Chapter 3
Once I offered Wordsworth’s Lines (written in early Spring) to some forty or so graduates undergoing teacher
training and asked them how they would explain it to their students. I didn’t offer it with any hope, but I
expected the worst, which really happened.
Their explanations were irrelevant and wild. They were wild enough to make one mad. If they made a commonplace remark that
Wordsworth is a lover of Nature and so on, they could hardly form a meaningful
sentence. For all the years they learnt
English, they could write only broken sentences. One reader of the poem went so far as to
explain it in terms of the theory of evolution (a favourite with every educated
vain Indian)! Not one of them could read
it as a poem, first of all, and make sensible comments on it. As I said earlier, they appear to have no
normal growth of mind with sane habits of reading a poem closely and getting at
its obvious sense. Their habits, it seems
to me, are so untidy as to make them unaware of the importance to be given to
the reading of it. I was really
depressed by their naïve and ridiculous attempts to explain it. Years of teaching convince me that it is
foolish to imagine a better state of affairs anywhere in
Let us begin with the first stanza.
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
There are many things to consider here. We will have
to consider them according to a method so as to avoid confusion. As you read the stanza coming to the last
line, you must be struck by its sense, and if you are struck by it, it shows
you have some practice in reading poetry.
In the sense of the last line there is a force that strikes you. Recognising it and being affected by it is
what happens when you are a good reader of poetry. Is there anything in the stanza that makes
you feel rather than know it? If you
feel it, what happens to you? Can you
identify the feeling evoked? Is it so rich
that it cannot be evoked by any other means?
Yes, “I heard a thousand blended notes” is an exaggeration no doubt,
from the viewpoint of ordinary discourse, as there cannot be such music. But as you read it some warmth is kindled in
your blood stream. The point is that
what is heard is as ecstatic as that unimaginable music. Your reading of this line results in active
motion of the spirit; you anticipate the next with excitement, and are ready to
meet it. “While in a grove I sate
reclined”. The second line is not wild
enough to satisfy your anticipation.
There is a cooling-off. But you
are not disappointed, for the exaggerated effect is only normalised by the
position of serenity, which doesn’t cancel out the effect of the splendiferous
music, but serves as a rebuke to a wild anticipation. ‘Sate’ adds a quaint touch to the position of
serenity; perhaps its modern form would produce a vulgar sensation of the body
reclined, which is here incongruous. To
be serene in a grove is not to be serene by self-attempt but to be serene
naturally. We settle down in an
undisturbed calm. But it is not a
rest. And there is no unnatural
stimulant here for a directing emotion.
What is roused is a feeling of anticipation and it is brought down to a
sense of serenity. Here is an overture
to something that must come. We wait for
development, since our position is not a position of rest; it is an unstable
position in which we are placed. Go back to the stanza and read again the last
two lines; here the remarkable thing is the connection between ‘pleasant
thoughts’ that too, in ‘sweet mood’ with ‘sad thoughts’; we didn’t anticipate,
of course, this connection, but our waiting is richly rewarded; we didn’t
expect the connection but coming as it does, it enriches our being. In his personal address by the poet of the
stanza the two feelings of anticipation with serenity, and of the ‘pleasant
thoughts’ leading to ‘sad thoughts’ seem to be self-sufficient, but, no, they
are not so. For to be effective they
need the content of another support.
They are fine and surprising as a prelude, but they cannot stand by
themselves. Take the firs line. Its life is “thousand-blended”; you cannot
say it without feeling what it invokes.
Say it to yourself, like this, ‘I heard a beautiful music’ or I heard a
noisy brawl’ and so on. You will see
that they don’t read like the line of the stanza, and if you feel the
difference you will feel the rhythm special to the poetic line—the rhythm with
the feeling which provokes warmth in you.
The other sentences you have put down may convey sense, but without the
rhythm and the richness of the feeling.
The difference must be sensed with feeling, and then the significance of
the line will be clear to you. In the
context here ‘thousand-blended’ produces the energy of a stimulus and at once
you anticipate something further. You
feel something; it is the same thing which “you experience” – in a given
form. We will touch on this form when we
come to the end of the poem. By this
time, the difference between poetic discourse and ordinary discourse must be
impressed upon you. If so, you have
gained some ‘knowledge’ of vital importance about life. Poetic discourse stirs life in us; it means
that it ‘improves’ us. Let us not
confuse the feelings evoked by poetic discourse with emotions roused by any
other means. These feelings will be
quite different from the crude emotions we suffer from. They act as a commentary on the latter, or
they are a criticism of the latter.
The feelings roused in this stanza have not taken a
definite shape. Only by their further
development can they be profitable to us.
All development involves complexity.
The feelings of the first stanza do not advance into complexity, in any
expected way. Read again the first
stanza and come to the second.
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
Here is a feeling of community between human beings
and Nature. The speciality of it is its
richness by interpretation. “The human soul that through me ran”. With its ‘human soul’ the poem suggests the
community of the poet with other human beings.
Nature links him to her ‘fair works’ (note the stress on ‘fair’ which
gets its force from the rest of the poem) because he shares the human
soul. If they are not ‘fair’ works, the
connection would be pointless. The
connection becomes meaningful by realising what is contrasted with the sense of
‘fair’. Surprisingly, there are no
ordinary connotations to work up into a coherent sense proffered by a sentence
of subject and object. There is a
lambent moral feeling if one contemplates what sort of man would
one be without that connection.
Here ‘Nature’ and ‘soul’ must come within the purview of the feeling
conjured up, and they mustn’t be interpreted independently to allow for any
idea that might distort the effect of the feeling, since they are used to
condition our response. They don’t even
refer to objects of thought, let alone present objects of sense, such that the
feeling doesn’t terminate with a finite object (contemplated or sensed) of
satisfaction.
Note that the second stanza begins without apparent
(logical) connection with the first.
With the first we aren’t in a stable position, because ‘sad thoughts’ is
a suggestion and not any content. The
second stanza provides content, of course, without a good shape. The first
feeling of this stanza is the positive one of the community in harmony. But let us not mistake the thought here:
‘this community in harmony’ isn’t an idea deceiving us by an emotion or
sentiment. It has to be posited as the positive
content of ‘the sad thoughts’. How? Because sad thoughts are sad when this
positive content is negated. This first
feeling of the second stanza would need another feeling threatening its
position to find itself attractive by being opposed. We desire harmony, but it is sad that this
desire is not fulfilled. Wordsworth here
evokes some of the most profound feelings, inexhaustible by any interpretation.
And
much it grieved my heart to think
What
man has made of man.
What is negated here is the desired harmony in the
community of men and Nature. They are
marvellous lines; they refer to the tragic circumstance in the relation between
man and man, - the tragic circumstance that destroys the harmony pointed out
above. There is no wailing on the part
of the poet. In that one short line, - I
wonder if any other line of English poetry could be as powerful as this – the
haunting sense of the tragic circumstance is there as if it cannot be caught in
words, but, as if it can only be felt imaginatively by the full use of the
power of words. It is the most powerful
line without image or metaphor. It
evokes an infinite number of feelings pointing to the hideous transactions
between man and man down the long history of mankind. The feeling, so infinite and rich, has
nothing of despair in it but it is tragic with vitality unspoiled by any
sentiment or idea. What is felt here
doesn’t console or weaken the mind. It
has power—it is the creative power of the complex feeling roused. Therefore, it is vitality for living. It is impossible to clinch the feeling by
describing it since it is creative and unending. You cannot fix a point of terminus for
it. Now, say the line to yourself like
this, “Man has exploited man”, well, it can never be poetry, for it is a
statement of idea with sentiment. Once
again it cannot have the power and movement of the last line. Auden’s socialist
poetry would not have the quality of Wordsworth’s poetry; it has clever
modulations impressive to the superficial reader, but it has no strong basis of
relation to human life, as in Wordsworth.
After the first two stanzas, we come to a stable
position of a theme articulated—Nature’s fair works contrasted with the hideous
transactions between man and man. For
three more stanzas we have the theme illustrated. I call this theme tragic in its true sense;
but still there is one feeling of the poet that is untragic
– he regrets that between man and man it should be so. Such a feeling is moral, but it isn’t given
any prominence so as to disturb the tragic feelings roused and sustained by the
marvellous poetic statement of the history of relations between man and
man. The theme could have easily tempted
the poet to state ideals or offer appealing abstractions, but then the pressure
for its treatment is the pressure of life in him. It is carried out with the utmost economy and
under compulsions in the interests of life.
The poet can so create a poem of life, because he must have assessed the
worth of ideals, ideas, sentiments and abstractions by the power of his mind. It requires genius not to be tempted by
them. Compared with him, the Indian mind
rests in the belief that ideas, ideals, sentiments and abstractions are the
highest possible for the human mind.
Compare any modern Telugu poem with Wordsworth’s; you might come upon
differences, which would shock you. I
appeal to you to employ your mind in such exercises, but not under the
so-called discipline of comparative literature, which is academic and
false. Compare the two poems in the two
languages when, by your interests, you feel the pressure for such a comparison. Comparative literature is one of the recent
academic attractions, which falsify the mind, like linguistic analysis. Read
the classics in our language or in English with the purpose of living a fuller
life, you will find that I am not harsh on the new academic disciplines, but
essentially right. Let not comparisons
be academic comparisons; let them be for life’s sake. The academic spirit is the careerist spirit,
very blind to the life of poetry, though it can discourse on poetry. It is one condition, most desirable, when
literature (let it not be confused with non-literature) has a significant
reading public and when it is studied in the universities. But it is quite a different condition when it
is studied in the universities without a reading public. In this second condition the academic spirit
alone is the spirit of reading literary works; interest here in literature has
no vitality. Well, for example, an
academic discourse in England could be meaningful, as it is still related to
the reading public, but it is intolerable in India because it is intolerably
bad, not being related to any reading public, and therefore, not having a vital
basis for it. In
Reading this poem of Wordsworth presupposes abilities
and interests, which enables you to feel its life. If you read it with a philistine’s abilities
and interests you cannot feel its life.
Cultural habits and thinking habits in the interests of life enable us
to grasp the life of the poem. If you
perceive that there is life in the poem to be drawn rather than an idea to be
understood, you have grasped the poem as poetry. Then you won’t relish academic trafficking
with it. You must work on the poem till
you feel its relation to human life.
There are subtle points in that relation, which are not always easy to
catch in any form of expression, but still they must be apprehended by the
spirit. The only trouble is that we
don’t have the spirit to apprehend them.
Poetry reading, with us, is a crude school or college affair. With our present spirit, very few students
would be inclined to read poetry if it isn’t there in their curriculum. The spirit to live today is the spirit to
possess, to which poetry is as inviting as it was to the Benthamite
spirit of the 19th century.
Who wants to sense life in Wordsworth’s poetry? Read the third stanza.
Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower
The periwinkle trailed its wreathes;
And it is my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
There is life in poetry only when there is a
significant reading public for it. I
mean such a reading public offers a discipline to you to sense life in
poetry. You must avoid reading poetry to
serve your academic purpose. Read it for
a finer life. You see in this stanza how
‘the fair works’ of Nature ‘live’. You
must feel that they live differently from the way men live. That they live without misery is marvellously
conveyed in the last two lines. The life of Nature’s ‘fair’ works have no sordid and ruinous
preoccupations that are the misery of human life. It is the life of delight and enjoyment,
because it is natural. It is the poet’s
faith that ‘every flower enjoys the air it breathes’, but he cannot have such a
faith about the conditions of human life—that is the feeling he rouses in us by
the line. Note that the flowers are not
described and no conventional poetic attribute of theirs is mentioned. Flowers
are not here the objects for any self-forgetting poetic emotions. On the other
hand one becomes self-aware, and the self-awareness is characterised by self-commentary. Self-commentary is the inevitable result of
the profound feeling evoked –“Am I not wretched for being so?” This self-commentary isn’t a self-deceiving
flourish nor is it an ironical pose to escape from guilt. It is a feeling - such is the power of the
line – which resists any self-salvaging tact of self-condemning but
self-pleasing criticism. We are here
confronted with the true awareness of our self-responsible condition of living. Our self is disturbed, that is where life is
in the poem. Yes, our self of
evil-mindedness is disturbed. The
economy of words shows tragic intensity.
We turn our eyes naturally to the primrose-tufts and periwinkle; their
being there in the poem is not presented as a scene for the mind to luxuriate
in. The poet must have taken care not to
touch up the naturalness, and ‘the sweet bower’ adds grace rather than
artificiality. Life is shown here by
focussing on points rather than by display on a canvas. It is one of the rare poems in the English
language with the least irresponsibility towards life. If you compare it with any Victorian poem of
sentimentality, I am sure, the latter will be found to be spoiled by
irresponsibility towards life – which irresponsibility is to seen in sentiment,
idea, and the lack of heightening accuracy.
Do you think a Telugu poem in the modern times would be closer to
Wordsworth’s or the Victorian poem?
We have another stanza following the above to
intensify self-awareness by the feeling roused for the life of ‘Nature’s fair
works’
The birds around me hopped and played;
Their thoughts I cannot measure;
But the least motion that they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
In the life of the birds (fair works) the least motion
is “a thrill of pleasure”; surely, they are not like human beings in whose life
we cannot expect what is natural.
Wordsworth saw to it that the feeling roused did not terminate in a
commonplace sentiment of contrast between the life of birds and human life. It is very difficult to keep the human mind
poised by deep feelings, since it tends to satisfy itself by the impurities of
ideas, sentiments and abstractions. It
is by keeping his poem free from these impurities that Wordsworth maintains his
responsibility towards life. The poem is
a flow of life; the birds’ hopping and playing is the natural life of activity,
which makes the human mind self-aware and which causes it to think that that
ought to be the human lot too, and their life is shown as undisturbed by
self-made misery. Of course, the birds
cannot have thoughts like those of human beings, but to suggest that theirs are
elusive to the poet’s grasp is to imply that they live with such thoughts as do
not interfere with the joy of living.
Something unnatural created by us endangers our life, but it is unimaginable
in natural life, and alien to the “fair works of Nature”. The feeling that affects us here leads to the
question: can we live on as we do now?
Change is necessary for a different life. This life that we lead is not worth living,
but a different life is, don’t you see? But we shudder to think of change,
because we are incapable of it by our own self-will. Here is a natural life presented to us to
feel and think of, and the feelings run into the thought arrested by the
premonition of the impossibility of change in us. Such a premonition must produce a change – of
desiring a different life, because premonition is a state of mind that must go
over into a change. We are condemned to
the self-preoccupied living of disharmony by our self-made misery; to be made
to sense difference in the life of “fair works” of Nature is the purpose of the
poem. Wordsworth’s poems have a purpose
as he informs us in his Preface. The
theme and its illustration in the poem are wonderfully suited to the purpose.
We don’t generally reflect on our life, because we
have self-flattering ideas against thought in that direction. Even if we reflect on our life, I don’t think
we can bring forth any true change within, for we lead a life we are made to
lead as if by some uncontrollable force, our thought of our life is never a
serious thought, for self-interests dominate us. Thinking about life is not like cleaning a
room. It is a complex exercise, and too
complex for anyone absorbed only in practical affairs. Usually we have half-thoughts or
pseudo-thoughts on our own life, and so, there is no possibility of appealing
to us except when we are flattered. The
poem before us has a power against our self-will, half-thoughts and
pseudo-thoughts. Listen to the next
stanza.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure
there.
The insistent note of delight and pleasure
in the life of Nature’s ‘fair works’ underscores the purpose of the poem. The
poem works on us unconsciously, for there are no conscious poetic devices
employed in it. Of course, its simplicity conceals the profundity of the
feelings it conjures up. Our mind is not
burdened with a poetic structure as in ‘Lycidas’. Read the first two lines of the stanza three
or four times; notice the effortless ease underlying the movement, and notice
the naturalness of life suggested in the budding twigs catching the breezy
air. I think ‘breezy’ suggests the
fullness of life of the plant, as if the twigs have a desire for the breezy
air, and not for the air. Contrast this
life with the human life under the weight of evil intentions and evil-minded
preoccupations. The pleasure which is in the actions of natural life is thrown
into relief by the effort made in the poet’s thinking, “I must think, do all I
can”. The poet is one who could bring to our consciousness the natural life of
Nature’s ‘fair works’, but as a human being he too suffers from the lack of it,
and communicates his feeling most subtly.
Coming at the close, the last stanza captures the
development of the rich feelings in a codification. After repeated readings of this poem, it
strikes to me that this stanza is so deep in its implications that it can serve
as an epitaph for the whole history of mankind.
I believe that one cannot feel better, and one cannot express oneself
better. The codification is apt, but it
is a bit smart, if not a little sententious.
Nothing is defective in the poem; words are fully charged; there are no
poetic devices; nor are sentiments, ideas and abstractions deployed; the syntax
and the movement are in unity; it is a poem of perfect poetry but for the
danger of stock associations that might be called up with some words in what I
call the lines of codification. The poem
is not a poem of mood or personal emotions, but it is a poem of the mind’s
activity of self-judgement. The poet is
the voice of humanity in the interests of life; notice how wonderful he is; he
doesn’t propose anything. He doesn’t
write about humanity either rhetorically or morally; he writes his poem with an
interest in human life. It is a standard
of very good poetry. Read this last
stanza carefully.
From Heaven if this belief be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan
Have I no reason to lament
What man has made of man.
‘Heaven’ and ‘holy’ are here heightening and
intensifying. (To introduce anything like pantheism in explanation would be
academic vulgarity). They help to keep
the codification from rigidity. The poet
says “I believe that the life of ‘the fair works’ of Nature is filled with
delight and pleasure, and it is so according to Nature’s plan. Men ought to be ‘fair works’ of Nature, but
they aren’t. That they aren’t so is
because of their self-will, and self-made misery, and they couldn’t be fair to
each other. Between one man and another
there is nothing but what is lamentable.
It appears that men are too ill-minded to live a natural life of
“delight and pleasure”. But remember,
the power of his lines cannot be caught in prose statements. “What man has made of man” stirs so much in
us that any amount of stating cannot exhaust its haunting power, but
articulation can at least help us keep track of it. We can only point to what the line does, but
cannot explicitly state it. It isn’t a statement
with meaning, which can be represented in other statements. The line suggests the way we have to feel
about the human history. The beauty of
it is that it doesn’t veer towards any graspable idea or sentiment or
abstraction. But it includes so much;
all that must be felt. It cannot be
pinned down to any one or some aspects of history, but it requires awareness of
history; this awareness is not to be got through knowledge alone. It is a line with a content of feeling about
human history—it is anti-rhetorical, anti-liberal, and anti-ideal in its
evocation of history. History mustn’t be
understood only in terms of facts and their interpretation; one must feel how
human history is not the history of life as it should be lived, - it is lacking
fully in the natural life of human beings—and how there has been in fact too
much in history against life. The best
training by which we can grasp the strength of the poem and its subtle
evocations is that of acquiring the ability to avoid making mistakes which we
make consciously or unconsciously in stating.
Yes, we must be able to say that the poem is related to the interests of
life by exercising its creative power over our minds. It means that care should be taken not to be
overwhelmed by any appeal it has to the vagaries of our individual minds. We must look for the strength it has in terms
of life. Our mind is able to feel its
strength on the condition that by experience, maturity, and taste it can make
choices which do not harm the interests of life. It knows what is awkward or amiss or
impressive, or partisan in writing. Let
us remember that the quality of mind unfolds itself in the ability to make
statements, and in its grasp of the poem.
We are not, as we should be concerned, with mind and its development,
and we don’ show an awareness that it is the centre of regulating life. In education, in particular, the mind and its
development must be our concern. Just as
cruder religion could be a substitute for the finer religion, depending upon
the mind, so also cruder writing for the finer
writing. If we have no development of
mind to respond to a poem like Wordsworth’s it shows that we have lost the
values of civilisation. As I point it
out often, the mind is subject to its development. How it develops is the crucial matter for us.
If it develops acquiring experience, maturity and taste and is able to read
Wordsworth’s poem with a sense of its relevance to human life, it is the
development we most desire. But if it develops along the Indian philistine
route, we have to protest that it is the mind which harms most the values of
civilisation and the interests of human life.
You have to learn about your mind to feel the power in the poem, the
power that is essential for living.
Learning about your own mind would disclose what has happened to your
mind to have made it unable to respond to the poem. It is not as if you could learn all on a
sudden about your mind; note that every point of advance in learning can only
be gained by a struggle. You won’t struggle
to gain any point like that unless you are made to perceive its worth. But now we live like a gang, pardon my
expression, with a certain formidable force pushing us—and this force which
animates us in practical affairs is resistant to intelligence and to
perceptions about our mind and life. You
must be ready to liberate yourself from this force if you want to come to grips
with Wordsworth’s poem. Get this clear
in your mind; you can never understand poetry, being an Indian philistine. You have to be a different being to
understand it.
If you think that I have explained everything
regarding this poem, you cannot be more wrong.
I have made several statements to explain how to read the poem. If you see that your sense of the poem
doesn’t approve of some of my remarks and that you could feel what cannot be
explicitly said about it, by the help of my statements, I have every reason to
think that my communication hasn’t been in vain. One shouldn’t expect me to say everything
rightly on the poem. Do try to have a
sense of the poem by mastering it; that is how you improve your mind and change
your consciousness. With wild ideas—all
so-called progressive ideas are wild—how angry you would be, when anyone disagrees
with them—you cannot come to the minute details of the poem and have the
patience to allow yourself to sense subtle points and feel the intensity of the
feelings roused, recognising and enjoying the direction in which they lead you
and the points of thought or reflection in which they terminate. With wild ideas, once again you don’t allow
the poem to have its full impact on you.
These ideas don’t allow you to know deeper things. In
There are always three questions related to poetry;
one, regarding its importance or value; two, regarding its understanding;
three, regarding its judgement. They are
themselves related questions, but we keep them apart in mind to avoid being
confused and talking nonsense.
There is a lot of difference between, on the one hand,
considering poetry really seriously in the interests of life and considering it
either academically or from the spirit of belles-lettres. There is then the popular consideration of
poetry, which can be dismissed, because, I think, the attitude implied is a
low-degree sentiment for poetry with indifference towards it. It accepts concessively
the value of poetry as a matter of sentiment, but it doesn’t care for its
importance in education or in the growth of mind. The academic spirit is more or less the
specialist spirit, and it takes up poetry as an object of profession. It cannot have a vital interest in
poetry. In one case only the academic
spirit can be engaged in poetry, that is, when a significant reading public is
a stimulus and encouragement for it. The
Indian academic spirit has not even the virtues of the specialist spirit; it is
interested in the job and rarely in the work.
It is therefore too false a spirit to have even professional
honesty. Writers and poets in
We use ideas in discussing the value of poetry without
a proper consciousness of its relation to human life. Poetry is a human achievement; it is a value
of civilisation. Usually, we don’t sense
its value, therefore we reject or ignore it. Since poetry has life, it cannot be totally
rejected or ignored. Still, we are in a
phase of history in which we, having lost the vital relation to the values of
civilisation, cannot bring ourselves to see a connection between them and our
preoccupations and our style of life. I
said nearly all this before, but the point I wish to make is this: the form and
content of life belong to the values of civilisation. Can you imagine any life without its
civilisation? So much has happened—I
have explained it earlier – that for us what counts in practical affairs only
counts. We do not grow and form our mind
and consciousness in relation to the values of our civilisation, acquiring its
form and making its content a basis for living.
A thousand things are necessary in practical affairs, including science,
technology, and commerce, and more than these, diplomacy, tactics and even
dishonesty. You have to have a true a
consciousness of them and grow; you can do that only because of your relation
to the values. Practical affairs are
very important, but their judgement by our consciousness is more
important. To have a consciousness with
its power to judge must be possible, and it is only possible under the
conditions of its growth in relation to the values. But there is our tragic
circumstance now – we grow without being put in this relation, adopting
Westernisation and preparing ourselves for practical affairs. So much so that we look now like formless and
contentless people working in an industrial colony of
the West, with all its advantages for the upper class, and all its
disadvantages for the poorer, and with inferior conditions of production and
quality. Some of us have a very
one-sided active consciousness of these inferior conditions and shout at
The second question about poetry is its
understanding. I am particular that one
must be well trained to understand poetry, for it is so important in the growth
of the mind. But education which
excludes it is now so much valued that no attention is ever paid to poetry and
its teaching. There is a lack of real
interest in poetry. It is, therefore,
mechanically taught, and learnt for the sake of writing answers in
examinations. I have explained the
conditions which are responsible for the spiritless affair of teaching and
learning. I have made my comments on
Wordsworth’s poem, but with this point of communication to the students, that I
want to show how I understand the poem to be relevant to my mind because it bears such and
such a relation to human life, and that I have steered clear of ideas and
theories in making sense of it and explaining what it is about. I am specially
averse to ideas and theories being applied to poetry, first because the poetry
of a poem is relevant to life but not its ideas and theories, and secondly
because Indian teachers have fouled up teaching, introducing them, and along
with them, the jargon of literary criticism.
What your mind records of a poem is more important than any idea you
employ in understanding or explaining it.
Something that goes deep and affects your mind is what is wanted of
poetry.
To understand a poem there must be a good personal
history of the habit of reading poetry.
Besides, as a general condition, what poetry offers to the mind must be
valued socially. We have said enough on
this score. In the absence of such a
condition, one cannot have the spirit of poetry, and one reads it with much
less attention than is really required for its understanding. One doesn’t feel
important in reading poetry—it is a condition we must think over. There are reasons today why one doesn’t make
head or tail of poetry even if one reads it.
An inattentive mind is the least favourable condition for understanding
poetry. Above all, consider how language
itself is an unimportant subject in
Mastery of the language, the habit of thinking and
feeling clearly, and the ability to conceive of matters related to poetry are
most essential for understanding a poem.
Once, Yeats pointed out that one must read a poem with rich memory. There must be a preparation of years
integrated with education to enable us to read a poem meaningfully. The most indisciplined
mind for poetry is the one with superficial consciousness, the spirit of
self-interests, ideological bent, and progressive
ideas. I.A.Ricahrds’s
findings (protocols) demonstrate that in England itself there had been a change
for the worse in education over a hundred years with the deplorable result that
an educated Englishman, now-a-days, confronted with a poem, cannot conceive of
it as poetry and read it, placing its ranks with regard to its quality and give
an account of his experience of it. What
Eliot calls half-education has come into existence by the end of the nineteenth
century, disqualifying the student for intelligent contact with a literary work. As for what
kind of education we have in
You have to watch out for many things which might
hinder you, in your attempts to know and master the poem. Some familiar ideas on poetry stick to your
mind if you had only a few poems in school and never advanced to reading poetry
seriously. In a sense, schoolteachers do
offer them, and also the generality of the reading public if it has any
inclination to say something on poetry, likes and
adopts them. It is right if they are
described as commonplace. Let me put
down these.
“Poetry gives pleasure”
The trouble with such an idea is that the whole
emphasis is on pleasure. What kind of
pleasure? What kind of poetry gives
it? Why, where one person gets pleasure,
another might have quite a different experience, and so on. If reading poetry isn’t pleasure enough, no
one takes to it willingly. To say that
it is a pleasure to read poetry is one thing, but it is quite a different thing
to say that poetry gives pleasure, because here pleasure is emphasised at the
expense of other things that poetry offers.
On the other hand, to know poetry by the pleasure it gives is the
poorest way of knowing it. We must also
be aware that there are many more things that give pleasure and that we should
make a distinction between the pleasure of poetry and the pleasure of other
things. One nice thing happens here,
many people prefer the pleasure of other things, and those who love poetry for
its pleasure decline by the law of the commercial industrialism. No, the pleasure idea of poetry is a false
idea. To get rid of this idea we ought
to take poetry as a discipline of the mind; we ought to see that it is the
energy of power that disciplines our mind.
To read great poetry is a great strain, no doubt, but it engages us
because it promises us life. Master it,
and you are a different man. However, in
our circumstances, you could read a great poem without its making any
difference to you. Yet it is one of the
benefits of reading poetry that we come to know that certain ideas, popular or
fashionable, on poetry are indeed baseless.
Here is another equally pointless commonplace idea.
“Poetry (as literature) reflects or should
reflect life”.
‘Reflect’ is the poorest verb to suggest a true
relation between life and poetry. In the
light of what I have said, it is nothing but an imbecile idea. But there is another side to it. Those who repeat this idea are, remember,
those with progressive views. By ‘life’
they mean society, and they tell us that poetry must reflect society, exposing
social evils and doing good to society, while they condemn poetry, which,
according to them, orthodox people prefer, and which has nothing to do with
life (society). Of course, they don’t
care for poetry, nor do they know anything at all relating to poetry. Only by hard work to improve their command of
language and by reading poetry with concentration can they see such of these
commonplace ideas to be not only untrue but also harmful. Nevertheless it is not easy for them to
realise that a good command of language means a good hold on life. These commonplace ideas seem to say something
about poetry. That is the point. But you must not let yourself be deceived by
them. We have to know about life: by
knowing science, technology and commerce, we won’t know much about life, but by
knowing and mastering great poetry like great novels we can know about it. We live life today without knowing about it
in commercial industrialism; our mind now acquires enormous knowledge of all
things, which was denied to our ancestors, but it isn’t knowledge of life. We have a very high proud estimate of our
knowledge; there is self-deception in it; as, for instance, we deceive ourselves
by believing that with our life of gadgets and luxuries we live better than our
forefathers. It is generally not
possible to communicate with those who believe in progress without a deeper
understanding of history. Again, there
are some expressions like ‘enjoying or appreciating’ poetry, which are as
harmful as commonplace ideas. If someone
says, ‘we must enjoy poetry’ or ‘we must appreciate poetry’, he has no subtle
point to make, and uses these expressions like an orator. Of course, we must enjoy and appreciate
poetry, if only we read it! There must
be much more to say about a poem than what can be indicated by ‘enjoy’ or
‘appreciate’. What you could say if you
read the poem well clearly shows whether you have enjoyed the poem or not. A good hold on human life must tell you that
such and such expressions aren’t in place and that they imply a defective habit
of thinking contracted for this or that reason.
You have to go on learning for maturity till you have acquired sound
habits of recognising the worth of an idea or the aptness of an
expression. In the first place, there
is, in so far as our expression is concerned, so much awkwardness or
pretentious statement or verbosity or poor thought that we must set up
standards and expose them. We cannot
willingly set ourselves to expose them unless we have the spirit to do it. Are we interested in a learning that leads us
to see what is defective in our expression?
Are we interested in living that gives us power to know about
ourselves? It should never be forgotten
that our difficulties with the language are deeper than being merely personal, they have something to do with our choices in
living. In fact, your choices clearly
show what it is that you could say or how your mind is compelled to choose such
and such an expression. There are two
things more than anything else that represent our
state of mind. One, we don’t value the
learning of language for the purpose of achieving a standard in our
expression. Two, it follows that we
don’t know what difficulties we have to overcome in making clear, forceful,
thinking statements. Somehow we manage
with statements but at a level at which it is shameful to think that we could
be so ungracious. All this amounts to
saying that your command of language and your hold on life are both essential
conditions for understanding poetry, and they are increased by reading
poetry. We have been crude, believing
that we have learnt from the West and benefited by the English language. Yes, we have learnt from the West and
benefited by the language, but by what standards is our learning good enough
and by what evidence of our mastery of it can you prove that we have
benefited? I wish that we could review
our condition and be intelligent about poetry rather than express commonplace
ideas or wild gestures, or as teachers do, resort to theories and critical
jargon. Perceiving and feeling what is
there in the organisation of the poem and its subtle relation to human life and
its thrust of advance in suggesting the object of our attention is what you
must be prepared for as you take up a poem.
To be prepared for it you will have to sacrifice some of your other interests, and the prospect of reading and understanding
would be bleak if you cannot endure the hard work of long years. If you could work so hard with the aim of
being a good reader of poetry, mastery of life, maturity of mind, and the
pleasure of achievement are your reward. I think it is a great reward. Many people cannot desire it, and there is no
question of their withstanding the strain of hard work. Don’t desire to read poetry without working
hard and without aiming at a balanced and intelligent mind and at living by
cultural habits. I find that the normal
discourse of commonplace ideas and expressions is most distanced from the
intelligent discourse of poetry, and very influential to the student, who
rarely takes pains to be free of it. As
far as I know, the Indian student never enters the sphere of understanding, of
making sensible statements, of arguing sensibly and of reading books
intelligently. By extension, what is
true of the student applies to the teacher in
We must say that a poem is organised for its
effect. Take the poem of Wordsworth that
we have examined. Could it not be
translated into prose-sentences with the same effect? No, I don’t think so. It has its own organisation, because it is
intended to produce a particular effect.
The question is not whether there is a difference between prose and
poetry; if the effects are intended to be different, they are bound to be
different. Even two poems will be
different in their organisation, because they aim at two different kinds of effects. You must sense the poem’s organisation
according to its effect it has produced in you.
The word ‘form’ could be useful here as long as we take care to use it
for a specific reference. Wordsworth’s
poem is different in form from prose. It
may be different from another poem, but they belong to poetry which has its own
form very different from that of prose.
Of course, one can achieve a poetic effect, if that is intended, in the
prose form too. That is why a
distinction between prose and poetry rests on the difference in their
effects. Nowadays poetry takes so many
forms that the line of distinction between it and prose is blurred, and there
can be no substantial argument either way.
But we had better keep the distinction because there is a difference in
effects intended. Poetry has now no
definite form, for it has no definite role to play, since it isn’t really
important for anyone in the modern world.
It will be more and more difficult to produce good poetry, but it
grieves nobody.
We slowly get the ability to recognise the form of
poetry. We have to wait till it
impresses itself upon our minds with its distinctiveness. Form is inseparable from the organisation. We use this word to distinguish one object
from another. To distinguish poetry by
its form from other forms of writing is essential; but it is at the same time
the same as distinguishing by its content.
We can even know poetry well without referring to its form, though we
have to know its organisation. Use
whatever words you like in place of form as long as you identify poetry. Take a
stanza from Wordsworth’s poem.
From
Heaven if this belief be sent,
If
such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have
I no reason to lament
What
man has made of man.
To say that it is a stanza is only to mark it off from
other varieties of writings. Even a
school-going child can recognise it as a stanza. It is a stanza, but what distinguishes
it? In a similar form, you can have a
nonsense rhyme or a very poor poem. So,
to put an external thing like ‘stanza’ isn’t very important. We must use form in relation to the poem’s
organisation. Our consciousness must aim
at a true sense of it, -- at perceiving the point of contact of between human
life and the form of poetry. Poetry is
life’s activity for its own enrichment; it should be, therefore, conceived of
in terms of the best things that life produces.
Its relation to human life must be distinguished from the relation of,
say, cinema to human life. Cinema is a
commercial organisation for entertainment; poetry is a creative organisation.
Poetry, like music and painting, is one of the great
forms of life in which human achievement has been possible. In each form, which wouldn’t exist but for
the spirit of life that creates it, we find the mind’s greatest effort and the
best achievement, but for what purpose? –Surely, for no other purpose than to
refine, advance, and preserve life.
Deprived of such achievements, life must be lived without possibilities. There is really no life without them. Yes, only biological life is possible in
their absence. But our science,
technology, and commerce now reduce life with human achievements to biological
life with possessions, luxuries and entertainments. Each form with its achievement
is the creation of the human spirit. It
is there to keep the spirit human. The
effort made to create it for the purpose for which it is intended obliges us to
make an effort to master it. Depending
upon the conditions, we may or may not fulfil the obligation. If we fulfil the obligation, we will be more
vital and finer in our life; if we don’t we will be absorbed in a crude life of
practical affairs only. Mastering human
achievements is not now accepted as the necessity of life, for we prefer to
live by our interests and drives. We must
desire to live life with a true sense of life, but we don’t. The sense of self-interests dominates all our
activities, and we are too unnatural to survive. If we cannot see the threat to our survival,
arising from the nature of our own interests, we will not have the sensitivity
to recognise the form of poetry in its relation to human life. Don’t think in terms of ‘poetry has a form’,
but consider that poetry has form in relation to… Poetry has exercised great influence over the
mind, for the reason, perhaps, that it has arisen and taken its form
unconsciously in history, as a necessary part of higher life. It might be difficult to perceive this vital
relation of poetry to life, but as you grow with the habit of reading it, you
must work up the form of poetry like other forms into this relation. If you use any (sociological or otherwise)
idea for the origin of poetry, you miss the relation but keep the idea. The result will be this; with the idea in
your head, you cannot help imagining that you know about the form of poetry,
but you will not possess the content of the relation. The form of poetry exists in its relationship
with life and it should be conceived in that relation. Once this point is clear, we have to advance
from this unconscious relation in which poetry fulfils the desire for higher
life. Poetry has no reason to exist
without a purpose. The point is that we
mustn’t misunderstand its purpose.
What we have to do next is to account for the fact
that some forms of poetry cease to be live forms. Here again the sense of the relationship
between poetry and human life is very important. It may appear as simplification, but worth
mentioning that in this relation each form of poetry corresponds to a form of
life and that if this form of life ceases, the corresponding form of poetry
loses its vital spirit, and receives its death knell. Perhaps the ballad-form is a classic example
of the disappearance of a poetic form when it has lost the nourishing response. It is not surprising that it has disappeared
with the industrial advance, which has brought in its train a different form of
life from which there has been no response to the ballad-form. I do not deny that the matter is much more
complex than my explanation here implies.
Nevertheless, it is right to insist on the correspondence of forms. But then we must avoid a facile and external
representation of it in an idea. Take,
for example, tragedy. This form of drama
is no longer possible as it was in that great time of the Elizabethan age. People then lived deeply and naturally: it was possible to represent the best and the
worst and the subtle forms of life in a live and profound spirit of the spoken
word. I say, the tragic form then, had a
nourishing response. An author, then,
could be rhetorical and fanciful yet from the basis of life only. To have the standard of the Elizabethan
achievement in poetry in its profound relation to human life is to be really
inward with what is the best in English poetry.
A modern tragedy cannot have life, however successful it may be
theatrically. My point applies to the
whole of drama. The exception of Synge proves the point in our age. There was nothing for Shaw to feel about, so
he manufactured his plays with an appeal to the false spirit of the people of
his times. Eliot’s drama enjoys a
partisan success with those people who could be partisan
to a religious dramatist. This special
circumstance of his success shouldn’t be ignored. Eliot could never feel unselfconsciously so
as to be creative in drama. He could be
creative in his poetry by the power of his intelligence, even here, inspite of the success of his poetry,
he is not spontaneous as a poet. Sure,
we have his intelligence in drama, but it fails for lack of his relation to the
passionate spirit of life. It is very
true that the English people had themselves no passionate spirit of life then
to keep Eliot alive in his drama.
Eliot’s drama is like the smart silk sari, desired by the upper class
men for their wives who would have chosen smarter ones by themselves. Yeats could feel passionately, but he was
prone to exaggerate and embellish his feeling in his special circumstances, and
still, was far more natural and engaging than Eliot. His drama is creative and sparkling at
places, but on the whole, it is less than an achievement. No doubt, he has profound emotions about
Ireland, but they aren’t always unobtrusive.
All of those that I have referred to had no unconscious relation to the
passionate spirit of life. Not that they
chose it voluntarily, but the form of life of the modern times, if we can know
it truly, excludes such a relation.
What I want you to do is to
have an inward sense of the creative activity in a creative achievement when it
is related to the nourishing response it gets.
Your mind must acquire the ability to recognise any poetic form in this
relation. Having said all this, I feel I
have not communicated what strikes me as essential when we are contemplating
the form of poetry. You must feel the
achievement of poetry and at the same level, avoiding having ideas about how
the people of that age lived, you must feel those
characteristics of their life, which had nourished the poetry. Your mind must be able to settle many complex
questions before you are clear on the form of poetry. It is with them I am dealing rather than
providing a simple frame-work of ideas.
Here, the level at which you regard poetry is all-important. Poetry doesn’t exist on its
own; it is a force of advance, because it is the great resource of
feeling; it comes into existence in its form, suited to the richness of content
desired by the mind through its habit of reading poetry, which is integrated
into living as a cultural habit. You
would agree that it is important to have such and such habit of feeling. I am sure if you have been able to read
poetry and allow your reading of it to influence your habit of feeling, you
have learnt to read poetry inwardly, and consequently, you will not only know
why poetry takes such and such a form but also why it has such a vital
spirit. You have to gain here a point of
knowledge. The vital spirit of poetry is
what decides its relation between itself and the form of life in which it is
created. Its creative spirit declines
with the decline of the vital spirit in the form of living. A poet can write a ballad today, but it is no
longer in the form in which it has a nourishing response. There is no community to offer its vital response
to it. So it exists in the external form
of ballad without life. If it has some
merit, it will be like the copy of some ancient sculpture appealing to us by
the sculptor’s talent. We might, a few
of us, enjoy a ballad written by a modern poet, but its power cannot be
integrated into our living. Similarly a
great tragedy is not possible in the modern world. It is possible in the novel-form and not in
the drama-form. We have too much of the
false spirit of industrial life in which creative attempt is usually commercial
or technical. Since to be creative is to
be creatively related to human life, such a relation is out of the question in
industrial life. Milton’s epic is a
curious phenomenon. It appeals more as a
Christian poem than as an epic to many of its
readers. It is one creative work lacking
the vital relation to the form of life in which it was created. Like the Ramayana to the Hindus, it can never
be a great source of feeling, I mean, to the Christians themselves. For us it is even more difficult to read it
with interest. It is an achievement
without the creative force for the reader; one must enjoy it as one enjoys
looking at a great aqueduct. What life
is there in the poem is what determines its form as well as its status. The grandeur of the epic suited Milton’s
lofty spirit. By his genius, he made
Paradise Lost a success without drawing on the human life of the English spirit
of the seventeenth century. His
religious interests are the only real link with his contemporary life: at his
level, it isn’t a vital link.
I hope that if you recognise the form of poetry, you
will not have much trouble in reading and understanding a poem. Usually, when we talk of the form of poetry,
the practice is to explain the poetic and linguistic devices employed in a
poem. Except that I make a few
observations, I would not spend much time on them, as they are wherever
necessary, explained in the notes to the poems.
I.A.Richards is a better author than anyone I
can think of in making clear to the student the special devices in poetry. He doesn’t explain them academically, but in
relation to the value and effect of a poem; note how he leaves out prosody
altogether. His interest in poetry isn’t
academic, though he is an academician.
If your aim is not to fill your mind with ideas, Richards is the best
critic for you, though he is difficult for anyone academically interested in
literature. He is the one who asked the
right questions on literature and poetry, and answered them most
convincingly. To study literature
without a good grounding in his work is like studying physics without knowing
Newton’s laws of motions. His work
consists of the basic structure of thought (earlier work before the 1930s) on
relations among literature, mind, life and civilisation, and if you go to him
with the academic spirit, you are bound to misunderstand him. Don’t pick up
ideas on him as Indian university teachers do without reading him.
Let us get this idea of form straight, working on our
example of Wordsworth.
From
Heaven if this belief be sent,
If
such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have
I no reason to lament
What
man has made of man.
Now, you may
turn back to the prose statement I have made of its sense. The point is that it can never be a
substitute for the poem. In fact, I defy
anybody to turn the stanza into prose statements with equal effect. The purpose of this unwarranted challenge is
to draw your attention to the fact that if you change the form even slightly,
the poem will lose its power of appeal.
You must keep in view the fact that the poem could be written in that
form, because the conditions supporting the form were there: the assurance of
response and the convention of writing in that form, which made possible the
poet’s vital relation to human life.
What I am driving at is that the poet could think and feel in that form
in the interests of life. The
organisation of the poem demonstrates it.
If any condition were wanting in support of the form, the life of the
poem would have been affected. Imagine
Wordsworth living among the Beatniks, not knowing much of his contemporary
England and its history and not growing up amidst so many things that had gone
to form his mind. It would be
unimaginable for him to write sense, let alone compose such lines as these. In that England there were possibilities for
a poet not to be false, and not to suffer to have any other interest than the
one related to human life, but to think and feel as a real man and to express
himself as a poet. England hadn’t yet
faced falsifying life conditions and falsifying knowledge as it had to
later. Wordsworth could be critical of
human life with the strength of his mind derived from the English life. The Enlightenment ideas and liberalism were
yet to have full impact, so much so that the poem was saved from any loose
construction. The poet could produce
directing energy instead of consoling ideas or sentiments; however, he would
not have been able to do it but for the enriching and supporting
conditions. It was impossible for him to
think of his relation to his readers as a matter of consideration for success. Suppose one writes a poem now in similar form
without what we have called the supporting conditions, it will be far from
poetry and we have no reason to take it up.
I am of the opinion that there are no supporting conditions for poetry;
the form of our life is such that in it we cannot help being false. By the power of intelligence one could do
creative work, as Eliot did. In English
poetry, Yeats was the last passionate spontaneous poet in relation to the
spirit of human life. Creative work is
possible in our time in fiction, but I better leave out this question. In the organisation of the poem the strength
of life makes it a success and makes it relevant to us and to anyone hereafter. It isn’t as if it was written for the
contemporaries only and would be irrelevant in future. It had drawn on the contemporary life, and
was not written for the contemporaries only.
The poem is an achievement of a particular period but it is poetry
forever.
Have
I no reason to lament
What
man has made of man.
This can be read as a prose sentence. But if you read it as such, - note how close
it is to prose—I think the effect is gone, and it might sound as a rhetorical
flourish. But read them as poetic lines,
they take on meaning, stirring us with memories, and in the context of the
whole poem, ‘reason’ gets more than the justification he has in lamenting but
read as prose, ‘reason’ standing for justification, can even be doubted. As prose, the sentence isn’t very good,
because it isn’t clear, but as poetry, it is magnificent with inexhaustible
implications. “What man has made of man”
fits into the poetic rhythm, but doesn’t suit the prose intonation. Prose thinking would produce a different
sentence with no rhythm which marks off these lines. Only thinking of it as poetry could produce
it, and the tremendous power it has is only possible in a poetic
statement. There must be a significant
reading public used to poetry to feel the power of such lines. The first two lines of the stanza,
From
Heaven if this belief be sent,
If
such be Nature’s holy plan,
could be contested as prose. But they have the power of poetry, moving and
inspiring us, and making us conceive of life at a different level. They give us power to conceive of life differently. There lies the poetry in these lines. As prose, we have to read them as making an
assertion, and as assertion, we respond to it with our will to challenge
it. Here, the difference in our response
is very crucial. Without the habit of
reading poetry, it isn’t possible to respond to the stanza as poetry. If there is no reading public with the habit
of reading poetry, I doubt if such a poem could have been created. In that condition, prose would be the choice,
for communication wouldn’t be communication of poetic power, since there would
be no one who would want it. It shows
that we have a different form of life, in which the value of poetry goes
unrecognised. But still we have a mind;
it requires power and we must have a true consciousness of life. Therefore, we have to learn from poetry what
it can give us, and the discipline of this learning is invaluable for the
mind’s development and its hold on life.
Nothing can invigorate the spirit as great poetry and music can and
living is the spirit of being invigorated.
If we go without them and if we have substitutes for them, we may be
living only to ruin ourselves.
Wordsworth’s poem has the minimum of variation from prose, though in its effect it is far from being close to
prose. Practically, no devices are used;
it looks like a poem unadorned. It is
least possibly metaphorical. It is
natural, profound, and moving and vitally related to the spirit of life. There isn’t a single gesture or word that is
thrown in because the poet had no skill and because his mind wasn’t capable of
what I have called, heightening accuracy.
But, remember, poetry is never a simple experience or a crucible of
ideas unfolding to the mind. It is a complex
experience. In dealing with Wordsworth’s
poem, I want to impress on you how complex the poem is and how careful we must
be in reading and understanding it. You
must always expect that a poem is a very complex experience and that it will
have surprising and unaccustomed points of reference. So, the structure of experience in the poem
must be articulated in as far as possible adequate statements. Don’t encapsulate it into some ideas even if
they appear relevant. To have an idea of
complex experience and express the idea in a statement, which betrays its own
weakness, is very undesirable—and it is very different from the struggle to
find adequate statements for the complex experience, which exhibit their
strength by being striking to us. To
have an idea of complex experience is to have a false idea of it. It is probable that we will not be
successful, at first, in our reading of a poem; but repeated readings of it
will show how we must understand its complexity. The more skill we develop in writing, the
more successful we will be in handling a poem.
More important than anything else is our maturity in watching our own
mind, when we talk of a poem. We get
nothing from a poem if we approach it with selfish habits of the mind which
remains chaotic for lack of real education.
Poetry can give us what it can give, but we must be able to take
it. I don’t know when we realise that
values are more important than anything else for living, but unless we realise
it, poetry wouldn’t be vital for us.
