Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

K.D. Sethna's Concept of Love and Beauty

A Master lying like a Hidden Treasure

K.D. SETHNA has been the most important literary figure in the post-Aurobindo Indo-Anglian scene. It is a surprise that he is still quite unknown outside a particular circle. But the few who have probed sensitively into his prolific prose and poetry with a mind trained on all the elevations of English prose and verse, have been moved to speak of his achievement in the same breath with the work of the greats in literature, history, and philosophy.

Sethna's association with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is a myth and a history. What he has done and what remains before us can hardly be mistaken. One look anywhere at his work, at any paragraph or any stanza, is enough to open our eyes to the mind behind the words. There is that touch of class everywhere, that authentic Indian behind the English Idiom, that art of seriousness long lost in the fancy-vapour of a kind of literary exercise that passes in the name of Indian literature and sells like hot cakes across the ocean.

Unlike his poetry, where he uses his brief style with a masterful ease, his prose is usually based on the exhaustive method. There is a fastidious rejection of the touch-and-go. He likes to argue, and yet sometimes within the texture of his logical prose, there are majestic units combining revelation and argument:

The writing of Hamlet would stand for Shakespeare's finest and most far-reaching self-expression - the profound cry of the heart's rosy blood grown strange and baffled by reflection of the brain's grey cells. The drinking at the Mermaid would represent the poetic frenzy arising from intoxication

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with the life-force, from a constant touch on the founts of a vitality stimulated at the same time by what is human, what is elemental and what is mythic, the half woman and half fish and their harmonious whole of fantasy which the sign of the Mermaid connotes. The capturing of immortality would sum up not only an achievement but also the means to it. Shakespeare becomes - in the words of Thorpe in that enigmatic dedication to the Sonnets - "Our ever-living poet" by catching in the language of life and death the thrill of some depth of being, where abide the immortal patterns of things, where knowledge is the perceiver's consciousness directly penetrating the perceived, the inward interchange of a manifold oneness, and where - to adapt slightly a pregnant phrase of Sri Aurobindo's -

Sight is a flame-throw from Identity.

Generalisation is the sign of a perceptive mind or a talent. But what is done above is not just talent. There is an inspired sweep from the start till the end of the passage. Poetry and argument have coalesced together to form a unique structure, which not many can do. Sethna does it frequently and this makes him a genius.

Greater power of seeing and telling may be found elsewhere, even in his Talks on Poetry, which is a mark of supreme inspiration inside the classroom. Here is a portion from his textual commentary on Sri Aurobindo's poem, Rose of God:

What about the Rose of Life ? If we may go by the suggestions in the poem, it is not something unrelated to the Roses of Power, Light and Bliss. It is characterised as Desire that has a smiting drive and comes incarnate: It is also a multiform movement of colourful collectivity and a creator of concordances in a time-existence made deathless. The smiting drive towards deathless incarnation connects up directly with the infinite force and might and the piercing diamond halo spoken of in the preceding stanza,

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about the Rose of Power, as well as with the "image of immortality" there.

Besides, there are his invaluable works on Indology, books where we see insight at every page, and also his letters on the English Language and the Indian Spirit. Year after year, Sethna has renewed himself, updated himself, with a passion to remain young for ever. The result is an incredible bulk of prose writings. With so much of his works published till now, Sethna still remains the most unpublished author in India.

Superlatives are suspect in literary criticism, but there are times when a major truth is contained in a superlative phrase. I have very little hesitation in calling him the greatest living mystic poet- He blends with great effect the cryptograms and the epigrams, the natural and the supernatural, the mundane and the celestial. His poetic style has very little relation with his prose style. Even when Sethna extends his details in a poem, the style bears no relation with the expository technique of his prose. He passes from one dream image to another instead of concentrating on just one slide. Sometimes, the octet of a sonnet contains the present reality exposed by an inward look and the sestet records the memory of the future:

I am a tree of time, a swaying shadow,

With one sole branch lit by eternity -

All of me dark save this song-fruitful hand,

There the large splendour tunes my blood and makes

Fragments of deathless ecstasy out flower;

And I but live in these few fingers that trace

On life's uncoloured air a burning cry

From God-abysses to God-pinnacles.

Some day the buried vast which holds me rooted

In dreamful kinship to the height of heaven

Shall wake: then through each quivering nerve shall

course

No feeble brightness self-consumed in joy

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like the brief passions of earth,, but nectar flame —

A Force drunk with its own infinitude.

The sestet might be mistaken for words of hope. But, interpreters who are in touch with the Aurobindonian school of poetry will be quick to see in those six lines the presage of a great realisation.

The mystic love shapes itself in a pleasing form in Sethna's hands:

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 blesssing's diadem.

Make of these proud eyes beggar-bowls,

But only drop your smile in them.

The Mother has become Sethna's dream lady. This is the

climax of aesthetics which really aims at purification of our emotion. Such poems by Sethna indicate that there is a constant effort in him to discover what Sri Aurobindo calls "the soul of the  emotion" and thereby to make bis poetry a means of sadhana.  Thus he passionately appeals to the force to come close to him, and in this passionate appeal discovers the real love:

Draw near, O Love, draw very very near,

For I would see your visage full and dear:

A distant adoration cannot ease

My heart's unbearable burning chastities.

Even in his intense dreams of the future, Sethna exhibits his purified emotion in magic utterances:

A mystery journeys forth to meet

Across the rapture of rhyming feet

Its own unplumbed repose.

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Beyond the clamour of surface, beyond the noise of the loud heart, Sethna burns slowly, softly like the self-effacing incense stick. And he gets his reward for that: The smell of the wells of deathless nectar, the eyes like blue lotuses, the aureoled kiss, the real rose, the white embrace and the colour showers in the nights.

During a personal conversation, the great K.R. Srinivasa lyengar once said to me: "Our talk of scholarship and knowledge seems trifle when we go near Sethna." Therefore, it is time we took notice of a Master, lying like a hidden treasure at 21 rue Francois Martin, Pondicherry. Without knowing Sethna, nobody can hope to write honestly on recent Indo-Anglian literature.

2

Altar and Flame*

Most of the poems in Altar and Flame came out after Sri Aurobindo's departure. Unlike the more characteristic work of Sethna, these are closer to us. They are also mystic poems, but the hyphen linking Matter and Spirit is quite charming because of a fine blend of the mundane and the ethereal. The rhetoric is curious and it is a bit unlike the rhetoric Sri Aurobindo uses in his later poetry. There is of course an influence of the Aurobindonian rhetoric, but tradition is so transformed in the context of a middle world that it is hard to trace the memory of Sethna's Master. By and large, this is a new rhetoric discovered in a fresh situation and coloured by an individual consciousness.

Rhetoric for Sethna is a way of "beyonding". One has the impression that the poet is involved in a process of purification, and unlike Tagore and Whitman Sethna is singularly free from the sexual connotations in his quest for the beyond. There is a conscious effort at discovering a purer aesthetics based on Mother-cult. The poet is possibly trying to imagine the beauty of higher planes and this sense of beauty comes only after a great purification. In trying to imagine, Sethna's eyes open to the

*This article appeared first in the March 1992 issue of Mother India. - Editors

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magic worlds of beauty. There is a search for purer images. The Mental poet has an inkling of the supramental weather. As a result there is a strange ecstasy flooding the lyrics. Sometimes there is an inspired sweep of run-on lines, and the wild profusion of metaphors and similes overwhelms us.

Changing the small fire's smile to a maddened blaze

That laughs like a golden wilderness of whips

And slashes the skies of secrecy hung between

Our groping sight and the miracled unseen.

Thus only we drag down the Apocalypse!¹

There is an absolute air of spontaneity in his gesture of imaging the exact sight and feeling. This is no Johnsonese, as without this sweep of rhetoric the things cannot be expressed. Sri Aurobindo clarifies the point in a letter: "Truth first - a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist."² Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo says that the technique of mystic poetry cannot be taught.

In Sethna's poetry, especially in Altar and Flame, love is a thing of beauty maturing like the maturing moon:

We love, but scarcely know

What they mean -

The unsated kisses, the deep quiets

Hung between.

Suddenly in our eyes

A full moon glows

And, quick with tears, the mind

Feels that it knows.³

The poet is distinctly aware of the fact that mundane kisses are there only to make us more thirsty for an "aureoled kiss" (a phrase from Psyche). The second stanza of the poem indicates the mystery of sudden revelation in a man's life. Throughout his life, a man talks of love, makes love in Hemingway style, lecturing on

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love, writes on love and is blinded. Then one day a moment sees what ages have toiled to express. The moment of the full moon is the moment of love. The "tears" indicate suffering, the thorns behind which blooms the deathless rose. The word "knows" hints at realization. The inmost being, his soul, is always full of love and it struggles to come to the front through the physical, the mental and the vital layers. When the psyche comes forward the drop of blood becomes a diamond tear. This is the beginning of knowledge. Hence the mind feels that it knows.

With the misconception that Sri Aurobindo is a monk, there has grown up another wrong belief that he is a platonic love-poet. In fact love is a many-branching mood in his poetry. K.D. Sethna, Captain of the Aurobindonian School, starts from the mature Sri Aurobindo. He too depends on the sap of the earth and he too believes like his master that love cannot live by heavenly food alone. But, as we have said, Sethna has for his ideal a later Sri Aurobindo, he has left behind Sri Aurobindo's early reponses to the love of Urvasie and Priyamvada. In Altar and flame - although the poet calls his products "mundane" in an interview with the present writer - there is already a maturer sight into the mystery of love. With the process of purification going on, the concept of love is also growing. The images of tear, love, fire and the moon indicate a growth through inferno and purgatory. The controlled emotion, occasionally breaking into poignant utterances, indicates a quality of endurance achieved. There is "this hand on fire" (Out of My Heart).  Because Sethna is preparing to leave the animal behind, he has a foreknowledge of true love. Hence the line:

Foretaste of all-fulfilling peak.⁴

The poet is sometimes dreaming of a love which is to come, is coming, and his life is already full of the rays, "the prescience of a marvellous birth to come," (in Sri Aurobindo's words). This prescience or, to borrow Sethna's own word, "foretaste" gives a strange colour to the love poems in this collection. The symbol of the moon becomes a key-symbol in Sethna's love poetry of the half-world.

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The tree in the moonlight is dangerously amorous and it tears our heart and creates great music which spreads everywhere. In the poem entitled After a Tuscan Saying, the moon is not just a symbol of love but a symbol of beauty showing us where the Spirit has passed. This moon is the Wordsworthian moon seeking to open the golden doors in silvery quiet.

O trust no tree in the moon —

Great arms will tear

Your heart and make its tiny rune

Spread everywhere.⁵

It is obvious that Sethna's pantheism has given birth to a poetry which is as poetic in its own way as Wordsworth's poetry of pantheism. Besides, there is an element of supenaturalism suddenly overtaking us with the violent image of "tear" in the above stanza. Nature installs a cosmic violin inside us in a magic hour.

In Altar and Flame the woman is not an outcaste on the way. The woman becomes a co-walker on the path.  The double adventure involves the fate of both the man and the woman.  Even in mundane love the memory of the supreme love is not forgotten. In Between us two and also in Fragments, the poet speaks of an emptiness and an unquenched thirst in physical love. Unlike Faustus, he is fully aware that there is no immortality in the kiss of Helen. The insatiated thirst irresistibly drives him to the woman at Kailash. But, also, his mundane love is not a waste. In Equality the poet says: "Love's life is precious only if given whole." At the same time Sethna is living with the memory of the future, with the hope of discovering "the shining secret" of a love unknown.

The double adventure is taken in the right spirit and once again it is beauty that lights the desperate roads of the pair.

The day floated for the last time on the sea.

Twilight's blur, washing the horizon's edge,

Made the immense waters loom infinite.

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Two lonelinesses linked by one far love,

We came, earth-empty, but our small eyes sank

In the grey distance flowing evermore.

Our arms stretched toward the eternal shore beyond,

Which seemed divided by time endlessly.

You, with lips quivering on the great Name

Borne by the deep to this side of the unknown,

Murmured of the human heart's poor faltering

  strength,

But a faint touch of random spray on my brow

Moved me to breathe suddenly of fathomless Grace

That calls for nought save the surrendering cry

And gives all to the dwarf soul given entire.

"How shall we cross the sea?"... "The sea shall

cross us."⁶

The "far love" remains an eternal quest and the memory of the man and the woman is replete with "the eternal shore beyond".   Prayer is poetry in the expression "with lips quivering on the great Name." One can always rise from every bondage. There is no bondage the moment you seek help from above. There is a consciousness of the Grace with the touch of the "random spray". Grace brings faith and faith is transformed into poetry in the last line of the poem.  Sethna is more interested in the mountains than in the sea as we see in the poems in Overhead Poetry. But here his responses to the beauty of the evening sea reveal that like his master he has also an eye on the mystery of the waters. Very rarely, Sethna's concept of beauty is expressed in the idiom of the Savitri poet:

Our very limbs strain for the timeless smile.⁷

In almost all the poems of Altar and Flame, there is a quest for sacred images: fragrant breath, pink sleep, aureoled kiss, shadow in the moon's white core, hidden honey, aura of unfading day, a foretaste of the all-fulfilling peak, homeless heart, pilgrim in my feet, stainless stars, flawless touch, flame and fragrance, etc.

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Throughout his life Tagore tried to feel and express the Divine in terms of an aesthetics which is not purely based on Indian tradition. In trying to find a purer aesthetics, Tagore sometimes depends too largely on the western romantics like Shelley and Keats, and he seems to have been neglecting a vital point relating to the Tantric cult. Nor that he was unaware of the thrill of Mother-worship. In fact, some of his lines clearly indicate that he was bubbling over with the thrill of Her touch. But he was restricted by his own religious cult which is against idolatry. The same was the problem with a little-known Bengali poet singer, Atulprasad Sen, who belonged to the same religious cult. Both of them were thrilled inside, but the tongues could not utter the name. Aesthetics of the western kind has certain limitations, and yet in some of the western moderns we have clues to the Great Feminine to whom the artist bows his head. There's a strange poem by Stephen Crane in his Black Riders where the Chattertonian is distinctly rejecting Christ and God in favour of Mother Mary who is often seen as a channeling grace.

Should the wide world roll away

Leaving black terror, limitless night

Nor god, nor man, nor place to Stand

Would be to me essential,

If thou and thy white arms were there.

And the fall to doom a long way.⁸

This is a clue to the purer aesthetics taking shape at the beginning of the century through a western-educated Indian named Aurobindo Ghose. It is various that Sethna has a similar response to the Great Feminine in his poems in Altar and Flame. In an interview in October 1988 he informed me that he had never read Stephen Crane's poem and that the similarity of imagery is just accidental. But then this is not an accident in view of Sri Aurobindo's claim that even the inanimate objects arc dumbly praying to the Great Mother, The passion for '"white arms" is something like the collective unconscious. All Sethna's poems are characterised by a search for a purer aesthetics and in some of

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them in Altar and Flame, there are lines which are pure Mother- worship and pure poetry rolled into one.

Make me your nothing, my whole life

I would drown in your vastnesses -

A cry to be ruled by your flawless touch,

Your will alone my peace.⁹

The mystery of being "nothing" in the Mother's hands is the mystery of the ecstasy of surrender. The "flawless touch" initiates a rebirth, as every Aurobindonian believes. This is the climax of aesthetics, a way to the soul of emotion. In order to judge Sethna's poetry, we have to keep in mind this quest for purification. The rhetoric of love and beauty indicates the great process going on inside the poet.  Sri Aurobindo was not wrong when he named the young Parsi from Bombay Amal Kiran. Who is Sethna's dream lady? It cannot be an Urvasie or a Priyamvada. It must be the daughter of Savitr (Savitr means the Creator).

A woman, white-veiled, crowned with olive, came —

Under the shade of her green mantle, all

Her body clothed in colour of living flame.¹⁰

Finally Sethna's eye is on a woman who is a "living flame". The climax of me Aurobindonian aesthetics is in this spiritual romance between the Mother and the son. Our real being is thrilled by Her memories, Sethna has found what Ramakrishria Paramahansa calls the "post": "Hold the post hard and run circling it." This is the new romance which Sri Aurobindo has revealed in Eric, Perseus the Deliverer and Savitri. Sethna as an Aurobindonian modem recreates the new aesthetics. To imagine is to walk ahead.

GOUTAM GHOSAL

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References

1. Amal Kiran, Altar and Flame, Aspiration, Chariottesville, Virginia 1975, p. 1.

2. K.D. Sethna, Overhead poetry, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry, 1972, Quoted at p. 16.

3. Amal Kiran, Altar and flame, p. 14 ("Fragments"),

4. Ibid., p. 12 ("God's Sleep").

5. Ibid., p. 15 ("After a Tuscan Saying").

6. Ibid., p. 33 ("The Sea").

7. Ibid., p. 7 (“Life's Extremist").

8. Stephen Crane, Prose- and Poetry. The Library of America, 1984.

9. Amal Kiran, Altar and Flame, p. 40 ("Pranam to the Divine Mother")

10. Ibid., p. 26 ("Dante Meets Beatrice in Purgatory").

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