Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

"HEAVEN'S VAST EAGLE"

Discussion of a Literary Point

A Reader's Letter

In The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo (p. 26) you find some small fault with "Like heaven's vast eagle" in the lines from the very early narrative poem of Sri Aurobindo, Urvasie:

Like heaven's vast eagle all that blackness swept

Down over the inferior snowless heights

And swallowed up the dawn.

You suggest instead: "Like a vast eagle", which appears reasonable. And then realizing that "heaven" was there for rhythm you would allow "Like some

I'm all the more perplexed because you say that this would "stir the imagination with a clearer and closer touch"—but in your poem "Sri Aurobindo" (The Secret Splendour, Splendour, p. 60) you have

Eagles of rapture lifting, flickerless,

A golden trance wide-winged on golden air.

Would you then not delete "rapture" here for a clearer, closer touch and make up the metre in another way?

This is just a dart from my provocative nature on a vital-pressured day.

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The Author's Reply

Your dart of a question is welcome. My answer, to be clear, has to be a little lengthy, more a lance than a dart.

By way of a preamble I may confide that I am not in the habit of sitting in corrective judgment on the inspiration of a poet like Sri Aurobindo. In my book, although I did discriminate between several levels no less than kinds, I could not but recognise the varied excellence of his work. Only in this particular matter I offered a direct, even if passing, criticism of a different order. Sri Aurobindo himself saw all that I had written in my book. With his grand impartiality he allowed all sorts of views on his poetry wherever some case could be made out. I cannot definitely claim that he must have seen eye to eye with me in these comments of mine on a very early bit of his poetic output. But I have a sense that if I had made an entire faux pas in critical estimate he would have been kind enough to guide me. So I may make bold now to put up a defence of my attitude.

First, I must refer you back to the precise reason I give for inclining to pick fault with "heaven's" in the line: "Like heaven's vast eagle..." I am not taking "heaven" as an equivalent of "sky" and understanding the poet to imply that the bird known as the eagle, which belongs to the domain of sky, is a vast one. No known eagle can be so vast as to be comparable to the storm that the poet is describing. The poet is alluding to the mythological Garuda whom Vyasa in the Mahdbhārata describes as colossal and as having eyes like lightning and whose exploits in the heavenly regions he recounts at great length. Although the word "heaven" has a value for the metrical rhythm, I contend that the Garuda-allusion will be missed by the general reader and so his imagination will not be stirred sufficiently: a clearer and closer touch is wanted. That touch, according to me, would come with either "a" or

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"some" in place of "heaven's". Now the point of these substitutes is not just to send the reader's mind to the known bird aquila. If that were the point, the adjective needed would be "the". The suggestion has to be rather indefinite even while a particular species of bird is mentioned. The eagle has to be "vast" with a vastness beyond any possessed by the big bird of that name. Then alone will there be true competence of comparison, a simile measuring up to the phenomenon described. Both "a" and "some" take us out of mere ornithology into a sphere of suggestion exceeding nature even while borrowing a form from nature.

Now, as between the alternatives I offer, I think at present that "some" is not only rhythmically more strong, inviting a semi-stress, but is also more successful in lifting us out of nature's repertory to conjure up a real rara avis—an eagle which might have been—a black king-bird huge enough to blot out "the dawn." The article "a", for all its indefiniteness, can have still a certain naturalistic individualising import here. Although we need not, we may tend to think of one member of a tribe of vast eagles such as may be existing in the natural world. "Some" sweeps us clean away into a meta-biology of the imagination.

I feel that your sense of "flatness and inappropriateness" with regard to this adjective comes from the loose common usage in which "some" does duty for mere non-specification, as in your letter's own: "find some small fault..." In poetry it has at times an effective role which cannot be played by "a". You can see its irreplaceableness even in a simple expression like Wordsworth's—

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of today?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,

That has been, and may be again!

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At a deeper level, we have F. T. Prince's

And even we must know what no one yet has understood,

That some great love is over what we do...

At an intenser pitch, there are Browning's phrases:

...some interchange

Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,

Some benediction anciently thy smile:...

Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,

Some wanness where,I think, thy foot may fall!

In a more visionary vein, you have Sri Aurobindo's own:

A Splendour is there, refused to the earthward sight,

That floods some deep flame-covered all-seeing eye...

or else:

As some bright archangel in vision flies

Plunged in dream-caught spirit immensities...

I now come to your last point. You ask me why I write

Eagles of rapture lifting, flickerless,

A golden trance wide-winged on golden air—

instead of deleting "rapture" in order to have a clearer, closer touch, just as I have asked for the deletion of "heaven's" in Sri Aurobindo's "eagle"-line. After the explanation I have given about the mythology of "heaven", you will perceive that my "rapture" belongs to a different universe of discourse. It

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would' be comparable if "heaven" signified "bliss". Actually "heaven" stands for "Supernature" and Supernature's eagle is brought in not because of any rapture-association but because of its supposed immense size. No experience-concept of the spiritual life is here. My "eagles" are rapture turned aquiline, ecstasy mightily upborne, ample-poised, steeped in truth-light.

I may have been rash in wanting a more seizable figure from Sri Aurobindo in that line out of a poem shot with Indian imagery; but aren't you a little more rash in darting a tu quoque at me for my metaphor ? When I speak of "a clearer and closer touch" I do not desire something more earthly, something nearer home, passing more directly to men's bosoms and businesses. I only have in mind what is poetically more realisable, imaginatively more kindling, emotionally more intimate or penetrating. Were my eagles to cease being rapture-substanced, rapture-formed, rapture-motioned, would they touch you more clearly and closely in the sense I have indicated?

By the way, your letter pictures me as "realizing that 'heaven' was there for rhythm". I do appreciate the metrical-rhythmic weight of the word, but surely I don't think Sri Aurobindo was going by the ear alon? He had his eye on the avian hero of Indian mythological tradition. My reference to the rhythm served merely to direct attention to the expressive value, the suggestive strength, brought by the stress which a word like "heaven" would take in the line.

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