On Poetry
THEME/S
I
SRI AUROBINDO'S BLANK-VERSE INSPIRATION
Ruskin could not follow Browning's bold leap from crag to distant crag of poetic thought, even as Arnold "came a cropper" with the sky-arches of Shelley's iridescent imagination. Francis Jeffrey, before them, had uttered his notorious verdict on the lyricism of Wordsworth and Coleridge: "This will never do!" Johnson, still earlier, had found Milton's Lycidas commonplace if not crude. When such minds could show blindspots, it is hardly surprising that an Indian reviewer of moderate talent should miss the mark altogether in judging Sri Aurobindo. And the divagation from the bull's eye would indeed be undeserving of special notice, did it not happen in a famous and responsible English weekly, The Times Literary Supplement. Sri Aurobindo the prose-writer was fairly well'appraised, but the summing-up of him as a poet ran: "It cannot be said that Aurobindo shows any organic adaptation to music and melody. His thought is profound, his technical devices commendable, but the music that enchants or disturbs is not there. Aurobindo is not another Tagore or Iqbal or even Sarojini Naidu." The words fairly take one's breath away by their sweeping ineptitude. For, they deny inspiration completely and in all its modes to Sri Aurobindo's poetry. In poetry, music does not stand just for one particular arrangement and movement of speech — a simple dance or a rich swirl, a slow gravity or a swift puissance. It can be anything and it is born fundamentally of kindled emotion and vision setting language astir and aglow so that words and phrases become intense and harmonious in a vital suggestive way and fall into suitable metrical patterns that ring significant changes on a recurrent base. In short, it is inspiration adequately expressing itself.
Can Sri Aurobindo be said to want everywhere in that expression? Take this passage from an early narrative, Love and Death, where a lover is represented as searching the underworld of departed spirits for his prematurely lost mate:
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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. O 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.
Only a deaf man with his whole aesthetic being grown numb can refuse to find here "the music that enchants or disturbs". From the point of view of the inner music — that is, the thrill of the inspired consciousness — creating the outer that embodies it, the lines are some of the most perfect in literature, with a sustained exquisiteness of the mot juste, and the outer music is of such a markedly euphonious Virgilian type as to leave no excuse whatever for missing it. And again and again in Love and Death the music rises to the same pitch and carries the same tone. Nor, when a more austere tone has play, is there any lack of beautiful music organically adapted to the feeling and the vision:
Long months he travelled between grief and grief,
Reliving thoughts of her with every pace,
Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind.
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And it is eminently worth noting that either of the excerpts I have made is in blank verse. Blank verse is the hardest to infuse with poetic life: the inspiration has to balance the lack of the grace of rhyme by deft assonances and consonances, suggestive designs of stress and changing positions of the pause: a vital energy of most sensitive sound has to be at work in it if it is to pass that crucial test of poetry — exquisite enchantment or delightful disturbance by word-music. The creative pressure it demands for success is the clinching proof of the genuine poet. Sri Aurobindo's being very striking in its music gives the lie, with quintessential force, to the charge that he is less a poet than Tagore or Iqbal or even Sarojini Naidu.
None of these has produced blank verse in English. And no other Indian has anything to show in this "tricky" medium, which would bear comparison with the Aurobindonian afflatus, the blending continued through page after page of various colours and tones, the rich flexible beauty combined with the epic furor. And what English poet would not be proud to wield the wonderfully expressive style of that speech, in Love and Death, of the God of Love — Madan or Kama, as Indian mythology names him — when he manifests to help Ruru regain Priyumvada from the underworld? The young mourner doubts if the apparition is not just a dream of his "disastrous soul":
But with the thrilled eternal smile that makes
The spring, the lover of Rathi golden-limbed
Replied to Ruru, "Mortal, I am he,
I am that Madan who inform the stars
With lustre and on life's wide canvas fill
Pictures of light and shade, of joy and tears,
Make ordinary moments wonderful
And common speech "a charm: knit life to life
With interfusions of opposing souls
And sudden meetings and slow sorceries:
Wing the boy bridegroom to that panting breast,
Smite Gods with mortal faces, dreadfully
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Among great beautiful kings and watched by eyes
That burn, force on the virgin's fainting limbs
And drive her to the one face never seen,
The one breast meant eternally for her.
By me come wedded sweets, by me the wife's
Busy delight and passionate obedience,
And loving eager service never sated,
And happy lips, and worshipping soft eyes: .
And mine the husband's hungry arms and use
Unwearying of old tender words and ways,
Joy of her hair, and silent pleasure felt
Of nearness to one dear familiar shape.
Not only these, but many affections bright
And soft glad things cluster around my name.
I plant fraternal tender yearnings, make
The sister's sweet attractiveness and leap
Of heart towards imperious kindred blood,
And the young mother's passionate deep look,
Earth's high similitude of One not earth,
Teach filial heart-beats strong. These are my gifts
For which men praise me, these my glories calm:
But fiercer shafts I can, wild storms blown down
Shaking fixed minds and melting marble natures,
Tears and dumb bitterness and pain unpitied,
Racked thirsting jealousy and kind hearts made stone:
And in undisciplined huge souls I sow
Dire vengeance and impossible cruelties,
Cold lusts that linger and fierce fickleness,
The loves close kin to hate, brute violences
And mad insatiable longings pale,
And passion blind as death and deaf as swords.
O mortal, all deep-souled desires and all
Yearnings immense are mine..."
Here not only is the whole intricate truth of love seized in idea but the force of it is thrilled to in every shade of passion, while an alert eye converts the complete idea-feeling to a concrete
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pictorial power of suggestion and each phase of it is given a perfectly representative rhythm to make it not merely glow and be seen but also vibrate and be heard in the heart of the aesthetic sense. A burst like this — and it is one among many in the nine hundred and odd lines of Love and Death — sums up centuries of poetic evolution of the English language. There is the phrase of swift felicity:
...the thrilled eternal smile that makes
The spring.
There is the phrase of power mingled with piquancy:
...knit life to life
And sudden meetings and slow sorceries.
There is the phrase of tense grandeur:
Earth's high similitude of One not earth.
There is the phrase of audacious subtlety:
Cold lusts that linger and fierce fickleness.
Last, there is the phrase of sweeping vehemence:
But it is not alone these outstanding types of verbal form that render the passage so memorable. Types which are less unexpected have also their unforgettable finality: they carry home to us with such a sure and moving touch what we have always known that they set the commonplace afire and by them the obvious attains a diamond crystallisation. Nothing specially new is said in:
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...the husband's hungry arms and use
And yet the conclusive and unimpeachable word on the matter seems to be spoken with a happy effortless unassuming accuracy: the art is scarcely perceived, but it is present everywhere —.now focussing a particularity, as in "hungry arms" and "joy of her hair," now opening up a general view as in "nearness to one dear familiar shape". An almost casual word here and there creates the final and felicitous effect — a word like "old" or "silent". The rhythm too helps: half the point would be lost in the first line without the close alliteration of "h" which has a certain eager breath about it and without the exact assonance of the "u" accompanying and reinforcing it, while in the second line the thrice-repeated "w" is suggestive of the repetitive acts that are indicated and the unwearyingness of those acts is explained as it were by the thrice-varied vowel following the "w" — an echo of the subtle freshness residing in all the wonts of love.
So much for verbal form, with its supporting rhythm. A versatile aptness of metrical technique is as important a feature in Madan's speech. The end-stopped line, compactly holding a thought or image, is companioned again and again by a leaping enjambment, lines running over and linking up by means of swift speed or strong staccato. The accent falls resolute and close-patterned to beat out a forceful meaning or convey a psychological hardness: mark how the sense is brought home by the packing together of stresses in that phrase "The loves close kin to hate" while the three spondees in "Racked thirsting jealousy and kind hearts made stone" give us the precise tension and torture and perverse rigidity that are sought to be uttered. At other places the accent leaps lightly to express quick happy emotion, or else the scattering is alternated with the clustering where more than one mood is touched and transitions are intended. In fact, the diversity of foot accompanied by a constant
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shifting of the pause, is so great from line to line that — barring the syncopated unit in which one stressed syllable does duty by itself — all the resources of metrical modulation seem tapped. Four or five lines alone have throughout the normal iambic scansion, and they too are well spaced away from one another. Hardly any two verses in the whole passage scan in the same way. Still, there is no lawlessness, no loss of the basic beat in an amorphous and raw virtuosity. The rhythm is flawlessly handled both as a subtle echo of the significance and as an instrument of timed music played by changing yet harmonising voice-weights and voice-lengths. The technique, like the style, reflects a genius most sensitively complex.
Except for a few inversions which smack of the century in which the poem was composed — the date being 1899 — everything in it is refreshingly modern in craftsmanship. So much modulation and change of pace connect up with the art of Lascelles Abercrombie and Gordon Bottomley. These poets have a more colloquial turn of phrase: Sri Aurobindo, free though he is from making a cult of the precious, is less inclined to the homely than they, but like them he turns his medium daringly elastic. Where he differs from them is for the better, since he avoids the modern faults arising from a penchant for the colloquial: the flat and the anaemic on the one hand, on the other the crudely impetuous. There is also a more careful harmonisation. Blank-verse artists of the twentieth century are frequently content to let just a faint touch of poetic form serve to lift the language from prose-construction and prose-pitch. The result is a spurious spontaneity: what it tries to cover up by its so-called naturalness is lack of that intensity which confers on poetry its true distinction from prose and constitutes its true nature. Whatever heat is present is often due to a thought-stir or a nervous reaction which builds rhetoric rather than poetry. The impression in general is of a verse drawn not sufficiently from the creative inner consciousness but thrown up from the hasty surface of the excited brain. Something elemental is wanting in the main mass of modern blank verse. The defect may be caused by a predominance of thought-ten-
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dencies: contemporary poets as a rule try to get a "theory" out of things, incidents, personalities, experiences. Sri Aurobindo's later work has many dynamic moments of poetic thinking, but his young blank verse is seldom charged with intellectual values — it has no conscious philosophical atmosphere, it lays bare an idealism of emotion and character rather than of intellect, and its thoughts are but glowing passions becoming mentally clear to themselves and forging arguments from that fiery self-knowledge. The temperament that has fashioned it is akin to the Elizabethans and not to the Victorians or the poets of our century. But it has also a Miltonic strain, a deliberate and collected inspiration; so it is saved from the extravagance, the conceit-coloured flamboyance into which the Elizabethans used to fall. There is not absent a large and steady discipline of the mind: only, the Miltonic note is here as an intermediary between the rich life-force of the Elizabethans and a half-mystical half-mythological plane: it-does not sound the conceptual depths proper to the intellect but catches in terms and tones of thought a breath of semi-occult vistas from which the mind is visited by myths and which seem to open upwards into a first inkling of spiritual vision. In this respect Sri Aurobindo's blank verse hints the Indian in him and affines him to the genius of Kalidasa.
It is therefore no wonder that a few years after Love and Death which was written when he was twenty-seven Sri Aurobindo was able to make the most perfect and vivid translation possible of The Hero and the Nymph, a famous play by Kalidasa. It is, however, a wonder indeed that a few years before Love and Death he could write a long narrative which, while treating Kalidasa's theme, far exceeds the Sanskrit play in poetic merit. Considering the age at which it was penned, it is more astonishing than even Love and Death. The latter is maturer, more loaded with ore and moulded with a finer grip on the medium, but when we remember that it was in his early twenties Sri Aurobindo tackled the theme of King Pururavus, a mortal hero, making Urvasie, a nymph of heaven, his bride, we are inclined to ask whether any poet has been so young and
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at the same time has struck such splendid chords through so considerable a length of English blank verse.
Both Love and Death and Urvasie bear traces of the influence of Stephen Phillips's Christ in Hades and Marpessa. During his Cambridge days Sri Aurobindo had seen Christ in Hades in manuscript — a memorable and fecundating event. Marpessa got even more under his skin. Stephen Phillips is at present a forgotten name because he could not keep up his early inspiration and became a weaver of thin pseudo-poetic purple, but his verse once had subtle imaginative pathos and passion. Besides, he had a living technique: he realised that in using a difficult instrument like blank verse the bom poet has to be an alert artist as well. Sri Aurobindo was stirred by Phillips's poetic as well as artistic qualities and assimilated them into his manifold genius. Where he surpasses Phillips is in energy and variety. His mind is more virile and that virile strength is not stark force alone: it has a suppleness which adapts itself to opulent no less than austere effects and often brings like Kalidasa's afflatus a sensuous and voluptuous sweep that makes him like Kalidasa a poet par excellence of Love. Love's countless moods colour the texture of Urvasie. In a brief quiet phrase like
And she received him in her eyes, as earth
Receives the rain
Sri Aurobindo can catch the whole of love's inner heart — the freshness, the surrender, the assuagement of a dream-thirst, the transforming and creative penetration of the consciousness, the humble and happy gratitude as for a gift of the Gods. The outer tumult of love he can picture with swift alterations of simile and metaphor — alterations which carry in them the unexpected and uncontrollable vehemences of the body charged with desire:
He moved, he came towards her. She, a leaf
Before a gust among the nearing trees,
Cowered. But, all a sea of mighty joy
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Rushing and swallowing up the golden sand.
With a great cry and glad, Pururavus
Seized her and caught her to his bosom thrilled,
Clinging and shuddering. All her .wonderful hair
Loosened and the wind seized and bore it streaming
Over the shoulder of Pururavus
And on his cheek a softness. She o'erbome,
Panting, with inarticulate murmurs lay,
Like a slim tree half seen through driving hail,
Her naked arms clasping his neck, her cheek
And golden throat averted, and wide trouble
In her large eyes bewildered with their bliss.
Amid her wind-blown hair their faces met.
With her sweet limbs all his, feeling her breasts
Tumultuous up against his beating heart,
He kissed the glorious mouth of heaven's desire.
So clung they as two shipwrecked in a surge.
Then strong Pururavus, with godlike eyes
Mastering hers, cried tremulous: "O beloved,
O miser of thy rich and happy voice.
One word, one word to tell me that thou lovest."
And Urvasie, all broken on his bosom,
Her godhead in his passion lost, moaned out
From her imprisoned breasts, "My lord, my love!"
This no doubt is the poetry of youth, but there is nothing either callow or crude about it. It has a rich impetuosity saved by a keen psychological sense from becoming mere excess: everything Is apt and in the right place though it falls into that place and achieves that aptness with a swirling force. And how exquisitely significant is each excited image of love —
a sea of mighty joy
Rushing and swallowing up the golden sand,
or
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The fierce absorbed swaying of two souls and bodies in profound perilous passion could not be hit off more vividly than by this last line. Mark also the felicity of:
wide trouble
In her large eyes bewildered with their bliss,
and the sudden surprise of contrast, so packed with emotional truth, which the word "tremulous" gives here:
Mastering hers, cried tremulous...
In the final phrase that tells how Urvasie moaned out
the four opening words suggest most intensely the close embrace of Pururavus, the deep heaving breath of Urvasie's pent-up emotion, the true impulse from the hidden conquered heart of her and not just from her outward beautiful mouth yielding to his, while the four closing words sustain and crown and reveal in full all these meanings with a delicate abandon.
Love's leaping and engulfing joy is in the whole passage. But Sri Aurobindo has an equally skilful hand in depicting love's large desolation. Immediately before that first clasp of each other King Pururavus is told by Urvasie's companion-nymph that he would have delight of his beloved so long only as he observed one law: a mortal could take a heavenly nymph to himself provided he let a profound secrecy lie for ever between the two differing natures during their love-moments:
Either a rapture she invisible
Or he a mystic body and mystic soul.
Reveal not then thy being naked to hers,
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O virgin Ila's son, nor suffer ever
Light round thy body naked to her eyes,
Lest day dawn not on thy felicity.
But once Pururavus forgot himself: jerked out of sleep by an alarm from Urvasie, the hero in him leaped up and "on one swift stride reached to his bow." It was a night of thunder:
Suddenly wide
The whole room stood in splendour manifest,
All lightning.
In a flash he realised "his weak tenure of mighty bliss", and stood like a statue where he was; but he had already lost his heaven, for his unclothed limbs had been seen by Urvasie. She vanished from him. He hoped on for a while, dreaming that she would return. He tried to engross himself in his kingly work among a great people, ruling with a kind yet powerful hand and giving
magnanimous decrees
Bronze against Time.
All to no avail: the face of the dreadful future kept looking at him,
And brilliant passage of remorseless suns
And wakeful nights wrestling with memory
wore his heart until he could bear the burden of kingship no longer. All his time he spent now in his deserted chamber. The country mourned over his inert grief and wished for the enemy's war-cry to rouse him. No battle broke upon it; but the king,
When the bright months brought round a lustier earth,
Felt over his numbed soul some touch of flowers,
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And rose a little from his grief, and lifted
His eyes against the stars.
A resolution grew in him that he would not accept defeat: the warrior in him vowed that he would pursue Urvasie even to the unearthly distances where she was lost in her native light. Announcing his abdication, he left his empire to search amid the old forest-haunts where he had lived with her before bringing her as queen to his marble city.
But all was silent;
only Perhaps a bird darted bright-winged away,
Or a grey snake slipped through the brilliant leaves.
Nowhere he found her; so from woods and streams he climbed to the mountains that had framed the first meeting and marriage between him and Urvasie, mountains in which was concealed the secret entrance to the heavenly worlds, her home. Nor did he linger on the inferior heights,
But plunged o'er difficult gorge and prone ravine
And rivers thundering between dim walls.
Driven by immense desire, until he came
To dreadful silence of the peaks and trod
Regions as vast and lonely as his love.
Then with a confident sublime appeal
He to the listening summits stretched his hands:
"O desolate strong Himalaya, great
Thy peaks alone with heaven and dreadful hush
In which the Soul of all the world is felt
Meditating creation! Thou, O mountain.
My bridal chamber wast. On thee we lay
With summits towards the moon or with near stars
Watching us in some wild inhuman vale,
Thy silence over us like a coverlid
Or a far avalanche for bridal song.
Lo, she is fled into your silences!
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I come to you, O mountains, with a heart
Desolate like you, like you snow-swept, and stretch
Towards your solemn summits kindred hands.
Give back to me, O mountains, give her back."
He ceased and Himalaya bent towards him, white.
The mountains seemed to recognise a soul
Immense as they, reaching as they to heaven
And capable of infinite solitude.
Long he, in meditation deep immersed,
Strove to dissolve his soul among the hills
Into the thought of Urvasie. The snow
Stole down from heaven and touched his cheek and hair,
The storm-blast from the peaks leaped down and smote
But woke him not, and the white drops in vain
Froze in his locks or crusted all his garb.
For he lived only with his passionate heart.
These lines, written by a mere stripling make one of the grandest passages in English literature. As love's language they are a masterly expression of a grief that is like a god — Pururavus aches and yearns through gigantic vistas and realises in himself a massive passion which absorbs him with an absoluteness like that of "the Soul of all the world. ../Meditating creation". As Nature-poetry, the intensity fused with the large overawing accent has a twofold strain. There is in it the human mind giving the mountains a significant value in terms of its own lofty dream, the human heart finding in them a comradeship, with its own high thrill; but over and above this process of transferred experience and imaginative symbolism, there is a sense of those altitudes being themselves alive, themselves a conscious presence independent of man and mingling with man's life a superhuman rest and a superhuman movement. The style, everywhere excellent, is a blend of different kinds: the amplitude and the intensity function on more than one psychological level. A level of effective vigour imaginatively clothing the thought and emotion is attained by:
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An excellence not so overtly effective but equally powerful through a more direct and less clothed presentation of the body of idea and feeling is in:
And capable of infinite solitude. .
The clothed and the direct are combined and transfigured into a vision and an intuitive significance that go deeper than imaginatively seized idea-feeling and bring a more mystical or spiritual vibrancy, when Sri Aurobindo writes:
...he came
The last line is a rare triumph of inward and outward grandeur. A similar way of seeing and of rhythrning out the substance of a thing is practised in that line and a half at once subtly and magnificently haunting:
And rivers thundering between dim walls,
Driven by immense desire.
In this excerpt the phrase, "driven by immense desire", is worth noting for the inspired technique that so positions it in the passage as to point it with a double reference: syntactically the words join up .with Pururavus restlessly plunging over difficult gorge and prone ravine and huge rivers as well as with those very rivers hurling without end through gorge and ravine. A happy stroke of economical suggestion by the constructive artist at one with the creative poet!
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In Sri Aurobindo's blank verse it is impossible to draw a dividing line between the artist and the poet. Surely his inspiration has grades, it is not always at the supreme pitch, but hardly anywhere do we feel a barren and lifeless decking-out or a forced technical trick. Let us glance at some of his Nature-paintings that have a precision of sight focussed on details within a harmonising all-round look. Here are verses on an enormous rain-storm:
...the cloud
Rose firmament on sullen firmament,
As if all brightness to entomb. Across
Great thunderous whispers rolled, and lightning quivered
From edge to edge, a savage pallor. Down
The south wind dropped appalled. Then for a while
Stood pregnant with the thunderbolt and wearing
Rain like a colour the monumental cloud
Sublime and voiceless. Long the heart was stilled
And the ear waited listening. Suddenly
From motionless battalions as outride
A speed disperse of horsemen, from that mass
Of livid menace went a frail light cloud
Rushing through heaven, and behind it streamed
The downpour all in wet and greenish lines.
Swift rushed the splendid anarchy admired,
And reached, and broke, and with a roar of rain
And tumult on the wings of wind and clasp
Of the o'erwhelmed horizons and with bursts
Of thunder breaking all the body with sound
And lightning 'twixt the eyes intolerable,
Like heaven's vast eagle all that blackness swept
Down over the inferior snowless heights
And swallowed up the dawn.
Movement and pace are most sensitively regulated — a speeding up here, a holding back there, a slow loosening out now, a quick breaking forth soon after, a succession of staccato urges
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ending in a huge rolling over. Word and phrase are animated with exact sight. For instance, the adjective "monumental" given to the piled-up nimbus connotes more than unmov-ing massiveness: it casts the eye back to the words — "as if all brightness to entomb." How felicitously vivid for a storm-cloud is the phrase: "wearing rain like a colour"! Then consider the simile of the horsemen: the verbal adjective "disperse" is a successful Miltonism used for the first time in English and harmonises effectively in meaning with "frail" and "light" coming later, while the cavalry-image itself, holding the suggestion of noise and bare swords or spears, represents at the same time the cloud-movement in the progress of the storm as described here and the imminence of thunder and lightning in association with that movement. Nor could thunder be more aptly expressed than by the fine extravagance in: "breaking all the body with sound." The jag and flash of lightning are caught keenly by the rhythm and vision of the phrase: "quivered from edge to edge, a savage pallor" as well as by the impact, on ear and sight, of the preposition "'twixt" in the line: "And lightning 'twixt the eyes intolerable." Only at one point I am inclined to pick fault with the expression. "Like heaven's vast eagle" is ambiguous. Sri Aurobindo, writing with the mythological atmosphere of his theme around him, refers perhaps to Vishnu's famous bird. I think an effect poetically more telling would have been produced if he had simply said: "Like a vast eagle." If the indefinite article is not rhythmically strong enough, "some" can be put instead: either of them helps the line to stir the imagination with a clearer and closer touch.
No flaw, however, can be found in the superb picture below, somewhat analogous to that in the long description of Pu-ruravus's quest among the Himalayas:
Snow on ravine, and Snow on cliff, and snow
Sweeping in strenuous outlines to heaven,
With distant gleaming vales and turbulent rocks,
Giant precipices black-hewn and bold
Daring the universal whiteness.
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A technique of the most felicitous order is brought by this inspiration. Examine the placing of the word "snow" in line one: "the universal whiteness" is created for us by that word beginning and ending the line as well as occupying its centre-foot. Again, the terminal "snow" runs the line over to the next by its connection with the word "sweeping" and sustains the idea of the icy continuity and ubiquitousness. Line two produces an effect of unrelaxing ardent stretched-forth energy by forcing us .through metrical necessity to enunciate clearly all the three syllables of the adjective "strenuous" instead of facilely hurrying as we might in ordinary speech over the last two. Also, there is the reversed foot "outlines", with its accent on the first syllable — a departure from the norm, thrusting our attention upon "out" and helping the visual content of the whole word to break more sharply into sight, so that the contour spoken of becomes etched with extra clearness. Line three makes the "vales" seem far-off, putting as it does the length of two dissyllabic epithets before the noun, while the rocks' rugged and rebellious aspect is conveyed by so fixing the adjective "turbulent" as to make its second and third syllables form with the noun "rocks" an anapaest, a foot which gives the impression of a quick stir as if the huge granite loads were actually starting out of their bases. Line four has a quartet of labials which entail the repeated opening of lips after sticking them together, thus again and again stressing the sense of depth. The long "o" in "bold", with which the line closes, keeps a note of wide-ness and hollowness ringing in our imagination. Simultaneously, the consonant-combination succeeding it saves that note from indicating quite untrammelled space: walls are felt to be present and their stony texture is hinted by the terminal "d". The line's general significance of a titanic drop and an aggressive abysmality is matched with a scansion audaciously commencing with the packed falling movement of two consecutive trochees and proceeding to suggest the emptiness as well as the shattering strength of precipices by means of an unresisting pyrrhic — that is, a couple of light unaccented syllables — followed by a couple of heavy ones building a hard
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spondee and finally by an iamb which combines the unresisting and the hard. Line five gives life to the gesture or attitude of "daring" by putting that word in the forefront; the word itself being a trochee makes the line open with a stress and thus reinforce that life. The life-giving is further enhanced by the stress standing out lonely and particular against a sequence of four "slacks" before the next stress occurs in the third syllable of "universal". The word "universal" too, just and right enough in both meaning and sound, conveys an extra hint of extensiveness by having four syllables and getting, as it were, commensurate with and equated to the four quarters that space comprises. It is also distributed partly into the second and fourth feet in addition to occupying the whole of the third, so that it seems to spread either way from the centre — universally — in the direction of the line's beginning and in that of its end. An apt technique is everywhere to do justice to the marvellous aptness of the words. Excepting the best of Keats and early Tennyson I know of scarcely any descriptive writing to approach the all-round expressive power of this short passage in the "grand style".
Nor is Sri Aurobindo perfect only when his brush moves with power: perfect too are his delicate strokes —
And here a secret opening where she stood
Waiting in narrow twilight; round her all
Was green and secret with a mystic, dewy
Half-invitation into emerald worlds.
Power and delicacy are interwoven without defect when he speaks of the habitat of the Goddess, the first among several to whose heights Pururavus climbs en route to his attainment of Urvasie's paradise. "The Mother of the Aryans" sat by a lake under Mount Kailas,
In a wild fairy place where mountain streams
Glimmer from the dim rocks and meet the lake
Amid a wrestle of tangled trees and heaped
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Moss-grown disordered stones, and all the water
Is hidden with its lotuses and sways
Shimmering between leaves or strains through bloom.
Keats and early Tennyson would have been proud to sign also under this picture.
So finely realised are Sri Aurobindo's word-pictures that they are as if on a canvas before us, or rather in three-dimensional Nature. A poet gifted with such visualisation — nowhere the details hanging inconclusive or the totality making a complex blur — is the one best suited to tackle what may be called "inscape", the world within. For, subjective experience truly comes into its own as a reality when it is not only drawn from the innermost harmony of consciousness we are capable of but is also thrown into the outermost form and pattern of vision we can find. A concreteness of utterance, ever ready with contour and colour, image and symbol, fits Sri Aurobindo's early blank verse to be a vivid instrument for the mind of his youth. Urvasie and Love and Death are created out of a mind vibrant with an idealistic sensuousness in which body and soul mingle their fervours, a high-toned passion based on the urgent tangibilities of the flesh without the crude and the cramped which ordinarily go with flesh-impulses. This super-love is set in an atmosphere in contact with some Super-Nature: spirits and entities, both good and evil, pervade Sri Aurobindo's outer world, wearing shape and moulding movement. The outer world itself is seen as part of a gradation of planes that rise higher or sink lower than the material. The authentic mystical or spiritual vision shines out only on very rare occasions and then too it seldom does so in its own right: either traditional mythology serves as a medium or else love between man and woman interprets it through a self-transcending extremism that seeks to leap beyond the limits of the earth. In Urvasie as well as Love and Death there is that struggle against mortality and the fate which circumscribes mundane life. Pururavus scales an Over-world to clasp the vanished Urvasie; Ruru descends into an Underworld to bring back Priyumvada killed before she was
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ripe. Earth's heart storming beyond earth to gain fulfilment, either by attaining the supra-terrestrial and remaining in its light or by invading the infra-terrestrial and reclaiming from its darkness what it has snatched and submerged — this is the psychological motif behind Sri Aurobindo's two most striking masses of achievement in blank verse during early life, and it renders his many-sided poetic masteries in them a kind of foreshadowing of the blank verse of Savitri in which today he is embodying his Yogic explorations of the Unknown in a more luminously mystical legend and symbol of love.
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