Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)

Virgil, Shakespeare, Hugo

I think what Belloc meant in crediting Virgil with the power to give us a sense of the Unknown Country [see page 373] was that Virgil specialises in a kind of wistful vision of things across great distances in space or time, which renders them dream-like, gives them an air of ideality. He mentions as an instance the passage (perhaps in the sixth book of the Aeneid) where the swimmer sees all Italy from the top of a wave

prospexsi Italiam summa sublimis ab unda.

I dare say —

Sternitur infelix alieno volnere caelumque

aspicit et dulcis moriens reminiscitur Argos

as well as

tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.

belong to the same category. To an ordinary Roman Catholic mind like Belloc’s, which is not conscious of the subtle hierarchy of unseen worlds, whatever is vaguely or remotely appealing — in short, beautifully misty — is mystical, and “revelatory” of the native land of the soul. Add to this that Virgil’s rhythm is exquisitely euphonious, and it is no wonder Belloc should feel as if the very harps of heaven were echoed by the Mantuan.

He couples Shakespeare with Virgil as a master of (to put it in a phrase of Arjava’s) “earth-transforming gramarye”. The quotations he gives from Shakespeare struck me as rather peculiar in the context: I don’t exactly remember them but something in the style of “Night’s tapers are burnt out and jocund day” etc. seems to give him a wonderful flash of the Unknown Country! He also alludes to the four magical lines of Keats about Ruth “amid the alien corn” and Victor Hugo’s at-least-for-once truly delicate, unrhetorical passage on the same theme in La légende des siècles. I wonder if you recollect the passage. Its last two stanzas are especially enchanting:

Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jérimadeth;

Les astres émaillaient le ciel profond et sombre;

Le croissant fin et clair parmi ces fleurs de l’ombre

Brillait à l’occident, et Ruth se demandait,

Immobile, ouvrant l’oeil à moitié sous ses voiles,

Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de l’éternel été,

Avait, en s’en allant, négligemment jeté

Cette faucille d’or dans le champ des étoiles.

What do you think of them?

If that is Belloc’s idea of the mystic, I can’t put much value on his Roman Catholic mind! Shakespeare’s line and Hugo’s also are good poetry and may be very enchanting, as you say, but there is nothing in the least deep or mystic about them. Night’s tapers are the usual poetic metaphor, Hugo’s moissonneur and faucille d’or is an ingenious fancy — there is nothing true behind it, not the least shadow of a mystical experience. The lines quoted from Virgil are exceedingly moving and poetic, but it is pathos of the life planes, not anything more — Virgil would have stared if he had been told that his ripae ulterioris was revelatory of the native land of the soul. These sentimental modern intellectuals are terrible: they will read anything into anything; that is because they have no touch on the Truth, so they make up for it by a gambolling fancy.

1 April 1932