Amal-Kiran - Poet and Critic

The Triumphant Call of Sethna's Poetry

A REVIEWER of The Secret Splendour is handicapped at the beginning. For, interspersed with K.D. Sethna's poems are Sri Aurobindo's own appreciative remarks, and who dare disagree with the Colossus of India's spiritual-literary renaissance?  Especially when he uses words like ‘beautiful', 'exceedingly fine' and 'magnificent' quite often ?

Fortunately for us, neither Sethna nor Sri Aurobindo are clique-ridden. Ready to face criticism, yes! For Sethna knows very well that mystic poetry has to survive in a highly critical soil. Besides, this is the ruthless age of science and technology. Sethna has equipped himself with the latest in literature, history, science, sociology. In this obviously externalised world, an internalised art hasn't a big chance. If, inspite of all the negative aspects of contemporary writing (poetry books have no sales value), Sethna has chosen to send forth this splendidly produced volume, it is because of his immense faith in the serenity of man's soul. That depth within which calls out to the deep elsewhere and achieves sterling samatva when true understanding dawns upon man in his hurried quest as on the bird in the Upanishad. An image of cognitive assonance that is a beautiful visual on the frontispiece and the evocative poem Two Birds in the volume:*

A small bird crimson-hued

Among the great realms of green

Fed on their multitudinous fruit -

But in his dark eye flamed more keen

A hunger as from joy to joy

He moved the poignance of his beak,

And ever in his heart he wailed,

'Where hangs the marvellous fruit I seek ?'

* The frontispiece painting illustrating the Two Birds is by Sethna himself; the same has been used for the jacket design of the book also.- Editors.

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Then suddenly above his head

searching gaze of grief he turned:

Lo, there upon the topmost bough

A pride of golden plumage burned!

Lost in a dream no hunger broke,

This calm bird — aureoled, immense -

Sat motionless: all fruit he found

Within his own magnificence.

The watchful ravener below

Felt his time-tortured passion cease,

And flying upward knew himself

One with that bird of golden peace.

The Secret Splendour has to be read at a steady pace, twice. The first time it is to be the poems alone to get the full impact of Sethna's creative ability as an extension of our own experience with literature as well as spiritual strivings.  Though the Indianness of the poems is obvious because of the  prayerful note in all the poems (you do not get this tone in the English poetry of Great Britain and America except perhaps in the Psalms and the Prelude) and the in-depth references to Indian names like Sakuntala and Parasara as well as concepts like Yoga and Maya, Sethna does take us back repeatedly to English and French poetry. Possessed of enviable scholarship in these areas, it is but natural to come across poems like Lammergeyer:

Preach pity to the Lammergeyer’s breast,

Make its brute claws grasp intellectual truth -

Vain strife! yet only the subhuman nest

Bears the untrammelled vigour that can strain

To skies like some vast super-rose of ruth,

Seer suns beyond the gold of Plato's brain.

The Divine Comedy gets invoked quite often in crystalline poems. Some passages from Dante and Prudhomme have also been transcreated.

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Sethna's is a lyric genius. Even the Sehra group is but a bouquet of lyrics. It is surprising that inspite of being an earnest disciple of Sri Aurobindo and having spent long decades in absorbing each line that Sri Aurobindo wrote, Sethna has never tried his hand at narrative poems or epics. Perhaps the early hold of French symbolists on Sethna's poetic spirit could never be loosened after. Also, it is quite possible that Sethna has understood his path and preferred not to waste time where his heart would not dictate: paradharma bhayavahah!

Yet another reason would be that his sunny genius prefers not to plumb despair, helplessness and tragedy which are indispensable in narrative poetry that call for externalised drama. He has suffered immensely but has always been a happy warrior. Hence none of the poems here is touched by the Shadow. A brush with death is always transformed into an exaltation, for Sethna has intuitively gazed at the Mula Prakriti.. Forget this body, this tiny self!  Look, look upon the immensities within and without where "Shiva [sits] throned on an all-supporting void"!

But when the Great self glows

Like a golden cosmic rose,

The petals fanning out from one sweet core,

No strangeness anywhere

Remains for stare and stare

Seeking to itself a door.

The central Eye of eyes

Can shut in all-repose,

For the Great Flower knows

Its perfume of paradise.

Not for Sethna the mole-like burrowing into the darkness's of one's own vital and lower-vital consciousness that is the hallmark of most of the anthologised poets of post-independence Indo-Anglia. Not for him the ironic skepticism of those poets whose daily servility to sex imagery has entombed them in their own excess as in the dramas of Ionesco. There is something imperial about Sethna's stance; yet there is no stand-offishness. Here are

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aspirations, the anxieties of the explorer, the regulated passion of the expert tennis player, the Keatsian joy on looking in Chapman's Homer. In this extended monologue with the Supreme, the aspirant mortal simply rejects sorrow in one clean sweep, for how can be sorrow present in the presence of the All-Beautiful Anandamaya ?

May my whole life in a flame of worship move

Towards the spirit-splendour of Thy limbs

Wherein our lost and fragmentary days

Find a uniting rapture and the unknown

Helpless dream-longing of the earth, star-sown,

Blossoms into undying words of light!

For Sethna writing poetry is yoga and in yoga there can be no place for sadness, hopelessness, death. Life is a seamless spread in the Time-Space continuum and it will be futile to waste one's breathing moments in the baubles of mundane pleasures or in weeping and wailing about the inevitability of ageing and death. You turn page after page of this hefty volume only to be confronted by various shades of a child-like joy. This is truly Ananda Yoga, the creative joy that unites the dancer and the dance. Sethna subscribed to this creed whole-heartedly and said so in his Talks on Poetry:

"No doubt, Arnold has said that great poetry carries a high seriousness with it. But poetry's high seriousness has behind it a creative Ananda. Poetry, says Sri Aurobindo, repeats in its own way and on a small scale the original universal Delight with which the Supreme Soul created all things and set the cosmic rhythms going.  Now, it should be very natural for Ananda both to smile and to laugh. Of course there can be a quiet or dumb happiness - a happiness which is ineffable. And poetry, with its burden of unspoken magnitudes, has to do with an ineffable bliss by means of wonderful speech just as the Supreme Soul is believed to have set the World-Word vibrating."

Despite this triumphant tone being heard in all the poems, the experience never palls. This is because the poems are backed by a

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tradition that springs from the fearless incantations of the Vedic Rishis who represent aspiring humans. In the poem The Parsi, Sethna describes this strain as "India's infinite Unknown / (that) Lures up the same fire-cry" that relates to his own ancestral Parsi "Fire-cult that neighbored the Greek world of thought". Confronted by the fury of Nature, the ancients (in Persia, India) invoked the Seer-Will, Agni, and exulted in mantric verses which transmuted the human into the Divine. The mantra's transformative power is boundless. As Sri Aurobindo says:

"By expression then we create and men are even said to create the gods in themselves by the mantra. Again, that which we have created in our consciousness by the Word, we can fix there by the Word to become part of ourselves and effective not only in our inner life but upon the outer physical world. By expression we form, by affirmation we establish."

Firmly established in the Ananda of a divine ambience, and powered by prosodic control, the mantra achieves utterance in an inspirational mood. Sethna's poems do achieve such an incantatory feel often. Song-Sculpture is a fine soliloquy on his art:

Poet, be yours the sculptor's art,

A visionary force of sound

Carving from the white profound

Of the trance-secluded heart

Symbols of fiery repose -

A rapture-resonance

Bright-shaping to disclose

With every song a monumental dream

Of some supreme

Inalterable hushed omnipotence!

As a result, the present tome has scores of lines that rise to a mantric height in the light of the Vedic-Persian-Aurobindonian world-view:

A pang of beauty thrown back from lips and eyes

To a Cave within that knows self-paradise!

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The core of a deathless sun is now the brain

And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold.

So much for reading Sethna's poems first. Our second reading is to be the poems accompanied by Sri Aurobindo's commentary. Here we enter a regular poetry workshop.  Sri Aurobindo is a patient guide, a gentle examiner, a loving friend.  Hence Sethna's flaws are ironed out. This process becomes our teacher as well. Thus Sri Aurobindo on Grave of Trance:

"The poem is otherwise successful, but the 'bright worms of eternity' is, I am afraid, bizarre and creates a sense of overstressed effect with no flash of revealing breath in it to justify it.  The macabre can be successful altogether only when it deals with what is terrible and repulsive - but here it is more like a violent conceit - gargoyling what is in itself noble."

A poem here lacks spontaneity, another is all conceit, and a sonnet has no outline. But Sri Aurobindo is interested only in fostering Sethna's talent and hence most of the time the comments are made up of ‘good’ and 'fine'. Sri Aurobindo's clarifications of the Overmental aesthesis are welcome additions to this book. Certainly the volume contains "an unusual body of verse and an expert analytic commentary on it", as Sethna had said in his introduction to Overhead Poetry.

    As he enters the nineties of his life, Sethna might wonder: has all this meditative aspiration, quill-pushing and spiritual struggle been worth it ? Has he not sacrificed "the long green crests of the seas of life" to float across "the orange skies of the mystic mind" in search of the Divine in the last Beyond ? Pat comes the joyous answer from the title poem like the laughter of early-morning blossoms:

Barren nor drear the exalted sacrifice!

Unquenched I bring the keen revealing flame,

The warm magnificence of love's caress.

Not with sage calm but thrilled vast hands, I claim

The unfathomed dark which round my spirit lies -

And touch immortal rapturous Loveliness!

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That is the affirmatory tone of the Vedic Rishi who hymned Agni Jatavedas, the High-Blazing Flame, King of Immortality in transformative Riks. That is the triumphant call of the victorious secret splendour within us all.

PREMA NANDAKUMAR

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