Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

A Craving for Thorough Perfection

"The Muse is again away" — complains Amal Kiran to Sri Aurobindo. And to invoke her grace the "method" the Master proposes is to "turn upward and inward". — Editors

The Muse is again away and I am feeling impatient. Can't you give me some due about the direction of consciousness by which I may draw her back to me or reach out to her ? But, of course, I want the highest and I want a thorough perfection. Perhaps I am too careful and self-critical ? But that is my nature as an artist. Has it got something to do with the Muse's flight from me ? In any case, the experience of uncreativeness, the loss of the freedom of flying on the wings of inspiration, the sense of the poetic part of me caught in the mere mind and rendered vague and ineffective - all this is most unpleasant. Sometimes I fear the present lack of fluency may become a permanent defect. What method would you advise to counteract it ? Quieting the mind ? What do you do to get inspiration ?

Poetry seems to have intervals in its visits to you very often. I rather think the malady is fairly common. Dilip and Nishikanta who can write whenever they feel inclined are rare birds. I don't know about 'the direction of consciousness'. My own method is not to quiet the mind, for it is eternally quiet, but to turn upward and inward. You, I suppose, would have to quiet it first, which is not always easy. Have you tried it ?

It is precisely the people who are careful, self-critical, anxious for perfection who have interrupted visits from the Muse. Those who don't mind what they write, trusting to their genius, vigour, fluency to carry it off, are usually the abundant writers. There are exceptions, of course. 'The poetic part caught in the mere mind' is an admirable explanation of the phenomenon of interruption — it was the same with myself in the old days. Fluent poets are those

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who either do not mind if they do not always write their very best or whose minds are sufficiently poetic to make even their 'not best’ verse pass muster well. Sometimes you write things that are good enough but not your best - but both your insistence and mind - for I think it essential for you to write your best always, at least your level best - may have curbed your fluency a good deal.

The diminution of your prose was compensated by the much higher and maturer quality to which it attained afterwards It would be so, I suppose, with the poetry and a new level of consciousness once attained there might well be a new fluency So there is not much justification for the fear.

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Sri Aurobindo's Poetic Psychology and Metaphysics

In his usurpassable critical study Sri Aurobindo — the Poet Amal Kiran has dealt with several aspects of the yogi-Seer's poetic creation, particularly at places touching upon the mantric utterance as the Voice of the Future given to us by him. Savitri is a rich storehouse for an aesthetician of the spirit, a composition not easily accessible even to a trained or 'advanced’ reader. He has not only to be a master of the poetic art; he should also be in living sympathy with the soul's revelatory power of expression. Amal Kiran's labour of love is to help us enter into these esoteric domains in a growing appreciation of its methods and its techniques. The following excerpt is a typical example of this inspired undertaking of his. —Editors

OUR second group of six lines picturing Sri Aurobindo's poetic psychology and metaphysics are part of an account of Savitri's long quest for her soul's mate Satyavan. Savitri encounters various types of spiritual seekers retired from the noisy world into woods and hills. One band of them, pressing with a motionless mind beyond the confines of thought to sheer spiritual Light, comes back from there with the native word of the supreme Consciousness, the mantra such as we find in the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita:

Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech,

Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens,

Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,

They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers

In metres that reflect the moving worlds,

Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.'

This is a description of the poetic process at its highest spiritual pitch and it is itself a-thrill with the vibrations of what is spoken

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of and compasses in the closing verse the full breath of the mantra while concentrating in one brief expression the ultimate nature of the mantric utterance.

Yes, the whole subject is a special hieratic one, but the treatment of it sheds light on the nature of poetic inspiration in general. For, if the mantra is the ideal poetry, all poetry that is genuine must represent or shadow forth in its own way the mantric essence.

In our first group of six lines we listed as the divine element in all poetry the inner intuitive cast of imaginative and emotional excitement taking shape in the outer rhythmic word-gesture and word-movement and thereby creating a perfect beauty. It is the creative intuition that is now pictured as it operates on the level of a most directly spiritual poetry. In such poetry the original power channelled by the poet comes into its own, getting its fullest scope; for has not Sri Aurobindo2 the defining phrase: "A direct spiritual perception and vision called by us intuition" ?

We begin with the basic act of "intuitive knowledge" and its stirred seizures of truth that get moulded into language: the leap upon the heart of reality's significances is at the same time a leap into words answering to them. The intuitive knowledge has two sides: the revelatory rhythm and the revelatory vision. The former is a subtlety of vibration in tune with the measureless mystery of the absolute Bliss and bringing into manifestation the unknown silences: it is in the form of a "voice" which gives the secret body of the heavenly existence a vesture woven of meaningful sound — sound that follows like a wonderfully responsive clothing the ever-indrawn identity of the Supreme. And this clothing of sound, with its rhythmic ripples, is a "splendour" at the same time that it is a "voice". The simile of a garment for sound is of high import: it shows that what is heard and what is seen are a single reality. Thus our passage's transition from revelatory rhythm to revelatory vision is natural and inevitable. A cloth of gold, as it were, is the theme - and the gold is the Light of lights, the creative fire that goes forth in a million modes and materialises as the suns with which our heavens are bespangled. An elemental incandescence projecting the contents of the Inscru-

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table in symbol-shapes is at work in the ecstatic heat of poetic production. The mantra holds it in a white state, so to speak, but something of it persists everywhere, and each poet has in him the sense of a supra-intellectual illumination no less than a sense of some primal rapture which affines his heartbeat to what the old tradition designated the music of the spheres, the concord of the universal OM. With that illumination he becomes the seer of truth just as with that rapture he becomes the hearer of it — the truth concerned being the sight achieved of any aspect of reality by means of the faculty of intuition, with its thrilled flash into the depths of any part of the world through the depth of some part of one's self.

A gloss on the triple operation sketched by the lines —intuitive knowledge that is a voice, a voice that is a splendour — may be derived from four verses elsewhere in Savitri:

Even now great thoughts are here that walk alone:

Armed they have come with the infallible word

In an investiture of intuitive light

That is a sanction from the eyes of God...3

Even the cloth-symbol is present and it directly serves to merge the elements of our three lines.

With these elements unified in his consciousness, the poet at his highest raises up an art-form of flawless loveliness, a Song, in which Infinity's own self-disclosing articulation is at play: the godheads pronounce each his being's central note, his inherent name-image in which the power of his immortal creative bliss resides. The master-poet, by letting the Illimitable formulate its myriad magic of deific motion through his singing, echoes in the dominant rhythms of his poetry the primal measures of the Supreme's self-expression in the multitudinous cosmos: the metres of the starry revolutions, their set accords of majestic journey through endless space and time, are caught in his designs of long and short sounds, vowel-flows and consonant-curbs, overtones and undertones, stresses and slacks, line-units and verse-paragraphs — the macrocosmic regularities find their reflection
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in a microcosm of poetic cadences, the moving worlds make themselves felt in the harmonious words. As in our first group of verses, we have Infinity's rhythm-beats metricised. Then we have the grand finale — the last line which seems to bear in itself both qualitatively and quantitatively all the rest in quintessence:

Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.

It is a really lengthy line because of eight step-by-step monosyllables and eight intrinsically long vowels and four consecutive stresses at the start and three at the end. The slow weighty stretched movement conveys the sense of a massive flood drawn towards earth from the distance of a divine existence - the profound secrecy of the Soul. Here again, as before, we have the Soul as the source of poetry and this source is not only deep within us but also itself a great depth, holding as it were a vast concealed ocean of experience-movements in which the Divine Consciousness is hidden and in which there is an occult oneness of our individuality with the whole world. Sensation, emotion, idea are here involved or contained in a thrilled awareness focused for poetic purposes in a luminous vision which is at the same time a subtle vibration taking the form of rhythmic words.

"Sight's sound-waves": a marvellous turn condensing all that has been said before and constituting an entire system of poetics. Seeing and hearing are shown as fused faculties — yet each is given its proper role. Poetry brings the soul's vastness into our common life by means of "sound-waves" - it is a super-version of Homer's "many-rumoured ocean". But the mighty billows drive home to us a burden of sight: the ocean is not only many- rumoured, it is a also many-glimmered, many-figured. The poet's work is principally to set himself astir with the shine, the hue, the contour, the posture of things. Significances start within him as vivid pictures, imaginative conjurations, symbolic hints: through them he enjoys the subjective and the objective worlds and by them he traces the beauty and truth of things and attains to a comprehension of details, inter-relations, totalities. However, the

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poet's seeing are of such an intensity and come projected from such an ecstasy-vibrant fount that they burst upon us with a verbal declaration of their intents. Each sight has its own manifesting sound which is not just "transmissive" but "incarnative", embodying with a living intimacy and piercing directness the gleaming stuff and stir of the Soul's revelatory contact with reality.

And this sound is best compared, as by Sri Aurobindo, to waves. For, it is a sustained march with a rise and fall, its rhythms variously modulating on a basic recurrent tone and breaking upon the receptive mind and heart and sensation not only with happy spontaneities like the changing dance of spume and spray but also with powerful profundities like the sweep of unremitting rollers and persisting undercurrents and now and then a mysterious ground-swell.

We may remark how the image of the sea springs up time and again in Sri Aurobindo's poetry about the poetic phenomenon. It is particularly there when he refers to that phenomenon's highest resolution in the mystic and spiritual key. But it has a vital role elsewhere too. In the course of recounting Savitri's girlhood and its inclusion of an experience of all the arts he tells us:

Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds

And metres surging with the ocean's voice

Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature's heart

But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech

The beauty and sublimity of her forms,

The passion of her moments and her moods

Lifting the human word near to the god's.4

The unsealing of grandeurs from subtle dimensions of Nature to cast an interpretative light on the world-pageant through a rich packed poetry could very well be true of ancient epics like Valmiki's Rāmāyana and Vyasa's Mahābhārata or mediaeval ones like Kalidasa's Kumārasambhavam and Raghuvamsam. The last phrase about man's word being upraised to neighbour a divine utterance, rather than itself becoming such, is a pointer to the

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secular character of the poems concerned. This character is recognised all the more when we have a clear description of spiritual poetry, a use of the word in a different fashion and for a

different goal:

Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres

The word was used as a hieratic means

For the release of the imprisoned spirit

Into communion with its comrade gods.

Or it helped to beat out new expressive forms

Of that which labours in the heart of life,

Some immemorial Soul in men and things,

Seeker of the Unknown and the Unborn

Carrying a light from the Ineffable

To rend the veil of the last mysteries.5

Those other poems had their regard on Nature's forms, moments, moods and set free in the visible world deeper meanings, greater dynamisms that are like presences of hidden lords of Nature, living puissances that are secret cosmic agents. Now we are told of an attempt with the help of inspiration from "higher spheres" and not merely inner ones ("Nature's heart"), to liberate the soul of man, the "spirit" encased in the sensing, feeling, thinking body, and enable it to grow one with divine entities, share in the very being of secret cosmic agents. Nature's hidden lords, and even in that of transcendental powers, godheads beyond the universe and not only behind it. Further, side by side with the spirit's linkage with divinity through poetic rhythms brought straight from "above", hieratic or sacred poetry endeavours for a manifestation of divinity "below". It gets into touch with "the heart of life" where a World-Soul toils at evolution within man's physical mould and Nature's matter. Charged with the drive of this evolutionary Dreamer, it aims to infuse his idealistic dynamism into the stuff of outward existence, so that novel modes of thought and desire and perception may be realised, expressing openly through the activities of this stuff the fulfilment of the World-Soul's venture across the ages to reveal

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here and now the arcane Eternal, the masked Absolute. Yes, the poems spoken of in our earlier quotation are like the masterpieces of Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa rather than like the Vedic hymns, the Upanishadic slokas or that super- Vyasan rarity — the Gita — in the midst of the Mahābhārata. But these too, in Sri Aurobindo's imagination, have their own sound-waves of sight: through their metrical movement "the ocean's voice" is heard in them no less than in the mighty compositions that move from everlasting to everlasting in the worlds of the gods and whose imitations on earth are the Rishis' songs of "Infinity's names and deathless powers" — mighty compositions pictured by Sri Aurobindo in the last Book of Savitri:

The odes that shape the universal thought,

The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face,

The rhythms that bring the sounds of wisdom's sea.6

Large structured chants bearing the formative force of the ideas on which the cosmic plan is founded, intensely lyrical phrases capturing with visionary power the secrets of the Supreme Beauty, patterns of sustained sonorities conveying fathomless suggestions and ultimate significances that escape all defining speech - this progression of poetic elements in the supernal modes concludes deliberately on the image of wide waters. That image makes the right climax. For most in the mantra, even as mainly in every species of poetry, it is the rhythmic vibration which holds the keenest sense of the life-throb, so to speak, of the Infinite and carries the greatest potentiality of re-creating the human existence in the mould of the divine. This vibration serves as the strongest instrument to stir the deepest recesses of our being and awake in them an answer of sympathetic vision to the sight of the Eternal which in one shape or another all poetry fundamentally strives to lay bare.

Keeping "sight" and its "sound-waves" in mind we may sum up in the words of Sri Aurobindo7 our whole exposition: "Sight is the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately

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this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and word-images which become the expressive body of the vision; and the great poets are those who repeat in some measure

this ideal creation, kavayah satyasrutah, seers and hearers of the poetic truth and poetic word."

References

1. Savitri, Centenary Edition, p. 383.

2. The Future Poetry, Centenary Edition, p. 220.

3. Savitri, Centenary Edition, p. 258.

4. Savitri, p. 361.

5. Ibid., p. 360.

6. Centenary Edition, p. 677.

7. The Future Poetry, Centenary Edition, p. 30.

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