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

Robert Frost, William Plomer, Roy Campbell

Something inspires the only cow of late

To make no more of a wall than an open gate,

And think no more of wall-builders than fools.

Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools

A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit

She scorns a pasture withering to the root.

She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten

The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.

She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.

She bellows on a knoll against the sky.

Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

— Robert Frost

Now the edge of the jungle rustles. In a hush

The crowd parts. Nothing happens. Then

The dancers totter adroitly out on stilts,

Weirdly advancing, twice as high as men.

Sure as fate, strange as the mantis, cruel

As vengeance in a dream, four bodies hung

In cloaks of rasping grasses, turning

Their tiny heads, the masks besmeared with dung;

Each mops and mows, uttering no sound,

Each stately, awkward, giant marionette,

Each printed shadow frightful on the ground

Moving in small distorted silhouette....

— Williams Plomer

Through the mixed tunnels of whose angry brain

Creeps the slow scolopendra of the Train!

— Roy Campbell

Have you seen the “Golden Cowboy and Others” in the New Statesman? Gives a good idea of modernist poetry, I think. Frost is a rather elaborate frost. Plomer is a “terrible” contortionist, but Roy Campbell is really amusing — I like his “slow scolopendra” immensely. He has at least the courage of his images. Evidently poetry is following the same gallop into extravagance as painting. And yet there is an attempt behind it which looks like a seeking after the “Future Poetry” gone astray.

1937