On Poetry
THEME/S
To see a star of the first literary magnitude swim into our ken makes one of the rarest and richest moments of life. But there are thrills and thrills; and while it may strike us dumb to discover all of a sudden "deep-brow'd" Homer's "demesne", it may prove difficult to stand
Silent, upon a peak in Darien,
if we find that a mare magnum already familiar to us had all along a shade of glory we had never distinguished—that, for instance, it was Homer who also wrote Plato or that the author of the Republic was the true wizard who even here in the world of Impermanence had made the phenomenal ill-fate of Ilium almost a divine Idea. Such indeed is the blessing of surprise in store for those of us Indians by birth or by affinity, who have heard of Sri Aurobindo the great nationalist prophet of the century's opening decade and Sri Aurobindo the illumined philosopher and Yogi of Pondicherry in the subsequent years but scarcely realise that his poetic inspiration has been as unsurpassed
* This article—except for one additional passage helping the ends of poetic comparison—was first printed in 1929 in the cultural monthly, Orient, of Bombay. It is also the first lengthy and comprehensive study written of Sri Aurobindo's published poetry up to that year—barring translated work and his earliest blank-verse narrative, Urvasie, which was out of print and not even in his own possession. Previous to this article, only two short notices attempting critical evaluation had come out: James Cousins' "The Philosopher as Poet" in New Ways in English Literature and a review of Sri Aurobindo's Songs to Myrtilla by Harindranath Chattopadhyaya in the Madras periodical, Sh'ama. The present article was read by Sri Aurobindo before publication and it had the good fortune to obtain from him an encouraging comment: "It is admirably written both as to style and force of presentation of the thought."
Page 1
as his political idealism, his intellectual power and his towering spiritual attainment.
Born in India on August 15,1872, but educated from his early boyhood in England and speaking the English language as if it were his mother-tongue, he was already at nineteen an unmistakable poet, writing in a vein which is little short of remarkable, considering that only a few even among English singers have distilled such pure nectar at so early an age. No one with a ear for sound-values, an eye for apt images and a little ability to look below the surface can fail to observe that his juvenilia hold just the right sort of promise. For, provided there is always an aspiration towards something "translunary", however vaguely perceived, an abundant felicity of phrase and fancy is altogether the best starting-point for a poet. The ecstasy of insight which is the acme of metrical utterance and lays bare the very heart and meaning of the world in one shade or another can hardly be reached if a poet has not in his early life brooded with intent joy and devotion on rhythms and figures. He must be a true artist in those formative years which precede his ultimate message to mankind; unless his medium has already been made sufficiendy musical and imaginative he can never in his hour of maturity reveal in an authentic poetic accent an aspect of "divine philosophy". And who can deny either music or imaginative subtlety to Sri Aurobindo when in his Songs to Myrtilla, written largely in his late teens under the influence of a close contact with the Greek Muse, he gives us piece after finely-wrought piece of natural magic? Whether we listen to him telling us how the earth is full of whispers after twilight and the daily voice of men is not heard,
But higher audience brings
The footsteps of invisible things,
When o'er the glimmering tree-tops bowed
The night is leaning on a luminous cloud,
Page 2
or expressing the delicate exhilaration imparted by the grace of Eros and constanly enjoyed as an ever-new surprise
Since in the silver mist
Bright Cymothea's lips I kissed,
Whose laughter dances like a gleam
Of sunlight on a hidden stream
That through a wooded way
Runs suddenly into the perfect day,
or giving tongue to the unexpected fear and sadness breathed into the heart of youth by the cheerless suggestions of a night by the sea:
Love, a moment drop thy hands;
Night within my soul expands.
Veil thy beauties milk-rose-fair
In that dark and showering hair.
Coral kisses ravish not
When the soul is tinged with thought;
Burning looks are then forbid.
Let each shyly-parted lid
Hover like a settling dove
O'er those deep-blue wells of Love...
To the wind that with him dwells
Ocean, old historian, tells
All the dreadful heart of tears
Hidden in the pleasant years...
We shall lose, ah me! too soon
Lose the clear and silent moon,
The serenities of night
And the deeper evening light.
We shall know not when the morn
Page 3
In the widening East is born,
Never feel the west-wind stir,
Spring's delightful messenger,
Never under branches lain
Dally with the sweet-lipped rain,
Watch the moments of the tree,
Nor know the sounds that tread the sea—
whether, in short, we find him moved to joy or touched to melancholy by the hues and harmonies of life, there is, without the least doubt, that unanalysable quality in him which proves that here is the first utterance of an exceptionally gifted mind. Now and then we even come across a passage which makes us feel the glow and vibration of some immeasurable mantra lodged in the writer's inmost being, though he himself might not be fully aware of it, and waiting there for ripening experience to deliver it in its native speech of spirit instead of in the accent of ordinary psychological motives. Such, for instance, is the following, based ostensibly on Greek elegiac style, where the pan-piping lover, in the midst of his lament by the banks of the Arethuse for the cruel manner in which Nisa has forsaken him for Mopsus, longs for death:
Oplaintive murmuring reed, breathe yet thy strain.
Ye glades, your bliss I grudge you not,
Nor would I that my grief profane
Your sacred summer with intruding thought.
Yet since I will no more behold
Your glorious beauty stained with gold
From shadows of her hair, nor by some well
Made naked of their sylvan dress
The breasts, the limbs I never shall possess,
Therefore, O Mother Arethuse, farewell.
Page 4
Mark how the consonances, assonances, long vowels, and slow spondees interspersing the iambic beat hum and sing and with the help of the grammatical suspense of the last sentence, indefinitely draw out the sense as if into strange remote spaces beyond or behind the earth's horizon. No less magical and suggestive is the intonation which charges the atmosphere with full yet restrained emotion at the beginning of "The Island Grave
Ocean is there and evening; the slow moan
Of the blue waves that like a shaken robe
Two heard togerher once, one hears alone.
Now gliding white and hushed towards our globe
Keen January with cold eyes and clear
And snowdrops pendent in each frosty lobe
Ushers the first born of the radiant year.
Haply his feet that grind the breaking mould,
May brush the dead grass on thy secret bier,
Haply his joyless fingers wan and cold
Caress the ruined masses of thy hair,
Pale child of winter, dead ere youth was old,.
There is here, apart from verbal artistry, a trembling of the heart's rhythm on the verge of a sort of incantation which gives us vague mystic hints, persuading us to look for some poem or other by this boy not yet twenty, where we would find a sign of some wide intensity of idealism. We are not disappointed; for a little piece in the same collection embodies, despite its apparent call to the near and the tangible rather than to "solitary thinkings", an extremely fine feeling of the greatness and divine
Page 5
lustre of the human soul—especially the human soul in its moments of utter self-giving:
Why do thy lucid eyes survey,
Estelle, their sisters in the Milky Way ?
The blue heavens cannot see
Thy beauty nor the planets praise. Blindly they walk their old accustomed ways.
Turn hither for felicity.
My body's earth thy vernal power declares,
My spirit is a heaven of thousand stars,
And all these lights are thine and open doors on thee.
It is, however, in the touching Envoi which Sri Aurobindo appended in 1895 to his juvenilia that we are given distinctly to know that a spiritual hunger was always present in him. On the surface, this hunger was an artistic desire to endow his poetic expression with a certain potent ease—not by any means facility, but inspired fluency, subde, limpid or sweetly solemn as the occasion required. This he achieved very well, spontaneity and finish being stamped almost everywhere in Songs to Myrtilla. But he was not satisfied, since it was not only Art but also life that he wanted to make glorious in a supreme unflickering fire of beauty. His Muse was no mere goddess of poetry, but a secret cosmic Spontaneity of beautiful creation, a Plenitude of Power whose words are worlds. He aspired to live poetry as well as write it; and his failure to discover in the hopes and loves and labours of ordinary life anything final to rest upon, cast a painful shadow over his art, gave his sweetest songs a lingering note of sad hopelessness, making him feel that the highest in him stood unliberated and inarticulate. That indeed seems to be the true significance of the magnificent stanzas with which the Envoi opens:
Page 6
Pale poems, weak and few, who vainly use
Your wings towards the unattainable spheres,
Offspring of the divine Hellenic Muse,
Poor maimed children born of six disastrous years!
Not as your mother's is your wounded grace,
Since not to me with equal love returned
The hope which drew me to that serene face
Wherein no unreposeful light of effort burned.
And the reason of his discontent and sense of frustration was that he missed a practical method to realise, to incarnate, the high serenity which the mind of Greece had in its theoretic flights conceived. Greek Art and Philosophy, in spite of the transcendental ideal they envisaged, were directed more towards moral and aesthetic ends than towards strictly spiritual fulfilment: a certain indispensable inwardness was lacking, which only India could give to the Indian in Sri Aurobindo, with her agelong yogas, sadhanas and soaring tapasyas, her incessant cry to what the Vedas had called the Dawn of God, the everlasting flush of divine self-revelation to all who look up in appeal from the strife and trouble of the mortal world:-
Vision delightful who standest crowned on the hills far above me,
Vision of bliss, stoop down to mortality. Lean down and love me!
Dawn on me over the edge of the world, across twilight's margin,
Heal my unease with thyself, O heaven-born delicate virgin!
Thou hast the stars to sport with, the winds are the friends of thy sweetness;
Marred am I, earth-bound, troubled with longing,—thrust down from completeness.1
1 This passage reads a little differently in Collected Poems and Plays (1942,
Page 7
Unlike, however, the conventional mystic, Sri Aurobindo did not yearn to escape into some ineffable Nirvana leaving the earth to its bitter failures and privations. He had the unshakable conviction that mere tranquillity of trance-absorption is not our end and what the inner heart seeks is fulfilment, in the universe, of all that makes the universe so passionate and full of colour. To call down into this very life whatever Transcendent there might be was the guiding principle of his mysticism: it was soon to become his master-passion and lead him away from the political field into which he had launched some years after his return from England. Thus, in 1910, induced by five years of growing inner illumination through the practice of Yoga side by side with public activity, he withdrew to Pondicherry to perfect an integral method of spiritual askesis by which those supra-mental ranges of consciousness of which the seers of the Upa-nishads had spoken would be rendered accessible to the waking state and brought down to transfigure earth-existence. But before he retired from public life, he had already written, besides a large number of shorter poems and some translations from Kalidasa and Bhartrihari, two perfecdy admirable narratives in blank verse which were published several years later in book-form.
Both of these are Indian in matter and spirit, and the shorter pieces too show in various lights the facets of Indian thought; but there is one inimitable fragment which suggests that, though Greek traditions were no longer his main preoccupation, he had not quite forsaken his early love. Suddenly in the midst of the heat and challenge of the political controversy which he was conducting in an English weekly edited by himself, he came forward with this pearl beyond price, throwing it at random among fiery nationalistic articles concerned with the standing
Vol. II, p. 141) where the long piece Ahana, whose opening it forms, has been revised and enlarged.—K.D.S., 1970.
Page 8
grievances of the hour. Fragmentary as it is, it is yet one of his utterly unimpeachable creations from the purely aesthetic point of view, with its high Homeric beginning and the lyrical surprise which follows it, drawing by their play of contrasting imagery the most charming character-sketch possible of Priam's son:
Rushing from Troy like a cloud on the plains the Trojans thundered,
Just as a storm comes thundering, thick with the dust of kingdoms,
Edged with the devious dance of the lightning, so all Troas
Loud with the roar of the chariot, loud with the vaunt and the war-cry,
Rushed from Troywards gleaming with spears and rolled on enormous.
Joyous as ever Paris led them glancing in armour,
Brilliant with gold like a bridegroom, playing with death and the batde
Even as apart in his chamber he played with his beautiful Helen,
Touching her body rejoicing with a low and lyrical laughter,
So he laughed as he smote his foremen. Round him the arrows,
Round him the spears of the Argives sang like voices of maidens
Trilling the anthem of bridal bliss, the chant hymeneal;
Round him the warriors fell like flowers strewn at a bridal
Red with the beauty of blood.
Even if Sri Aurobindo had given us nothing else save just this passage, we would have known at once that the hand of a true artist had been at work. But that would have been, in one sense,
Page 9
a rather sad knowledge, for our regret at having no more would have been unlimited. Fortunately, he has left us little room for mere guesswork as to his superabundant genius. For he has made it difficult for us to attempt restraint in speaking of the marvellous imaginative alchemy of Love and Death or the pure epic strength and sweep of Baji Prabhou, his two hitherto published poems of long breath.1 In the former he touched in one magnificent flight heights which can only be called classical. This is high praise indeed, but is it after all inapt to ask if anything could be more Shakespearean than, for example, this little soliloquy of Ruru on returning to Priyumvada after having stolen from her side in the early morning to go "seeking comparisons for her bloom" among the best that he could pluck from woods of the earth's prime?
"And she will turn from me with angry tears
Her delicate face more beautiful than storm
Or rainy moonlight. I will follow her,
And soothe her heart with sovereign flatteries;
Or rather all tyranny exhaust and taste
The beauty of her anger like a fruit,
Vexing her soul with helplessness; then soften
Easily with quiet undenied demand
Of heart insisting upon heart..."
Or take this burst of sublime language, like fierce rain:
"For what is mere sunlight?
Who would live on into extreme old age,
1 The "imaginative alchemy" of the still earlier published but unknown Urvasie, which has greater length than either of these, has been dealt with in some detail in the first part of The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo (1948).—
Page 10
Burden the impatient world, a weary old man,
And look back on a selfish time ill-spent
Exacting out of prodigal great life
Small separate pleasures like a usurer,
And no rich sacrifice and no large act
Finding oneself in others, nor the sweet
Expense of nature in her passionate gusts
Of love and giving, first of the soul's needs?"
Or hear Yama the God of Death address Ruru when that impetuous boy offers half his life as a sacrifice to recover the snake-bitten, prematurely lost Priyumvada:
"Not as a tedious evil nor to be
Lightly rejected gave the gods old age,
But tranquil, but august, but making easy
The steep ascent to God. Therefore must Time
Still batter down the glory and form of youth
And animal magnificent strong ease,
To warn the earthward man that he is spirit
Dallying with transience, nor by death he ends,
Or again, relish the psychological subtlety of word and rhythm, where to the essentially Shakespearean note is added a sensuous felicity peculiar to Kalidasa:
"Priyumvada!"
He cried, and at that well-loved sound there dawned
With overwhelming sweetness miserable
Upon his mind the old delightful times
When he had called her by her liquid name,
Where the voice loved to linger. He remembered
Page 11
The chompuc bushes where she turned away
Half-angered, and his speaking of her name
Masterfully as to a lovely slave
Rebellious who has erred; at that the slow
Yielding of her small head, and after a little
Her sliding towards him and beautiful
Propitiating body as she sank down
With timid graspings deprecatingly
In prostrate warm surrender, her flushed cheeks
Upon his feet and little touches soft;
Or her long name uttered beseechingly,
And the swift leap of all her body to him,
And eyes of large repentance, and the weight
Of her wild bosom and lips unsatisfied;
Or hourly call for little trivial needs,
Or sweet unneeded wanton summoning,
Daily appeal that never staled nor lost
Its sudden music, and her lovely speed,
Sedulous occupation left, quick-breathing,
With great glad eyes and eager parted lips;
Or in deep quiet moments murmuring
That name like a religion in her ear,
And her calm look compelled to ecstasy;
Or to the river luring her, or breathed
Over her dainty slumber, or secret sweet
Bridal outpantings of her broken name.
All these as rush unintermitting waves
Upon a swimmer overborne, broke on him
Relentless, things too happy to be endured...
Then observe those passages and lines which achieve by grace, balance, poignancy or strength of diction a many-shaded aesthetic quality which puts us at a most pleasurable loss to decide
Page 12
whether they are more Virgilian or Dantesque. Begin with this glimpse of morning in a wood-
(He) felt slow beauty
And leafy secret change; for the damp leaves,
Grey-green at first, grew pallid with the light
And warmed with consciousness of sunshine near;
Then the whole daylight wandered in, and made
Hard tracts of splendour, and enriched all hues
dwell a Utile on the exquisite pathos of the picture
She for a moment stood
Beautiful with her love before she died;
And he laughed towards her—
proceed to the quiet but terrible lines—
So still he was,
The birds flashed by him with their swift small wings,
Fanning him. Then he moved, then rigorous
Memory through all his body shuddering
Awoke and he looked up and knew the place,
And recognised greenness immutable,
And saw old trees and the same flowers still bloom.
He felt the bright indifference of earth
And all the lonely uselessness of pain—
follow up with a brief contrast of the grand style in simplicity
"Then in the joys of heaven we shall consort,
Amid the gladness often touching hands
To make bliss sure"—
Page 13
to the same manner handled with tremendous severity when Ruru, in his search through Hades, chilled at "the cry not meant for living ears", pervading that region—
but terrible strong love
Was like a fiery finger in his breast Pointing him on—
and reach a climax in the combination of both in his moan at the sight of anguished ghosts drifting on "the penal waters", a moan of profound pity, with one line in it—the twelfth—of complex alliteration, which is also a fount of inexhaustible vowel-music:
"O miserable race of men,
With violent and passionate souls you come
Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days
In fear and anguish, catching at stray beams
Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;
Then from your spacious earth in a great horror
Descend into this night, and here too soon
Must expiate your few inadequate joys.
O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads
Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,
The naked spirit here. Oh my sweet flower,
Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?
Ah me! But I will haste and deeply plunge
Into its hopeless pools and either bring
Thy old warm beauty back beneath the stars,
Or find thee out and clasp thy tortured bosom
And kiss thy sweet wrung lips and hush thy cries.
Love shall draw half thy pain into my limbs;
Then we shall triumph glad of agony."
Page 14
It would be difficult to find a match for so richly composite a texture with so many tones striking across it of pathos and passion. One's memory cannot help going back to that most wonderful of farewells in the presence of death, Romeo's last soliloquy, the top poetic reach of Shakespeare's youth:
"Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe
That insubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be thy paramour?
For fear of that, I still will stay with thee;
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again; here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chambermaids; O here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace! and lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain with engrossing death."
Surely it is not difficult with even these few instances before us to understand what the classical touch is—unmistakable in the midst of all diversity of subject or treatment. For there is no slavish imitation or echo; rather, a versatile originality winning rapid access to the worlds of visions and voices to which only the masters have the key. This is brought out even more convincingly in another passage which challenges comparison with those lines by Milton which have often been considered some of the most majestic in the language—the description of Satan's army of rebels:
Cruel his eye, but cast
Signs of remorse and passion to behold
Page 15
The fellows of his crime, the followers rather
(Far other once beheld in bliss) condemned
For ever now to have their lot in pain;
Millions of spirits for his fault amerced
Of heaven and from eternal splendours flung
For his revolt; yet faithful how they stood,
Their glory withered: as when heaven's fire
Hath scathed the forest oaks, or mountain pines,
With singed top, their stately growth, though bare,
Stands on the blasted heath.
Side by side read now the words in which the sorrow of Ruru at the loss of his young mate is made vivid:
Long months he travelled between grief and grief,
Reliving thoughts of her with every pace,
Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind.
And his heart cried in him as when a fire
Roars through wide forests and the branches cry
Burning towards heaven in torture glorious.
So burned, immense, his grief within him; he raised
His young pure face all solemnised with pain,
Voiceless. Then Fate was shaken, and the Gods
Grieved for him, of his silence grown afraid.
It is impossible to decide which passage is more nobly conceived and executed, and which of the two analogous similes more stupendously beautiful in originality of application. But one thing is certain: the moment Sri Aurobindo was capable of writing these lines he stood among the elect. That was in 1899, the last year of the century which had produced Hyperion, perhaps the only other poem in English which could compass so well the packed splendour of a Miltonic moment. But
Page 16
Sri Aurobindo is not only able to command the grand style at will; he can also bring to his work a quality which the great Puritan in the days of his Paradise Lost as good as allowed to atrophy, a subtle yet puissant interfusion of fantasy with strength and grandeur, a touch half Coleridgean half Shelleyan in the midst of Miltonic energy. Milton himself would have been full of it, had he followed up and perfected his early manner and written his magnum opus after a life of continuous poetic development instead of turning to do so after a long period of religio-political controversy. As it is, the account of Ruru's voyage to the underworld, armed with the magic flower given him by the God of Love, "a quivering magnificence...whose petals changed like flame", stands almost a solitary wonder of its kind. He is bidden to sail
"To that high meeting of the Ganges pure
With vague and violent Ocean. There arise
And loudly appeal my brother, the wild sea."
And, after passing through many lands, he arrives at last where
In a thin soft eve
Ganges spread far her multitudinous waves,
A glimmering reslessness with voices large,
And from the forests of that half-seen bank
A boat came heaving over it, white-winged,
With a sole silent helmsman marble-pale.
Then Ruru by his side stepped in; they went
Down the mysterious river and beheld
The great banks widen out of sight. The world
Was water and the skies to water plunged.
All night with a dim motion gliding down
He felt the dark against his eyelids; felt,
Page 17
As in a dream more real than daylight,
The helmsman with his dumb and marble face
Near him and moving wideness all around,
And that continual gliding dimly on,
As one who on a shoreless water sails
For ever to a port he shall not win.
But when the darkness paled, he heard a moan
Of mightier waves and had the wide great sense
Of ocean and the depths below our feet.
But the boat stopped; the pilot lifted on him
His marble gaze coeval with the stars.
Then in the white-winged boat the boy arose
And saw around him the vast sea all grey
And heaving in the pallid dawning light.
Loud Ruru cried across the murmur: "Hear me,
O inarticulate grey Ocean, hear.
If any cadence in thy infinite
Rumour was caught from lover's moan, O Sea,
Open thy abysses to my mortal tread.
For I would travel to the despairing shades,
The spheres of suffering where entangled dwell
Souls unreleased and the untimely dead
Who weep remembering...
Lo, this petalled fire,
How freshly it blooms and lasts with my great pain!"
He held the flower out subtly glimmering.
And like a living thing the huge sea trembled,
Then rose, calling, and filled the sight with waves,
Converging all its giant crests; towards him
Innumerable waters loomed and heaven
Threatened. Horizon on horizon moved
Dreadfully swift; then with a prone wide sound
All Ocean hollowing drew him swiftly in,
Page 18
Curving with monstrous menace over him.
He down the gulf where the loud waves collapsed
Descending, saw with floating hair arise
The daughters of the sea in pale green light,
A million mystic breasts suddenly bare,
And came beneath the flood and stunned beheld
A mute stupendous march of waters race
To reach some viewless pit beneath the world...
But enough! We have drawn quite sufficiently on this extraordinary poem; and yet there are other passages in it almost as astonishingly imaginative, describing the "dead grace" of the nether regions and the psychological phantasmagoria of their life—a veritable embarras de richesse for the quotation-lover.
The same can be said of Baji Prabhou, written indeed in a different vein but no less splendid an achievement—granite in its suggestion of strength and at the same time as brightly flexible and resonant as a Damascus blade. It is founded on the historical incident of the tremendous self-sacrifice of Baji Prabhou Deshpande, who to cover Shivaji's retreat held the fort of Rangana for over two hours with a small company of men against twelve thousand Moguls. The metre is, in the truest sense of the epithet, the heroic blank verse, breathing in every line the dauntless ardour of the protagonists—the angry impatience of Agra to put an opportune end to Shivaji's intolerable career and the grim resolution of the Mahrattas to thwart and foil the Moguls to the last. The language is full-winded and noble, with a staccato rapidity at times to heighten the impression of the deadly combat up and down the rugged slope of a "tiger-throated gorge". There is constantly present the sense of a fight against implacable fate: hence the occasional pressing of many shades of meaning into a few powerful phrases,
Page 19
as though to remind us continually of the immediate peril and the shortness of precious time in hand. And yet nowhere is the terseness obscure, depriving the action of its essentially direct martial character; nor, on the other hand, is there any lack of that lyrical feeling which alone makes war an arena of the soul as much as of brute flesh. But even this rapture is deepened beyond any danger of false glamour by being intensified into a high religious experience. In fact, the principal merit of the poem is the completely satisfying manner in which the author has revealed the spiritual heart of the Mahratta insurgence under Shivaji, the flaming inspiration of the patriot saint Ram-das which made the former a leader of men who thought and felt and acted as if they were instruments of a divine Power Bhavani, the Goddess believed to preside over the destiny of India. The whole movement is worked out from this central motive with one master stroke after another: each word and phrase seems to be poised and weighed in the balance before being welded with those preceding and, though less delightfully bold than in Love and Death, the skilful enjambment or overlapping of the sense in different lines renders vivid and colourful with a large variety of internal cadence what would otherwise have been, in dealing with such a theme, an exercise in blank verse either stiffly monotonous or prosaically blatant. The very opening scene may well serve as a first instance of the inspiration and art of the entire piece:
A noon of Deccan with its tyrant glare
Oppressed the earth; the hills stood deep in haze,
And sweltering athirst the fields glared up
Longing for water in the courses parched
Of streams long dead. Nature and man alike,
Imprisoned by a bronze and brilliant sky,
Sought an escape from that wide trance of heat.
Page 20
Nor on rare herdsman only or patient hind
Tilling the earth or tending sleeplessly
The well-eared grain that burden fell. It hung
Upon the Mogul horsemen as they rode
With lances at the charge, the surf of steel
About them and behind, as they recoiled
Or circled, where the footmen ran and fired,
And fired again and ran.
Then follows an account of how Shivaji had hoped the same morning to take by storm a favourable mountain fortress and command the whole stretch of the adjacent territory but had been driven back by an overwhelming number of Moguls to his own hills, till by noon his forces had been lamentably thinned and not all their guerilla tactics availed against the pursuers.
At last they reached a tiger-throated gorge
Upon the way to Raigurh. Narrowing there
The hills draw close, and their forbidding cliffs
Threaten the prone incline. The Bhonsle paused,
His fiery glance travelled in one swift gyre.
Hill, gorge and valley and with speed returned
Mightily like an eagle on the wing
To a dark youth beside him, Malsurè
The younger, with his bright and burning eyes,
Who wordless rode quivering, as on the leash;
His fierce heart hungered for the rear, where Death
Was singing mid the laughter of the swords.
"Ride, Suryaji," the Chieftain cried, his look
Inward, intent, "and swiftly from the rear
Summon the Prabhou." Turning at the word
Suryaji's hooves sped down the rock-strewn slope
Into the trenchant valley's depth.
Page 21
In answer to the summons Baji gallops to the Chief, who shows him the strategic position of the gorge and asks him to crown his career of heroism by posting himself there with a picked company in order to hold the enemy at bay till Shivaji should return with reinforcements from Raigurh:
"Say with what force thy iron heart can hold
The passage till I come. Thou seest our strength,
How it has melted like the Afghan's ice
Into a pool of blood." And while he paused
Who had been chosen, spoke an iron man
With iron brows who rode behind the Chief,
Tanaji Malsurè, that living sword :
"Not for this little purpose was there need
To call the Prabhou from his toil. Enough,
Give me five hundred men; I hold the pass
Till thy return." But Shivaji kept still
His great and tranquil look upon the face
Of Baji Prabhou. Then, all black with wrath,
Wrinkling his fierce hard eyes, the Malsurè :
"What ponders then the hero? Such a man
Of men, he needs not like us petty swords
A force behind him, but alone will hold
All Rajasthan and Agra and Cabool
From rise to set."
To this taunt Baji replies in one of the most nobly thrilling passages in epic literature:
"Tanaji Malsurè, not in this living net
Of flesh and nerve, nor in the flickering mind
Is a man's manhood seated. God within
Rules us, who in the Brahmin and the dog
Page 22
Can, if He will, show equal godhead.
Not By men is mightiness achieved; Baji
Or Malsurè is but a name, a robe,
And covers one alone. We but employ
Bhavani's strength, who in an arm of flesh
Is mighty as in the thunder and the storm.
I ask for fifty swords." And Malsurè :
"Well, Baji, I will build thee such a pyre
As man had never yet, when we return;
For all the Deccan brightening shall cry out,
'Baji the Prabhou burns !' " And with a smile
The Prabhou answered : "Me thou shall not burn.
For this five feet or more of bone and flesh,
Whether pure flame or jackals of the hills
Be fattened with its rags, may well concern
Others, not Baji Prabhou."
Then Shivaji rides off, leaving the slender band of heroes in the gorge. The Moguls immediately begin their assault and, though often hurled back, thrust on,
a mingled mass,
Pathan and Mogul and the Rajput clans,
All clamorous with the brazen throats of war
And spitting smoke and fire. The bullets rang
Upon the rocks, but in their place unhurt,
Sheltered by tree and rock, the silent grim
Defenders waited, till on root and stone
The confident high-voiced triumphant surge
Began to break, to stumble, then to pause,
Confusion in its narrowed front. At once
The muskets clamoured out, the bullets sped,
Deadly though few; again and yet again,
Page 23
And some of the impetuous faltered back
And some in wrath pressed on; and while they swayed
Poised between flight and onset, blast on blast_
The volleyed death invisible hailed in
Upon uncertain ranks. The leaders fell,
The forward by the bullets chosen out,
Prone or supine or leaning like sick men
O'er trees and rocks, distressed the whole advance
With prohibition by the silent slain.
So the great onset failed.
But the Mogul army was not to be disheartened; nor, on the other hand, would the Mahrattas yield an inch. Then
The heads that planned pushed swiftly to the front
The centre yet unhurt, where Rajasthan,
Playmate of death, had sent her hero sons.
They with a rapid royal reckless pace
Came striding over the perilous fire-swept ground,
Nor answered uselessly the bullets thick
Nor paused to judge, but o'er the increasing dead
Leaping and striding, shouting, sword in hand,
Rushed onward with immortal courage high
In mortal forms, and held the lower slope.
Never has the inmost essence of the Rajput spirit on the battle-field been so monumentally described in a few phrases. "Playmate of death" is absolutely unexcelled, and approached only by the fine alliteration which follows it in the next line... But even the Rajputs could not reach the higher incline; for, like "the rapid breath of Agra's hot simoon" the Mahratta musketry bore them down, till to retrieve the disgrace
Page 24
A lord
High-crested of the Rathore clan stood out
From the perplexed assailants, with his sword
Beckoning the thousands on against the few.
With a violent desperate urge they clambered up and stood almost face to face with the defenders who leaped out at them, hacking with all their might, three times prevailing against the repeated onslaught. At last the Rathore lord hurled himself forward in a last attempt to reach the heart of the fort, and the close-locked hand-to-hand tussle gave great hopes to the watchers in the valley, for now numbers seemed sure to tell. But their expectations were not fulfilled:
For, as in the front
The Rathore stood on the disputed verge
And ever threw fresh strength into the scale
With that inspiring gesture, Baji came
Towards him singling out the lofty crest,
The princely form: and, as the waves divide
Before a driving keel, the batde so
Before him parted, till he neared, he slew.
Avoiding sword, avoiding lifted arm
The blade surprised the Rajput's throat, and down
As falls an upright poplar, with his hands
Outspread, dying, he clutched Mahratta ground.
The Rajput batde reeled back, and in their place the Pathan infantry advanced, trying to exhaust the mountaineers; and though even they could not make much headway, Baji's men felt themselves hard put to it because of their ever diminishing ammunition. But a brief pause ensued upon the recoil of the Pathans, the Mogul generals having grown doubtful whether
Page 25
to persist or to withdraw with whatever men had survived the dreadful carnage. They, however, resolved to make a final dash. This time it was not Pathans or Rajputs who came forward,
But Agra's chivalry glancing with gold
And scimitars inlaid and coloured robes.
Swiftly they came expecting the assault
Fire-winged of bullets and the lethal rain,
But silence met them and to their intent
So ominous it seemed, a while they paused,
Fearing some ruse, though for much death prepared,
Yet careful of prevention.
Reassured, they climbed up, crossing unhurt the open space till they reached almost the top; but they were surprised by merciless swords and lances from behind bushes where the Southron few had concealed themselves. The batde grew apace, the latter holding their own by dint of breathless skill; then suddenly Baji found himself in the grip of one of those abnormal religious exaltations which used to be the mysterious spring of Shivaji's most brilliant military adventures.
Upon the Prabhou all the Goddess came.
Loud like a lion hungry on the hills
He shouted, and his stature seemed to increase
Striding upon the foe. Rapid his sword
Like lightning playing with a cloud made void
The crest before him, on his either side
The swordsmen of the South with swift assault
Preventing the reply, till like a bank
Of some wild river the assault collapsed
Over the stumbling edge and down the rise,
Page 26
And once again the desperate moment passed.
The relics of the murderous strife remained,
Corpses and jewels, broidery and gold.
But not for this would they accept defeat.
Once more they came and almost held.
Then wrath Rose in the Prabhou and he raised himself
In soul to make an end; but even then
A stillness fell upon his mood and all
That godlike impulse faded from his heart,
And passing out of him a mighty form
Stood visible, Titanic, scarlet-clad,
Dark as a thunder-cloud with streaming air
Obscuring heaven, and in her sovran grasp
The sword, the flower, the boon, the bleeding heady
Bhavani. Then she vanished; the daylight
Was ordinary in a common world.
And Baji knew the goddess formidable
Who watches over India till the end.
Even then a sword found out his shoulder, sharp
A Mogul lance ran griding through his arm...
But the day was saved; for as he still fought, surrounded by the last few of his comrades, he saw a wave of cavalry plunge forth from the direction of Raigurh. And before he fell dead in a culminating grapple with the odds against him in the unconquered gorge, he heard friendly horsehooves ring upon the rocks behind,
And in a quick disordered stream, appalled,
The Mogul rout began. Sure-footed, swift
The hostile strength pursued, Suryaji first
Shouting aloud and singing to the hills
A song of Ramdas as he smote and slew.
Page 27
But Shivaji by Baji's empty frame Stood silent and his gaze was motionless Upon the dead. Tanaii Malsurè
Stood by him and observed the breathless corpse
Then slowly said, "Thirty and three the gates
By which thou enterest heaven, thou fortunate soul,
Thou valiant heart. So when my hour arrives,
May I too clasp my death, saving the land
Or winning some great fortress for my lord."
About a dozen lines more complete this poem, Sri Aurobindo's greatest contribution to the patriotic literature of his country. A true epic in every syllable, it shows one more side of its creator's powerful versatility, and together with Love and Death makes us anxious to have more of his blank verse, especially as it is an open secret that he keeps guarded with him treasures more royal than any he has hitherto shared with the public. For what the public has been privileged to have is mostly work done long ago, the first few fruits of his genius, all the maturest abundance of its spontaneity and skill lying still un-published in the desk of the Yogi indifferent to fame.
Even that little, however, is enough to make us repeat Dryden's famous eulogium of Chaucer: "Here is God's plenty." And the expression takes on a special hue of meaning when we turn to another class of poems from his pen, which are devoted to embodying a more explicitly spiritual oudook and inlook. The first portents of his subsequent self-consecration to Yoga, they are illustrative in part of the ideal he later enunciated in the pages of his philosophical monthly, Arya, that Art can never really find what it seeks or succeed in liberating its soul in the highest perfection of speech unless it transfuses the rhythms of its exquisite moods into a sustained spiritual experience. English literature has not been utterly barren in
Page 28
this kind of direct revelatory speech; here and there the veil has been lustrously rent, but there has been no secure possession of the mantra, the innermost utterance of the divine in humanity. For, a dangerous pitfall always lies in wait for the poet who aspires to discover a higher significance and purpose in the universe than the outward phenomenal suggestions which lie all around—intellectualisation of the artistic motive. Wordsworth is the standard example of the slow stiffening of the impulse of song towards the suprasensuous; for unless a centre of vision is reached and possessed beyond the mere ideative mind, poetry is likely, in its endeavour to express the first principles of things, to get hardened into metrical metaphysics, so that instead of the great moving rhythms and transparencies of the inner heart we get only the dry light of reason, indeed shedding occasionally some profitable radiance when it falls upon too stormy a billow of feeling, but by itself quite unfruitful because it attempts to interpret as a universe of logical discourse what is really a manifold strain of eternal music.
The only way of escape is either to remain secure in the mid-regions of aesthetic thought and passion if the wings of inspiration are too Icarian to bear the luminous pressure of supernatural motives, or to make a bold dash towards the golden gates and invoke their guardians not with the ordinary categorising brain-mind or the troubled desire-ridden emotional nature but with the true soul, the true psyche which has an ever-present contact with the spiritual meaning of the world. There is room, no doubt, for stately philosophic verse, a rising to the height of spiritual argument on the steps of apparendy intellectual language, provided a strong impassioned soul-significance is supporting the mental process. In some of his poems Sri Aurobindo gives us such utterance, but they are not his most insistent revelations. When he wants to bring home to us some eternal verity from its mysterious abode of light,
Page 29
he speaks in a tone which has in it either a sublime simplicity which renders clear a profound truth by a few striking images, or a direct imaginative force which without needing to bring in abundant colour can create for us a self-sufficient mystical symbol or atmosphere, or else a puissant intuitive luminosity which wears form and name only as a concession to the weakness of human mentality but imparts in a subtle unanalysable manner a sense of some beatific vastitude of ultimate creative Idea.
Here, for example, is a piece of supreme wisdom irresistible in its childlike appeal to the soul:
Thou who pervadest all the worlds below,
Yet sitst above,
Master of all who work and rule and know,
Servant of Love!
Thou who disdainest not the worm to be
Nor even the clod,
Therefore we know by that humility
That Thou art God.
In the same simple strain but with a greater breath of melody are these stanzas of spiritual intoxication;
We will tell the whole world of His ways and His cunning:
He has rapture of torture and passion and pain;
He delights in our sorrow and drives us to weeping,
Then lures with His joy and His beauty again.
All music is only the sound of His laughter,
All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss;
Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal
Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss.
Page 30
He is strength that is loud in the blare of the trumpets,
And He rides in the car and He strikes in the spears;
He slays without stint and is full of compassion;
He wars for the world and its ultimate years...
A mixture of unaffected sublimity and tense Vedantic atmosphere is achieved in the opening verses of In the Moonlight:
If now must pause the bullocks' jingling tune,
Here let it be beneath the dreaming trees
Supine and huge that hang upon the breeze,
Here in the wide eye of the silent moon.
How living a stillness reigns! The night's hushed rules
All things obey but three, the slow wind's sigh
Among the leaves, the cricket's ceaseless cry,
The frog's harsh discord in the ringing pools.
Yet they but seem the silence to increase
And dreadful wideness of the inhuman night.
The whole hushed world immeasurable might
Be watching round this single spot of peace.
So boundless is the darkness and so rife
With thoughts of infinite reach that it creates
A dangerous sense of space and abrogates
The wholesome litleness of human life.
As an instance of direct imaginative symbolisation of a supra-sensuous experience, there can be scarcely anything more magical than the little gem called Revelation:
Someone leaping from the rocks
Past me ran with wind-blown locks
Page 31
Like a startled bright surmise
Visible to mortal eyes,—
Just a cheek of frightened rose
That with sudden beauty glows,
Just a footstep like the wind
And a hurried glance behind,
And then nothing,—as a thought
Escapes the mind ere it is caught.
Someone of the heavenly rout
From behind the veil ran out.
This language of pure sight is carried up into what we have called intuitive luminosity and power when Sri Aurobindo confronts, as many a poet has done before, the rush and tumult of the sea: there is, therefore, something in it which leaves the most exalted rhetoric of Byron far behind as pallid and superficial just as much as it makes the most grandiose and colourful of Swinburne's alliterative chants mere sound and fury, incomplete in genuine vision and unsatisfying to the divine deeps of the soul. It is the physical natural sea that is apostrophised at the start but the voice which thus hails it comes from some profundity within and instandy the physical melts into a symbol, the merciless assault of the boundless waters becoming the great challenge of pain and peril to the advancing spirit in the world, and the whole poem ends on a note of heroic self-assertion of the hidden infinite in man against the infinite of circumstance which he has to fight and conquer, fathoming all its dangerous possibilities before he can come into his own as an incarnate godhead.
O grey wild sea,
Thou hast a message, thunderer, for me.
Their huge wide backs
Thy monstrous billows raise, abysmal cracks
Page 32
Dug deep between.
One pale boat flutters over them, hardly seen.
I hear thy roar
Call me, "Why dost thou linger on the shore
With fearful eyes
Watching my tops visit their foam-washed skies ?
This trivial boat
Dares my vast battering billows and can float.
Death if it find,
Are there not many thousands left behind?
Dare my wide roar,
Nor cling like cowards to the easy shore.
Come down and know
What rapture lives in danger and o'erthrow."
Yes, thou great sea,
I am more mighty and outbillow thee.
On thy tops I rise;
'Tis an excuse to dally with the skies.
I sink below
The bottom of the clamorous world to know.
On the safe land
To linger is to lose what God has planned
For man's wide soul,
Who set eternal godhead for its goal.
Therefore He arrayed
Danger and difficulty like seas and made
Pain and defeat,
And put His giant snares around our feet.
Page 33
The cloud He informs
With thunder and assails us with His storms,
That man may grow
King over pain and victor of o'erthrow
Matching his great
Unconquerable soul with adverse Fate.
Take me, be
My way to climb the heavens, thou rude great sea.
I will seize thy mane,
O lion, I will tame thee and disdain;
Or else below
Into thy salt abysmal caverns go,
Receive thy weight
Upon me and be stubborn as my Fate.
I come, O Sea,
To measure my enormous self with thee.
It is evident that something of the amplitude and energy of the ancient Upanishads is here caught and it is this style which gives us perhaps the clearest prevision of what the hitherto unpublished works of Sri Aurobindo must be having of quintes-sential royalty of pace. Majestic beyond conception must indeed be the full utterance of which we have once again a portent in the scriptural magnificence of The Rishi, the longest among his shorter poems. It is no piece of hyperbole to affirm that at least in the first hundred and nineteen lines of it we have a poetic phenomenon to which there is in certain respects no parallel. The famous close of Crashaw's Flaming Heart may have greater colour in its rocket-like leap into the heaven of heavens, Wordsworth's Immortality Ode may be richer and more varied in the roll of its harmony towards the vision splendid, The Hound of
Page 34
Heaven may carry itself on a more passionate torrent of religious imagery, but to see language stride like an imperturbable Colossus from pinnacle to pinnacle of thought stark, as it were, against Eternity we must listen to the colloquy which took place when King Manu in the former ages of the world, during which the Arctic continent still subsisted, sought knowledge from the Rishi of the Pole:
Manu
Rishi who trance-held on the mountains old
Art slumbering, void
Of sense or motion, for in the spirit's hold
Of unalloyed
Immortal bliss thou dream'st protected! Deep
Let my voice glide
Into thy dumb retreat and break that sleep
Abysmal. Hear!
The frozen snows that heap thy giant bed
Ice-cold and clear,
The chill and desert heavens above thee spread
Vast, austere,
Are not so sharp but that thy warm limbs brook
Their bitter breath,
Are not so wide as thy immense oudook
On life and death:
Their vacancy thy silent mind and bright
Outmeasureth.
But ours are blindly active and thy light
We have forgone.
Rishi
Who art thou, warrior armed gloriously
Like the sun?
Page 35
Thy gait is as an empire and thine eye
Dominion.
King Manu, of the Aryan peoples lord,
Greets thee Sage.
I know thee, King, earth to whose sleepless sword
Was heritage.
The high Sun's distant glories gave thee forth
On being's edge.
Where the slow skies of the auroral North
Lead in the morn
And flaring dawns for ever on heaven's verge
Wheel and turn,
Thundering remote the clamorous Arctic surge
Saw thee born.
There 'twas thy lot these later Fates to build,
This race of man New-fashion.
O watcher with the mountains wild,
The icy plain,
Thee I too, asleep, have watched, both when the Pole
Was brightening wan
And when like a wild beast the darkness stole
Prowling and slow
Alarming with its silent march the soul.
O King, I know
Thy purpose; for the vacant ages roll
Since man below
Conversed with God in friendship. Thou, reborn
Page 36
For men perplexed,
Seekest in this dim aeon and forlorn
With evils vexed
The vanished light. For like this Arctic land
Death has annexed
To sleep, our being's summits cold and grand
Where God abides,
Repel the tread of thought. I too, O King,
In winds and tides
Have sought Him, and in armies thundering,
And where Death strides
Over whole nations. Action, thought and peace
Were questioned,
sleep And waking, but I had no joy of these,
Nor ponderings deep,
And pity was not sweet enough, nor good
My will could keep.
Often I found Him for a moment, stood
Astonished,
then It fell from me. I could not hold the bliss,
The force for men,
My brothers. Beauty ceased my heart to please,
Brightness in vain
Recalled the vision of the light that glows
Suns behind:
I hated the rich fragrance of the rose;
Weary and blind,
I tired of the suns and stars; then came
With broken mind
To heal me of the rash devouring flame,
The dull disease,
And sojourned with this mountain's summits bleak,
These frozen seas.
Page 37
King, the blind dazzling snows have made me meek,
Cooled my unease,
Pride could not follow, nor the restless will
Come and go;
My mind within grew holy, calm and still
Like the snow.
O thou who wast with chariots formidable
And with the bow!
Voiceless and white the cold unchanging hill,
Has it then
A mightier presence, deeper mysteries
Than human men?
The warm low hum of crowds, towns, villages,
The sun and rain,
The village maidens to the water bound,
The happy herds,
The fluting of the shepherd lads, the sound
Myriad of birds.
Speak these not clearer to the heart, convey
More subtle words ?
Here is but great dumb night, an awful day
Inert and dead.
The many's voices fill the listening ear,
Distract the head:
The One is silence; on the snows we hear
Silence tread.
Page 38
And so onward the mighty argument proceeds. The rest of the poem is not exactly on the same level, but it suffers only in comparison with its own commencement; for the whole makes one of the very rare pieces for which, if at all so unpleasant a bargain were to be struck, one might even exchange the twelve Upanishads. Their revelatory force is here focussed to inspire the word of the highest wisdom. For indeed the Rishi's final message is not bare asceticism and Nirvana, but Sri Aurobindo's own insistence on manifesting both in life and art a world of values "beyond the mind's imagining", a transcendent status to which Yoga alone possesses the key. After puzzling King Manu with conflicting sides of Yogic knowledge, he reassures him in fine of the utility of all human work and aspiration; for, the great Unknown is no immutable void but an utter fullness—only, its ineffable secrecies of a more abundant life are lodged in the bosom of a peace which passes the ordinary understanding. It is by rising to it that man, spiritualised, can achieve completeness; it is also by entering into sustained communion with that highest Consciousness that, in Sri Aurobindo's view, a poet can taste most satisfyingly of the fountains of true creative art and help to raise up humanity to the Divine. For, in poetry, according to Sri Aurobindo, there is an upward evolution of its powers and at its summit the highest function of sound is to instil in the listener the poet's experience of a Truth that is behind all things, its significances in themselves beyond word and thought finding expression through an inner silence, and to lift him rapt, spellbound, dazzled into sudden awareness of that wondrous supreme Beauty and Delight which elude normal perception, a high-uplifted Beauty and Delight sustaining magically the cosmic process. In the cosmic process, Matter, Life, Mind and Soul are intended to arrive at a progressive expression of this Truth of themselves, this all-sustaining Beauty, which are already existent in the supramental as
Page 39
a perfect harmony of ideal realities, and poetry thus raised to a supreme Light and Force can powerfully assist towards that consummation. If, therefore, the possibilities of the poet of the future are to come to their utmost fruition, his art, whether it flowers forth in the lyric cry or the narrative, in the drama or the epic, should not merely be an instrument of forces which work through him by passing inspirations. It must represent the continuous rhythm of an inner life in which the meaning of the universe shall be unfolded in the individual and the Spirit manifested, with constant integrality, even through the prose of daily intercourse with the world.
Page 40
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.