On Poetry
THEME/S
From Kathleen Raine
What a surprise and a pleasure to hear from you again after all these years, and I certainly thought the publication of our correspondence had been long forgotten. I look forward to re-reading your own letters but did quickly run through my side of the correspondence to see whether what I had then written was too foolish or far from what I now feel about these things.I found that on the whole I do think as I did, only with perhaps greater pessimism about the future of all the world and English as the world]-language not of Shakespeare and Wordsworth but of the television commercial. The vocabulary now in use in this country is I know not how many hundreds of words poorer than that used by Alfred the Great, not to name Marvell or Milton or, I imagine, the Romantics. But I still think we have to go on making every effort until the last day - which after all is not named on any calendar. One point - it was made by Ramchandra Gandhi whom I met in New Delhi earlier this year - is that it may be providential that so many Indians are versed in English because by the mastery of our language you may be able to teach the West. It's a point 1 had overlooked. Meanwhile it does look as if India is being increasingly westernized and if India is lost to traditional wisdom, we are all lost. I should think that as regards poetry there is little to be hoped on cither side of the world, but then the unforeseen is only obvious after the event and historic continuity is a trompe-I'ocil, seen in retrospect.
The question is whether in taking over our technology it is possible to reject materialist values, and the effortlessness of the technological age. Perhaps you can fight back - help us to fight back. Tides do turn. Your own presence - and Arabinda Basu's - in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is one of those spiritual points of illumination in our world.
I hope you are well and still writing, as I am, at the age of seventy-nine, and still at work. My most recent book was on Yeats - 'Yeats the Initiate". I think I sent a copy to prof.
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Sisir Kumar Ghose. I also edit Temenos, which Arabinda may have shown you. But I have not seen him either for some time. I hope to do so at the end of February, at a conference in New Delhi on 'Tradition as Continual Renewal' which in fact takes up the themes - some of them -which we were discussing all those years ago - how to preserve in a secular world sacred values. If India is lost all is lost, and yet there are many of us here in the West who are much troubled by the way our world is going, a situation beyond the power of politics to heal. I enclose a programme of our recent Temenos conference at Dartington Hall in Devon - a companion foundation to Santiniketan.
It's interesting to me to read again in a letter my hope that some day I would 'make it' to India. I feel very much that one has to await the time, and not rush blindly here and there, like a tourist, gate-crashing other countries and their civilization. But visiting India has taught me a great deal, both about India and about myself, though not nearly enough of either.
But never do I forget the definitions of barbarism once given by the American classical scholar, Edith Hammerton: a barbarian is one who 'has no past' and her phrase 'effortless barbarism' is ever in my mind. The television-set is the purveyor and spearhead of the 'effortless' in all parts of our small world. We are all in the same mess now and must surely pool our resources. In which we can but look to you for wisdom, which we lack as you lack technology. Yet I feel that Mahatma Gandhiji's vision of India is far from what has happened and is happening. I send you a recent issue of Temenos which has Indian contributions you may find interesting. T.8 is now in proof - we hope to reach ten issues, perhaps twelve. We shall see.
I do wish you a very happy and fruitful 1987. Remember me also to Arabinda. He's for ever jetting around the world but it's now a long time since he called in on London.
I hope the book is a great success and widely read.
(5.1.1987)
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From K.D. Sethna
I was delighted to get your letter and to feel the warmth of it as well as the old idealism running through its words. An added joy was the immediacy of your response and the unusual celerity of the postal service. I sent you our book on December 31 and got your letter on January 10-quite a feat for the air-mail between Pondicherry and London. It is as if, knowing my eagerness to rush the book to you and yours to reciprocate with enthusiasm, the aerial spirits went all out to set up a record in quick delivery.
I would have written back on January 10 itself, but I waited to send the offprints of two essays by me which had appeared some time back in Mother India. I could lay my hands on one but searched in vain for the other. if I can't find my "W. B. Yeats - Poet of Two Phases" I'll bookpost you by air "Poetic Expressions and Rhythms - Greek and English" which reproduces some comments from two letters of mine, the first of which was apropos of The Penguin Book of Greek Verse.
Mention of "Penguin" brings me to your splendid gift of No. 5 of Temenos, which has among other valuable contents, nine poems of Tagore's, translated by William Radice and originally published by Penguin about a year and a half ago. I had learned from Arabinda Basu that you had expressed to him your keen appreciation of Radice's renderings which had for the first time given you a sense of Tagore's greatness as a world-poet. Although Basu had some copies of Temenos sent by you, I could not find anywhere the work you had praised. Your present gift is really a rich answer to my desire. Apart from your own article "Yeats and Kabir", these nine poems were the first things I plunged into: I liked most two out of the three mentioned in your introductory note: "Shahjahan" and "The Sick Bed - 6", and one not particularly marked there: "In the Eyes of a Peacock". "Shahjahan" is indeed superbly done. "The Sick Bed - 6" goes home to me not only for
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what you have termed its "revealing informality" but also because a pair of sparrows have built their nest in one corner of the cross-beam of my roof and the male bird usually chirrups me out of sleep in the morning from the top of the netting on my window. Judging from Radice's feel of the Tagorean style and form, I should expect a magnificent version of the finest of the Bengali poet's short masterpieces: "Urvashi." I have not yet come across the Penguin book-. Now I'll search for it to get at this poem.
Your "Yeats and Kabir" taught me several things. I had never realised Kabir's influence on Yeats. Now it is clear to me. Nor had I thought that Yeats had turned to the tradition of Indian spirituality resulting in his final unconcern with mediumship, magic and other secondary matters of occult lore. Your reference to Yeats's Indian studies having been coloured by the Shiva cult of the sacredness of sexuality explains why, in spite of his immersion in the Vedanta of the Upanishads under Sri Purohit Swami's tutorship, his last poems are markedly charged with what we may dub vitalistic energy. Perhaps his undergoing an operation according to the "Steinach Technique" (to be distinguished from the "Voronoff Method") was also responsible for the upsurge of the sexual strain in his verse? Your whole essay makes fascinating reading with its blend of esoteric interpretation and literary appreciation. Is your Yeats the Initiate available in India?
You have thrown new light on Yeats's self-epitaph1 by picking out as one important source a poem of Kabir's. Now I find, over and above the play of the "athletic will" and the aristocratic poise, a view of death which is apparently "cold", if not even "bitter", but is really "tranquil", as you say, a high detachment touched by the philosophia perennis. I would go a little further and, with the background you have noted, see the epitaph as being somewhat in the
1. Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by.
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Dantesque style, a forceful conciseness pregnant with a significant silence. What is said leaves an unsaid suggestion which is the heart of the meaning. When Yeats tells the "Horseman", by indicating a la Kabir that life and death are to be looked upon as having "no separation between them" any more than there is a difference between one hand and the other, he is not only hinting at "Unity and harmony" at the base of the world-movement: he is also pointing to a condition transcending this movement, a condition to which life and death are of equal inconsequence because it is beyond time itself. That which is the Unborn and the Undying, the Eternal, hovers inaudibly over the three brief lines. And the "Horseman" seems to be the witness-image, within the time-spirit, of the Eternal, moving with the passage of time but as Plato's "spectator of all time and all existence", casting "a cold eye" on the ever-changing transitory pageant. A kind of Shankarite Vedanta appears to be implicit in the Yeatsian indifference.
(14.1.1987)
Something is indeed at work between Pondicherry and London for your letter of Jan. 14th has arrived. I was very glad to have it, with your comments on William Radice's translations (they were in fact published in Temenos before the Penguin publication) and my own paper on Yeats and Kabir. Yeats's interest in India was lifelong but in later years he certainly abandoned spiritism and all those secondary occult practices for his study of Vedanta. I am interested in your comments on the relationship between the Shaivite teaching and the 'Steinach technique' operation. This extremely unwise and unphilosophic action of so great a poet and seeker for truth is troubling however regarded and I left it alone, but I don't think Yeats had quite caught up, humanly speaking, with what the poet knew. It seems to me this is a significant difference between the poet and the holy
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man, who lives his thought, whereas the poet sees from afar the beautiful land, knows it is there, praises that country in his work, whereas the saint or sage simply lives there in bliss, whereas the poet, being far off, weeps and mourns. He was a great but I think not a happy poet. But if what he believed be true, each life, each death, is a progression. For us all, I hope, for I shall be seventy-nine this year.
It seems I must send you a copy of my 'Yeats the Initiate.' I did not know that you, like myself, had moved from Blake to his greatest follower. In return perhaps you could review the book somewhere. I think it will interest you. A very brilliant Indian scholar, whose doctorate thesis I read for Delhi University, has a book on 'Yeats and the Sacred Dance' in which she derives Yeats's dance from India mainly: and she plans a further book on Yeats and India which should also be an eye-opener to both Western and Indian scholars. There is no doubt of the direction in which Yeats moved, and to which he looked. She knows far more about this field than I. In fact it was she not I who first traced Yeats to Foucher. I had reached the same result, so to speak, from Binyon, who no doubt put Yeats on to Foucher, whose book is in Yeats's library. Santosh felt that my general recognition of her work was not enough to cover that particular source, so I tell you of this now lest you should review my book in India.
I will post 'Yeats the Initiate' separately. I still have a very English trust in the post, unlike my Indian friends who always prefer to wait until a cousin is travelling on Air India.
I also enclose a photocopy of my review of Radice's Tagore for T. 6.
(23.1.1987)
From K. D. Sethna
I am happy that what "is at work between Pondicherry and London" is also at work the other way around. Your letter
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of January 23 is in my hands and has set me thinking along several lines.
Yes, I have been interested in Yeats for a long time but without any particular connection with Blake, though I could see that both he and Blake had equally sensitive entries into the "middle worlds'', the occult planes which are "behind" our physical-vital-mental cosmos rather than "beyond", where the true spiritual supernature is. The vistas the two poets "insight" of those worlds are different. Blake, apart from his "innocent" lyrics, seems to have found reflections of the truths of the "beyond" in a whole chiaroscuro universe in which the energies of Imagination fought with the forces of Mechanism and "Ratio". The early Yeats seized magical entities and runic rhythms that were swept into his mind by his empathy with the reveries of Celtic mythology crossed with vague shadows from Blavatskyan theosophy and the later Yeats touched the fringes of semi-Vedantic semi-Tantric mysticism from the East in a much more direct manner than was possible to dabblings in theosophical lore. I had no clear idea of the initiate Yeats. You have brought a new picture of him before me and your book (which you could send by sea-mail to save too much expense) will acquaint me more closely with his latest development and most profoundly enlighten me to the full on the theme of his having been, as you say, Blake's "greatest follower."
I am not sure whether the Shaivite teaching which seems connected with the "Steinach technique" Yeats underwent is that teaching in its inmost aspect. The sense of it which is coloured by the linga-symbol is the popular or exoteric one which has lent itself to frequent perversions. The creativity of Shiva and Shakti locked together is a hyper-sexual mystery. As a scripture "of the Shaiva-Siddhanta cult puts it: "Shiva begets Shakti and Shakti begets Shiva. Both in their happy union produce the worlds and souls. Still Shiva is [ever] chaste and the sweet-speeched Shakti remains [ever] a virgin. Only sages can comprehend this secret." Even the
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word linga (penis) carries in old texts the adjective jyotir, suggesting "a pillar of light". Besides, it is doubtful that the penis erectus in Shiva-representations is a pointer to sexuality in action. It has been contended that it really indicates the sexual force raised up, sublimated, turned towards its spiritual archetype in the over-world. In that case the organ limp would signify surrender to the lower life. The subject is rather complicated.
Going back to Yeats, I am prompted to a hypothesis which perhaps you may confirm or modify. It is as follows. The "Steinach technique" did not create the sex-zest we find in some of his later poetry but merely increased its incidence. Primarily this zest was a natural accompaniment of the wide-awake earth-grappling inspiration to which he turned from the old Celticism. The intellect masterfully drawing on mystical tradition and combining the speaking voice with the inner tone would also lead to a recognition of the genitals' claim: a poet who has fused the essence of the Celtic mood with a deliberate "modernism" and even flirted with an aristocratic mode of fascism cannot escape this claim on his life. One may wonder how Yeats could switch on to his second poetic phase when he had appeared to be drenched in the Celtic Twilight. Perhaps there was a dichotomy in his nature and the sensual side which looked quite submerged in the colourful sense-rarefying and heart-uplifting mistiness of the mid-world was never ineffective in Yeats the man as distinguished from the poet. Do you remember the incident of his proposal to Maud Gonne's daughter? When he found that Maud herself was out of his reach he offered marriage to her daughter and arranged to meet in a restaurant for her answer. The practical mind shown here and the matter-of-fact and even mundane atmosphere of the whole procedure and the subsequent marriage to a woman who is said to have had a sort of "barbaric" beauty were things not out of tune with the resort to the tying up of the vas deferens in order to super-vitalise the organism and intensify the mating power. You
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are right in differentiating the mere poet from the holy man but Yeats seems to give you the impression that one might have expected him at least to live out the holiness of his poetic vision. What I am trying to suppose is that the study of certain signs in his life-posture should have discouraged such an expectation. He strikes one as far from being another AE.
I don't know whether you have made as deep a study of AE as of Yeats. The general idea is that Yeats was a greater poet than AE. Some even believe AE was not a true poet. Yeats himself appears to have rated him rather low. No doubt he was not so creative a singer and Yeats in both his poetic phases, his earlier and later orientations, had more power, more richness of expressive art. But I think AE has not yet received proper appreciation as a poet. When English poetry comes to fulfil more consciously, more directly the particular mystic strain in it which gleams out in Coleridge and Shelley and most in Wordsworth and which is best designated as a secret Indianness of inner and outer perception, then AE will surely come into his own in the world's judgment as a profound pioneer of a new poetic age. In that age the poet will be at the same time "saint" and "sage". AE to my mind was one such, who could sincerely write:
Some for beauty follow long
Flying traces, some there be
Who seek Thee only for a song,
I to lose myself in Thee.
Before I close I can't help touching on some points in your letter to my friend Kishor Gandhi. When he showed it to me it really made me sad. You don't realise what you are missing because of some kind of mental block. And unfortunately the trouble is getting worse. Once you said that Sri Aurobindo failed as a poet on account of his having written in English instead of Bengali, his "mother tongue". You
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also suggested that the failure was due to the attempt to express in English verse things alien to the English genius. Now you assert that Sri Aurobindo is not a poet at all -unlike Tagore whom you feel to be a-pocl even through the most inadequate translation. This means Sri Aurobindo lacks the fundamental qualities of a poet: imaginative perception and harmonious expression. Hence it would make no difference what language he wrote in!
Of course, a philosopher and spiritual teacher docs not ipso facto become a poet, but neither is he debarred from the poetic utterance provided he does not versify bare philosophy and mere spirituality. Besides, a Yogi such as Sri Aurobindo is much more than cither a philosopher or a spiritual teacher. Vivid concrete visions and experiences of the inner life are the stuff of a Yogi-poet's expression. Philosophy and spiritual teaching are byproducts of his verse. Also, before launching on an exploration of "unknown modes of being", he was neither a philosopher nor a spiritual teacher. His absorption was in literature and history and politics, all three mostly of Western countries much before he turned to their Eastern counterparts. The same holds for his knowledge of languages. He spoke in English long before he spoke in Bengali. His education as a child started under English nuns at the Lorcto Convent in Darjceling and continued in England from the age of seven to his twenty-first year. Until he trained for the Indian Civil Service during his term at Cambridge he knew no Indian tongue. He heard and spoke English through the most formative period of his youth and up to the end of his life one could mistake his pronunciation for an Englishman's. When he began to write poetry in England he was not expressing anything Indian any more than when he wrote in Greek and Latin at Cambridge and won prizes for his compositions. In his English work too at that time he embodied the Classical spirit plus a sense of the English landscape and seasons. As an example of the Classical spirit in a happy mood I may cite two stanzas, titled "A Doubt":
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Many boons the new years make us
But the old world's gifts were three,
Dove of Cypris, wine of Bacchus,
Pan's sweet pipe in Sicily.
Love, wine, song, the core of living
Sweetest, oldest, musicalest,
If at end of forward striving
These, Life's first, proved also best?
Surely, the lines could have hailed from the Greek Anthology in one of its lighter aspects and the compact suggestive syntax at the close seems possible only to a budding master of English speech? I catch a hint of mastery also in the felicitous boldness of "musicalest".
1 may add that even during his later life Sri Aurobindo kept on exercising his in-feeling of the English language and his insight into themes Classical. Perhaps you are unaware that side by side with the nearly twenty-four thousand lines he wrote of his blank-verse epic Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol he worked at an epic in hexameters dealing with Homer's own subject: Ilion. To my ear it is a poetic revelation of the Greek genius passed most subtly through an Indian spirit and constituting a masterpiece beyond the range or passion of any Kazantsakis. Several years back a separate edition of it was published, prefaced by a long essay on the possibility of a truly English quantitative metre which would not be a mechanical copy of Greek and Latin rules. If I can lay my hands on the edition I'll post it to you. Please read just ten pages of it, ending with the line:
Capturing the eye like a smile or a sunbeam, Penthesilea.
In case after those ten pages you don't respond and can't go further, kindly pass the book on to your friend Philip Sherrard or somebody like him who is deeply conversant with Greek poetry both modern and ancient.
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As you may recall from our old correspondence, it was about Ilion that Herbert Read wrote to A.B. Purani on June 5, 1958: "It is a remarkable achievement by any standard and I am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality," Evidently Read, though in agreement with you on the general rule that people not of English origin cannot pen genuine English poetry, is prepared to grant - without any reservation - indubitable exceptions or at least one overwhelming exception.
(5.2.1987)
What a magnificent gift, your Yeats the Initiate! I realise I have such a lot to learn - and to enjoy. All the fourteen essays call me equally and I have been dipping into many of them. Your autobiographical sketch in "Yeats's Singing School" gripped me with its story of your progress from modern materialism and scientism, products of a passing phase, surface glimmers of time's flux, to the Eternity which the masters of insight like Plato and Plotinus and the adepts of the imagination like Blake and Yeats have felt in the depths of their being on the one hand and on the other in the urge of the endless that is the secret carried by the sweep of the ages.
I belong to the same generation as you, being only four years older and, though materialist science was not a roar in my ears as it would have been in Europe of the early twentieth century, it was a siren-song loud enough for one who from his earliest years had his mind steeped in the multifarious movement of modernism's self-expression in the English language. Plato was a voice I had heard from almost the beginning and his call to see the temporal as the changing image of the eternal was never quite forgotten, but it couldn't help becoming just a background music for
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several years while the assertive self-confident shout of the empirical and analytic scientist sprang from various directions at me and swayed me in spite of Plato from antiquity and the great Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats - from the near past. A new turn came only when I had on a few rare occasions the direct contact of India's still lived spirituality, and glimpses were dimly caught of the light treasured for ever in the Upanishads, glimpses as if through what a line in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri designates;
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
Soon followed the discovery of the Ashram of Integral Yoga at Pondicherry. I was doing my M.A. at the time. I had graduated in Philosophy, with Plato's Republic as my Honours-study. Now I had planned a thesis to embody the two sides of my nature which were equally dominant. The thesis was to be "The Philosophy of Art". But when I reached Sri Aurobindo's Ashram I didn't feel like continuing with my research and plunged into his writings which had given a philosophical form to his spiritual experiences and realisations in a language which was both profound and precise, literary at the same time that it was expository — a combination of qualities found in a mere handful of philosophers. The author of the Republic and the Symposium Berkeley. Fichte, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Bradley, William James are the ones that strike me at the moment. Then there was the fascination of the actual life aiming to plumb the In-world and penetrate the Over-world as well as move in step with the Universal Divine. Nor was the rapt experience the ultimate goal here: Augustine's "Beauty of ancient days yet ever new" was to be made active in all the waking hours and set at smiling play in all relationships; for this was a Yoga of earth-transformation. The Platonic archetypes which were ever high up and whose reflections alone could ride uncertainly the phenomenal flood below were to be felt as also "involved" in the very abyss and
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waiting to be "evolved" by the pressure from above helping out the upward push from the blind antres. The permeation of all our parts, finally even our most material part, by the Supreme Truth-Consciousness was the ideal, however strong might be the sense of impossibility. After all, the whole history of evolution gives such a sense: brute matter becoming alive and sentient, mere vitality and sentience becoming conscious and self-aware and God-oriented. So why should we demur at the extreme Aurobindonian vision of the future? I remember those two lines from Savitri, driving home an insight first with concentrated audacious richness and then with an utterly simple paradox:
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven.
The impossible God's sign of things to be.
To go back to your book: I liked your remark that you went to the early Yeats for delight and to the later Yeats for knowledge, along with your statement elsewhere that you have still not "renounced (like the Academics) the early Yeats, for of all poets in this century he was, even then, most aware that the Imagination does not reflect but creates its own universe". I go even further than you in my evaluation of the Celtic-Twilight period, as you will gather from the essay I wrote long back when I never knew anything of the wisdom and tradition you have traced in Yeats no less than in Blake whose greatest disciple you consider him. Perhaps you'll think my essay superficial by your present standards, but as you write that "the early Yeats spoke with the full power of magical incantation" and as you have, to my great joy, a keen appreciation of AE who seems to me to have moved on to a semi-Upanishadic seerhood along comparable Celtic lines, possibly you will appreciate the point I have tried to make. There is also what I may term the literary-occult view I have ventured to set forth in regard to the two phases of Yeats's poetry. I have an essay on AE too, written like the other about 40 years ago.
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which 1 shall send as soon as I can to be read at your leisure. I wouldn't have thought of sending it if I hadn't read your paper on this poet, though you have written on AE the visionary and mystic and haven't quoted a line of his verse. In this excellent paper there is one small oversight. The adoption of "AEON" as his name by George Russell does not explain how he came to be known as AE. The fact is that the name "AEON" put by Russell at the end of an article was accidentally turned into AE by the falling out of the last two letters because of a printer's negligence. When the writer saw the result he accepted it as a suitable abbreviation.
Now a few words on your review of Radice and Sisir Kumar Ghose. Your appraisal of Radice's work is just: the poems published in Temenos are indeed very well done. I agree also that Tagore's later books of prose-poems were rather thin in spite of the delicacy of perception in certain parts of them. But surely this was not due to Tagore's inadequacy in English? He fell into a semi-religious semi-romantic sentimentalism of expression which tried in vain to echo the beautiful rhythms and inner-heart responses of the Gitanjali. The Gitanjali will remain a classic in its kind along with The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran which achieves in terms of power what the Gitanjali does in terms of exquisiteness and, as far as 1 know, Yeats had very little to do with its English. In my old correspondence with you I discussed what he did with one of the Gitanjali's items for his Oxford Book of English Poetry and I found it a very mixed affair with its partly archaising, falsely biblical effects which outweigh the tautness he brings in one or two places. Tagore's original is on the whole better expression and more transparent to the spiritual sense and substance. As for Yeats's letter to Rothenstein 1 think it is ridiculous in saying: "Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English" - as well as patently self-contradictory when he ends with the declaration that Tagore "has published, in recent years, and in English, prose books of great beauty, and these
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books have been ignored because of the eclipse of his reputation as a poet."
Why the eclipse came about is not clear from Yeats's letter. He attributes it to Tagore's "sentimental rubbish" and this is intrinsically nothing to do with English as such. The contents of Tagore's post-Gitanjali writing was poor and no amount of good English could have essentially helped. Besides, the fault did not lie in Tagore's attempting English poetry: even the Gitanjali is not poetry proper: it has neither what you call "formal structures" such as Yeats clung to for all the modernity of his later phase nor the authentic swing of "free verse" such as Whitman and some followers of him practised triumphantly. It is poetic prose of a fine sensitive order and is not utterly cut off from Tagore's "prose books of great beauty" in English - evidently written without Yeats's help - to which Yeats refers soon after pontificating that "nobody can write with music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since the language of his thought."
In the wake of Yeats's confused letter - itself a species of xenophobic "sentimental rubbish" - you fall into the same trap, especially with your unfortunate and rather irresponsible indulgence in Aurobindo-baiting, forgetting that - as I explained in my previous letter - English was to Sri Aurobindo a language "learned in childhood" and always "the language of his thought". While I am about this subject I should like you to pick out a poem of Sri Aurobindo's maturity and tell me in precise terms why you rate it a failure, bearing the stigma you discern when you write: "English Romantic and late Victorian poetry (itself using a highly artificial diction and vocabulary) has set on Indian-English verse a stamp which makes it unacceptable to modern English readers..." If you come down to criticism cast in "minute particulars organized" and applied to one definite poem specially chosen from among those considered by your "Indian friends" to be his best, I shall be able to come to grips with your own literary mind in this sphere.
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So far you have indulged in generalities and off-hand judgments. At times you say that the Indian mind, all the more the Indian spiritual mind, is alien to the genius of the English language and yet you have told us in your new book on Yeats "of the great Hindu scriptures, of which, with his Swami, Sri Purohit, he made those fine translations of the ten principal Upanishads". How can there be a fine English translation by Yeats of something so alien to the nature of the language native to him? You have also said on other occasions that people like Sri Aurobindo don't know the subtleties of literary English enough to create genuine English poetry. Lately, you have brought up a new and different point: Sri Aurobindo fails to be poetic in English not because he writes in a foreign tongue but simply because he is no poet at all, which means that he would be a miserable versifier even if he wrote in what you regard (most mistakenly, of course) as his mother-tongue, Bengali. Don't you think it's high time you made up your mind and put your cards on the table? You are a person of remarkable talents amounting to genius in certain fields of scholarship (Blake-research and Yeats-study) and in the composition of poems like Invocation, To My Mountain, Envoi, A Strange Evening, A Kiss, etc. - the first two superb in every way. Vague sarcasms hardly befit you: give me something to bite on.
Taking up one of your poems, shall give you an example of what I mean - a close step-by-step appraisal? Here is the piece you have entitled "Prayer" (p. 58 of the volume Collected Poems which you presented to me in 1962 and which has a good number of pages annotated by me in some detail):
The laws of blind unrest, not art
Have built this room in time and space,
The furniture of human sense
That bounds my sorrow, curbs delight.
But to the grail, these fragile walls
Are thinner than a floating dream,
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And here the heart's full measure fills
With what is worldwide, yet within.
And gathering round me those 1 know
In the close circle of a prayer,
The sleepers, the forgetful, grow
In love, though not in presence, near.
My distant ones, this heart on fire
Is for a candle in your night,
While you lie safe within that care
Whose dark is sleep, whose waking, light.
COMMENT
Some lines are fine indeed. The opening two have a pointed power blended with a large sweep of significance. The next two also are well turned and the whole stanza with its diversified units of suggestive expression and its skilful placing of pauses has a distinct "art" governing its substance of "unrest". This art persists admirably all through the poem and, when one has finished reading, one notices that the first stanza stands apart from the others by the different way the half-rhymes are disposed - abba rather than abab - and one realises how appropriate the standing apart is because of the negative meaning here as contrasted to the positive mood developed out of it everywhere else, signalled by that "But" beginning the second stanza.
This stanza, even more than the first, is a poetic success, having a specially memorable moment in its third and fourth lines. The fourth is markedly perfect both by depth of suggestion and inevitability of sound. There is a telling counterpoising of "worldwide" to "within" and the entire phrase has a lift, a rapturous feeling accompanied by a most effective rhythm. The chief characteristic of this rhythm is the all-carrying alliteration of w's. The w-alliteration has always a widening movement, a sound-succession of spread-
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ing spaciousness. And a last felicitous auditory effect by which the spaciousness is, as it were, interiorised is brought by the two short vowels of "within" - the second with a sharp stress driving home the intcriorisation and, by its place at the line's end, making it doubly definitive. What further gives an intaglio-impression to the sound of "within" is that the word which stands out in opposition to it - namely, "worldwide"' - is itself a quantitative long, by natural vowel-length in the second syllable and by clustered consonants in the first. Yes, the two words get differentiated by their very constitution answering to their opposed meanings, but their inner linkage - one might even say the essential identity of state which they paradoxically represent and which that "yet" between them insinuates - is made living to us by the mutually echoing w's.
The third stanza is less of a success in its word-form, though quite effective in total sound. The final stanza is again strongly inspired. Perhaps its total quality is the best in the poem, with a mingling of strength and tenderness, the sense of the divine mystery enfolding all at all times and of the loving human presence casting its warmth afar from a small centre, steady in the midst of the earth's darkness and danger.
The only point a little opaque to me is the "grail" of stanza 2.I have a general response to its religious aura and the aesthetic grasp of its relevance, but I would welcome from you a bit of help making more precise for me its role in the poetic design.
*
You must have received by now the typed copy of the opening pages of Sri-Aurobindo's Ilion, the epic in hexameters moulded according to his insight into what this great medium of Homer and Virgil should be in a natural English form. Ilion is not ostensibly poetry of the sacred but it has still a depth of vision made dramatically vivid. Surely you
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wouldn't call this "Indian" poetry Victorian in any valid sense nor dub it imitative Romantic verse? Again, can one say that here themes or moods or experiences which are typically Indian and cannot be assimilated by the genius of the English language are sought to be forced into that speech and the result is a clearly non-English poetry? It is interesting to ask what critical comment you would make along the lines of your habitual running down of Sri Aurobindo as a poet.
To return to your review. I find the part dealing with Ghose's book as fine in its general treatment as the first and even more profound in its evaluation of the Oriental consciousness. All that appreciation of Mystery to the Hindu or the Buddhist mind is excellent. But the poem of Tagore -"Last Question" - which sparks it off is in my opinion rather poor stuff:
The first day's sun had asked
at the manifestation of new being -
Who are you?
No answer came.
Year after year went by,
the last sun of the day
the question utters
on the western sea-shore
in the silent evening -
He gets no answer.
May be the translation renders the poem vacuous, more a thing thought out than seen and felt though the image of the sun and the western sea-shore in the silent evening are meant to vivify the formulation. They remain a superficial ornament instead of being fundamentally woven into the depths of a discovery by the rapt imagination. I miss in these twelve lines the "enthousiasmos" which can be there in a
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subdued secret key as authentically as in a grand style. You have in several poems of yours an equal simplicity but it is a stirred and not a flat simplicity as here. I am afraid Ghose's impressive and valuable speculations apropos of the piece and his rhetorical summoning of Holderlin and Rimbaud and Rilke have led you astray in pronouncing : "The poem is neither question nor answer, but resonates, like Blake's 'The Tyger', with 'fathomless suggestions'." Indeed the theme is profound and has evoked a fine philosophical vision from Ghose: the triviality lies in the form the theme has acquired - the verbal and rhythmical shallowness. Even the phrasing is at fault: "the first day's sun" does not accord with "the last sun of the day". The second phrase should run: "the sun of the last day".
Trying to make the best of the same material I would cut out all that decorative Romantic padding of "the western sea-shore" as well as the overt references to the absence of an answer and the unnecessary inversion of "the question utters" and let the poem stand in a pared shape, more suggestive than assertive: .
Year after year went by:
the sun of the last day
repeats the question
in the silent evening.
Framed thus, it becomes a kind of extended or doubled haikku, a picture with its edges fading away into the ineffable instead of a disguised thesis propping itself on explanations : "no answer came... He gets no answer."
The Yeats-poem - "Lapis Lazuli" - you quote at almost the end is a typical example of this poet's later art, a fusion of inspired sight with perfect craftsmanship satisfying, as you
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have said in "Yeats's Singing School", "at once intellect and imagination" with the help of "his inimitable sound-patterns of vowels and metrics". It has. as you point out, "the same acceptance of Mystery" as Tagore on the whole, though there is no true parity of significance between it and his "Last Question".I cannot admire enough the linguistic skill and the metrical modulation with which the subtle psychology of "these Chinamen" is communicated:
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes with many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes are gay.
Very aptly you have shown the inner touch between the ultimate attitudes of the Irish master and the Indian with that splendid phrase from the Gitanjali that brings your admirable review to its close: "When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable."
Please forgive me if I have tired you with the length at which I have written. Let me thank you again for that masterpiece of both scholarly perspicacity and book-production: Yeats the Initiate.
(7.4.1987)
I received your card some time back, with its gallant
message:
"When I can face it I'll try to answer your long letter - a fine mounted attack! But you must send me a poem by Sri Aurobindo which you like and I'll read it without prejudice. I'll also reply to your analysis of the little Tagore poem which I like much more than you do and will explain why.
Greetings,
Kathleen Raine"
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You have asked me to send you a poem by Sri Aurobindo, More than two months back I posted you by sea-mail a typed copy of the first 380 lines of Sri Aurobindo's Ilion, an epic in quantitative hexameters. The hexameter in English, with a movement and a quality like those of this grand measure in Greek and Latin, has been a problem for centuries. There is no sustained hexametrical creation in English coming anywhere near the work of Homer and Virgil or even lesser Classical poets. Part of the lack is due, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, to the absence of a true conception of the form which a genuine English hexameter should have. All attempts have either transferred into English, with unreadable effect, the rules of "quantity" (that is, the speaking time taken by the vowel on which a syllable is based) natural to the ancient languages, or else worked exclusively by accent, ignoring quantitative values altogether in spite of the fact that they do play a subsidiary yet subtly telling role in English verse and that the quantitative spirit cannot come into its own unless the unstressed intrinsic "long" is counted in constructing the metre.
Perhaps Wordsworth's great line -
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone -
will serve, though it is not a quantitative hexameter, as a good illustration of some important points. What a letdown it would be if the long "through" were replaced by the short "in" or if "through" were given not a full but only a transitional inflexion which a monosyllabic preposition as the second component of an iambic foot would normally have! Again, there would be some loss in the sound-suggestion of the sense if the unstressed "a" in "Voyaging" were slurred into an "i" as in commonly spoken English instead of being given a value approximating to the "a" in the words "age" and "aging" to make it a significant part of a line which supports the sense of a subjective adventurous launching-out with a run of intrinsic longs, stressed or
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unstressed. Mark the skilful metrical structure starting with a plunging trochee and having in the middle an alliterative spondee whose consecutive stresses fall on a couple of intrinsic longs ("strange seas''). Then there is a loosening forth into the suggestion of an on-and-on with two clear iambs ("of thought, alone"), where also we have natural voice-lengths under the ictus.
In a detailed essay Sri Aurobindo has examined the whole theory of quantity and its various applications and arrived at what a true English quantitative metre would be like, neither neglecting the vertical voice-weight of stress nor overlooking the horizontal voice-stretch of the intrinsic long. I am sure anybody interested in prosodic questions would be glad to read this exposition. But finally it is not exposition but illustration that will count - illustration putting life into the guiding theory and employing this theory with inspired tact and flexibility and diversity in the development of a theme not out of tune with the genius of the measure exploited.
Some day I'll send you the essay I am speaking of. In the meantime there will be before you those 380 lines which begin Ilion. Please read them with an open mind and let me know whether they strike you as poetry or not. I shall be happy to have for the first time a critical appraisal instead of random summary opinions which give me, as I have already told you, nothing to bite on but simply "vague sarcasms" not at all worthy of the poet and critic you have been taken to be.
(4.7.1987)
...As for Sri Aurobindo's verse. I must find - surely there is one in London - a copy of his Savitri and try again. Many Indians I know admire it - Raja Rao for one - and I may be wrong. But my own judgement is that he writes correct verse, as any well educated man of his time might have
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done. This does not make a poet! Poetry is a living language of the imagination, and every time and place creates its own form. To write in this or that metre of another period is a skill indeed but not likely to be poetry because poets don't imitate, they create their language. Of course it was important before Independence for someone like Sri Aurobindo to master the language of the enemy - so as to beat him at his own game, or perhaps, indeed, so that, now, Indians can instruct us in your learning, philosophy, values by this also, to be sure. As Sri Aurobindo has indeed done to a very high degree.
Do you have my "The Human Face of God" (on the Job-plates)? I would exchange one for 'Savitri' if you like.
(17.8.1987)
...Recently I saw the report of an interview you had given while you had been in India. It made very sad reading for me - not because I was somehow made out to be a lady from Auroville but because you were so dogmatic and prejudiced over matters with which you are not sufficiently acquainted and about which you keep airing views you must have formed long ago on the strength of some poor stuff in English by Indians you might have come across. And, of course, your bete noire came in for a whipping. Your latest letters to me, including the one just received, show signs of a possible more balanced turn in the future. Still, some preconceptions die hard. Thus you say: "...every time and place creates its own form. To write in this or that metre of another period is a skill indeed but not likely to be poetry because poets don't imitate, they create their language."
First of all, creating one's language has nothing to do with writing in one form or another. If a poet has inspiration his words will have an original glow in any form. When I say "any form" I don't mean that true poetry does not take the right form for itself, but the right form is to be judged by us
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from the success the living movement achieves. If one's inspiration flows out in rhymed verse, can we assert that there is an artificiality from another age and the modern spirit is all for free verse and therefore the lyricism thus embodied is spurious? Take again blank verse pentameters. Are they outmoded? The epic spirit in English is most apt to adopt this form because it is organic to that spirit. Then there is the problem of the hexameter. This metre has carried the grandest flights of inspiration - it has held the "living language of the imagination" in the past which is really not the past at all. The tradition of poetry has a continuity over the ages and, when a surge of epic creativity comes with an organic turn towards what Tennyson has called "the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man" and when a profound interpretative insight visits one in connection with an old theme, one is not imitating but breathing new life into a measure that is really not for one or two ancient tongues but is ready for any tongue if one can use it from the inside instead of employing it from the outside as mostly English poets have done. From Elizabethan times the hexameter has tempted English poets. Somehow they lacked intimate contact with its spirit and did not know how to make it genuinely English. Even an established medium like pentametrical blank verse has failed to spring alive in most hands. We do not run across a Milton or a Keats in every century. An Arnold may triumph in a certain vein in a piece like Sohrab and Rustum, a Stephen Phillips (unfortunately a forgotten voice now) may draw forth an exquisite in-toned somewhat novel music in his Marpessa, but no poet with an authentic and sustained blank-verse soul has come after the writer of Hyperion. Just as the form gloriously exploited by him remains viable at all times, so also the hexameter keeps calling for its Keats and Milton. Whether its call is truly answered or not has to be seen by an open-minded sympathetic approach such as Herbert Read has tried with Sri Aurobindo's Ilion, a work to which he has given, however briefly, superlative praise.
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You appear to shirk plunging into the opening part of this poem which I sent you some months back. Please put aside the prejudice that here is an outmoded form which cannot but be artificial. Of course I'll try to send you Savitri, as you want, but I should like you to get down to sampling Ilion and let me know whether you can see eye to eye with Read.
(28.8.1987)
P.S. I am sending you by air a copy of Selections from Savitri, along with an offprint of "Letters from Aldous Huxley and Herbert Read on Sri Aurobindo" published in the August issue of Mother India.
Thank you for your last letter and for the selections Dick Batsford has made from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. I have long known Dick Batsford, who is a friend of my daughter's, who was at school with his wife. I know he is a follower of the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and that this selection must have been a labour of love.
Now to the question of Sri Aurobindo's poetry. I have read the book of selections. Perhaps the whole long poem contains narrative passages in whose absence there is a disproportion. I have not seen the poem for forty years, when I discussed it with Herbert Read. I note from the quotations from Aldous Huxley and Herbert Read that both wrote before having read the poem, and that Huxley's recommendation of Sri Aurobindo for the Nobel Prize was on the grounds of his-prose writings - The Life Divine in particular - and not as a poet. That Sri Aurobindo was one of the leading minds of his (and our) time is not in dispute. But a philosophic and metaphysical mind, with the discourse proper to philosophy, is very different from the poetic gift,
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which is something else. Poetry may be 'philosophic' in that poetry also is concerned with meanings and values but the method is different since the philosopher deals in ideas and abstractions, and the language of poetry is image and symbol and Blake's 'minute particulars'. Having read through the extracts from Savitri with great attention I turned to Sri Aurobindo's translation and commentaries on the Isha Upanishad, and immediately was transported from vague superlatives and abstractions interwoven with cliches of English nineteenth century verse, to beautiful clarity of thought and language.
I can but write what I see, and I may be blind to all kinds of background knowledge and assumptions that Indian readers, familiar with Sri Aurobindo's philosophy (and Indian philosophy as a whole), read into the poetry. But as I see it - and although indeed I am not infallible I have a lifetime's experience and knowledge of reading and writing poetry - I see it as follows. It was Sri Aurobindo's destiny to live at a time when India was still subject to British rule and he therefore was given an English education by his parents who saw this as the way to success in any profession he might follow. No doubt he himself also, as his nationalist convictions developed, saw English as a way to prevail over the occupying power. Later it has proved providential that his excellent knowledge of the English language enabled him to write Indian philosophy in English, thereby reaching the English-speaking world as a whole. To do this was doubtless his providential task. But for poetry the fact of his English education was disastrous, since it deprived him of an Indian language, essential to an Indian poet, as Tagore understood. Since I don't think Sri Aurobindo was a poet in that sense, it perhaps does not greatly matter; his great contribution was made in the way it was meant to be.
I like what you write about Blank Verse, and of course it is the essential poetic rhythm of the English language, and has been used both by Shakespeare and Milton, Keats and Tennyson with great narrative beauty. But I have heard
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Indian music (and Arabinda Basu used to expound its rhythms to me) and also heard Indian poetry recited (in Hindi and in Sanskrit too) and the rhythm of the Indian imagination is quite different, those long majestic slokas have quite a different movement. Sri Aurobindo was trying to 'pour a quart into a pint pot' in using Blank Verse. The metre of the Ramayana was 'revealed' to Valmiki, was it not, and is surely to India what Blank Verse has been to English poets, the very shape of the mind itself that created it. Not that Sri Aurobindo's blank verse is not perfectly correct - any well-educated student can write blank verse by the yard - but his thought is so essentially unlike that of any English poet that one is aware that his writing does not spring out of the same experience of 'this litel spot of erthe'.
That his sense of English is an abstract matter is even more evident in his vocabulary of words. There are scarcely any concrete images in the whole book. His lofty ideas find their natural expression in his very clear philosophic writing. But the language of the poet is a language of image and symbol - there must be forms to contain the abstractions which are, without these containing vessels, what Yeats has called 'Asiatic vague immensities'. Blake writes of the 'minute particulars' and of these there are virtually none in Sri Aurobindo's poem. One longs for a blade of grass, for Tagore's 'patient mother the dust' or for his 'morning sparrow.' In this sense Sri Aurobindo is not a poet, he does not think in images and symbols, his characters are as vague and abstract as his discourse. In the Vedic Hymns there is the poetry of images, in the Mahabharata what vivid Shakespearean characters Draupadi and Savitri are, and one can see the mysterious smile of the Lord Krishna and the mocking raised eyebrow of Duryodhana, and Kunti 'like a faded lotus-wreath' as she begs Radheya to spare her sons the Pandavas. You challenge me to give chapter and verse, so I do so. Open the book at almost any page and you find vague abstract words abounding in superlatives: p.54 for example, 'pathless heights', 'eternal arms', 'absolute bliss',
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'unimaginable depths', 'Immeasurable heights', 'bourneless change', 'Omniscient knowing without sight or thought', not to mention 'violent ecstasy', 'sweetness dire', 'stupendous limbs'. It all adds up to nothing in terms of poetic image or symbol, 'the Unknown's grasp' too - all these on one page. True, there are two lines where the paradox of:
'In a moment shorter than death, longer than time'
at least produces a grammatical figure of paradox that for a-moment brings the language to life. It's all like this, full of words like 'vast', incommunicable', 'timeless' - a multitude of words ending in '...less', a negative concept which may have its place in philosophy but has none in poetry. No, as poetry it just won't do.
Certainly Savitri is an ambitious and impressive attempt -an impressive failure if you like - like Bridges* Testament of Beauty perhaps. As to cliches, I again open at random: 'earthly tenement', 'pure abode', 'supernal light', 'surcharged with light and bliss', 'mystic stream', 'viewless summits', 'mighty Mother', 'trembling with delight'. And so on.
So, alas, I don't see Sri Aurobindo as a poet at all. I'm sorry to find that I cannot change anything of my earlier impression. Arabinda Basu used to hand me the book and ask me to read aloud the poem but I refused then to do so and I would refuse now. If he wished to relax and express himself in verse, well and good. But if you press the claim that Sri Aurobindo was a great poet - or, more than occasionally, a poet at all - you will only be detracting from his undoubted importance as a thinker and perhaps a saint. You will never persuade any Western poet or critic.
I repeat, this is doubtless an English response, and to Indian readers familiarity with a whole philosophic language may give substance to these imageless abstractions - but not poetic substance. Poetry is what David Jones calls 'incarna-tional' or as Shakespeare says, 'gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name'. I don't find this in Sri
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Aurobindo's writings, though I do richly in Tagore, in Kalidasa's wonderful Meghaduta, in the Vedic Hymns, even in Kabir, a religious poet.
In fact not all Indians of repute admire Sri Aurobindo as a poet either. Keshav Malik agrees with me - true, Keshav is perhaps a westernized and secular poet - but so does my friend and teacher Prince Kumar who has just been here -he was a friend of Tambimuttu's, wrote verse himself, taught Indian philosophy at Columbia University and now has a spiritual household (he refuses to call it an ashram but that's what it is). He naturally admires Sri Aurobindo as a thinker but not as a poet. In fact, it was and is his poetry which has made me hold back from aligning myself with Pondicherry as I might otherwise have done. As a poet I cannot.
Forgive me, I have to be truthful. I may only be revealing my English obtuseness, but I do know my own language of poetry, though not your Indian language of philosophy. You have asked me to explain myself and I have, in all friendship tried to do so. I know that Raja Rao admires Savitri and so does Professor Gokak of Bangalore. I wish I found it possible to do so, but having re-opened the Isha Upanishad, 1 shall at least re-read The Life Divine.
(10.9.1987)
I have just received your long letter of Sept. 10. 1 am glad you have written at some length on a subject which cannot be dismissed by casual summary remarks such as used to be your practice so far. It's good also that you have come down to 'minute particulars' and given me, as I had wanted, something to bite on. Quite a number of issues arise from the general opinions you have expressed on poetry and the special treatment you have accorded to Savitri.
Let me start with your comment on Aldous Huxley and Herbert Read apropos of Sri Aurobindo's writings. Of
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course, Huxley, a great admirer of The Life Divine, openly says he has not read Savitri, but how do you make out that Read wrote his letter without any acquaintance with the poem? You make him cut a very poor figure indeed if he could call Savitri 'undoubtedly one of the world's great poems' and refer to 'the sustained creative power of Savitri" without opening the volume and at least dipping into it in order to get some feel of its poetic quality, 1 have gone through quite a lot of Sir Herbert's writings and nowhere have I had the impression that he would make irresponsible statements on any work of art - especially statements couching the highest praise, however briefly - without the sense of its aptness. You do him gross injustice by suggesting that he was merely being polite to my friend Mr. Purani when he penned those phrases. We have touches of politeness in several parts of his letters and they are clearly recognisable, but it is impossible that a mind of his calibre and sincerity should indulge in the language he has used without meaning what he says. What is obvious is that he has not taken up the reading of Savitri in full - indeed he confesses that he can't do it because of a 'fault' in 'the nature of our present western civilization', its apparent 'lack of leisure' and 'at a deeper level... a failure of the capacity of contemplation'. It is surely very far from being evident that he has not opened Savitri anywhere. I refuse to consider him the hypocrite your words conjure him up to be. At any rate it is perfectly clear that he has gone through a fair part of Ilion before making the pronouncement: it is a remarkable achievement by any standard and I am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality.' Here he does not extol simply Sri Aurobindo's mastery of the English language: he ranks the hexameters of llion as equal to the finest poetry in English. In this he runs utterly counter to your position that Sri Aurobindo couldn't write English poetry at all, and to your sweeping announce-
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ment to me: 'You will never persuade any Western poet or critic' that 'Sri Aurobindo was a great poet.'
This announcement is given the lie not only by Read. Years back I drew your attention to the letter of Christopher Martin, Assistant Editor of Encounter. On 9.12.1959 he wrote to a friend of mine who had sent him a copy of Ilion: "I certainly am impressed by this masterly achievement in hexameters." On Savitri I may quote to you H.O. White of Trinity College, Dublin, who had to read the whole poem, nearly 24,000 lines, in order to examine a Ph.D. thesis on it from India: "I greatly appreciate the privilege of making the acquaintance of Savitri, a truly remarkable poem. I may add that I was immensely impressed by the extraordinary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modern cosmopolitan world." These are not twopenny-halfpenny minds. And I am sure many others might be found to have similar responses if Won and Savitri were more known in the West.
For my immediate purpose, Read alone is sufficient, and just because of his standing at the other pole to you without any reservation in the case at least of one long poem of Sri Aurobindo's I was anxious to make you attend to Ilion above everything. I never recommended Savitri to you. It belongs too much to what Sri Aurobindo has termed 'the Future Poetry' with unusual canons and uncommon modes of expression true to states of consciousness and spiritual experience much beyond the range of most people's actual life or even imaginative vision. This does not mean that Savitri has no contact anywhere with genuine past or present poetry. But even to judge the contact correctly one must have a broad open mind. You have certain hasty criteria which surprise me by their inapplicabteness to the matter in hand. I shall deal with them presently in some detail. Generally speaking, too, I find you enunciating a rule which is a half truth. Thrice you affirm "the language of poetry is image and symbol." Sri Aurobindo also has repeated the Vedic idea that the work of poetry is fundamentally to 'see'.
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But he does not forget what the Veda covered by such an idea. The Vedic poet is designated 'seer' - and as soon as we understand that word we realise at once that its significance cannot be confined to 'image and" symbol'. Images and symbols are one way of embodying seerhood in speech a very frequent way. But true poetry can come shorn of explicit imagery and symbolisation. What basically counts, within an intense mould of word and rhythm, is depth of feeling, height of thought, wideness of insight or, to use a noun less evocative of 'seeing', intuition. The quintessence of image and symbol is present in the last-named but it need not show itself openly. You can hardly trace image and symbol in the lines that occur to me at the moment from various literatures.
I may start with that snatch from the Odyssey:
Zenos men pais ea Kronlonos autar oixun
Eikhon apeiresien,
which I may approximate in English with:
I was the child of Zeus Cronion, yet have I suffered
Infinite pain.
Or take that equally poignant yet more reassured cry from
Virgil:
O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem,
rendered most sensitively by Sri Aurobindo:
Fiercer griefs you have suffered; to these too
God will give ending.
Then there is the Dantesque core of religious wisdom:
En la sua volontade e nostra pace,
whose simplicity-aim-sonority our less polysyllabic English
can only approach by something like:
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His Will alone is our tranquillity.
And here is Mallarme, the arch-symbolist, with one of his greatest lines, opening his sonnet on Poe's death with nothing visual:
Tel qu'en Lui-meme enfin 1'etemite le change,
which I may dare to echo with
At last to Himself he is changed by eternity.
(Did Mallarme happen to haunt you when you wrote in 'The Sphere':
Ourselves, perfect at last, affirmed as what we are?)
Coming to English poetry, where is any image or symbol in Milton's
Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering
I may add that great line of Dunbar's, mostly forgotten:
All love is lost but upon God alone,
as well as Sidney's
Leave me, O love, that readiest but to dust,
and Auden's less sublime yet still quietly piercing
We must love one another or we die.
We may well come to almost a climax with Shakespeare's masterstroke of metre responding to the meaning -
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Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain -
along with Wordsworth's profoundly pathetic
And mighty poets in their misery dead.
Now I take up your other charge that Sri Aurobindo deals in 'vague abstract words abounding in superlatives'. You instance 'pathless heights', 'unimaginable depths', 'bourne-less change'. You also jib at words like 'vast', 'incommunicable', 'timeless' - and conclude: 'No, as poetry it just won't do.' Well, you don't seem to remember one of the most memorable passages in English epic poetry, those lines of Milton's:
But first whom shall we send
In search of this new world, whom shall we find
Sufficient? Who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark unbottomed infinite Abyss
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his aerie flight
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive
The happy Isle...
The kind of locutions you condemn would be objectionable if they served as mere bombast without life in them. When they arc organic to a particular type of vision or experience they are reflexes of inner or higher realities. Even without involving such realities they can be proper to poetry. Haven't you yourself immeasurable complexities of soul' in Eileann Chanaidh (1), 'unfathomable skies' in Message, 'unfathomed heights and depths' in Moving Image, 'incommunicable selfish pain' in Seen in a Glass, 'grief inexpressible' in A Certain Moist Nature, 'flight unbounded' in Eudaimon? And the verbal sin you most condemn - 'a
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multitude of words ending in '...less', a negative concept which may have its place in philosophy but has none in poetry' - do you not commit it whenever you feel it necessary? I have come across 'boundless void' in Bheinn Naomh, 'boundless nature, sea and sky' in Eileann Cha-naidh (2), 'endless space' in Death's Country and 'inner spaces numberless' in The Hollow Hill (4). Your best poems bring us vivid subtleties, rarefied reveries, wafts of a secret air, and the examples I have cited fit in perfectly. I judge them with artistic as well as semi-mystic empathy and do not bring to them the narrow mind of a doctrinaire critic. When 1 turn to the page of which you fall foul, - namely, 54 - in Selections from Savitri I discover a most powerful evocation of a spiritual experience in an intensely inspired blank verse of the end-stopped kind, a difficult mould masterfully varied in internal structure and line-to-line linkage. One has to be in an unusually dense mood and aesthetic torpor not to be carried away by the passage:
A Might, a Flame,
A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,
A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,
Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs
And penetrated nerve and heart and brain
That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany;
His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.
In a moment shorter than Death, longer than Time,
By a power more ruthless than Love, happier than
Heaven
Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,
Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,
In a whirlwind circuit of delight and force
Hurried into unimaginable depths,
Upborne into immeasurable heights,
It was torn out from its mortality
And underwent a new and bourneless change ...
A mystic Form that could contain the worlds,
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Yet make one human breast its passionate shrine,
Drew him out of his seeking loneliness
Into the magnitudes of God's embrace.
Out of this burst of dynamic poetry possible only to a Milton doubled with a Marlowe and both swept beyond themselves from a starting-point in the latter's imagination
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
and in the former's
intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity -
out of such an outbreak of inspiration you could pick out just one verse
as 'bringing the language to life'! All here that carries speech to what I may call superlife passes over your head. It is nothing save abstractions to you in spite of the spiritual getting fused with the physical, as it were, at every turn. 'Flame', 'eyes', 'limbs', 'grasp', 'arms', 'whirlwind circuit', 'Form', 'embrace' give a concrete impression, and the verb-turns 'enveloped', 'penetrated', 'taken', 'haled and coerced', 'shuddered', 'torn out', etc. can hardly be regarded as a play of abstractions.
Some of the other targets of your disapproval in Sri Aurobindo's passage - 'violent ecstasy', 'sweetness dire' - or locutions picked out elsewhere which you dub 'cliches' -'pure abode', 'supernal light', 'surcharged with light and bliss*, 'mighty Mother', 'trembling with delight' - many such things are frequent occurrences in epic poetry which does not run after out-of-the way felicities or isolated gemlike phrases but has a broad current of energetic language aiming
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at a total novel effect. You may open Paradise Lost anywhere to see what I mean:
...till then who knew
The force of those dire arms? yet not for those
Nor what the potent victor in his rage
Can else inflict do I repent or change,
Though changed in outward lustre; that fixt mind
And high disdain, from sense of injured merit
That with the mightiest raised me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits armed...
or glance at this:
So spake th'Apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair:
And him thus answered soon his bold Compeer.
"O Prince, O Chief of many Throned Powers,
That led th'imbattled Seraphim to war
Under thy conduct, and in dreadful deeds
Fearless, endangered Heaven's perpetual King
And put to proof his high Supremacy,
Whether upheld by strength, or Chance, or Fate,
Too well I see and rue the dire event
That with sad overthrow and foul defeat
Hath lost us Heaven, and all this mighty Host
In horrible destruction laid thus low...
What a lot of cliches or easily found expressions Milton pours on us and yet achieves grandeur and force! Let me underline a few: 'dire arms', 'dire event', 'high disdain', 'high Supremacy', 'potent Victor', 'injured merit', 'fierce contention', 'deep despair', 'dreadful deeds', 'bold Compeer', 'sad overthrow', 'foul defeat', 'mighty Host', 'horrible destruction', 'laid low'. Insensitive to genres and their artistic implications or
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demands you bring your trenchant criticisms. Something akin to the situation you create happened a long time back when a friend of mine, a highly accomplished professor of poetry, passed some strictures on Savitri. Either from want of sympathy or from certain verbal penchants a rather finicky literary temperament may develop. A reference to the latter will be apt here. In a long apologia addressed to me Sri Aurobindo, dealing with all the issues raised by my friend, wrote on this point:
"I may refer to Mendonca's disparaging characterisation of my epithets. He finds that their only merit is that they are good prose epithets, not otiose but right words in their right place and exactly descriptive but only descriptive without any suggestion of any poetic beauty or any kind of magic. Are there then prose epithets and poetic epithets and is the poet debarred from exact description using always the right word in the right place, the mot juste? I am under the impression that all poets, even the greatest, use as the bulk of their adjectives words that have that merit, and the difference from prose is that a certain turn in the use of them accompanied by the power of the rhythm in which they are carried lifts all to the poetic level. Take one of the passages from Milton:
On evil days though fall'n and evil tongues ...
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
Here the epithets are the same that would be used in prose, the right word in the right place, exact in statement, but all lies in the turn which makes them convey a powerful and moving emotion and the rhythm which gives them an uplifting passion and penetrating insistence. In more ordinary passages such as the beginning of Paradise Lost the epithets 'forbidden tree' and 'mortal taste' are of the same kind, but can we say that they are merely prose epithets,
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good descriptive adjectives and have no other merit? If you take the lines about Nature's worship in Savitri [of which Mendonc,a has disapproved], I do not see how they can be described as prose epithets; at any rate I would never have dreamt of using in prose - unless I wanted to write poetic prose - such expressions as 'wide-winged hymn' or 'a great priestly wind' or 'altar hills' or 'revealing sky'; these epithets belong in their very nature to poetry alone, whatever may be their other value or want of value. He says they are obvious and could have been supplied by any imaginative reader; well, so are Milton's in the passage quoted and perhaps there too the very remarkable imaginative reader whom Mendonca repeatedly brings in might have supplied them by his own unfailing poetic verve. Whether they or any of them 'prick a hidden beauty' out of the picture is for each reader to feel or judge for himself; but perhaps he is thinking of such things as Keats' 'magic casements' and 'foam of perilous seas' and 'fairy lands forlorn', but 1 do not think even in Keats the bulk of the epithets are of that unusual character."
Before I proceed further, let me ask you to guard against a notion you may catch from so much allusion to Milton on my part and on Sri Aurobindo's as well. You may conceive that Sri Aurobindo is trying in so post-Miltonic an era as the twentieth century to revive some sort of Miltonic epos in a style reminiscent of Paradise Lost in various traits. One cannot be farther from the truth. Milton does illustrate preeminently certain basic features of epic composition, 'but Miltonism as such is a matter of technique strictly speaking -Latinistic language, flowing relation of line to line, large paragraph-building, rolling rhythmic resonance - over and above the type of mind: scholarly, energetically outward (despite his famous blindness), vivid and broad in its scope but not protean and penetrating like Shakespeare's. Technically, Savitri is non-Miltonic in an essential aspect. As Sri Aurobindo wrote to me in 1932: "Savitri is blank verse without enjambmcnt (except rarely) - each line a thing by
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itself and arranged in paragraphs of one, two, three, four, five lines (rarely a longer series), in an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English:"' Once when I charged him with Miltonism in style he replied: "Surely not. The Miltonic has a statelier more spreading rhythm and a less direct more loftily arranged language. Miltonically I should have written not
The Gods above and Nature sole below
Were the spectators of that mighty strife
but
Only the Sons of Heaven and that executive She
Watched the arbitrament of the high dispute."
Then there is the question of the habitual 'plane' constituting one's source of inspiration. Sri Aurobindo says in general: "Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence." The poetic intelligence "is only a high activity of the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it" and "the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic, though in a different cast of thinking, is nearer... than the ordinary intellect" to ranges of consciousness which are more inward or else above that intellect, and though Milton on the whole has nothing of the knowledge or vision of those 'planes' in either his style or his substance, "there is often a largeness of rhythm and sweep of language in Milton which has a certain distant kinship to the manner natural to a higher supra-intellectual vision, and something from the substance of the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry... and uplift it."
All this clears much of the road to what I have still to say, but one more citation from the letter inspired by Men-
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donca's reaction will help to lead better to it:
"One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that subject to say only what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination or understanding of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness: that is the method I have chosen in Savitri. But Mendonca has understood nothing of the significance or intention of the passages he is criticising, least of all their inner sense - that is not his fault, but is partly due to the lack of the context and partly to his lack of equipment and you have there an unfair advantage over him which enables you to understand and see the poetic intention. He sees only an outward form of words and some kind of surface sense which is to him vacant and merely ornamental or rhetorical or something pretentious without any true meaning or true vision in it: inevitably he finds the whole thing false and empty, unjustifiably ambitious and pompous without deep meaning or, as he expresses it, pseudo and phoney.... I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced.... Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch; there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry. Moreover, if it is really new in kind, it may employ a new technique, not perhaps absolutely new, but new in some or many of its elements; in that case old rules and canons and standards may be quite inapplicable; evidently, you cannot justly apply to the poetry of Whitman the principles of technique which are
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proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of the old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We have to see whether what is essential to poetry is there and how far the new technique justifies itself by new beauty and perfection, and a certain freedom of mind from old conventions is necessary if our judgment is to be valid or rightly objective."
Your failure with the passage on p. 54 is typical of your unresponsiveness to Savitri as a whole. What, as I have said, "passes over your head" is precisely the characteristic sweep of the inspiration which Sri Aurobindo has titled "overhead poetry". This sort of poetry hails from regions of the Spirit above the mind - not only the perceptive, conceptive, imaginative intelligence through which the 'divine afflatus' blows in most of the poetry written in the world but also the inner reaches of poetic creativity available to us up to now -Blake's psychically delicate or mythically mighty explorations, Wordsworth's semi-Vedantic widenesses of thought and emotion or else his penetrating lyrical simplicities, Coleridge's occasional seizures of magic lights and shadows, Shelley's wingings in strange ethers, AE's quiet or intense echoes of God-haunted in-worlds, Yeats's early dream-drenched incantations or his later wide-awake gripping of secret significances, Mallarme's complex pursuits of the mysterious Form that no one is, Rilke's sensitive searches for beseeching or commanding presences in the Weltinnen-raum. 'Overhead poetry', while capable of contact with and absorption of all the play of the mental soul, is primarily the voice of 'planes' transcending it and mounting through varied word-revelation towards the Mantra about which Sri Aurobindo has written: "Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some
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fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater."
Overhead poetry in general and the Mantra especially are the speech par excellence for uttering spiritual states in their true and pure essence as well as in the diverse ways they adopt to manifest their powers: these states become dynamic in a multiplicity of forms which are divine beings and objects, 'minute particulars' of moulded light and bliss. On the one hand there can be simply a beatific blank which may seem an apotheosised abstraction, but on the other there are plenty of 'containing vessels' (to use your term). The phrase you quote from Yeats - 'Asiatic vague immensities' - is most misleading if the stress is laid on the epithet 'vague'. The vagueness comes to the Western philosophic mind which has little touch on the 'immensities' familiar and concrete to Asia. Indeed the very word 'immensity' makes the European intellect boggle and be on its guard - perhaps all the more because of Hugo's lavish sprinkling of it and of its likes over his poetry without sounding real depths, and because a number of cultist mystagogues have employed them cheaply. Here a reference to a correspondence between my friend Dilip Kumar Roy and AE and to some comments by Sri Aurobindo is likely to be of interest and profit. AE wrote from Dublin on 6.2.1932:
"Dear Dilip Kumar 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 send me. Yes, you have my permission to translate the verses or any others 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...
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Many such lines show a feeling for rhythm which is remarkable since the poet is not writing in his native but in a learned language. I refer to this because the only advice one writer can give to another rightly is technical criticism. The craft of any art, painting, music, poetry, sculpture, is continuously 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 own 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 one is 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 a painting in which only the primary colours were used would weary the eye.
I would ask Mr. Sethna to try to reserve the use of such great words, as a painter keeps his highlights for sun or 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 English: Dhyani, Sushupti, Turiya, etc., and I am sure the languages which the Hindus speak must be richer in words fitting 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 in finding a vocabulary, though English is the language I heard about my cradle.
I hope Mr. Sethna will forgive my saying all this, I do so because 1 find a talent in the verses you sent and do
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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 meditation and then he must give away what he gets, or nothing more will be 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 by being negative,"
AE's letter is both beautiful and profound, a clear mirror to his own great personality. His advice too is sound in so far as it would suggest that one should not be prodigal with highlight words just because they may be short-cuts to what is sought to be conveyed. The full truth about the subject you will see when you read Sri Aurobindo's second letter to me apropos of AE. Till then you may hold back from whatever hurrahing impulse rises in you as a result of AE's warning. Besides, he is surely not all on your side. Like Herbert Read with Sri Aurobindo the poet of Ilion, AE grants though on a smaller scale that one Mr. Sethna, in spite of English not being his mother-tongue, has "a genuine poetic quality" and, what is particularly rare, "a feeling for rhythm... in a learned language". He also allows from his own example that spiritual poetry is not alien to the genius of English, however difficult it may be to write - and we may remember that AE's verse has on one side an exquisite affinity with the Indian psyche while on another it has a colourful link with the Celtic soul. I was very pleased with his letter to Mr. Roy, but some kink in me dwelt upon his non-enthusiasm for a certain poem of mine in the lot despatched to him and I expressed to Sri Aurobindo my bit of disappointment without quite telling him all that AE had said on other matters. So the following is the note I received from Sri Aurobindo:
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"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 am not primarily a poet and have made in criticism a practice of appreciating everything that can be appreciated, as a catholic critic would.)1 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 is 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 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. Differences of estimate need not surprise him at all."
Realising I had somewhat misguided Sri Aurobindo 1 sent him a copy of AE's whole letter. Sri Aurobindo at once wrote back:
"Your letter suggested a more critical attitude on AE'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
I. By saying "I am not primarily a poet" he means that first and foremost he is a Yogi who uses poetry not for its own sake but to express his spiritual realisations more and more adequately in terms natural to poetry. In a similar vein he has declared that he is not a philosopher in the current sense but one who has employed intellectual language to put together in a systematic form the comprehensive world-vision his many-sided Yogic experience has brought to him.
K.D.S.
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AE and Yeats also, I think, would naturally like. But the poem ["This Errant Life"] I selected for especial praise had no striking expressions 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 ideas in the lines quoted by AE 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. AE himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'highlight' words are few in the English language. His solution may be well enough where the realisations they represent are mental realisations or intuitions occurring on the summits of the consciousness, rare 'highlights' over the low tones of the ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not to the ordinary man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent the balance or harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere full of these highlights - 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 and infinite, the immensities or intimacies of the timeless? To follow AE's rule might well
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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; it has 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 a note to me Sri Aurobindo asked what one was to do when one felt the Infinite, the Eternal, the Limitless constantly and he added: "AE who had not this consciousness but only that of the temporal and finite (natural or occult) can avoid these words, but I can't. Besides, all poets have their favourite words and epithets which they constantly repeat. AE himself has been charged with a similar crime."
Now you should have some inkling of what Savitri brings to the world of English poetry. Although it differs markedly from the Miltonic mentality and style, it carries on the general epic mode of articulation that has become a part of the English literary heritage through Milton's masterpiece. You argue that Sri Aurobindo's blank verse is no more than 'correct', an artifice with no genuine inspiration because, according to you, his thought is so essentially unlike that of any English poet that one is aware that his writing does not spring out of the same experience of 'this litel spot of erthe'. I am afraid here is a bit of ambiguity. As you who have written 'The Eighth Sphere' know, the last phrase is from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. You seem to suggest that it encourages emphasis on terrestrial matters and that English poets choose to be full of earthly sensations and feelings and that therefore they are able to write genuine, not merely 'correct' verse. In your poem you want to be 'like that other Cathie' (of Wuthering Heights) and, though drawn to heaven, you have learned through love earth's prime importance. I don't fancy any 'escapism', but was Emily Bronte, creator of 'Cathie', quite oriented like you? She wrote that
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stanza which holds the quintessence of her being:
Though earth and men were gone.
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
Doesn't her English experience spring from the same source as does Sri Aurobindo's 'Indian'? And Chaucer's phrase is related to the ascension of the slain Troilus's soul to the heavens from where he looks down on the small terrestrial scene: his viewpoint is of infinite time and space. From high above he laughs at the mourning of his friends over his death, people whose thoughts are entirely fixed on trivial transitory things. Contrary to your intention, you are directing me to a poet who stands at the very birth of English verse and brings up here a theme in tune with a sense of immortality, infinity, eternity - a tiny anticipatory flash of the Aurobindonian vision.
Long ago I joined issue with you on the non-Englishness you had asserted of poetry like Sri Aurobindo's and, comparatively in a minor key, Sethna's. I argued that English poetry is of two orders - one steeped in the English atmosphere, the other carrying a universal air, taking up any subject from any place or age and becoming its native speech. I suppose this is common sense and it could apply to any poetic literature. But it should apply all the more to English poetry by the very nature of the language concerned, the plasticity to which Sri Aurobindo has referred. We may be struck by this plasticity in the diverse styles English literature teems with - the individual element at almost riotous play as between author and author (Sir Thomas Browne, Addison, Gibbon, Ruskin, Carlyle, Meredith, Arnold, Chesterton, Shaw, etc.) with no persistent tradition of writing as, for instance, in France for both prose and poetry until very recent times when a rebellious 'modernism' blew winds of radical change over it. English
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poetry is a field of adventure, with abrupt starts and turns, as it were, from the homely and sunny work of Chaucer to the opulent exquisiteness of Spenser and the multi-toned passion of Shakespeare, from the Elizabethan period to the time of the Metaphysicals with their scholarly or mystic exercise of wit and on to Milton's Latin-moulded polyphony of a widely stored intellect and to the so-called Classical phase of the epigrammatic eighteenth century, then the sudden luminous outburst known as the Romantic Revival, followed by a deviation, as Sri Aurobindo has aptly observed, into 'an intellectual, artistic, carefully wrought but largely external poetry' which in turn was surprisingly intruded upon by a subtle strain of the Irish soul which, seeming to continue the Victorian aesthetic language, was really a breakaway into a new dimension of inwardness. This innovation appeared to Sri Aurobindo as the promise of a plenary voice of supreme depths and heights made possible on one side by the oceanic roll of Whitman from America and on the other by whatever rarefication or intensification of sight and insight could come initially from Tagore and finally from the practitioners of 'overhead poetry' bearing India's ancient genius to a novel fulfilment by turning to Yogic use the power of subtle suggestion and compact intuitive directness which are the outstanding qualities of the language developed during six hundred years by English poetry.
1 have spoken of abrupt starts, but there is still a secret continuity in the sense that certain movements of mind and its expressive medium are present in embryo form in one age and come to fruition in another. This double phenomenon is due to the pull this way and that of the two components of the English poetic consciousness, the mundane Anglo-Saxon and the aerial Celtic - the submergence of the latter by the former in one period and vice versa in the next and at the same time the shooting up of either here and there amidst the predominance of its opposite. Thus the usually down-to-earth Chaucer with his tempered lucid manner can amaze us
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now and again with, as Arnold noticed, 'the grand style' -
O martyr souded to virginity -
or with the imaginative felicity of the Elizabethans when he tells us, in 'The Knight's Tale', of a thick wood being cut down but adds that he will refrain from describing the plight of the nymphs and fauns, the beasts and birds,
Ne how the ground agast was of the light.
Or take some of the surprises facing us from the Elizabethan Age's general upsurge of the Life-Force presenting to us human motives vehemently criss-crossing. All of a sudden we find in the protean Shakespeare an almost irrelevant allusion to the Cosmic Spirit in a Wordsworthian vein -
Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come...
Here it is not only Wordsworth but also the Aurobindonian 'overhead poetry' that is anticipated. A similar prefiguration of it in again a semi-Wordsworthian feeling and form is met with in Vaughan's
But felt through all this earthly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
In Wordsworth's own time of the so-called Romantic Revival we get in the middle of Keats's hymn to Pan in the course of Endymion a snatch of ancient Indian Yoga and a clear Aurobindonian experience when the poet invokes the genius of the place:
Be thou the unimaginable lodge
Of solitary thinkings such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain.
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In passing, I may remark that this kind of poetry breathes nothing of the English scene or temper. None of the lines quoted from Shakespeare or Vaughan or Keats are English in experience. Nor does Wordsworth emerge as English, even though set in an English milieu 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey', when we get the inward pull of a waking samadhi
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened
and when we are told that with the organic functions being
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul.
What, again, corresponds to English experience even in the outward pull of Wordsworth's pantheistic vision of a mysterious Presence 'interfused' with all things,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air...'?
Aren't you yourself touched occasionally by a typical Aurobindonian intuition with some thrill of the 'overhead' rhythm, as when you conclude your 'Eden' with a line which has a universal bearing and passes beyond any recognisable English outlook:
Unsleeping the sky whose sight embraces all?
Let me end this series of brief citations with a reference once more to my favourite Wordsworth. His 'Ode on the Intimations of Immortality...' with its May morning in Cumberland comes with a mood essentially shot with non-English emotions and insights. The sense of the human
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soul's pre-existence in God, the impression of a child deserving to be addressed as
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity
or as
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the day -
have we not here something quite alien to any North-England mind, however religious it may be? Nor can that mind be anywhere near 'those shadowy recollections' which have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence.
Yet the English Wordsworth, using the 'tongue that Shakespeare spake', can pass from a prospect of North-England landscape to something which, while appearing to be part of a Cumberland dawn, belongs really to the deepest mystic region our consciousness can plumb. I am referring to those four lines on which I dwelt at some length in our old correspondence:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep...
We feel the tone suggesting distances and heights and bringing secret messages from them and the poet's heart forgetting all human sadness and responding to the strange joy that seems abroad and concentrated mysteriously everywhere. Then comes a drawing of the inner self into a hushed intense receptivity to some absolute Ineffable whose pre-
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sence from far off gets communicated as if by its breath of an all-pervading ecstasy. There is no missing the profound vibration of the last line and its sheer revelatory vision. But we may realise how in such verse every touch has to be right or else the final wonder will fail to reach us. It almost seems as though everything depended on how the state of the 'fields' were worded. Suppose we had: 'fields asleep'. At once the level of the inspiration would be disturbed. The profound sound effect would fall short of the sense towards which it should carry us. But it needs a special sensitivity to discern the difference. The ordinary literary critic would tend to consider the words 'of sleep' to be a mere prepositional phrase doing duty for the straightforward 'asleep'. Then automatically our stress would be on 'fields', whereas actually it is the 'sleep' that is to be emphasised. The 'fields', though hardly negligible and certainly necessary in lending concreteness to the vision that has started with the vague yet not impalpable 'Winds', is the support of 'sleep' and not the principal subject. It indeed points to a reality but what confers on the suggested expanses their true, their ultimate character is the expression 'of sleep'. This expression lifts the expanses beyond the physical to the arcane. To equal 'of sleep' to 'asleep' is to fall short completely of the revelation and end up with the explanation offered by one Professor Hales that Wordsworth is speaking of a breeze coming to him at an early hour of the day from the 'reposeful slumbering countryside.' Dowden, trying to exercise more imagination than Hales, inclines to the opinion that the line may merely mean that the west wind blows, the west where the sun sets being emblematic of sleep. However, he has some doubt and asks: "Are 'the fields of sleep' those deep and shadowy parts of our own souls which lie out of the view of consciousness?" A commentator on Dowden finds this suggestion too refined, landing us as it does upon Freud's subconscious mind and the 'Id' about which Dowden knew little and Wordsworth less. So there is an urge to play down whatever supernatural aura the line bears. One critic has
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sought the key to it in those two other lines of Wordsworth's:
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers.
Of course here is nothing supernatural, but in fact the picture is puzzling by its curious mixed imagery, and just the adjective 'sleeping' in the context of ]'winds' can scarcely throw light on the profoundly stirring obscurity in the Ode's phrase, A hint of the basic truth comes to us from the Mandukya Upanishad in which three grades of being - the outer human, the inner occult, the inmost spiritual - are termed Jagrat (Wakefulness), Swapna (Dream), Sushupti (Sleep), with a final utter transcendent state simply named Turiya (Fourth). Sushupti indicates the tranced condition at its deepest, in which the human soul partakes of a Super-consciousness described by the Upanishad thus: "The self of Sleep, unified, a massed intelligence, blissful and enjoying bliss, ...the lord of all, the omniscient, the inner control."
Ancient India that is also modern because it is undying lay behind Wordsworth's strange line as it lay behind several other utterances by him, just as it did with Keats's 'solitary thinkings' and Shelley's
One whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere
and
The One remains, the Many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly
and many other deliverances of the English Romantic poets to whom a supra-intellectual light beckoned from some ether of being in which Platonic and Plotinian presences mingled with 'Asiatic immensities' which were a little baffling at times yet never really 'vague'. What these im-
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mensities hold can be caught as a hint not only from the Mandukya Upanishad but also from a brief correspondence between Sri Aurobindo and me in 1948. When I had asked him to help me draw inspiration from the 'overhead' planes which he had named Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind, with the still unmanifested Supermind at the top, and whose distinguishing traits and powers he had explained, I was eager to get lines of English and European poetry elucidated both in suggestion and technique by him in terms of those planes. One of my letters ran:
"It is a bit of a surprise to me that Virgil's
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt1
is now considered by you 'an almost direct descent from the Overmind consciousness', the home of the Mantras. I was under the impression that, like that other line of his -
O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem -
it was a perfect mixture of the Higher Mind with the Psychic; and the impression was based on something you had written to me in the past. Similarly I remember you definitely declaring Wordsworth's
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep
to be lacking precisely in the Overmind note and having only the note of Intuition in an intense form. What you write now means a big change of opinion in both the instances - but how and why the change?"
1. The best failure in English with this untranslatable little masterpiece by Virgil seems to be C. Day Lewis's:
Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience.
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Sri Aurobindo replied:
"Yes, certainly, my ideas and reactions to some of the lines and passages about which you had asked me long ago, have developed and changed and could not but change. For at that time I was new to the overhead regions or at least to the highest of them - for the higher thought and the illumination were already old friends - and could not be sure or complete in my perception of many things concerning them. I hesitated therefore to assign anything like overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writings as belonging to this order. Besides, the intellect took still too large a part in my reactions to poetry; for instance, I judged Virgil's line too much from what seemed to be its surface intellectual import and too little from its deeper vision and meaning and its reverberations of the Overhead. So also with Wordsworth's line about the 'fields of sleep': I have since then moved in those fields of sleep and felt the breath which is carried from them by the winds that came to the poet, so I can better appreciate the depth of vision in Wordsworth's line. I could also see more clearly the impact of the Overhead on the work of poets who wrote usually from a mental, a psychic, an emotional or other vital inspiration, even when it gave only a tinge."
Now I come to a final point you have striven to drive home three times in your charge-sheet apropos of Selections from Savitri which, by the way, was not 'Dick Batsford's doing'. Actually "there ain't no sich person". You have made a portmanteau surname from Dick's own 'Batstone' and his wife M.E.'s 'Milford'. In the second place Dick Batstone is not the maker of the selections. He is only the writer of the Introduction. The selecting was done by Mary Aldridge who has written the 'Editor's Note'. By the way, you are facing a book over which an Englishwoman of culture and fine sensibility has worked and which an Englishman with an equally developed mind and aesthetic taste has introduced to the reading public. Their valuation of
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Savitri cannot be put down merely to their being Sri Aurobindo's disciples. Their Englishness and their knowledge of English poetry have also to count in the balance. They are not themselves poets but their critical sense cannot be brushed aside cavalierly. You have not given it even a passing thought. Mary Aldridge's name you have completely overlooked.
Of course the two collaborators are not professional critics and I won't harp on their claims. Let me turn directly to your criticism: "There are scarcely any concrete images in the whole book... But the language of the poet is a language of image and symbol... Blake writes of the 'minute particulars' and of these there are virtually none in Sri Aurobindo's poem. One longs for a blade of grass, for Tagore's 'patient mother the dust' or for his 'morning sparrow'," Do you mean to say that there are no earthly pictures in Savitri? Here are a few:
Often in twilight mid returning troops
Of cattle thickening with their dust the shades...
I caught for some eternal eye the sudden
Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool....
Or wandered in some lone tremendous wood
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry...
The colonnade's dream grey in the quiet eve,
The slow moonrise gliding in front of night...
As if at flower-prints in a dingy room
Laughed in a golden vase one living rose...
However, it is not only Nature that can show concrete images: concreteness can crowd Supernature too. And in between there is a concrete fusion of Supernature with Nature as in the Symbol Dawn in the first canto of the poem:
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A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
Here are images of the world we know, serving the ends of a visionary significance. Or look at this combination of the earthly hieratic, the subtly occult, the spiritually psychological to drive home both subjective and objective values of a highly Yogic state of embodied being, the Avatarhood of Savitri:
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple door to things beyond.
You cannot have a passage of poetry more thronged with images. A Shakespearean profusion and variety of sight meet us, each instance a different surprise and all coalescing towards a single total effect of opulent mystery. Technically we have on the whole the impression of end-stopped lines which yet have an interlinked mobility and a couple of skilful enjambments (lines 4 and 6) which do not interfere with the over-all Upanishadic or Kalidasian movement. The rhythm carries the inward-outward vision with a more and more deepening vibration until in the last line its soul-stirring flow reaches at once a culminating intensity and a breaking forth into some interminable distance which is felt to be both within and without. I would consider the passage a most vivid Mantra, the farthest one can think of from a series of abstractions. Doubtless, it does not bring us minute
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particulars such as we might expect from an English poet writing of English matters but if a supreme English poet turned to matters not specifically English we would certainly have something comparable though not in a vein of equally developed insight. Shelley's apostrophe to Emilia Viviani springs to mind:
Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath the radiant form of Woman
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light and love and immortality!
Sweet benediction in the eternal Curse!
Veiled glory of the lampless Universe: -
along with his idealistic description matching the intoxicated apostrophe:
...the brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless heaven of June,
Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon
Burns inextinguishably beautiful.
Back to Sri Aurobindo, let me affirm that denizens of a supramundane sphere do not become abstract just because they are not of the earth. What could be more precisely visualised than that constant companion of the young Savitri other than the humans around her? -
Almost they saw who lived within her light
Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres
Descended from its unattainable realms
In her attracting advent's luminous wake,
The white-fire dragon bird of endless bliss
Drifting with burning wings above her days:
Heaven's tranquil shield guarded the missioned child.
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I may observe that Sri Aurobindo has not merely given us a striking picture, a 'containing vessel' to hold the endless bliss: he has also employed an inspired technique of structure to vivify still further its character. I asked him: "Is an accumulating grandiose effect intended by the repetition of adjective-and-noun in four consecutive line-endings?" He answered: "Yes; the purpose is to create a large luminous trailing movement like the flight of the Bird with its dragon tail of white fire."
A seeing of the common terrestrial condition through eyes opened to a deeper reality, evil or good, behind or beyond it, is found again and again in Savitri. Thus we read:
An Inquisition of the priests of Night
In judgment sit on the adventurer soul...
A bond is put on the high-climbing mind,
A seal on the too large wide-open heart;
Death stays the journeying discoverer, Life.
Thus is the throne of the Inconscient safe
While the tardy coilings of the aeons pass
And the Animal browses in the sacred fence
And the gold Hawk can cross the skies no more.
This 'gold Hawk' is as living as Tagore's 'morning sparrow' and is part of a profounder world-consciousness. And where in Tagore can you find the ornithological vision that the Yogi's eye raises before us?
All things hang here between God's yes and no...
The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,
The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken
Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,
A great surreal dragon in the skies.
Nor will you be able to trace in Tagore a packed revelation that is simultaneously a far-shooting philosophy of the cosmos stated in a most simple manner immediately on the
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heels of the same thought flashed out in imagery audacious in the extreme - a packed revelation cast in the form of a paradox such as
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,
It is worth noting how the revelatory is conveyed by a cunning logic to the art-sense of the reader. In poetry logic is not confined to an argument a la Aristotle: it operates too by aesthetic devices. Assonances, consonances, rhymes or at least echoes and even transfigured puns are some of them. Metrical structures also serve to persuade and convince. In the lines before us, 'Earth's' and 'Truth's' make a marked echo by related sounds, the connective 'are' stands in the very middle of the first line so that the section preceding it is balanced by the succeeding one and, what is more, the scansion of the two is absolutely the same; the opening pair of words in either section is heavily stressed, constituting a spondee, and is followed by an iambic foot and one further syllable. An exact metrical equation is made to bear out the precise correspondence asserted of two dissimilar figures. The second line brings also a perfectly poised division 'God's sign' is right in the centre of the phrase, the third foot out of the five, its significance looking backward and forward with an equal eye, as it were, allotting two feet each to the earlier part and the later, suggesting a secret similarity of meaning within the disparate expressions. Over and above functioning in its own way like the 'are' of the first line, 'God's sign' builds again a spondee and by situating it in a prominent place communicates to us an affinity between the striking philosophical statement and the startling visual postulate leading to it.
Please don't think I am indulging in pedantry to impress you. I am trying to show the inspired craftsman going hand in hand in Sri Aurobindo's poetry with the illumined seer. As you appear to misconceive his verbal art all through, I
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feel urged to dwell on some technical details, when the opportunity has offered itself.
The second verse of the quotation I have discussed sets us on the track of lines that are great without an ostensible simile or metaphor, bare pronouncements which yet make us perceive verities and feel them on our pulses:
All can be done if the God-touch is there....
Our life's repose is in the Infinite....
A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest....
The One by whom all live, who lives by none....
But mostly a figurative element quickens the great single phrase:
Love is man's Iien on the Absolute....
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient...
Unweave the stars and into silence pass....
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Even when a transcendent experience is presented, such words as would shadow forth its living and substantial nature are pressed into service:
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
The third and the fourth lines which may appear to the ordinary reader as rather abstract after the vividness of the first two do not remain so as soon as the last which begins with a negative vocable springs into substantiality by means of another negation which is not subjective but objective and evokes the picture of a solid vacancy, as it were, one which could have paths yet refuses to have them and chooses
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to be remote. The livingness of this solitary state of the mind-surpassing peace-packed Divine is also impressed on us by the word 'lies' instead of 'is'.
Many 'superconscient' states, passive or active, many explorations of the in-world make their impacts on us in the course of the story of Aswapathy's Yoga and Savitri's sadhana side by side with her soul-romance with Satyavan and battle against Death for her lover's life. Still the ultimate stress is not on the Beyond. You misconstrue Sri Aurobindo if you think that his concern is not with 'this litel spot of erthe'. Aswapathy's invocation to the Supreme is all on its behalf:
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the Universe,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride,...
O radiant fountain of the world's delight
World-free and unattainable above,
O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within
While men seek thee outside and never find,
Mystery and Muse with hieratic tongue,
Incarnate the white passion of thy force,
Mission to earth some living form of thee.
One moment fill with thy eternity,
Let thy infinity in one body live,
All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,
All-Love throb single in one human heart.
As a result of this appeal, Savitri is born. She grows up, seeks and finds her mate, learns that Satyavan is fated to die within a year but still marries him, determined to fight Yama, the God of Death, and snatch his soul back to earth. She is not content that she should join him in some other world and be free of the toil, the trouble, the tangle, which the Divine has imposed on terrestrial existence:
Freedom is this with ever seated soul,
Large in Life's limits, strong in Matter's knots,
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Building great stuff of action from the worlds
To make fine wisdom from coarse scattered strands
And love and beauty out of war and night,
The wager wonderful, the game divine.
What liberty has the soul which feels not free
Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds
The Lover winds around his playmate's limbs,
Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?
To seize him better with her boundless heart
She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,
Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands
And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most
free.
When Satyavan has been granted back by Death, Savitri's ordeal has not ended. Her soul and his are transported to the domain of Everlasting Day and there the Supreme tempts her to abide with Satyavan and leave earth behind. She replies:
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven....
O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars
For victory in the tournament with death,
For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,
For flashing of the splendid sword of God!
O thou who soundest the trumpet in the lists,
Part not the handle from the untried steel,
Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.
Are there not still a million fights to wage?
O King-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,
Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.
Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,
Thy blade's exultant smile name Satyavan...
The Supreme accedes to her prayer and sends the two of them back to the travail of Time, making them his instru-
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merits of the spiritual consciousness. She especially is marked out:
O Sun-word, thou shalt raise the"earth-soul to Light....
Awakened from the mortal's ignorance
Men shall be lit with the Eternal's ray....
My will shall be the meaning of their days; Living for me, by me, in me they shall live.
Look at the last line here. The whole of the Bhagavad Gita is summed up in its message of three steps to fulfilment - the spiritual self-dedication, the pervasion by the Divine's guiding will, the utter oneness with God, which is meant to be no escape into Nirvana but a dynamic living for earth's perfection. Savitri's ideal is allowed and enforced by the highest Wisdom:
Olasso of my capture's widening noose,
Become my cord of universal love -
the same ideal that she had declared in her debate with death:
A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
Iam a deputy of the aspiring world,
My spirit's liberty I ask for all.
I shall end here, with my hope that one day my delight in Savitri as a poem may come to be shared by all. Not that I consider it
One entire and perfect chrysolite.
There are variations in the poetic enthousiasmos, as is natural when the work is not only Legend and Symbol but also Philosophy. H.O. White, besides saying what I have quoted
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earlier, has marked that most themes of philosophical thinking have been touched upon in Savitri. Even scientific thought and experiment have not been missed. Sri Aurobindo has referred to
The rare-point sparse substratum universe
On which floats a solid world's phenomenal face
as well as to
The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force.
Though this last line affects my ear as being no less inspired, both verbally and rhythmically, than any that deals with the spiritual life, I do not claim that there are no comparatively arid areas; but, by and large, I cannot help being aware of "God's plenty".
However, let me press on you Sri Aurobindo's other epic more than this which may prove too much of 'the Future Poetry' for many. I repeat my request to you that you should look at Ilion and tell me how you react to it. After getting your reaction I shall close the chapter of my discussion with you on Sri Aurobindo the Poet.
(17.9.1987)
Please give me a little time to ponder your very eloquent and persuasive letter, in which you make some very true points. I have just returned from Paris, much work on my table awaiting me, but I now have beside me a copy of Ilion' sent me by Dick Batstone, 'Letters on Poetry and Literature' silently sent me "by Prof Gokak; a reproachful letter from Sisir Kumar Ghose; a photocopy of 'The Riddle of This World', sent from America; I have just re-read Aurobindo's commentary on the Isha Upanishad! Please give me a little time. These things are important. Your point
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about the 'overpoetry' which shines down from above this world's experience is an important one and indeed where that 'divine vision' is absent, where is the 'poetry'? What did Blake say? 'One thing alone makes a poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision'.
I will write at length when I can.
(20.10.1987)
Thank you for your acknowledgment of my elephant of a letter which I hope hasn't quite failed to be chryselephantine. From the generous bits of appreciation of some points in it by you I feel happy that you haven't taken it as an infliction.
It's most unexpectedly good news that you have received so many Aurobindonian presents. I am particularly grateful to Dick for having sent you Won. I am glad to remember, from your mention of re-reading Sri Aurobindo's commentary on the Isha Upanishad, that it was I who sent you this little book nearly 25 years ago. You liked it very much at that time for its clear systematic elucidation of the ancient knowledge and wisdom. Sri Aurobindo picked out the Isha because it forms a link between the Veda and the Vedanta, carrying into the more intellectualised intuition of the later seers the light caught by the ecstatic insight of the old Rishis to unify the temporal and the eternal. It also looks forward to Sri Aurobindo's own Integral Yoga of the Supermind's life-transformative power.
A few months back I posted to you by surface mail my latest publication: The Obscure and the Mysterious - A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry. It not only contains a series of essays on Mallarme the Man and the Poet but also attempts to translate a good number of his poems.
I keep dipping with great pleasure into your Yeats the Initiate. By the way, have you come across Swan and Shadow by Thomas R. Whitaker which is said to be "the greatest book yet written on Yeat's poetry"? I haven't, but I'll be looking for it.
(30.10.1987)
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