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)

Hopkins and Kipling

I should like to have a few words from you on the poetic style and technique of these two quotations. The first is an instance of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ polyphony “at its most magnificent and intricate”:

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ˡ vaulty, voluminous, ...stupendous

Evening strains to be time’s vast, ˡ womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.

Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ˡ her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height

Waste; her earliest stars, earlstars, ˡ stars principal, overbend us,

Fire-featuring heaven. For earth ˡ her being has unbound; her dapple is at an end, astray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ˡ self in self steeped and pashed — quite

Disremembering, dismembering ˡ all now. Heart, you round me right

With: Our evening is over us; our night ˡ whelms, whelms, and will end us ...

The next quotation illustrates Kipling’s Tommy-Atkins-music at its most vivid and onomatopoeic — lines considered by Lascelles Abercrombie to be a masterly fusion of all the elements necessary in poetic technique:

’Less you want your toes trod off you’d better get back at once,

For the bullocks are walking two by two,

The byles are walking two by two,

And the elephants bring the guns.

Ho! Yuss!

Great — big — long — black — forty-pounder guns.

Jiggery-jolty to and fro,

Each as big as a launch in tow —

Blind — dumb — broad-breached — beggars o’ battering-guns.

My verdict on Kipling’s lines would be that they are fit for the columns of The Illustrated Weekly of India and nowhere else. I refuse to accept this journalistic jingle as poetry. As for Abercrombie’s comment,— unspeakable rubbish, unhappily spoken!

Hopkins is a different proposition; he is a poet, which Kipling never was nor could be. He has vision, power, originality; but his technique errs by excess; he piles on you his effects, repeats, exaggerates and in the end it is perhaps great in effort, but not great in success. Much material is there, many new suggestions, but not a work realised, not a harmoniously perfect whole.

30 December 1932