Correspondence 1934, May (I)

May 1934

The English language is not naturally melodious like the Italian or Bengali — no language with a Teutonic base can be — but it is capable of remarkable harmonic effects and also it can by a skilful handling be made to give out the most beautiful melodies. Bengali and Italian are soft, easy and mellifluous languages — English is difficult and has to be struggled with in order to produce its best effects, but out of that very difficulty has arisen an astonishing plasticity, depth and manifold subtlety of rhythm. These qualities do not repose on metrical structure, but on the less analysable elements of the rhythmic. The metrical basis itself is a peculiar combination by which English rhythm depends without explicitly avowing it on a skilful and most extraordinarily variable combination of three elements — the numeric foot dependent on the number of syllables, the use of the stress foot and a play of stresses, and a recognisable but free and plastic use of quantitative play (not quantitative feet), all three running into each other.

I am afraid your estimate here is marred by the personal or national habit. One is always inclined to make this claim for one’s own language because one can catch every shade and element of it while in another language, however well-learned, the ear is not so clairaudient. I cannot agree that the examples you give of Bengali melody beat hollow the melody of the greatest English lyricists. Shakespeare, Swinburne’s best work in Atalanta and elsewhere, Shelley at his finest and some others attain a melody that cannot be surpassed. It is a different kind of melody but not inferior.

Bengali has a more melodious basis, it can accomplish melody more easily than English, it has a freer variety of melodies now, for formerly as English poetry was mostly iambic, Bengali poetry used to be mostly akṣaravṛtta.[1] (I remember how my brother Manmohan would annoy me by denouncing the absence of melody, the featureless monotony of Bengali rhythm and tell me how Tagore ought to be read to be truly melodious — like English in stress, with ludicrous effects. That however is by the way.) What I mean is that variety of melodic bases was not conspicuous at that time in Bengali poetry. Nowadays this variety is there and undoubtedly opens possibilities such as perhaps do not exist in other languages.

I do not see, however, how the metrical aspect by itself can really be taken apart from other more subtle elements — I do not mean the bhāva [feeling] of the sense only, though without depth or adequacy there metrical melody is only a melodious corpse, but the bhāva or subtle (not intellectual) elements of rhythm and it is on these that English depends for the greater power and plasticity of its harmonic and even to a less extent of its melodic effects. In a word, there is truth in what you say but it cannot be pushed so far as you push it.

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May 1934

I may say that purely vital poetry can be very remarkable. Many nowadays in Europe seem even to think that poetry should be written only from the vital (I mean from poetic sensations, not from ideas) and that that is the only pure poetry. The poets of the vital plane seize with a great vividness and extraordinary force of rhythm and phrase the life-power and the very sensation of the things they describe and express them to the poetic sense. What is often lacking in them is a perfect balance between this power and the other powers of poetry: intellectual, psychic, emotional, etc. There is something in them which gives an impression of excess — when they are great in genius, splendid excess but still not the perfect perfection.

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May 4, 1934

(…) a bad headache — and can’t work much, which makes it sadder still with me. However, no more of that. If possible help me, I will try my best not to complain henceforward and pray to believe that it is all for the best and that the Divine has not abandoned me — though the prospects portend that.

Nishikanta has written a prārthanā [prayer] to-day which is very beautiful and I will send it to you tomorrow. He was asking me to remind you of him and to tell you that he somehow consoles himself with poetics and thus divert his growing melancholy. I let you know this as he prayed to me to do so.

I had put to you in my yesterday morning’s letter some questions on Vairāgya[2] to which 1 had expected an answer. If you should have mislaid the letter, it is thus:

Amal[3] told me Vairagya was morbid and a friend of mine wrote to me in Yogic Sadhan you strongly disapproved of Vairagya. But I marvel how one could stick to spiritual life without an intense Vairagya. In my own case I Find I have been favoured with not more than one concrete spiritual realisation: that is, Vairagya. But I believe it is this that has been my saviour, otherwise with my weak faith I would have run away like a shot. But it is this intense dislike of outside and the world that prevents. So how can I say it is undesirable — which is implied by Amal’s “morbid”?

As to Amal, a little bit of Vairagya on his part might have been very useful to him in getting rid of the vital bonds of K.D. Sethna which still cling around him and prevent his psychic being from occupying these fields of his nature. As to Yogic Sadhan, it is not my composition nor its contents the essence of my Yoga, whatever the publishers may persist in saying in their lying blush in spite of my protests.

I have objected in the past to Vairagya of the ascetic kind and the tamasic kind and by the tamasic kind I mean that spirit which comes defeated from life, not because it is really disgusted with life, but because it could not cope with it or conquer its prizes; for it comes to Yoga as a kind of asylum for the maimed or weak and to the Divine as a consolation prize for the failed boys in the world-class. The Vairagya of one who has tasted the world’s gifts or prizes but found them insufficient or finally tasteless and turns away towards a higher and more beautiful ideal or the Vairagya of one who has done his part in life’s battles but seen that something greater is demanded of the soul, is perfectly helpful and a good gate to the Yoga. Also the sattwic Vairagya which has learned what life is and turns to what is above and behind life. By the ascetic Vairagya I mean that which denies life and world altogether and wants to disappear into the Indefinite — I object to it for those who come to this Yoga because it is incompatible with my aim which is to bring the Divine into life. But if one is satisfied with life as it is, then there is no reason to seek to bring the Divine into life — so Vairagya in the sense of dissatisfaction with life as it is is perfectly admissible and even in a certain sense indispensable for my Yoga.

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[1] akṣaravṛtta: system of versification in which the number of letters and not the sounds is taken into account.

[2] Vairāgya: disgust or distaste for the worldly life.

[3] K.D. Sethna (1904), a Parsi poet and critic.