The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo

Prologue

How shall we crown Sri Aurobindo? Is he greater as a Yogi than as a philosopher? Does the literary critic in him outtop the sociological thinker? Does he shine brighter as a politician or as a poet? It is difficult to decide. Everywhere Mount Everest seems to face Mount Everest. But when we study this Himalaya of various extremes of height, the first eminence that strikes us is Sri Aurobindo the poet. Even in his teens the Muse had touched his lips and drawn from them the perfect note, at once exquisite and grand, with apt imaginative suggestion running from phrase to phrase;

Love, a moment drop thy hands;

Night within my soul expands.

Veil thy beauties milk-rose-fair

In that dark and showering hair....

To be a born poet, however, does not ensure a uniform heat and light in each part of one's work. And they can be lacking even in spite of the thought being pithy and the language dignified or graceful. Weighty substance and well-ordered speech do not by themselves make first-rate poetry. A vividly worded vision, an expressively rhythmed emotion — these are what we want. When they are not often at play, the work must tend to grow tame. Though the mark of the skilled artist may be evident, I dare say Sri Aurobindo does not escape a semi-tameness in certain scattered patches where the philosophical intellect mixes a somewhat dry breath with the flame and flush of the inner enthousiasmos. But whoever takes a global view of his achievement cannot help feeling that no amount of critical carping will leave him less than a poetic giant.

On the brows of this giant we must place a crown of triple triumph. For, Sri Aurobindo has done three exceedingly rare things. First, he has to his credit a bulk of excellent blank verse — a statement possible about poets we can count on our fingers. At least five thousand lines in the Collected Poems

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and Plays published in August 1942 are a diversely modulated beauty and power with no appreciable fall below a fine adequacy and with peak after peak of superb frenzy. They put him cheek by jowl with Keats in both essence and amount. The huge epic Savitri, still unfinished, is a marvel which places him at once in the company of the absolute top-rankers by a sustained abundance of first-rate quality. Add to living lengths of blank verse a large number of sublime or delicate shorter pieces, mostly in rhyme, and we have a further testimony to Sri Aurobindo's creativeness. But what is of extraordinary import is that among them we have a body of successful work in a medium that has eluded English poets: quantitative metre. Sri Aurobindo has solved once for all the problem of quantity in English — a feat which gives the language "a brave new world" of poetic effects, a revelation of strange rhythm-moulds of the inspired consciousness. Quantitative metre is the second tier in Sri Aurobindo's poetic crown. The third is not merely a revelation of strange rhythm-moulds, but also the laying bare of a rhythmic life beyond the ranges of inspired consciousness to which we have been so far accustomed. To bring the epic surge or the lyric stream of the quantitative metres of Greece and Rome into English is not necessarily to go psychologically beyond the ranges of inspiration we find in the epic or lyric moods of England. It could very well be just an opening up of fresh movements on psychological planes already possessed by those moods. Over and above opening up such movements Sri Aurobindo discloses planes that have been secret hitherto except for stray lines here and there, occurring as if by a luminous accident. Only the ancient Vedas and Upanishads embody with anything like a royal freedom these ranges of mystical and spiritual being, hidden beyond the deepest plunge and highest leap of intuition known to the great masters. Sri Aurobindo stands as the creator of a new Vedic and Upanishadic age of poetry.

Three tiers I have distinguished in the Aurobindonian crown. But it would be wrong to think of them as sharply distinct. For, the third includes the characteristics of the two

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others: the Vedic and Upanishadic inspiration constituting it is caught to a considerable degree in quantitative metres and to an even larger extent in blank verse. However, when treating it we have to concentrate more on the speciality of the sheer expression-stuff of its unique planes than on its quantitative scheme or its blank-verse form. So, in treating the two other tiers, it will be more appropriate to confine ourselves to poems not directly concerned with Sri Aurobindo's Yoga. The blank verse best suited for separate study is, therefore, some part of that which he wrote in his early life, awhile the separate study of his quantitative poetry is kept to his masterful handling of a Greek theme in the central and most difficult of all quantitative patterns inherited from Europe's antiquity, the hexameter.

Here probably it will be said: "Sri Aurobindo may be a fine practitioner of blank verse, the quantitative hexameter and spiritual poetry resembling the Vedas and Upanishads. But what bearing has such work on concrete life? Is he a dynamic help in our problems?" Well, it would be absurd to regard the Vedas and Upanishads as academic exercises or else gospels of escapism. They are passionately alive and seek the solution of life's most acute problem — mortal ignorance that is responsible for all our errors, weaknesses, depravities, divisions. Their solution rests on what they recognise as the central fact of the universe — the Divine; and they aim at the flowering of the Divine in the human by a process of Yoga. If we are inclined to look upon their poetry's vision as chimerical and upon its emotion as issueless for moderns, it is well to note that Jung who is our most comprehensive typically modern mind-explorer has attempted to co-ordinate the psycho-analytic integration of personality with the Yogic process and that T. S. Eliot who is said to be the chief shaper of the modern poetic impulse has not fought shy of the mystic's Dark Night of the Soul:

I said to my soul be still and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God.

Sri Aurobindo outdoes the ancient Indian scriptures in the as-

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piration to suffuse and transform earth's life with the Golden Immortal the Rishis saw everywhere pressing for manifestation. And in his care to get the aching externals into harmony by some power from within, his concern about the poor unfulfilled trivialities that are divorced from the deep springs of our consciousness, he outdoes also the modernism of Eliot no less than Jung. His main poetic work lies along this line of potent synthesis of the outermost and the innermost: so he can scarcely be put by as an anaemic denizen of dreamland fashioning clever patterns of remote sound. His hexameters too are not bare technique: they are vital, they are a body of novel construction found at length in a modem tongue to match that of the Iliad and the Aeneid for a new searching of human hearts and mortal fortunes. To deal with a Greek theme is not to be antiquated or obsolete. Much depends on the inner substance of the theme. When we open Herodotus or Thucydides, Plato or Aristotle, Aeschylus or Sophocles, we often light on "modern" figures, situations and attitudes, for the world-drama has many motifs common to its several acts. Besides, we must not forget that Sri Aurobindo is no scholar shut up in the past: he mixes with his insight into vanished times a broad and multifarious knowledge of contemporary living and thinking and this would subtly impregnate any theme he might adopt. The blank verse we shall select and scrutinise was written in his youth and in the comparative seclusion of the Baroda State Service taken up by him on return from Cambridge. Yet even here there is a puissant pulse and a vibrant complexity of perception within a chosen orbit, and while the "translunary things" without which poetry cannot exist are perhaps made here more kin than elsewhere to the dreamy and the fictitious by being enveloped totally in mythological stories, the faces that move in these stories are like our own and our own heartbeats are heard and the imaged ideas are caught like flames within our own minds and illuminate the problems of desire and action that close upon us day after day.

Of course, it is not only the contents of Sri Aurobindo's poetry that we must occupy ourselves with. Manner and tech-

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nique, the creation of outer form, are of paramount importance in art, and when we appreciate art we must approach the "what" of expression primarily through the "how". Unless the "how" stands in the forefront for the critical consciousness we shall miss the specific cultural influence which poetry brings. Poetry affects us by treating words not just as counters for significance and experience but also as types of sound-texture and sound-volume and as elements of design: it conveys the feel and rhythm of words and a sense of verba] patterning together with what the words express and it conveys significance and experience markedly if not mainly through this feel and rhythm and this patterning. Further, as long as the verbal body is beautifully intense with an inner glow, poetry fulfils its function for one who is receptive in the right cultural way: the nature of the "message" does not add to or detract from its essential quality. No doubt, it must have sufficient vision and emotion, but their social or anti-social character, their moral or hedonistic turn, their open-eyed or misty orientation, their optimism or pessimism do not directly determine whether it is first-rate or no. Hence to speak of Sri Aurobindo's poetic genius and not dwell upon the manner and technique and outer form of its activity is to shoot wide of the target. At the same time, it is worth remembering that what they express and present is likely to be of all-round value since the poet in him is based in the man who has also distinguished himself variously in other matters than poetry, matters where height can be achieved only by having momentous significance and experience to offer.

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