Soul Prompted:
A Reading of Amal Kiran's Poetry
Somebody once said, and wisely was it said, that a beggar might look on a king. In addition, we have this gem from the Bard, "Now, Sir, thought is free." Encouraged by these two dicta, I have made bold to give voice to my personal observations about a very small number of Amal Kiran's poems, letting, for once, "I would" wait upon "I dare not", unlike the poor cat in the adage.
As I was leafing through The Secret Splendour, I distinctly heard certain poems calling out, "Me, me, choose me!" as if they and I had an inner affinity and they wanted to whisper their secrets into my inmost ear. So I opened my heart's closed doors to them and led them to the core of my being which they filled with their sweetness and light. Their soul spoke to mine and prompted my soul to speak.
"The Tree of Time", a sonnet with a difference, being in blank verse, reveals the ultimate reality of a true poet. 'Earth-bound, heaven amorous', Timeless bound in time, the poet here sees himself as the tree of time whose 'one sole branch is lit by eternity', this sole branch being the poet's 'song-fruitful hand'. On this branch bloom 'the deathless flowers of ecstasy'. The poet's entire existence is concentrated in these 'few fingers that trace on life's uncoloured air a burning cry from God-abysses to God-pinnacles.'
The octave, while describing the 'swaying shadow' and 'the dark depths' of the tree, focuses our attention on the sole, luminously efflorescing branch. Here we discover another truth about poets - that the poet and the man who houses the poet are two completely different beings. They must never be confused. The man may be the swaying
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shadow of the dark tree but the poet is lit by eternity. The metaphor of the tree continues throughout the octave, giving such a minute detail as the turning of the sap into flower by the Targe splendour', before spilling over into the first line of the sestet - 'the buried vast which holds me rooted' -in order to maintain the link.
The antithetical sestet looks forward to a glorious future:
the buried vast which holds me rooted
In dreamful kinship to the height of heaven
Shall wake.
Then the promise will be fulfilled, the dream become a reality and 'nectar-flame' shall course through every nerve.
This 'nectar-flame - a Force drunk with its own infini-rude' is in sharp contrast to the 'feeble brightness self-consumed in joy like the brief passions of earth', suggesting a glorious picture of supramental transformation.
As students in the Ashram School, there were many ways • we learnt to relate to poets like Amal Kiran. From the time Tehmi-ben, our peerless professor of English, introduced us to "A.E." by reading out his "Babylon" to us, this Irish poet has exercised a tremendous fascination on me. Although I was then just a callow youth, my whole being immediately thrilled 'through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient Babylon.'
Soon I learnt that I was not the only one, even before I was born "A.E." had begun to cast his spell on many an Ashramite, especially the poets of the 1930's. The 1930's mark a golden age in the life of the Ashram not only in the field of Sadhana - we hear that almost every sadhak and sadhika in the Ashram used to have rich spiritual experiences at that time - but also in the fields of poetry, painting and music. On the one hand Sri Aurobindo was either creating poets out of non-poets or inspiring inborn poets to greater endeavour, to 'faather sail' in Whitman's words; on the other, the Mother was doing the same for the painters. It was a wonder
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of wonders to find so many class poets like Amal Kiran, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, Nishikanto, Arjava, Dilip Kumar Roy, Nirodbaran; painters such as Jayantilal, Krishnalal, Nishikanto, Sanjiban, Amal Kiran; and singers like Dilip Kumar Roy, Sahana Devi, Bhishmadev Chattopadhyay, Venkatraman, all enriching with their art forms a small community of some one hundred inmates.
To come back to "A.E.", I do not think that the poet and painter, George William Russell who wrote under the penname "A.E.", was appreciated anywhere in the world as much as he was in our Ashram. "The vaporous sapphire, violet glow and silver gleam' of his spiritual experiences were perhaps too ethereal to be grasped by the average western reader but, mystic experiences being universal by nature, they were readily identified here by people engaged in spiritual pursuit.
Dilip Kumar Roy had corresponded with "A.E." and had sent him six of Amal Kiran's poems, requesting him to comment on them. Unfortunately, "A.E." was very ill at the time and not in a position to write at length. But he did pen a few lines praising Amal Kiran's poems. He spoke of their 'genuine poetic quality' and 'many fine lines' and added that they 'show a feeling for rhythm which is remarkable since the poet is not writing in his native but a learned language.'
Celtic mysticism vibrates in the lyrics of "A.E." with lines like these:
But I have touched the lips of clay.
Mother, thy rudest sod to me
Is thrilled with the fire of hidden day
And haunted by all mystery.
"A.E."s poems are mostly brief but they silence the mind and let us look into the life of things. It is this brevity that Amal Kiran stresses in his poem, "AE":
No fragile joy were those song-briefnesses:...
but laden with a breath of mysteries.
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It is interesting to note that this short eight-line lyric which Amal Kiran had begun on 21.8.1935, shortly after " A.E."'s death on July 17, he did not complete until 16.4.1992 when he added the last two lines:
Each song the tiny-seeming giant mood
Of a world aglow in a far empyrean.
"The Signature: Sri Aurobindo":
The signatures of both the Mother and Sri Aurobindo are very beautiful and significant. The Mother's signature has inspired many painters to depict it as the Bird of Fire in flight, but none before Amal Kiran dared to fathom the mysterious depths of the bold lines of Sri Aurobindo's signature and interpret their recondite beauty and bliss.
Amal Kiran finds the strength of sculpture there which he expresses as:
Sharp-hewn yet undertoned with mystery,
A brief black sign from the Incommunicable.
In this poem Amal Kiran uses a most original metaphor. The 'laughing whip-lash of love' merging into the image of the snake with its coils as well as 'straight sweep', is rife with a wealth of shimmering suggestions which escape the mind before they are caught. The 'whip-lash' is naturally followed by 'a wonder-weal holding bright secrets'.
Sri Aurobindo tells us that great poetry comes from the 'interpretative and intuitive vision'1 of the poet. I feel that while meditating on Sri Aurobindo's signature, Amal Kiran too had such an interpretative vision. Hence he could reveal the secret of the'S' in 'Sri', as
Clutching with gentle finger our dumb desire
A slanting full-bodied soar loops a firm loop
Of light...
1. SABCL, Vol 9, p. 30.
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and of the 'A' in 'Aurobindo', as
Then one curve-straightening gracefully girdled stance,
A peace and pulchritude and potency,
A slender pyramid chasing a viewless line
Within,...
and of the ultimate 'o', as
... and then the term
Of all this labour and rapture in a full sweet circle,
He says that Sri Aurobindo's signature with its final flourish is 'never a stagnant splendour' but is dynamic: '...it casts a hook... to dig and drag the dark Divine out of some heaven made hell, the Abyss that is All.' These last two lines are reminiscent of Sri Aurobindo's famous poem, "A God's Labour":
.. .Go where none have gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate.
"Pranam to the Divine Mother"
There are two ways of bowing
To you, O Splendour sweet!
One craves the boon of blessedness,
One gives the soul to your feet.
As I read these lines, my mind left today and yesterday and flew back three score years. I saw the little boy that I then was, clutching a bunch of flowers in my hand, climbing the stairs in the Meditation Hall. At the top of the steps she stood, the Sweet Splendour, clad in sari, a golden band on her forehead holding her veil in place. Smiling sweetly she took the flowers from my hand. I bent down and touching her
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beautiful, white feet gently placed my forehead on them. Oh, how tender they were! I could feel their softness on my forehead, long after I came down after receiving the Mother's blessings. I was too young then to know whether I craved the boon of blessedness or gave my soul to her feet. Most probably it was the latter as it is the case with the very young, because I do not remember asking for anything. To be able to touch her feet was its own reward and made us
quite forget
Whether our day be a richer rose,
A wealthier violet.
Sighing nostalgically, I read the next stanzas. Here Amal goes on to elaborate the craving for the boon of blessedness. It is somewhat self-centred. The touch of the Divine Mother makes us feel holy and happy, but this is a
rapturous robbery
Deaf to infinity's call
That we should leap and plunge in [Her].
The other way of bowing to the Mother is to surrender oneself completely to Her and drown one's whole life in Her vastnesses. Amal Kiran ends the poem uttering the mantra of self-surrender. "Your will alone my peace", in the manner of Dante - "E'n la sua volontate e nostra pace."
A gem of a lyric is "Purblind". The metaphor of the candle runs all through the four stanzas, at times revealing, at times concealing the beautiful beloved who has so felicitously been compared to the brief candle. Only a true poet discovers similarity in the dissimilar. And when he does discover it with the power of his intuition, o joy, what Truth unfolds itself before the reader! Like a candle, a loving woman brings light and joy in a man's life quietly sacrificing herself in the process:
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Quiet as a candle,
She burned the brief
White span of her beauty
With a golden grief.
An admirer once complimented a sculptor on the beautiful statue that he had created out of an ordinary piece of marble. The sculptor merely smiled and said, "It is no credit to me. She was already there hidden in that piece of marble. I've merely liberated her." In the same way, while we see nothing but an ordinary candle, the poet's eye has seen what is hidden in the slender white candle with its golden flame -the quintessence of womanhood, the Eternal Feminine. It is 'her wondrous flame' which enables the poet to find within himself 'secrets... of a minstrel mind'. It is 'her wondrous Flame' which glimmers
a votive dance
In [his] spirit's temple
Of lonely trance.
And yet, oh irony of ironies, in spite of possessing such magic powers of seeing, very rarely does the purblind poet see that Love is burning away its life for him!
About the "Giant Wheel" Amal Kiran's note acknowledges that it was inspired by a poem of Nishikanto. Once again we are back in the golden thirties, when the literary creation of one poet in the happy family of the Ashram used to be passed on to the others to savour. The word savour is doubly apt in the case of Nishikanto who, apart from being a poet and a painter, was known for his exceptional culinary skills. Amal Kiran's inspiration might have launched itself from Nishikanto's springboard, but the flight path that it takes, is entirely its own.
The image of the Giant Wheel is presented in the first stanza complete in all the details, but when we begin to take note of the keywords and phrases - 'One curve ethereal
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hite, one earth embrowned', 'a timeless pole fixed in each our', 'bearing its load of lives', 'the magic power/Moves in erpetual self-oblivion' and 'a cycle of desire half shade half in' - the symbolism reveals itself in all its glory. It is the giant Wheel of Prakriti, teeming with life, fixed upon a time-bound timeless pole in the cosmic Fair. The motive force is finished by the Purusha who in perfect equanimity 'looks with far eyes of calm' and 'turns the dream-mystery of gold and gray'.
In the last stanza the poet describes his yogic experience:
After the rise and fall of a myriad days,
My vision merges now with his wide gaze
And through all changing cry of colour sees
One single beauty born of deathless peace -
"Tennis with the Mother" has a special place in my heart, remember the time when the tennis courts were made ready and the Mother came to the Tennis Ground almost every afternoon to play her favourite game. I was very young then, and although myself a tennis enthusiast, I was never skilled enough to play with the Mother. But whenever I got the opportunity, I made good use of it and watched the Mother playing tennis. She was in her seventies then but insisted on using a very heavy racquet. She had a strong, steady foreland and she returned every ball that came within her reach with devastating accuracy. As it was customary in those days, he was a baseline player and her rallies lasted long. Her rower of concentration was worth observing and emulating, as did those players privileged to oppose her from across he net.
In the Indian mythology we have the story of Jaya and Vijaya, the celestial gatekeepers of lord Vishnu in Vaikunth, who were cursed by the rishi Sanaka that they would be ex-led from the Lord's presence. Later when the rishi was mollified he commuted the period of exile to either seven human births as friends of the Divine or three human births as His
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Asuric enemy, to be destroyed by Him. Jaya and Vijaya, in order to return to Vaikunth quickly, chose the latter alternative and opposed the Lord on the earthly battlefields in three incarnations as Hiranyaksha-Hiranyakashipu, Ravana-Kumbhakarna and Shishupala-Dantavaktra.
My immature mind with its fertile imagination, often wondered whether the players who opposed the Mother on the tennis court would have a quicker spiritual realisation on that count. Even now, although a part of my mature intellect ridicules that idea, another part nods gravely and thinks that there might be something in that notion. Whether they made spiritual progress or not, it is an undisputed fact that all the players who played against the Mother improved their game greatly, achieving smooth strokes, fine ball control and intense concentration.
Against this backdrop, when Amal Kiran's poem "Tennis with the Mother" appeared in Mother India in the year 1954, it is no wonder that I took a special interest in it. I had studied the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in school, so when I saw the title "Tennis with the Mother", Fitzgerald's popular lines
The ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes
spontaneously came to my mind. But as I read Amal Kiran's revelatory words
She seems but playing tennis -
The whole world is in that game! A little ball she is striking -
What is struck is a huge white flame
Leaping across time's barrier
Between God's hush, man's heart,
the facile, fatalistic philosophy of Fitzgerald, like the unsubstantial pageant that it undoubtedly was, melted into air, into thin air, leaving me to concentrate on the deep significance of the next two lines
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And while the exchange goes speeding
The two shall never part.
This yoga, this union between 'God's hush' and 'man's heart' is further strengthened by the mystic mantras of 'Love' and 'Service' - words in constant usage in tennis, which, as Amal Kiran has intuitively discovered, symbolise Bhaktiyoga and Karmayoga, the two most essential disciplines of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga.
Playing tennis with the Mother, as indeed anything that is done while concentrating on her in the deep heart's core, is sadhana par excellence - this is the great Truth, one might think, that this poem expresses. But the phrase 'huge white flame leaping across time's barrier' conveys much more, an awe inspiring vision, to the 'meeting soul'. I feel that while watching the Mother at play, Amal Kiran went into a deep trance and as his inner eye opened, he had a cosmic vision. All the boundary walls fell away and the little tennis court started widening, becoming vaster and vaster every moment. The net stretched and stretched and became 'time's barrier' separating the Eternal Mother who grew and grew until she pervaded the water, earth and sky, from her time-bound children who gamely returned the huge white flaming ball that she struck towards them. And all the while the poet dimly heard the referee intoning, among others, the mystic words 'Love' and 'Service'.
The Secret Splendour is a collection of nearly six hundred poems. A good number of them (ninety-two to be exact!), especially the ones written in the golden thirties, have had the good fortune of being read and commented upon at length by Sri Aurobindo himself. Then how can I dare to tarnish them by wrapping them in my 'more rawer breath'? Why even think of gilding the lily? While commenting on many of Amal Kiran's lines Sri Aurobindo has pinpointed their origin to the illumined Mind, touched with the Overmind! Regarding some others he has congratulated the poet by calling them "absolutely perfect"! He has even explained the apparent unintelligibility of some of Amal Kiran's
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poems by saying, "It is precisely because what you put in is not intellectualism or a product of mental imagination that your poetry is difficult to those who are accustomed to a predominantly mental strain in poetry....That is the difficulty, the crux of imaged spiritual poetry; it needs not only the fit writer but the fit audience - and that has yet to be made."
Perhaps I should conclude by saying that vis-a-vis these poems and many other poems from The Secret Splendour that came clamouring to be cuddled and appreciated, I wisely adopted Cordelia's policy: "Love and be silent."
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