Annotation in the strict sense can be of two kinds. One directly illuminates lines of poetry by correctly construing them or suggesting their right interpretation or setting them beside similar ones found elsewhere or analysing their technical qualities. The other provides the background of event and circumstance from which they get projected. From the strictly artistic viewpoint exact information relating to this background is superfluous: the verse stands by itself, making its own statement or story, picture or symbol, and requires no comparison with real life to add to its intrinsic value.

Thus, to find that there was a special purpose in using the names Cymothea and Myrtilla in one of the closing passages in the first poem in Songs to Myrtilla would help little the beauty of the lines. Even the information that Myrtilla is derived from Myrtle, the name of the tree sacred to Venus, does not augment the loveliness of the girl's name or go towards justifying the perfections attributed to her. Again, in the poem Night by the Sea, neither the poetic quality nor the passion-poignancy can be increased by our knowing whether the Edith addressed in it existed in the actual Cambridge of Sri Aurobindo's day or, if she did, who precisely she was. Of course, biographical or historical interest, whenever it can be added, is not to be disdained, but the more important task is to make the poem, qua poem, go home more effectively and be a keener cultural force.

Stanza 5 of Night by the Sea is rather obscure in places and it would be worthwhile clarifying it. I had put before the poet the obscurities and had received a full detailed explanation.

* Mostly published in Mother India, June-September, 1957.

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Unfortunately the letter has been misplaced and as it had been received several decades ago the explanation cannot be clearly remembered. But some elucidation of particular turns is still possible.

In construing

These no longer. For our rose

In her place they wreathed once, blows

we have to remember that "rose" is personified and the lines are a compact version of: "The boys and girls (who had made love before us in the self-same garden) are now gone and their passionate pleasures are over. For now our rose is in bloom in place of the rose that they once wreathed." The personification of a flower is found elsewhere too. In this very poem, in stanza 2, we have "her" referring to a flower:

Censered honeysuckle guessed

By the fragrance of her breast.

But the reader will be on a false scent if "her" in the phrase "in her place" is read in a possessive connotation and the wreathing is taken to be of "place" and not of "her".

A more difficult proposition is the next couplet:

And thy glorious garland, sweet,

Kissed not once those wandering feet.

How is "kissed" to be interpreted? Is it just a poetic way of saying "touched" or does it convey a particular gesture and emotion—loving self-offering? Whose, again, are the "wandering feet"? We can do no more than surmise that the feet are Edith's own, and that they are called "wandering" because all

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feet are more or less on the move on the path of Time, and that Edith's garland is still intact and has not broken and dropped its flowers down to her feet. But other readings may be as plausible and perhaps all guesswork gives less poetry than the strange obscurity about the lines.

The later phrase about Spring (personified),

A lovelier child

His britde fancies has beguiled,

seems to mean that now it is Edith who has become Spring's favourite, Spring who has rejected (as the preceding lines say) the beauties of girlhood that had been wooed in the past in the same garden.

The next six lines,

O her name that to repeat

Than the Dorian muse more sweet,

Could the white hand more relume

Writing and refresh the bloom

Of lips that used such syllables then,

Dies unloved by later men,

make a generality of the girls loved before Edith in this garden and bemoan all human beauty's transitoriness and the oblivion into which it soon falls. They are somewhat involved and vague, but they may with some assurance be paraphrased and elucidated thus: "If the white hand (of Death or Time) would only agree to brighten up the faded name and quicken the life-bloom on the withered lips that at one time uttered it, then we should know how sweet it were to repeat that name, sweeter than the simple and solemn music in the Dorian mode prevalent in the Greek countryside. But such a name disappears and later men do not cherish it."

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The first fourteen lines of stanza 8,

With thy kisses chase this gloom:—

Thoughts, the children of the tomb.

Kiss me, Edith. Soon the night

Comes and hides the happy light.

Nature's vernal darlings dead

From new founts of life are fed.

Dawn relumes the immortal skies.

Ah! what boon for earth-closed eyes?

Love's sweet debts are standing, sweet;

Honeyed payment to complete

Haste—a million is to pay—

Lest too soon the allotted day

End and we oblivious keep

Darkness and eternal sleep,

are reminiscent in general of Catullus's famous

Soles occiders et redire possum.

Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,

Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Da mi basia mille,

which Ben Jonson has woven into a couple of "songs" in the same metre as Sri Aurobindo, thus anticipating him in general:

Come, my Celia, let us prove,

While we may, the sports of love;

Time will not be ours for ever:

He, at length, our good will sever.

Spend not then his gifts in vain.

Suns, that set, may rise again:

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But if once we lose this light,

'Tis, with us, perpetual night...¹

Kiss me, sweet: the wary lover

Can your favours keep, and cover...

Kiss again: no creature comes.

Kiss, and score up wealthy sums

On my lips, thus hardly sundered,

While you breathe. First give a hundred,

Then a thousand...²

C H. Hertford³ remarks: "The simple intensity of the [Catullus passage] offered no vantage-ground for the salient qualities of Jonson's style, and became, 'literally' rendered, merely smooth and insignificant... Campion came far nearer with the superb Elizabethan Romanticism of his

Heaven's great lamps do dive

Into their west, and straight again revive,

But soon as once is set our little light,

Then must we sleep one ever-during night."⁴

Perhaps some may think the best rendering is not even Campion's. The cri du coeur

The sunset's dying ray

Has its returning,

But fires of our brief day

Shall end their burning

¹ The Forest, V

2 Ibid., VI.

³Ben Jonson, edited by C H. Herford and P. Simpson (Oxford, 1925).

⁴A Book of Airs, 1601, 1.

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In night where joy and pain

Are past recalling—

So kiss me, kiss again—

The night is falling.

Line 19 of stanza 8, asking the beloved to keep safely shut in her white bosom his own heart

Like a rose of Indian grain,

is interesting because for the first time the poet refers to anything Indian and even directs, though obliquely, the reference to himself. The next specific reference, in these early poems, to matters Indian with now a clear implication of his own Indianness, occurs in Envoi. An unspecific one, in the line,

And even my mother bade me homeless rove,

comes in stanza 3 of Love in Sorrow.

* *

The Lost Deliverer is a poem found originally in the midst of several concerned with Ireland and particularly with Parnell who is addressed in one of them as "Deliverer lately hailed"and in another as "great deliverer". But it does not seem easy to apply it to Parnell, for, though the Phoenix Park murders committed during his period of nationalist agitation were often wrongly ascribed to his inspiration and though some groups (mostly Roman Catholic) in Ireland itself threw him over after the case for adultery brought by a lieutenant of his, Captain O'Shea, against Mrs. O'Shea whom Parnell subsequently married, there is nothing apparently in ParnelPs life to correspond to the phrases:

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A weakling sped

The bullet when to custom's usual night

We fell because a woman's faith was light.

This lack of correspondence, however, does not hinder our poetic appreciation of it—least of all is our response lessened to a magnificent turn like

Vainly, since Fate's immeasurable wheel

Could parley with a straw,

which can gain nothing of essential world-wide import from being substantiated by one or other actual event in Parnell's life.

The two opening lines of the same piece,

Pythian he came; repressed beneath his heel

The hydra of the world with bruised head,

run together two incidents of Greek mythology, which have been already explained in the second part of The World of Sri Aurobindo's Poetry. The reference is to Apollo and Hercules.

Lines on Ireland. 1896 express indignation at the abject state into which Ireland fell soon after its petty disownment of Parnell and particularly after his almost unhonoured death in 1891. As poetry it shows a fine command over the heroic couplet, combining flexibility of internal movement and frequent enjambment with the monumental phrase—a sort of transference of the spirit of Miltonic blank verse to the conditions of the couplet as practised by Dryden and others of his age.

The nine lines beginning,

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As once against the loud Euphratic host

The lax Ionians of the Asian coast

Drew out their numbers...

refer to the revolt against the Persian rule in 500 B.C. by the Ionians who were made luxurious by the wealth and prosperity of their cities in Asia Minor and had a name for effeminacy. The revolt was put down by King Darius. His success was due both to his own superior forces and to the soft character the Ionians had developed.

The fifty-five lines beginning,

Therefore her brighter fate and nobler soul

Glasnevin with that hardly honoured bier

Received...

speak of Parnell who was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. In the course of them the phrases,

Thus the uncounselled Israelites of old,

Binding their mightiest, for their own ease sold,

Who else had won them glorious liberty

To his Philistian foes,

refer, of course, to Samson, with an elliptical Latinism in "who" for "Him who"; while the reference in

Thus too Heracles

In exile closed by the Olynthian seas,

Not seeing Thebes nor Dirce any more,

His friendless eyelids on an alien shore,

is to Hercules, called Heracles by the Greeks, a native of

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Thebes with its neighbouring fountain Dirce. After his famous twelve labours, he fell madly in love with Iole, daughter of Eurytus, King of Oechalia. He was repulsed by Eurytus when he demanded her, and the matter was further complicated by his killing Eurytus's son, for which he had to go into exile for a year, as a slave to the Lydian queen Omphale.

⁂

The Latin epigraph to Envoi is from Virgil and forms the conclusion of his Catalepton V which runs:

Ite hinc, inanes, ite rhetorum ampullae,

inflata rore non Achaico verba,

et vos, Selique Tarquitique Varroque

scholasticorum natio madens pingui,

ite hinc, inane cymbalon juventuris;

tuque, O mearum cura, Sexte, curarum,

vale, Sabine; jam valete, formosi.

Nos ad beatos vela mittimus portu

magni petentes docta dicta Sironis

vitamque ab omni vindicabimus cura.

Ite hinc, Camenae; vos quoque, ite jam sane,

dulces Camenae, nam fatebimur verum,

dulces fuistis, et tamen meas chartas

revisitote, sed pudenter et raro.

T. H. Warren has a verse translation of it:

Avaunt, ye vain bombastic crew,

Crickets that swill no Attic dew:

Good-bye, grammarians crass and narrow,

Selius, Tarquitius, and Varro:

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A pedant tribe of fat-brained fools,

The tinkling cymbals of the schools!

Sextus, my friend of friends, good-bye,

With all our pretty company!

I'm sailing for the blissful shore,

Great Siro's high recondite lore,

That haven where my life shall be

From every tyrant passion free.

You too, sweet Muses mine, farewell,

Sweet Muses mine, for truth to tell

Sweet were ye once, but now begone;

And yet, and yet, return anon,

And when I write, at whiles be seen

In visits shy and far between.

The article on Virgil in the Encyclopaedia Britannica has the following pertinent passage: "After studying rhetoric he began the study of philosophy under Siron the Epicurean. One of the minor poems written about this time in the scazon metre tells of delight at the immediate prospect of entering on the study of philosophy, and of the first stirring of that enthusiasm for philosophical investigation which haunted him through the whole of his life. At the end of the poem, the real master-passion of his life, the charm of the Muses, reasserts itself."¹

Sri Aurobindo's choice of Virgil's lines as his epigraph may be taken to indicate his sense of some great and high work awaiting him beyond the inspiration of the Greek Muse, beyond all poetry even, though never quite excluding it, in the country of his birth about which he writes in the final stanza:

Me from her lotus throne Saraswati

¹ This quotation as well as the full text of Virgil's lines and Warren's translation I owe to Frederick Mendonca, Professor of English, St. Xavier's College, Bombay.

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Has called to regions of eternal snow

And Ganges pacing to the southern sea,

Ganges upon whose shores the flowers of Eden blow

The great and high work is symbolised by the call of Saraswati who is the Goddess not only of poetry but of all learning, spiritual and secular, and of perfection in life's organisation. Perhaps the "regions of eternal snow" stand for pure spiritual wisdom, the pacing "Ganges" for the majestic flow of the wisdom-touched soul through life's lands until it joins the ocean of the Infinite, and "the flowers of Eden" for the perfected happy details of those soul-fertilised places.

With regard to Urvasie, the general conception of the Apsaras (or Opsaras, as Sri Aurobindo in his early days under the influence of Bengali pronunciation calls them) may be of interest. Here we may fruitfully draw upon his own Notes, found among his old unrevised writings on Kalidasa's play Vikramorvasie which he has rendered into English as The Hero and the Nymph. When the Gods and the Titans had joined to churn the primeval Ocean of Being to bring up for the earth a marvel which neither side alone could have evolved, then after aeonic labour and various trying vicissitudes the Apsaras came into being out of the profundities. Says Sri Aurobindo: "The Apsaras are the most beautiful and romantic conception on the lesser plane of Hindu mythology. From the moment that they arose out of the waters of the milky Ocean, robed in ethereal raiment and heavenly adornment, waking melody from a million lyres, the beauty and light of them has transformed the world. They crowd in the sunbeams, they flash and gleam over heaven in the lightnings, they make the azure beauty of the sky; they are the

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light of sunrise and sunset and the haunting voices of forest and field. They dwell too in the life of the soul; for they are the ideal pursued by the poet through his lines, by the artist shaping his soul on his canvas, by the sculptor seeking a form in the marble; for the joy of their embrace the hero flings his life into the rushing torrent of battle; the sage, musing upon God, sees the shining of their limbs and falls from his white ideal. The delight of life, the beauty of things, the attraction of sensuous beauty, this is what the mystic and romantic side of the Hindu temperament strove to express in the Apsaras. The original meaning is everywhere felt as a shining background, but most in the older allegories, especially the strange and romantic legend of Pururavas as we first have it in the Brahmanas and the Vishnupurana."

The Apsaras are also "the divine Hetaira of Paradise, beautiful singers and actresses whose beauty and art relieve the arduous and world-long struggle of the Gods against the forces that tend towards disruption by the Titans who would restore Matter to its original atomic condition or of dissolution by the sages and hermits who would make phenomena dissolve prematurely into the One who is above phenomena." "Ideals of all the plastic and sensuous arts fall within the scope of the Apsara; she is actress, songstress, musician, painter. When they arose from the waves neither the gods nor the demons accepted them as wives; accepted by none they became common to all; for neither the great active faculties of man nor the great destructive recognise sensuous delight and charm as their constant and sufficient mistress, but rather as the joy and refreshment of an hour, an accompaniment or diversion in their constant pursuit of the recognised ideal to which they are wedded."

Urvasie is the fairest of the Apsaras—and Sri Aurobindo, unlike Kalidasa, does not fail to present her as she has been pictured by Hindu mythology. Two fine passages may be

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pointed out in this connection. One is the passage in which Pururavus sees Urvasie. Pururavus's words here are not just a lover's idealising imagination running riot: together with it is the expression of the mythopoeic philosophy behind the Apsara-conception. The other passage¹, designable The Man and the Nymph, goes to the heart of the matter. Yes, we see here the Goddess-function of Sri Aurobindo's heroine, but still only as felt by Pururavus and known by her sister-companion and not as manifested by her in action. Urvasie in herself bears out almost what Sri Aurobindo notes of Kalidasa's creation: "His presentation of her is simply that of a beautiful and radiant woman deeply in love. Certainly the glories of her skiey residence, the far-off luminousness and the free breath of the winds are about her, but they are her atmosphere rather than part of herself. The essential idea of her is natural, frank and charming womanliness.... If this is a nymph of heaven, one thinks, then heaven must be beautifully like the earth." Sri Aurobindo's poem is meant to be not an epiphany of the Apsara so much as an idyll-epic of human love, showing the rush of a regal heart beyond all bonds and bounds of life towards perfect beauty embodied, a rush through varied scenes of the earth into the above-earth that is the true home of such beauty. We may add that Sri Aurobindo, particularly at the end, does not leave it unrecognised that a rush of this type is not the whole of man's ideal and that this sublime sensuousness, though an uplifting movement of the heart, is bound to leave a good deal of man's destiny unfulfilled. The poem, however, does not abide mainly on the philosophic or ethical level, striking any complete balance of Pururavus's deeds: it depicts centrally the colour and the strength of a one-pointed love daring the seemingly impossible and achieving it. Urvasie contains a lot of allusions to mythology and legend

Urvasie contains a lot of allusions to mythology and legend

¹ Quoted in the essay The World of Sri Aurobindo's Poetry, pp. 70-71

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—too many to be exhaustively dealt with. A couple may here be elucidated. In the passage somewhere towards the close, where Pururavus's ascent towards Urvasie is described, the verses—

... In thy line the Spirit Supreme

Shall bound existence with one human form;

In Mathura and ocean Dwarca Man

Earthly perfectibility of soul

Example—

refer to Sri Krishna the Avatar, traditionally considered the complete incarnation of divinity, who was born in Mathura and many of whose famous deeds were by the waters of Dwarca. He was of the same "lunar line" as Pururavus, unlike the earlier Avatar Sri Rama who belonged to the "solar line" about which are the verses:

...Upon my heights Breathing

God's air, strong as the sky and pure,

Dwell only Ixvaacou's children.

Of Love and Death a letter of Sri Aurobindo's (3.7.1933) says: "The poem... was written in a white heat of inspiration during 14 days of continuous writing—in the mornings, of course, for I had to attend office the rest of the day and saw friends in the evening. I never wrote anything with such ease and rapidity before or after.... I don't think there was any falling of the seed of the idea or growth and maturing of it; it just came—from my reading about the story of Ruru in the Mahabharata; I thought, 'Well, here's a subject', and the rest burst out of itself..."

An earlier note—recently found among Sri Aurobindo's

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papers and dating itself to about 1919 by referring to Love and Death, a work of 1899, as having been "written a score of years ago"-runs:

"The story of Ruru and Pramadvura—I have substituted a name [Priyumvada] more manageable to the English tongue —her death in the forest by the snake and restoration at the price of half her husband's life is told in the Mahabharata. It is a companion legend to the story of Savitri but not being told with any poetic skill or beauty has remained generally unknown. I have attempted in this poem to bring it out of its obscurity. For full success, however, it should have had a more faithfully Hindu colouring, but it was written a score of years ago when I had not penetrated to the heart of the Indian idea and its traditions, and the shadow of the Greek underworld and Tartarus with the sentiment of life and love and death which hangs about them has got into the legendary framework of the Indian Patala and hells. The central idea of the narrative alone is in the Mahabharata; the meeting with Kama and the descent into Hell were additions necessitated by the poverty of incident in the original story."

In the lines, occurring in the passage where the God of Love declares himself and there is a demand for sacrifice,

As tyrants in the fierceness of others' pangs

Joy and feel strong, clothing with brilliant fire,

Tyrants in Titan lands...,

the phrase "clothing with brilliant fire" was put before Sri Aurobindo for elucidation. He replied that it was suggested by "Nero's 'living torches', the Christians indued with combustible matter and set on fire in his fetes—according to the history (?) or the legend."

Sri Aurobindo was also asked about the meaning of the word

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"absolve" in the following lines from the same passage:

But if with price, ah God! what easier! Tears

Dreadful, innumerable I will absolve

Or pay with anguish through the centuries...

The usage here was contrasted to that in the lines in the passage dealing with Ruru's descent into the Underworld:

For late

I saw her mid those pale inhabitants

Whom bodily anguish visits not, but thoughts

Sorrowful and dumb memories absolve,

And martyrdom of scourged hearts quivering.

Sri Aurobindo replied: "In the second passage it is used in the ordinary sense. 'Absolution' means release from sins or from debts—the sorrowful thoughts and memories are the penalty or payment which procures the release from the debt which has been accumulated by the sins and errors of human life. In the first passage 'absolve' is used in its Latin and not in its English sense,—'to pay off a debt', but here the sense is stretched a little. Instead of saying 'I will pay off with tears', Rum says: 'I will pay off tears' as the price of the absolution. This Latini-sation and the inversion of syntactical connections are familiar licences in English poetry—of course, it is incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some other, likes, as Stephen Phillips used to say, to have liberties taken with it. But, of course, before one can take these liberties one must be a master of the language—and, in this case, of the Latin also." (1931) Apropos of "liberties", we may note two slighdy unusual constructions, both of them in the passage concerned with the

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speech of the God of Love. In

...Whom thou desirest seeing not the green

And common lovely sounds hast quite forgot—

we have an effective change of turn in the second line where we might expect something like "And quite forgetting common lovely sounds". Instead, we have an independent clause conferring importance on what is spoken, and "thou" is understood. In

...the wild

Marred face and passionate and will not leave

Kissing dead lips that shall not chide him more—

we have either a relative pronoun or else "it" understood before "will not leave".

On Love and Death we have a couple of valuable comments by the poet himself in private letters. One that touches also on some general issues runs: "A poet likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament or taste, the rest he condemns or ignores. Contemporary poetry, besides, seldom gets its right judgment from contemporary critics, even. You expect for instance Love and Death to make a sensation in England—I don't expect it in the least: I shall be agreeably surprised if it gets more than some qualified praise, and if it does not get even that, I shall be neither astonished nor discomfited. I know the limitations of the poem and its qualities and I know that the part about the descent into Hell can stand comparison with some of the best English poetry; but I don't expect any contemporaries to see it. If they do, it will be good luck or divine grace, that is all. Nothing can be more futile than for a poet to write in expectation of contemporary fame or praise, however agreeable that may be, if it comes: but it is not of much value; for very few poets have enjoyed a great contemporary

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fame and very great poets have been neglected in their time. A poet has to go on his way, trying to gather hints from what people say for or against, when their criticisms are things he can profit by, but not otherwise moved (if he can manage it) —seeking mainly to sharpen his own sense of self-criticism by the help of others. Differences of estimate need not surprise him at all." (2.2.1932)

The other comment concerns the passage in which the Love-God Kama or Madan speaks about himself. In the letter to which it is a reply, some doubt was expressed whether this passage, moving and powerful though it was, could be considered a peak of poetry. The passage runs:

But with the thrilled eternal smile that makes

The spring, the lover of Rathi golden-limbed

Replied to Ruru, "Mortal, I am he;

I am that Madan who inform the stars

With lustre and on life's wide canvas fill

Pictures of light and shade, of joy and tears,

Make ordinary moments wonderful

And common speech a charm: knit life to life

With interfusions of opposing souls

And sudden meetings and slow sorceries:

Wing the boy bridegroom to that panting breast,

Smite Gods with mortal faces, dreadfully

Among great beautiful kings and watched by eyes

That burn, force on the virgin's fainting limbs

And drive her to the one face never seen,

The one breast meant eternally for her.

By me come wedded sweets, by me the wife's

Busy delight and passionate obedience,

And loving eager service never sated,

And happy lips and worshipping soft eyes:

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And mine the husband's hungry arms and use

Unwearying of old tender words and ways,

Joy of her hair, and silent pleasure felt

Of nearness to one dear familiar shape.

Nor only these but many affections bright

And soft glad things cluster around my name.

I plant fraternal tender yearnings, make

The sister's sweet attractiveness and leap

Of heart towards imperious kindred blood,

And the young mother's passionate deep look,

Earth's high similitude of One not earth,

Teach filial heart-beats strong. These are my gifts

For which men praise me, these my glories calm:

But fiercer shafts I can, wild storms blown down

Shaking fixed minds and melting marble natures,

Tears and dumb bitterness and pain unpitied,

Racked thirsting jealousy and kind hearts made stone:

And in undisciplined huge souls I sow

Dire vengeance and impossible cruelties,

Cold lusts that linger and fierce fickleness,

The loves close kin to hate, brute violence And mad insatiable longings pale,

And passion blind as death and deaf as swords.

O mortal, all deep-souled desires and all

Yearnings immense are mine, so much I can."

Sri Aurobindo wrote: "My own private opinion agrees with Arjava's estimate rather than with yours. These lines may not be astonishing in the sense of an unusual effort of constructive imagination and vision like the descent into Hell; but I do not think I have, elsewhere, surpassed this speech in power of language, passion and truth of feeling and nobility and felicity of rhythm all fused together into a perfect whole. And I think

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I have succeeded in expressing the truth of the godhead of Kama, the godhead of vital love (I am not using 'vital' in the strict Yogic sense; I mean the love that draws lives passionately together or throws them into or upon each other) with a certain completeness of poetic sight and perfection of poetic power, which puts it on one of the peaks—even if not the highest possible peak—of achievement. That is my private opinion— but, of course, all do not need to see alike in these matters." (10.2.1932.)

An Image is the earliest experiment of Sri Aurobindo's in hexameters. It was written before he had fully evolved his theory of true English Quantity and it needed some corrective touches afterwards, but they were very few,

Transiity Non Periit is one of Sri Aurobindo's earliest sonnets—a combination of the Shakespearean form with the Petrarchan-Miltonic. The octet (as Sri Aurobindo used to name what is usually called the octave) is in Shakespearean quatrains unconnected by any repetitive rhyme-structure. The sestet is not a quatrain followed by a couplet but one of the many combinations of three rhyme-pairs possible to the Petrarchan-Miltonic form. Also, the run-on of the octet into the sestet is a Miltonic though not Petrarchan characteristic. The language is semi-Miltonic, especially towards the end where the constructions are somewhat Latinised.

Chitrangada, fragment of an early composition of which more than one fragmentary version exists, was touched up here

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and there when republished in the 'forties from the files of the periodical Karmayogin edited by Sri Aurobindo in the first decade of the century. But the line,

I praise my father's prescient love,

seems to have escaped notice, for it remains a tetrameter.

The blank verse is akin to that of Urvasie and Love and Death while suggesting in places the style of Baji Prabhou, Only one technical liberty stands out clear-cut-line 6 with its inverted fifth foot:

Prescient of grey realities. Rising,...

But there is another line with a curious and unusual scansion if it is to be taken as a pentameter:

A turretted gate inwalling my rule.

We may note that, like Urvasie and Love and Death as well as Savitri which are Sri Aurobindo's three other blank-verse poems dealing with subjects from mythology or legend, Chitrangada has a theme of love and paning under the action of fate: This year of thee is mine until the end. The Gods demand the rest.

We may note too that, like those poems, this begins with the motif of darkness passing into day. The transitional dawn-hour has a particular appeal for Sri Aurobindo: Ilion begins no less with it. But neither in Uroasie nor in Love and Death is the dawn given any particular significance or made the immediate mise en sceene. Though the broad mythico-spiritual im

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port woven into the fabric of the tale as in Ilion or the profound philosophico-mystic symbolism integral to the story as in Savitri is absent, we have here for the first time in Sri Aurobindo's early narratives a touch of the depths in the dawn-moment against whose pull towards dateless memories and formless yearnings Urjoon warns but which Chitrangada feels as taking us "near to the quiet truth of things". In other poems also of Sri Aurobindo's the dawn is a-quiver with inner suggestions—as when the invocation goes up in Ahana from the Hunters of Joy to the Goddess of the first break of inner illumination, and as when the soul has a Vedantic awakening in the short piece entitled Reminiscence.

As the only available copy of the drama, Perseus the Deliverer, Perseus the Deliverer, had some damaged pages, a bit of reconstruction was done here and there for the Collected Poems and Plays (1942) and while doing it Sri Aurobindo added—in the same style as the rest of the play—one passage with what seems a prophetic eye to the development of the contemporary phenomenon of Hitler:

This man for a few hours became the vessel

Of an occult and formidable Force

And through his form it did fierce terrible things

Unhuman: but his small and gloomy mind

And impure dark heart could not contain the Force.

It turned in him to madness and demoniac

Huge longings. Then the Power withdrew from him

Leaving the broken incapable instrument,

And all its might was spilt from his body. Better

To be a common man mid common men

And live an unaspiring mortal life

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Than call into oneself a Titan strength

Too dire and mighty for its human frame,

That only afflicts the oppressed astonished world,

Then breaks its user.

This passage may be compared with the slightly earlier poem entitled The Dwarf Napoleon,

Baji Prabhou, though not written on the whole in the strictly epic style which blends amplitude and poise with power, is epic in substance and suggestion everywhere and makes without the least loss in essential poetry a battle-piece comparable to any in the world's best literature. Being blank verse, there is nothing in it of the ballad-tone whose facility as well as jerki-ness often lowers the inspiration of such pieces in English literature: it has a terse strong construction, often with a touch of Latinisation, reminiscent of Milton, and its movement is perfectly controlled and manoeuvred. Some of the turns are a little obscure. In the phrase,

Yielding up, the dangerous gorge

Saw only on the gnarled and stumbling rise

The dead and wounded heaped,

the two opening words refer to the retreat, "experienced" by the hill, of the broken assailants whom the hill gave up from its slope, thus baring its own contour to view, and from whose ranks the dead and wounded alone were seen by the incline on its difficult terrain. In the phrase,

So hot a blast and fell

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Stayed their unsteady valour, their retreat

So swift and obstinate a question galled,

Few through the hail survived,

the conjunction "that" is understood after "obstinate" and this adjective goes with "swift" to apply to "retreat" and not to the galling question which without qualifying words and even before the description is over is made to arise as a result of, on the one hand, the deadly intensity of the "blast" and, on the other, the paradoxical character of the retreat ("obstinate" no less than "swift") and the strange combination of boldness and unsteadiness that was met by the blast. This question finds its sense only in the next sentence where the chiefs witnessing the rout and drawing back their forces are said to meet "in dubious council" to decide whether to quit or continue.

The word "griding", liable to be confused with "grinding", in the line,

A Mogul' lance ran griding through his arm,

is a word in fair use in older poetry, meaning "to cut or scrape with strident or grating sound". It is followed by the preposition "through" or "along".

Two proper names call for a little explanation. Bhavani is the Goddess-Spirit of India in its martial aspect, guarding the culture and religion of the country with a supernatural sword. Shivaji, fired by the sense of danger to the soul of Hinduism from Aurangzeb's Muslim fanaticism and autocracy, was a devotee of Bhavani and supposed to have been inspired and guided by Her. His devotion was further fostered by the san-nyasi saint Ramdas whom he accepted as his guru and at whose feet he was more than once ready to surrender his kingdom. Ramdas influenced the Mahratta mind greatly in those days, as is suggested by the picture, in the poem, of Suryaji

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singing to the hills

A song of Ramdas as he smote and slew.

Invitation and Mother of Dreams were both written in Alipore Jail in 1907, in two entirely different styles—the one bare and powerful, the other richly and complexly stimulating. It is curious how, despite the four walls of a cell, they breathe of freedom and spaciousness, while the sense of the lonely which the one conveys is but of a sovereign kingdom far above the populous and ordinary human and the feeling of transcendence which the second communicates is of a reaching beyond the outer world through the crowded wonders of the subtle planes towards some "peak of divine endeavour" that is supracosmic.

On the central point of the eight-lined lyric God, beginning "Thou who pervadest all the worlds below", Sri Aurobindo sheds light apropos of two translations of it into Bengali. Replying to one of the translators, D. K. Roy, he writes:

"Your translation of the second verse of my poem seems to take away the force and idea-substance of the original and to substitute a sentimental pseudo-Rabindrian half-thought without much meaning in it. He who is the greatest of the great —'Mahato mahiyan —does not disdain to dwell in the clod and the worm, and the vast impartiality shown in this humility is itself the very sign of the greatness of the Divine, that was the idea behind the verse. Does your rendering convey it?

"About R's rendering, I am afraid it is not very satisfactory either. The idea is that Work and Knowledge and Power can only obey the Divine and give him service: Love alone can compel Him, because of course Love is self-giving and the Divine gives himself in return. As for the second verse it does not give the idea at all. To have no contempt for the clod or the

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worm does not indicate that the non-despiser is the Divine: such an idea would be absolutely meaningless and in the last degree feeble. Any yogi could have that equality or somebody much less than a yogi. The idea is that, being omnipotent, omniscient, infinite, supreme, the Divine does not seem to disdain to descend even into the lowest forms, the obscurest figures of Nature and animate them with the Divine Presence: that shows His Divinity. The whole sense has fizzled out in her translation."

The Vedantin's Prayer is one of the first signs of the typical Aurobindonian Yoga, all the more notable because of the associations of the word "Vedantin". The traditional Vedantin who merges in the infinite silent Self of selves has no call for prayer: prayer can be directed only to some supreme Lord and Lover. Here the usual pressing towards the "hidden door of Knowledge" is mixed with a response to "the eternal Will" and a cry unto Love to outpour and unto Strength to fulfil itself. We may say this is the Vedanitin of the many-sided Upanishads and especially of the synthesising Gita, standing on the verge of the spiritual vision and discipline inspired by the Aurobindonian Supermind's integrality.

A Vision of Science is one of the two poems—the other being In the Moonlight which Sri Aurobindo refers to in a letter about the change in scientific outlook in our day. He says that it prophesies the awakening by science to the hollowness of its own early materialistic dogmatism, an awakening which is part presage of a new era of spiritual seeking and experience.

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The inspirational sources, in terms of psychology, of To the Sea

In the Moonlight has the passage:

Two genii in the dubious heart of man,

Two great unhappy foes together bound

Wrestle and strive to win unhampered ground;

They strive for ever since the race began.

One from his body like a bridge of fire

Mounts upward azure-winged with eager eyes;

One in his brain deep-mansioned labouring lies

And clamps to earth the spirit's high desire.

These lines may be compared to some of Goethe's in Faust, Englished by G. Lowes Dickinson and Susan Stawell in their Goethe and Faust published several years after In the Moonlight. The translation runs:

Twin brethren dwell within me, twins of strife,

And either fights to free him from the other;

One grips the earth in savage lust of life,

Clutches the ground and wallows in the mire.

The other lifts himself and struggles free,

Tearing the chains that bind him to his brother,

Beating the air with wings of vast desire

Towards the far realm of his great ancestry.

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Apropos of the incarnation of the Divine and the advent of the Age of Gold on the heels of the Iron Age after "the last fierce spasms of the dying past" have shaken the nations, as suggested at the end of In the Moonlight, we may quote the magnificent passage from Book III, Canto 4 of Saoitri:

A gaint dance of Shiva tore the past,

There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;

Earth was overrun with fire and the roar of Death

Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;

There was a clangour of Destruction's wings:

The Titan's battle-cry was in my ears,

Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.

I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers

Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life

Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;

Forerunners of a divine multitude

Out of the paths of the morning star they came

Into the little room of mortal life.

I saw them cross the twilight of an age,

The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,

The great creators with wide brows of calm,

The massive barrier-breakers of the world

And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,

The labourers in the quarries of the gods,

The messengers of the Incommunicable,

The architects of immortality.

Into the fallen human sphere they came,

Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,

Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,

Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light,

Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,

Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,

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Approaching eyes of a diviner man,

Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,

Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.

High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,

Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways

And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods

And dancers within rapture's golden doors,

Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth

And justify the light on Nature's face.

Among the poems of Sri Aurobindo's middle period, The Rishi represents, in a semi-dramatic form, the fullest philosophic statement of the all-round ancient Indian spirituality, at once life-transcending and life-embracing, which later ages broke up into many divergent strains and finally tended to narrow down to one predominant strain of other-worldly renunciation. The fourfold scheme of experience found in the Mandukya Upanishad is here: Virāt, the gross outer, called Waking—Hiranyagarbha, the subtle inner, called Dream— Prajnā, the causal inmost, called Sleep—the sheer absolute Self, simply called Turiya or Fourth. We must remember that in the Upanishad's Dream there is no unreality, just as in its Sleep there is no emptiness: they merely designate depths of consciousness in which is an existence greater and truer than in the surface dimensions that are usually our life. In fact, Dream is the rich sustaining medium, the world-shaping Thought-power, through which the outer manifestation takes place, while Sleep is the ultimate cause and creator of things, the supreme omniscient and omnipotent Divinity hidden within all and holding in itself the archetypal seed-form of everything. The absolute Self is indeed utterly featureless, an indivisible

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unity of infinite Peace, but it is not cut off from the other three poises: those poises are its own and, though as the pure Ground of them it is free of them, their activity is its Peace loosened forth, their multiplicity its Oneness diversely deployed, and its freedom is not limited by non-manifestation even as it is not limited by manifestation.

A direct poetic version of the fourfold scheme is in a passage in Savitri, Book XI, Canto I, pp. 763-765.

Ilion in hexameters, illustrating what Sri Aurobindo called "true English Quantity", exists as a fragment consisting of eight Books and a ninth which breaks off before the martial climax is reached: the batde between Achilles and the Amazon Queen Penthesilea. But the state of the manuscript leads one to believe that Sri Aurobindo completed the poem and that the last pages have somehow got lost.

Ilion technically fulfils an inspiration Sri Aurobindo had during his Cambridge days. He has referred to it in one of his talks. While the Alipore Bomb Case was going on in 1908, H. N. Ferrers, a barrister, passed through Calcutta on way to Singapore. About him Sri Aurobindo says: "He had been my class-mate at Cambridge. He saw me in the Court, sitting inside a cage with the other accused and was much concerned. We were put there lest we should jump upon the Judge and murder him ! Ferrers did not know how to get me out; so he had to leave without meeting me. It was he who at Cambridge had given me the clue to the genuine English hexameter. He read out a line from Clough which he thought the best in tone and this gave me the swing of the Homeric metre as it should be in English."

What must have been the line? We do not know for sure, but

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we may hazard a very likely guess. In his essay On Quantitative Metre Sri Aurobindo first discusses the technique and then comes to the temper of the hexameter. One of his reasons for the deficiency of the existing English hexameter is that the instrument "is compelled to express subjects whose triviality brings it down far below its natural pitch". Every form has a temper inspiring it and too much deviation from this temper would vitiate the form. Along with a sense of the genuine technique, there must be the hexametrical mood. And it is when Sri Aurobindo is dwelling on this desideratum that we get our hint.

After noting how Clough once or twice rises above his limitations and after quoting some lines where the hexametrical rhythm and its animating mood have both been approximated, Sri Aurobindo tells us: "at another place he rises still higher and suddenly discovers, though only once in a way and apparently without being conscious of his find, the rhythm of the true quantitative hexameter-

where the opening antibacchius and spondee followed by bounding and undulating dactyls give a sound-value recogni-sable as akin to the ancient movement. It would be an epic line if it were not in the mock-heroic style; but, even so, if we met it apart from its context, it would remind us at once of the Homeric rhythms-

Be de kat' Oulumpoio karenon choomenos ker..."

We may mention that elsewhere Sri Aurobindo has Englished the Iliai-line both literally and poetically. Literally it runs:

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"And he descended from the peaks of Olympus, wroth at heart..." The poetic rendering in Homer's own metre is:

Down from the peaks of Olympus he came wrath vexing his heart-strings...

By the side of the elaborate simile, in Book I of Ilion, apropos of Deiphobus, already slain by the Gods in their minds, though yet "clanging in arms" in the Trojan streets-

Even as a star long extinguished whose light still travels the spaces,

Seen in its form by men, but itself goes phantom-like fleeting

Void and null and dark through the uncaring infinite vastness,

So now he seemed to the sight that sees all things from the Real—

we may set Francis Thompson's lines in Sister Songs:

As down the years the splendour voyages

Of some long-ruined and night-submerged star...

Thompson aims, as subsequent lines show, to suggest the poet being survived by his poetry. A moving and original use, this, of a majestic astronomical figure in very fine verse, but Sri Aurobindo conveys a profounder meaning in his great passage than Art's effective continuity in men's remembrance and in their lives after the artist's personal disappearance from life: some deathless Artist Power which has fashioned the whole universe is conjured up in all Its immense and omniscient supremacy.

Thompson, in essential significance, was anticipated by Longfellow in his poem Charles Sumner, ending:

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Were a star quenched on high,

For ages would its light,

Still travelling downward from the sky,

Shine on our mortal sight.

So when a great man dies,

For years beyond our ken,

The light he leaves behind him lies

Upon the paths of men.

In the speeches of both Penthesilea and Laocoön Ajax is spoken of as having been slain by Penthesilea. In some other passages there is a living Ajax. This discrepancy is explained by the fact that in the Trojan War there were two Ajaxes, the Great and the Small. The Great was the most famous fighter of the Greeks next to Achilles. According to Greek legend and, unlike as in Ilion., he died by his own hand when after Achilles's death he lost to Odysseus in the attempt to gain possession of the armour of Achilles. The Small, son of Oileus and called the Locrian, boastful in character and reputed to be the fastest of the Greeks next to Achilles, figures as alive in Ilion.

Gades, mentioned in Antenor's speech, is the old name for Cadiz on the south-west coast of Spain and marked for the ancients the farthest point beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, on either side of which were the Mounts Calpe and Abyla called the Pillars of Hercules. It was also known as Gadeira. Pindar, for instance, priding himself on his own unmatched poetry, figures it as Gadeira and says: "Beyond Gadeira no man can pass into the gloom of the West."

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In the meeting between Paris and Polyxena, when Polyxena says to Paris, who is on his way to fight Achilles and his hosts, that he is going

Armed with the strength of Fate to strike at my heart in the batde,

she means that she is in love with Achilles who, as we learn from an earlier passage, sent a proposal for her hand in marriage.

In the Book of the Chieftains, Odysseus, in the passage beginning

Rather far would I sail in my ships past southern Cythera,

is made to anticipate the wanderings through which he went for twenty years after the fall of Troy before returning home to Ithaca. The passage has a very dramatic effect, as of prophecy, for all who remember the subject of Homer's Odyssey.

The line, put into the mouth of Briseis, in The Book of the Woman,

Stronger there by love as thou than I here, O Achilles,

sounds a little strange in construction until we realise what it means: "Just as here you are physically stronger than I, so there I shall be by virtue of my love stronger than you."

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In the passage about the gathering of the Gods before Zeus, in The Book of the Gods,

In the same passage the lines,

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,

are a rendering of some famous phrases in the Mundaka Upanishad. The stanza, where these phrases occur, is translated thus by Yeats in collaboration with Purohit Swami: "Neithersum, moon, star, neither fire nor lightning lights Him. When He shines, everything begins to shine." Sri Aurobindo, less faithful to the letter but more loyal to the spirit, catches the large breath of the inspired Upanishadic Sanskrit in his own prose translation of the Mundaka: "There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind. There these lightnings flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shineth."

Sri Aurobindo himself has provided various technical notes to many of his short compositions in quantitative metre— Trance, Shiva the Inconscient Creator, The Life Heavens, Jivan-mukta, etc. They have been published together with these poems, and some general indications by him of the themes and

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their treatment have also been supplied by him in the same place. What we may do here is to collect the remarks made by him elsewhere on a few of these compositions. Thus, in regard to a translation of the Alcaics of Jivanmukta

"The lines:

Revealed it wakens, when God's stillness

Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature

express an exact spiritual experience with a visible symbol which is not a mere ornamental metaphor but corresponds to exact and concrete spiritual experience, an immense oceanic expanse of Nature-consciousness (not the world) in oneself covered with the heavens of the Divine Stillness and itself rendered calm and motionless by that over-vaulting influence. Nothing of that appears in the translation; it is a vague mental statement with an ornamental metaphor.

"I do not stress all that to find fault, but because it points to a difficulty which seems to me insuperable. This Jivanmukta is not merely a poem, but a transcript of a spiritual condition, one of the highest in the inner Overmind experience. To express it at all is not easy. If one writes only ideas about what it is or should be, there is failure. There must be something concrete, the form, the essential spiritual emotion of the state. The words chosen must be the right words in their proper place and each part of the statement in its place in an inevitable whole. Verbiage, flourishes there must be none. But how can all that be turned over into another language without upsetting the apple-eart? I don't see how it can be easily avoided. For instance in the fourth stanza, 'Possesses', 'sealing', 'grasp' are words of great importance for the sense. The feeling of possession

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by the Ananda rapture, the pressure of the ecstatic force sealing the love so that there can never again be division between the lover and the All-Beloved, the sense of the grasp of the All-Beautiful are things more than physically concrete to the experience ('grasp' is especially used because it is a violent, abrupt, physical word—it cannot be replaced by 'in the hands' or 'in the hold') and all that must have an adequate equivalent in the translation. But reading X's Bengali line I no longer know where I am, unless perhaps in a world of Vedantic abstractions where I never intended to go. So again what has X's translation of my line to do with the tremendous and beautiful experience of being ravished, thoughtless and wordless, into the 'breast' of the Eternal who is the All-Beautiful, All-Beloved?"

On Thought the Paraclete Sri Aurobindo has written:

"As thought rises in the scale, it ceases to be intellectual, becomes illumined, then intuitive, then overmental and finally disappears seeking the last Beyond. The poem does not express any philosophical thought, however; it is simply a perception of a certain movement, that is all.

" Tale blue' is the colour of the higher ranges of mind up to the intuition. Above it, it begins to become golden with the supramental Light."

"Thought is not the giver of Knowledge but the 'mediator' between the Inconscient and the Superconscient. It compels the world born from the Inconscient to reach for a Knowledge other than the instinctive vital or merely empirical, for the Knowledge that itself exceeds thought; it calls for that superconscient Knowledge and prepares the consciousness here to receive it. It rises itself into the higher realms and even in disappearing into the supramental and Ananda levels is transformed

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into something that will bring down their powers into the silent self which its cessation leaves behind it.

"Gold-red is the colour of the Supramental in the physical— the poem describes Thought in the stage when it is undergoing transformation and is about to ascend into the Infinite above and disappear into it. The 'flame-word rune' is the Word of the higher Inspiration, Intuition, Revelation which is the highest attainment of Thought."

Journey's End, which is in quantitative metre—

The day ends lost in a stretch of even,

A long road trod—and the little farther,

Now the waste-land, now the silence;

A blank dark wall, and behind it heaven—

may be compared with another small piece of Sri Aurobindo's in traditional metre:

ONE DAY

The Little More

One day, and all the half-dead is done,

One day, and all the unborn begun;

A little path and the great goal,

A touch that brings the divine whole.

Hill after hill was climbed and now,

Behold, the last tremendous brow

And the great rock that none has trod:

A step, and all is sky and God.

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One Day was among the lines of poetry the Mother read out on the last day of 1954 when she gave the Message for 1955, the year which was said to be a crucial one bristling with difficulties. The Mother went on to say: "Now, as we have talked of difficulties, I wish to read two things, not two poems but some lines, one whole short poem and just one stanza of a poem, which are a very magnificent illustration of our message for the next year and which will give you a little sketch of what the true consciousness is, that which is free from all difficulties, that which is above all conflicts." The one stanza was the end of the piece called

Even in rags I am a god;

Fallen, I am divine;

High I triumph when down-trod,

Long I live when slain.

When the Mother was asked: "Will you explain the two passages?" she replied: "Explain? There is no explanation. They speak for themselves very clearly. Poetry is not to be explained. It is to be felt and not reasoned about. The poetic inspiration is above reason. It must not be made to sink into the domain of the reason, because it will get spoiled... It is to be understood by an internal contact much more than by the words."

The Bird of Fire was originally attempted in quantitative metre but the poem did not progress. Then another form was tried and the result was successful—"a kind of compromise between the stress system and the foot measure." About the symbolism Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The Bird of Fire is the living

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vehicle of the gold fire of the Divine Light and the white fire of the Divine Tapas and the crimson fire of Divine Love— and everything else of the Divine Consciousness."

Here we may quote some lines from Savitri, Book I, Canto 2, together with Sri Aurobindo's remarks in reference to them:

Almost they saw who lived within her light

Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres

Descended from its unattainable realms

In her attracting advent's luminous wake,

The white-fire dragon bird of endless bliss

Drifting with burning wings above her days.

The question asked was: "In the mystical region, is the dragon bird any relation of your Bird of Fire with 'gold-white wings' or your Hippogriff with 'face lustred, pale-blue lined' ? And why do you write: 'What to say about him? One can only see'?" Sri Aurobindo replied: "All birds of that region are relatives. But this is the bird of eternal Ananda, while the Hippogriff is the divinised Thought and the Bird of Fire is the Agni-bird, psychic and tapas. All that however is to mentalise too much and mentalising always takes most of the life out of spiritual things. That is why I say it can be seen but nothing said about it."

In Hons Aeternum: "This poem on its technical side aims at finding a halfway house between free verse and regular metrical poetry. It is an attempt to avoid the chaotic amorphousness of free verse and keep to a regular form based on the fixed number of stresses in each line and part of a line while yet there shall be a great plasticity and variety in all the other elements of poetic

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rhythm, the number of syllables, the management of the feet, if any, the distribution of the stress-beats, the changing modulation of the rhythm. In Hons Aeternum was meant as a first essay in this kind, a very simple and elementary model. The line here is cast into three parts, the first containing two stresses, the second, and third each admitting three, four such lines rhymed constituting the stanza."

"In this scansion as I conceive it, the lines may be analysed into feet, as...all good rhythm can, but in that case the foot measures must be regarded as a quite subsidiary element without any fixed regularity—just as the (true) quantitative element is treated in ordinary verse. The whole indispensable structure of the lines depends upon stress and they must be read on a different principle from the current view—full value must be given to the true stresses and no fictitious stresses, no weight laid on naturally unstressed syllables should be allowed—that is the most important point."

"A far sail | on the unchangeable monotone | of a slow slumbering sea. |

"...The beats are distributed at pleasure: sometimes they are close together, sometimes they stand separated by far intervals amid a crowd of short unstressed syllables. Sometimes there is a closely packed movement loosening itself at the end,—

Over its head | like a gold ball, the sun | tossed by the gods in | their play.|

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"Sometimes a loose run gathers itself up in its close into a compact movement:

Here or otherwhere, | poised on the unreachable abrupt | snow-solitary ascent. |

"Or any other movement can be chosen which is best suited to the idea or the feeling of the individual line."

Musa Spiritus and Bride of the Fire breathe a common aspiration towards the eternal Light and its expression in time—the one by a grand movement in which the intense is carried in the immense, the other by a poignant turn which bears the immense in the intense. The former has several lines beginning with a single-syllabled truncated foot (7,11,26,29), and the last Une of the final stanza—

Weave from my life His poem of days,

His calm pure dawns and his noons of force.

My acts for the grooves of His chariot-race,

My thoughts for the tramp of His great steeds' course !—

is particularly notable for the heavy thudding "horse-power" in its three closing consecutively stressed monosyllables with their massed "hoof-beat" consonants.

The fragment in Alexandrine, beginning

I walked beside the waters of a world of light,

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is Sri Aurobindo's only attempt in the metre which is the staple one of great French poetry. He has some interesting things to say on this metre: "The difficulty, I suppose, is its normal tendency to fall into two monotonously equal halves while the possible variations on that monotony seem to stumble often into awkward inequalities. The Alexandrine is an admirable instrument in French verse because of the more plastic character of the movement, not bound to its stresses but only to an equality of metric syllables capable of a sufficient variety in the rhythm. In English it does not work so well; a single Alexandrine or an occasional Alexandrine couplet can have a great dignity and amplitude of sweep in English, but a succession fails or has most often failed to impose itself on the ear. All this, however, may be simply because the secret of the right handling has not been found: it is at least my impression that a very good rhyth-mist with the Alexandrine movement secretly born somewhere in him and waiting to be brought out could succeed in rehabilitating the metre."

His own fragment was offered to a disciple as "a map of possibilities (not quite complete of course) without the use of any but an occasional anapaest." He further wrote about the lines: "Some of these can be differently divided, not the way I have done; it depends much on how one wants to read it. But the main thing is that there can be a variation of even or uneven divisions (of the syllables); the even ones have three varieties, 4-8, 6-6, 8-4; the uneven ones may be 5-7, 7-5, 9-3, or even 3-9. The division may be made by the caesura of a foot, a pause in the sentence or a pause of the voice. If there is a succession of similar lines (4-8, 6-6, 8-4 are always tending to come), then great care must be taken to bring in minor variations so that there may be no sheer monotone.

"This, by the way, is my own theory of the Alexandrine evolved at need. I don't know if it agrees with any current

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prosody. Perhaps there is not a fixed prosodic theory as the Alexandrine has been left very much in the cold, not having been adopted by any of the great writers."

The Children of Wotan catches vividly the perversely religious vision and exultation that was one of the most effective elements in the cult of Nordic race and blood and steely Titanism which Hitler let loose in Germany and swept outward on the war-path.

Most of Sri Aurobindo's Sonnets were written in the late 'thirties though a few were touched up afterwards. Except for Nirvana, The Other Earths and Transformation, which are slightly earlier pieces, they were published after the poet had passed away. All of them are spiritual autobiography, but about the subject of three of them (Adwaita, The Stone Goddess, The Godhead) we have in his letters a passing statement, while of the realisation behind a fourth (Nirvana) he has given several descriptions. In a note dictated regarding his early spiritual experiences we read:

"Before he met Lele, Sri Aurobindo had some spiritual experiences, but that was before he knew anything about Yoga or even what Yoga was,—e.g., a vast calm which descended upon him at the moment when he stepped first on Indian soil after his long absence, in fact with his first step on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay (this calm surrounded him and remained for long months afterwards); the realisation of the vacant Infinite while walking on the ridge of the Takhti-Suleman [Seat of Solomon] in Kashmir; the living presence of Kali in a shrine on the banks of the Narmada; the vision of the Godhead surging up from

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within when in danger of a carriage accident in Baroda in the first year of his stay..."

About the experience of Nirvana we may quote a passage from a note dictated by Sri Aurobindo for Aldous Huxley. Huxley had made a comment on a short excerpt from Sri Aurobindo in his book, The Perennial Philosophy. Sri Aurobindo said:

"...After three years of spiritual effort with only minor results he was shown by a Yogi the way to silence his mind. This he succeeded in doing entirely in two or three days by following the method shown. There was an entire silence of thought and feeling and all the ordinary movements of consciousness except the perception and recognition of things around without any accompanying concept or other reaction. The sense of ego disappeared and the movements of the ordinary life as well as speech and action were carried on by some habitual activity of Prakriti alone which was not felt as belonging to oneself. But the perception which remained saw all things as utterly unreal; this sense of unreality was overwhelming and universal. Only some undefinable Reality was perceived as true which was beyond space and time and unconnected with any cosmic activity, but yet was met wherever one turned. This condition remained unimpaired for several months and even when the sense of unreality disappeared and there was a return to participation in the world-consciousness, the inner peace and freedom which resulted from this realisation remained permanently behind all surface movements and the essence of the realisation itself was not lost. At the same time an experience intervened: something else than himself took up his dynamic activity and spoke and acted through him but without any personal thought or initiative. What this was remained unknown until Sri Aurobindo came to realise the dynamic side of the Brahman, the Ishwara and felt himself moved by that in all his sadhana and action..."

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To many lines in the Sonnets one can find parallels in Savitri though, of course, not always with the same nuance and intent. Perhaps the most easily paralleled are some lines in The Indwelling Universal which begins,

I contain the whole world in my soul's embrace:

In me Arcturus and Belphegor burn...

Book VII, Canto 6, of Savitri has :

His soul must be wider than the universe

And feel eternity as its very stuff,

Rejecting the moment's personality,

Know itself older than the birth of Time,

Creation an incident in its consciousness,

Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire

Circling in a corner of its boundless self...

Unlike the name "Arcturus", which is well-known for one of the brightest stars in the northern heavens and which has found its way not unoften into literature, "Belphegor" which Sri Aurobindo has brought in with powerful effect has practically no place in popular astronomy and has figured rarely in past literary usage.

However, it has become famous, though not in an astrono-mical context, in contemporary France because of Julien Benda's book Belphegor where, turning its etymological significance (Baal-Peor, Semitic deity of licentiousness) to critical purposes, he has given a new adjective to the French language, Belphégorien, to designate certain strains of degeneracy and effeminacy in the intellectual and social life of his country.

The closing couplets of the two sonnets The Guest and The Inner Sovereign,

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He hears the blows that shatter Nature's house:

Calm sits he, formidable, luminous,

and

Nature in me one day like Him shall sit

Victorious, calm, immortal, infinite,

summarise very finely and, because of some repeated expressions, very pointedly the double movement of the Aurobindo-nian Yoga, the discovery of the "deep deathless being" and then the extension of the inner immortality to the outer being that has so long been accepted as a thrall to limitation and imperfection, mutability and death.

The titles of the two poems are very significant. The one indicates that the Divine is a grand sojourner, safe in the power of His eternity, in a house not His own, as it were: He lives and acts in it, but is yet aloof as well as immune from its gradual breakdown at the hands of Time. The other suggests that this same inner resident is also a master of the house, capable of rebuilding and transforming it into a Nature-image of the Spirit-reality.

About the composition of all his poetry (and even of all his prose) ever since the experience of the utterly silent mind in 1908, Sri Aurobindo has written in a letter: "I receive from above my head and receive changes and corrections from above without any initiation by myself or labour of the brain. Even if I change a hundred times, the mind does not work at that, it only receives. Formerly it used not to be so, the mind was always labouring at the stuff of an unshaped formation... The poems come as a stream beginning at the first line and ending

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at the last—only some remain with one or two changes, others have to be recast if the first inspiration was an inferior one." Savitri was recast eight or ten times "under the old insufficient inspiration": afterwards it was written and rewritten wholly "from above".

Concerning the blank-verse of Savitri we may touch on the "Miltonism" so often attributed to this epic. To be in general Miltonic is surely no defect, provided one is not merely an echo. But it does not help the ends of criticism to see Miltonism as soon as we have anywhere a high-pitched blank verse embodying at some length an epic or semi-epic theme. Of course, repeated end-stopping, as in Savitri, is bound to de-Miltonise the basic mould. But even the presence of enjambment is insufficient by itself to constitute the Miltonic movement. On the side of form, the latter consists not only of run-over lines but also of complicated sentences and grammatical suspenses building up a closely-knit verse-paragraph in an English markedly Latinised in its turn. On the side of style, the differentia is well touched off half-humorously by Sri Aurobindo himself in a remark drawn by the attachment of the Miltonic label to a couple of his lines: "Miltonic? Surely not. The Miltonic has a statelier more spreading rhythm and a less direct more loftily arranged language. Miltonically I should have written not

The Gods above and Nature sole below

Were the spectators of that mighty strife

but

Only the Sons of Heaven and that executive She

Watched the arbitrament of the high dispute."

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On the side of substance, it is the strongly cut imaged idea in a religio-philosophical mood that is Miltonism—the substance which is proper, in one of its aspects, to what Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as the Poetic Intelligence from the really spiritual ranges that are "Overhead".

Not that thought-form is absent in Savitri: there is plenty of it and that is why the poem is a philosophy no less than a legend and a symbol. But the thinking is not from the mental level which is usually associated with thought. Thought-form can be taken by what arrives from Overhead through the Yogi's silent mind and the philosophy in Savitri is an idea-structure expressing a mystical vision, a spiritual contact or knowledge which have come by processes of consciousness other than the intellectual. The thought-element in Savitri therefore differs from that which is found usually in poets credited with a philosophical purpose—even a poet like Milton whose rhythmic roll seems to have a largeness reminiscent of Overhead inspiration. For, though the rhythm catches something of the Overhead breath, Milton's substance, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out in a letter, "is, except at certain heights, mental—mentally grand and noble" and his "architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence". And it is because of the mixture of a semi-Overhead sweep of sound with a mostly intellectual-imaginative substance that Sri Aurobindo, for all his admiration for Milton, has said: "The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."

Some notion of the difference between the "mental Miltonic" and the Overhead Aurobindonian may be caught, together with other impressions of the latter's rare quality, if we compare a few phrases collected from several sections of

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Paradise Lost with a few from the opening of Savitri. Milton apostrophises the Divine Spirit:

Thou from the first

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread

Dovelike satst brooding on the vast abyss

And madst it pregnant.¹

He addresses too the original spiritual Light:

Bright effluence of bright essence increate!...

Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice

Of God as with a mantle didst invest

The rising world of waters dark and deep,

Won from the void and formless infinite.²

About the advent of this illumination we may quote him further in the verses:

But now at last the sacred influence

Of light appears, and from the walls of Heaven

Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night

A glimmering dawn.³

He has also depicted an ethereal revelation, an entrance to God's grandeur, in the illumined distances:

The work as of a kingly palace-gate,

With frontispiece of diamond and gold

Embellished; thick with sparkling orient gems

The portal shone, inimitable on Earth

By model, or by shading pencil drawn.⁴

¹ Book I, 19-22.

² Book III, 6, 9-12.

³ Book II, 1034-7.

⁴ Book III, 505-9.

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Now look at Savitri:

...The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone

In her unlit temple of eternity,

Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.

Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite...

A long lone line of hesitating hue

Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart

Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.

Arrived from the other side of boundlessness

An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps...

Intervening in a mindless universe,

Its message crept through the reluctant hush

Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy

And, conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,

Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.

A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,

A sense was born within the darkness' depths,

A memory quivered in the heart of Time

As if a soul long-dead were moved to live...

Into a far off nook of heaven there came

A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.

The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch

Persuaded the inert black quietude

And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.

A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That glowed along a fading moment's brink,

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

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In one of the sentences of the multi-imaged Dawn-description there is a grammatical inversion which I could recognise only after Sri Aurobindo had explained it. In the lines—

As if solicited in an alien world

With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,

Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,

An errant marvel with no place to live,

Into a far-off nook of heaven there came

A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal—

the word "solicited" is not a past participle passive but the past tense and the subject of this verb is "an errant marvel" delayed to the fourth line by the parenthesis "Orphaned etc." The object of the inversion is to throw a strong emphasis and prominence upon the line,

An errant marvel with no place to live.

The sense, after "as if", is not that somebody was being gracefully solicited but that somebody solicited with a timid grace.

Another inversion, not much later, taxes us a little in:

Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,

Awaiting her ordeal's hour abode,

Outcast from her inborn felicity,

Accepting life's obscure terrestrial robe,

Hiding herself even from those she loved,

The godhead greater by a human fate.

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The subject of the verb "abode" is the whole last line.

The adjective "emerald" seems to have been a favourite of Sri Aurobindo's during the period of Savitri. Its first occurrence in his poetry in general comes in Songs to Myrtilla:

Behold in emerald fire

The spotted lizard crawl

Upon the sun-kissed wall...

A few years later we meet it in Urvasie:

a mystic dewy

Half-invitation into emerald worlds—

and in Love and Death:

...wandering mid leaves

Through emerald ever-new discoveries...

We find it also in the opening passage of Ilion:

There, like a hope through ans emerald dream sole-pacing for ever,

Stealing to wideness beyond, crept Simois lame in his currents,

Guiding his argent thread mid the green of the reeds and the grasses.

In Savitri it is first found in:

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A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life

Draped in the leaves' vivid emerald monotone...

This is on p. 17. The next comes after a gap of hundreds of pages—on p. 404:

Lost in the emerald glory of the wood.

Thereafter it is fairly frequent and always applied to forest-scenes. Once it is found twice on the same page: 442. Altogether in Savitri it plays the part of a stock epithet 21 times. Its last appearance is on p. 806.

The lines—

The dubious godhead with his torch of pain

Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world

And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss—

where the intellectual style is clean overpassed may be juxtaposed with the well-known phrases of Francis Thompson's about the human heart's unrealised grandeurs:

The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink—

Yet shall that chasm, till He who these did build

An awful Curtius make Him, yawn unfilled.

The comparison is interesting particularly because, while it is certain that Sri Aurobindo knew of the act of the fierce Roman patriot Sextus Curtius who jumped, horse-backed and full-armoured, into the deep trench which according to the augurs had to be packed with what Rome deemed most precious if she was to escape heavenly punishment, it is equally certain that he

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had not seen Thompson's lines where some of the very words used by Sri Aurobindo—"world", "chasm", "fill"—occur. We become aware how an afflatus with the same charge, as it were, of imaginative words comes in sheer intuitive visionariness and with an undiluted Overhead rhythm in the one instance and in the other with a no less poetic impact but with a more intellectually formulated substance and a vigorous movement which has a rather staccato effect in certain places and which, even when there is a wide sweep, seems to go from point to point in order to enlarge itself instead of presenting immediately a sense of the mysterious depths of being that are astir in the yawning chasm and the tremendous greatness of the Presence that alone can appease them.

Not only the intuitive directness blended with a keen gnomic turn is remarkable in the line:

Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven.

The line is notable for its metrical structure also. We have two equal parts balanced on either side by the connecting verb "are" which implies their equivalence on two different planes —and the exact balance of essential significances constituted by the identical number of syllables is reinforced by the stress-scheme being precisely the same in either part: two consecutive stresses followed by a stress between two slacks—

"Earth's winged chimeras", "Truth's steeds in Heaven."

Metrical as well as rhythmical effects of expressive originality are abundant in Savitri.

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With the Truth-Light strike earth's massive roots of trance.

Here we have a sense of both striking power and massive rootedness through the five successive stresses after the first two words. Or take

Heaven's wa|ters trailed | and dribbled | through the | drowned / land.

Here, together with the various suggestive alliterations, particularly of r in association with t, d, th and of "d" in association with "I" and "n", we have a scansion diversely pointing the many shades of the description.

We have again some fine metrical and rhythmical effects in the passage about the hierarchy of worlds towards the close of Book, I Canto 5. The lines,

Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences

Flamed in transparencies of crowded light,

have a strong startling impact of disclosure in the three consecutive stresses at almost the beginning, the last on a quantitatively long syllable reinforcing the sense of a penetration of depths. The second part of the opening line has two unstressed syllables at the end, giving a sense of the remote and unseized. The inverted foot, a trochee, starting with an accented intrinsic long the next line counteracts this sense and creates a revelatory stroke and the word "transparencies" which balances the word ''transcendences" of the preceding line and has the same dying away slack-

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ending gives now an impression which is the very opposite of the remote and unseized, an impression of the unresisting and easily grasped. The final phrase "crowded light" is all the more accurately expressive because the stresses are not successive: the light, for all its crowdedness, has yet to be not dense but transparent and this is achieved metrically and rhythmically by a slack coming between the stresses, while the crowdedness is conveyed by the divided stresses falling on two quantitatively long syllables and thus counteracting whatever dispersiveness may be suggested by the division.

Another piece of metrical and rhythmical memorableness is the line,

A last high world was seen where all worlds met.

Here the coming together of stresses in exactly the same way in two places (the first two feet and the last two) and the close play of long quantities there and the stance of a single long quantity in the middle foot of the line's five and the arrangement of the vowel sounds either differing from or agreeing with one another and, finally, the unbroken uniform run on and on of monosyllables—all these conjure up vividly the subtle reality expressed with simple and clear words.

On p. 214, in

Watched her charade of action for some hint,

Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes—

"No" refers to a form of Japanese lyric drama, also known as "Noh". Naturally, it has nothing to do with negation such as in the lines (p. 227):

A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still

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Accompanied by an eternal No.

The line in Savitri which seems to take the longest time to read is on p. 348:

The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought.

Every word is a monosyllable and six out of the ten words— "great, schemed, worlds, they, planned, wrought"—are quantitatively long, being either supported on a vowel-sound of intrinsic length or else having the vowel-time drawn out by succeeding consonants. .

The line in Savitri composed of the least number of words is on p. 399:

Architectonic and inevitable...

The passage about the abysm of Hell in Book II Canto 7, one of the most intensely etched in Savitri, has a marked play of alliteration in several lines hammering home the ubiquitous hellishness:

Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power...

The implacable splendour of her nightmare pomps...

Trampled to tormented postures the torn sense...

A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue...

A travelling dot on downward roads of Dusk...

In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space...

In the use and choice of words, too, Savitri comes often with highly original gestures. There is the uplifting of a non-poetic word beyond its common connotation into poetic effectiveness, as in

Page 385

Then shall the business fail of Death and Night,

where the commercial note is fully exploited by "fail" being added to "business" and even a partnership indicated. There is an energy of unsqueamish violence which is yet memorable poetry, as in

Then perish vomiting the immortal soul

Out of Matter's belly into the sink of Nought.

There is a drawing upon other languages for exact effects, as in

Knowledge was rebuilt from cells of inference

Into a fixed body flasque and perishable,

where the French word "flasque" is more significant in sound and serves better the rhythmic end than would its English synonyms—"slack", "loose" or even "flaccid". Over and above all these gestures of original utterance Sri Aurobindo shows an inventive audacity by the employment of new words and new usages, either based on English or continental languages. We have

A single law simplessed the cosmic theme—

or a similar treatment of an English noun:

Ambitioned the seas for robe, for crown the stars.

We have even a clear neologism for "immensities" in

And driven by a pointing hand of light

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Across their soul's unmapped immensitudes,

on the analogy of "infinitudes" for "infinities". It recurs:

A little gift from the immensitudes,

But measureless to life its gain of joy.

The same neologism comes also in the singular number along with "infinity":

In their immensitude signing infinity

They were the extension of the self of God...

Savitri's father, who is "the traveller of the world's" and whose Yogic explorations start with Canto One of Book II and come to an end with Canto Four of Book III, covering in all nineteen Cantos, is nowhere mentioned by name until the very last one.

There, on p. 386, for the first time and quite casually as if it were a familiar appellation by now, we come to know that he is "Aswapathy":

But Aswapathy's heart replied to her...

And the meaning of the name is indirectly conveyed to us at the conclusion of the same Canto:

The Lord of Life resumed his mighty rounds

In the scant field of the ambiguous globe.

"Aswapathy" literally stands for "The Lord of the Horse". But in the old Vedic symbolism the Horse represents the Life Force.

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In Book VII Canto 5, concerned with the finding of the Soul, the line

A being no bigger than the thumb of man,

is a translation from the Katha Upanishad where the inmost soul of man, divine in essence, governing his many lives and evolving through the ages into the Supreme Spirit's infinity, is spoken of in these terms.

In the long passage (pp. 598-99) beginning—

But now the half-opened lotus bud of her heart

Had bloomed and stood disclosed to the earthly ray;

In an image shone revealed her secret soul.

There was no wall severing the soul and mind,

No mystic fence guarding from the claims of life.

In its deep lotus home her being sat

As if on concentration's marble seat,

Calling the mighty Mother of the worlds

To make this earthly tenement her house.

As in a flash from a supernal light,

A living image of the original Power,

A face, a form came down into her heart

And made of it its temple and pure abode.

But when its feet had touched the quivering bloom,

A mighty movement rocked the inner space

As if a world were shaken and found its soul:

Out of the Inconscient's soulless mindless Night

A flaming serpent rose released from sleep—

an experience is described, which is well-known to Indian Yoga. But here the process is a little different. The Power or

Page 388

Shakti of the Divine—Kundalini—sleeping coiled like a serpent in the chakra

It is not easy to construe the passage (p. 122):

A brute half-conscious body serves as means

A mind that must recover a knowledge lost

Held in stone-grip by the world's Inconscience

And wearing still these countless knots of Law

A spirit bound stand up as Nature's king.

If we put a comma after "Law" and after "bound" and mentally read "must" before "stand", the sense is clarified. The last line would then link up with

A mind that must recover a knowledge lost.

The line (p. 297)—

Above the Masters of the Ideal throne—

has "Above" as an adverb and "throne" as an intransitive verb equivalent to "sit throned".

A Latin construction not infrequent in Sri Aurobindo may be exemplified by a line on p. 811, the middle one of the passage:

Page 389

And the swift parents hurrying to their child,—

Their cause of life now who had given him breath,—

Possessed him with their arms.

Here "Their"="of them". The relative pronoun "who" goes with the understood "them". The meaning of the line is: "Satyavan who was now the cause of the life of his parents who had given him life."

Some untangling is required for the last words (p. 813) spoken by Savitri:

"Awakened to the meaning of my heart

That to feel love and oneness is to live

And this the magic of our golden change

Is all the truth I know or seek, O sage."

There should be a comma after "heart": otherwise the next line would seem an explanation of the word "meaning" in the first. But if we join up these two lines, no sense can be made of them, for a verb would be missing. "Is" of the last line cannot serve the purpose. Nor can it be the verb for the third line without leaving the first two verbless. The only way out, it seems, is to make "Awakened" go with "I", and then the prose-order of the passage would be "That to feel love and oneness is to live, and (that) this (is) the magic of our golden change, is all the truth which I, awakened to the meaning of my heart, know or seek, O sage," or one may put "And this the magic of our golden change" between two dashes as a parenthetical comment.

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