{"id":1294,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:54","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1294"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:54","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:54","slug":"19-the-poets-of-the-dawn-3-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/09-the-future-poetry-volume-09\/19-the-poets-of-the-dawn-3-vol-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","title":{"rendered":"-19_The Poets of the Dawn \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 3.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n

\nC<\/font>HAPTER<\/font>
\n<\/span>XVIII<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n The Poets of the Dawn \u2013 3<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font><\/span>I<\/font>F WORDWORTH<\/font> and Byron failed by an
\nexcess of the alloy of untransmuted intellect in their work, two other poets of
\nthe time, Blake and Coleridge, miss the highest greatness they might otherwise have
\nattained by an opposite defect, by want of the gravity and enduring substance
\nwhich force of thought gives to the poetical inspiration. They are, Coleridge
\nin his scanty best work, Blake almost always, strong in sight, but are unable
\nto command the weight and power in the utterance which arises from the thinking
\nmind when it is illumined and able to lay hold on and express the reality
\nbehind the idea. They have the faculty of revelatory sense in a high degree,
\nbut little of the revelatory thought which should go with it; or, at least,
\nthough they can suggest this sometimes with the intense force which comes from
\nspiritual feeling, they cannot command it and constantly give it greatness and
\ndistinctness of body. And their sight is only of the middle kind; it is not the
\nhighest things they see, but only those of a borderland or middle region. Their
\npoetry has a strange and unique quality and charm, but it stops short of
\nsomething which would have made it supreme. They are poets of the supernatural
\nand of such spiritual truth as may be shadowed by it or penet5rate through it,
\nbut not of the greatest truths of the spirit. And this supernature remains in
\nthem a thing seen indeed and objectively real, but abnormal; but it is only
\nwhen supernature becomes normal to the inner experience that it can be turned
\ninto material of the very greatest poetry.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Coleridge more than any of his great
\ncontemporaries missed his poetic crown; he has only found and left to us three
\nor four scattered jewels of a strange and singular beauty. The rest of his work
\nis a failure. There is a disparateness in his gifts, an inconsequence and
\nincoherence which prevented him from bringing them together, aiding one with
\nthe other and producing great
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 123<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

work
\nrich in all the elements of his genius. Intellectuality he had in abundance, a
\nwide, rich and subtle intellect, but he squandered rather than used it in
\ndiscursive metaphysics and criticism and was most at home when pouring it out
\nin the spontaneity of conversation or rather monologue, an outlet in which the
\nlabour of giving it the firmness of an enduring form could be avoided. The poet
\nin him never took into himself the thinker. The consequence is that very much
\nthe greater part of his poetry, though his whole production is small enough in
\nbulk, is unconvincing in the extreme. It has at best a certain eloquence or a
\nturn of phrase and image which has some intellectual finish, but not either
\nforce or magic, or a fluidity of movement which fails to hold the ear. But
\nthere are three poems of his which are unique in English poetry, written in
\nmoments when the too active intellect was in abeyance, an occult eye of dream
\nand vision opened to supraphysical worlds and by a singular felicity the other
\nsense harmonized, the speech caught strange subtleties and coloured lucidities
\nof speech and the ear the melodies of other realms. It is indeed only just over
\nthe mystic border that his sight penetrates and to its most inferior forms, and
\nhe does not enter into these worlds as did Blake, but catches only their light
\nand influence upon the earth life; but it is caught with a truth and intensity
\nwhich makes magical the scenes and movements of the earth life and transforms
\nlight of physical nature into light of supernature. This is to say that for the
\nfirst time, except for rare intimations, the middle worlds and their beings
\nhave been seen and described within something of reality and no longer in the
\ncrude colours of vulgar tradition or in the forms of myth. The Celtic genius of
\nsecond sight has begun to make its way into poetry. It is by these poems that
\nhe lives, though he has also two or three others of a more human charm and
\ngrace; but here Coleridge shows within narrow limits a superlative power and
\nbrings in a new element and opens a new field in the realms of poetic vision.\n<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Blake lives ordinarily far up in
\nthis middle world of which Coleridge only catches some glimpses or at most
\nstands occasionally just over its border. His seeing teems with its images, he
\nhears around him the echoes of its sounds and voices. He is not only a seer,
\nbut almost an inhabitant of other planes and
\n\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 124<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

other
\nworlds; or, at least, this second subtle sight is his normal sight. But his
\npower of expression is not equal to his power of vision. When he would catch
\nthe very words and express the very images of these middle realms, he speaks
\nvery often things which are unintelligible symbols to any other intelligence
\nthan his own. He is unable to translate his experience to our comprehension,.
\nIt is only when he casts into some echo of the language of the luminous
\nchildren of those shores the songs of their childhood and their innocence, that
\nhe becomes limpid to us and sheds upon our earth some clear charm, felicity,
\nwonder of a half divine other-where. Here, again, we have something unique, a
\nvoice of things which had not been heard before nor has it been heard since;
\nfor the Celtic poets who sometimes give us something that is in its source
\nakin, bring a ripe reflective knowledge and a colour of intellectuality into
\ntheir speech and vision, but Blake seeks to put away from him as much as
\npossible the intellectual mind, to see only and sing. By this effort and his
\nsingularity and absorption he stands apart solitary and remote and produces
\nonly a half effect because he has cut away the link which would help us to
\nreach him and share his illumination.<\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>A greater poet by nature than almost
\nany of these Shelley was alone of them all very nearly fitted to be a sovereign
\nvoice of the new spiritual force that was at the moment attempting to break
\ninto poetry and possess there its kingdom. He has on the one hand, one feels,
\nbeen a native of the heights to which he aspires and the memory of them, not
\nindeed quite distinct, but still environing his imagination with its luminous
\nethereality, is yet with him. If the idea of a being not of our soil fallen
\ninto the material life and still remembering his skies can be admitted as an
\nactual fact of human birth, then Shelley was certainly a living example of one
\nof these luminous spirits half obscured by earth; the very stumblings of his
\nlife cam from the difficulty of such a nature moving in the alien terrestrial
\nenvironment in which he is not at home nor capable of accepting its muddy
\nvesture and iron chain, attempting impatiently to realize there the lay of his
\nown being in spire of the obstruction of the physical clay. This mind and
\nnature cannot live at ease in their dusk day and time, but escape to dwell
\nprophetically in future heaven and
\n\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 125<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

earth
\nin which the lower life shall have accepted then law of his own celestial
\nworlds. As a poet his intellect is suffused and his imagination is bathed with
\na higher law, another order of existences, another meaning behind Nature and
\nterrestrial things. But in addition he possesses the intellectual equipment
\npossible in his age and can speak with a subtle beauty and perfect melody the
\ntongue of the poetic intelligence. He is a seer of spiritual realities, much
\nmore radiantly near to them than Wordsworth, has, what Coleridge had not, a
\npoetic grasp of metaphysical truths, can see the forms and hear the voices of
\nhigher elemental spirits and natural godheads than those seen and heard by
\nBlake, while he has a knowledge too of some fields of the same middle realm, is
\nthe singer of a greater and deeper liberty and a purer and nobler revolt than
\nByron, has the constant feeling of a high spiritual and intellectual beauty not
\nsensuous in the manner of Keats, but with a hold on the subtler beauty of
\nsensible things which gives us not their glow of vital warmth and close
\nmaterial texture, but their light and life and the rarer atmosphere that
\nenvirons them on some meeting line between spirit and body. He is at once seer,
\npoet, thinker, prophet, artist. In his own day and after, the strangeness of
\nhis genius made him unintelligible to the rather gross and mundane intellectual
\nmind of the nineteenth century; those who admired him most, were seized only by
\nthe externalities of his work, its music, delicacy, diffusely lavish
\nimaginative opulence, enthusiasm, but missed its inner significance. Now that
\nwe are going more into the shape of his ideas and the forms of his seeing, we
\ncan get nearer to the hidden heart of his poetry. A Still high pinnacled as is
\nhis flight, great as is his work and his name, there is in him too a limitation
\nwhich prevents the perfect self-expression that we find only in the few supreme
\npoets.<\/p>\n

This was due to the conditions under which
\nthe evolution of his poetry had to take place and to the early death which
\nfound him at the time when it was rounding towards the full orb of its
\nmaturity. His earlier poetry shows him striving with the difficulty of the too
\nintellectual manner of speech from which these poets of supra-intellectual
\ntruth had to take their departure. Shelley uses language throughout as a poet;
\nhe was incapable of falling
\n\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 126<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

into
\nthe too had and outward manner of Byron or yielding to the turn towards mere
\nintellectuality which always beset Wordsworth. The grain of his mind was too saturated
\nwith the hues of poetic vision, he had too splendid and opulent an imagination,
\ntoo great a gift of flowing and yet uplifted and inspired speech for such
\ndescents, and even in his earlier immature poetry, Queen Mab, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam<\/i>, these powers are there
\nand sustain him, but still the first form of his diction is a high, sometimes a
\nmagnificent poetic eloquence, which sometimes enforces the effect of what he
\nhas to say, but more often loses it in a flood of diffuse and over-abundant expression.
\nIt is not yet the native language of his spirit. As his power develops, the
\neloquence remains, but is subdued to the growing splendour of his vision and
\nits hints and images, but the thought seems almost to disappear from the
\nconcrete grasp of the intelligence into a wonder of light and a music of
\nmarvelous sound. The Prometheus<\/i> and
\n\tEpipsychidion<\/i> show this turn of his
\ngenius at its higher; they are two of the three greatest things he has left to
\nus on the larger scale. Here he does come near to something like the natural
\nspeech of his strange, beautiful and ethereal spirit; but the one thing that is
\nwanting is a more ascetic force of tapasyā
\n\t<\/i>economising and compressing its powers to bring in a new, full and seizing
\nexpression of the thought element in his poetry, not merely opulent and
\neloquent or bright with the rainbow hues of imagination, but sovereign in
\npoetic perfection and mastery. Towards this need his later style is turning,
\nbut except once in Adonais<\/i> he does
\nnot seize on the right subject matter\u00a0
\n<\/span>for his genius.\u00a0 <\/span>Only in the lyric
\nof which he has always the secret, \u2014for of all English poets he has perhaps the
\nmost natural, spontaneous, sweet and unfailing gift of melody, and his emotion
\nand lyrical cry are at once of the most delicate and the most intense, \u2014is he
\nfrequently and constantly equal alike in his thought, feeling, imagery, music.
\nBut it is not often that he uses the pure lyrical form for his greatest sight,
\nfor what would now be called his \u201cmessage\u201d. When he turns to that, he attempts
\nalways a large and more expansive form. The greatness of
\n\tPrometheus Unbound<\/i> which remains, when all is said, his supreme
\neffort and one of the masterpieces of poetry, arises from the combination of
\nthis larger <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 127<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

endeavour
\nand profounder substance with the constant use of the lyrical mould in which he
\nmost excelled, because it agreed with the most intimate turn of his temperament
\nand subtly exalted spirit. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>The spiritual truth which had
\npossession of Shelley\u2019s mind was higher than anything opened to the vision of
\nany of his contemporaries, and its power and reality which was the essence of
\nhis inspiration can only be grasped, when it is known and lived, by a changed
\nand future humanity. Light, Love, Liberty are the three godheads in whose presence
\nhis pure and radiant spirit lived; but a celestial light, a celestial love, a
\ncelestial liberty. To bring them down to earth without their losing their
\ncelestial luster and hue is his passionate endeavour, but his wings constantly
\nbuoy him upward and cannot beat strongly in an earthlier atmosphere. The effort
\nand the unconquered difficulty are the cause of the ethereality, the want of
\nfirm earthly reality that some complain of in his poetry. There is an air of
\nluminous mist surrounding his intellectual presentation of his meaning which
\nshows the truths he sees as things to which the mortal eye cannot easily pierce
\nor the life and temperament of earth rise to realise and live; yet to bring
\nabout the union of the mortal and the immortal, the terrestrial and the
\ncelestial is always his passion. He is himself too much at war with his age to
\nignore its contradictions and pass onwards to the reconciliation. He has to
\ndeny God in order to affirm the Divine, and his denial brings in a note too
\nhigh, discordant and shrill, He has not the symbols or the thought-forms
\nthrough which he can make the spirit of light, love and freedom intimate and
\nnear to men; he has, as in the Prometheus<\/i>,
\nto go for them to his imagination or to some remote luminous experience of idea
\nworlds and to combine these beautiful ideal images, too delicately profound in
\ntheir significance, too veiled in robe upon robe of light to light to be
\ndistinct in limb and form, with traditional names and symbols which are
\nconverted into this other sense and fail to be perfect links because by the
\nconversion they cease to be familiar to the mind. To bring his difficult
\nsignificance home he lavishes inexhaustibly image on radiant image, line on
\ndazzling beauty of line, the sense floats in a storm of coruscations and
\ndissolving star-showers; the more we look and accustom our
\n\t <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 128<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

eyes
\nto this new kind of light, the more loveliness and light we see, but there is
\nnot that immediate seizing and taking captive of the whole intelligence which
\nis the sign of an assured and sufficient utterance. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>He is in revolt too against the lay
\nof earth, in arms against its dominations and powers, and would substitute for
\nit by some immediate and magical change the law of heaven; but so he fails to
\nmake the needed transition and reconciliation and his image of the thing to be
\nremains too ideal, too fine and abstract in spite of the beauty of the poetical
\nforms he gives it as its raiment or atmosphere. Heaven cannot descend to take
\npossession of the gross, brute and violent earth he sees around him, therefore
\nhe carries up the delivered earthy into a far and ideal heaven. Something of
\nthe same excess of another light than ours surrounds and veils his intercourse
\nwith the spirit in Nature. He sees her earthly forms in a peculiar radiance and
\nlight and through them the forms and spirits of his ideal world. He has not
\nWordsworth\u2019s distinctness and intimate spiritual communion with Nature as she
\nis on earth; the genii of the worlds of dream and sleep cluster too thickly round
\nall that his waking eye seizes. He tries to let them in through the force of
\ncrowding images, brilliant tossings aside of the lucent curtain,
\ntiraskarani<\/i>, which\u00a0 <\/span>veils them from us: but they remain
\nhalf-hidden in their means of revelation. The earth-nature is seen in the light
\nof another nature more than in its own, and that too is only half visible in
\nthe mixed luminosity, \u201cburning through the vest that hides it.\u201d Tradition
\ngoverns very largely his choice of rhythms, but wonderfully melodious as is his
\nuse or conversion of them to the mould of his spirit, one feels that he would
\nhave done better to seek more often for self-formed movements. Shelley is the
\nbright archangel of this dawn and he becomes greater to us as the light he
\nforesaw and lived in returns and grows, but he sings half concealed in the too
\ndense halo of his own ethereal beauty. <\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>As with Wordsworth and Byron, so too
\nwe find Shelley and Keats, standing side by side, but with a certain antinomy.
\nThey are perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English
\ntongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth
\ntowards Olympus. Keats is the first <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 129<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

entire
\nartist in word and rhythm in English poetry, \u2014not grandiose, classical and
\nderived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new
\nera. His astonishing early performance leaves us wondering what might have been
\nthe masterpieces of his prime, of which even
\n\tHyperion<\/i> and the Odes are only the unfulfilled promise. His death
\nin the beginning of his powers is the greatest loss ever suffered by human
\nachievement in this field.\u00a0 <\/span>Alone of all
\nthe chief poets of his time he is in possession of a perfect or almost
\nperfected instrument of his native temperament and genius, but he had not yet
\nfound the thing he had to say, not yet seen what he was striving to see. All
\nthe other high things that interested his great equals, had for him no
\ninterest; one godhead only he worshipped, the image of divine Beauty, and
\nthrough this alone he wished to see Truth and by her to achieve spiritual
\ndelight and not so much freedom as completeness. And he saw her in three of her
\nfour forms, sensuous beauty, imaginative beauty, intellectual and ideal beauty.
\nBut it is the first only which he had entirely expressed when his thread was
\ncut short in its beginning; the second he had carried far, but it was not yet
\nfull-orbed; towards the third and highest he was only striving, \u201cto
\nphilosophise he dared not yet\u201d, but it was forum the first the real sense and
\ngoal of his genius.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>On life he had like the others \u2014
\nByron alone excepted \u2014 no hold; such work as
\n\tLamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.Agnes<\/i>, in which he followed the
\nromantic tendency of the time, was not his own deeper self-expression; they are
\nwonderful richly woven robes of sound and word and image curiously worked and
\nbrocaded, but they clothe nothing. The Odes, where fulfillment of imaginative
\nbeauty rises out of a higher sensuous seeking and satisfaction to an admirable
\nsweetness, fullness, largeness and opulence and admits intimations of the ideal
\ngoddess, are almost all of them among the scanty number of the chief
\nmasterpieces in this high and deliberate lyrical form. But the real soul of
\nKeats, his inner genius, the thing he was striving to bring out of himself is
\nnot to be altogether found even here; it lay in that attempt which, first
\nfailing in Endymion, was again resumed in Hyperion. It was the discovery of the
\ndivine Idea, Power and living norm of Beauty which by its breath of delight has
\ncreated
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 130<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

the
\nuniverse, supports it and moves towards a greater perfection, inspires the
\nharmonies of inward sight and outward form, years and strives towards the
\nfullness of its own self-discovery by love and delight. Not yet in possession
\nof his idea, he tries to find and to figure it in
\n\tEndymion<\/i> by sensuous images of a rich and dim moonlit dream with a
\nsort of allegory or weft of symbols behind the words and thoughts, but his hand
\nis still inexpert and fails in the execution. In
\n\tHyperion<\/i> the idea is clearer and in bolder relief, but it is
\nmisconceived under a too intellectual, external and conventionally epic
\nMiltonic influence, and in his second version he turns not quite happily to a
\nrenewal of the form of his first attempt. He has found a clue in thought and
\nimagination, but not quite its realization in the spiritual idea, has already
\nits imaginative, sensuous, something of its intellectual suggestion, but not
\nyet what the spirit in him is trying to reveal, its mystically intellectual,
\nmystically sensuous, mystically imaginative vision, form and word. The
\nintimation of it in his work, his growing endeavour to find it and the
\nunfulfilled promise of its discovery and unique fullness of expression are the
\ninnermost Keats and by it he belongs in spirit to these prophetic, but
\nhalf-foiled singers of the dawn. He lives more than any other poet in the very
\ntemple of Beauty, traverses its sculptured and frescoed courts with a mind hued
\nand shaped to her forms and colours and prepares, but is never permitted, to
\nenter the innermost sanctuary. The time had not yet come when these spiritual
\nsignificances could be more than hinted. Therefore Keats and Shelley were taken
\nbefore their powers could fully expand, Byron led far out of the path, Blake
\nobscured in his own remoteness, Coleridge and Wordsworth drawn away to lose the
\npoet and seer in the mere intellectual mind. All wandered round their centre of
\ninspiration, missed something needed and stopped or were stopped short. Another
\nage had to arrive which worshipped other and lesser godheads. <\/p>\n

\nPage – 131<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER XVIII  The Poets of the Dawn \u2013 3   \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 IF WORDWORTH and Byron failed by an excess of the alloy of untransmuted intellect…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-09-the-future-poetry-volume-09","wpcat-29-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}