The Inspiration and Art of John
Chadwick by Amal Kiran (KD Sethna)
(from Inspiration and Effort: Studies
in Literary Attitude and Expression)
[In his copy of Arjava’s Poems, Amal Kiran has pasted as
frontispiece the pencil impression of Arjava made by himself, Amal Kiran. He is
shown clad in dhoti and a buttoned-up shortish kurta, with a walking stick in
his hand. He is well-groomed, has a pointed nose and a pointed chin. In this
copy of his Amal has, importantly, copied Sri Aurobindo’s comments on the poems.
Amal writes about Arjava’s poetry as follows: “As we might expect of a mind
trained to careful intellectuality, Chadwick—or Arjava, as he came to be known
from the name Arjavananda (meaning "Joy of straightforwardness")
given him by Sri Aurobindo—did not achieve closeness to the Ideal through a
lavish spontaneity whose very breath is song. A deliberate self-critical
compact perfection belonged to him. Instead of taking the Kingdom of Heaven by
a stormy frontal assault, he laid slow siege to it and won its treasures by
patient compulsion—a victory no less complete though differing in plan and
technique. Here too is a superb energy of imagination expended not so much in a
royal diffusion as in concentrated exquisiteness or magnificence. We feel, to
quote the poet's own words from a sonnet, "a chaos-ending
chisel-smite" in each work—a faultless statue emerges in which every line
and curve has been traced by an inspired precision…” This is one of the deepest
studies on the Ovehead poetry that has come after Sri Aurobindo and it must
prove immensely helpful in our critical appreciation as well as creative
effort.—RYD]
The most famous work of the prominent
philosophical writer, CD Broad, Mind and its
Place in Nature, is inscribed to JA Chadwik. Although this inscription is
enough to hint to us the esteem in which, even as a young man, that student of
philosophy and Mathematical Logic was held, we can never guess from it that it
deserves an essay which might well be entitled Chadwick and His Place in the World. For it is not as a philosopher
or mathematical logician that he has become significant, nor was it at
As we might expect of a mind trained to careful intellectuality, Chadwick—or
Arjava, as he came to be known from the name Arjavananda (meaning "Joy of
straightforwardness") given him by Sri Aurobindo—did not achieve closeness
to the Ideal through a lavish spontaneity whose very breath is song. A
deliberate self-critical compact perfection belonged to him. Instead of taking
the Kingdom of Heaven by a stormy frontal assault, he laid slow siege to it and
won its treasures by patient compulsion—a victory no less complete though
differing in plan and technique.
Here too is a superb energy of imagination expended not so much in a royal
diffusion as in concentrated exquisiteness or magnificence. We feel, to quote
the poet's own words from a sonnet, "a chaos-ending chisel-smite" in
each work—a faultless statue emerges in which every line and curve has been traced
by an inspired precision. Naturally, the result is less prolific—a volume of
merely 327 short poems with 2 playlets in verse, published soon after their
author's untimely death in 1939—but a greater stress is brought to bear upon
the understanding, a stress which produces a peculiar intensity of rapture
packed with haloed mysteries, so to speak—unfamiliar twilights, symbolic
enchantments, hieratic seclusions—and yet no narrowness in the ultimate
revelation made: the sole difficulty lies in turning the key which throws the
esoteric doors wide open into expanse on shining expanse of heights and depths.
It is an art which may be a little baffling at first, but for those who can
absorb its strange atmosphere there awaits a reward often of a beauty which takes
one's breath away by its magic spell or by its grave amplitudes of
spirituality. The style is highly original with unexpected turns that are
vividly forceful and a power of pregnant construction armed with a genius for
rhythmical innovation is everywhere manifest—as in that finely as well as
incisively imaged poem called Communication:
Ebbing and waning of joy, the day estranged:
Here, petalled evening droops;
Below sky-rim the petals have drifted—all is changed
To a dim listless stalk where Twilight stoops
Horizonward; and then
The black scorpion, Night, lifts claws of loneliness and
loops
The zenith and all the sky
(Its venomed blackness is in the life-blood of men).
...O then, love-armed cry,
Bring with compulsive dream the moon's foreglow
Over the difficult edge
Of being, that eastward-strainig hopes may know
Lit pearl of untarryng pledge,—
Counsel, and laughter, and undissembling eyes.
Time-tameless thought shall dredge
Wide welcome for the glimpsed sail of moonrise,
The ship of understanding and conjoined wills,
The keel of trust from far-off friendly skies.
Remarkable as this poem is, with
its subtle variations of tempo and appositely manipulated expressive drive
which promise a capacity for effective blank verse if ever the poet were to be
inspired in that direction, Chadwick's most majestic work seems to be those
flights where bursts upon the gaze an imaginative colour widening every moment
into some "objective correlative" of high philosophy charged with the
profoundest spiritual illumination. A striking instance is Moksha:
As one who saunters on the seabanks in a wilderness of day
Is dazzled by the sunshot marge and rippling counterchange
Of wavebeams and an eagerhood of quivering wings that
range—
Grey on the sky's rim,—white on the foam-pathway,—
Each man is wildered myriadly by outsight and surface tone
Engirdling soul with clamour, by this fragmentary mood,
This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude
Of Truth's abidingness, Self-Blissful and Alone.
But when eastward-streaming shadows bring the hush of
eventide
The wave-lapped sun can wield again his glory of
hencegoing
And furnish by his lowlihead vast dreams of heaven-knowing—
A golden wave-way to the One where Beauty's archetypes
abide.
One can see how deftly the fourteener
can be modulated by a hand conscious of the possibility it offers of many
internal tones—swirl and stream and surge playing significant roles within the
cumulative dignity of the whole movement. The two alexandrines in the above
quotation are very suggestive also—the fourth line with its truncated firts
foot and its inverted accent in the fourth produces by the resultant emphasis
on "grey" and "white" just the changeful bewildering effect
which is sought to be conveyed by the sense of the stanza; while the eighth
line, marking a contrast to the three longer ones preceding it, is eloquent of
the self-compactness and isolation attributed therein to Truth. In a similar
way the comparative lengthening out of the finale seems to indicate the
triumphant roll of the meaning like a lustrous billow towards some immutable
mystery beyond the mind's horizon. All the three stanzas are consummately
inspired art, and no greater praise is possible than that the middle—particularly
in its second half—might well be one of the supreme moments of the Upanishads,
a Mantra.
The large and lofty utterance met with in the major Upanishads, carrying with
it an echo of some rhythm infinitely vibrating out of a stupendous Unknowable,
is indeed a rara avis in the
atmosphere of the English language. Hardly any recent poet of the
If we wish to find among English-writing poets a match to that pair of lines
ending with the full yet far-away gong of the word "alone" we shall
have to pick out from Wordsworth his noblest music. Curiously enough the verses
that equal them are just the two that also end with the same word's long
rounded o and belly-like consonance—the lines on Newton's face in the bust at
Cambridge:
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
And here it may be significant to
mention that the terminal "alone" is not confined to Wordsworth's and
Chadwick's Upanishadic pictures. It seems to have some innate affinity with the
peak utterance of the Spirit, for it crowns too one of Sri Aurobindo's own
poetic masterpieces, a passage visioning the very state hinted by Chadwick:
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
To continue with Chadwick: he is
not only a spiritual poet but an occult one. And in his occult sensibility too
he strikes a new note. His Unicorn—
Unicorn uncreated,
Time may grow tired, not you!
For changes of rhythm are dated
By the clang of your topaz shoe—
and his
Tranquil the phoenix-poise of golden-crested,
fleece-white and sorrowless
head of the undefeated vision who had nested
where on Time's moments looms the Everlivingness—
are neither of them merely
traditional figures; they are a fresh contribution to symbolic sight. The white
Unicorn with is single pointed projection on the head seems to be a symbol of
purity and of faithfulness to a spiritual purpose, while the golden yellow of
the topaz is emblematic of some spiritual principle behind manifested life in
the recurrences as well as the variations of Time's movement. The
Symbolic sight again, blending now the outer scene with an inner
occult-spiritual lucidity of shape and significance, casts its spell on us in
that short piece called Unveering Light:
Across unmoving lake
A mirror-theme
Of swans with white wings take
Their endless dream.
Poise-perfect is the set
Of lunar-bright
Pinions of trance where silence met
Unveering light.
The swan is an old symbol of the
human soul as a representative of the immaculate Eternal, but here it is given
a specially revelatory attitude. The compound adjective
"lunar-bright" immediately refers our imagination from the embodied
soul to some Beyond of sheer Bliss. And the relationship indicated between the
bird and the lake suggests a unison between the soul and environing nature.
Here is a double reception of the transcendent beauty and purity—the soul
realising its divine origin not only by an in-look towards the heavenly height
but also by an outlook upon the natural elements amongst which it lives with
the ideal of progressively manifesting the supreme light in the changeful
character of earth's limited existence. That existence is here glimpsed in a
transformed moment of tranquillity and made one in substance as it were with
the soul's vision of its own enraptured being—and the whole double identity is
caught by the poet's eye in a tranced inner dimension where the perfection that
is to be accomplished in Time waits full-formed in an immutable Nunc Stans, an ever-standing
Now of Eternity.
In the pure occult also, as distinguished from the spiritual or the
spiritual-occult—the pure occult of the mid-worlds behind us where a whole vast
life of subjective-objective motifs, beautiful or bewildering, fantastic or formidable,
proceeds on its way, pulling various strings of our own psychology—there too
Chadwick captures a new note. Sri Aurobindo has contrasted Walter de la Mare's Listners with Chadwick's Totalitarian, not as a disclosure of the
spiritual with that of the occult but rather as the occult's superficial
glimpse with its profound sight. De la Mare's is a poem of fanciful
hauntedness, enveloping earthly objects with a faint ghostly atmosphere—Chadwick's
carries a direct focussing of realities clean beyond earth, a vivid vision
powerfully evocative of the sheer occult. Not only do the actions described
have entirely different gestures: the very sceneries differ though apparently
similar.
Take de la Mare's
...the faint moonbeams on the dark stair
That goes down to the empty hall
And
...the dark turf 'neath the starred and leafy sky.
Delicately imitative, this, of an
occult landscape, but how stark and realistic a projection of some
"terrible elsewhere" are Chadwick's
...the empty eerie courtyard
With no name
Or
...a crescent moon swung wanly
White as curd.
And, as the poems proceed, de la
Mare goes on increasing his exquisite ghostliness with strange movements whose
meaning is elusive, while Chadwick presses home to a weirdly dynamic symbol of
a soul-attitude struck by the human in accord with some drama of hell's tyranny
and murderous monotony. Here is de la Mare's ending:
Never the least stir made the listners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward
When the plunging hoofs were gone—
and this is the way Chadwick
recounts how his "traveller", feeling frantic after having flashed
his single sword-blade in a night where none resisted,
Hurled his weapon through the gloaming
Took no aim;
Saw his likenesses around him
Do the same:
Viewed a thousand swordless figures
Like his own—
Then first knew in that cold starlight
Hell, alone.
De la Mare's poetry is undeniably
fine in a daintily phantasmal vein, but it is ever so far from Chadwick's
dreadful revelation of an occult depth reaching its climax with the gripping
resonance once more of that predicative epithet about whose poetic
suggestiveness we have already remarked.
Perhaps something of this kind of dreadful revelation dealing with the soul's
own recesses is to be found in a few verses of that eccentric little genius
Emily Dickinson, where she emphasises the individual's solitary confrontation
of himself in some spectral profundity of consciousness. She lacks Chadwick's
direct occult sight and consummate symbolic art, but she has an occult feel by
means of an inward-straining thought and a terse elliptic style adding to the
psychological eeriness:
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Far safer of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than in interior confronting
That whiter host.
Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones a-chase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place...
Even when a scene of external
earth-nature is clearly recognisable, Chadwick always throws a visionary hue
upon it, calling up immediately a soul-reality: as in that atmospheric snatch,
half Yeatsian half de la Maresque—
Drowsy pinions whitely winging
Smoulder dimly past the strand—
or in those lines that end with a
most sensitive vibration from the depths of the Godward-turned psyche—
...the eve
Has limned a trance upon the air,
A swirl of sunset on the stream,
An ecstasy of quivering bells that seem
Born from the heart of prayer.
But Chadwick is not only
depth-suggestive; he has many moments that burst upon us with amplitude and
power. Instead of a sensitive psychic vibration, indirect in its description of
the physical stars twinkling as though tinkling, he can look straight at the
constellated firmament and give us an in-feeling of it in a line where the
entirely monosyllabic pentameter with its various dispositions of similar or
dissimilar vowels and consonants and with its meaningful massings of stress
makes a most effective conjuration:
You stars that span with strength long leagues of space.
Or else, with less direct power but
equally direct communication of a vast experience-value, we have the same
starry phenomenon:
To gaze and gaze upon the fire-strewn sky
Until the hush of heaven loom within.
Here there is a breath of what Sri
Aurobindo has called "overhead" rhythm. This rhythm, winging down as
if from some boundlessness above the brain-clamped mind, tends in Chadwick to
touch at times the very summit. And the Upanishadic magnificence of a poetic
gesture like the following apostrophe to the transcendent divine Force which he
visions as drawing the quintessence of a triple Absolute of Being,
Consciousness, Delight, and reigning from on high over the mental plane like a
Sun-kingdom of Knowledge, is, like those verses about Truth's solitude that is
perfectly withdrawn from the mind's "fragmentary mood", the most
memorable of Chadwick's poetic victories:
Unsullied wisdom of gold which was thrice refined,
Shine in the clear space of holy
noon
On all the upland hollows of the mind:
May every shadow-harbouring thought be strewn
With solar vastness and compelled
To feel all fear and all self-limits quelled.
Of course, the fact that a poet
seizes or at least neighbours the Mantra does not mean that he is so filled
with a supreme spirituality that he can never drop to a lower level of
utterance. Neither must we expect all his speech on that level to be one tissue
of originality. In Chadwick we may trace, except when he is at his best,
certain general influences from poets preceding or contemporary. The
Nature-poems, startlingly fresh though they are as a whole, share in details
the vocabulary of Edmund Blunden's inspired pastoralism enamoured of the
English countryside. The magic vision within many verses casts our mind back to
Yeats's Celticism and here and there is a drift of dreamy fancifulness not very
far removed from de la Mare. Even on some occasion the colouring shows a touch
of the minutely marking as well as luxurious painter eye of the young Tennyson,
and not infrequently the phrasing bears an aspect of traditional poeticism from
Spencer down to William Watson, which especially the rebellious modernist ear
may dub wearying. In a semi-modernist manner we get at a few moments an
affinity to Gerard Manley Hopkins. But if we look deeper and hear more intently
we realise that in the echo-semblances themselves a novel genius runs to create
a general pattern of mind which is sheer Chadwick and that an artistic flair
lends by vigorous compactness or airy suggestiveness originality even of
language to the ensemble and makes almost every stanza if not every line
sparkle in at least one place with pure dew on whatever petals may have grown
from the past or have reflected contemporary burgeonings. This should restrain
the critic from pronouncing anything to be stale or even merely traditional.
Further, we must remember that Chadwick is not confined to old forms of verse.
He is perfectly aware of recent tendencies and can exploit the possibilities of
new forms without losing the true poetic quality. Thus he has several
experiments in free verse, each an artistic success, and at times he not only
works out the substance revelatorily in faultless language and rhythm but also
brings super depth and energy:
A green-grey twilight hush in the ageless forest,
After the immense canopy of boughs
Has strained all glare and vivid colours from the
sunlight.
Plinths of tree and stems of giant creeper rise up from
the floor of dimness
To the full height of these grey spaces
In a cathedral calm.
A plashy thud of some hard-rinded fruit
Ripples momently the tapestries of hush.
The greyness and the quiet are over all, a many-fathomed
covering of ocean mystery.
The turbulence of harsh atomic being,
Those hard and garish colours of the upper day
Are no more;
And only a faint dissolving line, a bubble's membrane
holds
Frontiers of existence and not-being.
We may apply to this the remarks
made by Sri Aurobindo about another splendid performance in free verse:
"Its rhythmic achievement solves entirely the problem of free verse. The
object of free verse is to find a rhythm in which one can dispense with rhyme
and the limitations of a fixed metre and yet have a poetic rhythm, not either a
flat or an elevated prose rhythm cut up into lengths. I think this poem shows
how it can be done. There is a true poetic rhythm, even a metrical beat, but
without any fixity, pliant and varying with the curve or sweep of the thought
and carrying admirably its perfect poetic expression." We may also note
here, in passing, the phrases: "a plashy thud" and " a bubble's
membrane." They do not sound quite poetic in the old style of
verse-writing. But they are entirely in place not merely in free verse but also
in the type of work turned out by Chadwick in all forms, and they constantly
mix a sort of modernism with his usual avoidance of the modernist degradation
of poetry. They are intrinsic to his aim, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out at the
very commencement of Chadwick's poetic career when an objection was raised by a
reader to the use of the phrase: "bobbing globelets". Sri Aurobindo
wrote: "I entirely dispute the legitimacy of the comment. It is based on a
conventional objection to undignified and therefore presumably unpoetic words
and images—an objection which has value only when the effect is uncouth or
trivial, but cannot be accepted otherwise as a valid rule. Obviously, it might
be difficult to bring in 'bobbing' in an epic or other high style, although I
suppose Milton would have managed it and one remembers the famous controversy
about Hugo's 'mouchoir'. But in poetry of a mystic (occult or spiritual) kind
this does not count. The aim is to bring up a vivid suggestion of the thing
seen and some significance of the form, movement etc. through which one can get
at the life behind and its meaning; the adjective here serves its purpose very
well as a touch in the picture and no other could have been as true and living
or given so well the precise movement needed."
Modern-sounding or traditional-seeming, Chadwick's artistic technique is nearly
always flawless, and it is original by more than a living sense of word-value
and rhythm-value reinforcing thought and vision: there is the originality of
the thought and the vision themselves. And this originality is of a rare order
by being mysticism which is not merely intellectual or emotional but comes of a
genuine intuitive hold on hidden domains. Even when the symbols chosen are hold
ones, verging on the well-worn, he can transmute everything into a masterpiece.
Who has not heard of the shell that brings from its whorl the long boom of
breakers? And has not Swinburne familiarised us to easy enthusiasms like
"the sea, my mother", and "my mother the sea"? But take now
Chadwick's:
Out of an infinite ocean
Time arose;
By his shore with a thunderous motion
That Splendour flows.
Here is one shell of its bringing,
Cast on the beach;
Hold it and hark to the singing,—
Eternity speech.
Flotsam and jetsam of Onehood
Unbaffled and free,
Spurring Time to remember his sonhood,
His mother—the Sea.
With masterful ease the whole depth
of the poetic significance of sea-born land and stray sea-cast shell is plumbed
and a power of mystical sight creates a little marvel of profound word and
rhythm out of what may seem almost nursery-rhyme properties. In view of this
power, whether exercised with striking novelty or within a known symbology,
Chadwick's art in even its most traditional appearance must be distinguished as
a new element at play in poetic literature, a pioneering triumph of one kind in
what Sri Aurobindo has designated as "Future Poetry". And this
triumph which springs from a heart of spiritual feeling attuned to an inmost
Presence never so permanent and piercing in any English poet and approached in
intensity by perhaps none else than Shelley and AE, is not a matter of a few
isolated poems. In piece after piece that Presence makes Chadwick an expert
discloser of mystical soundscapes. We should hardly exaggerate in saying that
it leads his poetry to overtop in sustained quality the production of all his
English contemporaries and to hold a promise of gratness rendering his
premature death a tragedy whose true significance can be adequately uttered
only by a fineness of word comparable to his own, whether the fineness
quickens, the imagination by a sober felicity as in
Boles of strength with that whisper of blessing,
or by a rhapsodical beauty as in
Lustrously pale like the starlight when the air has been
washed by the rain,
or with a happy audacity as in
Gleam and bend cloud-centaurs from afar
Moon-bow that is aiming, silver taut,
Arrows made of silence at a star,
or with a vividly strange
suggestiveness—
Only a moon-pale ledge of rock,
Lapped by that sullen waste
Of Limbo-drift where a shadowy flock
Of dream-birds spaced
In the unquiet wideness of their lonelihood
Are as that sky-line aimlessly
empty of good—
or with an exceedingly exquisite
"moon-prompted" aspiration—
Power and immaculate Glory
Whom outward eyes may greet—
In this hour might the inward quicken,
Cloudlessly meet
Mother and Beauty Divine—
or with an august intuitiveness
coupled with an inmost poignancy, setting Shiva before us—
Aimless yet knowing each goal,—
As unfrontiered Space
Moves not at all,
But centres in each place
One instant effortless control;
Or as the pity finds Thy face
When on Thy shrine the tears and bel-leaves fall,
or with profound ingenuity of
"counterchanged" sense-perceptions spiritualised—
Timid
clamour-pomps we see
Whose mingled sound
Leave naked yet the limbs of earthly faring:
While all around
The undraped silences go Selfward, wearing
Form's ecstasy—
or with a powerful insight
symbolling the seer-trance by a "rock-hewn cavern" open to unrealised
piritual possibilities—
So sleep the strong and keep their guarded peace,
Whilst gracious dreams from aisles of future Time
Lean past the bars of Being, whisper their secret word,
Yearn to be made rock...Inlapidate Sublime—
or with a fusion of almost all the
varieties exemplified above of poetic imaged speech in a grand attitude of
keenly felt self-dedication to the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo:
Precarious boat that brought me to this strand
Shall feed flame-pinnacles from stem to stern,
Till not one rib my backward glance can find—
Down to the very keelson they shall burn.
Now to the unreal sea-line I would no more yearn;
Fain to touch with feet an unimagined land...
The gates of false glamour have closed behind;
There is no return.