Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 27

Fragment ID: 7521

Marginal Comments¹

The writer justly contends that Quantitative Verse has, hitherto, been misunderstood by English poets who have used it, because the constituent elements of such verse have not been correctly appreciated. These elements are accent, stress, and quantity. Accent is voice-weightage on a syllable; stress is voice-weightage on a one-syllable word (which may or may not be accented by itself) considered hic et nunc as a component part of a phrase, clause or sentence;

Not in my theory; stress occurs in English words of all lengths, not only in monosyllables.

quantity is this voice-weightage in poetry. The best (and the only true) Quantitative Verse is that in which accent, stress and quantity fall on the same syllable.

This is not part of my theory, where accent is disregarded for metrical purposes (though it counts in the intonation and rhythm) except when it coincides with stress. On the other hand unstressed long syllables count as long and here stress and quantity do not fall on the same syllable.

English being an accentual language, poets writing in English have a natural bias towards accentual verse. The result is, that they tend to regard quantity in verse as secondary, and by misplacing both accent and stress produce (when they venture into such fields) Quantitative Verse of unbelievable badness. This is written in a slipshod metre whose “tread-mill movement” (p. 346) has been charged against it as an incurable defect....

All this is, assuredly, excellent in theory. But in practice, certain serious objections arise. If it be true, as the author asserts that it is true, that only certain heroic themes can be treated in English hexameter (the most practised of the numerous types of Quantitative Verse),

This has nowhere been said; epic, pastoral, epistle, satire, familiar speech, poems of reflection have all been admitted,– only there must be either power or beauty.

then the utility of the suggested adoption of verse based on quantity will be utility in name alone, since the just claim of poetry at present to give not only airy nothing, but everything, a local habitation and a name, would be effectively quashed.

This objection would arise if it were proposed to write quantitative verse only; that is not so.

If it be true, further, that because of the undactylic nature of English, the hexameter needs to be “modulated” by bacchius, by lighter cretic, by the first paeon, by the choriamb or double trochee (similar variations to be used in the other quantitative metres), what remains of the fundamental metric of the original form?

The ground given is not the undactylic nature of English, but the natural tendency of English poetry to resort to modulation for the sake of freedom and variety. I have said that this device should be adopted in transferring classical metres into English, so as to create a natural English quantitative verse – not a rigid imitation of Greek and Latin models.

The verse so written would, doubtless, be something rich and strange:

So much the better.

but would it be really hexameter, simply because it would (and then not always) have a dactyl in the 5th, and a spondee (or more likely a trochee) in the 6th?

Why not? All that is necessary is that it should be a six-foot verse with a sound and predominant dactylic basis.

Would sapphics, with the changes advocated as a relief to monotony, remain genuine sapphics?

Again, why not? The modulations are few and do not destroy the characteristic swing of the Sapphic verse.

And ionics, ionics? It would seem, then, that the learned author’s scheme would amount merely to some sort of quantitative verse; this is native to English, as Langland, Hopkins and others have shown, and shown most successfully.

If it is some sort of quantitative verse, rich and strange, and based on the recovery by quantity of its place in metre, that would be enough. Hopkins, I believe, wrote sprung verse – it is not entirely quantitative.

There are a number of other points, of more or less importance, to which attention must, in fairness, be drawn. The punctuation leaves something to be desired: on p. 322, line 13 from the bottom, there should be a colon or a fullstop instead of a comma; on p. 323, line 8 ... a semi-colon instead of a comma.

No, that would disturb the connection and balance. The comma is intended to preserve the close connection of the two statements.

Grammar is also defective, as in the following:

(i) “ ... they can seldom intervene or only if it is done very carefully” (p. 362) where it lacks a true antecedent.

“It” refers to the intervention; there is an unexpressed or implied antecedent. This is a liberty, but one that can be taken. Literary style can take such liberties sometimes with schoolmaster’s grammar.

(ii) “All that is necessary is that artificial quantity ... must be abandoned.” (p. 363) Must ought to be should.

“must” ought to remain “must”. It is meant to indicate the nature of the necessity and its imperativeness.

(iii) “A better statement may lead to a solution that could well be viable.” (p. 317) May or might instead of could would be an improvement.

No. “Could” has a different shade of meaning from “may” or “might”.

(iv) On p. 318, bottom line, “they” lacks an antecedent, unless it be “desire”!

Yes, there should be in the previous sentence “by many” after “vividly felt”.

(v) The order of words in “He perpetrates frequently lines that are wholly trochaic” (p. 355) could scarcely be more un-English. Frequently should be the first or, preferably, the second word in the sentence.

The word can be where it is to give a certain effect.

(vi) What, one wonders, is meant by “no insuperable impossibility”? (p. 363) If a thing is an impossibility, there is no necessity to say that it is insuperable; if it is not insuperable, then it cannot be an impossibility. What the author meant was either “no apparently insuperable impossibility” or “no insuperable difficulty”.

“insuperable impossibility” gives a single idea, something that is impossible and therefore insuperable; it is not meant that there are impossibilities that are not insuperable.

(vii) On p. 352, line 5, “verily evidently” is a misprint for “very evidently”.

These are, however, flaws of little importance. More serious is the claim, put forward on p. 321 that Spenser, Tennyson and Swinburne were great geniuses. It would be nearer the truth to say that they were poets whose technical ability was considerable.

New and strange opinions! “My opinion” would be preferable to “the truth”.

And in a treatise on metre, one hardly expects to find the following:

(i) “The way was long, the wind was cold” is referred to as iambic pentameter! (p. 324)

The “pentameter” is evidently a slip of the pen; it should be “iambic verse”.

(ii) We are told (p. 338) that the correct way to read the first line of the Aeneid is to place a stress on que.

That is obviously a misprint, quite as obvious as the “verily evidently”. The stress mark should be omitted.

(iii) In a detailed scanning of the speech beginning “The lunatic, the lover and the poet” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the lines is quoted as

And as imagination bodies forth.

In all the editions of Shakespeare your reviewer has consulted, this line runs

And, as imagination bodies forth.

In the second form, it is clear that And, followed by a comma, must be stressed: the line then has 5 stresses; therefore is regular. But its irregularity (without the comma and hence with only 4 stresses) is pointed out by our author. (p. 326)

Even with the comma (is it Shakespeare’s?) it is an accentual inflexion that I should put on “and” not a stress.

(iv) On p. 333, we find the following accentuations: narrâtive; contemplâtive, incarnâte, swîft, abstrâct. These are wrong; except the last, if it is a verb.

The signs do not indicate accentuations, but natural long quantities. Accentually these “a”s are short because unaccented, but in quantitative reckoning they should recover their native value. The second “a” in “abstract” is a short vowel, but the 4 consonants of the syllable can be taken as giving it quantitative force.

Moreover, when producing examples from prose to show that accent, stress and quantity do fall on the same syllables, and that therefore English “preserves the natural sound values”, (p. 341), it might appear to some readers that the author is out-Jourdaining Monsieur Jourdain.

Why? The idea that English prose is capable of scansion is not at all new or absurd.

Nor is he quite certain whether poetic composition is conscious or unconscious (p. 348 and ff.)

Psychologically it is both, or let us say, partly conscious and partly subconscious.

and he sometimes mars the utility of his criticism by taking refuge in such phrases as “the rhythmic rendering of significance” (p. 360) and “the native utterance of things seen” which “conveys by significant sound its natural atmosphere.” (p. 328)

Why? These are not phrases in which I took refuge, but express a recognised fact, both psychological and practical, of poetic technique. Is it denied that either in music or word-music sound can convey significance or reproduce the natural atmosphere of a thing seen? This is a constant experience of a sensitive reader of poetry.

The book is intended to show the possibility of writing in a metre that will “read as if it were a born English rhythm, not a naturalised alien.” (p. 363) The words that give the clue to the result, are, one feels, the words as if. Quantitative Verse, except what is written in Sprung Rhythm, will always masquerade in English as if it were in everyday garb: it will always be meretricious.

“As if” here refers to the fact that the hexameter is in origin an importation from Greek and Latin, but it must not read as such, it must not sound like a naturalised alien music; it must have a native English sound and for that it must follow the native rhythm of the English tongue. If it sounds “meretricious” the condition has not been satisfied. “As if” does not mean that it must be a false metre pretending to be a native one. The hexameter has not to pretend to be in everyday garb, for it is admittedly a new dress, but it has to fit perfectly the body of the English language. It may use the Sprung Rhythm which is also not an everyday garb, but a dress novel, reinvented and artistically fashioned. It seems to me that “meretricious” here means simply new and unfamiliar and therefore felt by the conservative mind to be foreign and artificial, just as blank verse first sounds when it is first brought into a language accustomed to rhymes; after a while it becomes quite natural, native, to the manner born – as has happened in French, in Bengali and other tongues.

Is this book, then, one of which “love’s labour’s lost” must be said? By no means. There is in it a great deal of illuminating criticism on Longfellow, Clough and Kingsley. There are some extremely wise remarks on poetry, of which these are samples:

It is evident that a crowding or sparseness of consonants will make a great difference to the total rhythm, it will produce a greater or less heaviness or lightness; but that is a rhythmic effect quite distinct from any imperative influence on the metre. (p. 339)

A great deal of free verse is nothing but prose cut up into lines to make it look like verse. (p. 348)

And one must admire the generous “expense of spirit” that went to the writing of On Quantitative Metre, and acknowledge that Sri Aurobindo’s poems are far more than mere illustrations of a poetic theory.

In spite of being written in a false and artificial rhythm? Queer!

¹ In April 1943 a review of Sri Aurobindo’s On Quantitative Metre by a certain F. J. Friend-Pereira was published by the New Review of Calcutta. Sri Aurobindo jotted down some comments in the margins of a copy of the journal, and also began a reply, which he abandoned after writing a single paragraph. Here, in [A], Sri Aurobindo’s marginal comments are published, along with the relevant passages of the review. (Page references to On Quantitative Metre have been altered to agree with The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo edition.) Sri Aurobindo’s incomplete reply follows in [B].

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