Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

K.D. Sethna's Profession of Poetry

We reproduce in the following a few excerpts from K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar's writings on some of the works of K.D. Sethna.-Editors

AN ACCOMPLISHED craftsman in verse, K.D. Sethna has been following the profession of poetry with a sense of dedication for nearly half a century.  Artist Love (1925) was followed by The Secret Splendour (1941) and The Adventure of the Apocalypse (1949).  Like Nirodbaran, Sethna too has been profoundly influenced by the poetry and spiritual philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, and, besides, Sethna has drunk deep in the springs of English and European poetry. Grace could be cited as an example of his earlier work, fancy-fed and neatly-turned in phrase and light-glancing in its movement:

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 lone-faced poverty

You give your blessing's diadem.

Make of these proud eyes beggar-bowls,

But only drop your smile in them.

An even better lyric is This Errant Life, one of Sethna's best:

This errant life is dear although it dies...

If Thou desires my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn light no thought can trace,

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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.

Earth and Heaven are here brought together in one rhythmic wave of utter comprehension. And Creators is another fine poem, self-luminous, firm and delicately balanced;

Rooted in deep on measureless deep of love,

A rapture-rock intense with quietude -

They rise, companion-crests of dream above

A shadowy world, in mystic parenthood.

Their children shall be eyes new-born to climb —

Out of old dark, kissed by a luminous swoon

Of passion-prayer cleaving beyond all time -

Two summits haloed by one perfect moon.

The lyrics in Sethna's third volume, The Adventure of the Adventure, mark a further advance still in the nature of his inspiration and the quality of his poetic utterance. On 8 May 1948 he had a heart attack and he had to remain in bed for two months. As if a spring had been released, he began composing poetry daily almost, and often several times a day: "I was writing with a kind of automatic energy. It was as if I were a mere gate through which poems strode out...I seemed to be plastic in the hands of the inner being." On the very day after the heart attack, Sethna wrote three lyrics, each in a different measure. Here are the opening lines of the first, Seated Above:

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.

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Although confined to bed and submitting to the usual medical treatment, Sethna had a feeling of peace, a sense of the living presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and more and more poems seemed to write themselves out, as if insisting on utterance. A month after the heart attack, he wrote:

A month has flown like some Archangel's form

Dripping a light of God-drunk reverie.

And I have lain aloof and still to see -

The truth-gold pinions of that singing storm.

Men move with days; but I have reached a rest

From where I view days moving wondrously

Out of an east of crimson gaiety

Unto a violet wisdom in the west!

Again, a month later:

Two months of song have swept my soul

Out to the very nerves of sense

And with the body's vehemence

I have taken to myself the whole

Wonder of the timeless Secrecy!

And, finally, on 9 August:

Forsake me not, Sweet Power!

Make my life music with Thy kiss

The 89 lyrics, long and short, are in a variety of metres, and the sequence may be described as a record of the beatings of the poet's heart as it turned more and more in complete surrender to the Divine. What is probably the central insight in the collection is conveyed through these lines:

...man's orb

Of vision can never absorb

The adventure of the apocalypse -

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Until his passion inward dips

Where hides, behind both dazzle and dark,

Perfection's pigmy, the soul-spark

Plunged in the abyss to grow by strange

Cry of contraries...

(Indian Writing in English, 6th Edition 1987, Sterling Publishers, pp. 612-615.)

2

An intellectual like Chadwick, K.D. Sethna too was early drawn to Yoga. By the merest accident he heard about Sri Aurobindo and read about the Ashram, and now told himself: "I am going there!... I have found my goal — or at least the path to my goal." He was then twenty-three, and he made the trip to Pondicherry without much delay, arriving there in December 1927. His first darshan was on 21 February 1928:

I saw him sitting very grandly, with an aquiline nose and smallish eyes, and moustaches and a beard..,. I was examining him thoroughly. At length I. made my pranam. He put both his hands on my head - that was his way - a most delightful way, with his very soft hands. I took my leave, looking at him again. I observed to myself: "Quite an impressive Guru...!"

The "rebirth" in the Ashram was really the awakening to the "sweetness and light" of the psychic being within. It was actually an "open book" - once one was able to fix one's gaze on it:

     ...the sweetness in the experience is of a bliss which has no cause; a self-existent bliss is there. It is not dependent on persons, occasions, circumstances, objects.  To be there, deep within, to feel oneself there is to be perennially, and I might even say unbearably, happy. The light also is present, because some kind of natural truth-feeling is experienced, which guides

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you all the time. ... On the negative side... one is not depressed, one does not bewail one's lot any more; secondly, one does not rebel, either against the Divine or against human beings.

He now acquired a new name too, 'Amal Kiran' (The Clear Ray) often shortened to 'Amal'; and he promptly started a correspondence with Sri Aurobindo. Innumerable letters passed to and fro covering a variety of subjects, and especially poetry - Sethna's, Sri Aurobindo's and other people's poetry. Ever since his first coining to Pondicherry over sixty years ago, Sethna has been a committed and dedicated and evangelistic Aurobindonian, and he is also the best informed, the most perceptive and the most illuminating of the critics of Sri Aurobindo's poetry.

(Sri Aurobindo: a biography anda history, 4th Revised Edition, 1985.)

3

A graduate in Philosophy of Bombay University, young K.D. Sethna read quite by accident a newspaper article on Sri Aurobindo and his Ashram at Pondicherry where the aim was "a new life not rejecting but transforming the main activities of man". Not long after, Sethna reached Pondicherry, had darshan of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on 21 February 1928, forgot all about the dissertation on ‘The Philosophy of Art’, and stayed on in the Ashram for ten and a half years fully engaging himself in the Aurobindonian integral Yoga of self-change and world-transformation. He acquired a new name 'Amal Kiran' (‘The Clear Ray’), and his sadhana took within its scope the literature of Power as well as Knowledge.  Although Sethna returned to Bombay in 1938, he paid periodical visits to the Ashram and was in constant communication with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

When Independence (saddled with the ruinous Partition) came on 15 August 1947 (which was also Sri Aurobindo's 75th birth anniversary), it was felt a new journal taking a spiritual look at

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Indian and world problems was desirable. The young Bombay businessman, Keshavdeo Poddar (later known as Navajata), accordingly helped to launch Mother India as a fortnightly with K.D. Sethna as editor, and he was promised ready guidance from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A few years later, the journal (along with the editor) was shifted to Pondicherry, and has since been appearing as a monthly Review of Culture.

The political fact of a fissured India made no sense to a nation that had awakened to the consciousness of its identity in unity and strength during the 'Bande Mataram' movement forty years earlier; and in the Ashram at Pondicherry, the Mother unfurled 'The Spiritual Map of India' comprising, not only the undivided India before the partition, but Burma and Sri Lanka as well. This vision of the spiritual reality that is 'Mother India' has been figuring on the cover of the Review all these years. And under Sethna's missionary editorship, Mother India has sustained this robust and spiritually valid "cartographical aggression" for 46 years; and Mother India growing in knowledge, wisdom and benevolence is now grandmotherly in her global sweep of understanding and unfailing good will.

Aside from his learned studies on ancient India like The Problem of Aryan Origin and Karpāsa in Prehistoric India, his critical monographs on Sri Aurobindo's Poetry, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Blake's Tyger and Mallarmé's Symbolist Poetry, and collections of his own poems (for example, The Secret Splendour and the Adventure of the Apocalypse), Sethna's seminal sadhana has been his editorship of Mother India for an unbroken span of 46 years, the journal has never been late “by even a few hours”.  A host of contributors have no doubt helped to give Mother India its standing, but it is the Amal-stamp that makes the Review sport its own individuality and power. Earlier Sri Aurobindo and the Mother often spoke through him to the outside world, but now all three merge in the cumulative light - the clear ray - radiating from Mother India.

In 1968, almost 20 years after the launching of Mother India, a selection of 25 essays (including several that had appeared in the journal) came out with the title The Vision and Work of

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Sri Aurobindo and now twenty-five years after, a "second revised and enlarged edition" has come out. The 5 new items include a short poem on 'Mind of Light' with these opening lines.

The core of a deathless sun is now the brain

And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold -

lines that elicited the Mother's comment that they "are sheer revelation", what in fact that preceding 32-page essay on The Supermind's' Descent and the Mind of Light tries to present with a due weight of learning and Yogic experience. Towards the close of his masterly exposition, Sethna writes:

"Yes, the Mind of Light as its supreme and in its absolute orb, is what was realised in the descent into earth's being in December 1950."

And at the time of Sri Aurobindo's passing, the Mind of Light (as admitted by her) got realised in the Mother, and paved the way for the supramental manifestation of 29 February 1956.

While some of the selections are thus addressed specially to close students of Sri Aurobindo, the volume as a whole must appeal to a wider audience. A mere glance at the titles will give an idea of the range and richness of the volume. Normally, no doubt, a bringing together of pieces written over a period of several decades will only make a miscellany, not a book. But it is different with the volume under notice because the three - Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, and Amal - confer on it a lively unity of its own.

It would be fascinating to begin with The Grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, for it takes us to the heart of the medium, the message and the ministry, and Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and Amal become almost a trinitarian phenomenon. One of the essays is on Freewill in Sri Aurobindo's Vision. This is an essay that had received the Master's specific approval. In Milton, freewill is yoked with fixt fate. Satan, Adam and Eve are free to choose, but cannot avoid the relevant consequences, but, then,

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with Grace reigning supreme, even causality loses its sting.

Some of the essays are really reprints of letters to correspondents like Paul Brunton; one is a review-article on M.P. Pandit's Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga and another on Path to Perfection comprising selections from the Mother's writings.

Like the essays on Sri Aurobindo (for example, Sri Aurobindo and Human Evolution, Aurobindonian Viewpoints and Sri Aurobindo and the Veda), those on the Mother (especially Some General Truths and Personal Facts) will also be read with gratitude by a widening circle of readers. In barely 13 pages, the personality and ministry of the Mother are evoked with an uncanny sureness of touch. The selected ‘general truths’ and 'personal facts' really build up the Mother's life-history in miniature.  The entire essay is a rare birthday tribute to "the saviour love" of the Mother.

Among other illuminating essays are those on Sri Aurobindo as the Poet of Integralism, on the importance of the English language and of French culture to India, and on Essence as viewed by Shankara and Sri Aurobindo. In a word, then, here in this well-produced volume on Sri Aurobindo's Vision and Work, is gathered with a deft hand 'Amal Kiran's Plenty', and the reader cannot ask for more.

(The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo, Second Revised and Enlarged Edition; by K.D. Sethna. Reviewed in The Hindu dated 13 April 1993.)

4

While Romanticism was the stimulating culture of the French Revolution, French romantic poetry had its efflorescence much later, say with Victor Hugo's Hernani (1830). Almost three decades after, Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (1857) "created a new shudder" in France, but also gave modern poetry the violent renovation it needed. His successors were the Symbolists - Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine - who sought to "bury their meaning in a tissue of images and symbols" (Bernard Weinberg).

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If Verlaine was the purest singer of the group and Rimbaud the 'god-struggler' and the laureate of desires, Mallarmé sought to crystallised the essences of things in symbols, and was an adept at linking chance audacious images to initiate reverberation of meaning.

Written over 25 years ago, the publication of Mr. K.D. Sethna's penetrating research in Mallarmé's symbolist poetry is most welcome. The book divides roughly into two equal parts. The first is a close study in 8 sections of Mallarmé - Man and Poet. The second comprises English translations of 35 of Mallarme's poems, and commentaries on a few of them. Throughout the book, the citations from Mallarmé are in the original French as well as in Sethna's excellent English renderings.

Himself an accomplished poet with a pronounced mystical bent, Sethna's present study, with its expository brilliance as also its estimative sensitivity, is criticism of poem at its seasoned best. The subtlety of the reasoning notwithstanding, the attentive reader cannot miss the unfolding argument. In the movement from the old poetry to the new. Mallarmé has a centrality following Baudelaire and the earlier Symbolists and preceding the latter day Surrealists.  Sethna is not lost in the ramifications of the subject, and shows how, for all its obscurity and knotted density, Mallarmé’s is poetry that creates out of the essences of 'nothing' an ideal reality, not the rose in the garden, but - shall we say ? - the Rose of God.

Sethna repeatedly quotes Sri Aurobindo, especially on Mallarmé's poetry, and the spinal column of the argument is that past Mallarmé, past Valery, past Yeats, Eliot and Wallace Stevens, there shines Sri Aurobindo the pole star, the laureate of Overhead Poetry and Savitri.

In the second part, Sethna remarks that Mallarmé "is likely to suffer least by being translated into English". This is hardly surprising, for writing poetry and teaching English to French pupilswere Mallarmé's parallel careers in life. The sonnet Le Cygne (The Swan) figures prominently in both halves of Sethna's book. The 'swan' - the hamsa - What is it ? It signifies the poet who has failed in his vocation, and also the human soul that has

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failed to break away from bondage and rise to the higher plateaus of the Spirit. The sonnet, as Sri Aurobindo reads it, is "a moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness" memorably conveyed by the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned swan. Sethna's own 12-page commentary on the poem is almost the heart of his whole illuminating critical exposition of Mallarmé's symbolist poetry.

K.R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR

(The Obscure and the Mysterious: A research in Mallarmé's Symbolist Poetry, by K.D. Sethna — Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry; paperback - reviewed in The Hindu, dated 2 February 1988.)

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