Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

THE WORLD OF SRI AUROBINDO'S POETRY*

AN INTRODUCTORY EXPLORATION UP TO SAVITRI

I

Great Poets of Our Times

Yeats, Rilke, Valéry, Bloc: these are the indisputable peaks of poetry the West has thrown up in our times. One may extend the roll by adding Jiménez who has been outshone in the public eye so far by that more picturesque, romantic and tragic-fated countryman of his, Lorca. Several others of a little later generation, with whom Lorca connects at some points, have had a more sensational success by their revolt against all tradition and their seizing mostly in contorted or bizarre image, in complicated and intellectualised idiom, in free semi-prose versification, what they regard as the characteristic chaos of modern life. But, though we may grant them a certain liberative utility at a particular stage of poetic history, their work, even when it has a keen newness and not just oddity or perversity, falls short of the revelation of both the intense and the immense which the older masters of poetic speech bring us in various styles.

Too much of the ingenious intellect, too frequent a prose-turn and too large a preoccupation with that layer of contemporary existence on which the chaotic is luridly real, cut across the subtle seeing and hearing which is the soul of the art of

* Adapted and expanded from an essay written in 1953 to go with a projected volume, Selected Poetry of Sri Aurobindo, and published a little later in Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture, Pondicherry.

Page 56

poetry. They seem to clip again and again in even the most serious, most symbol-charged compositions the wings of what Bloc calls the Spirit of Music throbbing not in calendar time but in an inner dimension of Nature's life and what Rilke figures as the Angelic Order in which, at once terrifying and enrapturing, resides the absolute of earthly song and towards which man should move by opening out of physical "World" into psychological "Space".

Valéry, whose thinking mind is analytic, agnostic, doubtful of norms and reluctant to subscribe to his teacher Mallarmé's aesthetic mysticism, is yet at one with Rilke and Bloc in the personality he unfolds in his poetry. He becomes a penetrating sorter of delicate psychological depths, a poised visionary of the secret founts of his own poetic self ecstatically emerging from a strange nothingness—"Harmonieuse Moi...Mysterieuse Moi" He never forgets that imaginative exaltation and sustained vibrant form are indispensable if great poetry is to be born. We may sacrifice rhetoric as well as fixity of structure and break down the fences erected by the old schools in regard to theme, but poetry must always be something that not merely puts into a different key what can be said in prose but also says what prose is not sufficiently tuned up to articulate.

Perhaps Jiménez in his disclosures of "the animal of the depth of air with wings that cannot fly in the air"—stringent, rarefied, evanescent disclosures depending so much on minute impetuosities and hesitations and shiftings of cadence and tone —illustrates this special function of poetry most quintessentially in certain aspects. It is illustrated too in another manner by the best product of a poet whom the so-called "modernists" often set at the centre of their cult in opposition to the bulk of verse in the past—passages of Eliot's Four Quartets: a fact rather curious, for, if we may judge by it, the less typically modernist a poem the more genuinely poetic it would appear to become. The

Page 57

finest utterances in Four Quartets, like the lines about "being still and still moving" or those about "the moment in and out of time," are not only broadly traditional—at the same time that they are personal—in their religious insight and urgency and akin to Rilke's during some of his tensions of passionate prophetic loneliness: they are also embodied in a flexible verse which is not at all amorphous, haphazard and prosaic but very rhythmically patterned, often directly metrical though not many lines have the same number of feet and though there is a lot of modulation in those whose feet are equal. Among the poets of contemporary England, however, Yeats, while hardly so profound a seer as his friend AE, is the articulator par excellence of the suggestion and the feeling beyond prose. Even when in his later work he goes outside the wizard circle of the Celtic Twilight with its "sweet everlasting voices" and puts his hand on life as lived by flesh and blood among concrete challenges, takes for use words commonly spoken and finds room for many sides of his mind, he rarely loses the magical mood, the inspired no less than measured intonation.

In the East two names have stood high in our own day, one in Urdu and Persian by a dynamic colourful passion of religious thought, the other in Bengali by a deep and exquisitely imaged devotionalism, and both by an intonation inspired and measured: Iqbal and Tagore. But there is a third that is coming more and more to the front—the sole Indian poet whom, as Francis Watson reported in a radio talk from England in 1951, Yeats had singled out as writing creatively in English. And this name is likely to be found, in a final assessment, to be in a class apart. Not that the purely poetic quality of those two or of the others we have listed is less, but profundities and amplitudes and heights of experience greater than any they command are compassed and there is a royal quantity of quality in excess of anything done by them. Face to face with a multiaspected

Page 58

spiritual epic like Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol, with its nearly twenty-four thousand lines, we cannot help feeling the enormous stature of Sri Aurobindo. But, even outside this performance, we have before us an abundance of poetic creation which is out of the ordinary in merit.

To get him into proper focus we should mention also that his life covers a period of seventy-eight years: 1872-1950. Hence his contemporaneity is bound to be many-shaded. But here we must be free of several confusions. To be contemporary, a poet must not be expected to be, as some of the Victorians thought, the expressive channel of popular currents or, like the modernists, the mouthpiece of the exaggerations of his age. Fundamentally, to be contemporary can mean nothing more than to be, in every period of one's life, aware of the experience that is offered to one in ways never quite the same before. How much one stresses or does not stress the peculiar ways, how far one works within their terms or ranges outside them affects in no wise one's contemporaneity. Again, a poet's momentousness for his age (or for all history) is not determined by any of these factors. It depends on the meaning with which his attitude is fraught and, inasmuch as the meaning is an integral part of his poetry, on the art by which his matter and manner fuse and kindle up. Sri Aurobindo the poet has undoubtedly been contemporary in the fundamental sense and, in a good deal of his output, momentous. In certain respects, as we shall gather later, he is in the best sense a "futurist". Otherwise too, there is nothing to expose him, just because he is not a strict modernist nor exactly in the popular stream, to the charge of being tradition-bound, old-fashioned or remote from life. He would be vulnerable only if he were flabbily imitative or derivative, or immured in cloud-cuckoo fantasy, not if he took past forms and bent them to his own uses, chose past themes and infused them with a new significant vitality driving towards things to come, least of all if he plunged to bedrock spiritual purposes and problems instead of getting mazed in superficial or else merely fashionable perplexities.

To overlook or underrate his poetic quality would be a misfortune for the lover of literature who is not confined by specific cults.

Page 59