Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

Inner Sight and Inner Song

Nirodbaran's Achievement in Mystical Poetry

The following article by Amal Kiran on Nirodbaran's poetry, written years ago, is being published, it is understood, in the author's forthcoming book Inspiration and Effort. We reproduce the same here. As reviewer of a poetry book this is perhaps a unique example of his literary writings. — Editors

DOCTORS have been good novelists: there are enough unusual incidents of human value in their clinical experience to make arresting stories under the selective surgery of a realistic imagination. But rare is the doctor who turns poet. A Dr. Cronin is conceivable, a Dr. Bridges is a wonder indeed. The book Sun-Blossoms which is before me is a radiant curiosity since — as the Foreword to it by K. H. G. tells us — the poems here collected were penned by a doctor. The wonder, however, becomes easier to accept without ceasing to be splendidly out of the way, when we are told also that Dr. Nirodbaran blossomed into a poet under the revelatory sun of that Master of Yoga as well as Poetry, Sri Aurobindo.

Dr. Nirodbaran has followed the old command: "Physician, heal thyself" — but the health and wholeness he aims at are the transformation of the human into the divine:

I will rise yet healed of my mortal wounds

To thy dome of jewelled ecstasy,

A warrior soul invincible,

Chainless, orbed with infinity!

And the book charts the course of his celestial cure. A magical chart it is, the lines of progress being luminous lines of highly inspired poetry. Yes, Nirodbaran's book is highly inspired; but

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perhaps the enthusiastic conclusion of K.H.G.'s interesting and well-written Foreword is too sweeping in one place. When it is said that never does Nirodbaran "lapse into the mere intellectualised or the externally vital or sensational level of speech or seeing," the judgment is perfect. But can we declare that "even at his lowest pitch he never forsakes the intuitive felicity of the genuinely inspired word and vision"? I dare say all poetry to be genuinely inspired must have, in essence and in general, some intuitive felicity — but this felicity is not always of the same kind and to call everything felicitous is to weaken the force of that term just as to use the epithet "intuitive" for each kind of felicity is somewhat to water it down. Take the stanza:

Belated traveller, vainly dost thou mourn

Because the transient night engulfs thy way!

Thou art not on the perilous road alone,

Left to some cruel demon's sovereign sway.

This is not unpoetic, but is it more than passable? Would we not have to wear rose-coloured glasses to discern in it "intuitive felicity"? Even at a keener pitch —

My solitude is filled with thy delight;

I drink thy beauty like a passionate wine.

My flickering mortality grows divine,

A shadowless image of the Infinite —

poetry can leave us hesitant about that characteristic. Even now the speech, in spite of the attractive pair of phrases "passionate wine" and "flickering mortality", seems a little easily found. Except in the broadest and a hardly distinctive sense, the ascribing of "intuitive felicity" to it would be an exaggeration. As such speech is more frequent in Nirodbaran than that of the first quotation, what can be confidently averred is that he always brings us the substance of mystical inwardness and that the expression seldom stops with barely skimming this substance;

but at times, instead of diving deep, the expression goes just

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below the surface. Then the result is good poetry as contrasted to passable, yet not packed with the subtle intense novelty which would make the poetry at least fine, if not superlative. Good poetry is not anything to disparage, but surely its temper and tone we cannot equate to the real "intuitive felicity" of verse like Nirodbaran's own:

My passions one by one turn towards thee

Like stars in midnight's silence; peacefully

They lie on the altar of a silver dream

To be cast into the vision of the Supreme.

These lines may not be superlative poetic articulation: they are, however, truly fine and not merely good.

Nirodbaran has plenty of the truly fine utterance. And often the truly fine is interspersed with things that have a superlative touch. There is no doubt that the two closing lines of the quatrain,

All joy of life is now a shining part

Of the ecstasy of the eternal Heart

Where time is a voyage with wide unfurled wings,

The flame-sails of unknown awakenings,

are magnificent. The vision is a grand suggestion of spiritual movement onward and inward; the language, at once subtle and concrete in its turn, is an illumined embodiment of the sense; the rhythm goes home from some vast beyond to some hidden vast in ourselves. Mark how apt is the fusion of "wide unfurled wings" with "voyage" by means of the word "sails" and also "awakenings" by means of the word "flame" with its implication of golden visibility and bright uplifting as in dawn-break when the eyes too become lit and begin to see with the uplifting of the lids and appear to be like two wings wide and unfurled. The inspiration here is a mighty magical bringing-together of many vivid and far-reaching intuitions into an inevitable unity.

Nirodbaran is successful in achieving such inspiration not only

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in short snatches; there are whole poems that stand out as veritable masterpieces. Naturally they are not a multitude, but in this matter the achievement of even half a dozen poems of all- round perfection is a feat eminently worth noting. To focus all the better the quality of these poems we may distinguish three varieties of poetic performance. Some poems reach their goal more by a total effect than by individual details: the diverse parts in them do not strike us as particularly memorable, but the ensemble makes an unforgettable impact on the mind. Other poems move to their goal by brilliant steps and everywhere there is an impressive play of word and image, but though the total effect is felt the individual details stand out more. Still other poems have an integral harmony in which both the details and the ensemble are equally seizing, neither are the parts subdued to the whole nor is the whole subdued to the parts, but there is a beautiful balance and every part is a perfect whole in itself and the sum of the parts is a perfect super-whole. If we are to label the three varieties, we may stress one shade out of the hundreds seen in the old terms "classical" and "romantic" and say that the first type of poetic performance is classical, the second romantic, while the third is a union of the two. The best works of those usually called classical and romantic poets are such a union. And it is the poems in which Nirodbaran brings about this union that I consider veritable masterpieces. The rest are truly fine creations, but here are the sheer climaxes of poetic genius.

As examples of the three types, we may cite New Life, the very first poem in Sun-Blossoms, as a classical perfection — feeling that is not superficial at all, tone that is authentic throughout, imagery that is organic to the mystical feeling, but the graceful details adding up without drawing special attention to themselves and only the complete poem "clicking" in the deep background of the receptive consciousness. As compared to this, the second poem, Your Face, has many lines leaping out to us, lines that can be culled from the context and exhibited in their own rich right, but the whole piece does not form a sudden cumulative revelation: it has a poetic point but not quite a sharp and shining one, and the total impression, felicitous as it is, is not momentous enough;

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what is gripping are the various significant phrases that catch fire in the course of the movement to that slightly unsurprising total impression. The book's third poem Secret Hand, mingles the classical and the romantic qualities; it is memorable in a step-by-step scrutiny and memorable in a synoptic survey. But perhaps the best examples of the supreme art are the sonnets Creator and Earth-Cry. The former runs:

A giant figure carved from the rock of Night

Chiselled with poignant fires of Sun and Moon,

A body outlined with a measureless might

Where heaven and earth have joined their spirit-rune.

A myriad streams flow from his luminous feet

To elemental spheres of voiceless hush

Where nascent worlds are rhythmed to one heartbeat,

Lit with creation's primal roseate blush.

He stands behind the heaving stress of the hours,

A tower of triumphant Force and Light,

A lonely peak crowned with the Infinite

Hiding within a passionate heart of flowers.

Lightening our shadow blossoms of life his grace

Hews from earth's clay beauty of a white-moon face

.

Every line is a profound surprise - mysticism finding its happiest originality of expression, and the complete work is a "white- moon face" as flawless in unity as are its features in their multiplicity. Of course neither the multiplicity nor the unity yields itself to immediate appreciation by the unprepared non-mystical reading. This is verse of super-normal symbolic insight, and we have to be attuned to its new "wave-length" to get the message correct. Quiet sensitive concentration can alone secure the rich critical response. But even an aesthetic alertness can provide some measure of the double excellence. The same can be said of the other sonnet:

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Bright mystery of earth, O foam-washed shore

On the edge of time, you bring thoughts pale and sweet

Of happiness long lost, memories that bore

In their veiled bosom twilight's starry heartbeat!

These desert-tracts, as they lie lifeless, cold—

Strange melancholies buried in their sand —

Are like dry barren moments deeply scrolled

On endless canvas by an inscrutable hand.

Whence like a cry of fire night and day

Your soul climbs to the topless distant peaks

In the heart of solemn vastness holding sway,

Lined with immutable silence's golden streaks.

Your body's faint murmur-falls slowly heard,

A dying warrior's last half-spoken word.

Splendid is each stanza and equally splendid is the fourteen-lined fusion of the several pictures. And what an achievement is that closing couplet with its deep defunctive music — its echo of a grand ebbing of the body-consciousness, with the soul entering no domain of common death but a realm of trance where the human gets absorbed into the deific.

Nirodbaran's poetry is full of the passing of the outer being into the Unknown that is like a death into a larger and richer life —

a death

Tranquil and luminous-whorled,

as he puts it in Heaven-Ascent. He speaks also of

The tranquil dome of Death

and of

The starry wings of Death.

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Evidently he is visioning some transcendental reality, a sky of the Ineffable, Nirvanically calm yet not empty, a high world of untroubled pure puissances. This transcendental height haunts Nirodbaran and his poetry catches now and again glimmers and vibrations from it, but perhaps the major portion of his work is more an inwardness of the mystic mind exploring occult vistas of its own or mirroring in lovely lakes and torrents the colours and designs and dynamisms of the Overworld. In consequence, there is often a kind of "faery" spirituality, an affinity to something Yeatsian in sight without being Celtic. The inner worlds are not the magic mid-worlds of Yeats that have a certain exquisite self- sufficiency, a certain completeness of the Divine in a restricted fixed formula of creation. Nirodbaran's are planes washed indeed with the glint and gemmy tremulousness of moonlit mysteries but there is everywhere a cry to the Infinite that is overhead. Through many rifts the inspiration glimpses the Eternal who is beyond all formula and capable of all creativeness. Through many apertures are received the urgencies of the earth-soul that has an evolving and not a typal career and that yearns to broaden from its deep dreaming centre of Godward devotion into some Cosmic Consciousness and into some overarching Ultimate brooding with utter fullness of light and love and life upon cosmos and earth. The Yeatsian atmosphere and vibration are felt in:

Candle-vision from haunts of starry caves

Flickers on my path of dreams

Like sinuous smiles of pearl-glistening waves

On the heart of rock-strewn streams,

but there is mixed with Yeatsianism a higher call, a vaster longing, a poignancy more inwardly experienced without losing any enchantment or delicacy. The difference within the similarity to the Irish wizard is more noticeable in:

Birds of Vision, fraught with heavenly treasures,

Brimming with diamond peace,

Fill our yearning vastness with the measures

Of your unhorizoned seas.

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A trait akin to Yeats is also a fluctuant imagery that is not self-consistent on the surface, varies suddenly and sometimes seems even conflicting in its aspects. This is no surrealistic confusion - feverish jerky disconnected oddities of sight. It is also not the complicated obscurity of Donne, a curious and far-fetched and many-meaninged play of thought. Nor is it exactly Blakean, teeming with a private mythology. It is the subtle many-sidedness of occult vision. In Nirodbaran this Yeatsian trait, like all others, goes beyond Yeats by a boldness that is more direct. Yeats makes different symbols follow in succession; Nirodbaran not only does this but also runs two or three symbols into one another, since the proprieties and plausibilities of the occult planes differ from those of ours. Look at the poem First Word. There the same mystical entity is called a star-rising out of the morning-sea and said to be calm and inviolable like a mountain and then described as "first word breaking the womb of agony" and then summed up thus:

A voice it brings and opens the hidden door

Through a narrow fissure of encrusted earth:

A blazing eye of the invisible core

Came down like an eagle into mortal birth.

The lay reader is likely to be puzzled, but it is impossible to miss the drive of a supra-logical harmony, and the drive, paradoxically enough, is most potent in the last two lines where the images, picturing the all-seeing power of the transcendence descending into cosmic manifestation and embodiment, are most a-jostle in a surface view. The language and the rhythm have become so alive to the occult phenomenon here hinted, that somehow the intuitive sense in us is smitten to recognise the significance even though the constructive intellect finds it hard to dovetail the lightning flashes of the several hints.

Fidelity to the inner truth of mystical perception is Nirodbaran's motto. Fidelity, however, can be of several sorts. Nirodbaran at his most alert does not write with the intention just to convey spiritual meaning with the help of a plastic

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imagination: he wants to write of the inner in the inner's own way and he lets the meaning emerge as a sort of oblique effect. Ordinarily, poetry puts its mysterious halo around a centre that is easy to recognise. Nirodbaran likes to make the centre itself a mystery and let the recognisable meaning come as a halo. All true poetry of the Unknown should be like this, though it need not be of one fixed type. The central mystery in Nirodbaran is mostly a many-coloured shimmer. One can also centre a sun of fiery truth- knowledge which is above the mind and whose mystery is caught by us through the intense dazzle it produces, forcing us to shut our eyes, as it were, and feel the immense Inscrutable which has put forth that golden focus of itself. The poetry of Sri Aurobindo is thus sunlike.  Nirodbaran gets the sun-apocalypse in rare instances, and more often by reflecting it in a full moon midway between earth and ether. His usual activity, though never without an instinct of the sun-wholeness, is shimmery. But that does not detract from the poetic merit of his work nor from the sincerity and power of his mysticism. Neither does his poetry suffer because most often it is a seizing of brief moods, passing perceptions, touch-and-go gleams, "flickers on the face of Destiny", either directly occult or indirectly so with a kinship to the visionary vein that is at its best in AE. Perhaps the finest instance of the half-visionary half-occult mood is in Fingers of Light:

On this dark corner of my cell

Fingers of Light fall - slow and white —

From the invisible crescent moon;

Ethereal seems the prisoned night!

The beams pale, slowly move away;

Through the iron bars my dream-eyes cast

A final glance; the silver trails

Wing to some unknown region's Vast.

This style has another aspect in which a greater simplicity has play, a limpider tone that is born less from the mystic mind than

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from the psychic being, the infant divinity at the deep heart of us, and then the poetry is capable of moving along a range of beautiful expression in which the simple and the sublime, the childlike and the seerlike, are constantly meeting and parting and meeting again in a delightful game. Thus a poem starts with the utterly ingenuous:

No more I ask of thee

What I have gained or lost,

What shadow-veils wrap me,

What distance I have crossed,

and ends with the high note that is yet the same style:

I feel within my soul

Crowding like gold fires

The hidden immortal scroll,

The word that for thee aspires.

This style gains its most luminous point in Childhood Dream, a poem linking itself with Vaughan and Wordsworth in their phases of recollecting the soul-sight of early childhood. It begins:

My childhood veiled a secrecy

Within its delicate shroud

Like a splendour of celestial light

Under the folds of a cloud.

Often I used to think and feel

That a white dream was laid

Upon my eyes and suns and moons

Out of that dream were made.

The poem runs on, through felicity after felicity of speech, to a perfect conclusion and a faultless general effect. I have mentioned Vaughan and Wordsworth and indeed they come to the mind, but there is in Nirodbaran a clearer recognition of hidden

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realities: he has a sense of universal consciousness that is not prominent at all in Vaughan and more keenly than Wordsworth he feels occult or spiritual presences of an individualised character:

I felt a sudden cry

Within the closed fane of my heart

Reminding of a sky

That hid behind its sapphire veil

Strange faces orbed with light

And beckoning to their splendour-home

Beyond the brink of night.

Wordsworth could sense the universal consciousness sufficiently, but these "strange faces orbed with light" arc rather outside his pantheistic ken. They are allied more to the Gods of Yeats walking the inner worlds in unbearable beauty and the Undying Ones of AE residing in purple lucencies behind the earth: only, they are in Nirodbaran a touch of the transcendental beyond the cosmic, the ultimate archetypes of earth's living creatures, though they are intuited rather through the psychic heart than by a straight ascent to the overhead immensities.

If it is objected by some captious critic that one cannot keep feeding on divine realities and that some contact of common Nature through a fresh sensibility is required, we need not leap to a defence of divine realities, for Nirodbaran has enough of that contact. Of course, he is no lover of Nature for her own sake and there are always inner nuances glancing out. But Nature is present in his work and the dew is upon his poetry both in the sense that his poetry is receptive to the influences of the earth's atmosphere and that it is quite free from the artificial and the hot-housy. Look at this stanza:

The first glimpses of a new-born

Laugh of earth-flames in the green wood,

Birds bringing from the depths of dawn

Music of God-beatitude.

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A more typical way of Nirodbaran's of treating Nature is to see her through a strong mood of the inner consciousness and project that mood through the outer eye rather than receive through that eye a picture to create a mood. A faultless snatch of such Nature-poetry is:

A smothered sigh is the heavy air

And Time a press of pain,

Night trails her sad infinity

Under a sick moon's wane.

As effective in the same mode are the verses:

A star struggling to climb from a black sea,

and

In the cradle of night curtained by nebulous dreams.

Single-lined miracles arc these verses — and such miracles are often accounted the test of a poet's power. They are not infrequent in Nirodbaran. There is that hinting of the inner Yogic process, ardent, harmonising and revealing, in the subtle phrase:

A rhythmic fire that opens a secret door.

There is the finality of supreme spiritual achievement, at once solid and soaring, ecstatic and immutable, in those intensely clear words with a regular rising beat of iambs:

Our heaven built with granite rocks of peace.

There is the insight summing up the whole secret quality of existence in the simple yet infinitely pregnant description:

Life that is deep and wonder-vast.

A rare greatness is Nirodbaran's in these marvels of much in-

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little. But face to face with them one feels it all the more a pity that he should on occasion drop into an echo of Harindranath Chattopadhyaya at his somewhat feeble rather than at his most flaming. Chattopadhyaya at his middle pitch is all over the stanza:

A lonely tramp of Heaven I go

Along the high watermark of time

Where time itself has ceased to flow

In the silence of the vast Sublime;

while Chattopadhyaya almost lashing his Muse in an effort to carry off a weak moment is:

Wipe off the dew from your tortured brow;

The blood-stained soul's lone Godward vow

Must never flicker or become

A shadow of pale martyrdom.

There is also Chattopadhyaya at his "high water-mark" in certain places, but as soon as one recognises him one's rapturous and unique response to Nirodbaran's poetic value diminishes. Luckily the individual strain re-emerges soon and we are happy again with bold things or exquisite things like:

Where flowers of a heavenly hue

In silence born,

or powerful things like:

What mighty crystal hands

Release the music-flood of the sun-bird?

This last quotation can stand side by side with the famous questions in Blake's Tyger, though the whole atmosphere and association are different:

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy dreadful symmetry?...

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In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

Nirodbaran needs no model, Chattopadhyaya or any other: he has a living fount within him and it is best for him to let it spring into our earth's day in the way it wants. And he is not only an original poet but also an original artist. No doubt he would have been a more attractive artist if he had tackled a larger variety of forms and not remained within the cherished charm of just two or three kinds of poem-structure; but the diverse manipulation of his chosen metres is beyond praise. An extreme ease of audacious effect marks his technique, extraordinary variations of beat are freely achieved as if there were no fear of anything going amiss. Scan, for instance:

A moment's touch - what founts of joy arise

Running through dull grains of my life's dead sands.

The first line is almost regular, the second is trochee, iamb with a quantitatively long opening syllable, trochee, iamb and spondee, a remarkable combination fully justified by the rush, the slight slowing, the speeding up again, the smooth flowing, the struggle against the final obstruction, that is the many-tempo'd progress of heavenly delight through earth's dim and coarse stuff. Or analyse:

...Falls off like a leaf torn by a short breath

Of wind.

Outside Donne and Hopkins - and occasionally Milton - it is difficult to meet with such metrical license indulged in so masterfully. The line is a pentameter but composed of a semi-spondee, a semi-pyrrhic, a full spondee, a pyrrhic and again a full spondee! And the result is not chaos but a most telling irregularity charged with the destructive staccato of the very event described. Only once in Nirodbaran the metre seems limping and ill managed in the midst of novelty and freshness of accent.

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A deep glimpse of a memory behind

The veil of time when my soul was with thee

has a flawlessly modulated first line, the suddenness of a glimpse conveyed by that inverted second foot, but the next line is overstrained by the inversion of stress in the fourth foot following a foot that is as good as a pyrrhic. One may plead a profound excitement at the celestial memory and a consequent catch in the voice speaking of it. I do not feel convinced; neither do I find "soul" specially distinguished from something else and therefore occupying that metrical position, nor do I incline to stress that "was" so as to make the foot a spondee balancing the preceding pyrrhic or else to stress "my" and render the latter an iamb. There cannot be on principle a ban upon a trochee coming on the heels of a pyrrhic; what I am asking for is sufficient psychological justification, as can be found in Sri Aurobindo's line:

This truth broke in in a triumph of fire.

A forcible and violent action is here suggested, the first half of the metre is appropriate to the powerful bursting in of the truth, while in the second half the high exultation and exaltation of the inrush is brought out by the quantitatively long and accentually strong vowel in the opening syllable of "triumph" and in "fire", coming contrastingly after a pyrrhic in the one case and after two short syllables in the other.

Nirodbaran's slip, however, does not matter much, just as the slight falls in the poetic level do not, nor the over-use to which he puts the rhyme-pair of "sleep" and "deep", nor his repeating twice or thrice in the book that lovely and profound phrase: "a universe of tranquil prayer". Who cares about small foibles when there is abundance of valuable content no less than expressive skill? Inspiration blows like a well-nigh endless wind through Sun-Blossoms. And I personally enjoy this inspiration the more because it is not always easily appreciable by the lay mind. Mystical poetry should not be too easy, it loses its own truth by becoming clothed altogether in shapes that are denizens of the

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non-mystical world. A certain secrecy and a certain distance are most delightful and fitting when God is the theme. Just what the mystic Muse should be is Nirodbaran's source of song as revealed in that descriptive apostrophe of his:

O radiant minstrel of my heart,

Sing from your shadow-lonely bower,

Where in white plenitudes apart

Your songs are wed to the timeless Hour.

As significant as "white plenitudes" and "timeless Hour" are for me the terms "shadow-lonely" and "apart". Unless the mystic poet is, to some extent, "shadow-lonely" and "apart" without being ascetic or other-worldly he cannot make the supreme soul-discoveries or the supreme soul-disclosures, even as the doctor in Nirodbaran cannot, I am sure, deal very successfully with the complexities of the body unless he keeps his mind a little aloof and employs methods that are somewhat subtle.

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