Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

A Priest of the Muses

...Carmina non prius

Audita musarum sacerdos

Virginibus puerisque canto.

[Horace (Odes I)]

THE appearance of a volume of poems of the highest quality is a rare event in any age, and in our own can be considered almost a miracle. Lovers of poetry can throw away their mourning clothes! The muse of poetry is not dead but has been sleeping, her dreams foreshadowing glorious things to come: Not only poems superbly crafted but a new kind of poetry, truly the carmina non prius audita - songs never heard before - for which Horace claimed the tide 'Priest of the Muse' in ancient times.

But Horace was not a real innovator, and if he followed the conventions of the day in paying lip-service to the muse of poetic inspiration he did not follow her to the heart's depths or seek her above where thought gives way to spiritual sight. If any can be called Priest of the Muses in our time it is the author of The Secret Splendour - Amal Kiran.

Yet it will be surprising if this wonderful collection receives the critical acclaim which is its due. Sri Aurobindo put his finger on the dilemma of the true poet when he wrote: "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." Meanwhile the splendour is likely to remain secret to all but a few.

Sri Aurobindo's comments, published in the same volume, supply the definitive critical verdict.  It is a bold reviewer indeed who would challenge it, to seek to add the pittance of his learned or unlearned opinion to the heaped-up treasure of Sri Aurobindo's praise. Not all the poems were seen or appraised by

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Sri Aurobindo however - notably some early poems, as well as everything written after 1950. Any reader not already familiar with Amal Kiran's work would be well advised to begin with the section entitled Overhead Poetry - he will be rewarded beyond all . expectation.

Overhead poetry is the term used by Sri Aurobindo to describe poetry written "from those rarer levels whose voices have occasionally joined the utterance from the usual sources to make the profoundest moments of past poetry". The source is "an infinitude of conscious being above our brain-damped mentality".¹ The result is the sustained perfection of substance and style exemplified in his This Errant Life:

This errant life is dear although it dies;

And human lips are sweet though they but sing

Of stars estranged from us; and youth's emprise

Is wondrous yet, although an unsure thing.

Sky-lucent bliss untouched by earthiness!

I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn tight no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.

For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.

It has been said of Sri Aurobindo's yoga that it starts where traditional systems leave off. It may be said with equal truth that the writer of Overhead poetry aims consistently for a level of inspired expression only rarely achieved in the past. This would involve an intense and sustained enquiry, yogic in its dedicated concentration, into the origin and genesis of the revelatory speech or mantra. The poet who succeeds in this high endeavour becomes a yogi; the yogi, a poet.

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"The greatest work," Sri Aurobindo wrote, "will be to express adequately and constantly what is now only occasionally and inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above, the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its external or superficial happenings or phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges hut the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, the inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality. It would bring in the concreteness, the authentic image, the inmost soul of identity and the heart of meaning of these things, so that it could never lack in beauty. If this could be achieved by one possessed, if not of a supreme, still of a sufficiently high and wide poetic genius, something new could be added to the domains of poetry and there would be no danger of the power of poetry beginning to fade, to fall into decadence, to fail us...."²

Here we have the criteria by which Amal Kiran's achievement was measured by Sri Aurobindo. A question immediately arises; What can be the reader's instrument of measurement, since he is not Sri Aurobindo ? What sense or faculty will he use to recognise the authentic image, or the rhythm that carries the ‘inevitable word’ ?

"Have you ever had the sensation of an explosion of light in your head ?" - the Mother asked one day. "It translates as Ah, yes - that's it!  Something you knew before perhaps in an intellectual way, but it was dull, lifeless. And suddenly it comes with a formidable power that brings everything else in the consciousness into line - this does not last long."³

The poet needs to catch a little of the light - the light that makes us say “That's it!” When he succeeds, not only is the aesthetic judgment satisfied, but something in us responds at a deeper level. We feel ourselves to be on the brink of a new discovery - it is true. He needs to be quick, because the "Lord goes ever in front, and all that (knowledge by revelation or inspiration)

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is like a trail he leaves behind him.... it is like a rain that falls: and all who are capable of catching it, even if only a drop, receive a revelation..."⁴

The Overhead poet will try to catch a drop of that rain of truth left behind by the "One who is swifter than thought" at the moment of its maximum power. He will try to feel the rhythm of its moment of manifestation with a silent mind until it has clothed itself symbol and speech. For, as Sri Aurobindo reveals in one of his aphorisms, this knowledge that comes from above is invincible when it is fresh in us, but when it is old it loses its power. It shrinks into expression, to use the Mother's vivid phrase.

No poet has explored the process by which revelation passes into speech with a more passionate dedication than Amal Kiran. His poetry is unique in that the process itself is a major theme running through poem after poem and reaching a peak of intensity in The Adventure of the Apocalypse, where poet and spiritual seeker finally renounce their separate identities. The earth-consciousness seems to speak with their voice and, with this voice, to proclaim a promise and a revelation,

And all the world cries out it is the dawn!

The eighty-nine poems of The Apocalpyse were written between 8th May and 9th August 1948, in a tremendous burst of creative energy that coincides with the poet's recovery from a serious heart attack. "Day after day brought more and more poetry. I was writing with a kind of automatic energy. It was as if I were a mere gate through which the poems strode out. Occasionally I had to pull them out and also to correct on afterthought, but there was little now of the piecemeal writing and long and careful chiselling to which I had been accustomed in the old days of poetic composition."⁵

Some extraordinary experiences accompanied this period of intense creation: The ability to see through closed eyes; the perception of a living presence in material objects; the impression that words were "living creatures acting on their own".

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(It is interesting to note that all these experiences have been described by the Mother at different times.)

It almost seems as if the cardiac crisis had its parallel in a tearing of the veil behind the heart. The region of the heart is traditionally the seat of revelatory speech. The Mother confirms this: "There is a level here (the Mother's gesture indicates chest- height) where something is at play with words, images, sentences, - like this (her hand indicates a wave-like motion). It makes beautiful images and has a power to put you in touch with the real thing greater than the metaphysical language here (touching her forehead)... images, poetry: That has a more direct access to the inexpressible."⁶

What a vibration it was, that came through with all the immediacy and impetuous driven force of the subliminal self behind it! We can see this first poem, called Seated Above, as representative of a new voice in poetry, despite its imagery drawn from ancient Indian tradition:

Seated above in a measureless trance of truth -

A thunder wearing the lightning's streak of smile,

A lonely monolith of frozen fire,

Sole pyramid piercing to the vast of the One -

Waits Shiva throned on an all-supporting void.

Wing after wing smites to the cosmic sky.

Gathering flame-speed out of their own wild heart —

That tunnel of dream through the body's swoon of rock —

They find their home in this sweet silent Face

With the terrible brain that bursts to a hammer of heaven

And deluges hell with mercies without end.

The abysmal night opens its secret smile

And all the world cries out it is the dawn!

Shiva is the One who is seated above, but it is the Rudra aspect that first appears. Although he is a child of the Dawn, Rudra is described by Sri Aurobindo as the most terrible of all the Vedic Gods - the Violent One who breaks down all defective formations.

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His powers of light and sound, precursors of creation, appear symbolically in the thunder and lightning. Vibrating within the darkness of the thundercloud (the void) they precipitate the creation as "the monolith of frozen fire", the rock of matter where the power of the Godhead is coerced into form.

The image changes - from mountainous cloud to spear of rock to pyramid, that ancient symbol of the triple lower worlds pointing upwards to the place above where Shiva waits. As in many other poems in this series, symbols are packed "to a shining secrecy" as one image dissolves into another. This is a device which we readily accept from film-makers, unconsciously sup- plying the links as we are drawn more deeply into the experience. Finally, when the magic of the phrase "frozen fire" has done its work of suggesting some tremendous tension in the heart that hungers for release, the pyramid is able to be seen as the triangle-yantra in which the serpent power of evolution is pent up, reminding us that Rudra/Shiva is the one who leads the upward evolution of the conscious being.

Shiva in his "measureless trance of truth" has his counterpart below in one who is locked in "the body's swoon of rock", whence the flames of his aspiration soar upwards like winged birds to smite the cosmic sky. In the poem, no distinction is made between the Self above and the self below. They blend to a single identity, and in their union Rudra the terrible becomes Shiva of the "sweet silent face" who heals all wounds. The brain that bursts to a "hammer of heaven" is Shiva's - and it is also Earth's Roof, that is, the dome of human mind that

Must bear a trampling terror

Before we find

Through a sudden gap the mythic

Eternity alive!

It cannot reach our body

Ere hard heels drive

Deep into gilded dreams....

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Shiva as Nataraja dances the tandava of destruction until under his hard heels the lid of mind bursts asunder. There is a "tearing of thought", an opening to something above and a descent of its power, which pours down and "deluges hell with mercies without  end". The threat implicit in "the lighting's streak of smile" is seen in the end, as the "secret smile" of a new dawn that was always there, hidden in the dark.

Seated Above will bear other interpretations than the one attempted above. Because its images and symbols are deeply rooted in human consciousness, all credible interpretations must cohere and coalesce for their mutual enrichment.  Poems like Seated Above and Earth's Roof (and many others which cannot be looked at in detail in a short article) are like Amal Kiran's "one word of densest diamond" into which five things can be packed

...to a shining secrecy

That gathers a deep truth missed by them all.

We will never know to what plane of origin Sri Aurobindo would have assigned The Adventure of the Apocalypse. Some of the poems - The Two Crosses, for example - seem to reflect the pure vision of an occult truth from a plane above or beyond mind's reach. Others may not originate from any mental or intuitive plane. Rather it is as if the body itself, freed from the strong grip of the mind-consciousness, at last found a voice of its own and cried out its "naked primal need" for the divine joy, the divine light. In one poem after another this yearning of the physical being identified itself with the poet's quest for a Veilless Word which is itself a symbol of the yogi's longing for the Sole Reality. In fact the yogi and the poet in Amal Kiran are inseparable - despite his confession that the inspiration of the poet was more frequently in the forefront!

There is in many of Amal Kiran's Apocalypse - poems a voice that has not often been heard. A raw power is in it, a swift impetuousity, an impatient brushing aside of the conventional logic of thought. Sri Aurobindo himself remarked on some

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“violent connections and disconnections” and smilingly surmised that they might be a stumbling-block for any would-be critic. Hawk and eagle circle high above the bare slopes and jagged peaks of Shiva's mountain, the unexplored terrain where the Adventure begins with a sudden flight carrying skywards the body's energies set free - Rimbaud's million golden birds, a promise of glory to come. We are a long way from the aureoled "golden bird of peace" depicted on the jacket of The Secret Splendour and so charmingly evoked in the poem Two Birds. For these are birds of prey. In a very striking and original poem, called simply Words, they appear as the "enhaloed hawks", whose moving shadows on the clay alone are visible to earthbound eyes. The hawk-energies wheeling above are powers of the Divine whose

Beauty is but the beginning of terror

We're only just able to bear.⁷

The spiritual seeker (or the poet) who calls them down must bear the wrenching blissful pain of their descent:

Or, in rare moments quick with dawn and noon

And eve at once, our little human dreams

Love with such far-flung eyes the undying birds

That the large lust comes swooping down for prey

And, where the shadows mystically shone,

Falls - crushing, piercing, ravishing every sense —

The living body and beauty and blaze of God!

Here is an original voice, one that has no real predecessor in the literature of the past. Only rarely echoes of other poets come in. There is a resemblance to Mallarmé in Amal Kiran's sheer delight in the play of language in pun and teasing indirect allusion and the scattering of seemingly unconnected images like clues in a treasure hunt, leaving the reader to discover for himself the trail of meaning. There is a kinship with Rilke in the austere

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restraint and sheer power of his language. But no borrowing.

In his best work he achieves a subtle perfection, beautifully caught by Sri Aurobindo in his comments on Through Vesper's Veil: "The originality consists as in other poems of yours in the expression of a truth or plane of vision and experience not yet expressed and, secondly, in the power of expression which gives it an exact body - a revelatory not an intellectual exactitude."⁸

Is Amal Kiran's poetry 'difficult' ? The poet himself put the question to Sri Aurobindo. He replied: "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. One can grasp fully if one has some clue to what you put in, either the clue of personal experience or the clue of sympathetic insight."⁹

If here and there, even in our prosaic age, a few readers with such insight or experience can be found, The Secret Splendour with Sri Aurobindo's illuminating comments and his vision of a Future Poetry could become the Ars Poetica of a new era. May it be so.

The last poem in the book (though not, we hope, the last to be written) is an elegant Farewell:

Farewell, sweet earth, but I shall find you sweeter

When I return

With eyes in which all heaven's farnesses

Intimately bum.

Then you will show in all I once held dear

The cause of my keen flame;

The holy hush my poet tongue miscalled

Name on poor mortal name.

Our answer, which we believe will be approved by Amal Kiran's many admirers, is to take some small liberty with a few lines from Robert Bridges:

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We will not let thee go.

We hold thee by too many bands:

Thou sayest farewell, and Lo!

We have thee by the hands,

And will not let thee go-

SONIA DYNE

References

1. Amal Kiran, The Secret Splendour, p. 60.

2. Ibid., p. 210.

3. Agenda, 6.10.62.

4. Ibid.

5. The Secret Splendour,  p. 223.

6. Agenda, 4.3.66.

7. R.M. Rilke: Duiner Elegien.

8  The Secret Splendour, p. 88.

9. Ibid., p. 91.

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