The Thinking Corner

The Peacock Lute

Sarojini Naidu flashed out that phrase in a poem - Professor Bhushan has caught it on the title-page of his excellent new anthology of poems written in English by Indians. Both are acts of inspiration. The fine phrase becomes a focus of special significance when applied to Indian poetry in any form.

A peacock is commonly known for three things: the abundant colour of its plumes, its keen dancing - and its look of vanity. But the vision of the East has not found the peacock invariably vain: to be self-delighted has for the Indian a profound sense as well as a superficial one, since self-delight can stand for an independence of outward objects or occasions for finding life sweet and a plunging towards the centre of our being for the source of joy no less than light and strength, the deep centre where the human and the divine meet. It is because that profound sense is there that the peacock could become in our legends Sri Krishna's own bird.

To be called a peacock is not for the Indian poet both a criticism and a compliment. It is altogether a compliment -yet one which in order to be deserved necessitates a certain rising above any gratified lapping up of it. A feeling of dedication is surely implied if one is to be considered Sri Krishna's bird. One's heart must be offered to the ideal beauty and, just as one derives one's inspiration from it, so too must one pass on to it whatever praise is one's lot: "Thine the power and therefore Thine the glory!"

Soulwardness and the feeling of dedication, however, are not all that the Indian poet is meant to have. They can easily lead to an austere otherworldly attitude - and such an attitude he must avoid. He has to be at the same time most inward and most outward, translunary and sublunary. The world of sense - shining hues and glowing harmonies - he must embrace and make his life's instrument. Images from the visible and the tangible are to be mated by him with the

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Unknown. Upon his blood-stream the music of the spheres has to tremble: without this music his poetry will be crude, but without that blood-stream his poetry will be thin. Whatever the Indian saint may do, the Indian poet cannot renounce the world and still be a poet. He has to be what Sri Krishna's bird symbolises - a combining of soulwardness and the feeling of dedication with a wealth of bodily colour and an intensity of bodily rhythm: he must unfold variegated feathers and set his feet dancing, while his heart is drawn inward and upward beyond them.

Won't the combining create a conflict in him? No. For to be drawn beyond these things is not to be in love with a supreme void. The poet, Indian or otherwise, is essentially an archetype-hunter. His other-world is not a negation of this but the perfect original of it which is here broken and fragmentary, emerging slowly and with struggle. In taking up physical colour and rhythm he is not going over to the utterly undivine: his song is not a blow against the silence of God nor his magnificence a violation of God's mystery. Deep in the divine silence, far in the divine mystery, dwells the pattern and plan which the world is striving to manifest. That is the poet's basic vision, whether he openly acknowl-edge it or no. Divest him of it and his frenzy is lost. It is at work not only when triumph burns on his lips but also when those lips are ashen with despair. For, if they triumph because the poet sees the archetypal beauty shining out through things that are wry and fleeting, they despair for no other reason than that the selfsame beauty is found by him to be obscured. What the poet's joy discovers and what his agony misses are one: some sheer and sovereign Perfection. In poetry the hunger that is appeased and therefore laughs and the hunger that is robbed of sustenance and therefore wails are both of them at bottom a hunger for the Archetypal through the modes and movements of the phenomenal.

And because this one single hunger is behind all poetry, all poetry seeks faultless form - the mot juste, the unimprovable phrase, the sentence without a defect, the stanza

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that is an unflawed whole, and through such absolutes a expression the poet gives them. If not all the while in what he says, then in the manner of his saying, the Archetypal is ever his quest and goal. But he seeks it and attains it ever through the phenomenal. The marble of Phidias and Ustad Isa, the pigments of Rembrandt and the Ajanta Buddhists, the word-stuff of Shakespeare and Sri Aurobindo - all these are phenomenal, even as the figures and designs and images that stand out from the work of those masters to convey its message are caught from the world of phenomena, the sphere of sense.

No, there is no conflict in the poetic art between the Beyond and the Here. The man may know a keen strife in his breast between them: the poet may even voice the strife, but afire to make a faultless form from phenomenal substance, he transcends it in his art by the way he voices it: he cannot succeed in his poetry without harmoniously combining in the absolute beauty of his expression the Here and the Beyond. So the peacock, as Sri Krishna's bird, is the right essence of his lute - and all the more right if he is an Indian, for then the matter no less than the manner draws the two worlds together.

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