Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

The Friend Who Impressed Me So Deeply

THE friend who impressed me so deeply in the early years of my Ashram life was K.D. Sethna who has since become famous both as a poet and a priest of high - or shall I say, spiritual - journalism. I can clearly recapture with my mind's eye his delicate sensitive face which first attracted me with its fine crop of Christ-like whiskers which he discarded subsequently, to the universal regret of his friends and admirers. For we did admire it without pressing the 'resemblance' any further. And let me add, with a sigh, that those who have never seen him with his whiskers will never be able to appreciate our sigh over its merciless eradication. And then his eyes: how they radiated a keen though not unkind glint of intelligence.  For he was nothing if not sympathetic and enthusiastic. Fortunately, he knew where to draw the line when expressing his sympathy in favour of this or that person.

Which brings me to his alert common sense.  I have been told that Sri Aurobindo once said, in joke, that the Divine wanted the aspirants to surrender many things which they guarded jealously but one thing they did surrender with alacrity which was not exacted: common sense. Sethna was not one of these. For his common sense was never an absentee in his talks and adjudications which seemed remarkable to me as he talked and passed verdicts readily enough. I remember once (years later, when he had matured further) how he debated with Krishnaprem in myliving-room. How I envied his dialectical intelligence! And Krishnaprem not only admired his mental robustness in a frail physique but enjoyed to me full breaking a lance with him. But he had to go all out to hold his own against Sethna, which is saying much. Yes, Sethna was nothing if not perspicacious and wide-awake on top of being sensible. It was refreshing to talk with him and stimulating to differ from him, since even when one differed from his point of view one did feel that one was

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made to look at things from a new angle as it were. In a word, his talks were always suggestive. But to come now to something more important....

Those who are not born with an exceptional intelligence are somewhat fortunate as they have no axe to grind in favour of the status quo established and jealously guarded by the intellect. But those who have once tasted of intellectual joys find it not a little hard to relinquish what they have grown to love. That is why I admired Sethna more than I admired many another who claimed being advanced sadhakas, to the deep chagrin of Sri Aurobindo. For when somebody once claimed that he was an advanced sadhaka and men like Sethna were mere poets he wrote: "Why X's claim to be an advanced sadhaka and what is the sense of it ? It resolves itself into an egoistic assertion of superiority over others which is not justified so long as there is egoism and the need of assertion, accompanied as it always is by a weakness and a turbid imperfection which belie the claim of having a superior consciousness to the inadvanced sadhaka. It is time these crudities disappeared from the Ashram atmosphere."

This is not irrelevant. For Sethna impressed me the more because he not only never made such a claim to having reached "a superior consciousness" but also he had the uncommon wisdom of common sense to see that one should accept what the Guru said even if it seemed - as it often enough must, intellectual egoism being what it is - unacceptable to one's mental pre-conceptions. That is why he often helped me by bowing to Sri Aurobindo's verdicts even though he too, like me, wanted first to understand with the mind as far as one could achieve it.

Luckily for him, he had an advantage over many another who came to the Ashram with deep religious samskaras (formulations) and could thus pour his heart's worship, unstintedly, at the altar of the Master. This I say with full knowledge of its implications. For I myself dared not compare Sri Aurobindo with some of his predecessors whom I need not name. But Sethna could - and with an honest conviction. It was this honesty married to an intelligence which drew me to him more and more for I have been sometimes roused to oppose some sadhakas who talked with

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disrespect about past prophets and seers. I myself did not feel any call to compare, because I could not at the time feel quite the same degree of enthusiasm about Sri Aurobindo as Sethna did. Here I have to admit that he scored over me in his gurubhakti.  But what I found personally rather charming of him was that he never flaunted the initial advantage he had in coming to Sri Aurobindo with a clean heart-tablet on which no other holy figure had been etched. This was assuredly one of the reasons why he received so much from Gurudev, especially in insight into mystic poetry. I do not know personally of any living critic who has read Sri Aurobindo's poetry so thoroughly and acquired such a deep grasp of both its poetical beauty and technical mastery, insomuch that he may easily be adjudged a specialist in these two capacities. (I say 'living critic' because Chadwick has, alas, departed this life - about whose outstanding poetical gift and sadhana I will have a good deal to say presently.)

Naturally I liked Sethna also because he was, like Chadwick and myself, a poet who continued all along to be a recipient of Sri Aurobindo's letters on poetry. I was fond of his poems too but as my knowledge of English verse was rather poor at the time, I could not sufficiently appreciate his technique. Still I loved some of his poems even in those days - nearly twenty years ago - and translated them, which knit us together into a closer bond. One such poem which was singled out for special praise by Gurudev was entitled This Errant Life which I must quote in full if only to bring out the side of aspiration to his nature:

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,

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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 ail Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face!

When I sent Gurudev my Bengali translation he wrote, commenting:

"Amal's lines are not easily translatable, least of all into Bengali. There is in them a union or rather fusion of high severity of speech with exaltation and both with a pervading incense sweet-ness which it is almost impossible to transfer bodily without loss into another language. There is no word in excess, none that could have been added or changed without spoiling the expression, every word just the right revelatory one - no colour, no ornamentation, but a sort of suppressed burning glow, no similes, but images which have been fused inseparably into the substance of the thought and feeling - the thought perfectly developed, not idea added to idea at the will of the fancy, but perfectly interrelated and linked together like the limbs of an organic body. It is high poetic style in its full perfection and nothing of all that is transferable. You have taken his last line and put in a lotus-face and made divine love bloom in it, - a pretty image, but how far from the glowing impassioned severity of phrase: 'And mould thy love into a human face!'"

I shall pass by me constant and ready help plus encouragement which Sethna has given me all along in my poetic aspirations in English as that will be going beyond me immediate and urgent aim of this humble homage to one under whose aegis we in our little colony endeavoured to follow, as best we could, the ideal that has drawn us together. I will refrain, for the same reason, from enumerating his other rare qualities such as his sheer love of poetry or innate generosity which prompted him to praise many a budding Ashram poet. But I might as well write here of my fruitful contact with the great poet A.E. for which Sethna was

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partly responsible. It happened like this.

Sethna, and later Chadwick, used to give me valuable subsidiary advice about English prosody and verse-making which I was learning under the direct guidance of Sri Aurobindo. I will have more to write in a subsequent chapter on our Master's corrections and counsels and so will confine myself here to Sethna who became the leader of our little cenacle almost as naturally as a courageous man becomes the leader of a party oftimid pilgrims. One day without telling him, I sent A.E. a few of his poems along with some extracts from Sri Aurobindo's Future Poetry which moved us to a deep admiration, extracts such as (I quote these from a then diary of mine):

"All art worth the name must go beyond the visible, must reveal, must show us something that is hidden."

"So poetry arrives at the indication of infinite meanings beyond the finite intellectual meaning the word carries."

"Poetical speech is the spiritual excitement of a rhythmic voyage of self-discovery among the magic islands of form and name in these inner and outer worlds."

"The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement of her image, but an interpretation by the images she herself affords us not on one, but on many planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal." And so on.

Also I asked A.E.'s permission to publish my translations of some of his lovely poems like Warning, Krishna etc.

I enclosed also a poem on silence written by a friend, a poem which I could not sincerely sympathise with; I wrote that I held all wordy eloquence about silence somewhat suspect.

He sent me his kind reply written in his own hand (that is, not a typed letter) in which he signed himself A.E. (his pen-name) and not George Russell.

The letter was from Dublin and was dated 6 January 1932:

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"Dear Dilip Roy,

"Your letter has come at a time when I am too troubled in mind to write, as I would like, about the poems you sent me. Yes, you have my permission to translate the verses or any other poems you may desire.

"I think the extracts from Sri Aurobindo very fine, and the verses you sent of Mr. Sethna have a genuine poetic quality. There are many fine lines like

'The song-impetuous mind.'

‘The Eternal Glory is a wanderer

Hungry for lips of clay.'

"Many such lines show a feeling for rhythm which is remarkable since the poet is not writing in his native but a learned language. I refer to this because the only advice one writer can give another rightly is technical criticism. The craft of any art, painting, music, poetry, sculpture, is continually growing and much can be taught in the schools. But the inspiration cannot be passed on from one to another. So I confine myself to a technical criticism.

"You, like many Indians, are so familiar with your great traditions that it is natural for you to deal with ideas verging on the spiritual more than European writers do. The danger of this when writing poetry is that there is a tendency to use or rather overuse great words like 'immensity', 'omnipotence', 'inexhaustible', 'limitless’ etc. By the very nature of the ideas which inspire you, you are led to use words of that nature because of a kinship with the infinity of the spirit. But in the art of verse if one uses these words overmuch they tend to lose their power just as painting in which only the primary colours would weary the eye.

"I would ask Mr. Sethna to try to reserve the use of such great words, as a painter keeps his high lights, for the sun and moon or radiant water and the rest of his canvas is in low tones. So the light appears radiant by contrast. English is a great language but it has very few words relating to spiritual ideas. For example the word Karma in Sanskrit embodies a philosophy. There is no word in English embodying the same idea. There are many words in Sanskrit charged with meanings which have no counterpart in

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English: Dhyani, Sushupti, Turiya etc., and I am sure the languages which the Hindus speak today must be richer in words fitted for spiritual expression than English, in which there are few luminous words that can be used when there is a spiritual emotion to be expressed. I found this difficulty myself of finding a vocabulary though English is the language I heard from my cradle.

"I hope Mr. Sethna will forgive my saying all this, I do so because I find a talent in the verses you sent me and do not wish him to do without such burnishing as a fellow-craftsman can help to give.

"Will you tell your philosophic friend who praises silence that with the poet the silence cannot be for ever ? He sings and then keeps silent until the cup is filled up again by sacrifice and mediation and then he must give away what he gets, or nothing more will he poured into his cup. The secret of this is that through the free giver the song flows freely and whoever constrains life in himself, in him it is constrained. There is indeed the Divine silence, but we do not come to that being by negation,"

Sethna submitted his comments on this letter to Gurudev who wrote back;

"If you send your poems to five different poets, you are likely to get five absolutely disparate and discordant estimates of them. A poet likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament or taste the rest he condemns or ignores. (My own case is different because I have made in criticism a practice of appreciating very thing that can be appreciated as a catholic critic would.) Contemporary poetry, besides, seldom gets its right Judgment from contemporary critics even.

"Nothing can be more futile than for a poet to write in expectation of contemporary fame or praise, however agreeable that may be, if it comes; but it not of much value; for very poor poets have enjoyed a great contemporary fame and very great poets have been neglected in their time. A poet has to go on his

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way, trying to gather hints from what people say for or against, when their criticisms are things he can profit by, but not otherwise moved if he can manage it - seeking mainly to sharpen his own sense of self-criticism by the help of others. Difference of estimate need not surprise him at all."

Sethna asked him next a pointed question (which will be readily inferred from his reply) to which the answer came again:

"Your letter suggested a more critical attitude on A.E.'s part than his actual appreciation warrants. His appreciation is, on the contrary, sufficiently warm: 'a genuine poetic quality' and 'many fine lines' - he could not be expected to say more. The two quotations he makes certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are moreover of the kind, which A.E. (and Yeats also) would naturally like. But your poem This Errant Life selected for special praise, has no striking expression, like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would be no single feature standing out in a special beauty (eyes, lips, head or hands) but the whole has a harmoniously modelled grace of equal perfection everywhere as, let us say, in the perfect charm of a statue by Praxiteles. This - apart from the idea and feeling which goes psychically and emotionally much deeper than the idea in the lines quoted by A.E. which are poetically striking but have not the same subtle spiritual appeal; they touch the mind and vital strongly but the other goes home into the soul.....

"His remarks about 'immensity' etc, are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought, but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot apply to a new poetry dealing with spiritual things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. A.E. himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English language.

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His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent are mental ones or intuitions occurring on the summits of consciousness, rare 'high lights' over the low tones of ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not the average man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent the balance of harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere of these high lights - in a consciousness in which the finite, not only the occult but even the earthly finite, is bathed in the sense of the eternal, the illimitable infinite, the immensities or intimacies of the Timeless ? To follow A.E.' s rule might well mean to falsify this atmosphere, to substitute a merely aesthetic fabrication for a true seeing and experience. Truth first - a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and even if it did, the language will have to be made adequate. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however new; it must now be urged to a farther new progress. In fact the power is there and has only to be brought out more fully to serve the full occult, mystic, spiritual purpose."

And then he went on in another letter:

"What you say may be correct (that our oriental luxury in poetry makes it unappealing to Westerners), but on the other hand it is possible that the mind of the future will be more international than it is now. In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will have a chance.

"If our aim is not success and personal fame but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds of poetry, the English tongue is the most wide-spread and is capable of profound turns of mystic expression which makes it admirably fitted for the purpose; if it could be used for the highest spiritual expression, that is worth trying."

And then in another letter:

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"The idea that Indians cannot succeed in English poetry is very much in the air just now but it cannot be taken as absolutely valid.... At present many are turning to India for its sources of spirituality, but the eye has been directed only towards Yoga and philosophy, not to the poetical expression of it. When the full day comes, however, it may well be that this too will be discovered, and then an Indian who is at once a mystic and a true poet and able to write in English as if in his mother-tongue (that is essential) would have this full chance. Many barriers are breaking, moreover, both in French and English there are instances of foreigners who have taken their place as prose-writers or poets."

I have been at some pains here to labour this point because I feel it necessary to combat the unhelpful attitude of those who cannot create and yet presume to adjudicate on our highly laudable attempt to express our deepest perceptions in English, as also because I feel sure, among other things, that Sri Aurobindo will be recognised in future not only as a poet but also as a poet-maker. It will take me too much space to bring out what I mean when I say this. So I will confine myself at present to saying that those of us who have seen not one, but many poets flower under his inspiration (some of whom had never before written a single poem) cannot possibly accept the verdicts of those who have no access to such data, for the simple reason that no-experience is incompetent per se to adjudicate on the validity or otherwise of experience.

But before I conclude my account of Sethna I must stress something about his poetic perspicacity and insight, the more because these native gifts, which matured rapidly under Gurudev's fostering, he utilised religiously not only to understand our Master's special contribution to poetry, but - what is more important for the public - to pave the way to a more critical and deeper understanding of his genius by his luminous studies, in different Journals, of Sri Aurobindo's form and message. I am myself definitely persuaded - even from what little I have imbibed with my limited receptivity of the supreme beauty of his

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epic Savitri - that he will be regarded as by far the greatest poet of this age, a new epoch-maker in poetry, or to quote from Sethna's own estimate:

"On the brow of this giant we must place a crown of triple triumph. For, Sri Aurobindo has done three exceedingly rare things. First, he has to his credit a bulk of excellent blank verse - a statement possible about poets we can count on our fingers. At least five thousand lines in the Collected Poems and Plays... are a diversely modulated beauty and power with no appreciable fall below a fine adequacy and with peak after peak of superb frenzy. They put him cheek by jowl with Keats in both essence and amount. The huge epic Savitri... is a marvel which places him at once in the company of the absolute top-rankers by a sustained abundance of first-rate quality. Add to living lengths of blank verse a large number of sublime or delicate shorter pieces, mostly in rhyme, and we have a further testimony of Sri Aurobindo's creativeness. But what is of extraordinary import is that among them we have a body of successful work in a medium that has  eluded English poets: quantitative metre. Sri Aurobindo has solved once for all the problem of quantity in English - a feat which gives the language 'a brave new world' of consciousness. Quantitative metre is the second tier in Sri Aurobindo's poetic crown. The third is not merely a revelation of strange rhythm-moulds, but also the laying bare of a rhythmic life beyond the ranges of inspired consciousness to which we have been so far accustomed. To bring the epic surge or the lyric stream of the quantitative metres of Greece and Rome in English is not necessarily to go psychologically beyond the ranges of inspiration we find in the epic or lyric moods of England.  It could very well be just an opening up of fresh movements on psychologicalplanes already possessed by those moods. Over and above opening up such movements Sri Aurobindo discloses planes that have been secret hitherto except for stray lines here and there, occurring as if by a luminous accident. Only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these

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ranges of mystical and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Sri Aurobindo stands as the creator of a new Vedic and Upanishadic age of poetry."

I do not feel called upon to apologise for giving such a long quotation from Sethna's book, the less because I cannot help a deep regret that we, Indians, who have already flowered, at our loveliest, into no mean creators in English poetry should have elected to cling to a cautious if not timid silence about Sri Aurobindo's epic achievement in poetry (an achievement which has been making history while we remain standing in a non-committal hush) simply because we want to play safe and so dare not give our verdicts lest our highbrow English tutors reverse it later on.  I will not go into the cause of the unresponsiveness on the part of the English, but I feel I owe it to truth to speak out my deep conviction: that not to know Sri Aurobindo as a poet will be, in the near future, to argue oneself unknown as a critic and lover of poetry. Fortunately Krishnaprem (formerly Ronald Nixon) has made some atonement at least for the silence of his compatriots, the English, by writing in his tribute to Savitri:

"Such poetry can only be written either in the early days before the rise to power of self-conscious mind or when that particular cycle has run its course and life establishes itself once more in the unity beyond, this time with all the added range and power that has been gained during the reign of mind. It is an omen of the utmost significance and hope that in these years of darkness and despair such a poem as Savitri should have appeared. Let us salute the Dawn."

And one must congratulate him - the more because he is English - on his courage for having anticipated a hackneyed objection thus: "The English language has been given to the world and its usages and limits can now no longer be determined exclusively by the ears of the islanders whose tongue it originally

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was. Those who would remain sole rulers of their language must abjure empire." But to revert to Sethna.

I have felt this about him and a few others, isolated appraisers of Sri Aurobindo's poetry, that when, in the not too-distant future, Sri Aurobindo will have been acknowledged by the whole world as by far the greatest of modern poets to whom the mantric word came as native as soaring to the eagle, this first small band of ardent admirers led by Sethna shall receive the smile of the great Goddess of Poetry, Saraswati, not only for having (in the words of Chesterton)

...watched when all men slept

And seen the stars which never see the sun.

but also for having readily acquitted themselves of their sacred responsibility, the sense of which prompted them to "salute the Dawn" they had seen and announce the high Herald of a new consciousness in poetry, who sang vibrantly of Earth's deepest aspiration and highest fulfilment:

An inarticulate whisper drives her steps

Of which she feels the force but not the sense;

A few rare intimations come as guides,

Immense divining flashes cleave her brain...

Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,

Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods

Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time

What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,

A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,

A Will expressive of soul's deity,

A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,

A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.

For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:

Heaven's privilege she claims as her own right.

Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,

Clear in a greater light than reason owns:

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                                      Our intuitions are its tide-deeds;

                                      Our souls accept what our blind thoughts refuse.

                                       Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,

                                       The impossible God's sign of things to be.¹

DILIP KUMAR, ROY

Sri Aurobindo Came to me, pp. 85-103 (first published in 1952).

1. Savitri, Cent. Ed, pp. 51-52.

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