The Inspiration and Art
of John Chadwik

by Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna)
(from Inspiration and effort
Studies in Literary attitude and expression)

The most famous work of the prominent philosophical writer, C.D.Broad, Mind and Its Place in Nature, is inscribed to J.A.Chadwik. Although this inscription is enough to hint to us the esteem in which, even as a young man, that student of philosophy and Mathematical Logic was held, we can never guess from it that it deserves an essay which might well be entitled Chadwick and His Place in the World.
For it is not as a philosopher or mathematical logician that he has become significant, nor was it at Cambridge that he did so.
Only after leaving Trinity College to sail to India and after throwing up a professorship at an educational institution at Lucknow he suddenly flowered into a poet of exceptional quality.
What brought about the flowering was his stay in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram of Yoga at Pondicherry.
There, after a short spell, he made one of a group of poets writing in English whom, during the 1930s, Sri Aurobindo carried with a most acute and intimate care, both analytic and constructive, towards the Ideal of a perfect mystical and spiritual expression.
As we might expect of a mind trained to careful intellectuality, Chadwick — or Arjava, as he came to be known from the name Arjavananda (meaning "Joy of straightforwardness") given him by Sri Aurobindo — did not achieve closeness to the Ideal through a lavish spontaneity whose very breath is song. A deliberate self-critical compact perfection belonged to him. Instead of taking the Kingdom of Heaven by a stormy frontal assault, he laid slow siege to it and won its treasures by patient compulsion - a victory no less complete though differing in plan and technique.
Here too is a superb energy of imagination expended not so much in a royal diffusion as in concentrated exquisiteness or magnificence. We feel, to quote the poet's own words from a sonnet, "a chaos-ending chisel-smite" in each work — a faultless statue emerges in which every line and curve has been traced by an inspired precision. Naturally, the result is less prolific — a volume of merely 327 short poems with 2 playlets in verse, published soon after their author's untimely death in 1939 - but a greater stress is brought to bear upon the understanding, a stress which produces a peculiar intensity of rapture packed with haloed mysteries, so to speak - unfamiliar twilights, symbolic enchantments, hieratic seclusions - and yet no narrowness in the ultimate revelation made: the sole difficulty lies in turning the key which throws the esoteric doors wide open into expanse on shining expanse of heights and depths.
It is an art which may be a little baffling at first, but for those who can absorb its strange atmosphere there awaits a reward often of a beauty which takes one's breath away by its magic spell or by its grave amplitudes of spirituality. The style is highly original with unexpected turns that are vividly forceful and a power of pregnant construction armed with a genius for rhythmical innovation is everywhere manifest — as in that finely as well as incisively imaged poem called Communication:

Ebbing and waning of joy, the day estranged:
Here, petalled evening droops;
Below sky-rim the petals have drifted - all is changed
To a dim listless stalk where Twilight stoops
Horizonward; and then
The black scorpion, Night, lifts claws of loneliness and loops

The zenith and all the sky
(Its venomed blackness is in the life-blood of men).
...O then, love-armed cry,

Bring with compulsive dream the moon's foreglow
Over the difficult edge
Of being, that eastward-strainig hopes may know

Lit pearl of untarryng pledge, - 
Counsel, and laughter, and undissembling eyes.
Time-tameless thought shall dredge

Wide welcome for the glimpsed sail of moonrise,
The ship of understanding and conjoined wills,
The keel of trust from far-off friendly skies.

Remarkable as this poem is, with its subtle variations of tempo and appositely manipulated expressive drive which promise a capacity for effective blank verse if ever the poet were to be inspired in that direction, Chadwick's most majestic work seems to be those flights where bursts upon the gaze an imaginative colour widening every moment into some "objective correlative" of high philosophy charged with the profoundest spiritual illumination. A striking instance is Moksha:

As one who saunters on the seabanks in a wilderness of day
Is dazzled by the sunshot marge and rippling counterchange
Of wavebeams and an eagerhood of quivering wings that range -
Grey on the sky's rim, - white on the foam-pathway, -
Each man is wildered myriadly by outsight and surface tone
Engirdling soul with clamour, by this fragmentary mood,
This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude
Of Truth's abidingness, Self-Blissful and Alone.

But when eastward-streaming shadows bring the hush of eventide
The wave-lapped sun can wield again his glory of hencegoing
And furnish by his lowlihead vast dreams of heaven-knowing -
A golden wave-way to the One where Beauty's archetypes abide.

One can see how deftly the fourteener can be modulated by a hand conscious of the possibility it offers of many internal tones — swirl and stream and surge playing significant roles within the cumulative dignity of the whole movement. The two alexandrines in the above quotation are very suggestive also - the fourth line with its truncated firsts foot and its inverted accent in the fourth produces by the resultant emphasis on "grey" and "white" just the changeful bewildering effect which is sought to be conveyed by the sense of the stanza; while the eighth line, marking a contrast to the three longer ones preceding it, is eloquent of the self-compactness and isolation attributed therein to Truth. In a similar way the comparative lengthening out of the finale seems to indicate the triumphant roll of the meaning like a lustrous billow towards some immutable mystery beyond the mind's horizon. All the three stanzas are consummately inspired art, and no greater praise is possible than that the middle - particularly in its second half - might well be one of the supreme moments of the Upanishads, a Mantra.
The large and lofty utterance met with in the major Upanishads, carrying with it an echo of some rhythm infinitely vibrating out of a stupendous Unknowable, is indeed a rara avis in the atmosphere of the English language. Hardly any recent poet of the British Isles writing with a marked mystical penchant shows even a glimmer of it. AE has filled his verse with a wonderful simplicity of soul-vision; Yeats of the earlier phase brings a poignancy dipped in secret wells of faery colour and, when the later masterful will is at play, there is the "gold mosaic" of "God's holy fire" and the cry to be gathered into "the artifice of eternity"; Kathleen Raine now and then gives her song a crystalline touch of inward meditation in which yet the pulse both of the elements and of the human heart finds a richer rhythm. Among the less known poets there are James Cousins and Joyce Chadwick, gravely or delicately articulate in their intimacy with Light. But the best work of all these, whatever its aesthetic perfection, falls short of the eagle-height of spiritual quality. Not the substance by itself confers that pure zenith; what is necessary is a profound intonation vitally one with substance and language, and John Chadwick at his finest reflects something of this triple intensity because his English mind has more consistently steeped itself in Yoga and caught a breath from what we may call the luminous spaces of Sri Aurobindo's inner life.
If we wish to find among English-writing poets a match to that pair of lines ending with the full yet far-away gong of the word "alone" we shall have to pick out from Wordsworth his noblest music. Curiously enough the verses that equal them are just the two that also end with the same word's long rounded o and belly-like consonance - the lines on Newton's face in the bust at Cambridge:

The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

And here it may be significant to mention that the terminal "alone" is not confined to Wordsworth's and Chadwick's Upanishadic pictures. It seems to have some innate affinity with the peak utterance of the Spirit, for it crowns too one of Sri Aurobindo's own poetic masterpieces, a passage visioning the very state hinted by Chadwick:

Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.

To continue with Chadwick: he is not only a spiritual poet but an occult one. And in his occult sensibility too he strikes a new note. His Unicorn —

Unicorn uncreated,
Time may grow tired, not you!
For changes of rhythm are dated
By the clang of your topaz shoe —

and his Phoenix —

Tranquil the phoenix poise of golden-crested
Fleece-white and sorrowless
Head of the undefeated vision who had nested
Where on Time's moments looms the Everlivingness —

are neither of them merely traditional figures; they are a fresh contribution to symbolic sight. The white Unicorn with is single pointed projection on the head seems to be a symbol of purity and of faithfulness to a spiritual purpose, while the golden yellow of the topaz is emblematic of some spiritual principle behind manifested life in the recurrences as well as the variations of Time's movement. The Phoenix appears to stand for a power of some solar altitude of divine Truth, a power missioned to renew in the heart of Time the flame of aspiration towards the unquenchable and imperturbable luminosity above that has to be caught and intimately felt in Time's flux. But the achievement of Chadwick's symbolic poetry is the living body the spiritual-occult significances acquire in a verse where vision, word and rhythm are organically knit together. It is this that constitutes the revelatory originality of his symbolism.
Symbolic sight again, blending now the outer scene with an inner occult-spiritual lucidity of shape and significance, casts its spell on us in that short piece called Unveering Light:

Across unmoving lake
A mirror-theme
Of swans with white wings take
Their endless dream.

Poise-perfect is the set
Of lunar-bright
Pinions of trance where silence met
Unveering light.

The swan is an old symbol of the human soul as a representative of the immaculate Eternal, but here it is given a specially revelatory attitude. The compound adjective "lunar-bright" immediately refers our imagination from the embodied soul to some Beyond of sheer Bliss. And the relationship indicated between the bird and the lake suggests a unison between the soul and environing nature. Here is a double reception of the transcendent beauty and purity - the soul realising its divine origin not only by an in-look towards the heavenly height but also by an out-look upon the natural elements amongst which
it lives with the ideal of progressively manifesting the supreme light in the changeful character of earth's limited existence. That existence is here glimpsed in a transformed moment of tranquillity and made one in substance as it were with the soul's vision of its own enraptured being - and the whole double identity is caught by the poet's eye in a tranced inner dimension where the perfection that is to be accomplished in Time waits full-formed in an immutable Nunc Stans, an ever-standing Now of Eternity.
In the pure occult also, as distinguished from the spiritual or the spiritual-occult - the pure occult of the mid-worlds behind us where a whole vast life of subjective-objective motifs, beautiful or bewildering, fantastic or formidable, proceeds on its way, pulling various strings of our own psychology - there too Chadwick captures a new note. Sri Aurobindo has contrasted Walter de la Mare's Listners with Chadwick's Totalitarian, not as a disclosure of the spiritual with that of the occult but rather as the occult's superficial glimpse with its profound sight. De la Mare's is a poem of fanciful hauntedness, enveloping earthly objects with a faint ghostly atmosphere - Chadwick's carries a direct focussing of realities clean beyond earth, a vivid vision powerfully evocative of the sheer occult. Not only do the actions described have entirely different gestures: the very sceneries differ though apparently similar. 
Take de la Mare's

...the faint moonbeams on the dark stair
That goes down to the empty hall

and

...the dark turf 'neath the starred and leafy sky.

Delicately imitative, this, of an occult landscape, but how stark and realistic a projection of some "terrible elsewhere" are Chadwick's

...the empty eerie courtyard
With no name

or

...a crescent moon swung wanly
White as curd.

And, as the poems proceed, de la Mare goes on increasing his exquisite ghostliness with strange movements whose meaning is elusive, while Chadwick presses home to a weirdly dynamic symbol of a soul-attitude struck by the human in accord with some drama of hell's tyranny and murderous monotony. Here is de la Mare's ending:

Never the least stir made the listners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward
When the plunging hoofs were gone —

and this is the way Chadwick recounts how his "traveller", feeling frantic after having flashed his single sword-blade in a night where none resisted,

Hurled his weapon through the gloaming
Took no aim;
Saw his likenesses around him
Do the same:
Viewed a thousand swordless figures
Like his own —
Then first knew in that cold starlight
Hell, alone.

De la Mare's poetry is undeniably fine in a daintily phantasmal vein, but it is ever so far from Chadwick's dreadful revelation of an occult depth reaching its climax with the gripping resonance once more of that predicative epithet about whose poetic suggestiveness we have already remarked.
Perhaps something of this kind of dreadful revelation dealing with the soul's own recesses is to be found in a few verses of that eccentric little genius Emily Dickinson, where she emphasises the individual's solitary confrontation of himself in some spectral profundity of consciousness. She lacks Chadwick's direct occult sight and consummate symbolic art, but she has an occult feel by means of an inward-straining thought and a terse elliptic style adding to the psychological eeriness:

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

Far safer of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than in interior confronting
That whiter host.

Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place...

Even when a scene of external earth-nature is clearly recognisable, Chadwick always throws a visionary hue upon it, calling up immediately a soul-reality: as in that atmospheric snatch, half Yeatsian half de la Maresque —

Drowsy pinions whitely winging
Smoulder dimly past the strand —

or in those lines that end with a most sensitive vibration from the depths of the Godward-turned psyche —

...the eve
Has limned a trance upon the air,
A swirl of sunset on the stream,
An ecstasy of quivering bells that seem
Born from the heart of prayer.

But Chadwick is not only depth-suggestive; he has many moments that burst upon us with amplitude and power. Instead of a sensitive psychic vibration, indirect in its description of the physical stars twinkling as though tinkling, he can look straight at the constellated firmament and give us an in-feeling of it in a line where the entirely monosyllabic pentameter with its various dispositions of similar or dissimilar vowels and consonants and with its meaningful massings of stress makes a most effective conjuration:

You stars that span with strength long leagues of space.

Or else, with less direct power but equally direct communication of a vast experience-value, we have the same starry phenomenon:

To gaze and gaze upon the fire-strewn sky
Until the hush of heaven loom within.

Here there is a breath of what Sri Aurobindo has called "overhead" rhythm. This rhythm, winging down as if from some boundlessness above the brain-clamped mind, tends in Chadwick to touch at times the very summit. And the Upanishadic magnificence of a poetic gesture like the following apostrophe to the transcendent divine Force which he visions as drawing the quintessence of a triple Absolute of Being, Consciousness, Delight, and reigning from on high over the mental plane like a Sun-kingdom of Knowledge, is, like those verses about Truth's solitude that is perfectly withdrawn from the mind's "fragmentary mood", the most memorable of Chadwick's poetic victories:

Unsullied wisdom of gold which was thrice refined,
Shine in the clear space of holy noon
On all the upland hollows of the mind:
May every shadow-harbouring thought be strewn
With solar vastness and compelled
To feel all fear and all self-limits quelled.

Of course, the fact that a poet seizes or at least neighbours the Mantra does not mean that he is so filled with a supreme spirituality that he can never drop to a lower level of utterance. Neither must we expect all his speech on that level to be one tissue of originality. In Chadwick we may trace, except when he is at his best, certain general influences from poets preceding or contemporary. The Nature-poems, startlingly fresh though they are as a whole, share in details the vocabulary of Edmund Blunden's inspired pastoralism enamoured of the English countryside. The magic vision within many verses casts our mind back to Yeats's Celticism and here and there is a drift of dreamy fancifulness not very far removed from de la Mare. Even on some occasion the colouring shows a touch of the minutely marking as well as luxurious painter eye of the young Tennyson, and not infrequently the phrasing bears an aspect of traditional poeticism from Spencer down to William Watson, which especially the rebellious modernist ear may dub wearying. In a semi-modernist manner we get at a few moments an affinity to Gerard Manley Hopkins. But if we look deeper and hear more intently we realise that in the echo-semblances themselves a novel genius runs to create a general pattern of mind which is sheer Chadwick and that an artistic flair lends by vigorous compactness or airy suggestiveness originality even of language to the ensemble and makes almost every stanza if not every line sparkle in at least one place with pure dew on whatever petals may have grown from the past or have reflected contemporary burgeonings. This should restrain the critic from pronouncing anything to be stale or even merely traditional.
Further, we must remember that Chadwick is not confined to old forms of verse. He is perfectly aware of recent tendencies and can exploit the possibilities of new forms without losing the true poetic quality. Thus he has several experiments in free verse, each an artistic success, and at times he not only works out the substance revelatorily in faultless language and rhythm but also brings super depth and energy:

A green-grey twilight hush in the ageless forest,
After the immense canopy of boughs
Has strained all glare and vivid colours from the sunlight.
Plinths of tree and stems of giant creeper rise up from the floor of dimness
To the full height of these grey spaces
In a cathedral calm.
A plashy thud of some hard-rinded fruit 
Ripples momently the tapestries of hush.

The greyness and the quiet are over all, a many-fathomed covering of ocean mystery.
The turbulence of harsh atomic being,
Those hard and garish colours of the upper day
Are no more;
And only a faint dissolving line, a bubble's membrane holds
Frontiers of existence and not-being.

We may apply to this the remarks made by Sri Aurobindo about another splendid performance in free verse: "Its rhythmic achievement solves entirely the problem of free verse. The object of free verse is to find a rhythm in which one can dispense with rhyme and the limitations of a fixed metre and yet have a poetic rhythm, not either a flat or an elevated prose rhythm cut up into lengths. I think this poem shows how it can be done. There is a true poetic rhythm, even a metrical beat, but without any fixity, pliant and varying with the curve or sweep of the thought and carrying admirably its perfect poetic expression."
We may also note here, in passing, the phrases: "a plashy thud" and " a bubble's membrane."
They do not sound quite poetic in the old style of verse-writing. But they are entirely in place not merely in free verse but also in the type of work turned out by Chadwick in all forms, and they constantly mix a sort of modernism with his usual avoidance of the modernist degradation of poetry. They are intrinsic to his aim, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out at the very commencement of Chadwick's poetic career when an objection was raised by a reader to the use of the phrase: "bobbing globelets".
Sri Aurobindo wrote: "I entirely dispute the legitimacy of the comment. It is based on a conventional objection to undignified and therefore presumably unpoetic words and images - an objection which has value only when the effect is uncouth or trivial, but cannot be accepted otherwise as a valid rule. Obviously, it might be difficult to bring in 'bobbing' in an epic or other high style, although I suppose Milton would have managed it and one remembers the famous controversy about Hugo's 'mouchoir'.
But in poetry of a mystic (occult or spiritual) kind this does not count. The aim is to bring up a vivid suggestion of the thing seen and some significance of the form, movement etc. through which one can get at the life behind and its meaning; the adjective here serves its purpose very well as a touch in the picture and no other could have been as true and living or given so well the precise movement needed."
Modern-sounding or traditional-seeming, Chadwick's artistic technique is nearly always flawless, and it is original by more than a living sense of word-value and rhythm-value reinforcing thought and vision: there is the originality of the thought and the vision themselves. And this originality is of a rare order by being mysticism which is not merely intellectual or emotional but comes of a genuine intuitive hold on hidden domains. Even when the symbols chosen are hold ones, verging on the well-worn, he can transmute everything into a masterpiece. Who has not heard of the shell that brings from its whorl the long boom of breakers? And has not Swinburne familiarised us to easy enthusiasms like "the sea, my mother", and "my mother the sea"? But take now Chadwick's:

Out of an infinite ocean
Time arose;
By his shore with a thunderous motion
That Splendour flows.

Here is one shell of its bringing,
Cast on the beach;
Hold it and hark to the singing, —
Eternity speech.

Flotsam and jetsam of Onehood
Unbaffled and free,
Spurring Time to remember his sonhood,
His mother — the Sea.

With masterful ease the whole depth of the poetic significance of sea-born land and stray sea-cast shell is plumbed and a power of mystical sight creates a little marvel of profound word and rhythm out of what may seem almost nursery-rhyme properties. In view of this power, whether exercised with striking novelty or within a known symbology, Chadwick's art in even its most traditional appearance must be distinguished as a new element at play in poetic literature, a pioneering triumph of one kind in what Sri Aurobindo has designated as "Future Poetry". And this triumph which springs from a heart of spiritual feeling attuned to an inmost Presence never so permanent and piercing in any English poet and approached in intensity by perhaps none else than Shelley and AE, is not a matter of a few isolated poems. In piece after piece that Presence makes Chadwick an expert discloser of mystical soundscapes. We should hardly exaggerate in saying that it leads his poetry to overtop in sustained quality the production of all his English contemporaries and to hold a promise of greatness rendering his premature death a tragedy whose true significance can be adequately uttered only by a fineness of word comparable to his own, whether the fineness quickens, the imagination by a sober felicity as in

Boles of strength with that whisper of blessing,

or by a rhapsodical beauty as in

Lustrously pale like the starlight when the air has been
washed by the rain,

or with a happy audacity as in

Gleam and bend cloud-centaurs from afar
Moon-bow that is aiming, silver taut,
Arrows made of silence at a star,

or with a vividly strange suggestiveness —

Only a moon-pale ledge of rock,
Lapped by that sullen waste
Of Limbo-drift where a shadowy flok
Of dream-birds spaced
In the unquiet wideness of their lonelihood
Are as that sky-line aimlessly empty of good —

or with an exceedingly exquisite "moon-prompted" aspiration —

Power and immaculate Glory
Whom outward eyes may greet -
In this hour might the inward quicken,
Cloudlessly meet
Mother and Beauty Divine —

or with an august intuitiveness coupled with an inmost poignancy, setting Shiva before us —

Aimless yet knowing each goal, -
As unfrontiered Space
Moves not at all,
But centres in each place
One instant effortless control;
Or as the pity finds Thy face
When on Thy shrine the tears and bel-leaves fall,

or with profound ingenuity of "counterchanged" sense-perceptions spiritualised —

Timid clamour-pomps we see
Whose mingled sound
Leave naked yet the limbs of earthly faring:
While all around
The undraped silences go Selfward, wearing
Form's ecstasy —

or with a powerful insight symbolling the seer-trance by a "rock-hewn cavern" open to unrealised spiritual possibilities —

So sleep the strong and keep their guarded peace,
Whilst gracious dreams from aisles of future Time
Lean past the bars of Being, whisper their secret word,
Yearn to be made rock...Inlapidate Sublime —

or with a fusion of almost all the varieties exemplified above of poetic imaged speech in a grand attitude of keenly felt self-dedication to the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo:

Precarious boat that brought me to this strand
Shall feed flame-pinnacles from stem to stern,
Till not one rib my backward glance can find -
Down to the very keelson they shall burn.

Now to the unreal sea-line I would no more yearn;
Fain to touch with feet an unimagined land...
The gates of false glamour have closed behind;
There is no return.