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 Examples of Twentieth-Century Poetry

W. H. Auden

I so often fail to detect the poetry in modern “poems” that the enclosed piece (by a quite young man), was a welcome exception — also it hints at an unusual warmth of interest in England. But neither grammar nor sense is plain to me in the opening line and elsewhere.

O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven

Make simpler daily the beating of man’s heart; within

There in the ring where name and image meet

Inspire them with such a longing as will make his thought

Alive like patterns a murmuration of starlings

Rising in joy over wolds unwittingly weave;

Here too on our little reef display your power

This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp

The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;

And make us as Newton was who in his garden watching

The apple falling towards England became aware

Between himself and her of an eternal tie.

... and Glamorgan hid a life

Grim as a tidal rock-pool’s in its glove-shaped valleys,

Is already retreating into her maternal shadow

Leaving the furnaces gasping in the impossible air ...

The cluster of mounds like a midget golf-course, graves

Of some who created these intelligible dangerous marvels;

Affectionate people, but crude their sense of glory

Far-sighted as falcons, they looked down another future,

For the seed in their loins were hostile, though afraid of their pride,

And tall with a shadow now, inertly wait ...

Consider the years of the measured world begun

The barren spiritual marriage of stone and water.

Yet, O, at this very moment of our hopeless sigh

When inland they are thinking their thoughts but are watching these islands ...

Some dream, say yes, long coiled in the ammonite’s slumber

Is uncurling, prepared to lay on our talk and kindness

Its military silence, its surgeon’s idea of pain.

And called out of tideless peace by a living sun

As when Merlin, tamer of horses, and his lords to whom

Stonehenge was still a thought, the Pillars passed

And into the undared ocean swung north their prow,

Drives through the night and star-concealing dawn

For the virgin roadsteads of our hearts an unwavering keel.

It took me all these three days to overcome the obscurity of the phrasing and the uncouthness of some of the lines; even so I do not know whether I can give a very decided answer to your question. The poetical quality of much of the piece is undoubted, though very uneven; for some of the lines, as those about Newton, seem to me to be quite prosaic whether in expression or rhythm; at other places even where the expression is strong and poetic, the movement falls short of an equal excellence. All the same, there is a rhythm and there is a power of thought and poetic speech, rising to a climax in the nine or ten lines of the close. What seems most to contribute is the skilful and happy vowellation and consonantal assonances,— the rhythmic form of the lines is not always so happy,— and on the side of expression the concise power of much of the phrasing at once clear-cut in line and full in significance — in spirit though not in manner akin to the Dantesque turn of phrase. I mean such lines and expressions as

(1) a murmuration of starlings

(2) This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp

The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;

(3) a life

Grim as a tidal rock-pool’s in its glove-shaped valleys,

(4) gasping in the impossible air

(this is quite Dante; (3) also)

(5) these intelligible dangerous marvels;

(6) Far-sighted as falcons, they looked down another future,

(and the two lines that follow)

(7) the years of the measured world

(8) The barren spiritual marriage of stone and water.

(9) Its military silence, its surgeon’s idea of pain.

(10) And called out of tideless peace by a living sun

(11) And into the undared ocean swung north their prow

Drives through the night and star-concealing dawn

(These two lines again very Dantesque)

It is a pity he did not take pains to raise the whole to the same or a similar equal level — and more still that he did not think it worth while to make the underlying meaning of the whole as clear and powerfully precise as are in themselves these phrases.

15 September 1932