Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

4

GRADES OF POETIC QUALITY: SOME CRITICAL DISTINCTIONS

Before we look at the maturest and final phase of the Aurobindonian world of poetry, we may cast—as a phrase in Revelation has it—"a hurried glance behind" to make, apropos of Sri Aurobindo's work so far, some clear distinctions between fair levels on the one side and fine uplands on the other and then between the latter's laudable success and a sheer excellence of peaks beyond praise.

Our task is hardly unpleasant since it is not one of demarcating non-poetry from poetry: thanks to the nature of our material, it merely involves recording lower and higher degrees of enjoyment. Sri Aurobindo himself never disclaimed inequalities at places in his work. Nor did he discourage honest criticism that is, criticism made with awareness of the poet's aim, understanding of the genre in which he has couched his creation, response to his individual personality, sensitiveness to the peculiar movement of his style. Such criticism even of a great poet can only help his greatness to become more defined and nullify with the justice of its appreciation, scrupulously "this side idolatry", the literary bungling and botching which he is bound to provoke from prejudiced cleverness or ambitious incompetence.

The task we have assumed demands an examination of those poems or passages where we can easily distinguish in a compact ass the diverse grades. Necessarily, such poems or passages are not Sri Aurobindo at his sustained best. Our selection of them, therefore, must be understood in its limited bearing: we must be careful to avoid the inference that all of him is thus variable in short spans.

We may begin by taking up the picturesque genre and picking out there the genuinely revealing as against the ornamental and colourful, no matter if charming. Here is a passage from that very early composition, Songs to Myrtilla, published in 1894:

Snowdrops are thy feet,

Thy waist a crescent moon,

And like a silver wand

Thy body slight doth stand

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Or like a silver beech aspire.

Thine arms are walls of white caresses,

Thy lips a tale of crimson kisses,

Thine eyes two amorous armouries of fire.

A dash and a lilt attract us in all the eight lines, but in the first five do we get beyond fancy brightly disporting itself, a pleasurable flourish of decorativeness ? An unusual metaphor like

Thy waist a crescent moon.

tempts us to search for some subtlety but we return without much discovery though still keeping our glimmer of delight at the delicately strange. Its indication of slender silveriness is continued in the succeeding lines. And we may take note of the shade of difference between the slight body standing and the same body aspiring. The image of the silver wand has another vision than the image of the silver beech—the smooth-barked glossy-leaved tree with branches, a vertical whiteness which appears to lift arms upward. This picture links on happily to the next verse where arms are openly spoken of in a new vision of whiteness. Yet, for all their inspiration, the first five lines are lovely surfaces. They are poetry, but we cannot allow ourselves to consider them in general as more than fair levels. A grade above them is the description:

Thy lips a tale of crimson kisses.

We are here on the verge of a real ascension into fine uplands. A soupçon of the conventional, however, holds us back despite the push of the word "tale" with its double sense of an absorbing sequence and a thrilling totality. The phrase—

Thine eyes two amorous armouries of fire—

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vividly suggests a wealth of beauty going out in a gift of passionate love. Fine poetry is achieved. What it lacks a little is the thrust of an utter newness, such as the "crescent moon"promised at first glimpse. It is only in the line preceding both the above—

Thine arms are walls of white caresses—

that we have the rounded originality we need. This verse conjures up a warm vigour absolute in its shutting away of everything from the beloved except happiness by means of an intense yet tender self-giving which is also a seizing of the beloved. The epithet "white" indicates simultaneously the body-hue of beauty and the soul-tint of idealism. "Walls", on first impression, is rather exaggerative, if not even a trifle incongruous, but its very extremism is its virtue and the boldness of it asserts itself in the end. It is indeed the essential builder of the line's poetic value. And whatever oddness it may carry falls into sympathetic place in the total effect by its alliterative collocation with "white". "White" being at the same time natural and striking where arms' caresses are concerned, "walls" with the same initial consonant and with a possible colour-affinity stands as the inevitable word. Not only has the line true fineness: it has also some gleam of the excellent if it is considered out of its context of rather light-hearted exuberance.

Coming to more reflective poetry we may choose, from a slighly later collection, The Fear of Death for our purposes. Evidently an early remnant, it divides, in the matter of quality, more or less neatly into a pair of equal eight-lined parts—one of what we may term a somewhat facile felicity tending to be consciously honey-tongued at several points, and one of moved imagination seeking accurate loveliness of speech everywhere. Both the parts breathe the same romantic tradition, but they belong to different poetic grades.

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The word "poetic" is important. We are not trying to assess whether a great truth, a fundamental verity, is disclosed. In Sri Aurobindo's early and middle periods, several subjects are treated, to which his later work returns on another plane. Indeed, often enough the later work is a further deepening of what is already far below the surface: but on occasion the young Sri Aurobindo sees life in a light peculiar to the time or proper to a certain cultural milieu or demanded by some contextual necessity. Or else an aspect of some vision which is comprehensive in a subsequent period is isolated and then explored in its own wholeness as if that wholeness were the entire truth. Surely such a setting-about is not devoid of vital momen-tousness; yet we should desist from arriving at a final judgment on Sri Aurobindo's thought or insight on the basis of this or that reflective or even philosophical pronouncement here. With a mind like his in operation at whatever period, significant issues are bound to quicken under his hand: still the reader must be advised not to jump always to ultimate conclusions but view things in their right places within the grand Aurobindonian totality. In any case, we are not conducting a comparative study of truth as such: we are focusing—within a selected field—on the degrees of the poetic uncovering of whatever perception has pressed towards utterance.

In The Fear of Death, the opening half goes:

Death wanders through our lives at will, sweet Death

Is busy with each intake of our breath.

Why do you fear her? Lo, her laughing face

All rosy with the light of jocund grace!

A kind and lovely maiden culling flowers

In a sweet garden fresh with vernal showers.

This is the thing you fear, young portress bright

Who opens to our souls the worlds of light.

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The craftsmanship is fine enough—the pauses well-varied, the feet judiciously modulated, special effects produced of verbal position like "Death" beginning and ending the first line or of alliterative music like "wanders-will", "busy-breath", "fear-face", "kind-culling". The technique appears to slip up when "sweet" and "light" are twice used within a brief compass. But there is a point in the repetition. Death the destroyer is sought to be shown as equally desirable with the delightful things destroyed: if the garden is sweet, Death too is such. Again, to prepare for Death's function as a "portress bright" to "the worlds of light", her face is said to be lit up with "jocund grace": she is herself a luminous being. What may be criticised in this poetic procedure is the tendency of the expressive urge to yield too quickly to the pressure of the vision: a patient refusal to be satisfied, until the inner oestrus raises the original, the individual response of eye and ear in the linguistic spirit, is not altogether there. What that refusal might have brought about is illustrated at another moment of the inspiration in the lines. Thus a "maiden culling flowers" has her face very aptly termed "all rosy": the destructive culling is rendered as much a phenomenon of beauty's blossoming as are the plucked blooms of springtide. The point is made without any obviousness. It is the lack of sufficient subdety and the presence of an over-easy spontaneity in certain couplets, that send a waft of fancy into the imagination and make the eight-lined composition as a whole take on the look of a fair level of poetry instead of a fine upland.

The quality is not negligible. To evaluate it we have only to pick up a lyric of Shelley's, whose starting-point is similar to our poem's:

Death is here and death is there,

Death is busy everywhere.

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But Shelley goes more or less round and round in his four stanzas, ringing small changes on the theme of universal mortality, though not without some exercise of his usual gift of melody in the midst of a jigging metre at cross-purposes with the ideas and images. Sri Aurobindo has an impetus to development all through and an appropriate metrical medium as well as a deeper element of thought. Perhaps this element too has some link with Shelley—but Shelley of a more mature mood. An obvious clue is Sri Aurobindo's "flowers / In a sweet garden fresh with vernal showers", which seems to hark back to the famous Skylark's "Sound of vernal showers" and "Rain-awakened flowers" and "all that ever was / Joyous and clear and fresh..." The Fear of Death might be taken in general as an attempt to give body to Shelley's surmise when addressing his bird:

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

The truer and deeper things that Sri Aurobindo's lines deem of death may be said to represent the after-life destiny of the essential psyche in us, our soul proper hidden within a mental-vital-physical complex and often obscured by its integument. Whatever be the Karmic reward or punishment of the all-too-human personality, the psychic being which is an evolving delegate in us of the Divine would move through the passage of death ultimately to "the worlds of light" from which it came, the Wordsworthian "God who is our home", the star-beaconed "abode where the Eternal are" of Shelley's Adonais.

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However, while Sri Aurobindo's lines are maturer than the lyric Shelley wrote on ubiquitous Death, they do not rise in their more reflective strain to a full artistic result. Something of the less intense Shelley's romanticism gets here and there into the tone. And this is not unnatural since we are dealing with one of Sri Aurobindo's late juvenilia.

But with the second half of the poem we have a clean breakthrough into a higher utterance. It seeks to solve the puzzle of the first half's question about Death, "Why do you fear her?"

Is it because the twisted stem must feel

Pain when the tenderest hands its glory steal?

Is it because the flowerless stalk droops dull

And ghastly now that was so beautiful?

Or is it the opening portal's horrid jar

That shakes you, feeble souls of courage bare?

Death is but changing of our robes to wait

In wedding garments at the Eternal's gate.

Although the very ultimate alchemy of the poetic mood cannot be read in the lines, a precision of sight and a penetrativeness of feeling are perceptible from the start: they create the correct dispositions and combinations and oppositions of words and rhythms. A spark is at once struck in our imagination by the tenderest hands being shown as unavoidably causing pain. A happy paradox arises, giving us an unexpected in-look through the appearances of earth-life: revealing poetry faces us. And notice how an inspired skill has put the significant word "Pain" at the very beginning of the second line after a flow-over from the preceding one—we pass through a suspense and then encounter what is due to be there with a poised flash, so to speak. The manner in which "Pain" commences line 2

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the twisted stem—and the suggestion is confirmed by the next line which brings in "droops". "Droops" itself confronts us in the midst of words which, like it, are strongly stressed so that the expression "stalk droops dull" makes with its metrical dead-weight, as it were, the thing spoken of enact itself rhythmically no less than verbally. The effect is all the more enforced by the alliterative trend of the poem coming to a head with the two d's occurring close together in consecutive monosyllables.

The next revealing moment centres in "the opening portal's horrid jar". Again a meaningful paradox: what frees us, from imprisonment, into "the worlds of light" is a soul-shaking ex-perience. The image of door-unclosing in the poem's first half was a little bland and pretty: now it is quite vivid and powerful, the tension of the significance driving home pointedly with the internal rhyme of the initial syllables in "portal" and "horrid". As if to prepare this concord between the sounds with which the two words open, we have the adjective "opening" just before them, having in its own first syllable too the o-sound though with a different inflexion. The artistry is everywhere admirable, creative from within outwards. A mind-kindling vision is rendered in its own life-throb: no conventional poeti-cism is fitted with a "new look" in order to throw up some bright-looking picture. And the true stir of the imagination runs on into the final couplet where something of a slightly superficial romanticism reappears with the sentimental metaphor of the "wedding garments". But the inner poetic connection with what has gone before infuses a subtle breath of high seriousness: the portal-image returns in "gate", while the changing of "our robes" into "wedding garments" elaborates the hint of the apostrophe "feeble souls of courage bare", Which figures what is bare of courage and, by implication, what is clad in feebleness, thus leading us later to equate the robes with

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feebleness and the garments with courage and thereby to understand that death removes the vesture of weakness which is our body and constitutes by that removal a new clothing of strength. This clothing makes us ready for the ecstatic companionship with the Eternal who expects us in His house of light beyond a gate which offers with a terrifying sound an entry into bliss. A revealing eye carries with the aid of an inspired technique a truth of inner feeling into the apparent materials of a colourful decorativeness which might easily ring a trifle hollow.

The terminal couplet shows what the first half of The Fear of Death could uniformly have become with a keener afflatus. A like promise holds for the fair level in a different style practised by the Muse of Sri Aurobindo's middle years. In the same group as The Fear of Death we have Life and Death treating an analogous theme:

Life, death,—death, life; the words have led for ages

Our thought and consciousness and firmly seemed

Two opposites; but now long-hidden pages

Are opened, liberating truths undreamed.

Life only is, or death is life disguised,—

Life a short death until by life we are surprised.

The vein now is philosophical and not merely reflective, the language borrowed from the discursive plane, with neither fancy nor imagination overtly at work. The "long-hidden pages" are the sole explicit touch of sight. But "led" is a concrete term and so too is "opened" in relation to the pages. The four-syllabled "liberating" is another animated turn: we feel not only a large activity as of unlocking huge prison-gates but also an efflux of weighty and far-reaching secrets into the light of day. All these locutions, plus the skilful metrical rhythm and a faint breath of emotion accompanying the intellectual accent.

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save the first four lines from aridity. In spirit no less than in technique the lines stand as poetry. Yet they cannot be rated as much more than fair. It is only with the final couplet that we have notable articulation.

This couplet sets us seeking parallels between the poem's basic idea and the imaginative import of the other piece, towards which we are also verbally directed by the metaphor of pages being "opened" like liberating portals. But the thought-content here is somewhat dissimilar. In the other piece death is said to be the beneficent though misunderstood power ever busy to usher us into Eternity: here death's crowning role is stressed only to proclaim that what we consider death is just the life-power itself in one mode of its multifarious functioning, and the true form of this power is not what we usually recognise as life but another mode of vitality in comparison with which our so-called lease of vitality may be regarded as a living death.

Such is the broad theme. There is some ambiguity as to what exactly the other and greater mode of vitality is. On a simple reading we should understand it to be the existence after the body's dissolution and the "short death" to be the time before that end. But can we identify such a meaning as one of the "truths undreamed" which are now being brought out of the "long-hidden pages"? The life everlasting after death has been an accepted belief in many parts of the world for centuries. The Fear of Death gives tongue to the belief, as did verses by others before—from Shakespeare's

And Death once dead there's no more dying then,

through Donne's

One short sleep past we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more : Death, thou shalt die,

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to Longfellow's

There is no death! What seems so is transition,

This life of mortal breath

Is but a suburb of the life elysian,

Whose portal we call death.

A percipient friend¹ opines: "I think the second part of the last line means some sudden shock to our ordinary career, which turns us to the spiritual life. 'Surprised' suggests the 'Hound of Heaven': Sri Aurobindo always uses 'surprised' in its original sense 'to be caught from behind'. At the stage of philosophical and spiritual development, when he wrote the poem, he could not have said that by mere physical death the true life could start." According to this view, both the words "life" and "death" have no longer to be construed in their ordinary opposite drifts but must be interpreted with the old Vedic and Vedantic insight newly disclosed. To this insight, all life without God-realisation is Death, and Immortality connotes a Yogic experience of the eternal and infinite bliss of the Divine in this very body of ours, and that Immortality is the true Life variously manifesting in our world, secretly present even in so-called death.

Whatever be the correct reading of Sri Aurobindo's couplet, paradoxes are having a gymnastic holiday there, and it is their mutual tensions which strike out impressive poetry in an epigrammatic genre. The intellectual style acquires a vivacity which reaches a point of implicit vision at the termination of either line: "disguised" and "surprised" prompt us to see and feel

¹ Ravindra Khanna, Professor of English, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry, to whom, as well as to Nirodbaran, another Professor of English at the same institution, I owe several helpful hints.

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the truth enunciated. Their end-places touch to happy cumulative finality the seeing and feeling. A further proof of the inspiration is the Alexandrine which the concluding line is, in contrast to the pentametrical flow of the antecedent five: the extra foot-length is a hint-echo of the message that our common existence is a span of brief mortality whereas what would put an end to it is the true life that goes on and on.

The couplet, however explained, is indeed praiseworthy. And yet it is not exactly the sheer poetic height of a great argument any more than the last eight lines of The Fear of Death mount, in their different vein, to such a consummation. Both attain an "upland" below the last pinnacle possible, such as the grand literary commingling of the reflective and the philosophical in that snatch from Love and Death which strikes out a super-Ciceronian De Senectute:

Not as a tedious evil nor to be

Lightly rejected gave the gods old age,

But tranquil, but august, but making easy

The steep ascent to God. Therefore must Time

Still batter down the glory and form of youth

And animal magnificent strong ease,

To warn the earthward man that he is spirit

Dallying with transience, nor by death he ends,

Nor to the dumb warm mother's arms is bound,

But called unborn into the unborn skies.

Yes, the climaxes of our poems fall short of thought-vibrant outbursts of this kind which we may label pure excellence. And the concluding couplet of Life and Death is, from the poetic point of view, perhaps even an elevation lower than the second half of The Fear of Death; yet it is far removed from pleasant or attractive passableness. And it successfully proves what the

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four lines preluding it might have been with a greater intensity of intuition breathed into the discursive strain which does not have a particular penchant for imagery.

A closing illustration of the three grades distinguished by us may be given by showing how a word which can have a pull downward from fineness and excellence may yet be transfigured. It is not only vocables acting more or less as abstract counters or, if possessed of life and light, failing to be completely unified in a collective organism's impassioned gesture, that exert the pull. It is also vocables in which the life and light have become faded in some measure by over-use in the past. An instance is the adjective "vernal". It has been an instrument of poetic diction since the time of Spenser. At its appearance in our day we should put ourselves on the alert, for the likelihood of a labour-saving articulation can arise with it. In The Fear of Death we saw it occur in an overflow from Shelley. We may cite two more occurrences which also seem not sufficiently impressive, though the second is part of a charming line-rhythm:

For I recall that day of vernal trees,

The soft asoca's bloom, the laden winds...

And shy as violets in the vernal grass...

The usages make poetry, but on a fair level only. Perhaps just a lift above it is felt in a phrase like

Attending with a pale and solemn light

Beyond the gardens of the vernal year...

However, a whiff of life blowing towards a fine upland comes in:

O was thy voice

A vernal repetition in some grove...?

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And we get quite an enjoyable freshness in the semi-piquant usage:

Cowslip attends her vernal duty

And stops the heart with beauty...

But we come to definitely memorable poetry elsewhere—on at least three occasions. One is a bit on the luscious side but still revealingly forceful:

The vernal radiance of my lover's lips

Was shut like a red rose upon my mouth.

The fine verbal as well as rhythmic drive here will be better relished if juxtaposed with a less tense, more easily found poetic moment of the same mood:

Many a girl's lips ruby-red

With their vernal honey fed

Happy mouths...

The next occasion gripping the mind is not rich or voluptuous but economically suggestive in the absoluteness of its appeal to the beloved:

Turn hither for felicity.

My body's earth thy vernal power declares...

This is not only fine: it has the note of excellence. So too has the third occasion by a deft startling accompaniment of the traditional poeticism of the epithet with a ponderous abstract noun which suddenly springs into unforgettable vitality:

...And what needs Love in this pale realm...?

His vernal jurisdiction to bare Hell

Extends not...

The moral of all this varied exemplification is fourfold. First, even a born poet may have his comparative ups and downs. Secondly, the temptation downward comes mainly through an after-glow of the Romantic Movement or through an urge towards high thinking in verse. Thirdly, poetic inspiration can counteract the most down-pulling decorative or ratiocinative terms. Fourthly, a poet like Sri Aurobindo can afford to have his descents pointed out, for not only are they still poetry of some sort or other but he has a versatile power of recovery and the descents even in his early and middle periods are very few in proportion to the ascents. They are still fewer—practically nil—as sheer Light takes up more and more the poet in him into itself. After his arrival at Pondicherry from the political field we have sustained ascents, whether the theme be openly spiritual or not.

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