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<p class="paracenter">
<b>APPENDIX </b>
</p>
<br>
<p class="para">
<br>
<p class="paracenter">
<b>WORDSWORTH</b>
</p>
<p class="paracenter"></p>
<p class="para"> 
I did not come to appreciate the poetry of Wordsworth in my school days, it 
happened in college, and to a large extent thanks to Professor Manmohan Ghose. 
In our school days, the mind and heart of Bengali students were saturated with 
the poetry of Tagore:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">In the bower of my youth the love-bird sings,
	</p>
	<p class="para">Wake up, O darling, wake; 
	</p>
	<p class="para">Opening 
thy lids lazy with love, </p>
	<p class="para">Wake up, O darling, wake...
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
This poetry belongs to the type once characterised as follows by our humorous 
novelist Prabhat Mukherji through one of his characters, a <i>s&#257;dhu,</i> 
describing the charms of the Divine Name:<i> </i>
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">It has the sweetness and the sugar
	</p>
	<p class="para">of
	<i>sandesh </i>and <i>rasogulla.</i></p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
It is needless to say that to young hearts enraptured by such language and 
feeling, Wordsworth's
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray!
	</p>
	<p class="para">And when I crossed the wild, 
	</p>
	<p class="para">I chanced to see at 
break of day </p>
	<p class="para">The solitary child...
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
Page-95</p>
<hr>
<br>
<p class="para">would appear rather dull and dreary, tasteless almost.
</p>
<br>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
Let me in this connection tell you a story. We were then in college. The 
Swadeshi movement was in full flood, carrying everything before it. We the young 
generation of students had been swept off our feet. One day, an elder among us 
whom I used to consider personally as my friend, philosopher and guide, happened 
to pass a remark which rather made me lose my bearings a little. He was listing 
the misdeeds of the British in India. &quot;This nation of shopkeepers!&quot; he was 
saying, &quot;There is no end to their trickeries to cheat us. Take, for instance, 
this question of education. The system they have set up with the high-sounding 
title of &quot;University&quot; and &quot;the advancement of learning&quot; is nothing more than a 
machine for creating a band of inexpensive clerks and slaves to serve them. They 
have been throwing dust into our eyes by easily passing off useless Brummagem 
ware with the label of the real thing. One such eminently useless stuff is their 
poet Wordsworth, whom they have tried to foist on our young boys to their 
immense detriment.&quot; This remark was no doubt a testimony to his inordinate love 
of country. But it remains to be seen how far it would bear scrutiny, as being 
based on truth.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
For us in India, especially to Bengalis, the first and foremost obstacle to 
accepting Wordsworth as a poet would be his simple, artless and homely manner:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">Behold her single in the field
	</p>
	<p class="para">Yon solitary Highland lass.
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
Page-96</p>
<hr>
<br>
<p class="para">And, as a classic instance of that famous homely diction, the line that follows:
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
Can anyone tell me what she sings?
</p>
<br>
<p class="para">Who would be moved by lines such as these?
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
On the gates of entry to the poetic world of Wordsworth is engraved this motto:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para"> 
The Gods approve </p>
	<p class="para">The depth and not the tumult of the soul.
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
It is as if the hermitage of old, an abode of peace and quiet, <i>
&#347;&#257;nta-ras&#257;spadam-&#257;&#347;ramam-idam. 
</i>All here is calm and unhurried, simple and natural and transparent, there is 
no muddy current of tempestuous upheavals. That is why the poet feels in his 
heart as if he were</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para"> 
quiet as a nun </p>
	<p class="para">Breathless in adoration,
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">or else
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">The winds come to me from the fields of sleep.
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Here is an easy, natural, limpid flow, undisturbed in its movement and yet with 
a pleasant charm and filled with an underlying sweetness. But perhaps one has to 
listen intently to get at the sweetness and beauty of such lines. They do not 
strike the outer ear for they set up no eddies there; the inner hearing is their 
base.
</p>
<br><p class="para">
Page-97</p>
<hr>
<br>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">She was a Phantom of Delight
	</p>
	<p class="para">When first she gleamed upon my sight:
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Is this not a silent opening of the divine gates of vision?
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">Ethereal minstrel, pilgrim of the sky.
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Do not these words bear us far away on some unknown wings?
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
Tranquillity and a pleasant sweetness are then the first doors of entry. Through 
the second doors we come to a wide intimacy, an all-pervading unity, where man 
and nature have fused into one. This unity and universality breathe through and 
inspire such simple yet startling words:
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
I wandered lonely as a cloud
</p>
<p class="para"> 
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
</p>
<br>
<p class="para">Or,
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">And beauty born of murmuring sound 
	</p>
	<p class="para">Shall pass into her face;
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Or else, this easy and natural yet deep-serious utterance carrying the burden of 
a <i>mantra:</i>
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
Once we cross beyond these second gates we reach an inner region, a secluded 
apartment of the soul where
</p>
<br><p class="para">
Page-98</p>
<hr>
<br>
<p class="para">poetry assumes the garb of magic, a transcendent skill leads to words the 
supernatural beauty and grace of a magician's art. How often we have read these 
lines and heard them repeated and yet they have not grown stale:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">A voice so thrilling never was heard...
	</p>
	<p class="para">Breaking the silence of the seas 
	</p>
	<p class="para">Among 
the farthest Hebrides </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">Or,
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea
	</p>
	<p class="para">Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd 
horn. </p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
This magic has no parallel, except perhaps in Shakespeare's
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para"> 
Daffodils,
</p>
	<p class="para">That come before the swallow dares, and take
	</p>
	<p class="para">The winds of March with beauty; 
violets, dim </p>
	<p class="para">(The Winter's Tale, Act IV, Scene 4)
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para"> 
Sri Aurobindo has referred to another point of greatness in Wordsworth, where 
the poetic mind has soared still higher, opening itself not merely to an 
intimacy but to the voice of a highest infinity:
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">The marble index of a mind for ever</p>
	<p class="para">Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, 
alone </p>
	<p class="para"> 
(Prelude, III. II, 62-63)
</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
Page-99</p>
<hr>
<br>
<p class="para">Thus, with this poet we gain admittance to the very heart, the innermost 
sanctuary of poetry where we fully realise what our old Indian critics had laid 
down as their final verdict, namely, that the poetic delight is akin to the 
Delight of Brahman.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
But even the moon has its spots, and in Wordsworth the spots are of a fairly 
considerable magnitude. Manmohan Ghose too had mentioned to us these defects. 
Much of Wordsworth is didactic and rhetoric, that is, of the nature of 
preaching, hence prosaic and non-poetical although couched in verse. Ghose used 
to say that even the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality which is so 
universally admired is mainly didactic and is by and large rhetoric, with very 
little real poetry in it. I must confess however that to me personally, some of 
its passages have a particular charm, like
</p>
<br>
<p class="para">Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting:
</p>
<p class="para"> 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
</p>
<p class="para"> 
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
</p>
<p class="para"> 
And cometh from afar...
</p>
<p class="para"> 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come...
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
Atul Gupta had seen perhaps only the adverse side of Wordsworth. He had marked 
the heavy hand of the logician, <i>sth&#363;la-hast&#257;valepa, </i>
but omitted to see the delicate workmanship of the artist. But a man's true 
quality has to be judged by his best performance, and the best work of 
Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order.</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of
</p>
<br><p class="para">
Page-100</p>
<hr>
<br>
<p class="para">Wordsworth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed 
even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself 
has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of 
the poet.
</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">Breaking the silence of the seas
	</p>
	<p class="para">Among the farthest Hebrides,
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">or else,
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
Or hear old Triton blow his wrèathed horn
</p>
<br>
<p class="para">are indeed the highest peaks of English poetry.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 
Sri Aurobindo has said that Vyasa is the most masculine of poets. Echoing his 
words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This 
classification of poets into &quot;masculine&quot; and &quot;feminine&quot; was made by the poet 
Coleridge. &quot;Masculine&quot; means in the first place, shorn of ornament, whereas the 
&quot;feminine&quot; loves ornament. Secondly, the masculine has intellectuality and the 
feminine emotionalism. Then again, femininity is sweetness and charm, 
masculinity implies hard restraint; the feminine has movement, like the flow of 
a stream, the play of melody, while the masculine has immobility, like the 
stillness of sculpture, the stability of a rock. This is the difference between 
the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and Valmiki. This 
too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always 
been recognised
</p>
<br><p class="para">
Page-101</p>
<hr>
<br>
<p class="para">for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet,<i> 
&#257;di-kavi. </i>In 
the Mahabharata we appreciate not so much the beauty of poetic 
form 
as a treasury of 
knowledge, 
on polity and ethics, culture and spirituality. We consider the Gita primarily 
as a work of philosophy, not of poetry. In the same way, Wordsworth has not been 
able to capture the mind and heart of India or Bengal as Shelley has done. In 
order truly to appreciate Wordsworth's poetry, one must be something of a 
meditative ascetic, 
<i>dhy</i><i>&#257;n&#299;, 
tapasv&#299;</i>,
indeed,</p>
<blockquote>
	<p class="para">Quiet as a nun
	</p>
	<p class="para">Breathless in adoration...
	</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="para">
<i>(Translated by Sanat K. Banerji from the original Bengali)</i>
</p>
<br><p class="para">
Page-102</p>
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