Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

A New Landmark in English Poetry*

A Review-Article

SOME years ago, in a series of illuminating essays, published in the journal Arya under the title "The Future Poetry", Sri Aurobindo discussed the nature and evolution of future poetry. As the most significant poetic trend in recent times in this development he picked out the attempt to cast off the more externalised forms of poetic expression and to seek for a pure and authentic intuitive language, to bring forth the living truths of the inmost spiritual being, to reveal its light and vision, not in the inadequate speech of the surface mind but in the inspired and revelatory accent of Spirit itself. This attempt has not always been successful. In continental and English poetry it has not gone beyond a search for some inner meaning of the sensational and emotional experience and its formulation in a new kind of intuitivised expression. A few Irish and Indian poets have been able to go further and have succeeded in giving utterance to a deeper psychic and spiritual feeling and vision in a more authentically intuitive language. The secret motive-force behind all these attempts, the fundamental endeavour of the Time-Spirit, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, has been to break open the doors of our luminous inner being and to express its truth, beauty and light in its own rhythmic terms. This secret urge, however, finds its full voice in only a few (not always well- known) poets; the rest find it difficult to cast off the old habits of poetic speech and either totally fail to respond to this urge or

* This review-article was original written in 1942, soon after Mr.Sethna's small book of his poems, The Secret Splendour, was published in 1941. It was printed in the quarterly journal Triveni in its issue of March 1943. It is being reprinted in this volume with only a few minor verbal changes. Mr. Sethna has retained the same title, The Secret Splendour, for the complete edition of his Collected Poems published recently in 1993. But this review-article relates only to the earlier small book of the same title.

- Author's Note

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succeed only in making small beginnings.

All those who are acquainted with the recent poetry seeking this inward turn will not take long to find that a small book of poems lately published - The Secret Splendour by K.D. Sethna - marks a more brilliant disclosure of the unfolding spirit and a greater mastery over its native tones than what has been done before. This book is all the more remarkable because the stamp of the pure intuitive word is evident, not in a few lines or a few poems here and there but in every poem: each line of it is pregnant with a subtle, luminous, intense inspiration which seems to come from some hidden depth or height of the being.

There are several ranges of our inner self, each with its characteristic movements, forms and forces which express themselves intuitively through poetry when an opening is made to them. Broadly speaking, we can say that our inner being is composed of three parts: first, a luminous subliminal being behind each aspect of our surface personality - the inner mind, the inner vital and the subtle physical; second, an inmost psychic being or soul behind these inner parts; third, the higher planes of the spiritual consciousness posited in Yogic psychology above the mind-level. Most of the spiritual poetry so far has drawn its inspiration either from the luminous subliminal regions or from the psychic. Except in very rare cases there hardly exists any poetry derived from the spiritual planes above the mind. Poetry drawing its inspiration from these planes has been termed by Sri Aurobindo "Overhead Poetry", and its main characteristics are a language charged with a profound and vast sense of spiritual vision and experience, an intense absoluteness of expression that is sweepingly powerful yet perfectly poised, and an unfathomable rhythmic movement carrying with it overtones and undertones of luminous suggestion. To write "overhead" poetry is an extremely difficult thing, its highest pitch so difficult and rare to reach that any poet successfully bringing or bearing its authentic inspiration would be worthy of a very high status among poets and his work must be hailed as a new and momentous landmark in the history of poetic development. Though all the poems in this book are not derived from the "overhead" source, yet there are a sufficient

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number of them which unmistakably embody the "overhead" inspiration and are surcharged with its intense and unfathomable spiritual feeling, vision and vibration not yet evident in the current poetic literature. This entitles Mr. Sethna to the rare distinction of an innovator in the field of poetry. In his work we confront the splendour of a new age of poetic art.

The poet expresses his inspiration, "overhead" or otherwise, in many veins; sometimes in a strain of subtle suggestive delicacy as in:

Intangible she glimmers

Through solitary night,

A nameless moonday weaving

Her body's deathless white;

sometimes in an air of haunting exquisite mystery:

O halo of hair,

God's benediction on her mortal head,

Across my gloom ray down your tenderness!

O dream-cascade of splendour - to the quiet

Music of your faint filling I would die;

Upon heart-soothing spirit cadences

Carry me over the dread verge of time!

But his power is more characteristically revealed in lines which suggest an atmosphere surcharged with a subtle luminous wideness and intensity and an amplitude of visionary force:

The haunting rapture of the vast dream-wind

That blows, star-fragrant, from eternity,

or

The hours go drunken with a honeyed hum

Of heartbeats round immortal fragrances

In a spirit wideness sown with spirit stars,

or else,

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A light, a hush immense

Falls suddenly upon my voice of tears

Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears

The shining touch of that omnipotence.

This power reaches its height in various poems - in lines like

Your spirit in my spirit, deep in the deep,

Walled by a wizardry of shining sleep...

Make even my darkness a divine repose

One with thy nameless root, O mystic rose...

An ageless God-delight embracing all

The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind...

One of the most perfect examples of the "overhead" style sustained on the topmost peaks is Gnosis - an extraordinary poem. which has for its very theme the soar of the mystic consciousness, hushed and entranced, to those supreme heights:

No clamorous wing-waft knew the deeps of gold.

An eagle lost in earth-forgetfulness,

Rising without one stir of dreamy feather,

Life gains the Unmeasured through a flame of sleep -

A love whose heart is white Tranquillity

Upborne by vast surrender to this Sun.

Flickering no longer with the cry of clay,

The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind

Embraces there its own eternal Self-

Truth's burning core poised over the universe!

The compactness and high severity of the poet's speech is clearly noticeable in all his poems. He has a remarkable way of achieving the highest intensity by compressing not only a particular idea in a few words, but also various shades of significance in a single phrase. Mark the force of the following lines taken from different poems:

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A loneliness of superhuman night....

One ample azure brimming every thirst...

A flaming crown of godhead over life...

A force drunk with its own infinitude...

Gigantic rapture rolling from within...

Mr. Sethna seems to be essentially a spiritual seeker. His primary aim is to aspire for a contact with the Divine and not to remain satisfied with being merely a poet. To him his pursuit of poetry is justified only if it leads him further in his Godward Journey. His Ultima expresses this idea beautifully:

If each delightful cadence

Mark not a flight to Thee,

My fancy's airiest radiance

Profanes its own mute core of mystery!

The same idea takes another form in Evils:

With you unseen, what shall my song adore ?

Though waves foam-garland all the saffron shore

My music cannot mingle with their tone,

Because a purer worship I have known,

and also in Grace:

Take all my shining hours from me,

But hang upon my quiet soul's

Pale brow your dream-kiss like a gem.

Let life fall stricken to its knee,

If unto tone-faced poverty

You give your blessing's diadem.

Make of these proud eyes beggar-bowls,

But only drop your smile in them.

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The poet's approach to the Divine is through love but his love does not express itself in a profuse lyrical outburst. He prefers to express his emotion in a few significant words as he feels the utter futility of mere words:

With skill of mortal tongue how shall I phrase

A mirroring glory for her glorious face ?

Instead of indulging in "ineffectual words" he chooses to shape his love to a quiet consecration:

Needs must the soul express

Its thrilled response to her divinity ?

In silence 'twere more meet

To touch with lips of fervour those earth-sojourning feet!

It is not that the poet lacks keen susceptibility to earth's beauty -

I was a devotee of splendid hush -

Silvery moonglobe's surf-awaking sleep,

Purple precipitous lone-brooding steep

Of massive hills where wind and water rush.

But this outward beauty does not satisfy his soul because in it

Always a rapture

Remains untold,

An infinite vista

No eyes behold.

Dawn, noon, evening, night, all have a strong fascination for the poet and this he sometimes expresses in lines of extreme felicity:

How earth-strange on the ethereal way

Travels the first wing-carillon

A-tremble with the silver dawn

Ere rush of golden day;

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or,

In cloud-suspense the faint breeze died;

A deep glow spread on every side;

The firmamental hush came down,

A mirrored soul of aureate brown

Subduing each form-shade to one

Pervasive ecstasy of sun;

or,

While the vague deepening silence falls immense

On eve's dim echoes of the sunken day

Ere the cold stars emerge.

But here too his enchantment with outward beauty lures him inward to the mystery of divine beauty. Under the spell of the dawn, for example, he feels:

The heart, a hovering consciousness,

Thrills on some paradisal verge

As if awakening to merge

With beauty sorrowless.

He invariably turns the outward facts of Nature into symbols of inward mystery ever present at the heart of things. Night, for which the poet has a peculiar attraction, becomes for him a sanctuary of the Spirit:

Night has a core

Sense never knows

Either through glow-worm wandering white

Or silver-calm tuberose.

It turns into a symbol of the spiritual silence which precedes the fullness of divine revelation:

The darkness is a miracle of death

Into mysterious God-life brimming high

With dewy singlehood of earth and sky.

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To understand Mr. Sethna's poetry we must go beyond mere intellectual judgment. We must receive its impact inwardly, by spiritual feeling. The thing to be appreciated is so subtle and occult at times that it escapes all attempts at analysis. This may create a certain difficulty for the average reader, but no literary innovator makes facile reading. Mr. Sethna calls for a deep brooding attention on our part, no matter how brief his utterance may be.

The smallest poem in the book is about the greatest mystic of our times — Sri Aurobindo. Mr. Sethna has paid the highest possible tribute to this mighty soul in his profound, significant, highly-compressed vision-evoking style:

All heaven's secrecy lit to one face

Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry -

A soul of upright splendour like the noon!

But only shadowless love can breathe this pure

Sun-blossom fragrant with eternity -

Eagles of rapture lifting, flickerless,

A golden trance wide-winged on golden air.

Lines like these are a fit offering to the Master, because they bear out Sri Aurobindo's own prophecy that the future poetry will shape its utterance in the language of a higher illumined and intuitive mind "swallowing up the intellectual tones into the closeness and identities of a supra-intellectual light and Ananda".

KISHOR GANDHI

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