On Poetry
THEME/S
3
The mythic imagination passes more and more into the mystic as Sri Aurobindo penetrates to the very centre of the Indian consciousness and begins to practise Yoga. But this mysticism is not only free from a mere cloudy hugeness: it is also not restricted to a fiery teeming with ethereal populations: the earthly and the human are mostly filled out by it to a divinity of their own in a vibrant continuity with the supra-terrestrial, the ultra-human. And this bent towards synthesis but transposes to a new plane what was already an effective element in his Romanticist work. For, that work, as we have remarked, combines something Elizabethan and something modern with the nineteenth-century Romanticism. The combination
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bination is chiefly perceptible in a voluptuous directness— nothing vulgar or lascivious yet a sharp frank awareness of the impassioned body and its enamoured rhythms. This combination affines Urvasie and Love and Death to the poetry of Kalidasa, as perhaps might be guessed from the fact that the former treats in essence the same theme as a play of Kalidasa's which Sri Aurobindo translated soon after. Out of many possible instances we may pick out just one in passing. In Love and Death, Ruru remembers all the enchanting ways in which he has called Priyumvada by "her liquid name". Among these ways there is at one extreme his murmuring in deep quiet moments
That name like a religion in her ear
and at the other, in sweet secrecy again,
Bridal outpantings of her broken name.
Who save Kalidasa could match the happy audacity of this compact phrase about the name being uttered brokenly because of the quivering gasps of excited delight during the act of union?
The fine this-worldly energy shown thus here and variously elsewhere under the Romanticist aspect persists in many forms, with a bright eye on the immediately tangible, in all of Sri Aurobindo's subsequent creation.
It is inevitably evident in the dramatic pieces he began composing. They take up some psychological movement, either a general phase of the development of man's mind or the persistent trait of a nation and personalise it in a well-knit scheme of vividly interplaying characters. Among these dramatic pieces mostly in the Romanticist tradition though without the crude piling on of externally daubed effects or the tearing of the
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passion into garish tatters, that often disfigures this tradition— the first to be published and presumably the earliest to be written was Perseus the Deliverer} This play is on the Elizabethan model and is Elizabethan too in its blank verse, but at places the semi-mythic semi-mystic manner comes in or else a barer more intellectualised style. Of the vehement vein a sample is the piquant simile about a shipwreck—
From all sides
The men are shaken out, as rattling peas
Leap from a long and bursting sheath,
or that sadistic phrase about wrenching and distorting the body
till each inch of flesh
Gives out its separate shriek,
or the exaggeration—
The sea
Is tossed upon itself and its huge bottoms
Catch chinks of unaccustomed day.
The semi-mythic semi-mystic manner vibrates in lines like
If thou hadst lived as I,
Daily devoted to the temple dimness,
And seen the awful shapes that live in night,
And heard the awful sounds that move at will
When Ocean with the midnight is alone,
Thou wouldst not doubt.
1 The other works, in rough chronological order, are: The Viziers of Bassora, Rodogune, Vasavadutta3 Eric as complete works and a few in fragmentary form.
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The quieter and more idea-limpid style meets us in
The people's love
Is a glimmer on quicksands in a gliding sea:
Today they are with thee, tomorrow turn elsewhere.
Wisdom, strength, policy alone are sure,
or in
Then let the shrine
That looked out from earth's breast into the sunlight,
Be cleansed of its red memory of blood,
And the dread Form that lived within its precincts
Transfigure into a bright compassionate God.
But the more typical mode of expression has the Elizabethan colour. Elizabethan to the marrow are also the prose passages in the play, racy and even verging wittily on the improper— passages that seem not really intrusions from another medium but integrally woven into the play as well as into the verse-portions in their respective scenes. And both the poetry and the prose, however Romanticist in texture, are orientated towards flesh-and-blood actualities and, in some shape or other, the sense of the tangible runs almost everywhere.
But everywhere too is the thrill of the ideal. In each play some theme of aspiration is set moving within the scheme of things and, while the human cross-currents of personality and passion are depicted with gusto, the drama of evolutionary nature is movingly worked out through it with either delicacy or power or, most often, with a subtle mixture of both. Just one illustration may suffice—part of a scene from Perseus. Andromeda, who towards the close of the play is chained to a rock to be devoured by a sea-monster but is rescued by Perseus, is here longing to save shipwrecked foreigners condemned to be
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sacrificed to the sea-god Poseidon. The goddess comes as her helper.
Andromeda
O you poor shuddering men, my human fellows,
Horribly bound beneath the grisly knife
You feel already groping for your hearts,
Pardon me each long moment that you wrestle
With grim anticipation. O, and you,
If there is any god in the deaf skies
That pities men or helps them, O protect me!
But if you are inexorably unmoved
And punish pity, I, Andromeda,
Who am a woman on this earth, will help
My brothers. Then, if you must punish me,
Strike home. You should have given me no heart;
It is too late now to forbid it feeling.
She is going out. Athene appesrs
What is this light, this glory? who art thou,
Obeautiful marble face amid the lightnings?
My heart faints with delight, my body trembles,
Intolerable ecstasy beats in my veins;
Iam oppressed and tortured with thy beauty.
Athene
I am Athene.
Art thou a goddess? Thy name
We hear far off in Syria.
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I am she
Who helps and has compassion on struggling mortals.
(falling prostrate)
Do not deceive me! I will kiss thy feet
O joy! thou art! thou art!
Lift up thy head,
My servant.
Thou art! there are not only void
Azure and cold inexorable laws.
Stand up, O daughter of Cassiope,
Wilt thou then help these men of Babylonia,
My mortals whom I love?
I help myself,
When I help these.
To thee alone I gave
This knowledge. O virgin, O Andromeda,
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It reached thee through that large and noble heart
Of woman beating in a little child.
But dost thou know that thy reward shall be
Betrayal and fierce hatred? God and man
Shall league in wrath to kill and torture thee
Mid dire revilings.
My reward shall be To cool this anguish of pity in my heart And be at peace: if dead, O still at peace!
The role of Sri Aurobindo the dramatic poet is worth bearing in mind when, face to face with his later poetic work, one is inclined to believe that he looks too much beyond human nature. Of course, even his philosophical and spiritual inspiration would be misjudged by such a belief; for he always returns upon the world of clay and flux and common breath after his conquest of fire and ether. But in his dramas that world itself is the immediate subject. Sri Aurobindo shows by the labour he has spent on personalities and situations set in a variety of climes and ages that he never shies away from the touch or the clutch of man as he is. He lends himself to man at every stage of his development. The young adventurer, the longing lover, the ardent soldier, the powerful leader, the calm counsellor, the bon viveur, the dreamy girl-soul, the mind of mature womanhood-all these can find response in Sri Aurobindo and are called towards him by the wide range of his dramatic self-expression. He refuses nothing, he takes every chance to seize on multicoloured life and, within matters mundane and along roads of day-to-day history, he renders visible the ideal, the highest, motive possible to whatever may be the complex of circumstances,
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the maze of desire and ambition and vocation. No direct preaching is here, but an organic potentiality laid bare in the distance by means of the picture of a heart feeling its way beyond itself. It is as if Sri Aurobindo grew into a spiritual philosopher and a mystic Yogi in such a natural manner that, looking back upon the manifold path of creative imagination trod by him, he could say at the close of his career: "I am not summoning everyone to be a spiritual philosopher or a mystic Yogi. Come to me with all your striving, hungering, ordinary humanity and you will receive my guidance. I will accept your limitations and lead you through them. Nothing human is alien to me and nothing Aurobindonian should be alien to you. There is always a mode of being human, which can prepare for the divine without ceasing to be itself. My demands are never fanatic. To those who are ready to plunge into spirituality, I disclose the wonderful short cut. To those who still hope and fear and love and travail in the normal formula, I point the long way which also is wonderful, but with a slow surprise of psychological progression leading them forward instead of letting them go round and round as they usually do."
Nor is it only in the drama—whether shot with ancient mythology or criss-crossed with quasi-historical vicissitudes— that Sri Aurobindo comes down to common earth with an uplifting hold upon it. The sense of the tangible and the orientation towards flesh-and-blood actualities, along with the thrill of the ideal, run also through the narrative, Baji Prabhou, which he wrote soon after the time of most of the plays: that is, during the dawn of the mystic in him. But they take an extreme and martial shape now. For, at first the mysticism is part of a movement towards a novel nationalist resurgence against foreign rule, in which the country of birth is viewed and worshipped as a mighty Mother Spirit that is a face and
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front of the Supreme Power creative of the universe. A virile offspring of this political mysticism is Baji Prabhou, based on the actual episode of the self-sacrifice which Baji Prabhou, a lieutenant of Shivaji, made in order to cover his master's retreat. Here is a blank verse no longer packed with colour and sorcery, passion and fantasy, yet betraying no dearth of expressive intensity. It is Sri Aurobindo's greatest contribution to patriotic literature, but it is more than patriotism, for its chief merit is the convincing way in which is disclosed the religious core of the Mahratta uprising under Shivaji's leadership. The key-passage, therefore, is the one that begins:
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
Can, if He will, show equal godhead...
In the same period and charged with the same extraordinary patriotism is another work of Sri Aurobindo's—now not one on an extensive scale or an altogether original contribution but a memorable translation which in its brevity packs an intensity capable of rousing millions. Indeed in the Sanskrit version, interspersed with a few Bengali words, from which he has done his English rendering, the poem was the master-word of Indian Nationalism—the rebuilder of a fallen people, the revealer of their inmost truth, the song which made heroes out of mud and whose bespelling profundity gave the very act of death the sense of a supreme ecstasy. The unique union of sweetness, simple directness and high poetic force in Bankim Chandra Chatterji's Bande Mataram is difficult to reproduce with absolute accuracy in English verse. But the inspired drive of it is admirably caught in general by Sri Aurobindo:
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Mother, I bow to thee!
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
Bright with thy orchard gleams.
Cool with thy winds of delight,
Dark fields waving, Mother of might,
Mother free.
Glory of moonlight dreams,
Over thy branches and lordly streams,—
Clad in thy blossoming trees,
Mother, giver of ease,
Laughing low and sweet!
Mother, I kiss thy feet,
Speaker, sweet and low!
Mother, to thee I bow.
Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands,
When the swords flash out in twice seventy million hands
And seventy million voices roar
Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?
With many strengths who art mighty and stored,
To thee I call, Mother and Lord!
Thou who savest, arise and save!
To her I cry who ever her foemen drave
Back from plain and sea
And shook herself free.
Thou art wisdom, thou art law,
Thou our heart, our soul, our breath,
Thou the love divine, the awe
In our hearts that conquers death.
Thine the strength that nerves the arm,
Thine the beauty, thine the charm,
Every image made divine
In our temples is but thine.
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Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen,
With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen,
Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned,
And the Muse a hundred-toned.
Pure and perfect without peer,
Mother, lend thine ear.
Bright with thy orchard gleams,
Dark of hue, candid-fair
In thy soul, with jewelled hair
And the glorious smile divine,
Loveliest of all earthly lands,
Showering wealth from well-stored hands!
Mother, mother mine!
Mother sweet, I bow to thee,
Mother great and free!
Although a translation, the poem comes as something essentially Aurobindonian, born as it was of the translator's having felt the original in his very blood-stream during the days when he led the revolt of Bengal ("Seventy million voices") against British rule. And it has a depth of spiritual suggestion which the exegesis he is reported to have offered in a speech delivered in 1908 in the grand square of the National School of Amraoti lays bare excellently. In the light of that explanation it stands out also as essentially Aurobindonian, representative of the philosophic and mystic vision growing in him at the time. Not only is each phrase replete with precise and necessary significance, but the various phrases form an unfolding scheme both artistically and metaphysically satisfying. There is a three-stepped progression. As with the individual, so with the nation, there are three sheaths or bodies—the gross or outer, the subtle or inner, the causal or higher. The first consists of the physical
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elements, the shapes, the visible organic functioning. Here it is the rapid rivers and the glimmering orchards, the winds and the harvests waving, the moon-magical nights in forest and on riverside. A transition from the outer body of the Nation-Mother to the inner is through the human populations, the warrior men who are the physical instruments of the fine frenzy of freedom that is hers. Their teeming vitality is the cry of independence she sends forth from the inner to the outer—the inner that is a formation of beautiful disciplined powers, an inspired energy, a pure passion, an illumined thought, a righteous will, an aes-thesis enchanting and refining. This subtle sheath of her being bears hints of a still greater mode of her existence and by those hints the supra-individual and national self of her mingles, in our enthusiasms as well as in our meditations, with all the symbols of the Infinite and the Eternal our religious nature installs everywhere in our land. That still greater mode is the prime creative archimage, at once single and many-aspected, whose evolving expression is the vast world with its nations and peoples. Cause and controller from its transcendental status, it is the Divine Truth of all formulated being, the ever-living supreme Personality whose power and bliss and knowledge are the perfection towards which we aspire in this country of ours when we love so vehemently the soil sanctified by hero and saint and seer and when we fling ourselves so happily into the service of the majestic and maternal Presence that we feel to be the indivisible India stretched in a myriad harmonious moods across space and time.
Round about the period of this insight into what may be designated the real National Anthem of India Sri Aurobindo produced many other pieces and we note not only the heroic fusing with the mystic but also the philosopher manifesting in the Yogi. Most of his philosophical poetry is precise without either abstractness on the one hand or on the other a too-
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superficial clarity. Here and there a dry touch, a pursuit of the idea rather than the metaphysical reality behind it are perceptible, but, by and large, the philosopher and the poet suffer no divorce—and, when the full Yogi suffuses and absorbs both the poet and the philosopher, beauty and truth become identical and grow one body of something deeper: sheer spiritual Light. But before this transformation occurs we have a large utterance of the animated intellect in diverse modes. It blends the simple with the subtle as in God,1 where we can mark even the argu-mentative turn—"Therefore we know..."—and yet the speech has a living suggestion of the Transcendent who is also the Cosmic and the Immanent: the brief crystallised expression strikes home with a concrete perspicuity some of the antinomies of the Divine Presence in relation to the created world. The intellect is at times energetically pointed and deliberate as in A Vision of Science:
... And Science confidently, "Nothing am I but earth,
Tissue and nerve and from the seed a birth,
A mould, a plasm, a gas, a little that is much.
In these grey cells that quiver to each touch
The secret lies of man; they are the thing called I.
Matter insists and matter makes reply.
Shakespeare was this; this force in Jesus yearned
And conquered by the cross; this only learned
The secret of the suns that blaze afar;
This was Napoleon's giant mind of war."
I heard and marvelled in myself to see
The infinite deny infinity.
Yet the weird paradox seemed justified;
Even mysticism shrank out-mystified.
1 Quoted on p. 30.
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Then we have the thinking mind swiftly and sweepingly powerful as in To the Sea,1 with its challenge to circumstance from a depth of immense self-awareness—outer infinity defied by the inner infinite. Life's debate with the ultimate mystery becomes massive and majestic in that colloquy, The Rishi:
... Rishi, thy thoughts are like the blazing sun
Eye cannot face.
How shall our souls on that bright awful One
Hope ever to gaze
Who lights the world from His eternity
With a few rays ?
Among Sri Aurobindo's compositions of this period The Rishi is especially notable for the original form it achieves by its pairs of rhymed pentameters interwoven with a terza rima of two-foot lines and for the poetry it sustains at considerable length with a weighty and at the same time a flexible thought-content. Although essentially no less dynamic than To the Sea, it has a more contained note which lets the ideative element stand forth in subder colours:
OKing, sight is not vain, nor any sound.
Weeds that float
Upon a puddle and the majestic round
Of the suns
Are thoughts eternal,—what man loves to laud
And what he shums;
Through glorious things and base the wheel of God
For ever runs.
1Quoted on pp. 32-33.
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O King, no thought is vain; our very dreams
Substantial are;
The light we see in fancy, yonder gleams
In the star.
At the other pole to this manner in the same universe of discourse is the accent of Invitation, composed while Sri Aurobindo was in Alipur Jail on a political charge and while he was turning the enforced solitude into an opportunity of mystic self-exploration. We may say that To the Sea mediates between the two styles, vehemently working out its thought to a greater explicitness than does Invitation. The last-named makes us best realise one of the reasons for the easy success of the intellect in Sri Aurobindo's verse. The intellect succeeds so well not only because its perceptions and discriminations are Spirit-touched but also because the poet puts behind them a vigorous "vital" being, carried over from his youth when it had its royal self-deployment in the impassioned narratives. Invitation brings this elan vital very effectively forward, even swamping the play of ideas yet channelling a wide intellectual sight of the Yogi Soul mounting Godward and throwing at the world its arduous call:
With wind and the weather beating round me
Up to the hill and the moorland I go.
Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?
Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?
Not in the petty circles of cities
Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell;
Over me God is blue in the welkin,
Against me the wind and the storm rebel.
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I sport with solitude here in my regions,
Of misadventure have made me a friend.
Who would live largely? Who would live freely?
Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.
I am the lord of tempest and mountain,
I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side.
Of course, the lordly loneliness of the dangerous and unfrequented heights is not the end of the spiritual story for Sri Aurobindo, The Rishi makes this abundandy evident. For all its initial stress on the search for a remote and absolute One, it grows in its polyphonous progression and final resolution a forerunner of the comprehensive message of the Aurobindonian Yoga as elaborated in the Pondicherry-epoch. This Yoga does not seek to be lost in a far-off Immutable to the entire forget-fulness of earth-existence: it sees the fundamental unity as the possessor of an innumerable potentiality and as a Creative Being who actualises that potentiality in some perfect plane of divine archetypes and towards whom our souls must rise and through whom we must strive for an evolutionary expression of those archetypes in our entire nature and for a harmony of the One and the Many in a new collective life.
Sri Aurobindo's feeling of divine concretenesses behind the philosophical intellect's graspings of significance on high significance within the passing pageant of time-born figures
Like transient shapes that sweep with half-guessed truth
A luminous wall,
we may conjecture from the poetic bursts of pure vision that during this period interspersed now and then the rhythmic
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unrolling of lofty and difficult conceptions. In the course of one such unrolling in The Rishi we are told of our life's long soul-history:
...we rise from pyre,
We rise from grave,
We mould our future by our past desire,
We break, we save,
We find the music that we could not find,
The thought think out
We could not then perfect, and from the mind
That brilliant rout
Of wonders marshal into living forms...
In the short lyric, Revelation1, a magical outrush by the wonders" themselves is given us in a gemlike flash. We actually feel that
Someone of the heavenly rout
From behind the veil ran out.
The seer in Sri Aurobindo was keeping pace, though not always openly, with the sage in him in the march towards what we have termed "sheer spiritual Light".
1 Quoted on pp. 31-32
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