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)

Shakespeare [3]

Is there something definitely in the rhythm or language of a line of poetry which would prove it to be from a certain plane? From what you wrote some days back [see the previous page] I gather that the quotation from Shakespeare I sent has an Overmind movement as well as substance coming strongly coloured by the vital. But where and in what lies the vital colour which makes it the highest Shakespearean and not, say, the highest Wordsworthian — the line inspired by Newton?

It is a question of feeling, not of intellectual understanding; to distinguish the vital or psychic or any other element one must have the feeling for its presence — an intellectual definition is of little value. Take these lines from Shakespeare —

Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts so poor

But was a race of heaven —

they are plainly vital in their excited thrill, for only the vital can speak with that thrill and pulse of passion — the rhythm also has the vital undulation and surge so common in Shakespeare.

I have given an instance elsewhere of Shakespeare’s thought-utterance which is really vital, not intellectual —

Life is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Here is a “thought”, a judgment on life, and its origin would naturally be assigned to the intellect, but as a matter of fact it is a throw-up from Macbeth’s vital being, an emotional or sensational, not an intellectual judgment and its whole turn and rhythm are strongly vital in their vibration and texture. But yet in this passage there is a greater power that has rushed down from above and taken up the vital surge into its movement — so much so that if it had been a spiritual experience of which the poet was speaking, we could at once have detected an action of the illumined spiritual Mind taking up the vital love and soaring into spiritual greatness.

Or take the quotation —

the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

Here both style and language come ultimately from a higher above-mind level, but still it is quite different from Wordsworth’s line on Newton which also has altogether an above-head vision and utterance — and the difference comes because the vision of the “dreaming soul” is felt through the vital mind and heart before it finds expression; in the lines of Wordsworth the vision of the lone voyager through strange seas of thought has not that peculiar thrill but rather remains in an exaltation of light between the mind and some vastness above it. It is this constant vitality, this magnificent vital surge in Shakespeare’s language which makes it a sovereign expression, but of life and, so far as it is also a voice of mind or knowledge, not of pure intellectual thought but of life-mind and of life-knowledge.

27 February 1935