On Poetry
THEME/S
5
In the poetry of sheer spiritual Light we have two kinds of work by Sri Aurobindo. One makes an individual use of traditional forms: here the greatest achievement is the blank-verse Savitri The other makes experiments in new forms: here the outstanding accomplishment is compositions solving the problem of quantitative metre which has baffled so many English poets. But these compositions are themselves of two kinds—those that deal with directly spiritual experiences and an unfinished epic of about five thousand lines, entitled Ilion, that is based on
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Homer's theme in the Iliad. Only some four hundred and odd lines of this fragment were subjected to thorough revision by Sri Aurobindo, but the whole of it is memorable both as poetry and as technique. And even if this were not so and only the few thoroughly revised verses were worth attention, we should have to devote some space to them and to an exposition of their main metrical principles. For these verses are an astonishing piece and in general their metric applies also to other forms than theirs and the form they bear is itself central to the problem of quantity, attempting as it does to bring the Olympian pace of the ancient hexameter into English.
Sri Aurobindo holds it essential for the classical hexameter's typical pace that not only a suggestive rhythmical function but also a full metrical value should be given, as in the ancient languages, to quantity, to the time taken by the voice to pronounce the vowel on which a syllable is supported. English builds on stress, the vertical weight on a vowel. In quantity we deal with the horizontal vowel-mass. A word like "shadows" is by stress prominent in the first syllable; by quantity in the second. So it would seem that the two linguistic modes can be completely at loggerheads. One cannot blindly attempt to solve the problem by seeing to it that words are chosen so that quantity and stress may coincide. First of all, words like "poet" and "rival" in which they do coincide are not frequent enough to supply the basis of a metre: words like "mother" and "rivet" are quite frequent. Secondly, according to Sri Aurobindo, the unstressed long is the very soul of the quantitative movement. Unless it comes into its own in English, there can be in that tongue no avatar of the Greek or Latin harmony: to build the Homeric hexameter without it as an important part of a foot on many occasions is to miss Homer's tone and rhythm. But it cannot get its full value if stress dominates the metrical arrangement. Realising this, experimenters have tried to do away
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with stress-value and built their lines totally on classical principles. But to un-stress English is to un-English the language. The one way out, in Sri Aurobindo's view, is: the metre must somehow assimilate stress to a quantitative system.
Sri Aurobindo suggests that, within a certain recent sphere of English poetic expression, this has already been done, though mostly in an unconscious way. The sphere is that of so-called Free Verse, where Whitman is the most impressive figure. Looking at "the greatest effects" with the new instrument, Sri Aurobindo1 comments on Whitman and other writers: "we find that consciously or unconsciously they arrive at the same secret principle, and that is the essential principle of Greek choric and dithyrambic poetry turned to the law of a language which has not the strong resources of quantity. Arnold deliberately attempted such an adaptation but, in spite of beautiful passages, with scant success; still when he writes such a line as
The too vast orb of her fate,
it is this choric movement that he reproduces. Whitman's first poem in Sea-Drift and a number of others are written partly or throughout in this manner. When he gives us the dactylic and spondaic harmony of his lines,
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the ninth-month midnight,
one of them wanting only one foot to be a very perfect hexameter, or the subtly varied movement of this other passage,
Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
1 The Future Poetry, ( Podicherry, 1953), pp. 214-16.
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I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,
The solitary guest from Alabama,
one has almost the rhythmical illusion of listening to a Sopho-clean or Aeschylean chorus. In the opening stanzas of the noble Prayer of Columbus, there is a continuous iambic metrical stress, but with the choric movement. One finds the same thing sometimes in French vers libre,—one poem at least of the kind I have seen of wonderful beauty,—though the success is not so easy in that language. Tagore has recently attempted a kind of free verse in Bengali, not so good as his regular metres, though melodious enough, as everything must be that is written by this master musician of the word, and throughout there is the same choric or dithyrambic principle of movement. This then seems to be the natural high-water mark of free poetical rhythm; it is a use of the poetic principle of measure in its essence without the limitations of a set form."
To trace in Free Verse a choric or dithyrambic movement as in the Greek masters is to imply that although this movement happens to be no straight imitation of its ancient original which was quantitative it adapts the natural disposition of a stressed language to that original. In brief: stress is taken up as if it created some kind of quantity along with quantitative combinations of the old type. We may see this by scanning two of the lines from Whitman:
Out of the ninth-month midnight...
I saw, I heard at intervals the remain ing one the he-bird...
A third Whitman-line, from outside Sri Aurobindo's quota tions, may be adjoined for being a full unconscious hexameter
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Silent, a voiding the moonbeams, blending my self with the shadows.
Sri Aurobindo works out the conscious and complete theory of true English quantity in which stress suffers no cavalier dismissal and yet serves a quantitative end.
It can so serve, he says, because by its hammer-stroke on a syllable it masses the voice there and confers on it a special sort of length. Hence we may distinguish a length through vertical weight in addition to a length by horizontal volume. True quantity in English must reckon with two varieties of longs, that are valid under all circumstances. And in the genuine English hexameter—as also in other forms, like Sapphics and Alcaics—both the syllables of a word such as "shadows" must be taken, each for a different reason, as legitimately long.
A pair of important points emerges from this example. As the first half of "shadows" is, by classical measures, intrinsically short, a stress must be seen as constituting a long by vertical weight irrespective of the intrinsic quantity of a syllable. Not that a stressed intrinsic short is equal in value to the intrinsic long under the ictus; yet their difference is only a matter of nuance within the same prosodic category. Again, as the second half of "shadows" is, by English measures, a short—or a "slack", as the current terminology goes—in spite of its intrinsic length, "slack"-shortness must be seen as no bar to length when the horizontal volume is present.
In the English hexameter, however, the classical rule about length accruing from a collection of consonants after a short vowel has to be scrapped except where the voice is naturally stretched out by them, as in the word "stretched" itself. In English, according to Sri Aurobindo, the voice is carried away by the stress from all "slack" syllables that are intrinsically
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short: it is not allowed to dwell unless an intrinsic long meets it and, on some occasions, even the latter tends to be a little shortened. Hence, for example, to make the second syllable of "strident" long because of the two consonants at the end is to artificialise English. All the more is artificiality invited if we take a slack short vowel as lengthened by a throw-back influence from the opening consonant or consonants of the next word. To consider the preposition of a phrase like "loveliness of spring" as long because its o is followed not only by its own f but also by the spr of the next word is absurd. Words in English are individual units with a greater separateness and independence than in Greek and Latin where the inflections interconnect the words and where the voice is more uniformly and continuously spread out over the phrases. Even sensitive students of the language like Bridges have fallen into the error of employing spurious lengths as well as slurring over the stress-factor, just as poets like Longfellow have ignored the intrinsic long when unstressed. Avoiding either oversight, Sri Aurobindo reaches a form in tune both with the spirit of the classical languages and with the genius of English.
Along with syllables about which a clear rule can be laid down, there are many sounds in English which are doubtful or variable in quantity and some whose quantitative value may alter with position or some other circumstance. Sri Aurobindo wants the ear to be the sole judge in such cases and therefore a certain latitude is conceded to the poet.
As a result of all these factors the form Sri Aurobindo arrives at is much more plastic in foot-modulation than those of the past. Here plasticity is most necessary, since English, unlike Greek and Latin, is by nature prone to a diverse play on the metrical base. To un-English the hexameter by denying it that play on the ground that it will not duplicate the classical type is to see the structure and form of poetry with a scholarly instead
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of a creative eye. The usual English type is a run of five dactyls (long-short-short) with a closing spondee (long-long) or trochee (long-short) and a spondaic or trochaic substitution anywhere in the line, except perhaps in the fifth foot. Sri Aurobindo, regarding stress as a part of quantity and admitting the unstressed long as vital to the technique, automatically gets other trisyllabic feet than the dactyl: for instance, the words "shadows of" would constitute for him an antibacchius (long-long-short). Nor then is there any reason why a non-dactylic trisyllable should contain one stress alone: there can be more than one stress in a foot, as in "fire leaping" or "golden fire" or "calm god-eyes". None of these, and still less four-syllabled feet, have any acknowledged role in the existing English hexameter. Sri Aurobindo legitimises them into organic effective components.
It might be objected in general that, English being a stress-language and tending to slur over the unstressed syllables, we introduce an artificiality by giving importance to unstressed intrinsic longs. But verse is always a departure, to some degree, from natural speech. And to read verse with complete naturalness is to make it lose all its raison d'être. Why adopt verse if it is to be read wholly like prose ? Of course it must not be made sing-song or too artificial in any other way—and, even with the stress-system, we have always to cross the metrical pattern with the pattern of spoken language and not adhere strictly to the former. But some extra attention is to be given to the metrical pattern and in several other ways the reading of verse has to be a little "unnatural". Thus the line from Meredith's Lucifer in Starlight—
The army of unalterable law—
cannot afford to have "unalterable" read as usually spoken
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in English. No doubt, it is composed of 5 syllables—or, more correctly, 4 whole ones and a final half—with the accent on the second, al, but the last three tend to be slurred together. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren,1 after noting the latter fact, remark: "in the iambic pentameter line in which the word occurs in the poem, two of the regular metrical beats fall on alternative syllables of the word
unâlterâble.
This means that the entire word is given more force than is usual; and this is effective, because of the importance of the word in relation to the subject of the poem." At least, in order to keep a five-foot scheme, the ordinary slurring together cannot and should not be done. Even the final half-syllable—ble—counts as a complete one. And the long quantity of a word like "able" in its first syllable—the long a which in speech becomes subdued in the occurrence of this dissyllable in the adjective "unalterable"—is restored in spite of the tendency in speech to pass over it because the main accent falls on ah What Sri Aurobindo's quantity demands is similar departures from ordinary articulation. The departures may be less near in certain respects to those commonly made but they are in keeping with the essence of the latter and stem from the same principle as they. In the lines from Landor's Rose Aylmer—
A night of memories and signs
I consecrate to thee—
"the word 'consecrate'," say the authors of Understanding Poetry? "is accented in ordinary usage on the first syllable.
1Understanding Poetry (New York,
2P. 147.
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But when the word is used in this poem, meter dictates an additional accent on the last syllable, for the line is to be scanned as follows:
I consecrate to thee.
Thus the metrical situation tends to give the word an emphasis which it would not possess in ordinary prose usage; and this is appropriate because of the importance of the word in the poem."
In the examples given so far, the syllables gaining full value have come in a position where a second accent could be given to them and they are themselves slurred longs. But once the claims of "the metrical situation" are conceded there is no reason why unstressed longs should not come into their own even when they stand next door to an accented syllable. Take "contemplative" as in Milton's
nor aught
By me proposed in life contemplative
Or active...
Here the word is accented on the second syllable and, wherever it is so accented, the a of the third syllable is, as a rule, pronounced like the first a in "awake". But what can prevent us in poetry from giving this a its full due if some metrical need calls for it? The prevention would be all the more arbitrary since an unstressed intrinsic long does not always lose its clear length even in spoken language: a word like "decade", stressed in the first syllable, retains its long a in the second, however slurred it may tend to be. The same holds for the o of the word we have already mentioned: "shadows". The u preceding the stressed syllable in "brutality" also stays long.
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By analogy from such instances, all longs, be they distant from or next door to a stressed syllable, might be given their full value in a quantitative scheme like Sri Aurobindo's. No linguistic law of poetic expression would really be violated.1
So much for the technique. But what is technique without the life-breath of inspiration? Sri Aurobindo's merit lies in providing at the same time an imaginative vitality and a plastic metrical mould readily responding to it. The two are adequate to all moods and moments. And the adequacy has the extra interest of being not only characteristically Aurobindonian but also recognisably Homeric in Homer's own metre. How it can be both we may understand by noting some remarks of Sri Aurobindo's on Whitman.
Whitman is part of the modern movement in which the mind has become complex and subtle—setting comprehensively to work, opening to various possibilities of truth, admitting a crowded stream and mass of interests. But he brings, says Sri Aurobindo,2 into the stress and energy of his intellectual seeking "an element which gives them another potency and meaning.... He has the intimate pulse and power
1To appreciate in full and in all its nuances his conception of quantity and particularly of the hexameter one must read his long essay On Quantitative Metre included in Collected Poems and Plays, two volumes published in 1942. Here he touches also upon several problems related to poetry at large. An English reviewer, Banning Richardson, writing in The Aryan Path of March 1944, remarks about this "admirable essay" that it is "an essay which deserves wide currency and consideration by all those interested in the future of English poetry and of poetry in general". It is further remarked: "In it he seems to have struck at the root of the problem which modern poets have been attempting to solve by recourse to free verse forms. Both argument and example are convincing, and one wonders whether poets like Eliot, Auden and Spender have reached similar conclusions. At least, they should be made aware of this considerable contribution to English prosody by an Indian poet."
2The Future Poetry, pp.
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of life vibrating in all he utters, an almost primitive force of vitality, delivered from the enormous mechanical beat of the time by a robust closeness to the very spirit of life,—that closeness he has more than any other poet since Shakespeare ....But...Whitman, by the intensity of his intellectual and vital dwelling on the things he saw and expressed, arrives at some first profound sense of the greater self of the individual, of the greater self in the community of the race and in all its immense past action opening down through the broadening eager present to an immenser future, of the greater self of Nature and of the eternal, the divine Self and Spirit of existence who broods over these things, who awaits them and in whom they come to the sense of their oneness. That which the old Indian seers called the mahān ātmā, the Great Self, the Great Spirit, which is seen through the vast strain of the cosmic thought and the cosmic life,...is the subject of some of his highest strains..."
Adverting to Whitman in the context of Free Verse, Sri Aurobindo1 declares: "He is a great poet, one of the greatest in the power of his substance, the energy of his vision, the force of his style, the largeness at once of his personality and his universality. He is the most Homeric voice since Homer, in spite of the modern's ruder, less elevated aesthesis of speech and the difference between that limited Olympian and this broad-souled Titan, in this that he has the nearness to something elemental which makes everything he says, even the most common and prosaic, sound out with a ring of greatness, gives a force even to his barest or heaviest phrases, throws even upon the coarsest, dullest, most physical things something of the divinity; and he has the elemental Homeric power of sufficient straightforward speech, the rush too of oceanic sound
1 Ibid., p. 212.
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though it is here the surging of the Atlantic between continents, not the magic roll and wash of the Aegean around the isles of Greece. What he has not, is the unfailing poetic beauty and nobility which saves greatness from its defects—that supreme gift of Homer and Valmiki—and the self-restraint and obedience to a divine law which makes even the gods more divine."
Thus, in Sri Aurobindo's estimate, Whitman, with the help of his modern intellectualism, is a pioneer of things beyond the mind and is one who blends his contemporary thought not only with the ageless Indian perception but also with the Shakespearean throb and the Homeric attitude and intonation. A fortiori then can a giant at the same time of intellectuality and spirituality like Sri Aurobindo, with his vibrant touch on life and his mastery of that language of fire and ether which the Elizabethan age carried to its climax in Shakespeare, prove Homeric, particularly in the Greek poet's own metrical mould, if we can show in him the qualities he reads in common between Homer and Whitman.
First let us take the American vers-librist's elemental power of sufficient straightforward speech in spite of having a greater complexity and subtlety of mind than the ancient Greek. Has not Sri Aurobindo the same power even to a higher degree? Ilion begins majestically with a new day breaking over the besieged city and rousing once more the world:
...Earth in the dawn-fire delivered from starry and shadowy vastness
Woke to the wonder of life and its passion and sorrow and beauty,
All on her bosom sustaining, the patient compassionate Mother.
Out of the formless vision of Night with its look on things hidden
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Given to the gaze of the azure she lay in her garment of greenness,
Wearing light on her brow...1
Against a natural background of mystery without any mystification Sri Aurobindo sketches clearly and spontaneously the dawn's advent upon the beloved earth of mortals. But his spontaneity is as if primeval phenomena were themselves at large in its disclosures.
Next we may glance at the nearness to something elemental which makes everything come with a ring of greatness. Talthy- bius, the messenger of Achilles to Troy, is briefly conjured up as he rides in his chariot to the just-stirring city:
Old and unarmed in the car was the driver; grey was he, shrunken.
Worn with his decades. To Pergama cinctured with strength Cyclopean
Old and alone he arrived, insignificant, feeblest of mortals,
Carrying Fate in his helpless hands and the doom of an empire.2
The very frailness, the very infirmity of the aged envoy seems to add to the momentousness of his mission: the drabness of his look, the prose of his posture are, as it were, lifted into glory and made the chief motif of the picture. A transfiguration of the commonplace is again there when Talthybius is taken to a room to be refreshed before the Trojan people rise and meet in the morning to give their reply:
Brought to a chamber of rest in the luminous peace of the mansion,
1Ilion: An Epic in Quantitative Hexameters. (Pondicherry, 1957), p.
2P. 2.
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Grey he sat and endured the food and the wine of his foemen,—
Chiding his spirit that murmured within him and gazed undelighted,
Vexed with the endless pomps of Laomedon. Far from those glories
Memory winged it back to a sward half-forgotten, a village
Nesding in leaves and low hills watching it crowned with the sunset.1
And what shall we say of the supreme poetic vividness by a simple significant gesture? Sometimes just a phrase is the transparent garb of a whole world of proud pathos, as in a line on another old man, now Troy's lord, Priam:
Lonely, august he stood, like one whom death has forgotten.2
A subtler expression, but with as much economy and as direct a stress of dignified feeling, is the phrase about Priam's wife Hecuba who has suffered the loss of her most virile and valiant son as well as of the son who was most boyishly beautiful:
Mother once of Troilus, mother once of Hector.3
An entire history of rare happiness unremittingly snatched away is touched off, with a supreme restraint twice repeated, by that diminutive pregnancy, the adverb "once". And a long persistent mass of pitiful ordinary experience is gathered up, with a deft display of knowledge of human nature, in the moving yet poised phrases:
Helped by the anxious joy of their kindred supported their anguish
1 P. 19. 2 P. 23. 3 P. 56.
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Women with travail racked for the child who shall rack them with sorrow.1
The irony here is of personal life; an irony of martial interrelations strikes its note, both stern and tragic, in the vision of death's day-to-day events in a war:
Ajax has bit at the dust; it is all he shall have of the Troad;
Tall Meriones lies and measures his portion of booty.2
Again and again, the drift of the least impulse, the lightest act, the most familiar situation is charged with the heroic, the high-souled, the unforgettable. This burdening of even the smallest casual turn we may indirectly describe through the two lines put into the mouth of Deiphobus about the sudden actuali-sation of Fate:
Always man's Fate hangs poised on the flitting breath of a moment;
Called by some word, by some gesture it leaps, then 'tis graven, 'tis granite.3
And these lines with their closing compactness and sublimity bring us to the verses that remain fastest in our memory—those where the thought or the image hurls upon us with a wide yet controlled grandeur as in Homer at his most energetically inspired. The impact, in one manner, is at its effective best in the harangues by Antenor, Laocoön and Paris in the Trojan assembly. These are masterpices of political oratory that yet miss nothing of the poetic in the political and of the personal in the public, whether it is the old statesman who advises a
1 P. 105. 2 P. 38. 3 P. 25.
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strategy of temporary surrender in order to prepare covertly a future revolt—
Be as a cavern for lions;
Be as a Fate that crouches! Wordless and stern for your vengeance
Self-gathered work in the night and the secrecy shrouding your bosoms1—
or it is the temple-rapt enthusiast with his huge reveries and god-gilded delusions, brave with a desperate passion—
Storm is the dance of the locks of the God assenting to greatness,
Zeus who with secret compulsion orders the ways of our nature;...
Death? I have faced it. Fire? I have watched it climb in my vision
Over the timeless domes and over the rooftops of Priam,
But I have looked beyond and have seen the smile of Apollo...
Troy has arisen before, but from ashes, not shame, not surrender !2—
or it is the young lover and warrior setting aside both caution and self-censure and evoking happy confident heroism in what seems a world of iron caprice—
Power is divine; divinest of all is power over mortals...
Conscious dimly of births unfinished hid in our being
Rest we cannot; a world cries in us for space and for fullness...
All is injustice of love or all is injustice of battle...
1 P. 33. 2 P. 39-40.
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You cannot utterly die while the Power lies untired in bosoms;
When 'tis withdrawn, not a moment of life can be added by virtue...
Proudly determine on victory, live by disaster unshaken.
Either Fate receive like men, nay, like gods, nay, like Trojans.1
The essential Homeric impact is no less when it is single-lined, as in the verse about the cripple god Hephaestus—the verse whose beginning is reminiscent of several of Homer's "Olympian descents" (Bē de kaC oulumpoīo...):
Down upon earth he came with his lame omnipotent motion.2
The rush of oceanic sound is here too about us. It grows immense as well as intense in a passage which we may prelude with an allusion to one of Homer's which Sri Aurobindo classes among the absolute and ultimate inevitabilities of poetry. It is a description of Apollo's earthward sweep, starting with the line:
Bē de kat' oulumpoīo karēnon choömenos kēr.
Sri Aurobindo3 comments: "Homer's passage translated into English would be perfectly ordinary. He gets the best part of his effect from his rhythm. Translated it would run merely like this: 'And he descended from the peaks of Olympus, wroth at heart, bearing on his shoulders arrows and doubly pent-in quiver, and there arose the clang of his silver bow as he moved,
1 P. 48, 49. 2 P. 121.
3 Letters of Sri Aurobindo: Third Series (Bombay,
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and he came made like unto the night.' His words too are quite simple but the vowellation and the rhythm make the clang of the silver bow go smashing through the world into universes beyond while the last words give a most august and formidable impression of godhead."
Sri Aurobindo's own poetic burst of "inevitability" may be divided into two parts. In the first the superhuman beings move before us in their outward forms and dynamisms:
...not only the mortal fighters,
Heroes half divine whose names are like stars in remoteness,
Triumphed and failed and were winds or were weeds on the dance of the surges,
But from the peaks of Olympus and shimmering summits of Ida
Gleaming and clanging the gods of the antique ages descended.
Hidden from human knowledge the brilliant shapes of Immortals
Mingled unseen in the mellay, or sometimes, marvellous, maskless,
Forms of undying beauty and power that made tremble the heart-strings
Parting their deathless secrecy crossed through the borders of vision,
Plain as of old to the demigods out of their glory emerging,
Heard by mortal ears and seen by the eyeballs that perish.1
This is Sri Aurobindo turned Homer—the Indian intimacy with occult presences is riding on the Aegean's "dance of the surges". Now comes Homer turned Sri Aurobindo. The inner consciousness which the depicted superhuman forms and dynamisms
1 P. 4.
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symbolise and focus is evoked with all its tremendous breadth and plunge. The Greek "Immortals" are borne upon the heavenward heave of the profundities that are the Indian Ocean:
Mighty they came from their spaces of freedom and sorrowless splendour.
Sea-vast, trailing the azure hem of his clamorous waters,
Blue-lidded, maned with the Night, Poseidon smote for the future,
Earth-shaker who with his trident releases the coils of the Dragon,
Freeing the forces unborn that are locked in the caverns of Nature.
Calm and unmoved, upholding the Word that is Fate and the order
Fixed in the sight of a Will foreknowing and silent and changeless,
Hera sent by Zeus and Athene lifting his aegis
Guarded the hidden decree. But for Ilion, loud as the surges,
Ares impetuous called to the fire in men's hearts, and his passion
Woke in the shadowy depths the forms of the Titan and demon;
Dumb and coerced by the grip of the gods in the abyss of the being,
Formidable, veiled they sit in the grey subconscient darkness
Watching the sleep of the snake-haired Erinnys. Miracled, haloed,
Seer and magician and prophet who beholds what the thought cannot witness.
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Lifting the godhead within us to more than a hum an endeavour,
Slayer and saviour, thinker and mystic, leaped fron his sun-peaks
Guarding in Ilion the wall of his mysteries Delphic Apollo.
Heaven's strengths divided swayed in the whirl of the Earth-force.1
A curious point in connection with these Aurobindonian illustrations of the Homeric rush of oceanic sound is the reference again and again to the sea. And the next passage which renders clear the reason of the long indecisive siege of Troy— the divine forces working out their own play through the human clashes—we have again the sea-simile for the to-and-fro of the war's fortunes:
Vain was the toil of the heroes, the blood of the mighty was squandered,
Spray as of surf on the cliffs when it moans unappeased, unrequited
Age after fruidess age.2
But finally the Gods withdrew, recognising the rules of Time's workings: "the anguish ends like the rapture." The Olympians,
Artists of Nature content with their work in the plan of the transience,3
turned from the carnage,
1 Pp. 4-5.
2 P. 5.
3 Ibid.
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Leaving the battle already decided, leaving the heroes
Slain in their minds, Troy burned, Greece left to her glory and downfall.
And, while they reposed in their blissful ether,
Lifted was the burden laid on our wills by their starry presence:
Man was restored to his smallness, the world to its incon- scient labour.
Life felt a respite from height, the winds breathed freer delivered;
Light was released from their blaze and the earth was released from their greatness.
But their immortal content from the struggle titanic departed.
Vacant the noise of the batde roared like the sea on the shingles;
Wearily hunted the spears their quarry; strength was disheartened;
Silence increased with the march of the months on the tents of the leaguer.1
Here too the ocean-comparison figures. And we discover that Sri Aurobindo was aware of the association of Homer and sea, for he has in more than one place introduced a reflex of Homer's most famous line apropos of the Aegean's roll and cry:
Bed'akeon para thina poluphlois boio thalasses.
Sri Aurobindo has himself even Englished this line with the true Homeric blend of simplicity and splendour:
Silent he walked by the shore of the many-rumoured ocean.2
1 Pp. 5-6. 8 2 Letters, p. 47.
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Haunted by the mute sorrow of Chryses, Apollo's high-priest, listening to the ocean's roar, Sri Aurobindo makes Achilles say in his message through Talthybius:
Day after day I walked at dawn and in blush of the sunset,
Far by the call of the seas and alone with the gods and my dreaming.1
Again Achilles voices his solitude—and now with a direct memory of Homer Sri Aurobindo gives him the words:
Lonely I paced o'er the sands by the thousand-throated waters.2
And in the closing phrase here Sri Aurobindo has produced after Homer's poluphlois boīo thalassēs the grandest poetic multum in parvo about the sea in terms of a modern mind's complexity of verbal art which yet has an elemental force.
We may add that the same is true in connection with Homer's evocation of the rhythm of Apollo's silver bow. What Sri Aurobindo remarks of its tremendous suggestion we may repeat about his own phrase at the end of an account of the Sum-god leaving the divine mountain in suppressed anger because Zeus denies him continuance of his supremacy and decides the future in favour of Pallas Athene. A more psychological tinge is imparted by Sri Aurobindo with a symbolic gleam, but a "smashing through the world into universes beyond" is Homerically achieved through sheer pressure of poetic sound:
Clang of his argent bow was the wrath restrained of the mighty.3
1 Ilion, . p, 12. 2 Ibid., p. 14. 3 Ibid., p. n6.
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Not alone the mind in its trouble
God beholds, but the spirit behind that has joy of the torture.
Might not our human gaze on the smoke of a furnace, the burning
When we encounter in Ilion either one-line masterpieces or sustained perfections, we cannot help somewhat modifying Sri Aurobindo's Homeric apotheosis of Whitman. For, in such excerpts as we have made, we have on the whole an aesthesis finer than that broad-souled Titan's—and there is in addition the absence of the one un-Homeric feature in Whitman, the intermittent poetic beauty and nobility. The more concentrated exaltation of metrical rhythmic movement, without which "even his greatest things do not go absolutely and immediately home, or having entered they do not so easily seize on the soul, take possession and rest in a calm yet vibrating mastery," is constantly with Sri Aurobindo, ensuring a greater total Homerism.
However, the worth of Ilion lies ultimately in this Homerism being Aurobindonian without ceasing to be itself. What is unique is that the spirit of Greek myth and epic goes hand in hand with the spirit of Indian Yoga: flawless word and rhythm embody a vision packed with the light of the occult Orient yet tempered and naturalised to the atmosphere of heroic Hellas. The uniqueness shows out most in the lines where a deeper sense of the Divine is expressed than Helen-drunk Paris or even religion-intoxicated Laocoön can reach for all their instinct of powers beyond man. There is then a pressing forward to a large picture of Heaven's dealings with earth. Apart from the passage about the Gods joining the mellay and a few others, perhaps this sense comes closest to us in the declarations of Gods and Goddesses when Zeus summons them together in Book VIII. Apropos of Zeus himself Sri Aurobindo says:
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Red, intolerable, anguish of ore that is fused in the hell-heat,
Shrink and yearn for coolness and peace and condemn all the labour?
Rather look to the purity coming, the steel in its beauty,
Rather rejoice with the master who stands in his gladness accepting
Heat of the glorious god and the fruitful pain of the iron.1
Among the speeches given to Zeus a passage affords a rare insight into the nature of the deific. When Hera says that Zeus's sons Apollo and Ares forget the supreme purpose, he replies:
"Hera, queen of the heavens, they forget not, but choose to be mindless.
This is the greatness of gods that they know and can put back the knowledge;
Doing the work they have chosen they turn not for fruit nor for failure.
Griefless they walk to their goal and strain not their eyes towards the ending.
Light that they have they can lose with a smile, not as souls in the darkness
Clutch at every beam and mistake their one ray for all splendour.
All things are by Time and the Will eternal that moves us.
And for each birth its hour is set in the night or the dawning.
There is an hour for knowledge, an hour to forget and to labour."2
In the course of this Book we have even a direct reminiscence of spiritual India. Narrating how the Gods and Goddesses
1 P. 105. 2 P. 110
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called by Zeus ascend to him through various subtle kingdoms, he pictures their entry into the Mind-world which from its own splendours looks up to a greater Light and to
bliss from ineffable kingdoms
Where beyond Mind and its rays is the gleam of a glory supernal:
There our sun cannot shine and our moon has no place for her lustres,
There our lightnings flash not, nor fire of these spaces is suffered.1
Sri Aurobindo has here rendered some famous phrases of the Mundaka Upanishad.
Such passages may leave us most satisfied, but we should not miss in our love of them the fact that Ilion develops in a new way part of the story of Troy after the death of Hector and the coming of the Eastern Queen Penthesilea to the city's succour. Ilion deals with the events on the last day of the siege of Troy. The nature of these events and the many-sided play they involve of physical circumstance, human character, psychological motive, individual action, no less than hidden world-forces and inscrutable destiny, may be inferred from the names of the several sections of the poem: we have Books successively of the Herald, the Statesman, the Assembly, Partings, Achilles, the Chieftains, the Woman, the Gods—and a final unnamed Book presumably of Battle and Doom.
Ilion is a true epic in breadth and depth and height. If any one work of Sri Aurobindo's could be the spearhead of his poetic fame in the West, it should be Ilion. Unfortunately, there has been little open appreciation so far, in spite of enthusiastic pronouncements in private by men like Christopher Martin, once assistant editor of Encounter, and by the eminent art-critic and thinker, Sir Herbert Read. Martin wrote: "I certainly am impressed by this masterly achievement in hexameters" (Letter, December 9, 1959). Sir Herbert stated: "Sri Aurobindo's Ilion is a remarkable achievment by any standard and I am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our English language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality" (Letter, June 5, 1958).
1 P. 108.
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