Talks on Poetry

TALK FIFTEEN

Like the bell that has called us to the commencement of our class, a deeply melodious ring starts the felicity of phrase in Sri Aurobindo's

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

Before I say anything, let me observe that it is uncertain whether Sri Aurobindo means a capital G in the seventh word. It may prove on manuscript evidence that a small g is intended. Then a generalisation would be made, pointing to the realm or plane of the many divine cosmic workers whom the one Supreme Divinity has put forth as expressions of His various powers. Not the Supreme Divinity directly but any spiritual entity that comes as a representative of Him with an ability far beyond the human or that of any occult being who is not the immediate image of the Highest in one or another aspect of Him — such would be the suggestion of a small g. What we would have is the sense of godly or godlike. The difference would be that God is spoken of in a broad connota-tion instead of in a specific one. But since there would be nothing short of the godly or godlike we may for the practical purposes of poetic elucidation and appreciation proceed on the basis of the current reading of a capital G. There will be no essential impreci-sion in the drift of our comment.

A grand announcement is made by Sri Aurobindo with a con-trolled power of musical language. But the line is felicitous not only because it is beautifully moving in a poised potent way: it is felicitous also because it has a subdued piquancy exquisitely held in the contrast between "AH" and "touch". It says that everything is possible — and the omni-possibility is said to be compassed by nothing more than a touch of God: one finger of light brought by the hand of His Grace can dissolve adamantine difficulties, ages of massive darkness. And observe how the vowel-quantities help out the significance. The smallness required of the miraculous agency is conveyed by the short though stressed vowels in "God-touch" —, while the bigness of what is miraculously conquerable is there in the long stressed vowel of "AH". But the conquest of the appa-rently big by the apparently small is shown by the stressed yet short vowel of "done" which anticipates and prepares the quanti-

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ties of "God-touch". And a further expressiveness is achieved by the repetition, in "touch", of the very sound that is short in "done". We may even see the intuitive work of the poet's art in the fact that the same sound which is long in "All" is repeated in a short form in "God" as if to render the latter word capable, in its own terms, of matching the former whose meaning is to be met and coped with by its meaning.

If there is any line in European literature of which I am most reminded, both as regards sound and substance, by this of Sri Aurobindo's, it is Dante's famous

E'n la sua volontade e nostra pace.

Sri Aurobindo's line rivals Dante's as well as being affined to it in what I may call the art no less than the heart. Before I proceed, let me tell you that in Italian the c is always ch (while ch is always k) and the e is always pronounced when it is an end-vowel, except when it gets merged in another vowel immediately following it. To begin the comparison: there is here also the note of a deeply melodious bell, though now with l's as well as n's, in the opening: "E'n la sua volontade". Literally, the whole line may be Eng-lished: "And in His Will is our peace." Such a translation has an admirable directness, but the majesty of the original is absent. And absent too is the note we have spoken of. To catch this note as well as something of the polysyllabism which gives the Italian that majesty, a translator has written:

His Will alone is our tranquillity.

An excellent line, this, but a little different in its total effect from Dante's. It has the resonance, yet not the directness of the ori-ginal. And the sense of cessation of unrest brought by the s and ch sounds of "nostra pace" is lacking. I think this sense will come out if we write:

His Will alone is our serenity.

Then we shall have three sibilances — those in "His" and "is" and "serenity" — answering to the three related sounds, sibilant or semi-sibilant, of the Italian "sua" and "nostra" and "pace". Going back to Sri Aurobindo's line, I may draw your attention to the fact

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that my comparison of it with Dante's in the original does not end with the bell-rhythm. The s and ch of "nostra pace" are also almost exactly present here, though in a reverse order, in "touch" and "is".

So much for the art of the two lines. What about the heart? I suggest that the same heart is in both, approached and traversed from two opposite sides. In the Dante line we may read a profound faith in the rightness of God no less than in His almightiness - against which nothing can prevail. Only God's- Will is the ultimate determinant, and whatever He wills is right. A full acceptance of His omniscient decisions, a total surrender to His omnipotent acts - in short, an utter love which wants nothing except what He in His wisdom and power gives - is the sole road to attaining peace. This means a humility before the afflictions and adversities of life, a resignation to the blows of circumstance, a devotion that never doubts in the midst of doom - because all unpleasant happenings are seen to be the workings of God's inscrutable hand which nothing can stop and which even through the worst has to be taken as doing the best for us. To illustrate most acutely what is meant, we may look at a stanza from a French poem of the sixteenth century, Malherbe's celebrated Consolation a M. du Perrier sur la Mort de sa Fille. In this stanza, which is the final one, Malherbe, after saying that the rich and the poor alike are subject to the law of Death, La Mort, tells the grieving and inconsolable father:

De murmurer contre elle et perdre patience

Il est mal a propos;

Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science

Qui nous met en repos.

In the last two lines we have Dante's simplicity of penetrating intuitiveness transposed into a moving clarity typical of French verse at its finest. John Chadwick whom we Aurobindonians know as Arjava has rendered Malherbe most sensitively throughout the poem and especially in the closing verse (where the pronoun "her" in his version refers, of course, to Death):

Impatient murmur or embittered turning

Against her, deem not best;

Save willing the thing God wills, no other learning

Shall bring us to our rest.

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The religious quality recommended is a mixture of what Indian Yoga terms samata, sraddha and bhakti, a mixture of equanimity, faith and devotion to be practised vis-a-vis all occurrences and conditions; and the result is spiritual calm. Sri Aurobindo's line also involves God's Will, for it speaks of things being done with the help of the God-touch and wherever there is a conscious doing there is will. Here too we have the idea that God's Will is almighty and that it is the most right force — yes, right, since surely the "AH" that can be done is not anything mean or cruel or depraved: Sri Aurobindo is not saying. "You can succeed in being a thorough devil if you call God's touch to your aid." The thing which ought to be done, the action which would lead to the true, the beautiful, the good is intended — though not in a conventional sense which shies away from the bold, the grim, the stormy — and we are told that no matter how difficult or impossible-seeming such right action may be, we shall be victorious by having on our side the power of God in even a small measure. But the lightness and the power of God are visioned here primarily not as the establishers of things as they are: they are visioned primarily as the changers of established things. Of course, God is both. He has brought forth an imperfect universe, but only in order to make it perfect. And, since He has brought it forth, even in the most imperfect state of affairs His Will towards perfection must be at work, so that what-ever imperfection is present is perfectly in place and carries His Will in itself. The universe therefore is a paradox. It is at the same time God's Will manifest already and a mass of difficulties and darknesses in which this Will has to manifest progressively and create bliss and light. A single truth with two faces is before us and the Dante-line shows one face which has to be seen if we are to achieve spiritual peace and the line of Sri Aurobindo shows the other face which must be seen if we are to transform earth-existence into the Life Divine.

Even Death need not be accepted as an irrevocable decree of God. Just as ignorance in the mind has to be removed, just as misery in the emotional being has to be abolished, just as incapa-city in the life-force has to be eradicated, so also death in the physical form has to be conquered. "A tall order," the sceptic may sneer — but to grant that God's perfection awaits to be manifested is logically to imply this extreme triumph, though the triumph can be got only after a colossal travail. An unavoidable part of the

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instrument for that triumph is "willing the thing God wills" and taking with love the varied operations of the Universal Spirit in its drive through our little likes and dislikes. Then only can we build on a solid foundation — the foundation of a supreme peace — the hope and aspiration and effort of transfiguring the scheme of the universe with the fiat of the Transcendent Spirit that awaits with its archetypes to remould man and evolve even in man's body the Immortal. So we may bring the Aurobindonian idea to some kind of expository focus of relation with the Dantesque by picking up again in verse the theme of Death from Malherbe's poem and writing over against Arjava's translation of his final stanza the following:

Impatient murmur nor embittered turning

Against Death wins escape:

Only the God-touch on man's body burning

Calls forth the immortal shape.

(The use, as here, of "nor" in poetry confers the negative on what precedes no less than on what follows. The sense in the above is that we certainly have to start with the Dantesque attitude: we must stand imperturbable, since neither complaint nor resentment can free us from mortality. The sole help lies in receiving the luminous touch of God more and more upon our physical sub-stance and converting the clay-sheath into the concealed divine original of it.)

Now for a few words on the magnificence of that third line from Sri Aurobindo:

I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.

I must clear immediately a possible misunderstanding. In the very first Talk I described the poet as, among other things, a dreamer. I meant that the poet looks beyond the actual and thrills to a hidden perfection, to the Transcendent Spirit's veiled archetypes and to the Universal Spirit's secret omnipresent beauty. God the Dream in this sense must never be rejected and should be cherished if God the Fire is to come into play. In fact, the two are fused — and in poetry itself the reverie and the realising rapture are indis-

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soluble. Has not Gerard Manley Hopkins characterised the very activity of the poetic imagination as deriving from this rapture, in that phrase of his? -

Sweet fire, the sire of Muse...

The Dream against which Sri Aurobindo makes his Savitri pit herself is an indulgence in high visions accepted as wonders that cannot take birth — wonders about which he writes:

Behold this fleeting of light-tasselled shapes,

Aerial raiment of unbodied gods;

A rapture of things that never can be born...

Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom

Leans sweetly, sweetly is clasped or sweetly chased...

The mysticism which Sri Aurobindo-proclaims through Savitri's lips is a dynamic mysticism opposed to lying content with a Divine Perfection shining in some ever-aloof ether, a beautiful but issue-less splendour. It holds God to be a power of self-effectuation in the world of men, not merely a Light but also a Fire, the Truth that conquers by consuming our imperfections. Nor is the Fire-idea confined to the Power-aspect of God. Dreams such as Savitri abjures have a far-awayness that can never be palpable to the heart. Fire is the very inhabitant of the heart — nay, it is the heart's own substance. When God is Fire, He is an intense inti-macy — a supreme Love close and all-consummating. With His centre in the seat of longing, He becomes a rapture that can radiate forth into the physical World and make it rich with a wide and wonderful communion, a manifold infinite oneness. To approach and call into ourselves and treasure as our xielight a Godhead conceived and felt as what Patmore in a magnificent phrase of his own has termed a "crimson-throbbing Glow" - to do this is to make possible God's incarnation in each of us, to do this is to bring the God-touch that can do all and to help God grow up in the midst of the foolish wise men of the world. Thus Sri Aurobindo's magnificence· of phrase reveals the pure yet passionate Yoga that is the secret of the irresistible divine potentiality asserted by his felicity of phrase and the ground of the spiritual evolution that his piquancy of phrase prophesies.

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We may close with two points about the technique of the line. First, the three parts of the verse — "I cherish/God the Fire,/not God the Dream/" — are held together in a subtle roll of continuity by the occurrence of r in each. Secondly, the word "cherish" is most effectively in tune with the positive content of the statement carried by the word "Fire" as distinguished from the negative content in the word "Dream". For, "cherish" means, according to the Oxford Dictionary, not only to nurse, foster, cling to, hold dear but also to keep warm — and its very sound suggests the peculiar substance and activity of fire: the rich delicacy that is a scorching softness, the childlike quiver that is a rapture-rush.

As a Parsi, I find Sri Aurobindo's magnificent phrase especially appealing. The Parsis are known as Fire-worshippers. Their temples hold God's presence in the symbol of Fire. Day and night, the flames are fed on sandalwood and what burns in every Parsi temple today is a fire lit from the one which the Parsis brought, guarded most loyally, most lovingly, from Iran when the Arabs overran that country and threatened to kill or convert. The faithful few sought refuge in India after toiling across the sea in small boats, cherishing God the Fire. And this beloved glory had come through long ages of sandalwood-sustained force from the great golden presence kindled by the prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster to the Greeks) in remote antiquity. The self-same Fire that was set burning thousands of years ago has burned without a moment's cessation right up to this day, thanks on the one side to the zeal of the Zarathustrians and on the other to the tolerance of the Hindu faith that sees a myriad ways to reach the Divine and finds no way alien to its own essence. And perhaps it is because the Parsis made their home in the midst of India's multi-minded aspiration and realisation that they have developed a receptivity to all kinds of cultures — easily assimilating various values, eastern or western — and that some of them have become Aurobindonians as if they were born to be such.

It may be interesting to remember that at two points of history Zarathustrianism had the possibility of becoming in some form or other the religion of Europe. Darius the Great of Persia invaded Greece and fought her armies at Marathon in the very heart of their country, but suffered a defeat. After his death, his son Xerxes led another attack, cut down the heroic Spartans at Ther-mopylae, conquered Athens itself and offered it to God the Fire,

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yet with its blaze behind him he met with a check in the naval battle at Salamis and had to retire from Greece. If the tide of war had moved a little differently and Greece had fallen to the Per-sians, the rest of south-eastern Europe would have been at their mercy. Then, according to scholars like Max Muller, Zarathus-trianism rather than Judaeo-Christianity would have been pro-gressively the prevailing religion of Europe and finally also America. Fire-temples would have sprung up where now Churches abound.

Even after the setback to the military and imperial ambition of Darius and Xerxes, there arose the prospect of the West turning Zarathustrian. The old religion in the new garb of Mithraism — the cult of the Iranian Sun-god Mithra akin to the Vedic Mitra — grew a keen rival to early Christianity. Mithraism spread Fire-worship wherever it went. And by its dynamic character it appealed to the Romans. The Roman soldiers took Mithra as their deity and carried his cult to all the countries subjugated by the legionaries. Recently a temple of Mithra was unearthed in the heart of London! This shows how far and wide was the establish-ment of Fire-worship at the time when Christianity was struggling for a hold on the minds of men. Mithraism ran neck and neck with the new creed and, if some of the Roman Emperors had not been converted to Christianity and stamped out all other cults, what had remained undone by Darius and Xerxes would still have come to pass.

Would the West have been vastly different as Zarathustrian rather than Judaeo-Christian? At least with regard to theology and the ethical code, Dr. Spiegelberg does not think so. He believes that much of Judaeo-Christianity itself is Zarathustrian in origin. Some points of important affinity are quite clear between the ancient religion of Iran and the Christianity that flourished later. The former, like the latter, believed in a loving Father-God who is omniscient and concerned with His children's welfare. Zarathu-shtra, though not considered the unique Son of God, was yet regarded as God's messenger par excellence on earth and, like Jesus, was said to have been born miraculously of a sexless con-ception. The righteous were asked to look forward to "the King-dom of God". There was sharp prolonged conflict between God and Satan and there were the regions of Light and Darkness, Heaven and Hell, for the future life of human beings. Angels and

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demons were ranged on opposite sides. Also, there was to be a final resurrection of the dead similar to what is envisaged in the Christian Bible. The general mind of the West in its religious outlook would have been the same as now.

Would poetry have differed greatly? Shakespeare is little con-cerned with religion; so he could not have been unShakespearean in the essence of his poetry without Christianity. Dante's Divine Comedy would have changed in details but the broad scheme, except for his "Purgatory", would have remained identical in the spirit of its theology and in its picture of the Hereafter. (The very word Paradiso derives from the Persian Pairidaeza.) Milton too would have written of the war between God and Satan, angels and devils, though the story of the Garden of Eden might have differed. Goethe also would have thought of his Mephistophiles the Devil tempting Faust.

We are thinking of might-have-beens. As things are, ho more than a lakh of people survive to follow in the most literal sense God the Fire. In their own homeland, their glory is as good as extinguished. Well does Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam lament with both piquancy and felicity:

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

The Court where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:

And Bahram, that great Hunter — the Wild Ass

Stamps o'er his head, but cannot break his sleep.

The theme of the Fire-worshippers has attracted several English poets. In the hills of Persia they were known in Moslem times as Guebres or Gebirs, and Landor has a long poem on one of them. Moore has versified a story about a Fire-worshipper who was hounded by the fanatics of Allah, and in his poem are words that can apply not only to the Zarathustrian remnants in Persia but also to the Parsis of India:

Is Iran's pride then gone for ever,

Quenched with the flame in Mithra's caves?

No — she has sons that never, never

Will stoop to be the Moslem's slaves,

While heaven has light or earth has graves!

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But, though Moore says that Iran's surviving sons will never sub-mit to the Moslems, he nowhere puts a bar to their Indianising themselves and surrendering to India's greatest spiritual figure and becoming devotees of the Master who has written the poignant poem called Bride of the Fire, the splendid poem named Bird of Fire, the book of Vedic translations entitled Hymns to the Mystic Fire and put into the mouth of Savitri the magnificence of the line that has fired me to all this heated digression.

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