The Secret Splendour

  Poems


6

 

TIME-TELESCOPE

 

"How can thy reveire's molecule of sight

 Pierce the lone reaches of the starred Obscure?

Mix with my largening thought whose deep and pure

Quiet brings close the eternal harmonies!

 Across my length of vigil, nectars move:

I am a crystal medium of far light.

Through whom the unattainable galaxies

Glow with a luminous Mother's intimate love!"

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

(Does my consistent sustaining of the telescope image throughout by expressions like "largening thought", "brings close", "length of vigil", "crystal medium of far light", etc., put the poem in the class of what might be called "inspired conceit"?)

 

"No, I don't suppose it does—the turn has not that obvious ingenious cleverness which is the stamp of the conceit. The poem is a fine one—mental with a sort of reflection of the overhead manner; but it has not the overhead grip."

 

(What exactly is the mental process which would define "conceit" in poetry?)

 

"When an image comes out of the mind not properly transmuted in the inner vision or delivered by the alchemy of language, it betrays itself as coin of the fancy or the conceiving intellect and is then called a conceit."

 

(Would you describe the following poem of mine as "coin of the fancy"? What is the peculiarity of poetic effect, if any, here?)


Page 166


NIGHT

 

No more the press and play of light release

Thrilling bird-news between high columned trees.

Upon the earth a blank of slumber drops:

Only cicadas toil in grassy shops—

But all their labours seem to cry "Peace, peace."

Nought travels down the roadway save the breeze;

And though beyond our gloom—throb after throb—

Gathers the great heart of a silver mob,

There is no haste in heaven, no frailty mars

The very quiet business cf the stars.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

'It is very successful—the last wo lines are very fine and the rest have their perfection. I should call it a mixture of inspiration and cleverness—or perhaps ingenious discovery would be a better phrase. I am referring to such images as 'thrilling bird-news', 'grassy shops', 'silver mob'. Essentially they are conceits but saved by the note of inspiration running through the poem—while in the last line the conceit quiet business' is lifted beyond itself and out of conceited-ness by the higher tone at which the inspiration arrives there."

 

(What do you think of this is attempt at expressing inner mystical fact by what may seem to be poetic fancy?)

 

WHITE MURDER

 

A quick stiletto's smile of poignancy,

The pang of paradise cletves through the heart,

Committing against our human blood's career

A lustrous crime of immortality.

Truth's lightning stab—and from the core of life

Rich reveries flow to some inscrutable deep,


Page 167


While over a precipice of infinitude Clay-burdens drop, a trance-fall out of time.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"Very forcibly conceited. In is kind it is eminently successful."

 

(Another piece—somewhat similar in tone and turn to White Murder, but perhaps not openly "conceited". What is its source of inspiration?)

 

MOKSHA

 

A giant earth-oblivion numbs the brain,

A stroke of trance making each limb fall loose

And narrow-hearted hungers crumble down!

The soul has broken through the walls of time,

The unlustred prison of the dreaming clay,

To a palace of imperishable gold—

No transient pauper day but shadowless dawn,

Eternal Truth's sun-gated infinite.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"It is mental throughout except the last line which has a touch of Higher Mind; but it is fine all the same. Quite up to the mark."

 

*

 

LOVE'S TRIUMPH

 

O face of scorn, you winter not my will:

This heart grew brighter when your breath's proud chill

Flung my diffuse life-blood more richly in!

Now mystic reveries halo mortal din:


Page 168


No longer now the outward burning stress,

The eternal Spirit's self-forgetfulness—

But through a superhuman quietude

The timeless secret of each rhythm is heard.

Love turns a living ether's infinite mood;

Your beauty's call, a brief and flickering word

 Of clay, becomes in that divine expanse -

Truth-whitenesses clasped by a hush of trance.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"The mental is no doubt prominent, but inspiration is present throughout and in the lines marked rises above the mental, for the overhead note is there. It is the mental lines that give the tone to the poem, these lines rise out of the mental like islands out of the sea. Moreover, except in the lines marked with a cross where the illumined Mind gets strongly in, the 'note' is not quite pure,—there is the higher Mind tone, even a little of the illumined Mind, but not enough to make it absolutely that. It is a fine poem with very fine lines in it."

 

*

 

APOTHEOSIS

 

Spurning the narrow cities of your mind,

Climb to the turquoise dome of distances

Where Nature's spirit wears a measureless crown—

The unwalled glory of some Tartar day,

The inscrutable puissance of a Negro night.

There every straining mood brims infinite,

An all-submerging primal mystery,

A waveless ocean of Omnipotent ease—

Or like all heaven's truth-core flames the will!


Page 169


SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"The Tartar day and Negro night have vividness and power; the other lines are very fine poetry. As a whole, the Higher Mind with a touch of Illumination."

 

*

 

INCARNATION

 

Would you conceive her self? A sheer abyss

Of reverie existing by its own

Grandeur of inexhaustible silences

That know all secrets through a light unknown.

 

Nor her divinity the clay ensheathes:

Those pure immitigable joys unblind

Each human pore and her whole body breathes

The large and lustrous odour of her mind.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"It is very good. Such inversions as in the fifth line should not be too often used, as in modern English they are apt to be puzzling. It is from the Illumined Mind that the poem as a whole seems to have come. Most of your poems now are from there.

 

"Lines 1-3: Illumined style . Line 4: Illumined inspired style. Lines 5-8: Effective illunined style."1

 

*

 

 

 

 

1See pp. 100-104 and the footnote on p. 161. (K.D.s.)


Page 170


NIGHT OF TRANCE

 

Closing your eyes, outstretch vague hands of prayer

Beyond the prison-house of mortal air...

Then, soul-awakened, watch the universe thrill

With secrets drawn from the Invisible—

A force of gloom that makes each flicker-stress

Bare the full body of its goldenness

And yield in that embrace of mystery

A flaming focus of infinity,

A fire-tongue nourished by God's whole expanse

Through darknesses of superhuman trance.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"Lines five to eight (marked double) are from the Illumined Mind touched with the Intuition—the rest seem to be mainly from the Higher Mind, except that the last two [marked double] have a force of Illumination also. Perhaps the sustained intensity is less than that of your very best poems: that does not mean that it is a semi-success—it is a difference of shade rather than of category."

 

*

 

APE ON FIRE

 

Fuelled with forests I come, an ape on fire,

A brown beast burning towards the unbarred Blue,

Fierce brain that feels suddenly the skull blown off,

Blind belly crying to be an abysm of stars!

 

Helpless with flame that snatches them from earth,

My terrible arms strain reddening in mid-air—

Love that has lost the ecstasy it can grasp,

 To embrace the bourne ess body of the beyond.


Page 171


SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"The lines you have sent me no doubt have a remarkable force, especially three or four of them, but I do not know that I can say positively from what level or source they come. Perhaps the Illumined Mind but not purely from that. I would have to wait for more light from that illumined quarter before I could pronounce with a complete certainty."

 

*

 

IN TERRAM

 

Why this indignity that from the brave

Height of soul-lustre into a broken grave

Man's yearning flesh should drop and all his drouth

Of planet-passion kiss the worm's cold mouth?

What treasure yet unknown draws down his mood,

Whose heart is fashioned for infinitude?

Surely some God-abyss calls out to him!...

We die and all our winging senses dim

Because we have not dreamed the goal of birth,

The arcane eternity coring dull earth.

O omnipresent Light, break from below

As in the constellate seasons of our mind:

Rise up and flower in these cells of woe,

Flush the wan nerves, breathe your immense gold

breath,

And make our limbs no longer grope to find

 A heaven of quiet through world-weary death!

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"It is very fine. The thought is clear enough. Illumined Mind + intuitive inspiration."

 

*


Page 172


A METAPHYSICAL POET TO HIS MISTRESS

 

Not for the light of limbs

But for the peace

 Folding, when rapture dims,

Heart-poignancies —

 

The lull of ardour spent,

Which like a wind

Of some cool firmament

Blows out the mind,

 

Leaving our gaze a night

Timelessly deep

 As if all heaven's height

Sank asleep—

 

O love, for that abyss'

Unnamable sky

The soul from kiss to kiss

Wings on, a cry

 

Of passion to be freed

From its own fire

And hurl away the seed

Of earth-desire!..

 

Though far the eternal day

Pure vigils view,

Its secret in my clay

I plumb with you

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

'No, it is not weak or merely clever. It is a fine poem, the thought perfectly expressed—the thought itself may be queer', but it expresses something which people sometimes


Page 173


vaguely feel, a seeking in earthly desire for something beyond that desire. The lines marked are very striking and have a strong turn of intuitive revelation. The rest though it has not that originality is very felicitously phrased and rhythmed and has a certain finality or definitiveness in it which is always an achievement in poetry."

 

*

 

TRUTH VISION

 

How shall you see

Through a mist of tears

The laughing lips of beauty,

 The golden heart of years?

 

Oh never say

 That tears had birthh

 In the weeping soul of ages,

The gloomy blow of earth!

 

Your eyes done

Carry the blame

For giving tearful answers

To questionings of flame.

 

 

What drew that film

Across your sight

Was only the great dazzle

 Of everlasting Light!

 

Frailty begot

Your wounded gaze:

Eagle your mood, O spirit,

To see the Golden Face.


Page 174


SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

'It is exceedingly beautiful, one of the best things you have done. But don't ask me to analyse it. Things like that cannot be analysed, they can only be felt. It has throughout the perfection of simple inevitability about which no one can say, 'It is because of this that it is beautiful or because of that.' The more I read it, the more it gains upon me."

 

In terms of plane, we may conjecture "the perfection of simple inevitability" to be pointing—if we may go by Sri Aurobindo's own words elsewhere on mystic and spiritual poetry—to a manifold blending: the inner mind's "easy and luminous simplicity which is at the same time very felicitous', the psychic being's "fine subtlety of true perception" and "its intimate language" but touched with the "pure intuitive" 's "simple revealing directness and beauty".

 

***

 

ABOVE ALL ROSES

 

Giant roses,

Gods of light,

Glory and laugh and mingle

 On a dreamy height.

 

But, ever and ever

Above rose red

 Flame and forgetfulness,

Vigilling unwed

 

Is a white, immense,

Miraculous-blown

 Lily beyond time's dearth

Yet very alone.


Page 175


Omnipotence,

Infinitude,

Eternity of splendour—

 All are subdued

 

To a virgin breath

 Calling the far

 Earth-glooms of pain to marry

Its soul of star.

 

And therefore life

Yearns and yearns—

Feeling some limitless rapture

 Unmated burns.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"Very fine. All such poems come from the Intuition plane."

 

*

 

EXILE

 

With you unseen, what shall my song adore?

Though waves foam-garland all the saffron shore

 

My music cannot mingle with their tone,

Because a purer worship I have known.

 

How shall I join the birds' delight of space,

Whose eyes have winged the heaven of your face?

 

Or with the rain urge blossoms to be sweet,

When I have lost the altar of your feet?

 

A lone tranquillity whose eyelids fall

Is now my only voice, for thus I call


Page 176


Your godhead back: the gates of outwardness

 I shut and my lost rapture repossess—

 

Your spirit in my spirit, deep in the deep,

 Walled by a wizardry of shining sleep.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

'"I find it very good. It is not sentimental at all, for feeling and sentiment are not the same thing. It comes from the intuitive mind and has a note of fine adequacy which is often the best form for that inspiration to take. The last two lines are more intense and come straight from the Intuition itself—an expression not of mind, but of truth-sight pure and sheer."

 

*

 

PHARPHAR

 

("...Abana and Pharpha; lucid streams"—Milton)

 

Where is the glass gold of Pharphar

Or its echoing silver-grey

When the magic ethers of evening

Wash one the various day?

 

I have travelled the whole earth over

Yet never found

The beautiful body of Pharphar

Or its soul of secret sound.

 

But all my dreams are an answer

To Pharphar's blind career;

And the songs that sing are an image

Of quiets I long to hear.


Page 177


For, only this unreached beauty

No time shall mar —

 This river of infinite distance,

Pharphar.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"Very beautiful indeed, subtle and gleaming and delicate. The sound-suggestions are perfect. I suppose it comes from some plane of intuitive inspiration."

 

A Comparison between "Pharphar" and

Walter De la Mac's "Arabia"1

 

"It is indeed charming—De la Mare seems to have an unfailing beauty of language and rhythm and an inspired loveliness of fancy that is captivating. But still it is fancy, the mind playing with its delicate imaginations. A hint of something deeper tries to get through sometimes, but it does not go beyond a hint. That is the difference between his poem and the one it inspired from you. There is some kinship though no sameness in the rhythm and the tone of delicate remoteness it brings with it. But in your poem that something deeper is not hinted, it is caught—throughout —in all the expressions, but especially in such lines as

 

 

 

1ARABIA

Far are the shades of Arabia

Where the Princes ride at noon,

 'Mid the verdurous vales and thickets.

Under the ghost of a moon;

 And so dark is that vaulted purple

Flowers in the forest rise

And toss into blossom 'gains the phantom stars

Pale in the noonday skies

 

Sweet is the music of Arabia

In my heart when out of dreams


Page 178


When the magic ethers of evening

Wash one the various day

or

The beautiful body of Pharphar

Or its soul of secret sound

or

This river of infinite distance,

Pharphar.

 

These expressions give a sort of body to the occult without taking from it its strangeness and do not leave it in mist or in shadowy image or luminous silhouette. That is what a fully successful spiritual or occult poetry has to do, to make the occult and the spiritual real to the vision of the consciousness, the feeling. The occult is most often materialised as by Scott and Shakespeare or else pictured in mists, the spiritual mentalised, as in many attempts at spiritual poetry—a reflection in the mind is not enough. For success in the former, Arjava's 'Totalitarian' with the stark occult reality of Us vision is a good example; for the latter there are lines both in his poems and yours that I could instance, but I cannot recall them accurately just now—but have you not somewhere a line

The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind?

__________

I still in the thin clear mirk of dawn

Descry her gliding streams;

Hear her strange lutes on the green banks

Ring loud with the grief and delight

Of the dim-silked, dark-hained musicians

In the brooding silence of night.

 

They haunt me—her lutes and her forests;

No beauty on earth I seeee

 But shadowed with that dream recalls

Her loveliness to me:

Still eyes look coldly upon me,

Cold voices whisper and say—

"He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,

They have stolen his wits away."


Page 179


That would be an instance of the concrete convincing reality of which I am speaking—a spiritual state not hinted at or abstractly put as the metaphysical poets most often do it but presented with a tangible accuracy which one who has lived in the silent wideness of his spiritualised mind can at once recognise as the embodiment in word of his experience.

 

T do not mean for a moment to deny the value of the exquisite texture of dream in De la Mare's representation, but still this completer embodiment achieves more."

 

***

 

SPHERE-MUSIC

 

Bring not your stars the very same

 Magic as mine? I give that name

 Unto a touch of cool flame

Upon my heart

 

When evening yearns beyond the brief

 Monotonies of joy and grief

For some strange rhythmical relief

Shining apart—

 

And dim migrations, mindward sent

 From reveries omnipotent

Through shadows of a firmament

Crowned by deep full,

 

Scatter their white and winging powers

 Of song across the barren hours

Till darkness lit to flying flowers

 Breathes beautiful.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"It is a very good lyric, the rhythm and the thought very subtle and satisfying."


Page 180


(I have the same impression about it as about Pharphar which, according to you, has come from the Intuition plane. Am I right?)

 

' I believe it is the same source."

 

*

 

NEAR AND FAR

 

I see your limbs aglow

With passionate will,

But touching their white flesh I know

Your love's intangible—

 

As if each fiery line

 Of yearning clay

Brought only a mirror-shine

Of beacons far away

 

Your flames unquenchable dart

 Yet burn not by their kiss:

They Hash around my heart

 A dream of distance;—

 

A rich wave-aureole

That lures beyond its tune

Of time the lustre-haunted soul

 To a paradisal moon.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"It is a very fine lyrical poem, expressing with perfection what it had to say—it has the same quality as other lyrics of he kind formerly written by you—an entire precision and ease of language and rhythm, a precision that is intuitive and suggestive."

 

*


Page 181


(Has this poem too "brainy ' an air? What do you think of the turn in the last stanza?)

 

YOUR FACE

 

Your face unveils the cry,

Divinely deep,

 Heard from the inscrutable core

Of mystic sleep—

 

A lure of rapturous tune

Where vision fails,

Like a nest of heaven-hearted

Nightingales.

 

No hush of love could catch

That soul of swoon:

Dawn's body ever crossed

My dream too soon.

 

But now with a face of dawn

Night yearns to me,

Kindling the distance;

Of lost divinity.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"I don't find it brainy in any unpoetic sense—the turn in the last stanza might have been thought ingenious if it had not been given so fine a poetic form. A very fine little lyric with that intuitively felicitous choice of words which is very usual with you when you write in this kind."

 

The double marks in the margin are Sri Aurobindo's.

 

*


Page 182


DRAGON

 

A cry of gold piercing the spine's dark sleep

, A dragon fire consuming mortal thought,

 An aureoled hunger that makes time fall dead,

My passion curves from bliss to heavenward bliss.

 

  Kindling the rhythm of a myriad smile,

This white wave lifted by some virgin deep

Breaks through the embodied moments of the mind

To a starry universe of infinite trance.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

All the lines are very fine, especially those marked. The three first of each stanza have a great intensity of vision— Higher Mind plus Overmind Intuition touch. The last—Higher Mind plus Illumined Mind—is not equal in vision but still not too far below."

 

(Is it a bad habit on my part or the natural movement of a certain type of inspiration to have several appositional lines in a poem?)

 

"I suppose it is the natural movement of the inspiration cumulating illustrative images to light up something unfamiliar to the mind."

 

*


Page 183


[I have the feeling that this work, which brings in the highest "overhead" as, part of its theme, has on the whole the overhead afflatus. How would you estimate it as poetry?)

 

THANK GOD...

 

Thank God for all this wretchedness of love—

The close apocalypt fires that only prove

The shutting of some golden gate in the face!

Not here beside us burning a brief space

Of life is ecstasy: immense, above,

The shining core of a divine abyss

Awaits the earth-unglamoured lonely gaze,

The tense heart broken into widenesses!

All quiver and cry of time is splendoured there

By an ageless alchemy smiling everywhere.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"Perfect in thought and expression. 'The tense heart broken into widenesses' is a very fine line. (I suppose 'alchemy' can smile—usually it doesn't.)"

 

Nirodbaran, who read the poem out to Sri Aurobindo, reports that Sri Aurobindo repeated several times to himself the phrase which he has called "a very fine line".

 

*

 

(Here is a poem about all the planes, briefly charac-terising them. It starts with the "inconscient" physical then proceeds to the vital and the mental, with the psychic innermost recess between them—then sums up the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind and the Intuitior. and finally goes to the Overmind, the Supermind and the unmanifest Absolute. Do you think a special key is


Page 184


necessary to explain the poem or does it possess a sufficiently intelligible suggestiveness as a whole as well as in each part to give an intuitive sense of coherent meaning?)

 

THE HIERARCHY OF BEING

 

Abysmal shadow of the summit-soul—

Self-blinding grope toward the Sorrowless—

Trance-core of labyrinthine outwardness-

Visage of gloom with flowering aureole.

 

Streak on gold streak wounding the illusive night—

Miraculous monarchy of eagled gaze—

Eternal truth's time-measuring sun-blaze—

Lonely omnipotence locked in self-light.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"I can hardly say—it is quite clear to me, but I don't know what would happen to the ordinary reader. It is a fine poem, he last stanza remarkable."

 

*

 

(Now I pick up the overhead theme at its culmination, (he supreme plane whose forefront is the Supermind and which bears behind the Supermind the Ananda or Delight-plenitude, the Chit-Tapas or fullness of Consciousness-Force, the Sat or status of immeasurable Existence—yes, I take the supreme manifesting plane and regard it as still less than the very being of the Absolute, the utter unfathomable all-sufficient Divine. But have I practically succeeded? Are not my lines somewhat stiff in expression and rhythm?)


Page 185


ABSOLUTE

Lustre whose vanishing joint we call the sun—

 Joy whose one drop drowns seas of all desire—

 Life rendering time's heart a hollow hush—

 Potence of poise unplunbed by infinite space!

 

Not unto you I strain,

O miracled boons,

But that most inward marvel, the sheer Self

 Who bears your beauty; and, devoid of you,

His dark unknown would yet fulfil my love.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"No, they are not stiff: the expression is successful and the rhythm harmonious. The first three lines are magnificent "

 

*

 

DELUGE

 

You fear clay's solid rapture will be gone

If once your love dives deep to the Unknown—

But how shall body not seem a hollow space

When the soul bears eternity's embrace?—

Eternity which to the outward glance

Is some unmoving painted sea of trance,

Lifeless, an artist's dream—till suddenly

Those phantom colours wake and the whole sea

Hurls from its pictured distance, drowning the eyes

In a passionate world of dense infinities!

No longer will you talk cf shadowy bliss:

With measureless life God comes, and flesh-form

Sways like a weed in His enfolding storm.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"It is extremely fine and quite revealing and effective."

 

*


Page 186


HIMALAYA

 

The tides of gold and silver sweep the sky

 But bring no tremor to my countenance:

How shall sun-rise or moon-ebb lure, when I

 Have gripped the Eternal in a rock of trance?

 

Here centuries lay down their pilgrim cry,

 Drowsed with the power in me to press my whole

 Bulk of unchanging peace upon the eye

 And weigh that vision deep into the soul.

 

My frigid love no calls of earth can stir.

Straight upward climbs my hush—but this lone flight

Reveals me to broad earth an emperor

Ruling all time's horizons through sheer height!

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

 "A very fine poem. The lines marked are very fine and line 4 superlatively so."

 

(You have said the poem is "very fine"; but why is it so, what does it succeed in expressing by its theme, and what quality does it have—subtlety, power, colour? Could you explain a little?)

 

"Why is a poem fine? By its power of expression and rhythm, 1 suppose, and its force of substance and image. As all these are there, I called it a fine poem. Here there is more power than subtlety—it is the power with which the image of Himalaya as the mountain soul of calm and aspiration and supereminent height is conveyed that makes it fine."

 

*

 


Page 187


SKY- RIMS

 

As each gigantic vision of sky-rim

Preludes yet stranger spaces of the sea,

 For those who dare the rapturous wave-whim

Of soul's uncharted trance-profundity

There is no end to God-horizonry:

 A wideness ever new awaits behind

Each ample sweep of plumbless harmony

Circling with vistaed gloriole the mind.

 

For the Divine is no fixed paradise,

But truth beyond great truth—a spirit-heave

From unimaginable sun-surprise

Of beauty to immense love-lunar eve,

Dreaming through lone sidereal silence on

To yet another alchemy of dawn!

 

The first version had for its last line:

 

To yet another revelatory dawn!

 

Sri Aurobindo was asked about that version: "Will you tell me the worth of these fourteen verses both as poetry and as sonnet? I want perfection—so be unrelentingly critical if there is any drop."

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

"It is very good poetry and a very good sonnet—except for the last line where the vice is the word 'revelatory" which is flat and prosaic, at any rate here. I would use 'revealing" backed by another (and, if possible) revealing adjective."

 

(I am very glad and thankful you have drawn my attention to "revelatory". Will the line he up to the mark thus:


Page 188


To yet another rich revealing dawn!

 

Would you prefer

 

To yet another splendorous mood-dawn!

 

or else

 

To yet another mood-miriculous dawn!)

 

The first will do, I suppose, though 'rich' is not revealing—the others are too artificially splendorous. 'Miraculous' without 'mood' would be tempting if there were no gap to fill."

 

(I know "rich" is not quite adequate, though of all the epithets I can think of at present it seems the least objectionable. But how if I write the line like this:

To yet another ecstasy of dawn!)

 

it is better than anything yet proposed. The difficulty is that the preceding lines of the sestet are so fine that anything ordinary in the last line sounds like a sinking or even an anticlimax. The real line that was intended to be there has not yet been found."

 

(I have got Harin Chattopadhyaya to put his head together with mine. He has come up with: 'lambency of dawn." A good phrase, r,o doubt—but I wonder if it suits the style and atmosphere and suggestion in my sonnet. After over a fortnight of groping I have myself struck upon:

 

To yet another alchemy o 'dawn!

 

Do you like my "alchemy"?)


Page 189


"That is quite satisfactory—you have got the right thing at last."

 

*

 

MUKTI

 

What deep dishonour that the soul should have

Its passion moulded by a moon of change

And all its massive purpose be a wave

Ruled by time's gilded glamours that estrange

 Being from its true goal of motionless

Eternity ecstatic and alore,

 Poised in calm plenitudes of consciousness—

A sea unheard where spume nor spray is blown!

 

Be still, oceanic heart, withdraw thy sense

From fickle lure of outward fulgencies.

Clasp not in vain the myriad earth to appease

The hunger of thy God-pofundities:

Not there but in self-rapturous suspense

Of all desire is thy omnipotence!

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

 

"Congratulations! It is an exceedingly good sonnet—you have got the sonnet movement very well."

 

Originally, line 7 ran:

 

Poised in calm vastitude of consciousness.

 

Sri Aurobindo was asked if "plenitude" would be better in place of "vastitude". He replied:

 

" 'Vastitude' is better than plenitude'—but 'plenitudes (the plural) would perhaps be best. The singular gives a too abstract and philosophical turn—the plural suggests something concrete and experienceable."


Page 190


NOCTURNE

 

My words would bring thtough atmospheres of calm

The new moon's smile that breathes unto the heart

Secrets of love lost in clay-captured kisses;

The evening star like some great bird whose fury

Dies to a cold miraculous sudden pause—

Wings buoyed by sheer forgetfulness of earth;

And oh that dream-nostalgia in the air,

 

The sky-remembrance of dew-perfumed dust!

I would disclose the one ethereal beauty

Calling across lone fires and fragrances—

But vain were music, vain all light of rapture

That drew not sense a pathway to strange sleep

 Nor woke a passion billow ing through the body

In search of realms no eye-boats ever reached.

 

SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT

 

'Very fine indeed. This time you have got the blank verse all right, owing to the weight and power you have been able to put into the movement as, well as the thought and language. Nothing to criticise. The lines give a quite coherent development and there is a single aspiration throughout. It has almost the full sennet effect in spite of the absence of the rhyme structure "

 

*


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