On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Some Points about Poetry

The first canto of the greatest epic since Paradise Lost has at last seen the light! Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol makes its entry on the world-stage in the first eleven pages of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual published from Calcutta on August 15. With the rare depth and magnificence of this poem of Sri Aurobindo's I have already dealt in a special essay in the Second Annual (recently reviewed in the All-India Weekly) of the Sri Aurobindo Circle of Bombay.¹ Savitri marks a new age of mystical poetry, and all lovers of literature as well as mysticism will await with wonder-lit eyes further instalments of it.

The first canto is accompanied by a series of excerpts from letters written by Sri Aurobindo about certain characteristics of mystical verse in general and of the particular kind with which he himself is occupied. These excerpts are at once profound, suggestive and acute, and the concluding fourteen pages which explain the workings, especially on the poetic path, of a Consciousness far beyond the mind are a piece of "metaphysical psychology" and literary criticism which is supremely inspired. It would be foolhardy for me to discuss this part in a short causerie. But I may jot down some of my own opinions as regards a few of the other matters treated here.

One point concerns repetition of words in poetry. There are critics who are over-fastidious, who insist on a continual

1 [This refers to the article on the previous pages.]

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novelty and think it a deplorable defection of genius for a poet to bring in any word again which has already been used close-by. Thus, Coleridge looks at those phrases in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra–

Her gentle women, like the Nereides,

So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes,

And made their bends adornings: at the helm

A seeming mermaid steers–

and noting the occurrence of "mermaids" and "mermaid" with no more than a line and a half between, remarks on "mermaids": "I strongly suspect Shakespeare wrote either 'sea-queens' or rather 'sea-brides' ". Alternatively he suggests "submarine graces". Well, I for one strongly suspect that Coleridge's judgment, when he wrote this, was a little misted by his unfortunate addiction to laudanum. The repetition aids the atmosphere, renders the picture of strangeness and luxury more keen, direct, insistent: to knock out "mermaids" would be to weaken the fabulous appeal.

One cannot make a cut-and-dried rule about word-repetition. Even if no aim is perceived, one need not always be strict. In my view, much depends on the character of a poem. If it is a leap at top speed from thought to thought, image to image, feeling to feeling in a series of loosely developing coruscations, one hardly notices the minute details of language. In Shelley repetitions of words happen in an easy natural quickly flowering manner which does not clash with the general ease and naturalness and swift efflorescence of his verse: on the contrary, it often adds to its peculiar charm. The same applies to Harindranath Chattopadhyaya at his best. It applies a good deal to Swinburne also, but at Swinburne's best the repetition is not always unconscious: he is frequently a deliberate artist in sound, a maestro in orchestration, and echoes are developed into almost an art within an art and we at once grasp the complex beautiful ends they serve. There

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are other styles too where word-recurrences do not glare out as faults. For one instance, the bare and simple, almost colloquial "artless" style of certain ballads and lyrics. For another, the rapid palpitating metaphor-gorged multiform Shakespearian splendour. Where, however, the poetry is the work of a more brooding inspiration, packed with cunningly drawn-out substance and moulded with passionate precision, bearing everywhere the trace of "the chaos-ending chisel-smite", then each phrase is a unit that draws attention, each word stands by itself even while forming an organic part in the whole harmony. In such work the grounds for repetition should always become clear and take a definite shape in the reader's mind with regard to the meaning, just as the whole poem cuts a more marked and significant shape than the other types. If those grounds are not perceived, we become conscious of a flaw, a sort of oversight by the poet: there is little room here for innocent recurrences or merely euphonious reiterations: they would be out of tune with the general temper and manner. Of course, deliberate significant effects by means of repetition are not confined to poems broodingly created. They can find a place in every sort of poetry; so also can those that form a leitmotif, a key helping the mind to keep open to the main theme, like the word Ritam (Truth) in many Vedic hymns. What I object to is the unpurposive recurrence in a text of carefully intense poetry - unpurposive in that it does not come with a luminous point, as it should, where everything is close-knit and all the parts seem to call out to be considered in detailed relation to one another. I object as well to a too near-by echo in verse that flows with easy celerity or flashes along with many-mooded energy, when this echo could have been avoided without much difficulty but is let be because of slipshodness. At the same time, I do not deny that on occasion it is preferable to repeat a word, no matter if with a small interval: a synonym may not be as alive with meaning. I make no fetish of simply avoiding any repetition: sensitive weighing of the particular occasion,

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sensitive perception of the general harmony, sensitive insight into the individual nature of a poet's creative afflatus must be our guides. I agree with Sri Aurobindo that we must not blindly kowtow to the rigid ban put up by "a certain kind of intellectual elegance" or "a refined and classical taste" born of the decorous intelligence and ministering to the "cultured entertainment and amusement of the highly civilised mind".

Coming to another matter, what Sri Aurobindo says about the usual criticism levelled at both philosophical and mystical poetry appears to be admirable. Sensation and emotion need not keep thought out of poetry, as some romanticists, surrealists and "pure-poetry"-mongers urge. Thought has its own rights, and for a certain completeness and comprehensiveness of expression it is most necessary, provided of course no abstractness makes it dry and heavy and its terms a technical jargon unsupported by any living truth of vision or experience. Also, the mystic is perfectly justified in treating of things which may seem abstract to the ordinary man but are most concrete to himself through his unusual range of vision and experience, provided again he takes care to carry over into his poetry their concreteness. There are places in Savitri where the common reader is likely to cry "Philosophical Abstraction" or "Metaphysical Unreality", but I would say "More palpable than matter, more tangible than flesh"; for a subtilising of the senses and an inner intuition can arrive at the concreteness and actuality of what is described. One line, however, in the first canto of Savitri I am not quite confident about: it speaks of a vague stirring in the primordial darkness from which our world has evolved: it says that some nameless buried discontent

Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.[p. 2]

The words "teased" and "wake" are vivid, the terms "Inconscient" and "Ignorance" are not utterly devoid of self-explanation; they do hint a difference which can in general

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be felt to justify their being contraposed and there is no bad taste in speaking of the Inconscient being teased or Ignorance being wakened, since to spiritual experience they are concrete realities. Absolutely dry and abstract the line is not; and yet in its suggestive pregnancy I miss the full poetic turn that everywhere else carries Sri Aurobindo triumphantly through "strange seas of thought". Not that I want a bringing out of the entire philosophical content of the word "Inconscient" or the Vedantic idea of the Ignorance as the power behind the manifested world. All that I wish to say is that the line lacks somewhat the direct symbol drive or self-illuminative energy we meet in other verses from Savitri like Opponent of that glory of escape,

The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail

Lashing a slumberous Infinite by its force

Into the deep obscurities of form[p. 79]

or

And the blind Void struggles to feel and see - [p. 22]

verses with a similar drift of the Inconscient teased into a waking of Ignorance. Perhaps just a line more, carrying a few deft touches by the mystic seer and artist, would give the playing of the two terms against each other the subtle exegesis or the occult animation by which the least soupcon would be removed of abstract and technical jargon?

A third matter finely expounded by Sri Aurobindo is the freedom we must have from what may be designated the Johnsonian critical method if we are properly to appreciate the essence of mystical and spiritual poetry. This method expects a precise logical order in thoughts and language, jibs at all that is not sober and restrained, anathematises all association of contraries, excess or abruptness or crowding of images, disregard of intellectual limitations, departures

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in technique from established canons. Sri Aurobindo shows how it would stumble over the Veda. Even with poetry not markedly mystical it hopelessly flounders. "What would the Johnsonian critic say," asks Sri Aurobindo, "to Shakespeare's famous lines:

Or take up arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them...?

He would say, 'What a mixture of metaphors and jumble of ideas! Only a lunatic could take up arms against a sea! A sea of troubles is a too fanciful metaphor and, in any case, one can't end the sea by opposing it, it is more likely to end you.' " Sri Aurobindo defends Shakespeare and argues that Shakespeare knowingly accepted the mixture because it brought home, with an inspired force which a neater language could not have had, the exact feeling and idea that he wanted to bring out. The case is put very well indeed for romantic poetry and the liberty with images which it legitimately takes - to the complete discomfiture of the Johnsonian critic. I may add, however, that romanticism is not the only cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery - that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls between two stools -the afflatus of the élan vital and the inspiration of the pure mind - but both these poets have a certain affinity in their treatment of language and metre, their manner of thinking out a theme, their attitude towards images. Imagery is with them functional, it is a means of thinking and feeling, they think and feel in a sensuous fashion. Their imagery is not something added to the thought and the emotion: the adding can be most beautifully and harmoniously done, but it will still remain more a pictorial and artistic value than a direct

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and native mode of intellectual significance and emotional suggestion. Shakespeare's images often run into one another because he is trying not always to present a coherent pictorial description but rather to give flashes of the aspects of his thought, the turns of his emotion. His similes and metaphors are less to be realised in their sensory properties than in their meaning and mood. The sensory properties remain a little hazy - not in their individual picturisation but in collective effect: hence mixed, fused, changing images. A recent writer, noting some of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase:

Was the hope drunk

Wherein you dressed yourself?

Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Tennyson, it would be very rare in Milton for all his compact force.

As for a quick play of varying images in mystical poetry, there is a striking passage in the first canto of Savitri, where a symbolic picture of dawn is built up by one suggestion piled upon another. "An errant marvel with no place to live" is felt to be soliciting in the midst of "the night's forlorn indifference"; then comes "a slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal"; then "the persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch" is on "the inert black quietude"; then "a wandering hand of pale enchanted light" takes "a gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge"; then we have "one lucent corner windowing hidden things"; then

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god;[p. 3]

then a pallid rift is mentioned and the rift widens into a luminous gap; then all changes into "a brief perpetual sign", followed by an "iridescence" of the Unknown; then comes a

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blaze and Dawn builds a magnificent aura. Quite a race of rapid transitions is here - free from a strict logical chain. But it is worth observing that all the images, however different, have yet an underlying consistency: they all have a certain community of mystical atmosphere. The image that seems most at variance with the rest is the falling cloak; and if it had stood by itself it might have been a bit of an intrusion in even a context of swiftly altering figures; but it is made a perfect success by "the reclining body of a god". Just the suggestive mystical touch is brought which, though not introducing some sort of even distant affinity in the image as such to what goes before and comes after, provides it with the common basis the various other images have and thus renders it an organic part of the many-sided and many-shaped phenomenon described.

No doubt, the Johnsonian critic would fall foul of the passage despite the subtle single thread on which the beads of dissimilar cuts are strung, just as the opposite kind of critic would fail to see poetry where any philosophising shows its head. We have to avoid the mistakes of both and bring a receptiveness which while not accepting the rhythmless vagaries of ultra-modernism is yet plastic enough to answer the diverse demands of true inspiration. All the more plastic has it to be for taking the living impress of mystical and spiritual poetry, in especial when that poetry comes Aurobindonianly to create a new age.

(The Thinking Corner - Causeries on Life and Literature,

1996, pp. 130-37)

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