Sri Aurobindo - The Essence of Poetry

Introduction:

Sri Aurobindo (15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yogi, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. He was also a journalist, editing newspapers such as Vande Mataram. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule, in 1910 was one of its influential leaders, and then became a spiritual reformer. The Future Poetry was first published in the monthly review Arya in thirty-two installments between December 1917 and July 1920. It explores the possibility of spiritual poetry in the future.

Objective:

            Aurobindo begins the chapter “The Essence of Poetry” with an aim to probe into the highest power we demand from poetry, its nature and essential law, through which the possibility of its use as the mantra of the real can be understood. He says that “the essential things in poetry is(sic) neither an impossible nor an unprofitable endeavour”.

Two common errors:

            When analysing the poetic creation, two common errors occur.

 1. The ordinary uninstructed mind judges poetry without really entering it and looks as if it were an aesthetic pleasure of the imagination, the intellect and the ear.

2. Too instructed critic/ too intellectually conscientious artist or craftsman

Any poem pretty, pleasant and melodious with a beautiful idea, for instance – a song of Anacreon or a plaint of Mimnermus comes under this category. The externally sensible and the inner imaginative pleasure are only the first elements expected from this type of poem.

            Aurobindo remarked that Intelligence, imagination and the ear are only the channels and instruments of poetic delight and the true creator, the true hearer is the soul. The greatest work of poetry is raising the pleasure of the instrument and transmuting the word into the deeper delight of the soul.

Divine Ananda – A spiritual joy

            Aurobindo pinpoints the requirements of a powerful poet who can conquer the human difficulties of writing poetry. He should succeed in pouring into all those who receive it. Most importantly, the soul of the poet should be able to feel the spiritual joy – a Divine Ananda which is defined by Aurobindo as an inverse reflection of the joy that the universal Soul felt in its great release of energy when it rang out into the rhythmic forms of the universe the spiritual truth, the large interpretative idea, the life, the power, the emotion of things packed into an original creative vision. The intellectually conscientious poet focuses on a faultlessly correct or at most an exquisite technique.

Technique – Rhythmic Word

            The good technique is the first step towards perfection. The technique, however indispensable, occupies a smaller field in poetry because a) its instrument, the rhythmic word is full of immaterial elements; b) its complex, flexible, variously suggestive instrument has infinite possibilities. The rhythmic word has a sensible element – sound value, an immaterial element – thought value, and its sense and sound together or separately - soul value, a direct spiritual power that soars up beyond the province of any laws of mechanical construction.

            The intellectual sense of poetry creation becomes a subordinate action in the poet’s mind whereas the perfection of sound movement and style becomes the spontaneous form of the poet’s soul, that utters itself in an inspired rhythm and an innate, revealed word. It is the highest speech, the supreme poetic utterance and the immortal element in his poetry available to man for the expression whether of his self-vision or of his world-vision.

            The highest experience, the pure spiritual can never be wholly expressed, still, it tries to express them not merely intellectually, but instinctively using rhythmic forms. However, poetry attempts to extend this vision and utterance to all experience even the most objective and urges to express something in the object beyond its mere appearances.

Words and their sense

Words are the conventional signs for ideas. We put a more vital power into the conventional word-sign which is not inherent in itself. In the history of language, words did not have a real life of their own. The speaker was more conscious of its vivid life than the listeners with their mechanized and sophisticated intellects. Aurobindo opines that the intellectual sense - the feelings, sensations and broad indefinite mental impressions with minute shades of quality – must have been a secondary element in the primitive language but attained dominance as the language evolved.

Sound came to express fixed ideas but there is no natural and inherent equivalence between the sound and its intellectual sense. Intellectually any sound might express any sense, if men were agreed on a conventional equivalence between them. The word got its sense since an indefinable quality or property in the sound might have raised certain vibrations in the life-soul of the human creature, in his sensational, his emotional, his crude mental being. For instance, the word wolf, just denotes to our intellectual, a certain living object i.e. it expresses the sensational relation between the wolf and man.

Poetry and Words

Poetry recovers partly by a stress on the image replacing the old sensational concreteness partly by a greater attention to the suggestive force of the sound, its life, its power, and the mental expression it carries. Poetry associates this with the definitive thought value contributed by intelligence. In that way, it succeeds in carrying up the power of speech to the direct expression of a higher reach of experience than the intellectual or vital. It brings out its soul suggestion, its spirit. So poetry arrives at the indication of infinite meanings. Thus poetry expresses the experience, the vision, the ideas of the higher and wider soul in him. Here, Aurobindo says that poetry opens to the readers by the word, the doors of the spirit.

Prose Style and Poetry Style

            Aurobindo talks about the difference between the Prose style and the Poetry style. The prose style carries speech to a much higher power than its ordinary use. It doesn’t make it with greater attempts like the poetry. Because Poetry stands firmly on the intellectual value of the word. It uses rhythms that ordinary speech neglects, and aims at a general fluid harmony of movement. It associates words agreeably to please and to clarify intelligence. It strives for a more accurate, subtle, flexible and satisfying expression. A higher adequacy of speech is its first object. Beyond this adequacy, it aims at a greater effectiveness by various devices of speech for heightening its force of intellectual appeal. It may admit a more emphatic rhythm, more powerfully stimulate the emotion and appeal to a more vivid aesthetic sense. This rich use of images is employed as ornaments(alamkara) to give a stronger intellectual vision. Reason and taste, two powers of intelligence are rightly the supreme gods of the prose stylist while to the poet they are only minor deities.

The whole style and rhythm of poetry are the expression and movement that come from us out of a certain spiritual excitement caused by a vision in the soul of which it is eager to deliver itself. The vision may be of anything in Nature or God or man or the life of creatures or the life of things. There are two elements, that speech can express - the outward or instrumental and the real or spiritual. In thought, for instance, there is the intellectual idea, that which the intelligence makes precise and definite to us, and the soul-idea, that which exceeds the intellectual and brings out the whole reality of the thing expressed.

The poet seeks for the soul of the emotion. To Aurobindo, with the poetical sense of objects, the poet attempts to embody the truth of life or truth of Nature. It is this greater truth and its delight and beauty that brings us the delight of the soul in the discovery of its own deeper realities. Aurobindo, in a nutshell, defines poetry, as the spiritual excitement of a rhythmic voyage of self-discovery among the magic islands of form and name in these inner and outer worlds.

 

 

 

 

Sweets - Robert Lynd

 Introduction

Robert Wilson Lynd (1879 – 1949) is an Irish essayist and journalist. He writes under the pseudonym “YY” in journals like The New Statesman and Nation. His essays have somber humour and satirical remarks. His prose essay “Sweets” explores children’s fondness for different flavoured chocolates and sweets.

Sweets as Exchange

The essay begins with the depressing statistics of spending fifty million pounds every year on chocolates and confectionery in Great Britain. The city child has lost Wordsworthian delights of witnessing the variety of flowers and animals whereas as an exchange he has the riches of the sweet shop.  

Sweets as Expensive Luxury

It is hard to trace when the social history of the democratization of sweets began. Sweets hadn’t been the universal food of children till the eighteenth century when sugar had been an expensive thing. Lynd doubts whether poor children had ever tasted sweets like marchpane, kissing comfits referred to in Shakespeare’s plays.

                                                                     

                        Marchpane                                        Kissing Comfits

                                                                  

Sweets for Cure

Until the nineteenth century, sweet-making was in the hands of druggists. It implies that the ancestors of all present delicacies are that had medical utility, the cough-drop. The chemist remains half a confectioner with his liquorice, pastilles and marshmallows. What once done for utility is now done for pleasure. The child of today sucks jujube for pure joy which was sucked two hundred years ago as a cure.

Pastille                   Marshmallow	Liquorice                Jujube

Sweets for Pleasure

            It is highly fortunate that doctors once thought that sweets were good for us. Sweets have made a greater contribution to the physical happiness of mankind. The sight of the bottles in the sweet shop stirs the imagination of the infant. Lynd in a tone of exaggeration says that the sweets in each box would compete with their rivals to be the choice of the boy who enters the shop with a penny whereas he experiences only agonies of indecision among bull’s-eye, brandy balls, pear-drops and barley-sugar. Children want to taste all the sweets in the shop. They cannot decide which sweet to buy and which to reject.

bull’s-eye	pear-drops
brandy balls	barley-sugar

Greed for Sweets

All the jars of sweets fill him with an ache of longing from throat to stomach. “Great are the joys of greed but great are its sufferings.” Lynd says that the boy could make his choice easier if he has a sister to share his sweets who dislikes, for instance, coco-nut chips.  Humourously, he says that if that boy is either selfish or unselfish, he would buy coconut chips, so he need not share them. Lynd declares that such greed is to be blamed, but the pain of sharing almond rock with many others is extremely bitter. Hence the author remarks that the pang of desire and sharing stops children from eating sweets with others.

 

             Almond Rock                             Coco-nut Chips      

Sweets not for Sharing       

A boy who never offers a sweet to a friend is regarded as one who would live to be hanged. On the other hand, a well-mean boy has bought a packet of sweets with a benevolent intention of sharing it with others; but when he gets home, he has discovered that the packet is finished. The writer too found it difficult to get home with a box of nougat. The silver wrapper of nougat tempted him to open the box and made him to taste a piece. And he felt that the worst of nougat is that one could not stop eating it. The writer says that if his home had not been so far from the shop, the others would have considered him a saint for not touching nougat.

  Nougats

Features of Love of Sweets

1.     Declines with age

If no one under thirty were allowed to eat sweets, half of the confectionery would go out of business. Hardly a middle-aged man look into a confectioner’s window and gaze at a sweet shop as if it is a vision of Heaven. But the author knows a man who eats chocolates while he is drinking and many women who nibble sweets after dinner. However, none of them get excited like a child. Neither an adult would shout for getting a sugar mouse nor would get into raptures for seeing a chocolate Easter egg with a sugar hen. No friend would thank for passing a bagful of acid drops

Sugar Mouse               Acid Drops	Easter Egg with a Sugar Hen

2.     Indiscriminateness

     A true sweet-eater is an almost indiscriminate love of sweets. He loves everything called sweets from the despised acid drop to the delicious sugar almond, whether humbug or nougatine, butter-scotch or liquorice laces, either a peppermint drop or aniseed balls. The child has preferences among sweets but no hatred.

Sugar Almond	Humbug
Butter-Scotch	Licorice Strings
Nougatine	Aniseed balls             Peppermint Drops

Favourite Sweets of the Author

            Lynd’s preference was almond rock. He also wonders at a sweet which turns colour as one sucks it. He enjoys its miraculous transformation by taking it out of mouth for a while.   He questions whether the confectioners stop producing it considering the hygiene. Next, he mentions a flat honey-flavoured sweet in which a three penny was sandwiched between the two. The infants of the town bought shillings-worth chocolate with an unearned three pence. This was regarded as dangerous incitement of gambling and was stopped. Lynd says that the sweet never tasted quite the same afterward.  

Source of Pleasure

            Lynd concludes his essay by saying that the adult’s tastes for tobacco, beer, wine, and whisky are not sufficient compensation for the loss of the appetite for sweets. Because,

·       An adult does not long for all the brands of cigarettes in the shop.

·       He does not consider the packet of cigarettes as a treasure.

·       He smokes not much for pleasure but for the purpose of avoiding the discomfort of not smoking.

·       Wine experts may have the excitement of a child eating sweets but they have lost the indisriminateness of enjoyment. They discriminate the good and bad wine.

On the other hand, the child lives happily in a world in which greed and not fastidiousness are the source of pleasure. He never heard of bad sweets and loves all sweets with the large-heartedness with which it loves all stars and fireworks.

Alice Fell or Poverty - William Wordsworth

                        

William Wordsworth - Alice Fell or Poverty

The post-boy drove with fierce career,

For threatening clouds, the moon had drowned;

When, as we hurried on, my ear

Was smitten with a startling sound.

 

As if the wind blew many ways,

I heard the sound, —and more and more;

It seemed to follow with the chaise,

And still I heard it as before.

 

At length I to the boy called out;

He stopped his horses at the word,                         

But neither cry, nor voice, nor shout,

Nor aught else like it, could be heard.

 

The boy then smacked his whip, and fast

The horses scampered through the rain;

But, hearing soon upon the blast

The cry, I bade him halt again.

 

Forthwith alighting on the ground,

"Whence comes," said I, "this piteous moan?"

And there a little Girl I found,

Sitting behind the chaise, alone.                         

 

"My cloak!" no other word she spake,

But loud and bitterly she wept,

As if her innocent heart would break;

And down from off her seat she leapt.

 

"What ails you, child?"—she sobbed "Look here!"

I saw it in the wheel entangled,

A weather-beaten rag as e'er

From any garden scare-crow dangled.

 

There, twisted between nave and spoke,

It hung, nor could at once be freed;                       

But our joint pains unloosed the cloak,

A miserable rag indeed!

 

"And whither are you going, child,

To-night alone these lonesome ways?"

"To Durham," answered she, half wild—

"Then come with me into the chaise."

 

Insensible to all relief

Sat the poor girl, and forth did send                     

Sob after sob, as if her grief

Could never, never have an end.

 

"My child, in Durham do you dwell?"

She checked herself in her distress,

And said, "My name is Alice Fell;

I'm fatherless and motherless.

 

"And I to Durham, Sir, belong."

Again, as if the thought would choke

Her very heart, her grief grew strong;

And all was for her tattered cloak!                       

 

The chaise drove on; our journey's end

Was nigh; and, sitting by my side,

As if she had lost her only friend

She wept, nor would be pacified.

 

Up to the tavern-door we post;

Of Alice and her grief I told;

And I gave money to the host,

To buy a new cloak for the old.

 

"And let it be of duffil grey,

As warm a cloak as man can sell!"                         

Proud creature was she the next day,

The little orphan, Alice Fell!

About the author

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication "Lyrical Ballads" in 1798. Wordsworth is best known for his nature poetry and his deep reflection on the human experience, often focusing on the themes of childhood, humanity, and the natural world. His works emphasize emotion, simplicity, and the sublime beauty of nature, which he believed to be a source of spiritual renewal and inspiration. Wordsworth's poetry often reflects his philosophy that the human mind and nature are interconnected, and that the natural world can profoundly influence and shape human thoughts and emotions.

Summary

"Alice Fell; or, Poverty" is a narrative poem by William Wordsworth that explores themes of compassion, poverty, and human kindness. The poem tells the story of a young orphan girl named Alice Fell, who is found by the narrator in a state of distress.

The narrator is traveling in a carriage on a cold evening when he hears the cries of a child. He discovers Alice Fell, a poor, orphaned girl whose clothes have been caught in the carriage wheels and torn. Alice is destitute and without any family or means of support. Moved by her plight, the narrator takes Alice into the carriage and inquires about her situation.

Alice explains that she is an orphan and has no one to care for her. Her sorrow and suffering deeply affect the narrator. In an act of kindness and compassion, the narrator decides to help her. He takes her to the nearby town and ensures that she is provided with clothes, shelter, and care.

The poem concludes with the narrator reflecting on the importance of compassion and the moral responsibility to help those in need. Wordsworth uses Alice Fell's story to highlight the harsh realities of poverty and the impact that even small acts of kindness can have on the lives of the less fortunate.

Explain with reference to the Context

1. As if she had lost her only friend

She wept, nor would be pacified.

Context:

This line is taken from "Alice Fell; or, Poverty," in which Wordsworth narrates the story of a young orphan girl named Alice Fell, who is found by the narrator in a state of distress. The narrator, traveling in a carriage on a cold evening, hears the cries of a child and stops to investigate. He discovers Alice, whose cloak has been caught and torn by the carriage wheels. Alice, already impoverished and without family, finds herself in an even more dire situation due to the loss of her cloak, which provides her with warmth and protection.

Explanation

This line simile compares Alice's intense grief to that of someone who has lost their dearest companion. For Alice, her cloak is not just a piece of clothing but a vital possession that offers her comfort and security. Given her impoverished state and lack of family, the cloak may represent her last shred of protection and dignity. Losing it feels to her as tragic as losing a close friend because it intensifies her vulnerability and isolation. These lines serve to highlight the extreme hardship and emotional suffering experienced by Alice Fell. They emphasize her vulnerability and the dire consequences of poverty, particularly for an orphaned child. Wordsworth uses Alice's weeping to evoke empathy from the reader, drawing attention to the human cost of social neglect and the need for compassion and assistance.

2. And I gave money to the host,

To buy a new cloak for the old.

Context

These lines are from William Wordsworth's poem "Alice Fell; or, Poverty". While traveling in a carriage on a cold evening, the narrator hears the cries of a child. Stopping to investigate, he discovers Alice, whose only cloak has been caught and torn by the carriage wheels. Alice is deeply distressed. Moved by Alice's plight, the narrator decides to help her. After comforting her, he takes her to an inn, where he ensures she is provided with warmth and shelter.

Explanation

By giving money to the host of the inn to replace Alice's torn and lost cloak with a new one, the narrator is taking concrete steps to ensure Alice's immediate needs are met. This action goes beyond mere sympathy, demonstrating a tangible commitment to assisting her. The narrator restores some measure of security and comfort to Alice's life, showing a deep sense of responsibility and compassion.

Paragraph

1. Discuss the significance of Alice's torn cloak in the poem.

2. How does the narrator demonstrate compassion and empathy towards Alice?

Essay

1. Discuss how Wordsworth explores the themes of poverty and compassion in the poem "Alice Fell.

"The poem “Alice Fell or Poverty” tells the story of Alice Fell, a poor girl who lives in a rural area. Wordsworth emphasizes the importance of empathy and compassion for the poor.

The narrator of the poem and the post-boy of the chaise travelled to Durham on a rainy night. They heard a moaning sound – “But neither cry, nor voice, nor shout”. Alice was sitting behind the chaise with a piteous moan.

When Alice was enquired, she showed her dress which was entangled in the wheel. Together they released the torn wretched cloak which looked like scarecrow’s rag. Then the narrator asked about her whereabouts. She informed that she was fatherless and motherless and lived in Durham. She was taken along with them. Yet, her grief grew strong and sobbed “as if her grief/ Could never, never, have an end.” As if she lost her only friend, Alice wept and could not be pacified.

The narrator dropped her in the Tavern. He gave some money to the host for buying a new dress for Alice in duffel grey colour. He hopes that the cloak will warm the little orphan.

The poem hits at the disparities in society and insists on the need for social reform to address the suffering of the poor.