On Savitri
THEME/S
TWO CRITICS CRITICISED1
1
In the Illustrated Weekly of India (July 31, 1949) appeared a comment on Sri Aurobindo's poetry. It was by the periodical's editor, C. R. M., known to be an Irishman, in "Books and Comments" and was meant to review my study, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. After calling my book interesting, C. R. M. went on to say:
"For Mr. Sethna, Sri Aurobindo's Muse is a case of 'this side idolatry', and I am not so sure that genius is so rampant here as he claims. The merits seem to me to consist of a high level of spiritual utterance, abundant metrical skill, and a sound poetic sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters. Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse. There are some first-rate passages of blank verse, e.g.:
Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his heart's ignorant whisper,
Whistle of wind in the tree-tops of Time and the rustle of Nature.
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1 First published in Mother India, September 3, 1949, except for the change of a few quotations in order to avoid repeating some matter used elsewhere in my book.
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"Elsewhere there are many pleasant lines of a derivative nature and it is interesting to find traces of the influence of that Yellow Book character, the poet Stephen Phillips, who was at Cambridge with Sri Aurobindo. The Tennysonian influence is stronger:
And lightning 'twixt the eyes intolerable
Like heaven's vast eagle all that blackness swept
Down over the inferior snowless heights
And swallowed up the dawn.
"This, in spite of, or because of, that horrible word 'twixt (a crutch for amateur versifiers!) might be from the Idylls, and, by stressing the resemblance, one does not mean to decry Sri Aurobindo's talents, for Victoria's laureate was a master of rhythm and a true delineator of beauty."
Naturally, as the author of The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, I could not let C. R. M.'s comments pass. I wrote him a letter and requested its publication. The reply, though not ungenerous, scarcely served my purpose. It ran: "I find your letter on Sri Aurobindo's poetry very interesting and well-expressed (though it hasn't changed some of my opinions!) but I regret that my space is so confined that there is no room for it and we have no correspondence column in the Weekly." As C. R. M. is a gifted writer of considerable popularity and his readers may accept his estimate of Sri Aurobindo, it is necessary that I should voice in Mother India what was originally meant for the Weekly.
The Originality of a Master of Yoga
C. R. M.'s paragraphs, though appreciative in places and hitting off the truth here and there, seem to me on the whole to miss the mark because of his rather cursory acquaintance with Sri Aurobindo's poetry and a certain haste in making up his mind.
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When he pictures Sri Aurobindo as sometimes stirring and boiling the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson in his own Muse's cauldron, it is not easy to agree even if the critic's statement be applied to Sri Aurobindo's early work which is not that of a full-fledged Yogi; but when we come to his later work - especially his latest and longest, the epic Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, to which I have devoted many pages in my book - the statement loses all relevance. Milton's intellectual theology, Wordsworth's half-philosophical half-emotional pantheism and Tennyson's vague religious idealism can hardly be equated with the vision and experience of a Master of Yoga. As for the manner, it is equally individual in its turns and tones. Except that Sri Aurobindo, like Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson, does not bring in the typical modernist idiom a la Eliot of The Waste Land, nowhere are these poets discernible in either the substance or the style of lines like
Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes,
A figure in the ineffable Witness' shrine
Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts
Under its arches dim with infinity
And heavenward brooding of invisible wings, [p. 79]
or,
A greater force than the earthly held his limbs,
Huge workings bared his undiscovered sheaths,
Strange energies wrought and screened tremendous hands
Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed
The heavenly wideness of a godhead's gaze, [pp. 81-82]
In moments when the inner lamps are lit
And the life's cherished guests are left outside,
Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs....
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Invading from spiritual silences
A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile
To commune with our seized illumined clay
And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives. [pp. 47-48]
These lines, with their direct mystical insight and their suggestive rhythm carrying the concrete life-throb of a Yogi's supra-intellectual consciousness, are not only different in a striking way from the typically Miltonic, Wordsworthian or Tennysonian poetry but also lead us to question C. R. M.'s phrase: "a sound sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters". The term "conservative" is in itself debatable. What are called the "classics" are seldom conservative except in the sense that they are not flashy and flamboyant, addicted to involved conceit and confusing imagery, limping in metre and jaggedly irregular in form. If actually there are any conservative masters, the poet of Savitri is little akin to them in sensitivity. He has a warm suddenness of simile, a sweeping boldness of metaphor, a varicoloured intensity of vision, a breath-bereaving grandeur of intuition. Nor can the sensitivity shown in these things be said to have its basis in the classics, though the latter too are beautifully or powerfully vivid. Rather a vividness most revolutionary is at work in the Aurobindonian sensitivity - simile, metaphor, vision, intuition, all are of an unusual inner experience mostly beyond the classics. Sri Aurobindo's sensitivity is based on the classics in only one respect: it is neither morbid nor injudicious and has a certain poise and control even in the midst of extreme novelty and force. "Sound" it is, in the best connotation of the term, like the sensitivity of the classics, but its soundness, like that of theirs, is an attribute which makes for the genuinely great utterance as distinguished from the merely rushing, dazzling, distracting speech, and does not imply any imitativeness or want of "fine frenzy."
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2
(a)1
Mr. P. Lai has issued "A Testament for our Poets". He has some pointed and pertinent things to say, but he spoils their effect by falling foul rather violently of one about whom Francis Watson, in a recent broadcast on English Poetry from India, said that he was the one Indian poet whom Yeats had singled out as writing creatively in English. Yeats is well-known for his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: hence a comment like this from him has a rare value - particularly as he was himself one of the greatest contemporary poets in the English language. Mr. Lai seems to have been exceptionally unfortunate in his choice of Sri Aurobindo as a whipping-post.
His own personal preference is for "realistic poetry reflecting... the din and hubbub, the confusion and indecision, the flashes of goodness and beauty of our age". There is nothing intrinsically objectionable in this penchant, provided it does not deprive one of response to other kinds of poetry. But there must be no particular philosophical shade attached to the word "realistic" as if poetry that is not a product of so-called "realism" were a dressing up of unreality. Art is out of touch with reality only when its expression is abstract or imprecise instead of in concrete and vivid terms. Reality, for art, is simply that which is real to the artist and which he can best seize in perfect form with concreteness and vividness.
WRONG APPROACH
Such a position is not altogether repudiated by Mr. Lai - in broad theory. But he has grave limitations of perception and
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1 This was published in Mother India, November 10,1951, except that a few quotations have been changed.
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sympathy, rendering his theory itself a little hazy, and he cannot help bringing into it his temperamental preferences. He reacts against romanticism on the one hand and "criticism of life" on the other. In condemning Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri and warning Indian poets to keep away from the Aurobindonian brand of verse if they wish to do anything worth-while, he also betrays a most serious lack of response to spiritual poetry.
He, of course, protests that he cannot be considered totally unsympathetic to poetry of a spiritual order. "I can read," he says, "the Divine Comedy with pleasure, St. John of the Cross is a marvellous poet, poems of Kabir and Chandidas are exquisite. T. S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday is an excellent poem of spiritual tension, confusion and resolution which I can read with great enjoyment and recall with surprising accuracy and detail." Well, the protest is far from convincing. Dante was a first-rate religious poet, not a spiritual or mystic one; he was well-versed in theology, perfectly conversant with the living symbols of the Catholic creed, his imagination was finely and powerfully touched by religious fervour, but there never was any invasion of his consciousness by the super-conscious and he had not the temperament or the experience of the Saints who figure in his Paradiso. By the way, apart from certain portions, the Divine Comedy is not even directly religious poetry: only its setting is in terms of religion. T. S. Eliot also is in part an effective poet of religious feeling and idea: the tension, confusion and resolution in Ash-Wednesday are not spiritual in the true sense and they are more misty than mystic. Not that a state of mind is not infused into them but they give us neither the concreteness nor the intensity of spiritual vision and mystic experience. Mr. Lai's ignorance of this fact proves that he has no clear idea of spiritual poetry.
St. John of the Cross is a real mystic and in his poems there is the immediacy of inner contact with the Eternal. But they are spiritual and mystic in a certain way - a highly
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personal devotion-coloured lyricism, deeply intense yet not charged with the powerful amplitude of vision and vibration such as we find in the verses of the Upanishads, verses which seem to be the Infinite's own large and luminous language. Kabir and Chandidas are somewhat in the same category, though with a difference of tone and temper. They are indeed, as Mr. Lai says, exquisite and they are authentically spiritual, but again more intense than immense and the masterful mantric expression is not theirs. If Mr. Lai responds to St. John of the Cross and to these two Indian singers he is not without any spiritual sympathy; still, he cannot be said to show true sensitiveness to the kind of inspiration that is Savitri. We are not surprised that he fails to appreciate it.
POETIC COMMUNICATION
Here we are likely to have a couple of paragraphs from his own article thrown at our heads by him. He has written: "The job of all poetry is to convey an experience which the reader has not himself experienced but to which he is made sympathetic by the rhythm, linguistic precision and incantation of the poem he is reading.... The good poem must be able to communicate an emotion to me even when I have only the faintest intellectual, and no emotional, idea of what that emotion is."
But surely there must be something in the reader to serve as a point d'appui for the poet's effort at communication? Else we shall be obliged to reject Lycidas as no poetry because Dr. Johnson found it crude and unmelodious, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads as sheer metricised prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do", Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them ruthlessly. And, mind you, these were no small and narrow critics. If they could have
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a blind spot in their critical retina and prove unreliable on occasion, Mr. Lai who is obviously restricted in his general sympathies and semi-perceptive of the spiritual light in poetry can hardly hope to impress us by his statement: "When I read any passage from Sri Aurobindo's 'epics' a sick-as-stale-lemonade shiver gallops up and down my spine at a rate impossible to compute" - or by his description of Savitri-like verse as "greasy, weak-spined and purple-adjectived poetry", "a loose expression of a loose emotion" - or by his warning that unless poets like him band together and produce a Manifesto "there is every likelihood that the blurred, rubbery and airy sentiments of a Sri Aurobindo will slowly clog our own poetry".
SPIRITUAL VISION AND PHILOSOPHY
One point we may grant the preposterous Mr. Lai. If poets like him tried to write in Sri Aurobindo's vein without any of the Aurobindonian discipline of consciousness and mystical drive of the inner being, they might very well turn out in verse a painted anaemia of pseudo-spirituality. Spiritual poetry cannot be written on the cheap, but that does not mean that what Sri Aurobindo writes answers to Mr. Lai's designation of Savitri. Prima facie, a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism. If he is in addition an intellectual and a philosopher of giant proportions, all the less probable is it that his mystical expression should be greasy and weak-spined and purple-adjectived. At his worst he might be in danger of seeming elusive and esoteric or else remote and recondite. Mr. Lai's terms are absolutely irrelevant and incorrect.
One cannot tax with either gaudiness or prettification Sri Aurobindo's revelatory glimpses of Supernature:
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The ways that lead to endless happiness
Ran like dream-smiles through meditating vasts:
Disclosed stood up in a gold moment's blaze
White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite. [pp. 39-40]
Nor can we accuse of empty effusiveness his packed profound depiction of what man in his ignorance of the meaning of his life and of his high and splendid fate never sees in the dynamics of world-history:
Only the Immortals on their deathless heights...
Can see the Idea, the Might that change Time's course,
Come maned with light from undiscovered worlds,
Hear, while the world toils on with its deep blind heart,
The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event,
Bearing the superhuman rider, near
And, impassive to earth's din and startled cry,
Return to the silence of the hills of God;
As lightning leaps, as thunder sweeps, they pass
And leave their mark on the trampled breast of Life. [pp. 53-54]
Nor is there any pompous vacuity in Sri Aurobindo's suggestive conjuration of the strange fugitive experience to which the brain opens itself as it pauses at times between an unknown above and an unknown below and feels
Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge
Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores - [p. 347]
or in that phrase about the divinised consciousness's vivid play of self-disclosure within its universal oneness:
Idea rotated symphonies of sight,
Sight was a flame-throw from identity...[p. 301]
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All this is pure spiritual vision which seems to have made little impression on Mr. Lai during his reading of Savitri. But Savitri is spiritual philosophy as well as spiritual vision, and Mr. Lai is equally at sea with poetry that fuses the philosophical concept with mystic symbolism and revelation. Else how could he miss the concreteness and vividness of a large-idea'd utterance like:
Original and supernal Immanence
Of which all Nature's process is the art,
The cosmic Worker set his secret hand
To turn this frail mud-engine to heaven-use.
A Presence wrought behind the ambiguous screen:
It beat his soil to bear a Titan's weight,
Refining half-hewn blocks of natural strength
It built his soul into a statued God.
The Craftsman of the magic stuff of self
Who labours at his high and difficult plan
In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,
Modelled in inward Time his rhythmic parts. [pp. 24-25]
Or take the following philosophically spiritual lines:
Even were caught as through a cunning veil
The smile of love that sanctions the long game,
The calm indulgence and maternal breasts
Of Wisdom suckling the child-laughter of Chance,
Silence, the nurse of the Almighty's power,
The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word,
And of the Timeless the still brooding face,
And the creative eye of Eternity.[p. 41]
Or consider a passage like this - an example of something that occurs very frequently in Savitri - about earth's aspirations and her future fulfilment:
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An inarticulate whisper drives her steps
Of which she feels the force but not the sense;
A few rare intimations come as guides,
Immense divining flashes cleave her brain...
A vision meets her of supernal Powers
That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost
Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze....
Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,
Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods
Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time
What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,
A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,
A Will expressive of soul's deity,
A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,
A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.
For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:
Heaven's privilege she claims as her own right.
Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,
Clear in a greater light than reason owns:
Our intuitions are its title-deeds;
Our souls accept what our blind thoughts refuse.
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,
The impossible God's sign of things to be. [pp. 51-52]
It would really be a critical apocalypse if one could learn from Mr. Lai where in any of these magnificent excerpts is a stale-lemonade quality or a riot of blurred, airy and rubbery sentiments. One might as well look for an orgy of purple adjectives, or weak-spined greasiness, or loose emotion loosely expressed, in the profound-sighted and high-thoughted slokas of the Gita. Transposed to the plane of spiritual vision and spiritual philosophy, illumined and enlarged in the consciousness of a seer-sage, all that Mr. Lai demands of a true poem is here in abundance: "a choreographical pattern within a state of tension produced in a refined sensibility" - "language used precisely, nobly and with a sense of purpose."
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UNJUST CRITICISM
To be sure, the whole of Savitri is not uniformly inspired, but that is natural. In a long epic-narrative in which a story is unfolded or a sequence of experiences developed, inspiration has to build sober bridges, so to speak, between the glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still remain mighty names in the roll of poetry.
Even when the verse is not a sober bridge between the glories of dramatic moments, there is bound to be in a poem of considerable length and ample range of subject an inequality in the expression. What we have to appreciate in Savitri is the rareness of the inequality and the presence of some authentic minimum of inspiration in the passages where the afflatus tends to sink. According to Mr. Lai, there is no authentic inspiration of any kind in the following:
All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff:
A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.
All here was known by a spiritual sense:
Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one
Seized on all things by a moved identity...
Life was not there, but an impassioned force
Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps,
Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,
A quivering out from soul to answering soul,
A mystic movement, a close influence,
A free and happy and intense approach
Of being to being with no screen or check,
Without which life and love could never have been.
Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,
The soul itself was its own deathless form
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And met at once the touch of other souls
Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true. [pp. 291-92]
Well, can we say to Mr. Lai: "You are right for at least once"?
I am sorry that even this concession is out of the question. Read without prejudice, the passage for all its comparative inferiority has nothing to sicken us. There is a balanced systematic development of the theme of soul-stuff being all, and the lines –
Seized on all things by a moved identity –
cannot be bettered for accurate expression in a certain style. The phrase "near and one" is particularly pregnant for any alert intellect and the word "seized" is concrete and vivid as is also the word "moved": a suggestive picture of a knowing by means of a closeness of things to one another because of an intensely felt unity of being, which proves thought-knowledge a cold superficiality and an utter superfluity, comes before the inner sense. The lines that provoke Mr. Lai to the utmost sarcasm are -
Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps...
The second line is an echo of a turn we find at times in some Upanishads, it is a sort of paradoxical pointing of extremes and is not devoid of attractiveness or effectiveness: here it is particularly apt because the soul, in Yogic realisation, is the inmost entity of the inner world and the subtlest of all subtle forces. The first line is deemed by Mr. Lai an attempt at Miltonese which succeeds in being mere wind. He is mistaken in both respects. Miltonese is more packed in turn, more grandiose in language, less direct in suggestion and
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inclines towards a deliberate balance of emphasised idea: it might convert the line into something like
Life absent, save impassioned force be life.
Sri Aurobindo here has a straightforward style and statement expressing the truth that on an occult "plane," where Soul is the determining principle, there is a pure essence of vitality in both its ardent and its dynamic aspects, rather than what we know as Life Force. Of course, these lines and all the rest of the passage would hardly make an impact on a reader who has allowed the glib use of the word "soul" by wishy-washy and vacuous sentimentalists or by pseudo-mystics to spoil his stomach for it. Still less would an impact occur if a reader had from the very beginning no feel of what the soul could be like and looks upon every mention of it as a gaseous falsehood. Mr. Lal labours under a serious deficiency of soul-sense. Most non-mystic readers are somewhat in the same case, but not all lack as completely a sympathetic instinct for something which to the mystic is more "close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true" (a phrase, by the way, very felicitously worded and rhythmed) than even his bodily existence. Mr. Lai himself says vis-à-vis the passage: "I see nothing, there is nothing I can hang on to." This could just as well be because of his own clinging to the surface mentality as because of the supposed want of poetry in the lines.
Not that Sri Aurobindo is here at his best. But if we admit that Sri Aurobindo is here perhaps at his worst we still pay him a tremendous compliment. For the lines, by their harmonious significance and word and rhythm, remain poetry for all their falling below such bursts of inspiration as we quoted earlier - and even those examples cannot provide a really adequate notion of the sustained splendour Savitri has to offer nor of the huge variety of poetic merit in it, passages of a spiritualised "natural magic" and mysticised "human interest" as well as Yogicised philosophy and direct occult
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insight into the individual and the cosmos. Yes, the lines remain poetry and become more poetic when taken in their proper context as part of a fuller record in which is set alive before us an actual experience of the plane of the World-Soul. Terms like "soul-stuff" and "sky of soul" and "deep soul-ground" acquire a degree of concrete meaning that cannot arise when the passage is torn off from what goes before and comes after and when no indication is supplied of the totality of which it is an integral and almost inseparable portion.
Mr. Lai does injustice to the passage by the way he has presented it and the attitude he adopts towards it. But the worst crime he commits against the critic's office is to choose from Sri Aurobindo a passage that is not plenarily Aurobindonian, and declare it to be all that Sri Aurobindo is capable of throughout the nearly thirteen thousand lines published in Volume I of Savitri which has been available to Mr. Lai. That is an act of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, betraying a want of scruple added to limitation of aesthesis. No doubt, Savitri is not always easy to appreciate, it is mostly a new kind of poetry with a vision and language caught as if directly from hidden heights and depths and breadths of a more than human consciousness. Sri Aurobindo himself felt that it would take time to obtain wide recognition. But for an unprejudiced reader of quick, supple and penetrating imagination there is enough in it of recognisable excellence to win for its author the richest laurels - especially among his countrymen who may be expected to respond more readily to a sovereign spiritual utterance.
If, however, every Indian reader turns out to be like Mr. Lal I can only sigh and quote two lines - "a state of tension produced in a refined sensibility" and "language used precisely, nobly and with a sense of purpose", I suppose - from one of Mr. Lai's own recent and definitely non-Aurobindonian poems:
Here in dejection
I don't know what to do.
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(b)1
Fearing lest Mr. Lai should miss my criticism of him I took care to send him a copy of the issue of Mother India which had featured my attack. He was kind enough to acknowledge it and give consideration to that piece in a letter (November 22, 1951) from Calcutta:
Dear Mr. Sethna:
Thank you for sending me your rejoinder to my article on modern Indo-Anglian poets in the Sunday Standard. There was a time when Mother India used to be sold here regularly, but now I fail to find it on the news-stands; and if you hadn't forwarded me a copy I might very well have missed your interesting objections and counter-arguments.
I am flattered that you should think my remarks worth two lengthy pages of reply. To speak the truth, I brought in the poetry of Sri Aurobindo chiefly as a sidelight; my main purpose was to set a system of rules and methods which I hope would be helpful in encouraging the present efflorescence in our poetry and giving it a sense of direction and sureness.
I think I made it fairly clear from the very beginning that whatever I said was in no way an assertion of dogmatic belief; I divided poetry-appreciating people into two sorts, those who could derive what they thought was "poetic" satisfaction from the poetry of Sri Aurobindo and those who, for various reasons, the chief perhaps being an imperfect training in the enjoyment of spiritual poetry, could not. In spite of your many cogent arguments and very levelheaded attempt to puncture my thesis, I am still a member of the group which cannot find pleasure in Sri Aurobindo. If this were taken to mean that I condemn people who do, my ignorance would be shamefully evident. Nowhere in my article did I try to determine or standardize taste; I was
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1 Based on a feature in Mother India, October, 1968.
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advocating a policy for our poets which might help them to crystallize their productions into a poetic school, which I thought was urgently needed if the Indo-Anglian revival was to remain a revival and not fizzle out in a diffuse display of eccentric sparks.
This kind of argument could carry on for ever, and justification is always a somewhat hateful process anyway. I hope nevertheless that you will permit me a few words, if not to justify my remarks (if they are worth anything, time will justify them; if they aren't, I wouldn't like to play hypocrite), at least to clear up a few points that have arisen in the course of your rejoinder.
It is quite possible that I may have "a blind spot on my critical retina" when I chastise Sri Aurobindo, but this should in no way invalidate my argument that the job of all good poetry is to communicate an emotion to the reader even when he has no emotional and only the faintest intellectual idea of what that emotion is. That was the way I was educated to many kinds and strata of emotion not available in our humdrum petit-bourgeois family; and my experience (and those of my friends) is where I start from. You protest that the reader must have some point of contact for the poet to touch. But of course. The reader is a passive radio set on which many wavelengths are contacted and received; but you do not understand Bangkok or Teheran. The wavelength's job is to be communicable; if I find I cannot make head or tail of Sri Aurobindo or Wallace Stevens, I think I am within my rights to push on to a greener pasture. Perhaps if I spent time on Sri Aurobindo, I might pick up something. But you cannot compel that from me.
I am afraid it is not quite right to say that "a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism". Spiritual experience means nothing (like all
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other experience) unless it can be precisely communicated to a person not acquainted with it. To imply that fourteen years in England are likely to give a person a mastery of the English language, would seem to ignore the fact that there are Englishmen who have spent lifetimes in England without being able to improve their grammar to the extent of writing a letter to the Editor of Picture Post. Consummate knowledge of a language may be a very dangerous thing sometimes, especially for a poet. If knowledge were all, every leader-writer would be a poet. The essential thing is to get to feel a language in a kind of disciplined debauch. Finally, you imply that I condemn Sri Aurobindo for deliberately palming off poetic hypocrisy. This is absurd. Though I have no gauge to judge the genuineness of Sri Aurobindo's mysticism, I think it is fair and reasonable to say that he was a sincere mystic, perhaps a profound mystic. But that does not ipso facto turn him into a correspondingly profound poet.
Thank you for your stimulating criticism. I hope our differences on poetic matters do not stand in the way of a cordial personal relationship.
You may publish this letter if you like.
Very sincerely, P. Lal
Here was evidently a call for a second rejoinder, which did make its way from Bombay to its target, though a trifle belatedly (December 20,1951):
Dear Mr. Lal,
I received your letter on the eve of my departure to Pondicherry. Once there, I did not feel like entering into any correspondence. Now I am back and, with part of the work on Mother India disposed of, I turn to your criticism of my rejoinder. I am sorry you have had to wait three weeks or more.
Your letter is, to my mind, a much more dignified and genuine document than your article, though even in my
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counter-attack I have not refused to grant that you had some pointed and pertinent things to say on poetry in general and Indo-Anglian poetry in particular. If what you say now had been all your thesis, I don't think I would have plunged into a defence of Sri Aurobindo. The one impression I carried away from your article was precisely that you were making an assertion of dogmatic belief. At the start you record just your own violent reaction against Savitri; but a little later you say something which is exactly the opposite of your present statement that people who do not derive poetic satisfaction from Sri Aurobindo's epic fail chiefly because of an imperfect training in the enjoyment of spiritual poetry. You actually try to prove that you are quite competent to pass judgment on spiritual poetry: you list your qualifications by commencing favourably on Dante, Eliot, St. John of the Cross, Kabir and Chandidas. The suggestion is unmistakable: Sri Aurobindo is a poetic failure and not merely a poet to whom you are allergic. It is this suggestion that drew my fire.
I do not for a moment deny what you write about poetic communication. It is indeed the job of the poet to convey his experience or vision with effective art. But just because you cannot kindle up to a certain kind of poetry you have no right to vilify it. You have only the right to set it aside (if you are not inclined to make an effort to be catholic). You may push on to what is for you a greener pasture, with a shrug of your shoulders signifying that the stuff you are leaving behind may be very good yet is barren land to you. You cannot talk of merely different tastes and in the same breath pontificate as if from an absolute standard.
Even with regard to "tastes" your division of readers into two classes is rather dogmatic. There are hundreds who can appreciate all that moves you and at the same time relish Sri Aurobindo. Take me, for instance. I can read with pleasure the type of poetry you favour, without losing one bit of my intense delight in Savitri. You represent a rather small
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class which has allowed some obscure prejudice to colour its judgment. There seems almost to be some perversity at work, eager to run down somebody who, some instinct tells one, is truly great. C. R. M. seldom lets an opportunity go by of having a fling at Sri Aurobindo's poetry, whether earlier or later, without ever having taken the trouble to read him sufficiently. If you look at my rejoinder to a comment made by him apropos of my book on Sri Aurobindo's blank verse, hexameters and recent mystical poems, you will be surprised to see how ignorant as well as wrong-headed he was at every turn. Some time back Tambimuttu, to illustrate bad English by Indians, pronounced that there was a sentence of Sri Aurobindo's which simply screamed out for correction. He just couldn't help picking on a writer whose English even Englishmen had highly praised. As Tambimuttu did not quote the sentence in question, I had no means of finding out whether he was making much of a printer's devil or of a slip such as is possible even to a great writer in a hurry or merely colliding with a usage beyond him. You, I am sure, have no more than perfunctory acquaintance with Savitri - and yet you don't hesitate to be cleverly nasty about it. But I must say that you were not very clever when, on the strength of the supposed "loose emotion loosely expressed" of one short passage wrenched out of its context, you tried to insinuate that the nearly thirteen thousand published lines of Savitri, Vol. I, were a sickening staleness!
You are a man of considerable talent. I have read several poems of yours and they are not all of the flat quality of the two lines I have quoted at the end of my article to hoist you with your own petard of non-Aurobindonian poetic technique. If you really can't stand Sri Aurobindo after reading enough of him, one can't help you - much less compel you to like him. But I do regret the "blind spot". You would add much to your critical sensitivity if you could feel even a little of the gigantic inspiration that has given us this epic which can rank in value with creations like the Ramayana and the
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Mahabharata on the one hand and on the other the Rigveda and the Upanishads.
What I regret more is that even in the present letter you do not quite rest with stating that Sri Aurobindo does not appeal to you. The tendency to summon arguments attempting to show that he is worthless is not absent. Just look at your line of thought about knowledge of English. Englishmen who spend lifetimes in their own country may still remain unable to improve their grammar to the extent of penning a letter to Picture Post. But Indians who spend in England fourteen of their most formative years in the direct study of English and pass through Cambridge with distinction and show an undeniably extraordinary capacity to master difficult languages like Greek and Latin are not liable to be in the same case. If you'll forgive my being blunt, your reasoning is patently twisted. Secondly, I never said that consummate knowledge of English is by itself enough to make one a poet. You are arguing with a dummy of your own invention. If you will look again at the sentence of mine which you have quoted, you will mark that I am pointing out the unlikelihood of a vacuous pseudo-mysticism being penned and palmed off as the genuine article by a Master of Yoga who brings to his self-expression an expert intimacy with the English language. This is something quite different and contains sound sense. I agree that the essential thing is, as you put it in a memorable phrase, to get to feel a language in a kind of disciplined debauch - but surely consummate knowledge of a tongue is not inapt to conduce to such a debauch. In fact, the knowledge cannot really be consummate without the feel you have in mind. I wonder how you can speak of ordinary leader-writers being consummate in knowledge: they are no more than efficient at their best.
I had no intention to charge you with considering Sri Aurobindo a bogus mystic - though I shouldn't be amazed if you did consider him such, for you appear to have no idea of the wonderful spiritual personality that he was or
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of the perfect blend of illumination and intellect that his philosophical or other expositions are. If you had an idea, would you so easily miss seeing how that sentence of mine could imply only that Sri Aurobindo with his qualifications, both spiritual and literary, would naturally be a sufficient critic to himself and would know if by any chance he wrote anything misty instead of mystic?
I appreciate the courtesy of your letter. I like the way you have taken my criticism and the broadness of thought that makes you hope our differences on poetic matters may not stand against a cordial personal relationship.
Sincerely yours,
K. D. Sethna
It would be ungracious on my part to omit the short note (December 24,1951) I received from Mr. Lal.
My dear Mr. Sethna,
Thank you for your letter of the 20th.
Arguments like ours can be prolonged interminably, and what we ultimately reach may be simply - and not very regrettably - an agreement to differ.
It is Christmas now and hatchets are best buried. May I extend to you my sincerest wishes for a Happy Christmas and New Year? I shall in 1952 read Savitri with greater care, in order to cultivate a more perfect sympathy for it.
Very sincerely,
P. Lal
(c)
It is very doubtful whether Mr. Lai carried out his pious resolve. For, his prejudices do not appear to have essentially diminished, though they are within a somewhat changed framework. He has recently brought out a big book, Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo, partly
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to refute another critic, Buddhadeva Bose. In The Concise Encyclopaedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, edited by Stephen Spender and Donald Hall (1963), Bose levelled in effect the charge of rootlessness, incompetence and mediocrity against the sort of work Mr. Lal favours and practises. Bose's thesis was: "the best of Indian-English verse belongs to the nineteenth century, when Indians came nearest to 'speaking, thinking and dreaming in English'. In authenticity of diction and feeling Sri Aurobindo far outshines the others, but Toru Dutt's charming pastiche still holds some interest. As for present-day 'Indo-Anglians', they are earnest and not without talent, but it is difficult to see how they can develop as poets in a language which they have learnt from books and seldom hear spoken in the streets or even in their own houses, and whose two great sources lie beyond the seven seas."
Mr. Lal has several excellent things to say on the creative role of English in India at the present day no less than in the nineteenth century. Bose appears to have tilted the balance too roughly, too sweepingly. But Mr. Lai fails to cut an effective figure in any other respect. His reaction to Bose on Sri Aurobindo is: "I am struck dumb by this fatuous remark. If Mr. Bose thinks Sri Aurobindo 'far outshines the others' in 'authenticity of diction and feeling', he is entitled to his opinion - but should he put it down in an encyclopaedia for all the world to see?"
First, Mr. Lal is under the delusion that Bose's compliment to Sri Aurobindo in The Concise Encyclopaedia is a crazy one-man opinion or, at most, the view of a hopeless minority. Not that big battalions in themselves count, or that an encyclopaedia should be partisan in spirit. But such a book is surely the right place for a critical stance shared by many who can claim at least as much literary training and experience as Mr. Lal. Even within his own clique, G. S. Sharat Chandra ranks Sri Aurobindo among great writers, R. de L. Furtado finds his poetry impressive and S. R. Mokashi-Punekar manages both to contradict Bose and to outdo him in eulogy:
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"Why is Sri Aurobindo 19th-century please: I admire Sri Aurobindo. If I were more courageous and had the necessary genius, I would have tried to imitate him."
Secondly, Mr. Lal and his band of Post-Independence poets have not gauged the proper import of Bose's remark on Sri Aurobindo. Bose is referring to the nineteenth-century writers and it is in relation to them that he considers Sri Aurobindo as excelling everybody. Next to Sri Aurobindo he fancies Toru Dutt. He is not directly bearing on "present-day 'Indo-Anglians' ", whom he groups separately. Mr. Lai et al should really have no grudge against Bose within the universe of discourse where the comparative estimate was made. Do they contend that Sri Aurobindo is inferior in authenticity of diction and feeling to Toru Dutt and the rest of the nineteenth-century poets?
It is not directly but indirectly that Bose puts down Mr. Lai et al. Inasmuch as the latter are not even rated successful wielders of the English tongue in its poetic aspect they fall under Bose's censure. Here they are lumped as inferior to all the good nineteenth-century poets, not only to Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo, being the best of those poets in Bose's eyes, turns out to be the greatest exceller of these inferior writers. The terms of the condemnation are somewhat different in their posture from the over-touchy belief of the Lalians about them. However, apart from the lack of subtle perception in the matter, the Lalians are right in opining that Bose sets them lower than Sri Aurobindo. Actually, if Bose were comparing them with him, his compliment to Sri Aurobindo would not prove, in the world of his values, very laudatory in itself. For when he deems them so insignificant, Sri Aurobindo's greatness could very easily be no more than relative: he might well be a Triton among the minnows.
Not that Bose himself does anything less than hold him in high respect. And that really is the head and front of his offence to Mr. Lai. But Mr. Lal is not so brash today as he was in the past. In spite of the word "fatuous" to which he
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is provoked vis-à-vis Bose, he has come to a sort of specious compromise about Savitri. He writes:
"I realise that I may be charged, among the brighter and still wrathful younger groups of Tndo-Anglians' with critical flabbiness and senility. What K. Raghavendra Rao said of Buckenham's Paolo and Francesca (included in this volume1) in a letter to Kewlian Sio in 1950 - 'self-consciously literary and needlessly verbose; some good lines, yes, but the whole is verbose' - might be said of Sri Aurobindo also, but a fairer perspective is now called for.
"My private quarrel with Sri Aurobindo's technical abilities and philosophical system has nothing to do with the recognition of his importance as a guru. He is the only modern poet, in any Indian language, to have attempted the large philosophical poem.... I still find reason to complain of the nebulous images, and think the iambic pentameter fashioned by Sri Aurobindo to be weak-spined for most purposes. But there is a real attempt towards moulding a new verse form, and there is an admirable manner of philosophically transforming the Savitri story in the Mahabharata. The failure of a Titan is still cause for sorrow and awe, and in such failure, as distinct from petty losses, lie seeds of fruition later. Savitri is the work of a poet steeped in the Greek and Latin classics who realised, as he put it, that 'the nineteenth century in India was imitative, self-forgetful, artificial'. It aimed, he added, 'at a successful reproduction of Europe in India', forgetting that 'death in one's own dharma is better; it is a dangerous thing to follow the law of another's nature'. Such a death brings new birth, 'success in an alien path means only successful suicide'. Savitri is a great Pyrrhic victory."
It is not easy to make out Mr. Lai's meaning. One inclines to adapt K. Raghavendra Rao: "some good phrases, yes, but the whole is verbose." What is the sense of disapproving of "Sri Aurobindo's technical abilities" and of thinking "the iambic
________________
1 [Sri Aurobindo - The Poet]
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pentameter fashioned by Sri Aurobindo to be weak-spined for most purposes" and then turning round to say: "there is a real attempt towards moulding a new verse form"? Again, how are we to manage in the same breath Mr. Lai's "private quarrel with Sri Aurobindo's...philosophical system" and his declaration not only that Sri Aurobindo alone among modern Indian poets has attempted the large philosophical poem but also that "there is an admirable manner of philosophically transforming the Savitri story in the Mahabharata? One seems to move through sludge trying to grasp all that roundabout talk on death in one's own dharma being better than life in another's and on Savitri's being such a death rather than the nineteenth-century's "imitative, self-forgetful, artificial" life, and on Sri Aurobindo's being a Titan whose failure and death in Savitri brings a new birth or, alternatively, whose great victory in this poem is achieved at a tremendous cost and so is a great defeat as well. Further, what is the point of the statement that the realisation of the nineteenth-century's imitativeness, self-forgetfulness and artificiality by Sri Aurobindo who was a poet steeped in the Greek and Latin classics lay at the back of the writing of Savitri? Does it suggest that in Savitri the Greek and Latin classics are at work along with a break-away from the nineteenth-century's defects? Or are those defects equivalent to one's being steeped in the classics of Greece and Rome as were the Europeans of the nineteenth-century whose dharma the Indians eagerly adopted? We fumble and stumble in all this crammed and mixed-up endeavour to give Sri Aurobindo something with one hand and take it away with the other. If any piece of writing which purports to come to a conclusion can be called a Pyrrhic victory, this is it.
Pyrrhic essentially because the reader does not quite know where he stands and especially because what remains over in the reader's mind are words like: "the large philosophical poem", "moulding a new verse form", "an admirable manner of philosophically transforming the Savitri story",
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"a Titan", "awe", "seeds of fruition". Evidently Mr. Lal feels somewhere in himself that an epic of nearly 24,000 lines cannot just be ignored or bypassed. And, reading on in Mr. Lai's Introduction, we come across some light on the positive side of that see-saw passage. He says: "Toru Dutt..., Sarojini Naidu, and Sri Aurobindo - whatever their weaknesses - have this great strength in common though in varying degrees: they have Indian responses to life and things." And also a little before those zigzag asseverations, against which their author anticipated a charge of "critical flabbiness and senility" from even his own followers, we have a ray of illumination: "very recently there has been a feeling that the work of Sri Aurobindo and others of the 'mystic school' needs perhaps to be revalued instead of dismissed cursorily."
It would seem to be in deference to a slowly growing national sense of Sri Aurobindo's greatness not only as a spiritual figure but also as the poet of a spirituality which is Indian without ceasing to be integral that Mr. Lai is moved to make some concessions. His own personal attitude appears to be basically the same as before, looking askance at what he terms in one place even now "the stilted mystic-incense style of Sri Aurobindo". And equally unchanged is the ineptitude of his fault-finding. Take the criticism that Sri Aurobindo's "real attempt towards moulding a new verse-form" has still resulted in an "iambic pentameter ...weak-spined for most purposes"? Has Mr. Lal ever sought to see this "verse-form" in the concrete, definite and restricted terms Sri Aurobindo has employed? In a letter to me in 1933 Sri Aurobindo wrote:
"Savitri...is blank verse without enjambment (except rarely) each line a thing by 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. You can't take that as a model - it is too difficult a rhythm-structure to
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be a model. I shall myself know whether it is a success or not, only when I have finished two or three books."
For such a model the technical requirements have been clearly put down by Sri Aurobindo in another letter:
"The things I lay most stress on...are whether each line in itself is the inevitable thing not only as a whole but in each word; whether there is the right distribution of sentence lengths (an immensely important thing in this kind of blank verse); whether the lines are in their right place, for all the lines may be perfect, but they may not combine perfectly together - bridges may be needed, alterations of position so as to create the right development and perspective etc., etc. Pauses hardly exist in this kind of blank verse; variations of rhythm as between the lines, of caesura, of the distribution of long and short, clipped and open syllables, manifold constructions of vowel and consonant sounds, alliteration, assonances, etc., distribution into one line, two line, three or four or five line, many line sentences, care to make each line tell by itself in its own mass and force and at the same time form a harmonious whole sentence - these are the important things.... I may add that the technique does not go by any set mental rule - for the object is not perfect technical elegance according to precept but sound-significance filling out the word-significance. If that can be done by breaking rules, well, so much the worse for the rule."
To dismiss this kind of special iambic pentameter as "weak-spined" - an expression which must have a technical sense or is worth nothing - and to imagine it to be meant for "most purposes" argues a critical mind content with blanket phraseology and not caring to attend to significant formal minutiae. So the mention of his "private quarrel with Sri Aurobindo's technical abilities" is meaningless.
As for the quarrel with Sri Aurobindo's "philosophical system", it can only connote - in distinction from the "admirable manner of philosophically transforming the Savitri story" -that Mr. Lal finds incongenial the type of mysticism or spirituality
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which Sri Aurobindo has systematically worked out as a philosophy. In the context of poetic problems the quarrel is irrelevant - neither here nor there.
What remains, then? Only "the stilted mystic-incense style" and the "nebulous images". Here, all that Mr. Lal has so far produced as justification for himself is that ancient citation of his of 17 lines out of Savitri's 23,800 and odd. Even at the time he picked them out he was not unaware of objections and he has tried to meet them: "The reader now may have misunderstood me altogether, and started to say: It's all very well for you to puncture a specific passage, especially a passage dealing with spiritual vision and realisation. Don't you see that states of ecstasy and beatitude are hardest to communicate to a person who has not passed through identical spiritual experiences?' " The answer he provides is no more than that a poem's "rhythm, linguistic precision and incantation" must be such as to communicate even the most uncommon states -and "Sri Aurobindo does not satisfy me on this basic level". Well, suppose the passage in question does lack in "rhythm, linguistic precision and incantation": still, how would Mr. Lai be justified in pushing away the gigantic whole of Savitri on the strength of a minuscule part of it? Nowhere does he come to grips with the reader's query on this head.
Mr. Lal's criticism on every count is patently inadequate, patently prejudiced - a personal allergy and nothing else. And when we come to the issue raised by his inclusion of two poems of Sri Aurobindo's in his own anthology, what do we realise? Mentioning Sri Aurobindo and five other poets in whose favour he has relaxed the chronological principle of including "only poems written after 1947", he tells us: "The poems selected from their works show 'modernism', and since four died after Independence and two are still with us, I felt that some idea should be given of the change in idiom and feeling that was beginning to make itself felt some time before the first major 'modern' spearhead launched itself in the years 1947-1950."
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In the first place, does the selection evince any guiding sense of revaluing the Aurobindonian "mystic school"? In the second, is it actuated by a recognition of "Indian responses to life and things"? Out of the two poems one most amusingly pillories modern materialism and its egregious theories about man's mind and soul and its rash playing about with nuclear energy. No directly mystical element is there and the sole Indianism is an allusion to the Bo-tree in the midst of four allusions from which three touch on European things: the epics of Homer, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Napoleon's career. The other poem is wittily quizzical about a cat. There just one phrase - "fur-footed Brahman" - brings India in. And that phrase too is not exactly a key-expression. On the score of the non-mysticism and the non-Indianism of the poems chosen, I suppose we are expected to believe that we are forced on to them because not only Savitri but also the vast corpus of the remainder of Sri Aurobindo's poems and plays can supply nothing at all of re-valuable mysticism and desirable Indianism suiting a "modern" mind. What we really come to see is simply that Mr. Lal is either unacquainted with Sri Aurobindo's voluminous output or totally biased and therefore unable to spot for his ends even "some good lines" which he has theoretically granted.
Now we may face the "modernism" said to be making itself felt some time before the Lalians brought it to a focus soon after Independence. Let us look at the poems in full:
A DREAM OF SURREAL SCIENCE
One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink
At the Mermaid, capture immortality;
A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink
Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.
____________
1 Mr. Lal, for some reason, has a new name: One Dreamed and Saw.
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A thyroid, meditating almost nude
Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light
And, rising from its mighty solitude,
Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold path all right.
A brain by a disordered stomach driven
Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell,
From St. Helena went, perhaps to Heaven.
Thus wagged on the surreal world, until
A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout.
DESPAIR ON THE STAIRCASE
Mute stands she, lonely on the topmost stair,
An image of magnificent despair;
The grandeur of a sorrowful surmise
Wakes in the largeness of her glorious eyes.
In her beauty's dumb significant pose I find
The tragedy of her mysterious mind.
Yet is she stately, grandiose, full of grace.
A musing mask is her immobile face.
Her tail is up like an unconquered flag,
Its dignity knows not the right to wag.
An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,
Whether she is spirit, woman or a cat,
Is now the problem I am wondering at.
From the picture Mr. Lai has tried to conjure up of Sri Aurobindo one would never anticipate such poetry. If Sri Aurobindo is capable of writing in this vein, he certainly cannot be a hopeless addict to "nebulous images" and "weak-spined" pentameters. Here also are pentameters, though not blank verse, but they are full of vigour and variety. Here
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also images are at play, but they are handled by a master of precision and particularity. Nor is the author of either poem thinking and imagining in a way quite other than he was wont to do before the "modern" movement in India started faintly stirring in the pre-Independence days. In the early years of our century Sri Aurobindo had already written A Vision of Science, in which the poet dreams of three Angels striving within him for mastery. Towards the end of it the second Angel, Science, is asked by the departing Angel of Religion to try and know who she herself really is:
And Science confidently, "Nothing am I but earth,
Tissue and nerve and from the seed a birth,
A mould, a plasm, a gas, a little that is much.
In these grey cells that quiver to each touch
The secret lies of man; they are the thing called I.
Matter insists and matter makes reply.
Shakespeare was this; this force in Jesus yearned
And conquered by the cross; this only learned
The secret of the suns that blaze afar;
This was Napoleon's giant mind of war."
I heard and marvelled in myself to see
The infinite deny infinity.
Yet the weird paradox seemed justified;
Even mysticism shrank out-mystified.
By a strange coincidence, we have exactly fourteen lines again - and the same irony which is yet charged with a high seriousness is present, though with less exuberance and humour. Sri Aurobindo was "modern" two or three decades before the Lalians were born. The fact is: whatever else he was - and he was a great number of things, a rich manifold of culture - he was never less than modern. And his imagination was always powerful and concrete. And, if ever "nebulous", it was only so in the sense that in picturing a nebula in poetry you have to be very accurately nebulous.
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The other poem has no early counterpart but the realistic awareness of animal existence and of its beauty or mystery was never absent. It goes back to Sri Aurobindo's late teens when he saw
in emerald fire
The spotted lizard crawl
Upon the sun-kissed wall.
In his late twenties he has a bird-simile with a striking Latinism - "extravagance" - which, in the root-language, would mean "wandering beyond (the limits)":
As a bright bird comes flying
From airy extravagance to his own home,
And breasts his mate, and feels her all his goal -
and there is an animal-vision too in a supernatural setting, the Death-God Yama's four-eyed dogs which, on either side of him,
rested prone,
Watchful, with huge heads on their paws advanced...
In 1942, Collected Poems and Plays (which, most comically, Mr. Lai's anthology always calls Collected Poems and Prayers) gives us in a free-verse composition when Sri Aurobindo was past seventy an unforgettable evocation of Death incarnate "in forests of the night":
Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless paws of grandeur and murder.
What poet in Mr. Lai's anthology has anything to match this sight and insight? We should have to go to the pregnant details of Blake's "fearful symmetry" "burning
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bright" or to Rilke's painting of the tiger with a few vital pen-strokes:
Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte.
(Velvety softness wedding to striding strength.)
As for the humour blended with imaginative empathy in Sri Aurobindo's approach to the common cat, it too stands unrivalled by the anthology's other entries. Mr. Lai himself comes nearest to it in one line on Blake's and Rilke's and Sri Aurobindo's beast of prey -
The tiger licking his five-haired snout -
but how far he is from the fun no less than the fineness of the couplet:
Indeed there is more vitality, more feel of reality along with subtlety of perception - more modernness - in this alleged practitioner of the "stilted mystic-incense style" than in all the moderns claiming "the right to wag" their tongues under the inspiration of Mr. Lai's imaginarily "unconquered flag".
And when we look back at Sri Aurobindo writing poetry nearly four decades before Independence and confronting not a feline problem as in Despair on the Staircase but one before which he still might wonder "whether she is spirit" or "woman" we find what we may term a magical realism which is the very opposite of nebulousness in a pejorative sense or any mystic-incense stiltedness:
Someone leaping from the rocks
Past me ran with wind-blown locks
Like a startled bright surmise
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Visible to mortal eyes, -
Just a cheek of frightened rose
That with sudden beauty glows,
Just a footstep like the wind
And a hurried glance behind,
And then nothing, - as a thought
Escapes the mind ere it is caught.
Someone of the heavenly rout
From behind the veil ran out.
Compare the exquisitely suggestive clarity of this poem with Mr. Lai's prominently put lyric which may be taken to set some kind of example of how to write in a non-Aurobindonian manner:
The Parrot's Death
When rains fall
Is all astir
My green soul,
My prisoner.
November.
Middle age
Struggles, needing
More than a cage.
Soul is to cage
As love to foe.
My loved one, my bird,
Take heart and go!
Where is any modernism, Indian or otherwise, here? No doubt, the opening stanza, in spite of the somewhat awkward inversion in lines 2 and 3, has some charm; but so also has Jean Ingelow's nineteenth-century heart-throb:
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When sparrows build, and the leaves break forth,
My old sorrow wakes and cries.
Ingelow, however, is at least free from "blurred sentiments" - Mr. Lai's bête noire in relation to that notorious quotation of his from Savitri. And, of course, most free is the locus classicus of rain-stirring: Chaucer's vision of the pilgrimage to Canterbury
When that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote.
But we can hardly assert the same of Mr. Lai's lyric. Nor are its "blurred sentiments" left by him to work themselves out in the normal way on the human-animal level. They are raised to a climax of cloudiness (natural, surely, "when rains fall") with the use, twice repeated, of that highly ambiguous word "soul". Better the "soul-stuff" and "soul-ground" of the peccant passage than the insipid parroting of the word without the smallest whiff of "an ampler ether, a diviner air" to give it even a little chance of acquiring a poetic body.
I am afraid criticism like Mr. Lai's will not induce the slightest wavering in anyone's literary allegiance to Sri Aurobindo. And I dare to prophesy that as Mr. Lai grows up he will find himself distant from his present uneasy compromise with regard to Sri Aurobindo's greatness as a poetic figure - more distant than he now is, in his manner though not essentially in his matter, from the essay of 1951 in The Sunday Standard in which he still notes "some interesting points" even while he quite frankly admits it to be "a callow, opinionated, over-zealous and slickly-written piece". There is a vein of honesty and good will in Mr. Lai, in addition to a velleity somewhere not to be too narrow in poetic appreciation, all of which is sadly wanting in some other members of his group. These qualities, vague though some of them are, give me the hope that with advancing years he will more and more see eye to
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eye with me about the work of one who was his own severest critic and who taught his disciples to test all poetic production by the highest standards but at the same time warned them against confining such standards to just one particular school: above all he asked them to keep their minds clear of the penchants of the moment, the exaggerations of personal or local tastes and wide open to every poetic possibility.
(Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, 1999, pp. 373-413)
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