Sri Aurobindo on Yeats

I do not think I have been unduly enthusiastic over Yeats, but one must recognise his great artistry in language and verse in which he is far superior to AE—just as AE as a man and a seer was far superior to Yeats. Yeats never got a, he has not,beyond a beauti­ful mid-world of the vital antariks penetrated be­yond to spiritual-mental heights as AE did. But all the same, when one speaks of poetry, it is the poetical element to which one must give the most importance. What Yeats expressed, he ex­pressed with great poetical beauty, perfection and power and he has, besides, a creative imagination. AE had an unequal profun­dity of vision and power and range in the spiritual and psychic field. AE's thought and way of seeing and saying things is much more sympathetic to me than Yeats' who only touches a brilliant floating skirt-edge of the truth of things—but I cannot allow that to influence me when I have to judge of the poetic side of their respective achievements.... The depths of AE are greater than those of Yeats, assuredly. His suggestiveness must there­fore be profounder. In this poem which you have translated very beautifully, his power of expression, always penetrating, simple and direct, is at its best and his best can be miraculously perfect.

The perfection here of Yeats' poetic expression of things occult is due to this that at no point has the mere intellectual or thinking mind interfered—it is a piece of pure vision, a direct sense, al­most sensation of the occult, a light not of earth flowing through without anything to stop it or to change it into a product of the terrestrial mind. When one writes from pure occult vision there is this perfection and direct sense though it may be of different kinds, for the occult world of one is not that of another. But when there is the intervention of the intellectual mind in a poem this intervention may produce good lines of another power, but will not coincide in tone with what is before them or after—there is an alternation of the subtler occult and the heavier intellectual notes and the purity of vision becomes blurred by the intrusion of the earth-mind into a seeing which is beyond our earth-nature.

If the object is rather to create symbol-links between the seen and the unseen and convey the significance of the mediating figures, there is no obli­gation to avoid the aid of the intellectualising note. Only, a har­mony and fusion has to be effected between the two elements, the light and beauty of the beyond and the less remote power and interpretative force of the intellectual thought-links. Yeats does that too, very often, but he does it by bathing his thought also in the faery light; in the lines quoted 1 however, he does not do that, but leaves the images of the other world shimmering in their own native hue of mystery. There is not the same beauty and intense atmosphere when a poem is made up of alternating notes. The finest lines of these poems are those in which the other-light breaks out most fully—but there are others also which are very fine too in their quality and execution.

The Wild Swans at Coole

 

THE trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

 

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

 

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

 

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

 

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake's edge or pool

Delight men's eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

 

His Phoenix

 

There is a queen in China, or maybe it's in Spain,

And birthdays and holidays such praises can be heard

Of her unblemished lineaments, a whiteness with no stain,

That she might be that sprightly girl trodden by a bird;

And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind,

Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay

And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind:

I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

 

The young men every night applaud their Gaby's laughing eye,

And Ruth St. Denis had more charm although she had poor luck;

From nineteen hundred nine or ten, Pavlova's had the cry

And there's a player in the States who gathers up her cloak

And flings herself out of the room when Juliet would be bride

With all a woman's passion, a child's imperious way,

And there are—but no matter if there are scores beside:

I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

 

There's Margaret and Marjorie and Dorothy and Nan,

A Daphne and a Mary who live in privacy;

One's had her fill of lovers, another's had but one,

Another boasts, "I pick and choose and have but two or three.'

If head and limb have beauty and the instep's high and light

They can spread out what sail they please for all I have to say,

Be but the breakers of men's hearts or engines of delight:

I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

 

There'll be that crowd, that barbarous crowd, through all the centuries,

And who can say but some young belle may walk and talk men wild

Who is my beauty's equal, though that my heart denies,

But not the exact likeness, the simplicity of a child,

And that proud look as though she had gazed into the burning sun,

And all the shapely body no tittle gone astray.

I mourn for that most lonely thing; and yet God's will be done:

I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

 

The Fiddler of Dooney

 

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney.

Folk dance like a wave of the sea;

My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,

My brother in Mocharabuiee.

 

I passed my brother and cousin:

They read in their books of prayer;

I read in my book of songs

I bought at the Sligo fair.

 

When we come at the end of time

To Peter sitting in state,

He will smile on the three old spirits,

But call me first through the gate;

 

For the good are always the merry,

Save by an evil chance,

And the merry love the fiddle,

And the merry love to dance:

 

And when the folk there spy me,

They will all come up to me,

With 'Here is the fiddler of Dooney!'

And dance like a wave of the sea.

 

The Tower

 

What shall I do with this absurdity—

O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog's tail?

Never had I more

Excited, passionate, fantastical

Imagination, nor an ear and eye

That more expected the impossible—

No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,

Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back

And had the livelong summer day to spend.

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,

Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend

Until imagination, ear and eye,

Can be content with argument and deal

In abstract things; or be derided by

A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

 

 

I have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things

And the proud stones of Greece,

Poet's imaginings

And memories of love,

Memories of the words of women,

All those things whereof

Man makes a superhuman,

Mirror-resembling dream.

 

The Pilgrim

 

I fasted for some forty days on bread and buttermilk,

For passing round the bottle with girls in rags or silk,

In country shawl or Paris cloak, had put my wits astray,

And what's the good of women, for all that they can say

Is fol de rol de rolly O.

 

Round Lough Derg's holy island I went upon the stones,

I prayed at all the Stations upon my marrow bones,

And there I found an old man, and though, I prayed all day

And that old man beside me, nothing would he say

But fol de rol de rolly O.

 

All know that all the dead in the world about that place are stuck,

And that should mother seek her son she'd have but little luck

Because the fires of purgatory have ate their shapes away;

I swear to God I questioned them, and all they had to say

Was fol de rol de rolly O.

 

A great black ragged bird appeared when I was in the boat;

Some twenty feet from tip to tip had it stretched rightly out,

With flopping and with flapping it made a great display,

But I never stopped to question, what could the boatman say

But fol de rol de rolly O.

 

Now I am in the public-house and lean upon the wall,

So come in rags or come in silk, in cloak or country shawl,

And come with learned lovers or with what men you may,

For I can put the whole lot down, and all I have to say

Is fol de rol de rolly O.

 

In the Seven Woods

 

I HAVE heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods

Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees

Hum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away

The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness

That empty the heart.  I have forgot awhile

Tara uprooted, and new commonness

Upon the throne and crying about the streets

And hanging its paper flowers from post to post,

Because it is alone of all things happy.

I am contented, for I know that Quiet

Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart

Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,

Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs

A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee.

 

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

 

When you are Old

 

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

 

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

 

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

No Second Troy

 

Why should I blame her that she filled my days

With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done, being as she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

 

Cloths of Heaven

 

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 

Sailing to Byzantium

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees

- Those dying generations - at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.