On Savitri
THEME/S
SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI, THE NATURE
OF EPIC AND THE EXPRESSION OF
MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH POETRY
A LETTER
The script of your friend's projected lecture, incorporating your touches, on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri makes interesting reading and is surely helpful in several respects. Most of these are analytic, classificatory; but the labelling is done skilfully and catchingly. I can understand his dissatisfaction with the passages he has quoted from Sisir Ghose, Srinivasa Iyengar and myself. But I don't know whether it is right to pull out a passage from me like that, as if I have written nothing to explicate what I mean by "a direct poetising of the Divine". All the detailed description of "overhead poetry" that I have given time and again seems overlooked. To explain overhead poetry may not be sufficient for the lecturer's purpose, namely, the bringing home to his students the structure or texture of Savitri in the ordinary senses of these terms; but that does not rule out the legitimacy of other approaches provided one does not indulge in empty vapourings. It never occurred to me that I was called upon to justify the word "epic" or to distinguish the "narrative voice" from any other. To discuss these points is quite pertinent, but I had other axes to grind and I believe they are just as valuable weapons for breaking into the poetic quality of the work.
Now that the question of "epic" or "narrative" has been raised, I may say a few things. Why should we stick to
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old norms? We may pick out the essence and reject or go beyond the appearance. To me "epic" is a certain frame of mind and a certain tone of voice. The subject proper is secondary and so too is the mode of treatment or development. As for the basic subject, I see little in common between the wrath of Achilles and Man's first disobedience to God along with the justification of God's ways to men. Again, the wanderings of Odysseus are dissimilar, in their innate orientation, to Dante's tour of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. The deeply religious epic, with metaphysical implications, cannot be equated with the heroic epic, even the literary heroic like the Aeneid. Savitri takes further the former genre and subjects it to the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri. And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring a frame of mind marked by a high seriousness, a cosmic outlook on life in general and a weaving together of many strains of knowledge. Then there is the tone of voice, which links together the utterances of various poets. Take
Zenos men pais ea Kronionos autar oixun
Eikhon apeiresien,
(I was the son of Zeus Cronion, yet have I suffered
Infinite pain,)
and
O passi graviora! dabit Deus his quoque finem,
(Fiercer griefs we have suffered; to these too God will
give ending,)
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Nessun maggiore
Dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria,
(The greatest
of all woes is to remember days of happiness
In misery,)
Fall'n Cherub! to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.
All these get linked up with Sri Aurobindo's
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss,
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,[p. 453]
or
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss, [p. 17]
This tone of voice can come even into less momentous utterances: there is a breadth, there is a controlled power, there is an harmonious intensity, which distinguish it from poetic articulations such as we find in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso or Spenser's Faerie Queane. Ariosto and Spenser can be very poetic, but they are not epic in tone. Even when they bring a frame of mind akin to Homer's or Virgil's, Dante's or Milton's, something in the way of their speech lacks the epic touch. Compare Ariosto's
Cose non detta in prosa mai, ne in rima
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Things unattempted yet in prose or rime.
Somehow the two voices are worlds away from each other. The very technique differs. The extraordinary import of Ariosto's line does not find sufficient support in the expression: the expression has too easy a run and thereby creates somewhat the sense as of a melodious commonplace. Milton at once masters us with a double means in the word "unattempted". It is the one four-syllabled word in the midst of six monosyllables, coming at the right place with a suggestion of the rarity of what has remained to be done as well as of the lengthiness of the labour involved. Nor is this all. It also brings a considerable number of consonants which give weight to the sound and it joins three of them - mpt -together to effect a retardation of the voice: the long labour involved now seems markedly heavy and difficult. The high seriousness of epic verse comes through with an impressive technique reinforcing the tone.
On a still higher level of meaning and music we may note the difference of Shakespeare's
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven–
from Dante's
Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce tale,
Che la vostra misera non mi tange,
Ni fiamma d'este incendio non m'assale.
(I, by the grace of God, am fashioned such
I move untroubled by your suffering,
Nor me these cruel tongues of fire can touch.) –
and even more from Sri Aurobindo's
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A traveller of the million roads of life,
His steps familiar with the lights of heaven
Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;
There he descends to edge eternal joy.[p. 592]
Whereas the tone of Ariosto is not intense enough, the tone of Shakespeare is intensity itself, but, as Sri Aurobindo would say, it is the intensity of a tremendous vital thrill which makes the poetry unrestrainedly romantic, though the absence of restraint is not explosive as in Chapman but finely organised in its outbreaks. Sri Aurobindo has said that there is some essential "austerity" in the epic temper which emerges in the tone of voice. But we must remember that this "austerity" does not preclude all richness or colour, nor does it prevent the exercise of energy. Dante, for instance, combines great richness with his sharp-cut concision and restraint: we may even say his is an ideal epic "austerity" - except that, according to Sri Aurobindo, he does not have enough of the "epic élan" such as Homer and Milton in their own individual styles possess.
Of course all these shades I have distinguished are not easy to appreciate and perhaps I am talking an esoteric language; but I feel that epicness has fundamentally to be perceived in the two qualities - cosmic outlook and tone-energy on the leash - which I have listed and only afterwards in the conventional categories set up by academic critics. Or, if we must pay respect to these categories, then we may declare Savitri an epic narrative or a narrative epic.
Perhaps even this combination is not acceptable from the paper's point of view. For the "narrative voice" is found on the whole to be submerged by the "apocalyptic voice" as well as the "prophetic voice". Thus Savitri appears to be quite a poser to the academician. I like the way the paper brings out the elements of the poser. The treatment is very competent on the whole, even if a little overdone in parts and in spite of small errors of textual interpretation. As you have asked me
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to point out any such possible slips, let me come first to them. It is said that in the passage -
And Savitri too awoke among these tribes
That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner's chant
And, lured by the beauty of the apparent ways,
Acclaimed their portion of ephemeral joy -[p. 6]
it is Savitri who "acclaimed". If this is so, it is again Savitri who is "lured". The second inference is absurd; the first conclusion is unwarranted. The "tribes" - "the thousand peoples of the soil and tree" - were both lured and doing the acclamation just as it is they who "hastened" to take part in the day's bright rhythm of common life. Besides, if Savitri "acclaimed", what is the relevance of "their"? Why should she acclaim the tribes' portion instead of her own? Again, in the passage -
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink,
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge -[p. 3]
the paper says that "opalescent" stands for the milky light coming from the interior. I know that a secondary sense of "opalescent" derives from a semi-translucent white glass in commercial contexts. But I am sure Sri Aurobindo never thought here in terms of human manufacture: he would both artificialise and superficialise his meaning if he did. It is the true opal he has in mind or, rather, what is known as the common opal, which is milky or bluish in colour with green, yellow and red reflections. Not translucence but iridescence is the suggestion here - a touch preparatory of the slightly later
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unknown...[p. 3]
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However, we can say that the whole gate of dreams with its gold panel and opalescent hinge is a prevision of the mystery of the Light that is coming into the world's view. I should be disposed to interpret the adjectives "gold" and "opalescent" as suggesting ultimately the sun's golden light and the rainbow hues which are within it, the prismatic plenitude included in its aureate richness. The double quality goes appropriately with the dawn-scene with which Sri Aurobindo is here concerned, as well as with the multifarious content of the one creative Consciousness - the "Rose of God" which is "fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven".
Now for a few topics arising in the course of the paper. First: "the supreme moments of the poem are those in which all the three (voices) are fused". If this is a theoretical assertion, as if supreme poetry cannot come unless there is the fusion of the narrator, the apocalypt and the prophet, it is mere dogmatism. If it is an affirmation based on an examination of all the supreme moments, it shows aesthetic insensitiveness. Perhaps the sweeping character of the judgement is an oversight; for elsewhere occurs the phrase: "some of the supreme poetic moments" - and the passage where the mantra-image is elaborated is described as one in which the poet is employing his apocalyptic voice and the result fits into the narrative context.
Here only two voices are at play and yet we learn that the passage is "unmistakably great poetry by any critical standards". I am sure many passages have supreme excellence even though they embody only one voice or another of the three.
Further, we hear: "...the epic bard should never distract the listener's attention from the on-rushing flow of the narrative. Milton following the Homeric tradition also does the same thing." Well, does he? Milton is famous - or notorious -for his large digressions and even his personal asides like parts of the exordiums to Books Three and Seven, where we learn of his blindness and of the evil days on which he
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has fallen. Would you not consider his long-winding similes and parallels to be distractions of the reader's mind from the narrative? And, if he is most like Homer, it is just in this respect. So Homer himself, who initiated the Homeric simile, which the paper calls the image of impression - the simile where the "vehicle" is elaborated into a full-scale picture and the "tenor" is either ignored or omitted - so Homer too can hardly be said to rivet the reader to the narrative. As F.L. Lucas has observed somewhere, Homer does not care for cross-connections or "links of relevance". There is only one point of likeness, the rest is mostly a divine bounty. I do not know of a better image of impression than the one giving us a starlit scene. I am quoting Tennyson's version:
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed.
Mind you, we are presented with a battlefield as the occasion of the simile. The point of likeness is between many twinkling stars and many twinkling fires. Nothing else bears the least connection. Rather a strong contrast is there: the lurid darkness of the battlefield on the one hand and on the other the utterly peaceful night above the happy Wordsworthian shepherd on his moonlit moorland. I seem to remember another full-blown simile of Homer's, where we get a night-scene, this time with a sudden lightning bringing a surprise to the eye and striking one dumb: Homer likens this visual moment to the one when the Trojans all on a sudden heard the terrifying war-cry of Achilles. If my memory is correct, we get here a passing insight into the psychologico-poetic
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complexity of Homer's proverbially "simple" mind, the kind we attribute to the singer of a "primary epic". Even Homer in several respects cuts right across the exaggerated notion of what an epic bard must do or not do.
I would demur a little also to the contention that when Sri Aurobindo turns "the reader inward in order to make him debate within himself what the poetry is communicating" he is failing in the role of a narrator. The narration of a "legend" like Savitri, which is at the same time a "symbol", must involve such inner debating by the reader. Here is no straightforward narration, but why should narration be. limited to being straightforward? There are inner happenings no less than outer, and a suitable method of bringing them vividly before the mind of the reader has to be adopted and if Sri Aurobindo adopts the method the paper speaks of, he need not thereby cease to be either narrative or epic. In this connection we are told that Milton is epic because he focuses his reader's "attention on what is happening which is conveyed through poetry". But would you classify all the long speeches in the conference in hell as an aid to concentrating on the narrative's on-rushing flow? These speeches communicate inner debates of the devil's minds no less than phases of an outer powwow. The character of each devil is laid bare: the most memorable of the psychological disclosures is Belial's speech, with Milton's greatest moment in it and one of his greatest irrelevances:
To be no more; sad cure: for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense or motion?
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that subtlety and variety of intellectual argument helpful to the sheer purpose of telling a story? I don't believe so, but who would lose, though full of pedantic pain, these vast side-tracking thoughts which, just like the elaborate similes and historical correspondences ("Fontarabbia" and the rest), slow down if not submerge the tale?
I find one or two little touches of pedantry elsewhere also. What is the pertinence of the point made by saying that "Aswapati", the name of Savitri's father, first occurs only on page 368 [p. 341]? Does a narrative or epic become simple merely by each character getting his proper name from the start? Does Milton name Jesus or Christ anywhere in Paradise Lost? At the start he refers to him as "one greater Man" and everywhere else he is called the "Son". Even in Book XII, when his human birth is spoken of in a long passage of historical prevision, he remains anonymous although other figures, like Abraham and Moses, get their known appellatives. Of course it may be that the person here is too well-known to need naming. But in Aswapati's case there may be a reason too: he is a certain type - "A thinker and toiler in the ideal's air" - whose being and doing are of importance rather than his human particularity. As soon as he figures in a clear human context he gets his identity-card. Before that, he is summed up at the end of Book Three as "The Lord of Life", preparatory to his human role as "Aswapati" in the next Book. Apropos of the line -
But Aswapati's heart replied to her -[p. 341]
the special comment is made: "Even here, we notice that it is not Aswapathy that is talking but his heart'. Is there any sense in such a distinction? Surely Aswapati's heart did not convey its message directly to Savitri's heart: words did the work of communication, words in which the heart-element found voice. Merely because Aswapati is not pictured as saying things with his lips, do we get a submergence of the
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narrative voice in any intelligible sense? What does Milton write about Satan beginning the debate in hell? He tells us that Satan
His proud imaginations thus displayed.
Like Aswapati's heart, we have the arch-fiend's "imaginations" talking - no, not even talking but just being "displayed". What an unnecessary subjectivism has barged in, spoiling the epic tone!
Here I am tempted to ask, perhaps not quite relevantly at this place but with some bearing on the general argument: "Milton's theme is the loss of Eden by man's disobedience. And yet the first three Books - the best of Paradise Lost -march majestically in utter indifference to the announced subject and we are whirled through events that form the backdrop, as it were, of the true plot. And even the whole Book connected with the war in Heaven has nothing directly to do with Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve, the ostensible hero and heroine of the poem, don't make their appearance until thousands of lines have been written. Is this the way an authentic epic must proceed?" Savitri, the heroine of Sri Aurobindo, at least makes her début in the very first Canto of Book 1 - even though she disappears soon after Canto Two for nearly ten thousand lines. But Milton cannot be exonerated from complicating his epic by all that endless thunder of the opening three Books. Actually, there are two stories in Paradise Lost, and what is meant to be the secondary story steals the show. And yet we are told that Milton is carrying on the genuine epic tradition.
So far I have dealt with more or less formal points - and I would not think it especially necessary to break a lance over them, except in the matter of the nature of epic. But I now come to a rather serious business, the general comment on "the long and difficult revelatory passage, 'the Symbol Dawn' ": "The English is compelled to communicate a
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testament of faith which the genius of the language resists to communicate. There is also perhaps something there foreign to the ordinary mentality. That is why it is full of terms with negative prefixes and suffixes, or abstract nouns used to convey a concrete meaning. This is not only true of the first canto, but of the entire poem. In the first fifty lines of the poem we come across the following words: unlit, impenetrable, eyeless, unbodied, zero, nothingness, insoluble, nought, featureless, unknown, unconscious, unseeing, formless, soulless, unthinking, inscrutable, nameless, unthought, unfilled, moonless, unremembering, unshaped, unsounded, endless. It is clear the poet is trying to articulate an idea which defies articulation."
The immediate inference, though perhaps not the definitive deduction, from this comment can be: Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is a poetic failure both because it is highly mystical and because it is written in an intrinsically unmystical language like English.
I should have thought that after Milton's ambition or aspiration in the words with which he hails the "Heavenly Muse" -
I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rime -
no one writing in English need be daunted by any theme, however recondite or "foreign to the ordinary mentality". Particularly a medium like poetry which traditionally brings into its articulation a breath of the Gods and plunges into the secret places of the human heart and soars into the distant spaces of the divine Spirit or, as the Negro preacher styled his work, tries to "fathom the fathomless and unscrew the unscrutable" - well, poetry should never be tagged with any
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innate inability to express "unknown modes of being". All the more ridiculous is it to charge a language like English with having a restricted genius able to communicate only a certain kind of testament of faith, a language which has not only a strong element of the Celtic fire and ether in it but has received fecundating streams of psychological power from so many European tongues and become multiform, complex, subtilised, armed with almost endless potentiality, ensouled with a flexible universality behind or below its Anglo-Saxon surface of mind and has in the last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence - even if unlabelled as -such - through Wordsworth and Shelley and A.E. and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy articulation:
...solitary thinkings such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain.
The first canto of Savitri - as well as many a later part of the poem - is tough business. It is true that the frame of reference within which the opening passage is to be interpreted is not explicit. But all this creates only a difficulty, particularly for readers unprepared for the Aurobindonian revelation: there should be no conclusion to the effect that the substance falls outside the genius of English or even that all language must always fall short of the ideas concerned.
The proof the paper appears to see for such a conclusion strikes me as pretty artificial: namely, "terms with negative prefixes and suffixes, or abstract nouns used to convey a concrete meaning". The means and methods Sri Aurobindo adopts are suited to his theme, which is a huge spiritual Negation, the Inconscient, a fathomless zero, "the abysm of the unbodied Infinite". The negative prefixes and suffixes
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are just the right thing here, direct helps to communication. So also are the abstract nouns used to convey a concrete meaning. I may add that such prefixes and suffixes and such concretised abstractions have always been employed for particular poetic effects. Milton is not a truly mystical poet, but he knows that when his theme is either Chaos or the Empyrean he has to be negative-suggestioned and abstract-nouned in order to vivify it - as in:
who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark unbottomed infinite Abyss
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way...?
where "unbottomed", "infinite", "obscure", "uncouth" are all negatively prefixed and even "Abyss" comes from the Greek "abussos" meaning "bottomless". Or take:
Thee Father first they sung omnipotent,
Immutable, immortal, infinite,
Eternal King; thee Author of all being,
Fountain of Light, thyself invisible
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st
Throned inaccessible -
or else:
a globe far off
It seemed, now seems a boundless continent
Dark, waste and wide, under the frown of Night
Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms
Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky...
No doubt, Sri Aurobindo is more philosophical than Milton here, but Keats is sufficiently so in the lines I have quoted and Sri Aurobindo is not more abstract-nouned in
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the service of his philosophical turns than Keats there What makes those lines poetic is the concrete movement imparted to the abstractions. Sri Aurobindo, too, concretises all the terms. Even the most abstrusely metaphysical stir with life:
Something that wished but knew not how to be
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.[p. 2]
And I can't imagine anything so vivid as what immediately follows:
A throe that came and left a quivering trace,
Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,
At peace in its subconscient moonless cave
To raise its head and look for absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire.[Ibid.]
You may complain that you can't properly tell what it is all about. I can sympathise there, but I would refuse you the right to say that it is not something alive (if not kicking). Here is no mere arrangement of dead matter, nor yet an efficiently operative machine: here is a palpitant organism "doing or suffering". You may not be able quite to make out what is being done or suffered, but there is an harmonious movement, an internal order, a directed process, the tracing of a significant figure, even though some of its details alone are understood by you and you cannot get the sense of the whole. From the way the vision functions, from the mode in which the rhythm is patterned, we can feel that expressive poetry has been born no matter if it passes somewhat over our heads.
The closing phrase of my sentence sends me to the pun I made in a recent talk of mine to our students about the type of poetry I had essayed to write with Sri Aurobindo's
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inspiring help and which he had called "overhead" because it seems to come from secret dimensions of consciousness felt high above the brain-mind. My pun was: "Overhead poetry is the poetry that passes over everybody's head." To get its full impact therefore, calls for some sort of aesthetic yoga, by which one receives impressions in a wide quiet consciousness thrown open, as it were, to a descent of vibrant word from a spiritual sky. The top range of this poetry is known as the Mantra. About the Mantra Sri Aurobindo has written:
"The mantra (not necessarily in the Upanishads alone) as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is what comes from the Overmind inspiration. Its characteristics are a language that says infinitely more than the mere sense of the words seems to indicate and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into Infinite, and the power to convey not merely some mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing it speaks of, but its value and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind them all. The passages you mention (from the Upanishad and the Gita) have certainly the Overmind accent. But ordinarily, as I have said, the Overmind inspiration does not come out pure in human poetry. It has to lift it by a seizure and surprise horn above into the Overmind largeness; but in doing so there is usually a mixture of the two elements, the uplifting influence and the lower stuff of mind. You must remember that the Overmind is a superhuman consciousness and to be able to write always or purely from an Overmind inspiration would mean the elevation of at least a part of the nature beyond the human level."
Of his own Savitri he has written in a private note:
"There have been made several successive revisions each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry. As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully
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through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them."
Sri Aurobindo has also pointed out that overhead poetry in small quantities had already been written in the past in various languages - and even the rare Overmind accent has come in. Particularly is this kind of verse possible in a language like English about which Sri Aurobindo writes in connection with translations from it into Bengali:1
"It is not that I find the translations here satisfactory in the full sense of the word, but they are better than I expected. There is none of them, not even the best, which I would pronounce to be quite the thing. But this 'quite the thing' is so rare a trouvaille, it is as illusive as the capture of Eternity in the hours. As for catching the subtleties, the difficulty lies in one supreme faculty of the English language which none other I know possesses, the ease with which it finds the packed allusive turn, the suggestive unexpressed, the door opening on things ineffable: Bengali, like French, is very clear and luminous and living and expressive, but to such clear languages the expression of the inexpressible is not so easy -one has to go out of one's way to find it. Witness Mallarme's wrestling with the French language to find the symbolic expression - the right turn for what is behind the veil. I think that even in these languages the power to find it with less effort must come; but meanwhile there is the difference."
"The expression of the inexpressible": this means bringing out in words the suggestion, the presence, of what is beyond the mind's habitual conception or imagination. It is not an attempt at the impossible, the inherently self-contradictory. And it can best be done in poetry - in poetry of the overhead Aurobindonian type - in overhead poetry created in English.
_____________
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If we approach Savitri with a proper understanding of the process, we shall feel and see and intuit its truth through the figure and gesture of its beauty, and all that the narrative, the apocalyptic and the prophetic voices in it, which the paper so well describes, have to convey will go home to us and keep winging for ever in those depths where the poet in each man hides and holds the inexpressible as his own eternal Self.
26.12.1970
(Inspiration and Effort: studies in literary attitude and expression, 1995,
pp. 232-48)
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