{"id":2527,"date":"2013-07-13T01:42:13","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2527"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:42:13","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:42:13","slug":"16-english-poetic-forms-vol-27-letters-on-poetry-and-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/27-letters-on-poetry-and-art\/16-english-poetic-forms-vol-27-letters-on-poetry-and-art","title":{"rendered":"-16_English Poetic Forms.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t <\/p>\n


\n\t\t\tEnglish Poetic Forms<\/font> <\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n


\n\tThe Sonnet ―Regular and Irregular Rhyme Schemes <\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nThe two regular sonnet rhyme-sequences are (1) the Shakespearean ab ab cd cd ef
\nef gg ―that is three quatrains with alternate rhymes with a closing couplet and
\n(2) the Miltonic with an octet abba abba (as in your second and third quatrains)
\nand a sestet of three rhymes arranged according to choice. The Shakespearean is
\ncloser to the natural lyric rhythm, the Miltonic to the ode movement ―i.e.
\nsomething large and grave. The Miltonic is very difficult for it needs either a
\nstrong armoured structure of the thought or a carefully developed unity of the
\nbuilding which all poets can’t manage. However there have been attempts at an
\nirregular sonnet rhyme-sequence. Keats tried his hand at one a century ago and I
\nvaguely believe (but that may be only an illusion of Maya) that modern poets
\nhave played loose fantastic tricks of their own invention; but I don’t have much
\nfirst-hand knowledge of modern (contemporary) poetry. Anyhow I have myself
\nwritten a series of sonnets with the most heterodox rhyme arrangements, so I
\ncouldn’t very well go for you when you did the same. One who has committed many
\nmurders can’t very well rate another for having done a few. All the same, this
\nsequence is rather rather ―a Miltonic octet with a Shakespearean close would be
\nmore possible; I think I have done something of the kind with not too bad an
\neffect, but I have no time to consult my poetry file and am not sure. In the
\nsonnet too it might be well for you to do the regular thing first, soberly and
\nwell, and afterwards when you are sure of your steps, frisk and dance. <\/p>\n


\n22 February 1936<\/font>   <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-157<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n

Sonnet and Satire <\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

In a sonnet thought should be set to thought, line added to line in a sort of
\narchitectural sequence, or else there should be a progression like the pressing
\nof waves to the shore, with the finality of arrival swift in a closing couplet
\nor deliberate as in the Miltonic form. <\/p>\n

\nAs to your other proposition, I am not sure that satiric verse and the
\nmetaphysical lyrical can rightly be put together. Naturally, a great poetic
\ngenius could or might do it with success; but genius can do anything. Satire is
\nmore often than not a kind of half-poetry, because its inspiration comes
\nprimarily from the critical mind and a not very high part of it, not from the
\ncreative vision or a moved intensity of poetic feeling. Creative vision or the
\nmoved intensity can come in to lift this motive but, except rarely, it does not
\nlift it very high. <\/p>\n

\n\tIt is Dryden and Juvenal who have oftenest made some thing like genuine
\n\tpoetry out of satire, the first because he often changes satire into a
\n\tvision of character and the play of psychological forces, the other because
\n\the writes not from a sense of the incongruous but from an emotion, from a
\n\tstrong poetic "indignation" against the things he sees around him.
\n\tAristophanes is a comic creator ―like Shakespeare when he turns in that
\n\tdirection ―the satiric is only a strong line in his creation; that is a
\n\tdifferent kind of inspiration, not the ordinary satire. Pope attempted
\n\tsomething creative in his Rape of the Lock<\/i>, but the success, if
\n\tbrilliant, is thin because the deeper creative founts and the kindlier
\n\tsources of vision are not there. <\/p>\n


\n\t27 April 1931<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nThe Ode <\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nA successful ode must be a perfect architectural design and Keats’ Odes are
\namong the best, if not the best in English poetry, as I think they are, at any
\nrate from the point of view of artistic creation, because of the perfect way in
\nwhich the central thought is developed and each part related to the whole like
\nthe design of the masses in a perfect building ―each taking its inevitable place
\n <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-158<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tin the whole. In yours the ideas, words, images flow like your
\n\t\t\t"Ocean" with a certain fluent grandeur of diction and richness of
\n\t\t\tcolour, but there is not any inevitable beginning, middle,
\n\t\t\tconnections and end. An ode in that respect should be like a sonnet
\n\t\t\tthough on a bigger scale and with a different principle of structure
\n\t\t\t―but it must be, like the sonnet, a perfect structure. <\/p>\n


\n\t4 March 1935<\/font> <\/p>\n


\n\t\t\tThe Ballad<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

\nI have not much taste for the English ballad form; it is generally either too
\nflat or too loud and artificial and its basic stuff is a strenuous popular
\nobviousness that needs a very rare genius to transform it. <\/p>\n


\n\t20 November 1932<\/font> <\/p>\n


\n\t\t\tPoem and Song<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

\nNo, a song is not a kind of poem ―or, at least, it need not be. There are some
\nvery good songs which are not poems at all. In Europe, song-writers as such or
\nthe writers of the librettos of the great operas are not classed among poets. In
\nAsia the attempt to combine song-quality with poetic value has been more common;
\nin ancient Greece also lyric poetry was often composed with a view to being set
\nto music. But still poetry and song-writing, though they can be combined, are
\ntwo different arts, because the aim and the principle of their building is not
\nthe same. <\/p>\n

\nThe difference is not that poetry has to be understood and music or singing has
\nto be felt (anubhū<\/font>ti<\/i>); that one has
\nto reach the soul through the precise written sense and the other through the
\nsuggestion of sound and its appeal to some inner chord within us. If you only
\nunderstand the intellectual content of a poem, its words and ideas, you have not
\nreally appreciated the poem at all, and a poem which contains only that and
\nnothing else, is not true poetry. A true poem contains something more which has
\nto be felt just as you feel music, and that is its more important and essential
\npart. Poetry has a rhythm, just as music has, though of a different kind, and it
\nis the rhythm that helps this  <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-159<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n

something else to come out through the medium of the words. The words by
\nthemselves do not carry it or cannot bring it out altogether, and this is shown
\nby the fact that the same words written in a different order and without rhythm
\nor without the proper rhythm would not at all move or impress you in the same
\nway. This something else is an inner content or suggestion, a soul-feeling or
\nsoul-experience, a life-feeling or life-experience, a mental emotion, vision or
\nexperience (not merely an idea), and it is only when you can catch this and
\nreproduce some vibration of the experience ―if not the experience itself ―in you
\nthat you have got what the poem can give you, not otherwise. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe real difference between a poem and a song is that a song is written with
\n\ta view to be set to musical rhythm and a poem is written with the ear
\n\tlistening for the needed poetic rhythm or word-music. These two rhythms are
\n\tquite different. That is why a poem cannot be set to music unless it has
\n\teither been written with an eye to both kinds of rhythm or else happens to
\n\thave (without especially intending it) a movement which makes it easy or at
\n\tleast possible to set it to music. This happens often with lyrical poetry,
\n\tless often with other kinds. There is also this usual character of a song
\n\tthat it is satisfied to be very simple in its content, just bringing out an
\n\tidea or feeling, and leaving it to the music to develop its unspoken values.
\n\tStill this reticence is not always observed; the word claims for itself
\n\tsometimes a larger importance. <\/p>\n


\n\t4 July 1931<\/font> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n*<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nNo, a song need not have a less intricate metre than a poem; and if it appears
\nusually more simple in its rhythmical turns, yet in that apparent simplicity a
\nconsiderable, though very delicate subtlety is possible. A certain liquidity <\/i>
\nof sound is essential, but so long as you keep that, you can play variations to
\na great extent. I don’t think an identical regularity or unbroken recurrence is
\nimperative ―though equivalence of sound values may be. It is a matter of the
\ninner ear and its guidance rather than of any exact external measurements
\n―especially in the English language, which is too free and plastic for the
\ntheories which   <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-160<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nare sometimes imposed upon its movements. The theories don’t matter much,
\nbecause the language contrives to go its own way even while pretending to
\nconform to the theories. I don’t know what models to propose to you ―old style
\nEnglish practice was too regular for the freer spirit of the modern lyric and my
\nreading in contemporary poetry has been too fragmentary and unsystematic for me
\nto remember the right models, though they must be there. <\/p>\n

\n\t17 December 1931 <\/p>\n

\n  <\/p>\n

\n *<\/p>\n

\n  <\/p>\n

\nAbout French or German songs I know nothing ―but as for the English, except for
\na few like Cardinal Newman’s hymn "Lead, kindly Light" they don’t exist so far
\nas I know, ―I mean of course as regards their contents, manner, style. I believe
\nin European music the words are of a very minor importance, they matter only as
\ngoing with the music. But I am not an expert on the subject, so I can’t go
\nfarther into it. When religious songs were written in mediaeval Latin, they were
\nvery fine, but with the use of the modern languages the art was lost ―the modern
\nEuropean hymnals are awful stuff. <\/p>\n

\n13 May 1936 <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nNursery Rhymes and Folk Songs <\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nThe question you have put, as you put it, can admit of only one answer. I cannot
\nagree that nursery rhymes or folk songs are entitled to take an important place
\nor any place at all in the history of the prosody of the English language or
\nthat one should start the study of English metre by a careful examination of the
\nrhythm of "Humpty Dumpty", "Mary, Mary, quite contrary" or the tale of the old
\nwoman in a shoe. There are many queer theories abroad nowadays in all the arts,
\nbut I doubt whether any English or French critic or prosodist would go so far as
\nto dub "Who killed Cock Robin?" the true movement of English rhythm, putting
\naside Chaucer, Spenser, Pope or Shelley as too cultivated and accomplished or
\ntoo much under foreign influence or to seek for his models in popular songs or
\nthe products of the cafe chantant <\/i>in preference to Hugo or Musset or
\nVerlaine.   <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-161<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n

\nBut perhaps something else is meant ―is it that one gets the crude indispensable
\nelements of metre better from primitive just shaped or unshaped stuff than from
\nmore perfect work in which these are overlaid by artistic developments and
\nsubtle devices ― an embryo or a skeleton is more instructive for the study of
\nmen than the developed flesh-and-blood structure? That may have a certain truth
\nin some lines of scientific research, but it cannot stand in studying the
\ntechnique of an art. At that rate one could be asked to go for the basic
\nprinciples of musical sound to the jazz or even to the hurdy-gurdy and for the
\nindispensable rules of line and colour to the pavement artist or to the
\nsignboard painter. Or perhaps the suggestion is that here one gets the primary
\nunsophisticated rhythms native to the language and free from the artificial
\nmovements of mere literature. Still, I hardly fancy that the true native spirit
\nor bent of English metre is to be sought or can be discovered in <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\tHumpty Dumpty sat on a wall, <\/p>\n

\n\tHumpty Dumpty had a great fall <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nand is lost in <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n\tRarely, rarely, comest thou, <\/p>\n

\nSpirit of Delight. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

\nPopular verse catches the child ear or the common ear much more easily than the
\nmusic of developed poetry because it relies on a crude jingle or infantile lilt
\n―not because it enshrines in its movement the true native spirit of the tongue.
\nI hold it to be a fallacy to think that the real spirit and native movement of a
\nlanguage can be caught only in crude or primitive forms and that it is disguised
\nin the more perfect work in which it has developed its own possibilities to
\ntheir full pitch, variety and scope. It is as if one maintained that the true
\nnote and fundamental nature of the evolving soul were to be sought in the
\nearthworm or the scarabaeus and not in the developed human being ―or in the
\ndivinised man or Jivanmukta. <\/p>\n

\n\tAs for foreign influences, most of the elements of English prosody, rhyme,
\n\tfoot-scansion, line lengths, stanza forms and   <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-162<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nmany others have come in from outside and have altered out of all recognition
\nthe original mould, but the spirit of the language has found itself as much in
\nthese developments as in the first free alliterative verse ―as much and more.
\nThe spirit of a language ought to be strong enough to assimilate any amount of
\nimported elements or changes of structure and measure. <\/p>\n


\n\t23 February 1933<\/font>   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage-163<\/font><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

English Poetic Forms   The Sonnet ―Regular and Irregular Rhyme Schemes   The two regular sonnet rhyme-sequences are (1) the Shakespearean ab ab cd cd…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-27-letters-on-poetry-and-art","wpcat-51-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527","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=2527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}