On Poetry
THEME/S
I*
One is appalled by the blithe irresponsibility with which some of our writers launch into deep waters and spout frothy criticisms without realising how badly out of their depth they are. Thus Mr. Nissim Ezekiel, in a review published in the Sunday Standard of February 25, 1965, falls foul of Dr. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar for devoting to Sri Aurobindo three chapters of his Indian Writing in English and indulges in a little orgy of abuse over a poem of Sri Aurobindo's praised by Iyengar, Thought the Paraclete, from which Mr. Ezekiel quotes five lines while criticising all its twenty-two.
He says this poem is "simply execrable verse, a confused unconscious parody of the worst features of English rhetorical style grafted on a degenerate Eastern mysticism". The manner of the pronouncement is hardly in good taste; but, that apart, epithets like "confused" and "degenerate" in relation to anything Aurobindonian make one suspect immediately the very competence of the critic.
Sri Aurobindo's spiritual stature has never been in doubt anywhere in the world, and his mysticism is won Known for its large, comprehensive, balanced and harmonious character—a mysticism eminently healthy with its stress on a transformation of physical life no less than of the inner being. Again, all the world has recognised in him an intellect that has marshalled and organised the results of his integral spiritual experience in a most wide-sweeping yet systematic philosophy: Sir Francis Younghusband could not help hailing The Life Divine as the
*This section, except for its last paragraph which replaces the old ending, appeared in the Sunday Standard in March, 1965.
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greatest book of our time and Aldous Huxley calling it "a book not merely of the highest importance as regards its content but remarkably fine as a piece of philosophic and religious literature".
Yes, here is Sri Aurobindo whose mystical thought appreciates with its calm and clear vision a momentous truth behind the motive and work of western materialism itself, because its own emphasis falls on a new power of the Spirit fulfilling here and now the whole travail of earth's evolution. If anybody could be considered incapable of being "confused", it would be Sri Aurobindo. And if any phrase about him were the acme of ineptitude it would be: "a degenerate Eastern mysticism." The critic who can commit himself to such labels is bound to miss the inner imaginative and verbal necessities of many a poem by Sri Aurobindo and to fumble over its form and technique.
Whatever complexity of vision, strangeness of style or peculiarity of construction there may be in the poem cannot but seem to Mr. Ezekiel "execrable rhetoric" or, as he later puts it, "empty abstractions", "double-barrelled bubbles of sound", "archaic vocabulary". It is surprising how little understanding he brings to his job. There is, for instance, the fact clearly set forth by Iyengar that Thought the Paraclete is modelled, with the variations needed in English, on the Latin quantitative hende-casyllable. Some of these variations create metrically a demand for a repeated run of compound words: to decry that run offhand is not to know either their visionary or their technical raison d'être. Curiously enough, Ezekiel himself feels driven to a compound word in condemning as aptly as he can Sri Aurobindo's "dream-caught", "gold-red", "world-bare", "pale-blue-lined", "white-fire-veiled", etc. And he coins his own compound expression as the inevitable one even though he recognises its queerness and tells us: "If my mixed metaphor may be forgiven." Surely, if a locution like "double-barrelled *
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bubbles of sound" could strike him as right, he could have bothered to inquire whether Sri Aurobindo's combinations might not have been organic to the kind of inspiration and art the poem has embodied.
Besides, are compound terms in quick succession a purely Aurobindonian practice? As far as I know, they have been part of poetry from the most ancient times: Homer is chockful of them. And they are an outstanding feature of the poet who more than any other has been praised and commented on in modern criticism. In this respect as in several others, Mr. Ezekiel is just what a late-Victorian conventional reviewer would have been vis-a-vis Gerard Manley Hopkins's packed multiple metaphors, many-worded adjectives and substantives, startling sprung-rhythms, winding structural polyphonies, all charged with religious subtlety as well as passion. But even in Hopkins a degree of awkwardness both of vision and expression may at times be suspected because he was trying to get at depths and nuances of meaning in a region where he was not all at home. Sri Aurobindo, in addition to being an acknowledged master of English, is an established master of the spiritual and the occult no less than of the profoundly psychological. To make him out to be a raw bungling writer and image-fabricator, lingering in an outmoded manner of verse, is to be ineffably naive or perverse. Has Mr. Ezekiel stopped to appreciate, in line after line from the poem at which he waxes vituperative, even the purely rhythmic impact, overtone on sweeping overtone of sound-suggestion stirring the deepest heart—leave aside the sheer vision-energy striking the mind awake to unknown modes of being:
Hungering large-souled to surprise the unconned
Secrets white-fire-veiled of the last Beyond,
Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,
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Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned,
Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete
Disappeared slow-singing a flame-word rune...
Whether these lines be fully understood or no, there cannot be by a truly sensitive reader a mistaking of the lofty haunting evocation of a spiritual reality and experience.
Everywhere I find Mr. Ezekiel has failed to approach the poem with the imaginative open-mindedness and aesthetic sympathy that are absolutely essential in dealing with any type of unusual verse and most in assessing poetry that is evidently hieratic. In connection with such poetry, his objection that words like "lustred," "eremite", "bourneless," "supernal," "mooned", "rune" are archaic is pointless. And when he accuses of empty abstractions phrases like "the long green crests of the seas of life" and lines such as
Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss
Drew its vague heart-yearnings with voices sweet,
one cannot do better than quote the candid gloss of the poet himself for a somewhat puzzled and diffident but not unfriendly critic. Sri Aurobindo wrote: "I would like to say a word about his hesitation over some lines in Thought the Paraclete which describe the spiritual planes. I can understand this hesitation; for these lines have not the vivid and forceful precision of the opening and the close and are less pressed home, they are general in description and therefore to one who has not the mystic experience must seem too large and vague. But they are not padding; a precise and exact description of these planes of experience would have made the poem too long, so only some large lines are given, but the description is true, the epithets hit the reality and even the colours mentioned in the poem, 'gold red feet'
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and 'crimson-white mooned oceans' are faithful to experience. Significant colour, supposed by intellectual criticism to be symbolic but there is more than that, is a frequent element in mystic vision; I may mention the powerful and vivid vision in which Ramakrishna went up into the higher planes and saw the mystic truth behind the birth of Vivekananda..."
Now a final observation. Mr. Ezekiel generalises his case against Sri Aurobindo so as to cover his many volumes of poetry: "This is not merely a difference of opinion between Prof. Iyengar and myself on a few lines of alleged poetry written in English by an Indian. It poses the question whether much of this writing is on the level of literature at all, whether the normal critical categories can be applied to it. Even to call it bad or weak is to hazard making those words meaningless. If mine seems an extreme view I will be content to argue that as a poet Sri Aurobindo has some linguistic habits which virtually destroy the value of the voluminous output."
Well, Mr. Ezekiel does know how to make his generalisation in the grand style. He covers at one stroke the whole China-to-Peru of the Aurobindonian poetic corpus. Nothing, or practically nothing, is permitted to escape the castigation. There is only one course for an admirer of Sri Aurobindo to follow. He must run a rigorous eye swiftly across "the voluminous output" and try to identify everywhere the quirks and kinks of expression that Mr. Ezekiel assures us of and that would set the prolific claimant to poetry quite outside the pale.
2
Let us start with the semi-romantic period of the last century's end and this century's commencement. Here is a spontaneous-seeming and, to all appearance, charming snatch of
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youthful fancy entitled Seasons,
Day and night begin, you tell me,
When the sun may choose to set or rise.
Well, it may be; but for me their changing
Is determined only by her eyes.
Summer, spring, the fruitless winter
Hinge, you say, upon the heavenly sun?
Oh, but I have known a yearlong winter!
Spring was by her careless smiles begun.
Or let us take those happy-sounding eulogies in the Indian style raised by presiding priests with a mythological Hero-King and an Apsara bride before them in that very early narrative in blank verse, Urvasie:
As lightning takes the heart with pleasant dread,
So love is of the strong Pururavus.
As breathes sweet fragrance from the flower oppressed,
So love from thy bruised bosom, Urvasie...
According to Mr. Ezekiel, normal critical categories are irrelevant to such monstrosities of phrase. Much of the young Kalidasa would receive short shrift at this rate.
From the early period we may cull also a few locutions that look forward to Sri Aurobindo the mystic to be. There is that strange vision:
Time like a snake coiling among the stars—
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with its sudden sense of the endless and boundless, within which all things have their end and bound. Or the other conjuration, equally strange, with its touch of abysmal mystery:
I have entered caverns dim where death was born.
To Mr. Ezekiel these two lines must certainly fall below the level of literature, escaping as they do by their odd utterance his attempt at concrete formulation of their content: he would brand them as confused, rhetorical, abstract. Could he be doing so because they somehow rise above his level of literary perception?
When we come to a less romantic, more reflective period, we meet with "execrable" effects like:
Not soon is God's delight in us completed,
Nor with one life we end;
Termlessly in us are our spirits seated
And termless joys intend...
With a conviction of progressive rebirth the thinker Sri Aurobindo can say to the ordinarily short-sighted human entity:
An endless future brims beneath thy lashes,
Child of an endless past.
What nonsense is here, couched linguistically in such a manner as to knock all poetry out! Still worse is the device of transferred description pointing the paradoxes of the Absolute in the world:
Delight that labours in its opposite,
Faints in the rose and on the rack is curled...
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And when the Absolute is directly figured in His own transcendence with a bold finality of image directing us not only to a mysterious depth but also to an uncomprehended concreteness—
Both Time and Timelessness sink in that sea—
is not Sri Aurobindo just passing off paroxysmal gibberish as philosophical poetry? Or does Mr. Ezekiel's grey cells lock him in from all light?
More or less in the same period Sri Aurobindo buckled down to translating the aphoristic Bhartrihari. A whole book called A Century of Life
Be not a miser of thy strength and store;
Oft in a wounded grace more beauty is.
The jewel which the careful gravers score;
The sweet fair girl-wife broken with bridal bliss,
The rut-worn tusker, the autumnal stream
With its long beaches dry and slender flood;
The hero wreathed with victory's diadem,
Adorned with wounds and glorious with his blood;
The moon's last disc; rich men of their bright dross,
By gifts disburdened, fairer shine by loss.
For another sample, savour Bodies without Mind:
Some minds there are to Art and Beauty dead,
Music and poetry on whose dull ear Fall barren.
Horns grace not their brutish head,
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Tails too they lack, yet is their beasthood clear.
That Heaven ordained not upon grass their feasts,
Good fortune is this for the other beasts.
Mr. Ezekiers "mind", to be consistent, must disbelieve that Sri Aurobindo could feel any affinity to an art like Bhartri-hari's. But no rubbing of the eyes will prove illusory a hundred Aurobindonian evidences of poetry, either smooth-shining or glitter-pointed, comparable to
The jewel which the careful gravers score.
Coming to the mystical period proper, what do we encounter? The old romanticism undergoes an intense change but no whit of the passion and poignancy is gone, as can be demonstrated from stanzas like:
Bride of the Fire, clasp me now close,—
Bride of the Fire!
I have shed the bloom of the earthly rose,
I have slain desire.
Beauty of the Light, surround my life,—
Beauty of the Light!
I have sacrificed longing and parted from grief,
I can bear thy delight.
Image of ecstasy, thrill and enlace,—
Image of bliss!
I would see only thy marvellous face,
Feel only thy kiss.
Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart,—
Call of the One!
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Stamp there thy radiance, never to part,
O living Sun.
What linguistic habits could be said to betray their own deplor-ableness in this lyric? Perhaps we may feel like criticising as a bad habit the repetition of the opening phrase of stanza I in the next line and a similar procedure in stanza 2 and a near-approach to it in stanza 3. But if we attend a little to the recurrences we shall discover not only that they are natural to the movement of the rapt state which is there in the poem; we shall discover also that the reiteration is most apt because of the concluding phrase of the first line in each of the stanzas concerned. When the Bride of the Fire is told, "clasp, me now close", the very embrace wanted is suggested by the coming again of the same words: it is as if the Bride's fiery arms were being drawn from either side to hold the aspirant to her heart. The entreaty—"surround my life"—demands, as it were,that the Beauty of the Light apostrophised should be equally present in words at both ends. "Thrill and enlace" is an invitation expecting a passionate enfoldment by the Image of ecstasy: it must be followed up by a corresponding turn hemming "my life" in, so to speak. By contrast, stanza 4 brings no reappearance of its opening appeal. Although the same inseparableness is connoted by "sound in my heart", it is not formulated in so many words: hence "Voice of Infinity" can be replaced by "Call of the One" without yet the lines losing by the change rung there the inner sense of the adorer's fusion with the object of adoration since that object, being Infinity grown vocal, is necessarily the one and only Real beckoning the mystic. Sensitive poetic logic and not mechanical stop-gap habit is at work in the first three stanzas.
Again habit in the same significant mode only can be laid at the door of the last line of a sonnet belonging to the late mystical
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phase and bringing in a deliberate mental energy rather than the sheer lyric cry. This piece strikes me as an extremely moving bit of inner autobiography, which shows what supreme sacrifice goes hand in hand with the spiritual liberation when the Yogi is bent on being the Eternal's Worker in time and space and does not rest with liberation into Eternity;
Often, in the slow ages' long retreat
On Life's thin ridge through Time's enormous sea,
I have accepted death and borne defeat
To gain some vantage by my fall for Thee.
For Thou hast given the Inconscient the dark right
To oppose the shining passage of my soul
And levy at each step the tax of Night:
Doom, her august accountant, keeps the roll.
All around me now the Titan forces press;
This world is theirs, they hold its days in fee;
I am full of wounds and the fight merciless.
Is it not yet Thy hour of victory?
Even as Thou wilt! What still to Fate Thou owest,
O Ancient of the worlds, Thou knowest, Thou knowest.
Are we in the presence of empty abstractions swollen out with a wind of colourful language? Speech more direct, more realistic cannot be conceived; but of course the directness is from deep within a being who is not circumscribed by the pass-ing body of one brief existence lit by the surface-gazing of a small human mind—and, the realism includes Titan forces, the dark Inconscient and the Ancient of the worlds no less than the slow ages and Time's enormous sea and the days of this material
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world where life, in the Upanishad's phrase, is one long hunger that is death. Maybe Mr. Ezekiel will brush all of Sri Aurobindo's sonnets away as bombastic mystagogism, but, if he does so, how shall we excuse him when it happens that he is himself a true poet by fits and starts and is not unacquainted with seeming abstractions like "God", "soul" and "that inward eye", as two fine stanzas from an Emily-Dickinsonian poem of his will show:
God grant me privacy,
Secretive as the mole,
Inaccessibility
But only of the soul...
God grant me certainty
In kinships with the sky,
Air, earth, fire, sea—
And the fresh inward eye...
Sri Aurobindo would have been drawn to these lines, comprehensive as was the sensitive net of his aesthetic awareness. He had a relish even for modernist modes of expression, when they were inspired:
"There is a 'poeticism' which establishes a sanitary cordon against words and ideas which it considers as prosaic but which properly used can strengthen poetry and extend its range. That limitation I do not admit as legitimate.... I agree with the modernists in their revolt against the romanticist's insistence on emotionalism and his objection to thinking and philosophical reflection in poetry. But the modernist went too far in his revolt. In trying to avoid what I may call poeticism he ceased to be poetic; wishing to escape from rhetorical writing, rhetorical pretension to greatness and beauty of style, he threw out true poetic greatness and beauty, turned from a deliberately poetic
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style to a colloquial tone and even to very flat writing; especially he turned away from poetic rhythm to a prose or half-prose rhythm or to no rhythm at all. Also, he weighed too much on thought and has lost the habit of intuitive sight; by turning emotion out of its intimate chamber in the house of Poetry, he has had to bring in to relieve the dryness of much of his thought too much exaggeration of the lower vital and sensational reactions untransformed or else transformed only by exaggeration. Nevertheless he has perhaps restored to the poet the freedom to think as well as to adopt a certain straightforwardness and directness of style...
"Evidently, you cannot justly apply to the poetry of Whitman the principles of technique which are proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of the old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We have to see whether what is essential to poetry is there and how far the new technique justifies itself by new beauty and perfection, and a certain freedom of mind from old conventions is necessary if our judgment is to be valid or rightly objective..."
Again, apropos of a question about the lines in Savitri—
Knowledge was rebuilt from cells of inference
Into a fixed body flasque and perishabl
Sri Aurobindo wrote: " 'Flasque' is a French word meaning 'slack', 'loose', 'flaccid', etc. I have more than once tried to thrust in a French word like this, for instance,'A harlot empress in a bouge'—somewhat after the manner of Eliot and Ezra Pound.
Now that Savitri has been mentioned we may dip into it with the very passage to which Sri Aurobindo here refers. It is about an occult dimension explored by Savitri's father Aswanathv:
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Into an armoured fierce domain he came
And saw himself wandering like a lost soul
Amid grimed walls and savage slums of Night.
Around him crowded grey and squalid huts
Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power,
Inhuman quarters and demoniac wards.
A pride in evil hugged its wretchedness;
A misery haunting splendour pressed those fell
Dim suburbs of the cities of dream-life.
There Life displayed to the spectator soul
The shadow depths of her strange miracle.
A strong and fallen goddess without hope,
Obscured, deformed by some dire Gorgon spell,
As might a harlot empress in a bouge,
Nude, unashamed, exulting she upraised
Her evil face of perilous beauty and charm
And, drawing panic to a shuddering kiss
Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts,
Allured to their abyss the spirit's fall.
What the modernists very often fail to achieve is here: "true poetic greatness and beauty"—but with "a certain straightforwardness and directness of style" and always mindful of "poetic rhythm." and with no loss of "the habit of intuitive sight". Mr. Ezekiel has stressed Sri Aurobindo's "linguistic habits". There are actually no such trends in Sri Aurobindo: his language varies as the occasion and the theme vary. "The habit of intuitive sight" is the only persistent trait of his poetic character.
This trait may not present a grave problem to the reader when the occasion and the theme are such that things familiar or akin to them or conjecturable through a new combination of them call out to his imaginative perception. But a fair amount
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of matter in Savitri in of a different order. "Savitri" says Sri Aurobindo, "is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch; ...there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry. Moreover, if it is really new in kind, it may employ a new technique, not perhaps absolutely new, but new in some or many of its elements: in that case old rules and canons and standards may be quite inapplicable.... I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced; if, for instance, I indulge in the wealth-burdened line or passage, it is not merely for the pleasure of the indulgence, but because there is that burden, or at least what I conceive to be that, in the vision or the experience. When the expression has been found, I have to judge, not by the intellect or any set poetical rule, but by an intuitive feeling, whether it is entirely the right expression and, if it is not, I have to change and go on changing until I have received the absolutely right inspiration and the right transcrip-tion of it and must never be satisfied with any à peu près or imperfect transcription even if that makes good poetry of one kind or another. This is what I have tried to do. The critic or reader will judge for himself whether I have succeeded or failed; but if he has seen nothing and understood nothing, it does not follow that his adverse judgment is sure to be the right and true one, there is at least a chance that he may so conclude, not because there is nothing to see and nothing to understand, only poor pseudo-stuff or a rhetorical emptiness but because he was not equipped for the vision or the understanding."
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The above is as if penned precisely to answer an Ezekiel cross with poetry like Thought the Paraclete. But, even were it true that such poetry was of a dubious nature, it would be a gross procedure either to condemn all Savitri out of hand or to put a stigma on the whole of Sri Aurobindo's poetic production. Savitri itself is not esoteric throughtout. It takes up most problems of human thought and deals with them in a large light, as in a passage like:
Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men
To greatness; an inspired labour chisels
With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.
Implacable in the passion of their will,
Lifting the hammers of titanic toil
The demiurges of the universe work;
They shape with giant strokes their own; their sons
Are marked with their enormous stamp of fire.
A new Aeschylus seems to find tongue in this grandiose vision. But Sri Aurobindo does not always pitch his note so high. He can "pactise", as a neologism of his own would put it, with common things and borrow his imagery from them without a real drop:
Nothing is all our own that we create;...
The genius too receives from some high fount
Concealed in a supernal secrecy
The work that gives him an immortal name...
A sample from the laboratory of God
Of which he holds the patent upon earth,
Comes to him wrapt in golden coverings;
He listens for Inspiration's postman knock
And takes delivery of the priceless gift
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A little spoilt by the receiver mind
Or mixed with the manufacture of his brain:
When least defaced, then is it most divine.
Although his ego claims the world for its use,
Man is a dynamo for the cosmic work
Nature does most in him, God the high rest:
Only his soul's acceptance is his own.
When Savitri is not "philosophy" as here or "symbol" as elsewhere, it is "legend"—and in that legend there is a passionate play of the human heart. Its announced theme is Love—Love that has chosen once and will not choose again no matter if it is overshadowed by Doom. The long debate between Love and Death makes excellent dramatic verse. When Yama the Death-God claims to be the real world-creator and says to Savitri:
"Mortal, whose spirit is my wandering breath,
Whose transience was imagined by my smile,
Flee clutching thy poor gains to thy trembling breast.
Depart in peace, if peace for man is just"—
Savitri replies:
"Who is this God imagined by thy night,
Contemptuously creating worlds disdained,
Who made for vanity the brilliant stars?
Not he who has reared his temple in my thoughts
And made his sacred floor my human heart.
My God is Will and triumphs in his paths,
My God is Love and sweetly suffers all.
To him I have offered hope for sacrifice
And gave my longings as a sacrament.
Who shall prohibit or hedge in his course,
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The wonderful, the charioteer, the swift?
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..."
The last three lines make us feel, with a typical Dantesque brevity of suggestion though in a more imaged manner and with an acuter substance, the descent as of a beatific Beatrice into Inferno:
Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce tale, .
Che la vostra misera non mi tange,
Ni fiamma d'este incendio non m'assale.1
Yes, we meet with real dramatic quality in the Savitri-legend. And then there is Sri Aurobindo the writer of actual dramas: five full plays palpitant with various motifs against a background of history and coloured with the dreams and deeds of diverse cultures pass before us to prove that Sri Aurobindo is not just mystical vision and spiritual experience. Though behind all that the plays set forth we feel the pressure of cosmic forces and supra-terrestrial influences, they do not intrude in any way to render the mind erratic or the flesh anaemic. And one of the works, The Viziers of Bassora, a favourite of Sri Aurobindo's, is a hilarious comedy, delightfully down-to-earth—not indeed without idealism but everywhere shot with irrepressible vitality.
Besides the dramas, we have the long hexametrical epic Ilion
1, I may translate, of course inadequately, thus:
The grace of God has made my spirit such
I move untroubled by your suffering,
Nor me these cruel tongues of fire can touch.
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tussles of politics and confrontations of warfare and tensions of love as well as high debate in the empyrean among the Gods. Even in the Gods' assembly we witness intense pulls this way and that of universal ideas and emotions, aspirations and ambitions. Aphrodite, knowing that Zeus has willed in favour of Hera and Pallas, comes with
her perfect mouth a rose of resistance
Chidingly budded 'gainst Fate...
Passionate and desperate are some of her words:
"What though no second Helen find a second Paris,...
Ever while earth is embraced by the sun and hot with his kisses...
Me shall men seek with my light or their darkness, sweetly or crudely,
Cold on the ice of the north or warm with the heats of the southland,
Slowly enduring my touch or with violence rapidly burning.
I am the sweetness of living, I am the touch of the Master.
Love shall die bound to my stake like a victim adorned as for bridal,
Life shall be bathed in my flames and be purified gold or ashes.
I, Aphrodite, shall move the world for ever and ever..."
The War-God Ares, denied his free dominion, refuses to dwell in Greece and looks forward to the Greeks' successors in Europe:
"Consuls browed like the cliffs and plebeians stern of the wolf-brood,
Senates of kings and armies of granite that grow by disaster.,."
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These shall fulfil him until they too
"Slowly with haughtiness perish compelled by mortality's transience
Leaving a Roman memory stamped on the ages of weakness..."
All this is epic utterance, and for nearly 5000 lines we have Sri Aurobindo fused with Homer. Evidendy Mr. Ezekiel knows nothing of Ilon's superb achievement—and yet he passes final sentence on Sri Aurobindo's value as poet.
In the very field of spirituality we have not only lofty vision articulated with a masterly control but also in one place a rare note of laughter and irony. The realisation of the infinite Self free from the flux of nature has been one of India's highest spiritual ideals. In many a sonnet Sri Aurobindo has quintes-senced the experience in words; but his own ideal is not merely the inner liberation, and in the sonnet called Self he has hit off unforgettably the fiasco to which it often leads:
He said, "I am egoless, spiritual, free",
Then swore because his dinner was not ready.
I asked him why. He said, "It is not me,
But the belly's hungry god who gets unsteady."
I asked him why. He said, "It is his play.
I am unmoved within, desireless, pure.
I care not what may happen day by day."
I questioned him, "Are you so very sure?"
He answered, "I can understand doubt. But to be free is all. It does notmatter
How you may kick and howl and rage and shout,
Making a row over your daily platter.
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To be aware of self is liberty,
Self I have got and, having self, am free."
Another sidelight on the poet who was a practitioner of "the Integral Yoga" is his keen interest in world-events. One remembers his open declaration of whole-hearted sympathy with the Allied cause during the Second Great War in spite of admitting that the Allies were far from spotless and were but the Imperialists of yesterday. On October 16, 1939 he wrote The Dwarf Napoleon,a diatribe on Hitler, exposing his false and futile ambition to be
Even as the immense colossus of the past.
Sri Aurobindo, with the Yogi's eye, discerned an occult reality at work behind Hitler:
A Titan Power supports this pigmy man—
and he read a terrible threat to earth-life's evolutionary possibilities if the Swastika were to triumph. What is most remarkable about the poem, however, is its ending:
In his high villa on the fatal hill
Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice,
Dictator of his action's sudden choice,
The tiger leap of a demoniac skill.
Too small and human for that dreadful Guest,
An energy his body cannot invest,—
A tortured channel, not a happy vessel,
Drives him to think and act and cry and wrestle.
Thus driven he must stride on conquering all,
Threatening and clamouring, brutal, invincible,
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Perhaps to meet upon his storm-swept road
A greater devil—or thunderstroke of God.
Let us fix firmly in our minds the date when this was written: it was, as we have said, October 16,1939. Already before its composition Hitler had made a pact with the only other Titan one saw on the scene: Stalin. That was on August 23 of the same year. Britain and France had but recently—September 3—gone to war with Germany. Hitler's most sensational striding on and conquering all was still in the future. And it was not before June 22, 1941, that Hitler broke with Stalin and attacked Russia. Only on November 25,1942 the tide of batde in Russia began to turn against Hitler at Stalingrad. Rommell's crack-up in Tunisia, face to face with British and Commonwealth armies, came as late as May 12, 1943. The invasion of Normandy by Anglo-American troops was still years away: it began on June 6,1944. Sri Aurobindo's poem proves more than an occult realism: it proves also a spiritual prophetism. And we may emphasise the precision of the prophetic note. The poet mentions not only a " greater devil" but also a "thunderstroke of God". The former expression points to the combating of the gruesome Nazi "New Order" by the more massive totalitarian machine and monster of Stalinist Communism. The latter phrase sums up the decisive action of the Western democracies, behind which, in spite of their defects, Sri Aurobindo saw the Divine Power operating. One may thus picture, through the alternatives listed in Sri Aurobindo's last line, Hitler met on two fronts by roughly two forces of opposite characters, either of them stronger in the end than the one of which his body served as the channel or vessel. There is certainly no mystical degeneracy in the poem and the accent is ringing and positive. No critic can complain of befuddlement on any score.
It should be evident that Mr, Ezekiel has overshot his mark
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by miles. And we may close here but for a delicious bit of ganging agley of the plans of mice and men. It must compose our grand finale. The poem of Mr. Ezekiel's from which we have quoted two effective stanzas as well as another piece, Enterprise, which narrates what "started as a pilgrimage" and ended thus:
When, finally, we reached the place,
We hardly knew why we were there.
The trip had darkened every face,
Our deeds were neither great nor rare.
Home is where we have to gather grace—
both these compositions of distinct merit yet in no particularly memorable key occur in An Anthology of Commonwealth Verse,
If it were less beautiful,
And my eyes did not catch beauty, if in the morning
My eyes did not catch beauty,
I would have peace.
O Beauty fair goddess
deign to be kind on my heart your worshipper.
Rather milk-and-water Georgian stuff, this, sentimental though not devoid of all attraction. But in the same compilation we have also a poem of Sri Aurobindo's. In the Introduction to the part distinguished as "Poetry from India" we read about Sri Aurobindo: "The younger Ghose [the elder was Manmohan] is one of the great Indian poets of this century. He is experimental and highly individual... His poems are much influenced
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by modern science and are deeply philosophical... Young modern poets, however, have revolted against his style and consider his influence to be a danger to contemporary Indo-Anglian poetry, dismissing his work as 'greasy, weak-spined and purple-adjectived'. " The pejorative epithets are from a Manifesto by Mr. Lal. So too are some other words later on in the Introduction, where these young poets are described to "have set themselves to free Indo-Anglian poetry from what they call the 'blurred and rubbery sentiments' of the Aurobindonian school", to which, among others, K. D. Sethna is said to belong—"all of them considerable poets" in the compiler's opinion. If Mr. Ezekiel had been on the rampage against Sri Aurobindo before 1963 his vinegar would also have seeped into the Introduction as smacking of "young modern poets". But, for all the hostility meant to find a reflex there, the Introduction cannot be regarded as fundamentally hostile to Sri Aurobindo: when it speaks in its own voice it does not echo Mr. Lal or anticipate Mr. Ezekiel. How can it, indeed, when the compiler could pick out from both these progressive poets no very modernist inspiration nor anything striking deep either by sublimity, poignancy or ingenuity? But what a contrast to their efforts is the sonnet cited from Sri Aurobindo, A Dream of Surreal Science,1 satirising the vagaries of modern materialism and ending:
A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout.
Surely, after poetry with such an accent, the reader of Mr.Ezekiel's sweeping denunciation needs a little re-thinking.
Perhaps our critic will argue: "From the vast range of Sri Aurobindo's writings the anthologist could take no sample of Sri Aurobindo the Yogi. She must have found everything
1 See p. 440 for the whole poem.
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inadequate there and could pick out merely this non-Yogic piece. It must be, in her view, a fine freak. It condemns rather than recommends the spiritual poetry. And possibly even the rest of Sri Aurobindo failed to impress her as poetic enough in spite of its would-be lofty language."
But there can be no such implication in the choice. The anthologist has particularly read in Sri Aurobindo a poet inclined to philosophy and interested in science, and here she felt was an apt example, with the additional merit of a humour that, like "the innumerable laughter of the waves" heard by Aeschylus, had depths under it. She appears to have thought Sri Aurobindo's directly Yogic work not suitable for a popular book even though it obviously was contributory to his being "a considerable poet". Her picking out A Dream of Surreal Science imbues it with no freakish hue. And what the piece drives home to us is simply that the most vigorous, open-gazed, modern utterance is from somebody whom Mr. Ezekiel and his tribe picture as bombina-ting in the void. There is no proof that the same essential power which is expressed elsewhere is not expressing itself here, the difference lying only in the existential aspect, the special mood and mould adopted. Nor can this mood and mould be cut apart entirely from Sri Aurobindo the Yogi. As with The Dwarf Napoleon, the date of the sonnet is worth attending to: it is September 25, 1939, three weeks before that poem. And yet the Atom Bomb, which at that time was regarded as almost impossible of realisation, is already foreseen by the sonneteer six years in advance of the destruction of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and many more ahead of the menace of the mushroom cloud to the whole world with the invention of the Hydrogen Bomb. Behind the felicitous wit there is once more the spiritual seer.
That seer is no juggler with pompous rhetoric in verse: he is a true poet with eyes cast widely outward at the same time
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that they are turned deeply inward; and the seer-poet is himself but the culmination of a visionary force which from the beginning bore, again and again, the master word of a many-sided creativity.
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