On Himself

Grades of Poetic Style - Some Examples

Q: You have distinguished five kinds of poetic style—the adequate, the effective, the illumined, the inspired, the inevitable. In what kind are the following lines from my "Ne plus ultra"?—

Is the keen voice of tuneful ecstasy
To be denied its winged omnipotence,
Its ancient kinship to immensity
    And the swift suns?

A: This seems to me the effective style at a high pitch.

Q: Or take these lines—from your early "Urvasie":

But plunged o'er difficult gorge and prone ravine

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And rivers thundering between dim walls,
Driven by immense desire, until he came
To dreadful silence of the peaks and trod
Regions as vast and lonely as his love.

A: This is also high-pitch effective except the last line which is in the inspired style—perhaps!

23-9-1934

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Q: Some more lines to classify, the close of a sonnet by me—the sestet following the last four words of the octave:

        For I have viewed,
Astir within my clay's engulfing sleep,
An alien astonishment of light!
Let me be merged with its unsoundable deep
And mirror in futile farness the full height
Of a heaven barred for ever to my distress,
Rather than hoard life's happy littleness!

A: This is indeed an example of the effective style at its best, that is to say rising to something of illumination, especially in the second, fourth and sixth lines.

16-9-1934

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Q: Will you please comment on this new sonnet of mine, "Mystic Mother"?

Seeing you walk our little ways, they wonder
That I who scorn the common loves of life
Should kneel to You in absolute surrender,
Deeming Your visible perfection wife
Unto my spirit's immortality.
They think I have changed one weakness for another,
Because they mark not the new birth of me—

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This body which by You, the Mystic Mother,

Has now become a child of my vast soul!
Loving Your feet's earth-visitation, I
Find each heart-throb miraculously flower
Out of the unplumbable God-mystery
Behind dark clay; and, hour by dreamful hour,
Upbear that fragrance like an aureole.

A: Exceedingly good. Here you have got to inevitability. I forgot to say that all the styles "adequate", "effective" etc. can be raised to inevitability in their own line. The octet here is adequateness raised to inevitability except the fourth and fifth lines in which the effective undergoes the same transformation. In the sestet on the other hand it is the illumined style that becomes inevitable.

17-9-1934

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Q: Would you describe the following poem of mine as "coin of the fancy"? What is the peculiarity of poetic effect, if any, here?

NIGHT

No more the press and play of light release
Thrilling bird-news between high columned trees.
Upon the earth a blank of slumber drops:
Only cicadas toil in grassy shops—
But all their labours seem to cry "Peace, peace."
Nought travels down the roadway save the breeze;
And though beyond our gloom—throb after throb—
Gathers the great heart of a silver mob,
There is no haste in heaven, no frailty mars
The very quiet business of the stars.

A: It is very successful—the last two lines are very fine and the rest have their perfection. I should call it a mixture of inspiration

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and cleverness—or perhaps ingenious discovery would be a better phrase. I am referring to such images as "thrilling bird-news", "grassy shops", "silver mob". Essentially they are conceits but saved by the note of inspiration running through the poem—while in the last line the conceit "quiet business" is lifted beyond itself and out of conceitedness by the higher tone at which the inspiration arrives there.

20-8-1936

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Q: I feel my poem "The Triumph of Dante" has now been sufficiently quintessenced. If it satisfies you, will you make whatever analysis is possible of its inspirational qualities?

These arms, stretched through ten hollow years, have brought her
Back to my heart! A light, a hush immense
Falls suddenly upon my voice of tears,
Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears
The shining touch of that omnipotence.
Ineffable the secrecies supreme
Pass and elude my gaze—an exquisite
Failure to hold some nectarous Infinite!
The uncertainties of time grow shadowless—
And never but with startling loveliness,
A white shiver of breeze on moonlit water,
Flies the chill thought of death across my dream.

For, how shall earth be dark when human eyes
Mirror the love whose smile is paradise?—
A love that misers not its golden store
But gives itself and yearns to give yet more,
As though God's light were inexhaustible
Not for His joy but this one heart to fill!

A: There are three different tones or pitches of inspiration in the poem, each in its own manner reaching inevitability. The first

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seven lines up to "gaze" bear as a whole the stamp of a high elevation of thought and vision—height and illumination lifted up still farther by the Intuition to its own inspired level; one passage (lines 3, 4) seems to me almost to touch in its tone of expression an Overmind seeing. But here "A light, a hush...a voice of tears" anticipates the second movement by an element of subtle inner intensity in it. This inner intensity—where a deep secret intimacy of feeling and seeing replaces the height and large luminosity—characterises the rest of the first part. This passage has a seizing originality and authenticity in it—it is here that one gets a pure inevitability. In the last lines the intuition descends towards the higher mental plane with less revelatory power in it but more precise in its illumination. That is the difference between sheer vision and thought. But the poem is exceedingly fine as a whole; the close also is of the first order.

14-9-1936

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Q: According to your five kinds of poetic style—the adequate, the effective, the illumined, the inspired and the pure inevitable which is something indefinable—how would you class Dante's style? It has a certain simplicity mixed with power which suggests what I may call the forceful adequate—of course at an inevitable pitch—as its definition. Or is it a mixture of the adequate and the effective? A line like—

E venni dal martirio a questa pace¹—

is evidently adequate; but has this the same style—

Si come quando Marsïa traesti
Della vagina delle membra sue?²

A: The "forceful adequate" might apply to much of Dante's writing, but much else is pure inevitable; elsewhere it is the inspired

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style as in the last lines quoted. I would not call the other line merely adequate; it is much more than that. Dante's simplicity comes from a penetrating directness of poetic vision, it is not the simplicity of an adequate style.

3-11-1936

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Q: I am drawn to Dante especially by his conception of Beatrice which seems to me to give him his excellence. How would you define that conception?

A: Outwardly it was an idealisation, probably due to a psychic connection of the past which could not fulfil itself in that life. But I do not see how his conception of Beatrice gives him his excellence—it was only one element in a very powerful and complex nature.

10-7-1932