The Secret Splendour

A Personal Epilogue

To complete the story of this book, cast in personal terms that are connected with my spiritual guides at Pondicherry, it is appropriate not only to record, as I have done, their solicitous response, as summed up by one of them, to the strange experiences through which I was passing. It is appropriate also to present the literary response of the other, whose words of helpful criticism and evaluation had been precious to me for their rare insight throughout my life as a writer in both prose and poetry. Here are Sri Aurobindo's dictated comments in the form of two letters:

"Your new poems are very remarkable and original in their power of thought and language and image, but precisely for that reason I have to study and consider carefully each individual poem separately before I can comment on them either generally or in detail. That will be possible only after some time, perhaps a considerable time. I am afraid you will have to possess your soul in patience till things are quieter and time less crowded. The only thing I can find meanwhile to send you is the note I put down in passing after reading a few of these poems. 'Some of the poems such as Soul of Song have a remarkable perfection and this is often accompanied with a great felicity and power of revelatory image as in Cosmic Rhythms. In another poem, Un-birthed, the images grow more audacious and tense and might seem to be almost violent in their push but they usually justify themselves by their originality and success.'

"The poems inspired by the Savitri model have the same qualities as the shorter ones; here too I shall have to wait until I have gone through them individually before I can write anything. One thing only is a little doubtful to me whether you have always achieved a perfect unity of total rhythm blending all the passages into a perfect whole. I have just heard the poem, Here and Now, where you seem to have attained success in a total unifying rhythm; but this has

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been done by employing a fine irregularity in the lines which gives a different build from the Savitri model. In other poems, even when you have employed enjambment to loosen the rigorousness of the model and get a greater swing and freedom, this has not always happened. Long passages in the Savitri manner are not easy to manage; short sentences or paragraphs can succeed, but great care in the development is needed. Otherwise one may have a series of stiffly standing stone pillars or straight lines of intense colour packed side by side instead of a successive harmony. I shall, however, consider this more carefully after studying individually more of these poems; I only suggest the possibility for the moment; in a later letter I shall return to the subject and either withdraw or confirm the suggestion."

(July 20, 1948)

*

"I have gone through your manuscript of poems and I propose that they should be immediately published without further delay. I had started making comments on each poem as 1 think you had wanted me to do; but this would have been an interminable process and your poems would have had to wait till after Doomsday. I don't, think there is anything in the poems that needs to be changed; even when you become too original for some critics who would call you violently forceful or wilfully extravagant in your images, expressions or idea-substance, these very qualities are the breath of life of a poem and to change or modify them would take away its whole value. There are perhaps one or two poems in which my doubt about the Savitri rhythm in blank verse lending itself to long continuous passages might seem to have some sort of justification, as if rows of giant ninepins have been set up somewhat stiffly but powerfully on an inexorable flatness of surface. But here too I find that change could not be tolerated for somehow this rhythm manages to be the right one for the poems' posture. So if

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you agree we will send the manuscript at once to the Press as soon as we hear to that effect from you."

(December 25, 1948)

In his second letter Sri Auiobindo says: "I had started making comments on each poem..." But no such comments were sent to me—and only those dictated on one poem were found among his papers after he had passed away. As against the praise abundantly given, it is fair to reproduce them for what seems to indicate a possibility of censure when a certain trend is pushed to its extreme though Sri Aurobindo takes care to offset the imagined censure by not directly identifying himself with it. Even apart from my motive of being fair, they are worth citing for their lively teasing style. The poem is the very first in the book, in which the new inspiration may be considered somewhat tentative.

Seated Above

Seated above in a measureless trance of truth—

A thunder wearing the lightning's streak of smile,

A lonely monolith of frozen fire.

Sole pyramid piercing to the "vast of the One—

Waits Shiva throned on an all-supporting void.

Wing after wing smites to the cosmic sky.

Gathering flame-speed out of their own wild heart—

That tunnel of dream through the body's swoon of rock—

They find their home in this sweet silent Face

With the terrible brain that bursts to a hammer of heaven

And deluges hell with mercies without end.

The abysmal night opens its secret smile

And all the world cries out it is the dawn!

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENTS

"Seated Above is a striking poem but its violent connections and disconnections—I am lot condemning them—have

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somehow awakened the Johnsonian critic in me and I give voice to his objections here without supporting them. His first objection is to 'streak of smile' and he wants to know how thunder can wear a smile, because thunder is a sound, not a visible object. The next three lines are very fine, he admits, though he wriggles a little at the frozen fire. He would like to know how a wing can have a heart and want also to know whether it is the heart that is a tunnel of dream and whether it is the tunnel that finds a home and what can be meant by the home of a tunnel. He is startled by the deluge from Shiva's brain and his own brain is ready to burst at the idea that Shiva's brain is being knocked out of his head by the hammer of heaven. The last two lines elicit his first unquestioning approval; that, he says, is the right union of poetry and common sense.

"I don't ask you to take these Johnsonianisms seriously; I have only been taking a little exercise in a field foreign to me; but 1 am not sure that this is not how some critics will grumble and groan under this particular hammer of heaven."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     (12.11.1948)

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