THE MYSTICAL POEMS OF NISHIKANTO
It is high time critics took serious note of the new school of poetry that has arisen in India under the inspiration of Sri Aurobindo who is himself the centre of it. The new school is of special interest not only because of the novel content and form of its poetry but also because of the way in which that poetry comes to its members.
The old view of a divine breath blowing through the poet is rather at a discount today. Not that the poet is regarded as altogether a conscious intellectual agent deliberately fashioning out his work. Much indeed of modern verse is an intellectual exercise, an attempt at being clever and recherche and recondite; but there is also a good deal which is said to spring from non-intellectual sources and to come upon the writer without conscious effort. Unfortunately, this kind of verse has very little of harmony in it — either of vision or rhythm. It is chaotic, a throw-up of the Subconscious. Although it is a breath from beyond the outer mind of the poet, it is a spasmodic and foul breath, it is in no sense "divine", it is neither from mysterious deeps nor from magnificent heights, it has no intuitive substance and no felicitous expression. A power more than human and bearing in itself a secret light of spiritual reality is nowadays held to be a figment of self-deluded poets rather than the active inspirer of them.
The Aurobindonian school offers a mass of work which gives the lie very effectively to this notion. It is, of course, full of sublime or exquisite flashes that provide us with an insight into matters beyond the mundane; but it is as well a process in which the poet's usual shortcomings are masterfully transcended and harmonious wholes of a rare originality created through apparently unpromising human material. The lips seem really touched by a divine flame. Men whose
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preoccupations are far from poetic almost awake one morning and find themselves poets. An English mathematician and logician, after a few fumblings shot with hopeful gleams, brings out poem on poem of a profound haunting quality. A Bengali doctor feels drawn to the Muse and soon gets his finger on the pulse of perfect rhythm and feels the heart of all beauty and truth beating through his words. The case of the author whose book is before us was not so hopeless on the face of it as was John Chadwick's or Nirodbaran's. He was a powerful poet in his own tongue, Bengali. But, as K. H. Gandhi's short yet pregnant preface declares, his knowledge of English was nothing to boast of and his grasp of poetic form and technique in English absolutely rudimentary. And still by sheer absorption of the influence excercised by the Yogic presence of Sri Aurobindo, he was able to open himself to subtle worlds of visions and voices and his poor English equipment was magically made use of and transfigured, with the result that he produced poems which, whatever flaws there might have been in places to be set right by Sri Aurobindo's own hand, were splendid surprises of word and rhythm.
Naturally, the whole book is not an uninterrupted flow of the highest inspiration. There is a mixture at times of the moderately good. But on balance the amount of the extremely fine is so great that Dream Cadences by Nishikanto stands out as an extraordinary achievement. Part of the book consists of translation into English from the poet's Bengali. Two or three of them are superb and several have impressive moments, but the level of the translated work is in general lower than that of the poems written directly in English. We have not primarily to consider translated work while judging Nishikanto in the English garb: the best of it speaks much for his pure force, as also for the merit of Dilip Kumar Roy who has rendered so well the Bengali originals; but Nishikanto the poet dealing straight away with the English medium is what is of paramount interest from the point of view of the wonders the Aurobindonian influence has accomplished for
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him in the form no less than the content of poetry.
Word and rhythm are notable in Nishikanto in two ways. There is the sovereign tackling of forms that are not alien to the poetic tradition in English. And there is the moulding of forms that are of a new and modern variety, without any of the capriciousness and crudeness of much modern experiment. When, for instance, he writes in The Soul's Cry a revelatory verse like
Inspirations come
From a God-white source
And my heart-beats drum
To their wide-open force,
he produces something of great value — a royal intensity is there with a golden weight of meaning carried in massive-textured strongly stressed words. Similarly, in the lines from Descent with an analogous import —
In my bosom's secret core
Thou hast opened a radiant door
And through it vast melodies pour:
A gold-descent with heavenly murmur,
an angel-stream —
we cannot sufficiently admire the cunning craft of phrase so faithful to the mystic experience, the wizardry of that triple rhyme suggesting the continuity of the pouring melodies and that final long line clinching this suggestion as well as hinting the amplitude of the melodies while wording accurately the exquisiteness one with the vastness of their illumined flow. Yes, poetry like these two excerpts is beyond price, but its moulds are reminiscent of past poets. This does not in the least detract from their value, for by the term "mould" we mean not the individual shape each poet's expression takes but the basic pattern on which he plays the individual variation. All the same, no new technical base is ventured,
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though it must be noted that a very plastic metrical movement is present and the feet scan with larger freedom than in the usual run of the traditional forms. That plasticity, that freedom is characteristic of Nishikanto and supplies a sort of connection between poems where no new base is essayed and those where a base-novelty makes itself felt. Examples of the latter kind may be taken from the sonnet entitled The Artist Almighty:
On the dead-red canvas of a stone-stricken soil,
or
Here I have seen a straight brush-stroke, iron-ash grey,
A long winding of palm groves horizon-stretched,
Branches of star-triangular rhythm with heaven-sapphire
play,
Steel-strong sinews by deathless spirals caged,
Give Thy colour-fountained luminous brush of power,
Let bloom through my hard granite a heavenly flower.
Here we have effects which may be scanned according to old rules, but we shall have no unifying measure and the variations would be rather revolutionary and intractable. Lines of six, seven and five feet seem to rub shoulders — quite an anarchic assortment in a sonnet! And what is the base? There are so many kinds of feet occurring with almost equal frequency that we are at a loss to fix the metre. It appears that a reading by significant stresses alone is called for. It does not matter on what syllable of a foot the stress falls nor how many syllables a foot carries: one dominant stress to a foot, falling anywhere, is the guiding principle and each line has six dominant stresses. Perhaps we should not speak at all of divisible feet, but say simply that the lines have a six-stress rhythm unifying the whole poem and further enhancing the unification by each line bearing at its end a stress on the rhyme-syllable. This type of verse has been practised by Sri Aurobindo himself in the bunch of poems
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that are his experiments in uncommon metres, including his version of the quantitative system.1 But Nishikanto gives it, at least in The Artist Almighty and one or two other attempts, a more bold turn, verging almost at times on a free-verse technique.
So much for the strictly formal aspect of Nishikanto. Looking at the purely expressional aspect, we are struck again and again by alternation of condensed force and equally packed delicacy. Much-in-little is often his quality. But this quality must not be understood to mean that he writes very brief poems, four-line wonders that spring to birth suddenly and pass, yielding place to one another in rapid succession. Nishikanto is not limited to mere flashes, though the peculiar nature of his occult inspiration may create the impression that even his lengths are a series of loosely connected flashes. Nishikanto can build up his effects, he can raise substantial edifices of music, he can proceed unflagging to a fair enough distance. Only two poems are just a quatrain each — the rest mostly develop fourteen or sixteen lines, and several cover more than one page and three run to even three pages. But whatever his length, he compresses on many occasions a lot into each phrase. This compression is a sign of his essential energy and vari-colour, whether they come with a stride and a march or with a trip and a dance. Glance at this picture out of The Yawning West:
The lost dark sun shines like a hungry vulture's eye,
A serpent way from horizon swirls
Its flow of aimless, dreamless travellers....
or this out of Flower-Transformation:
From a little opening in the earth
A tiny spark of mud-black birth
Desired release
From cruel stress
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Of crust-claws, demon-dark
And pain obscure and stark,
or, again, this out of The Cat and the Rats:
Mad the shadows writhing a shabby tail,
Storing clay-crumbs with crooked miser nail.
In a less Aeschylean-cum-modernistic style, in a more limpid manner we have
I am the barren brownness of desert-desire,
Far-calling fountain voices of deep emotion
My life plays with all and with all
It blends its fluted footfall;
All my channels I fill
With an intimate One-Ward thrill.
Yes, much-in-little characterises a good deal of Nishi-kanto's way of putting things. But the same may be said in general of all that he writes: the way may not openly have the trait I have mentioned — a trait which frequently invites the compound word, either noun or adjective — but even where the energetic vari-colour is not evident in the very turn and texture of phrase, we always sense a whole world of pressing significance, large visions shining out through small spaces, as in
Primitive, nude and powerful
The great hunger of life,
Always fresh and flowerful,
Overleaping pain and strife,
O trivial creatures of flesh
In pleasure's dim painful mesh,
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I shall make you bright and fresh
And free, with the marvel touch of a mighty
luminous hand.
Or take the intense and immense revelation of snatches like
Omniscient dreams in his wide illumined sleep
and
the crystal source
Of the Creator flows through the stillness of burning stars.
Lines of this kind hail from poetry's most spiritual heaven — some Over-world speaking its own tongue, the mortal words lifted straight up into its high direct dazzling mystery instead of getting lit up with some reflex of its altitudes.
Nishikanto does not employ such transcendental speech always or even often, but there is often a transcendental vision invading his verse and mingling with what is his more usual range, the occult and psychic sight of the Divine's play and purpose. Before I touch on that range, I should like to express my pleasure at the sheer painter-viewpoint that also distinguished his seeing of the hidden things. I happen to know that Nishikanto is an artist with the brush no less than the pen and has to his credit rich creations of symbolic design and suggestive hue. But the painter in him would be evident even if I knew nothing of his activity with the palette. Delightfully many are the traces he leaves in his work of the specialist's interest in colour:
A barren evening's nut-brown atmosphere,
Before me moves an ocean of vastitude sapphire
With wavy curves cream-soft and Chinese-white,
Crimsoned snow and ranges of purple light
Kissed by cobalt firmament,
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Through the valley's labyrinth of emerald green.
Of course, he is no mere painter of outer things: all his word-canvases are flushed with shaped glories from behind the earth. The occult, the psychic and something from secrecies not only inward but also high above are a constant feature of his work: it is not only an inspired play with mystical ideas and emotions that is Nishikanto's poetry: his poetry is a visitor to actual mystical planes and is closely aware of strange presences inhabiting them and through his images and symbols their concrete though subtle realities meet us and find entry into our being. A very self-revealing poem, gathering together in a general fashion the modes of his experience and the trends of his nature, is the sonnet Tremolo:
A mystic land, a world of magic wonder;
A picture painted with subtle light and shade;
A white moon lotus of deep and delicate splendour;
A rainbow romance — a rose of passion-red.
A land of light with a delightful play;
A festival manifested with heavenly claim;
Descending showers that make to blossom the clay;
An eveless and a sleepless sunfire flame.
A land of earth with many laughters and tears
Churned and cherished in the bosom of a yearning
source,
Through the mortal game immortal experience bears
And pulls at the sky with giant cords of force.
O painter and poet-musician of my human birth,
I am tuned in thy tremolo of dreamland, heaven
and earth.
This is beautiful poetry, perfect in every word, but it is all the
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more fine because of the rarity of its beauty, the unusualness of the realms glimmering through it: even the earth is seen and felt in its inner soul-pregnant activity.
There are two poems, however, which are most outstanding for that rarity and unusualness. One is "Lion and Deer":
A deer of lightning comes and goes;
Flitting it plays,
Swift-limbed, spotted with silver rose —
A bodied golden grace.
It moves and hovers in green woodland,
A beauty-born thing;
On flaming heels that can hardly stand,
Its gait is a flash and a spring.
A lion of thunder and hungry fire
Paws with red-hot nail,
Groaning in the caverns of desire
By the side of the mystic veil.
The red beast runs through the rocky ways
Like a power of wild flame;
One sees a burning giant face
Move in a dreadful game.
When the screen is rent by a moment's slit
And shows where two lands end,
The lion-fire and the deer of light
Run and flame and blend.
But the veil blocks them then and there,
And still the drama goes on —
On a stage that is swept with noise and flare;
For each longing fire is alone.
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The giant beast leaps up and roars,
A hunger ever-burning,
The slender prey swerves back from its course
In a flight of fear and yearning.
One day, the two of themselves shall tire
And lie tossing on earth,
Till comes with help the secret Fire
To release their painful birth.
At its beckoning life's weird and muddy
Mystic veil has vanished,
The struggle-weary earthly body
In motionless peace is banished.
Then by the stroke of heaven's crimson flower
From either body shall rise
An angel of beauty, an angel of power
And kiss each other's eyes.
The lips of thunder, the lips of lightning
In an ecstasy mixed and dense
Cling, a married splendour widening,
And smite with a touch of intense
Immensity, — through my heart they enter
And my soul they force
With sunpower wine and honey-star tender
At vision's close and source.
It is not easy to explain and interpret this poem clearly. In fact, to try to do so would be to spoil its beauty, to limit and lessen its significance. Significance it certainly has, we are aware of a meaningful movement half on life's stage and half behind the scenes, a strange play is felt to be going on, whose figures and gestures are seen before us but not wholly, for they are projections from mysteries whose
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presence we intuit yet do not grasp with the outer mind. In this respect the poem has the atmosphere of certain works of Blake that have an occult vision conveying to us the emotion of that vision without any definite intellectual key to its symbols. But Nishikanto has something also of Blake's less occult but not less deeply suggestive Tyger. The latter classic with its picture of a terrible magnificence,
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
and with the disturbing question it poses,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
has been interpreted alternatively as Blake's confrontation of the paradox that even evil things have beauty and as Blake's symbolisation of the co-existence in God of the utmost tenderness and the utmost wrath. Either interpretation is pointed by the query the poem later puts to the tyger:
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
The "lamb", of course, can be seen as hinting of Christ who, as Blake says in another poem, is called by that name. Nishikanto, too, offers us a pair of opposites — on the one hand "a bodied golden grace", "a beauty-born thing", and on the other "a power of wild flame", "a hunger everburning". And the picture of the beast among the rocks, moving its "burning giant face" and pawing "with red-hot nail", is worthy of Blake's imagination. But in the poem as a whole there is an intimate grip on the deeps of being, a direct subtle psychic insight, added to the apocalyptic turn and tone. Blake is amazed, awed, swept out of himself into mystery unfathomable; Nishikanto passes with a luminous rapture into the Unknown, he appears to be on terms of
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intense felicitous familiarity with the hidden worlds, he is at home with the "secret Fire" that comes to release the contraries from their finitude and separation into their own archetypes, as it were, which blend and mix and marry in the midst of their difference. From the divine unity of the soul the drama of diversity, of conflict among splendid protagonists, comes out — protagonists whose splendour is stained with a dark defect and has become either a vulnerable exquisiteness or a murderous majesty. The defect remains and the conflict continues so long as the mystic veil is not rent and what emerged from vision's deific source is not found in its truth at vision's deific close. Enchanting is the dream-delicate deer in idyllic woodland, but the lion of the harsh rocky ways, with his pursuing limbs of a hoarse passion, is no less a glory at heart even as the prey does not lose its core of immortal value because it is fragile and flitting. Somehow the two splendours fall apart — "each longing fire is alone" — and that division is their defect. To perfect them, to rid them of their sense of being fragmented and opposed to each other, there is required the veil-rending stroke of "heaven's crimson flower" in which fuse flawlessly the rose light of the deer and the red fire of the lion — and then there will be the Beatitude one with the Omnipotence. The poem imprints on us its intuition with a varying imagery that may puzzle the outer mind — thunder and lightning, sun and star, wine and honey — but the ultimate suggestion is single.
And what an "intriguing" art bears home that suggestion! The expression has a finish, yet with no marmoreal smoothness as of all difficulty conquered and erased: the phrases are a-quiver with a sort of dangerous innocence as if they came happily right on the edge of going wrong, as if they were a slightly wayward dance whose step might any moment slide down a precipice but keeps high and graceful and perfect by an unexpected instinct. Two factors combine to create this peculiar touch-and-go absoluteness. First, a constant outbreak from inner planes: the mind is not given any stable standing-ground, it is all the time stirred and teased by sights
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and significances that at once yield and withhold themselves, and as soon as what is yielded is used by the mind to build an expectation on, a new thrust from the inner planes disturbs it and seems for the fraction of a second a misfire before the recognition dawns that the correct revelatory gleam has arrived. Occasionally, it is the difference of shade between one inner plane and another rather than between the outer and the inner, that sets up the illusion of a momentary maladjustment and then puts the picture in accurate focus and perspective; for the inspiration has formed a pattern with strands drawn from more than one hidden level of consciousness. Added to all this simple or diversified strangeness is the second factor: a most free sensitivity of rhythm-modulation. In tune with the ever-new occult or psychic aspect of the vision the stresses and the slacks change very frequently in position and number while weaving stanzas metrically concordant in general. The play of vowels and consonants is also according to the necessities of the inner planes, a plastic process of sound insistent and repetitive or flying and altering — in a manner not quite immediately seizable by the normal poetry-pursuing ear. The small interval between the particular rhythmic impact and that ear's absorption of its inevitability makes the perfection of the poem ring out after an instant's peril, rendering the surprise that is inherent in all true poetry doubly effective.
A poem fit to stand by "Lion and Deer" for its intuition of occult and psychic profundities is one with even an actual affinity of ultimate message: it is called The Sleeping Lion and its first stanza,
O Sleeping Lion in the caverned darkness
Of the rock-heart of every sentient thing!
Give us thy glance, if only for a moment,
Of a child upgazing in its slumbering,
sets the key-note of some concealed soul-reality, at once grand in the extreme and tender to the utmost, that has to be
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awakened in the outer being — a fusion to be realised by us of "an angel of power" and "an angel of beauty". The whole is an unforgettable piece of symbolic verse and the translator Dilip Kumar Roy has risen fully to the occasion. He has acquitted himself just as inspiredly in Oscillation, a poem charged with the Yogi's surge towards the Supra-cosmic, conquering all great obstacles whether attractive or frightful, whether of heaven or hell, yet drawn subtly back by the cry of small frail insignificant things, a poignant Maya of compassion bringing into his other-worldly heroic heart a sweet sense of the value of the universe he spurns and the deep need of transforming life instead of merely transcending it. All this is not directly stated as a theme — it is suggested, half positively half negatively, in a sweep of imaginative eloquence —
I wound the elephant mad with passion,
And the tiger impale on my pitiless sword,
And yet an infant gazelle's appealing
Eyes make me miss my way to the Lord.
If I drain to the dregs earth's wine of Maya
My feet will not falter nor body sway.
I kneel to no godheads, I cringe to no demons,
I outstrip both Heaven and Hades in play:
And withal, a derelict blind boy's cry
Still makes me pause — I know not why!
The entire poem rather than one stanza deserves to be quoted. Nor is the itch to quote in full caused by this poem alone: slim though Nishikanto's book is, there are only a few things in it that do not call for quotation. It is all the more a pity, therefore, that Nishikanto has let his poetic possibilities in English stay unplumbed beyond the short spell during which he wrote these poems. The urge visited him almost without his wanting it and left him without trailing a desire in him to recapture it. Perhaps his preoccupation with the Bengali Muse is so strong and is felt by him to be of so much
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value that he does not care to tackle a foreign language on his own initiative. I think we are missing very precious pleasures. For, the English language can have expressive effects, especially of a mystical type, which no other modern tongue can rival, and whoever is able to handle English poetically should do so. Nishikanto is a superbly endowed singer, and his natural gifts will always get the better of his normally hesitant English. With Sri Aurobindo's influence as well as correcting touch, what has been done once can be done again. And across the silence that has fallen on Nishikanto since his Dream Cadences broke through the mystic veil to "chase our nether shades", we appeal earnestly for a recurrence of his far-reaching vision and his deep-searching voice: to quote two lines of his own —
Come, O thou powerful prophet
Whose words are fire-blades!
Notes and References
1. Six Poems, Transformation and Other Poems and Appendix A in the Second Volume of his Collected Poems and Plays.
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