Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic


SECTION TWO

His study of Divining Thought


A SELECTION FROM

THE WRITINGS OF AMAL-KIRAN

According to Horace's Ars Poetica a good poem comes both with spontaneous naturalness and well-cultivated craft, combining a lot of book-learning and inspiration. Amal-Kiran's poetry is not only good, but is something more than that: it breathes the joy of the spirit in its wide-ranging manifestive life-urges and is luminous, even at times profoundly revelatory, carrying delights and splendours of the psychic-lyrical, or of the overhead. It is trans-Horatian. Indeed, to put it more explicitly, it is Aurobindonian, within and without. So too is his literary criticism. While his analyses are scientific and incisive, the insights are always soul-based. In fact it is all these that go to make his varied writings rich and rewarding. If he has carried out this profession for more than sixty years, it only shows that his creative occupations are sustained unflaggingly by an inspiration which of course gushes from some secret depth of an inexhaustible source. His majestic Collected Poems running into eight-hundred pages and his penetrating criticial works comprising of several volumes are a visible witness to the wonder that he is. To attempt any selection out of such a vast body of literature is to do injustice to the genius. Yet this has perhaps got to be done with the expectation that it may kindle interest for a more serious and recognitive appreciation. If there is a motive behind this selection, it is surely to highlight the unique literary pilgrim's progress on the sunlit path that has been made available to him, to bring in focus his endeavour in the aesthetics of the spirit given to us by Sri Aurobindo.

— Editors

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Abundance of Beauty


There is so much abundance of beauty in Amal Kiran's early poetry that to make a selection from it is to do great injustice to it. But this is perhaps more than compensated by Sri Aurobindo's superlative comments, which also indicate the new aesthetics, the creative possibilities of the spirit he was trying to establish in this realm of gold. The path of the future poetry was certainly hewn through these pioneering efforts. This is undoubtedly a luminous sample of the kind of work that was being done in what Sri Aurobindo had claimed proudly to be his Poetry Department. - Editors


NE PLUS ULTRA

A madrigal to enchant her — and no more?

With the brief beauty of her face — drunk, blind

To the inexhaustible vastnesses that lure

The song-impetuous mind?

Is the keen voice of tuneful ecstasy

To be denied its winged omnipotence,

Its ancient kinship to immensity

And dazzling suns?

When mystic grandeurs urge him from behind,

When all creation is a rapturous wind

Driving him towards an ever-limitless goal,

Can such pale moments crown the poet's soul?

Shall he — born nomad of the infinite heart!

Time-tamer! star-struck debauchee of light!

Warrior who hurls his spirit like a dart

Across the terrible night

Of death to conquer immortality! —

Content with little loves that seek to bind

His giant feet with perishing joys, shall he

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Remain confined

To languors of a narrow paradise -

He in the mirroring depths of whose far eyes

The gods behold, overawed, the unnamable One

Beyond all gods, the Luminous, the Unknown?


SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

"This is magnificent. The three passages I have marked reach a high-water mark of poetic force, but the rest also is very fine. This poem can very well take its place by the other early poem [This Errant Life} which I sent you back the other day, though the tone is different — that other was more subtly perfect, this reaches another kind of summit through sustained height and grandeur."

On the plane of inspiration of the lines marked in the second stanza: "Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch."

MUKTI

What deep dishonour that the soul should have

Its passion moulded by a moon of change

And all its massive purpose be a wave

Ruled by time's gilded glamours that estrange

Being from its true goal of motionless

Eternity ecstatic and alone,

Poised in calm plenitudes of consciousness —

A sea unheard where spume nor spray is blown!

Be still, oceanic heart, withdraw thy sense

From fickle lure of outward fulgencies.

Clasp not in vain the myriad earth to appease

The hunger of thy God-profundities:

Not there but in self-rapturous suspense

Of all desire is thy omnipotence!

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SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT


"Congratulations! It is an exceedingly good sonnet - you have got the sonnet movement very well."

Originally, line 7 ran:

Poised in calm vastitude of consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo was asked if "plenitude" would be better in place of "vastitude". He replied:

" 'Vastitude' is better than 'plenitude' - but 'plenitudes' (the plural) would perhaps be best. The singular gives a too abstract and philosophical turn - the plural suggests something concrete and experienceable."


ORISON

A godless temple is the dome of space:

Reveal the sun of thy love-splendoured face,

O lustrous flowering of invisible peace,

O glory breaking into curves of clay

From mute intangible dream-distances,

That like a wondrous yet familiar light

Eternity may mingle with our day!

Leave thou no quiver of this time-born

heart A poor and visionless wanderer apart:

Make even my darkness a divine repose

One with thy nameless root, O mystic rose —

The slumbering seasons of my mortal sight

A portion of the unknowable vast behind

Thy gold apocalypse of shadowless mind!

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SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

"That is extraordinarily fine throughout. But it is too fine for any need of remarks. Lines 3, 4, 5, also 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, Illumined Mind with Overmind Intuition touch - the rest Higher Mind suffused with Illumined Mind."


MADONNA MIA

I merge in her rhythm of haloed reverie

By spacious vigil-lonelinesses drawn

From star-birds winging through the vacancy

Of night's incomprehensible spirit-dawn.

My whole heart echoes the enchanted gloom

Where God-love shapes her visionary grace:

The sole truth my lips bear is the perfume

From the ecstatic flower of her face.


SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT


"I think it is one of your best. I could not very definitely say from where the inspiration comes. It seems to come from the Illumination through the Higher Mind - but there is an intuitive touch here and there, even some indirect touch of 'mental Overmind' vision hanging about the first stanza.

"There are two ranges of Overmind which might be called 'mental' and 'gnostic' Overmind respectively — the latter in direct touch with Super-mind, the former more like a widened and massive intuition."

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NOCTURNE

My words would bring through atmospheres of calm

The new moon's smile that breathes unto the heart

Secrets of love lost in clay-captured kisses;

The evening star like some great bird whose fury

Dies to a cold miraculous sudden pause —

Wings buoyed by sheer forgetfulness of earth;

And oh that dream-nostalgia in the air,

The sky-remembrance of dew-perfumed dust!

I would disclose the one ethereal beauty

Calling across lone fires and fragrances -

But vain were music, vain all light of rapture

That drew not sense a pathway to strange sleep,

Nor woke a passion billowing through the body

In search of realms no eye-boats ever reached.


SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

"Very fine indeed. This time you have got the blank verse all right, owing to the weight and power you have been able to put into the movement as well as the thought and language. Nothing to criticise. The lines give a quite coherent development and there is a single aspiration throughout. It has almost the full sonnet effect in spite of the absence of the rhyme structure."

Amal's question: This poem seems to have an occult air about it on the whole. But perhaps it is more surrealistic? What would you say of its quality and value ?

GREEN TIGER

There is no going to the Gold

Save on four feet

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Of the Green Tiger in whose heart's hold

Is the ineffable heat.

Raw with a burning body

Ruled by no thought —

Hero of the huge head roaring

Ever to be caught!

Backward and forward he struggles,

Till Sun and Moon tame

By cutting his neck asunder:

Then the heart's flame

Is free and the blind gap brings

A new life's beat —

Red Dragon with eagle-wings

Yet tiger-feet!

Time's blood is sap between

God's flower. God's root —

Infinity waits but to crown

This Super-brute.


SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

"Very powerful and original poem. There may be some doubt as to whether the images have coalesced into a perfect whole. But it may be that if they did, the startling originality of the combination might lose something of its vehement force, and in that case it may be allowed to stand as it is. At any rate it is an extremely original and powerful achievement."


A DIAMOND IS BURNING UPWARD

A diamond is burning upward

In the roofless chamber walled

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By the ivory mind;

An orb entranced glows

Where earth-storm never blows —

But the two wide eyes are blind

To its virgin soar behind

Their ruby and emerald.

The one pure bird finds rest

In the crescent moon of a nest

Which infinite boughs upbear....

Flung out on phantom air

In a colour-to-colour race

Yet never ending their quest,

The two birds dream they fly

Though fixed in the narrow sky

Of a futile human face.


SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT


"It sounds very surrealistic. Images and poetry very beautiful, but significance and connections are cryptic. Very attractive, though."


SAVITRI

A rose of dawn, her smile lights every gaze-

Her love is like a nakedness of noon:

No flame but breathes in her the Spirit's calm

And pours the omnipresence of a sun.

Her tongues of fire break from a voiceless deep

Dreaming the taste of some ineffable height —

A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all,

A universal hunger's white embrace

That from the Unknown leaps burning to the Unknown.

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"Exceedingly fine; both the language and rhythm are very powerful and highly inspired. When the inspiration is there, you reach more and more a peculiar fusion of the three influences, higher mental, illumined mental and intuitive, with a touch of the Overmind Intuition coming in. This touch is strongest here in the second and the two closing lines, but it is present in all except two — the third which is yet a very fine line indeed and the seventh where it is not present in the typed version ('A cry to clasp in all the one God-hush') but seems just to touch perhaps in the written one ('A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all'). In the typed version the higher mental is strongest but in the written one which is less emphatic but more harmonious, the rhythm gets in a higher influence. In the other lines the illumined mental influence lifting up the higher mental is strongest, but is itself lifted up to the intuitive - in all but the third just high enough to get the touch of the overmental intuition."

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