Thanks thanks to thee,
My worthy friend,
For the lesson though has taught.
Thus in the flaming forge of life,
Our fortunes must be wrought.
And upon its sounding anvil shaped,
Each burning deed and thought.'
The nursery rhymes which we learnt in the first two years in school liberated us into a fairyland of chiming music and flowers. It is in verse that the imagination learns its first steps. Reading and hearing the nursery-rhymes, indeed, we went round the entire clock-face of the emotions'at least of the emotions possible to a child. We were merry with Old King Cole, excited with Little Miss Muffet, distraught with Old Woman who lived in a shoe.
The classical distinction between poetry and verse is not the exclusive privilege of high and mighty literature alone. I am of the view that we can make a distinction between poetry and verse even in regard to nursery rhymes While Little Miss Muffet is indubitably verse and Little Jack Horner (though rich in character as in diet) almost indubitably so, Ride-a-Cock-Horse is poetry. Here we are in a fantastic world, a world beyond the prose of knowledge.
In poetry we are continually being reborn into new fairylands. The poet in the child is a traveller into fairyland, and if at a later stage he returns to reality, he must bring back with him fire from that heaven if he is to remain a poet. He can not be a poet of experience unless he has first been a poet of innocence. Great poetry begins as a random voyage among the blue seas of fancy, though it may end with the return of a treasure-ship laden with rich imagination into the harbours of home. To quote the beautiful words of Robert Lynd (1879-1949) in this context: 'The poet of riper years can not entirely dissociate his imaginative life from his every day experience.
He is always a commentator on life under whatever disguises. The child, on the other hand, claims complete liberty of the imagination, and can build for itself at a moment's notice a world as perfect and useless and beautiful as a soap-bubble�a world in which defiance is bidden to all the zoologists and geographers and Gods of the things that are. The child, it may be argued, is in this enjoying the pleasure of inexperience rather than rebelling against experience, and perhaps, this gives us a clue to one of the secrets of poetry. The poet must always retain a mighty sense of inexperience�of a world outside him of which he can know nothing save by guess and wonder. True poetry begins with the delighted use of this sense. It creates the mermaid, the unicorn and the fiery dragon. It peoples the vague unknown with witches on broomsticks and fairies and beasts that are kings' sons in disguise.'
Distance has no terrors for it, and we can travel over impossible spaces either in seven-league boots or by the light of a candle:
'How many miles to Babylon?'
'Three score and ten'
'Can I get there by candle-light?'
'Yes, and back again'
I can never agree with Milton (1608-1674) who in his attack on rhyme, denounced the �jingling sound of like endings�, as though they were but a child's toys that a mature world should discard and lay aside. In my view the truth is that rhyme makes even a fact doubly a fact because it makes it memorable. Memorableness, after all, is one of the eminent qualities in literature. We judge the greatness of a poet largely by his genius for writing memorable lines. Memorable lines abide in our memory and this appeal to the memory seems to be part of the appeal to the imagination.
The memory desires patterns, whether of metre or rhyme or alliteration, and the pattern in its turn excites the imagination to make new and unexpected uses of it. Thus poetry takes a double birth: that of a utilitarian father and an aesthetic mother. We see the same use of the pattern as a net for the image in the didactic poets. The Greek pot Hesiod (700 BC) was a didactic writer of verse, but in the heat of his excitement, he was exalted into an imaginative poet.
The Roman poet Lucretius (99 BC-55 BC) made his philosophy memorable by putting it into verse and in the process, his verse swelled and rose into immortal poetry that became more memorable than his philosophy. I am not literally saying that the masterpieces of Hesiod and Lucretius shaped themselves in this manner. I would however like to emphasise the fact that each of them wrote with fervour and enthusiasm with the aid of two muses�a muse of utility and a muse of inspiration.
The Roman poet Horace (65 BC-27BC) who wrote critical verse and the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) who also wrote critical and moral verse also did so, though in different degrees. Wit and wisdom, weaving themselves into a beautiful poetical pattern, marched together in their versatile verses and they speak to us today as eloquently as they did in their own time. Pope has been derided as a prosaic writer, but, if he had written only in prose, he would not be one of the most frequently quoted of English poets and authors.
It was a muse, a muse that sharpened his arrows. The epigram in Pope's verse may not necessarily be superior to the epigram in his prose, but other things being equal, it seems to stamp itself deeper and more delightfully on the memory. Lines such as:
'Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike' and 'Mistress of herself, though China fall', continued to remain clear as gold pendants in the mind when the wittiest sayings of La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) and Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) have become a little blurred in our mental screen.
The function of poetry is to make our lives more vivid, vital, vibrant, full and real. It is to make each one of us an independent hunter of facts by which we live � the facts of the world and the facts of the universe. It enables us to smoothly escape out of the make-believe existence of everyday in which perhaps an employer seems more huge and imminent than God, and to explore reality, where God and love and beauty and life and death are seen in truer proportions and where the desire of the heart is at least brought within sight of a goal.
Great poetry, like any other form of art, offers us not only an escape from life but also an escape into life, and the first escape is of relevance and importance only if it leads to the second. Another important point to be noted is that if the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they can be dismissed as mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.
The actual vital fact is that the wares of the poetic imagination are not just make-believe but reality. Even the make-believe of nursery rhymes can be viewed as a trial flight of the imagination into reality� the reality of the beauty and the wonder of things. What is imagination? It is a faculty by which not only do we see and hear things that the eye cannot see or the ear hear, but which enables the eye to see and the ear to hear things that they did not see or hear before. Anyone who scorns imagination can only be described as a blind man who deliberately and obstinately refuses or rejects the miracle of sight.
All things that make life worth living like friendship, patriotism, love of father, mother and children, love of nature, cannot exist without a sensitive imagination. In a world devoid of imagination, there will only be crass cruelty, suffocating selfishness and continuous death. Thus we can see that life without imagination will be a hopelessly mutilated life. When imagination soars higher and higher and becomes articulate in speech, and when at its loftiest moments desires to express itself in a beautiful pattern rhythmically and musically, it bursts out into great poetry. Viewed in this light, poetry is a form of supreme utterance marked by majesty of thought and loftiness of expression.
In his famous poem Out of the Candle Endlessly Rocking, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) poetically explained how his whole life was changed by hearing, as a boy, the song of a bird breaking its heart in longing for its lost mate. Whitman cried:
'Now I know what I am for,
Nevermore shall I escape, nevermore the reverberations,
Nevermore the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me.
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before
What, there, in the night
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there aroused�the fire, the sweet hell
Within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me'
Without that 'UNKNOWN WANT', there would be no poetry.
(To be contd...)
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