On Poetry
THEME/S
Sri Aurobindo is always a call to spiritual adventure. To read his recent poetry is like walking on the edge of a precipice. One gets intoxicated with heights, one feels dizzy with depths, and it is with an effort that one manages to breathe the keen air and keep a clear head. A vision is lit, an experience takes shape, which are difficult to connect with the familair contours of life. The critic, therefore, is liable to miss the true impact of this poetry, the right suggestion of each austere or colourful line. Most critics will go astray because the self-expression of a supreme Master of Yoga cannot be measured by the rules-of- thumb by which books of verse are reviewed, even religious or idealistic verse. Not that the criteria of poetry in general are inapplicable to it or that the religious or idealistic seeker will find no point of contact with its theme. Sri Aurobindo has chosen a form of art as his instrument and so it is as a poet no less than as a mystic that he should be judged. But his mysticism transcends the religious aim of giving mere mental and emotional "uplift" and the idealistic purpose of firing the imagination with far-away beauty. Sri Aurobindo writes of things he has actually seen and known : his poetry is the revealing word of realities that are supernormal to our mind but close and concrete to the subtle sense of the Yogi. To feel the power of such an inspiration we must bring an intense aesthesis free of old ideas and tempos, we must cultivate a profound sympathetic insight. Else we shall tack on labels that hang most oddly, pick out affinities and differences with a superficial eye and altogether shoot wide of the living soul, the passionate uniqueness of this work.
* First published in Sri Aurobindo Manadir Annual (Calcutta, 1942
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As if it were not enough to write from a range of experience beyond the common, Sri Aurobindo has turned his hand in nine out of these twelve poems to novel verse-forms. He has based his technique on a flexible modulation of classical quantitative foot measures or on a combination of stress and foot striking a many-sided mean between free verse and traditional metre. There are short but instructive notes to one of the books; their absence in the other makes somewhat of a lacuna for full technical appraisement.1 Luckily, it is not necessary to know the technique in detail for getting the rasa of the new movement. A driving force is felt in the expression which assures success in whatever novel pattern Sri Aurobindo chooses to cut. The poems have a pulse of their own and convey like an organic body their peculiar gait. Nothing is eked out with brain-labour to fit a preconceived framework; the inspiration seems to be skilful by a luminous instinct taking liberties with the base and achieving a "happy valiancy" impossible to intellectual experiment. In fact, brain-labour is absent in the very nature of this poetry. Sri Aurobindo writes from centres of consciousness which Yogic practice discovers behind the mind in occult regions and above it in a sort of spiritual ether. This brings in, apart from the technical novelty, an unusual rhythm which is a rarer enchantment, a more momentous adventure than any new and fascinating form. Rhythm, in poetry, is not the mere harmonious arrangement of sounds; it is sound suggesting the hidden life-throb of a thing as felt by a certain mode of con-sciousness. As long as the mode is one that is accessible to the majority of people every fresh sweep of poetic rhythm goes home to the heart. When an extraordinary mode comes into play, the aesthetic ear needs special tuning in order to catch the whole gamut.
1 When the books were included in Collected Poems and Plays, the absence was made good.—K.D.S., 1970.
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Emily Dickinson, referring to the physical effect poetry had on her, says, "It is as if the top of my head were taken off!" Her description applies most appropriately to Sri Aurobindo's work. The wind of his inspiration gives us the feeling that our brain-clamped mind has lost its limits and that it functions in a powerful immensity fraught with unfathomable suggestions. The rhythm fills out the meaning to a tense mystery breaking into a largeness of inner experience which is distinct both from the Classically Sublime and the Romantically Stupendous known to poetry so far. We have a grandeur of sense and sound sui generis. Take the line :
Calm faces of the gods on backgrounds vast.
The word-picture is of a steady watchful agelessness, but that is not all: the very life of that Super-Nature, that amplitude self-aware, is breathed into the long varying vowels and subtly alliterative consonants. Here is another instance :
My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight.
The actual process of the human enlarging itself into the Divine is conveyed both by the suggestive phrases and the rhythm with its leaping yet massive, vigorous yet poised movement of anapaests. Or consider a verse like
Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,
where what would otherwise be abstract springs into concrete-ness because of the vitality of each accurate word, a vitality echoing the very act of a high spiritual realisation, so deeply and intimately does the whole line vibrate in our consciousness.
It is not easy to grasp the essential nature of this rhythm.
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Nothing short of constant brooding over such lines as I have quoted and intoning them to some inner ear can create the true response. All fine poetry must be lived with a long while for the entire bulk of beauty behind its first surprise to be assimilated; work like Sri Aurobindo's demands a keener concentration. Critical analysis will not be enough : we must more than understand, we must get hypnotically haunted, so to speak, until our outward-going faculties develop a supernormal perception. We have to grow both aesthetically and intuitively. To facilitate this growth we cannot do better than make a cult of the new inspiration by repeating and revolving within ourselves as often as possible that magnificent quatrain from The Life Heavens which gives the ideal at once of Sri Aurobindo's askesis and art, the aim of his Integral Yoga and an example of what the best spiritual poetry should be :
Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,
An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
Force one with unimaginable rest.
Here we have the Vedas and the Upanishads and the Gita in miraculous quintessence. No other poet has caught the overtones and undertones of the ancient Indian scriptures with the sustained potency that in these four lines turns the etherealities of religion and idealism into an immediate and palpable greatness. Perhaps in their rarest flights Milton and Wordsworth have captured something similar, but there is in these verses by Sri Aurobindo a continuity, a completeness, an all roundness, an exhaustive loftiest expression of the truth of our whole nature—our body, our vital and emotional being, our thought-urge, our will-energy—a foursquare triumph of the spiritual mantra which arrests and satisfies us more than any accidental aspect of it in splendid isolation like
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Those thoughts that wander through Eternity
from Paradise Lost or that sudden
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone—
which is itself a very lonely voyager through much watery verse in The Prelude.
The mantra ! Whether scattered or built into a consistent pattern, it is the goal of mystical poetry. It occurs under special conditions in which the psychological standpoint of the writer undergoes a change. To speak eloquently of God's knowledge or his marvellous power is not necessarily to embody that power or that knowledge: everything depends on what "plane" of being has found expression. Every plane has its own voice, its own spontaneous manner of utterance. A vivid quivering nerve-poignancy and passion is Shakespeare, the plane of the Life Force par excellence. Milton is a less vibrant play with our guts but a more resounding impact on our grey cells, the plane of the Mind Force raised to its climax. Beyond these forces are other planes: there the basis of all experience is the Infinite and the Immortal—there a supreme Oneness underlying all diversity is the first fact of conscious existence—and consciousness there is not a logical or imaginative attempt to reconstruct truth but a direct entry into the essence of things: thought and its labour are no more, a swift blissful intuition radiates everywhere, with a harmonious surge exceeding the poetic possibilities of our lesser light. If that expressive amplitude is permitted to take hold of our speech, we get a combination of sounds and a turn of phrase and a glow of insight which carry the inmost "feel" of those divine heights. The vision, the word, the vibration—all three must be intensities drawn from the Spirit's ether. But more even than the wide inwardness of the vision,
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the mighty yet intimate grip of the word, it is the rhythm that marks the mantra, bearing as it does the precise thrill of a Consciousness which is everlasting and unlimited. Without such a thrill there would be just a distant glimpse of the Promised Land in admirable poetry of its own kind but no sensation of the Spirit's vastnesses as though they were within us. For that sensation and the concrete insight it brings, the mind must surrender its tongue to the luminous Beyond instead of essaying an imitation by means of its own heat and movement. To do this in any extensive measure calls for a patient and quiet aesthetic Yoga in tune with an actual practice of self-consecration to the Divine. Even then, what is achieved may not be the utter mantra, for there are fine gradations, each a power of the Spirit and the sheer top is the mantric miracle. But Sri Aurobindo has again and again the breath of the sheer top. And when he descends, it is mainly to the other altitudes of Super-Nature: almost throughout the tones of the Over-world blow through his music
An exceptional and unprecedented feat, this—but on being shown the new accent people blink and wonder what all the gorgeous frenzy is about. Unable to make much of his significance at the first blush they start comparing its language and its rhythm to those of older poets in order to arrive at some coign of vantage from which to get the right perspective. But, as I have indicated, the real affinities are such rare birds that the results of the comparison are generally ludicrous. Surface impressions are accepted without the least endeavour to dig below them. If the lines lengthen out and a richness of colour is employed, the cry of "Swinburne!" is raised. The temper of the poem is not even touched, the metrical design is not analysed. The fact that Sri Aurobindo has moulded novel metrical designs and royally filled them with inspiration adds, in the opinion of dilettante critics, a further resemblance to Swinburne
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the arch-metricist. Never a thought is spared for the basic distinctions between the various moulds or the expressive purposes to which they are put. What completes and crowns the huge confusion is that Sri Aurobindo's soar of mystical and spiritual vision beyond the range familiar to the imagination is taken to be half-brother of Swinburne's frequent vagueness and tenuity of substance! Not invariably does Sri Aurobindo soar a little beyond our comprehension; but whenever he tends to do so, there is no melodious thinness of thought, there is only a thrilled transcendence of thought by pure spiritual revelation. What, for instance, is decoratively inane in the pictorial profundity of a vision such as
Gold-white wings a throb in the vastness, the bird of flame went glimmering over a sunfire curve to the haze of the west,
Skimming, a messenger-sail, the sapphire-summer waste of a soundless wayless burning sea-
or in the opulent symbolism charging the deep tone of this passage about the same occult bird:
White-ray-jar of the spuming rose-red wine drawn from the vats brimming with light-blaze, the vats of ecstasy,
Pressed by the sudden and violent feet of the Dancer in Time from his sun-grape fruit of a deathless vine—
or, again, in the psychic tension as well as unearthly magic and mystery of another glimpse from the bird-apocalypse:
Rich and red is thy breast, O bird, like blood of a soul climbing the hard crag-teeth world, wounded and nude, A ruby of flame-petalled love in the silver-gold altar-vase of moon-edged night and rising day.
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The least sensitiveness on our part to great occult verse is enough to convince us that we are in the presence of a reality belonging to other planes of being than the physical. The inward vibrancy of an experience moving between some hidden heart of spirituality in us and some subtle ether above our mind is caught undeniably by the aesthetic sense, and when the whole poem is read we feel that sweep after sweep of an artist's brush has carried us in a multi-gestured scheme to a grand total out of the scope of articulate expression. The Bird of Fire is not a heaping up of half-vivid half-vague effects—it is one whole, and at the end there is no impression of an inadequate stammer. The light and leap of individual pictures come to a profound rest, a composed fullness packed with spiritual substance; only, the substance cannot be altogether grasped by the understanding. All poetry has an unresolved surplus, something that defies mental analysis, a suggestive aura beyond words. Mys-tical poetry lifts this surplus to its largest intensify: the failure, therefore, of the understanding to cope with the strange details and the stranger ensemble does not measure the incompetence of the mystic's art. The sole question we have to put is: Has the poetry everywhere a breath of life and does that breath form a harmony satisfying some intuitive awareness within us?
What strengthens our feeling of a harmony in each poem by Sri Aurobindo is the firm unfaltering manner in which the lines grow. No weakness, no hurry—but a sure and moulded progression even in the midst of speed; there is no myopic peering into mists nor an embranglement among depths as though his mind were alien to them. Sri Aurobindo moves like a master through the Unknown, with a grip on all that he describes: the poetry has an objective three-dimensional air as if the Spirit were neither an abstraction nor a far-floating haze but something to be seen and touched. The peculiarity, however, is that the universe in which Sri Aurobindo sees and touches reality
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is held in a wideness of being that is his own self—the objective and the subjective are a single strangeness. The impression that harmonious worlds of light are his theme and that he possesses whatever he wants to manifest and does not fumble for it distinguishes his poetry at its most puzzling from the discords and chaotic fantasies of the Surrealist School. The surrealist stumbles through a world of jostling phantasms, chunks of colour and imagery laid on one another as in a nightmare. All kinds of wayward combinations are projected and there is an amorphous look about the entire mass. Sri Aurobindo is always the artist seer, the shaper building beauty out of a spaciousness lit up within him. The seeing eye and the shaping hand are evident whether he writes quantitative trimeters with a broad clarity of stroke as in the first half of Shiva—
A face on the cold dire mountain peaks
Grand and still; its lines white and austere
Match with the unmeasured snowy streaks
Cutting heaven, implacable and sheer.
Above it a mountain of matted hair
Aeon-coiled on that deathless and lone head
In its solitude huge of lifeless air
Round, above illimitably spread.
A moon-ray on the forehead, blue and pale,
Stretched afar its finger of strange light
Illumining emptiness. Stern and male
Mask of peace indifferent in might!—
or colour and splendour are drawn from realms of the occult as in Rose of God where a famous symbol is steeped in the most intense spiritual light possible and lifted on a metrical base of
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pure stress into an atmosphere of rapt incantation. Each poem of Sri Aurobindo's must be read with a slow full voice in order to get its true rhythmic value: not indeed a dreamy drawl but an intensity that is controlled and deep-vowelling. Read thus, with the mind held quiet and receptive, Sri Aurobindo wafts to us in this apostrophe the breath of an unforgettable experience:
Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven,
Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven!
Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame,
Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name.
Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being,
Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing!
Live in the mind of our earthhood; O golden Mystery, flower,
Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour.
Rose of God, damask force of Infinity, red icon of might,
Rose of Power with thy diamond halo piercing the night!
Ablaze in the will of the mortal, design the wonder of thy plan,
Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in man.
Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire,
Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colour's lyre!
Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme;
Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the Children of Time.
Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,
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Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss:
Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life Beatitude's kiss.
This is not decorative art, splashing oriental hues and luxuriating in exotic effects for their own sake. Every phrase is plucked from the gorgeous heart of a spiritual ecstasy, every word is dyed in the life-blood of genuine mysticism. Nor is there anything haphazard, a welter of vividnesses. A balance is retained in the midst of intoxication and step by step the rapture is explored. Esoteric, no doubt, some of the expressions are, but they come to us like the actual sight of unknown yet undeniable objects. They are esoteric as the amazing actuality of the Aurora Borealis may be called esoteric when viewed by a traveller from southern latitudes to North Cape. What is more, we feel that the lights in the poem are a burst of secret significance—the vibrant imagery wakes in us an intuition of glorious purposes at work. To miss the sense of a divine reality that is borne on the profoundly moving language and rhythm and to say that we are face to face with abstractions covered by ornate phraseology is to be deaf and blind and numb.
The Infinite, the Eternal, the Divine—these are riot in mystical poetry philosophical abstractions. A certain philosophical air is bound to cling at times to whatever deals with things so remote from our day-to-day concerns. But it is only the most superficial who will assert that Sri Aurobindo has juggled with mere ideas and rendered them attractive with the help of images. Words like "vastness", "immensity", "timeless", "illimitable" and their equivalents scattered throughout his poetry do not stamp it as an intellectual exercise. Such words are an aid to the art that seeks to embody Yogic states of consciousness.
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Apart from monotony, the pitfall to avoid is insincerity and rhetoric—the hollow Hugoesque shout. In poetry that is deeply felt, these so-called abstractions live in the inner being, they create a sort of powerful subjective space—for vision to fill and illuminate. Vision—the seizing of actual presences and their interplay, the contacting of the shape and tint of hidden realities —turns Sri Aurobindo's work into a revelatory process. But to appreciate the revelation, one must keep in mind that Sri Aurobindo is treading the domain of the superhuman, the ultra-natural, and his aim is not to humanise and naturalise them altogether. Indeed poetry of a fine order is possible to a completely humanised and naturalised mysticism as in the lyrics of the Vaishnava devotees, yet such verse is not the sole genre nor the acme of spiritual expression. A thing that is not of earth becomes more authentic and vivid if viewed in its own native atmosphere and setting than if tamed to the needs of the outer eye and the established habits of the poetic imagination. Sri Aurobindo, however, does not indulge in fantasy: a fidelity to mystical fact constitutes his "strangeness". Nor is mystical fact cold and ghostly. In the atmosphere and setting of the Beyond we do not meet a passionless pageant of strange forms on the verge of dissolving into a void. All human emotions are carried up, stripped of their brief pleasures and small pains, kindled into what the old Rishis called ānanda and rested in a supreme single-lustred fullness or made to clasp the contents of a beatific cosmos. Poems like Jivanmukta, Nirvana and Thought the Paraclete which manifest superhuman states are not frigid—they burn in an aura of beatitude. They are the music of sovereign God-realisation, not of aching and thwarted desire for the Infinite. Feeling, passion, emotion—all are there, but in a massive, harmonious, full-flowered intensity —they are not slashed and smitten to tuneful shreds. Variously the genius of Sri Aurobindo brings home that
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intense height and breadth. A style not confined to one formula of symbolisation but cast into a changing chiaroscuro makes the two booklets of his recent poetry a many-faceted pointer to a new art fulfilling what is at present a dim tendency in the race mind. Not always is Sri Aurobindo the esoteric artist: he can also conjure up a picture whose significance is caught by us immediately—
... poised on the unreachable abrupt snow-solitary ascent
Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and spent.
But we are moved quite as much by more mysterious figurations.
... the dragon tail aglow of the faint night
brings us the sense of a power stretched gigantically in the darkness and laying on our minds a living touch through the swirl of stars. The sheer occult confronts us when Sri Aurobindo speaks of Shiva's creative force stirring within the core of Spirit merged in unconscious Matter:
In that diamond heart the fires undrape.
The finality of each word burns itself into the memory. "Undrape", with its hint of processes at once revelatory and creative, could not be bettered. The epithet "diamond" too is worth noting for its double felicity: not only is it true to the inner sight to which the Divine's will is a tremendous white lustre just as the Divine's knowledge is a gold blaze and the Divine's love a crimson flare—it is also extraordinarily apt when the Spirit concealed in Matter is visioned, a presence holding material
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rigidness in a precious and transfigured form, a supreme strength dense with light and beauty. An equal art is employed in a different manner where the hint is of an absolute leap of the soul beyond the narrow paradises that often sidetrack the Yogi's passage through the inner planes:
My consciousness climbed like a topless hill.
The line suggests vividly a straight ascension that never comes to a culminating point because what it explores is the Infinite unfolding expanse after expanse. The suggestion is unlike religious or metaphysical poetry of the past by being couched in a language and a rhythm that somehow impart a direct intimate sense of the Ultra-natural. Whatever the style, this intimate directness is everywhere brought to us by Sri Aurobindo. But it is at its most effective when it carries those large unfathomable reverberations which rise into the mantra and which he calls "overhead" because the afflatus then is a power felt in Yogic experience to be descending from above the mind-level in the brain.
The "overhead" afflatus is, among all inspirations, the most genuinely progressive: it is the sign of the next stage in our psychological evolution. It is like a message out of a future in which man's mind will not only plunge inward to his true psyche and from that spontaneous centre of light deepen into a majesty and a magnitude which is the secret Self of all things but also open upward to colossal powers of consciousness, a dynamic divinity taking up all our members and pouring into them the richest possible fulfilment of earth-existence. Strengthened by such a Yoga, poetry will no longer strain towards the Eternal in half-lit figures and a speech that carries a mere moiety of the Spirit's life-transmuting rhythm. Not that the new art will throw the achievement of past ages into the shade:
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poetic excellence can be attained by the atheism of a Lucretius as well as by the Aurobindonian God-realisation, and nobody will ever outsing Valmiki and Homer and Shakespeare. But a new region of reality will be laid bare, untrodden expressive paths penetrated. While the former ages gave us something of the world's wonder as seized by the body-sense, the life-gusto, the mental aesthesis, there will be found in the future a poetic word equal to Homer and Shakespeare and Valmiki but packed with a superhuman awareness which is man's profoundest though as yet unrevealed truth of being and the archetype of his body, his vital force and his mind. Mystical verse can be written from any inner level—a contact with the Superhuman can be made when one goes anywhere below the surface; still, the inspiration that has the amplest and closest grip on the Divine is the "overhead". In Sri Aurobindo the "overhead" breath is seldom absent: at times it is just a touch upon more familiar strata of harmony—oftener it is a full sweep clearing
Channels of rapture opal and hyaline
For the influx of the Unknown and the Supreme.
His twelve recent poems, therefore, are a remarkable step forward in the realm of Art. Among his own performances, they are a royal prelude of short span to the epic on which he is famed to be at work—Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol—the epic which will carry to its highest tempo and sustain at the greatest and most diverse length the type of poetry that the world's master-singers before Sri Aurobindo's day have created in a few rare moments.
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