On Poetry
THEME/S
2
Even in his juvenilia, written round about his twentieth year, Sri Aurobindo has at the same time a freshness and a finish, proving that from the beginning the artist went hand in hand with the visionary. Of course, the visioning is done by the heart of a youth and it is coloured by the temper of Romanticism which was inevitable in the eighties of the last century. But the blending of the rich with the graceful and shapely is an effect of the Greek and Latin Muse, in fervent dedication to whom the young Indian lived at Cambridge. Echoes and immaturities are not absent, but the inspired individual note is often struck. Thus The Lover's Complaint, which has the same subject as Virgil's Eighth Eclogue and treats of Damon's sad memories of Nysa who has been snatched away by the uncouth Mopsus, has in one stanza a most delightful originality. Where Virgil makes Damon say only that when he was a little lad of 10 and, along with his mother, plucking dewy apples from the lower boughs in a garden, he first saw Nysa and a fatal frenzy swept him off his feet, Sri Aurobindo adds a new turn to the story with a faint recollection of Sappho's "apple that reddens on the top branch" and concludes with a conceit of poignant whimsicality:
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She asked for fruit long-stored in autumn's hold.
These gave I; from the branch dislodged I threw
Sweet-hearted apples in their age of gold
And pears divine for taste and hue.
And one I saw, should all the rest excel;
But error led my plucking hand astray
And with a sudden sweet dismay
My heart into her apron fell.
The wit, for all the occasional romantic embroidery, is Attic as well as Aurobindonian. And surely a snatch from the Greek Anthology meets us with yet a personal accent in the earth-wisdom of A Doubt:
Many boons the new years make us
But the old world's gifts were three,
Dove of Cypris, wine of Bacchus,
Pan's sweet pipe in Sicily.
Love, wine, song, the core of living
Sweetest, oldest, musicalest,
If at end of forward striving
These, Life's first, proved also best?
Then there is that translation from Meleager, A Rose of Women, which is worth comparing with F. L. Lucas's rendering. Sri Aurobindo writes :
Now lilies blow upon the windy height,
Now flowers the pansy kissed by tender rain,
Narcissus builds his house of self-delight
And Love's own fairest flower blooms again;
Vainly your gems, O meadows, you recall;
One simple girl breathes sweeter than you all.
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Lucas's version is :
Now the white violet's blooming, and that lover of the showers,
Narcissus, and the lilies go climbing up the hill,
And now, delight of lovers, spring-flower among the flowers,
Sweet Rose of Persuasion, blossoms my Zenophil.
Ah meadows, vain your laughter, in vain your shining hair:
Than all your fragrant garlands the lass I love's more fair.
Verbally, Lucas may be more faithful, but, though attractive, he is hardly as neat and compact with a happy balance between naturalness and artistry. To take one point in Sri Aurobindo: to say that "lilies blow" is absolutely natural, yet when they do so on "the windy height" we see the artistic felicity of the word "blow" rather than "bloom", which could have changed places with it here from line 4 : it is as if the lilies were fused with the winds and their odour were all over the height.
Nor is the youthful Sri Aurobindo locked up in a tower of ancient ivory. He has poems of a personal heartbeat, and his eyes are open to contemporary situations as his verses on Parnell and Ireland show. The same modernism is astir in another piece, The Lost Deliverer, which begins with an allusion to Greek mythology but moves on to some dramatic development of the day. The subject is not very clear, but ignorance on our part detracts in no way from the poem's force and from the grandeur, the irony, the tragedy of the drama summed up in perfect language :
Pythian he came; repressed beneath his heel
The hydra of the world with bruiséd head.
Vainly, since Fate's immeasurable wheel
Could parley with a straw. A weakling sped
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The bullet when to custom's usual night
We fell because a woman's faith was light.
The opening lines telescope two incidents of classical legend. Apollo is called Pythian because he slew the serpent Python which was tormenting the god's mother Latona, while the killer of the terrible Lernaean Hydra with the hundred heads was Hercules. A rare leader, enlightened and heroic, steps forth into view, but his charisma is counteracted by petty circumstances. The poem's style proves that the young Indian author did not confine himself to the exquisite in expression. The phrase in lines 2 nd 3 about Fate's wheel and its parleying with a straw has an absolute magnificence condensing to a revelatory figure one of life's recurrent anomalies—events with worldwide import arrested in their course or deviated from it by small unexpected turns, some rash impulse or sudden frailty either of the main actor or of other characters involved with him. If one came across the phrase out of context, one would be inclined to grope for a Shakespearean source. It is as if the Bard had raised to the intensest pitch possible to him an insight taking brief shape with some linguistic affinity to his Ancient Pistol's fluent description—
cruel Fate
And giddy Fortune's furious fickle wheel—
as well as to his Hamlet's extended reflection
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake.
The closing line, too, about our falling by the lightness of a
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woman's faith has a memorable finality in its semi-epigram. Here also we can feel not only a broad sweep of vision over la condition humaine but a kind of secret Shakespearean relish in the piquant posture of a large-scale down-dropping, as if "never to rise again", because of psychological "trifles light as air
Felicitous in-look and a subtle strength of spirit are the repeated mark of Sri Aurobindo's poetry from the start and it grows increasingly keener and finer on the whole with the opening of his Europeanised mind, familiar with French, German and Italian no less than Greek and Latin, to the manifold opulence of his country's culture and life. The first result, before the century is out, is the composition of two narratives in blank verse, that most difficult of mediums in languages that have no very prominent formal support of "quantity" in their numbers. To Sri Aurobindo blank verse came with an inspired naturalness which some critics have compared with Milton's born hand for it. His style too has been called Miltonic. But if we accept the term it must be with no thought-saving looseness. For, Milton who produced Paradise Lost in his old age produced also Comus in his twenty-seventh year: the styles of the two are not precisely the same. Indeed Paradise Lost is one of the world's greatest poetic achievements, yet Comus has a flexibility and a richness that are often missing in the huge high thunders of the epic chant. What, however, Sri Aurobindo wrote at the same age as Milton wrote Comus—namely, Love and Death, the most finished among his early works in blank verse—holds in its short span of about a thousand lines a snatch of the power and amplitude found in the colossus of Milton's old age and also a delicate plastic splendour reminiscent of Comus. The fusion of the early Milton with the late : this may be taken in general to characterise at its best the blank verse of Sri Aurobindo's twenties. But, while some actual influence from
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Milton must be admitted, there is seldom a mere repetition of style or structure: what the fusion mainly displays, besides the assured movement of line after moulded line, is just the interweaving of qualities that mostiy fall apart in Milton's life. Within the fusion is a diversity of effects that cannot even remotely be always called Miltonic and, whatever the effect, a striking individuality makes itself felt.
Only in one special respect this diversity can be called invariably Miltonic. Milton, more impressively than any other eminent poet, carried the soul of past music mingled with a spirit that makes all things new. In fact, he had the avowed ambition to gather up in his Paradise Lost Aeschylus and Sophocles, Virgil, Lucretius and Dante into a mature mastery of style animated by his own genius and character. A consummate scholar in various literatures, deeply saturated with the great traditions of poetry, Sri Aurobindo too exhibits—particularly in the blank verse of Love and Death—a phenomenon of many colours from the past, the voice of diverse ages. Yet there is hardly a trace of slavish derivativeness, not a sign of the pastiche: only a versatile mode of expression is the outcome. Originality is almost rampant and with a technique to match of skilful sound-accord and metrical modulation and change of pace. Two passages may be picked out nearly at random to illustrate the individual organic nature of the poetry. One is psychologically imaginative:
...He heard
Through the great silence that was now his soul,
The forest sounds, a squirrel's leap through leaves,
The cheeping of a bird just overhead,
A peacock with his melancholy cry
Complaining far away, and tossings dim
And slight unnoticeable stir of trees.
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But all these were to him like distant things
And he alone in his heart's void. And yet
No thought he had of her so lately lost.
Rather far pictures, trivial incidents
Of that old life before her delicate face
Had lived for him, dumbly distinct like thoughts
Of men that die, kept with long pomps his mind
Excluding the dead girl. So still he was,
The birds flashed by him with their swift small wings,
Fanning him. Then he moved, then rigorous
Memory through all his body shuddering
Awoke, and he looked up and knew the place,
And recognised greenness immutable,
And saw old trees and the same flowers still bloom.
He felt the bright indifference of earth
And all the lonely uselessness of pain.
The other passage is imaginative with a weird phantasmal motif:
Hopeless Patala, the immutable
Country, where neither sun nor rain arrives,
Nor happy labour of the human plough
Fruitfully turns the soil, but in vague sands
And indeterminable strange rocks and caverns
That into silent blackness huge recede,
Dwell the great serpent and his hosts, writhed forms,
Sinuous, abhorred, through many horrible leagues
Coiling in a half darkness.
This style which is simultaneously linked with the past and inseparable from the personality of the poet is already a vital factor in the narrative of nearly a thousand and five hundred
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lines which Sri Aurobindo wrote some years earlier than Love and Death and which, in view of its teeming excellences and the poet's young age (barely twenty-three), may be considered with Keats's Hyperion the most remarkable production in blank verse in the English tongue. Urvasie—the story of King Puru-ravus, a mortal hero, who took a nymph of heaven, an Apsara, for bride—is shot with an impetuous beauty and steeped in love's coundess moods. A passage, capturing various phases of the tumult of desire with an alert kaleidoscopic art which casts back to the sensuous mobility of the Elizabethans and strains forward to the nervous subdety of the moderns, may be instanced:
He moved, he came towards her. She, a leaf
Before a gust among the nearing trees,
Cowered. But, all a sea of mighty joy
Rushing and swallowing up the golden sand,
With a great cry and glad Pururavus
Seized her and caught her to his bosom thrilled,
Clinging and shuddering. All her wonderful hair
Loosened and the wind seized and bore it streaming
Over the shoulder of Pururavus
And on his cheek a softness. She o'erborne,
Panting, with inarticulate murmers lay,
Like a slim tree half seen through driving hail,
Her naked arms clasping his neck, her cheek
And golden throat averted, and wide trouble
In her large eyes bewildered with their bliss.
Amid her wind-blown hair their faces met.
With her sweet limbs all his, feeling her breasts
Tumultuous up against his beating heart,
He kissed the glorious mouth of heaven's desire.
So clung they as two shipwrecked in a surge.
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Then strong Pururavus, with godlike eyes
Mastering hers, cried tremulous: "O beloved,
Omiser of thy rich and happy voice,
One word, one word to tell me that thou lovest."
And Urvasie, all broken on his bosom,
Her godhead in his passion lost, moaned out
From her imprisoned breasts, "My lord, my love!"
Nor is Sri Aurobindo in his early twenties an expert only at giving us love's leaping and engulfing joy: he has an equally skilful hand in depicting love's large desolation. When Pururavus lost Urvasie he went searching for her across woods and streams to the mountains that had framed their first meeting. He did not linger on the inferior heights,
But plunged o'er difficult gorge and prone ravine
And rivers thundering between dim walls,
Driven by immense desire, until he came
To dreadful silence of the peaks and trod
Regions as vast and lonely as his love.
The second and fifth verses here are rare triumphs of inward and outward grandeur. Those mysterious rivers that are like Pururavus's heart and those regions of silent snow that are like his mind are imaginative figurations worded and rhythmed with a strange spiritual and scriptural power that is a presage of Sri Aurobindo's later performance as a poet of Yoga. The presage is, of course, indirect since the inspiring motive is a hunger of a secular kind, high-toned though this hunger is and clear of the crude and the cramped which ordinarily go with secular impulses. But something in the visionary suggestion and in the large deep-thrilling vibrancy throws on that hunger the aspect of a veiled quest of the Infinite.1
1The passage from which these 5 lines have been culled, as well as the
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In a less veiled manner Urvasie creates an impression of occult realities or entities. There is not yet the Yogi's eye at work, embodying with intimate awareness the forces and beings behind the earth's complex search and march. But with a kindled imagination Sri Aurobindo gives us a glimpse of unearthly strangenesses. Towards the end of the poem there is a long passage attempting what may be called a sustained glimpse. Pururavus is pictured as ascending from earth to meet the lost Urvasie. In India the perfect other-worlds have been set by tradition in a mystic north, with their entrance the country of the Uttara-kurus:
a voice at last
Moved from far heavens, other than our sky.
And he arose as one impelled and came
Past the supreme great ridges northward, came
Into the wonderful land far up the world
Dim-looming, where the Northern Kurus dwell,
The ancients of the world, invisible,
Among forgotten mists. Through mists he moved
Feeling a sense of unseen cities, hearing
No sound, nor seeing face, but conscious ever
Of an immense traditionary life
Throbbing round him and dreams historical...
In the middle part of the poem there is a brief suggestion of the heaven from which Urvasie descends to cohabit with the human Pururavus rather than with the Gods. Through the waters of the Ganges' divine source she passes on to the portals of Paradise (Swarga) and along the slope leading towards the world:
preceding long passage quoted, has been dealt with in some detail in The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 18-20, 22-25.
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There she looked down
With yearning eyes far into endless space.
Behind her stood the green felicitous peaks
And trembling tops of woods and pulse of blue
With those calm cloudless summits quivering.
All heaven was behind her, but she sent
No look to those eternal seats of joy...
What is memorable here is the communication of the magical livingness of paradisal scenery through words like "trembling", "pulse", "quivering", as if some vast conscious being were grown wood and sky and mountain and as if its eternal bliss were all the time astir in them.
But in Urvasie Sri Aurobindo is not merely suggestive of the supra-terrestrial through description. In one passage he brings out in imaginative exposition the heart of the 'romantic mysticism that has conceived the Apsaras, of whom Pururavus's beloved is the most perfect representative. The Apsaras of Indian mythology, said to have been churned out of the Ocean of Existence, are the occult personalised agencies through which Divine Beauty is at universal play in the phenomena of sense-experience, in the aspirations of the sensuous mind. The passage where Sri Aurobindo is absolutely explicit about the Goddess-function of his heroine is a speech put into the mouth of Tilottama, a sister-nymph, as she brings Urvasie to Pururavus from Swarga:
"Yet, son of Ila, one is man and other
The Apsaras of heaven, daughters of the sea,
Unlimited in being, Ocean-like.
They not to one lord yield nor in one face
Limit the universe, but like sweet air,
Water unowned and beautiful common light
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In unrestrained surrender remain pure.
In patient paths of Nature upon earth
And over all the toiling stars we fill
With sacred passion large high-venturing spirits
And visit them with bliss; so are they moved
To immense creative anguish, glad if through
Heart-breaking toil once in bare seasons dawn
Our golden breasts between their hands or rush
Our passionate presence on them like a wave.
In heaven bright-limbed with bodily embrace
We clasp the Gods, and clasp the souls of men,
And know with winds and flowers liberty.
But what hast thou with us or winds or flowers?"
Some of Sri Aurobindo's subtlest and most felicitous poetry is here. An echo or rather counterpart of phrases like:
glad if through
Our passionate presence on them like a wave—
meets us in the long account—too long to be quoted at this point in full1—of Ruru's descent into the Underworld in search of the prematurely dead Priyumvada. This account may well be adjudged a ne plus ultra in the genre which we may call mythic rather than mystic but which in Sri Aurobindo's hands is still typically Indian in that the unearthly is as if felt and seen and not just conceived vividly by the curious thought. After sailing along the Ganges in a dim evening, Ruru launches on the ocean. There, with a whirling of the horizons, he is drawn in by the profundities:
1 All of it is given on pp. 17-19.
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He down the gulf where the loud waves collapsed
Descending, saw with floating hair arise
The daughters of the sea in pale green light,
A million mystic breasts suddenly bare...
Love and Death contains also what we have termed an indirect presage of Sri Aurobindo's later spiritual and scriptural power of expression. There are those lines of majestic pathos:
Long months he travelled between grief and grief,
Reliving thoughts of her with every pace,
Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind.
We are reminded of that high-water mark of the Miltonic "grand style severe":
Who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity?
Something of the same accent, though at a more reflective than visionary pitch, breathes in Sri Aurobindo's line:
Through the great silence that was now his soul...
But Love and Death, as its very name implies, is a testament of the passionate heart and, just as the descent into the Underworld is a masterpiece in its own kind, the speech of Madan, the Indian Eros, attains a supreme level with its psychological penetrativeness. We may glance at a few of the arresting phrases in this 41-line-long "manifesto". "I," says the Love-God,
"knit life to life
With interfusions of opposing souls
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And sudden meetings and slow sorceries..
"I," he continues, "teach filial heart-beats"
"the young mother's passionate deep look, Earth's high similitude of One not earth."
These are among the gifts for which he is praised. He ends by adding:
"But fiercer shafts I can, wild storms blown down
Shaking fixed minds and melting marble natures,____
Racked thirsting jealousy and kind hearts made stone:..
Cold lusts that linger and fierce fickleness..."
In another place, after being told of Ruru's daily happiness with his young bride, we read:
But Love has joys for spirits born divine
More bleeding-lovely than his thornless rose.
Working out this truth, Love and Death communicates to us its sense of the tears of things and, at the same time, the indomitable smile within man's soul which wrestles with fate and triumphs over mortality.
The blank verse of both Urvasie and Love and Death is surprisingly supple for the late Victorian era when liberties were not very usual. We may glance at a few of these early manifestations of Sri Aurobindo's sensitive technique. The dangerous second foot is inverted in
The birds flashed by him with their swift small wings
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and followed by what is nearly a trochee, a light one which at the same time seems to keep up the suddenness suggested by the preceding foot and join up with the run of slack syllables between "flashed" and the three stressed ones at the end. This run suggests the brevity of the flashing and, we may add, the concluding trio of stresses in which only one stress falls on an intrinsically long vowel conveys too the quick though unmistakable passage and the diminutive though definite disturbance. In
Giant precipices black-hewn and bold
there is a strong double trochee at the start making a clear counterpoint to the iambic beat, a counterpoint which resolves into regularity only at the close after passing through a pair of peculiar knots of the two movements: a doubly slack third foot and a doubly accented fourth. A very effective, combination of unexpected feet, commencing with a dactyl, is:
Lingering, while the wind smote him with her hair.
But perhaps the most memorable is:
Mad the boy thrilled upwards, then spent ebbed back
The rhythm starting with a trochee, followed by a spondee, again a trochee, a semi-spondee and a full spondaic foot, renders the technique keenly expressive of the sudden access of emotion becoming strong and sustained enough to create a break in the normal movement of life and cause a vertical leap, as it were, and, by that extraordinary effort, exhausting itself and making the leaper drop into the old posture, with a slow weight at first and afterwards heavily all a heap.
Some instances of originality in the word-technique of these early narratives may also be marked. In the lines from Urvasie,
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Suddenly
From motionless battalions as outride
A speed disperse of horsemen,
there is not only a Miltonic syntax: there is also the word "disperse", a Latinised verbal adjective making a new Miltonism. One may doubt whether this is wholly a success. But surely a creative touch of the Latin scholar in Sri Aurobindo is present in the phrase from Love and Death:
But if with price, ah God! what easier! Tears
Dreadful, innumerable I will absolve
Or pay with anguish through the centuries.
The word "absolve" is used not in its English sense of releasing from sins or from debts, but in its Latin connotation of paying off a debt and then too with a stretched sense, for instead of saying "I will pay off with tears" Ruru says, "I will pay off tears" as the price of the absolution—a deliberate incorrectness, a purposive violence to the language for the sake of poetic tension. Apropos of Latinisation, a piquantly imaginative term may be pointed out in
As a bright bird comes flying
From airy extravagance to his own home,
where "extravagance" is employed with its Latin connotation of "wandering outside" striking through the English sense of excess or immoderation. A word-originality achieved by a small stroke of colloquial, in preference to academic, grammar is in Madan's allusion to the Death-god :
... but behind me, older than me,
He comes with night and cold tremendous shade.
We have in the second "me" with its cumulative power, an example where to be ungrammatical is better than being ineffective in sense or intolerable in rhythm with the more correct and literary "I". Shelley too knew this when in his Ode to the West Wind he said : "Be thou me...." Finally, we may cite as word-originality of another type the suggestive effect of consonantal sounds in the line mentioning one of the Snake-lords of the Underworld—
Magic Carcotaka all flecked with fire—
a line of splendid art in both visual and rhythmical impact from that mythic imagination which is among the most noteworthy features of Love and Death.
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