, in which there meets the unity of a divine rhythmic movement with a depth of sense and a power of infinite suggestion welling up directly from the fountain-heads of the spirit within us. He may not always or often find it, but to seek for it is the law or at least the highest trend of his utterance, and when he can not only find it, but cast into it some deeply revealed truth of the spirit itself, he utters the mantra.

But always, whether in the search or the finding, the whole style and rhythm of poetry are the expression and movement which come from us out of a certain spiritual excitement caused by a vision in the soul of which it is eager to deliver itself. The vision may be of anything in Nature or God or man or the life of creatures or the life of things; it may be a vision of force and action, or of sensible beauty, or of truth of thought, or of emotion and pleasure and pain, of this life or the life beyond. It is sufficient that it is the soul which sees and the eye, sense, heart and thought-mind become the passive instruments of the soul. Then we get the real, the high poetry. But ifwhat acts is too much an excitement of the intellect, the imagination, the emotions, the vital activities seeking rhythmical and forceful expression, without that greater spiritual excitement embracing them, or if all these are not sufficiently sunk into the soul, steeped in it, fused in it, and the expression does not come out purified and uplifted by a sort of spiritual transmutation, then we fall to lower levels of poetry and get work of a much more doubtful immortality. And when the appeal is altogether to the lower things in us, to the mere mind, we arrive outside the true domain of poetry; we approach the confines of prose or get prose itself masking in the apparent forms of poetry, and the work is distinguished from prose style only or mainly by its mechanical elements, a good verse form and perhaps a more compact, catching or energetic expression than the prose writer will ordinarily permit to the easier and looser balance of his speech. It will not have at all or not sufficiently the true essence of poetry.

For in all things that speech can express there are two elements, the outward or instrumental and the real or spiritual. In thought, for instance, there is the intellectual idea, that which the intelligence makes precise and definite to us, and the soul-idea, that which exceeds the intellectual and brings us into nearness or identity with the whole reality of the thing expressed. Equally in emotion, it is not the mere emotion itself the poet seeks, but the soul of emotion, that in it for the delight of which the soul in us and the world desires or accepts emotional experience. So too with the poetical sense of objects, the poet’s attempt to embody in his speech truth of life or truth of Nature. It is this greater truth and its delight and beauty for which he is seeking, beauty which is truth and truth beauty and therefore a joy for ever, because it brings us the delight of the soul in the discovery of its own deeper realities. This greater element the more timid and temperate speech of prose can sometimes shadow out to us, but the heightened and fearless style of poetry makes it close and living and the higher cadences of poetry carry in on their wings what the style by itself could not bring. This is the source of that intensity which is the stamp of poetical speech and of the poetical movement. It comes from the stress of the soul-vision behind the word; it is the spiritual excitement of a rhythmic voyage of self-discovery among the magic islands of form and name in these inner and outer worlds.

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Re: Prose and Poetry: The Essence of Poetry. Sri Aurobindo

by RY Deshpande on Wed 02 Jul 2008 04:39 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Hi Rich
It’s good you opened out this theme. In the following I’m making a quick selection of related aspects, with a thrust essentially from The Future Poetry.

~ RYD
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Saraswati the power of the Infinite Truth
In the Vedic literature, very often we get the reference to Vak (Word). So it will be no exaggeration on our part to hold that the aim of the Vedic spiritual discipline is to get the significant sound aspect of the truth. And for this the Vedic seers of truth are called the seers of mantras, the creators of mantras. Vak is the living image of truth. There lies a rhythm in the being of truth and the movement of this rhythm produces a note which was later on called nāda (the unsounded sound) or Shabda Brahman (the Brahman manifested as Sound). When the rhythm of this note is found in our intelligence and mind, it takes the form of a sentence and this very thing is called a true mantra. The more a language can express intimately and directly the primal form and rhythm of truth, the more the mantra becomes living. Therefore the aspirant who has acquired this mantra has also acquired truth and the power of truth. The Vedic seers have placed the name of truth in different categories, e.g., ŗk, stoma, uktha, brahman, etc. At the beginning of the present Sukta too, in the spiritual practice of truth gih, the vāk or name that reveals the truth clearly in the consciousness of the aspirant has been invoked with the help of the twin equestrians. Then with Indra's help the Brahman, that is to say, the true message of the inner Self was invoked. When man gets a purified mind and purified intelligence, he discovers the real Being within and another name of this Being is Brahmanaspati (the Lord of the inner Self). Finally comes in Saraswati who is the power of the Infinite Truth in which the multiple aspects of the truth of the universal God are manifest.
Nolini Kanta Gupta
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The Divine Word
This hymn, though the name Vak does not appear in it, is the most magnificent chant to this feminine principle, the Devi of the supreme power, which later on would be known under the name of Shakti. Vak was before all creation, preexisting before any being came to be. It was she who initiated the creative process. The first two stanzas require a total immersion into the Vedic world in order for their full meaning to be grasped. With a beauty of their own, they say in solemn cadences that the Word is not only the First of the whole Vedic pantheon, but that she has a unique place, for her nature is not to be compared with that of any other being, whether created or uncreated. The Word is not only an integral part of the sacrifice; she is also the Queen who commands homage in every sphere and who, expressing herself under different forms, remains essentially the unique Word that preserves the unity of all worship. Vak is the life-giving principle within all beings, even if they do not recognize this fact; she is the wind, the breath of life. She is the mother, attentive to the needs of both Gods and Men. She bestows her gifts and favors graciously and freely. She, existing from all eternity, reveals the Father and for the sake of creatures "begets” him who otherwise would remain utterly disconnected and nonexistent.
Raimondo Panikkar, The Vedic Experience
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Poetry and Mantra
More relevantly let us go by Nolini Kanta Gupta’s Poetry and Mantra:

What is poetry? It is delightful speech. There can hardly be any better definition of poetry than this. Admitting this fact I would like to say that the definition of the mantra is the Brahman manifested as sound. At both the places we see the glory and greatness of Vak Ispeech). But there is a subtle border-line. On one side Vak grows into the mantra, on the other Vak grows into poetry however beautiful and great it may be. The real thing is this: when Vak does not assert itself in the least, when it does not hanker after displaying its own skill, remains self-enamoured like a deer with the fragrance of its musk, having no other object than to possess inner delight, then only it amounts to a mantra. When Vak abounds in mere words, it simply comes down to the category of poetry.

But it is not that mantra means something solely dealing with spiritual disciplines or religious practices. Even the esperiences and realizations of this terrestrial world can reveal themselves through the mantras provided their fundamental truth is the truth of delight… here speech is not the dress or outer garb of an experience, but the realization of an inner delight… when the poet reaches the acme of perfection one feels as if the poet has disappeared…

From this point of view Milton and Virgil may be looked upon as mere poets. Those who consider Shakespeare, Homer and Valmiki superior to Milton, Virgil and Kalidasa come to such a conclusion from a subtler consideration. One group of poets makes use of Vaikhari Vak, while the other of Pashyanti Vak.

Seer as a poet and poet as a poet are different, because of their differences in speech. Vaikhari Vak is the word that stands in its own value and glory, maintains its own separate dignity and greatness, giving free scope to the inherent power of sound, voice and articulation. Hence the inner being, the true Being of Delight, does not always relish even the sweet noise—as Hamlet speaks out: it is all words, words, words…

Pashyanti Vak is the spontaneous voice, the soundless soundof this inner being; it is the truth-vision’s own lovely streak.

Pondering on these lines Nolini Gupta bemoans that in his own native Bengali poetry what dominates is the Vaikhari Vak with hardly anything of the Pashyanti Vak, even in poets like Rabindranath Tagore. But this is true in all modern poetic creations, Indian or Western, perhaps with just freaky chance utterances where the inner being is in a position to experience the true delight of creation with its rhythmic voice and power of imagination to bring the unimaginable into view and sense that leaps beyond the analytical-mental seizing thoughts that wander through endless eternity.
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Vision is the characteristic power of the poet—Sri Aurobindo
Poetry, like the kindred arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, appeals to the spirit of man through significant images, and it makes no essential difference that in this case the image is mental and verbal and not material. The essential power of the poetic word is to make us see, not to make us think or feel; thought and feeling must arise out of the sight or be included in it, but sight is the primary consequence and power of poetic speech. For the poet has to make us live in the soul and in the inner mind and heart what is ordinarily lived in the outer mind and the senses, and for that he must first make us see by the soul, in its light and with its deeper vision, what we ordinarily see in a more limited and halting fashion by the senses and the intelligence. He is, as the ancients knew, a seer and not merely a maker of rhymes, not merely a jongleur, rhapsodist or troubadour, and not merely a thinker in lines and stanzas. He sees beyond the sight of the surface mind and finds the revealing word, not merely the adequate and effective, but the illumined and illuminating, the inspired and inevitable word, which compels us to see also. To arrive at that word is the whole endeavour of poetic style.

The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement of her image, but an interpretation by the images she herself affords us, not on one but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal.

That intensity comes where everything else may be present, but all is powerfully carried on the surge of a spiritual vision which has found its inspired and inevitable speech. All or any of the other elements may be there, but they are at once subordinated and transfigured to their highest capacity for poetic light and rapture. This intensity belongs to no particular style, depends on no conceivable formula of diction. It may be the height of the decorative imaged style as often we find it in Kalidasa or Shakespeare; it may be that height of bare and direct expression where language seems to be used as a scarcely felt vaulting board for a leap into the infinite; it may be the packed intensity of language which uses either the bare or the imaged form at will, but fills every word with its utmost possible rhythmic and thought suggestion. But in itself it depends on none of these things; it is not a style, but poetic style itself, the Word; it creates and carries with it its elements rather than is created by them. Whatever its outward forms, it is always the one fit style for the Mantra.

Sight is the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and word images which become the expressive body of the vision. The great poets are those who repeat in some measure this ideal creation, kavayah. satya´srutah. , seers of the poetic truth and hearers of its word.

The words which we use in our speech seem to be, if we look only at their external formation, mere physical sounds which a device of the mind has made to represent certain objects and ideas and perceptions,—a machinery nervous perhaps in origin, but developed for a constantly ﬁner and more intricate use by the growing intelligence; but if we look at them in their inmost psychological and not solely at their more external aspect, we shall see that what constitutes speech and gives it its life and appeal and signiﬁcance is a subtle conscious force which informs and is the soul of the body of sound: it is a superconscient Nature-Force raising its material out of our subconscience but growingly conscious in its operations in the human mind that develops itself in one fundamental way and yet variously in language. It is this Force, this Shakti to which the old Vedic thinkers gave the name of Vak, the goddess of creative Speech, and the Tantric psychists supposed that this Power acts in us through different subtle nervous centres on higher and higher levels of its force and that thus the word has a graduation of its expressive powers of truth and vision. One may accept as a clue of great utility this idea of different degrees of the force of speech, each separately characteristic and distinguishable, and recognise one of the grades of the Tantric classiﬁcation, Pashyanti the seeing word, as the description of that degree of power to which the poetic mind is called to elevate itself and which is original and native to its manner of expression. The degree of word-force characteristic of prose speech avails ordinarily to distinguish and state things to the conceptual intelligence; the word of the poet sees and presents in its body and image to a subtle visual perception in the mind awakened by an inner rhythmic audition truth of soul and thought experience and truth of sense and life, the spiritual and living actuality of idea and object. The prosaist may bring to his aid more or less of the seeing power, the poet dilute his vision with intellectual observation and statement, but the fundamental difference remains that ordinary speech proceeds from and appeals to the conceiving intelligence while it is the seeing mind that is the master of poetic utterance. (The Future Poetry)

Pashyanti is evidently speech with the vision of Truth in it—Para is probably the revelatory and inspired speech. I am not certain about the exact nature of the others [Vaikhari and Madhyama]. The Tantriks locate these forms of speech in different chakras. Speech may be internal or external, either may have the stamp of the same power. But if it is to be measured by withdrawal from externality, then Para ought to mean something of the causal realm beyond mind.

Speech comes from the throat centre, but it is associated with whatever is the governing centre or level of the consciousness—wherever one thinks from. If one rises above the head, then thought takes place above the head and one can speak from there, that is to say, the direction of the speech is from there. (Letters on Yoga, p. 374)

Re: Re: Prose and Poetry: The Essence of Poetry. Sri Aurobindo

by Rich on Wed 02 Jul 2008 06:40 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Savitri I/I

An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change.
As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the universe,
An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.
Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.
Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
An eye of deity peered through the dumb deeps;
A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun,
It seemed amid a heavy cosmic rest,
The torpor of a sick and weary world,
To seek for a spirit sole and desolate
Too fallen to recollect forgotten bliss.
Intervening in a mindless universe,
Its message crept through the reluctant hush
Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy

A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun?

Vak?

And, conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
A sense was born within the darkness' depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time

the quiver of the trace (arche-writing)?

Re: Re: Prose and Poetry: The Essence of Poetry. Sri Aurobindo

by Vikas on Mon 07 Jul 2008 10:12 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Nice extracts from Nolini and Sri Aurobindo.