Savitri

  VI

      OVERHEAD INFLUENCE IN

        SRI AUROBINDO'S POETRY

We shall now turn to Sri Aurobindo's own 'experiments' in the writing of overhead poetry. Mallarmé is reported to have told Dagas: "Poetry is not written with ideas, it is written with words."⁷⁰ But not mere words, not any words; words are variable and tantalising, they have looks, they have thought and sound values, and they have coils of significance; when coaxed into a particular order the current of rhythm flows through them, the ordonnance leaps to life, and the poetic line is, as it were, projected into eternity; "the secret chords of our being are awakened, we vibrate and thrill in response to its call... we listen to the unspoken, we gaze upon the unseen."⁷¹ Rhythm is thus vitally important.

      In his own poetic practice, Sri Aurobindo gave ample attention to rhythm and metre, and his metrical experiments were often doubled

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with his attempts to give expression to his mystical experiences, and the results have been astonishing. He no doubt attained an early mastery of the blank verse, as may be seen in his Urvasie and Love and Death, as also his plays—Perseus the Deliverer, Vasavadutta, Rodogune and The Viziers of Bassora. Presendy he was attracted to the classical quantitative metres, notably the hexameter, and he was led in due course to develop his own theory of true quantity in English. Classical names like iamb, trochee, spondee, pyrric, anapaest, dactyl, not to mention the more unusual anti-bacchius, choriambus, ionic a majore and so on, signifying various combinations of long and short syllables, are often— now, perhaps, less often than before—used with regard to English verse also, even though there is no rigid system of longs and shorts in English as there is in ancient languages like Greek and Latin.⁷²

      The classicist in Sri Aurobindo was fascinated by the possibilities of quantitative verse in English and, while conceding that, "English quantitative metres cannot be as rigid as the metres of the ancient tongues", he nevertheless devised a workable system with certain rules: stressed syllables and syllables supported on a long vowel are to be treated as longs, while unstressed short vowel syllables unweighted with consonants are to be treated as shorts; with regard to many uncertain syllables the ear should decide whether they are to be treated as long or short; and, above all, free modulation should be permitted.⁷³ These rules really make one basic rule: "If we are to get a true theory of quantity, the ear must find it; it cannot be determined by mental fictions or by reading with the eye."⁷⁴ This is not the place to go into any great detail about the Aurobindonian theory of true quantity or even to discuss how far Sri Aurobindo has really succeeded in effecting a happy marriage between English verse and quantitative metres. The relevant point that is to be made here is that, in several of his later poems, Sri Aurobindo audaciously tried a two-fold experiment, namely 'overhead' poetry in quantitative verse.

      The two poems in hexameters, Ahana in rhyme and Ilion the unfinished epic, are tour-de-forces. In Ahana, a philosophic poem in

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over 500 lines, as-also in Ilion, running to about 5,000 lines, it is not to be expected that the pure overhead inspiration can be more than occasional. But there are passages in both that come like an "outleap of a superior light", a ray of cosmic consciousness, an intimation of the Infinite; and of the two long poems, Ahana is the more uniformly sustained, packed with high thought, luminous in many places and suffused throughout with the promised radiance of Ahana, the Dawn of God. Only a few lines can be given here as a sample:

      I shall sport with my dove from his highlands,

      Drinking her laughter of bliss like a god in my Grecian islands.

      Life in my limbs shall grow deathless, flesh with the

      God-glory tingle,

      Lustre of Paradise, light of the earth-ways marry and mingle.⁷⁵

The Ilion is an epic after the manner of Homer, continuing the story of the siege of Troy from the point where The Iliad ends; but of the 5,000 lines pf the epic that Sri Aurobindo left behind him, only the first 381 lines were cast in the final form and published in his lifetime. The quality of the hexameter, as well as the overhead sweep of cosmic comprehension can be illustrated by this truly Homeric simile, which has received the characteristic Aurobindonian stamp:

      Even as a star long extinguished whose light still travels

      the spaces,

      Seen in its form by men, but itself goes phantom-like fleeting

      Void and null and dark through the uncaring infinite vastness,

      So now he seemed to the sight that sees all things from the Real.⁷⁶

Troy is already a doomed city; when Deiphobus hastens through the streets he is "a gleaming husk but empty", a corpse, although he doesn't know it; he is like the light of a star "long extinguished". Mr. Sethna comments as follows on this simile: "It is a question whether in the entire range of similes there has been one so grandly apt and penetrating, so cosmic in its beauty and its glimpse of the supra-terrestrial."⁷⁷ Deiphobus appears "brilliant" to the men of Troy, but to

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the gods he is a dead man in a doomed city; the appearance belies the reality; the petty terrestrial drama is the echo of a voice hushed already. In one tremendous simile Deiphobus and Troy are presented both in Time and in Eternity. Behind man and his pigmy insignificance and inescapable mortality there looms, massive and sombre, the figure of ominous Doom. The verse, too, with its succession of five dactyls capped by a trochee—instead of the five dactyls followed by a spondee in Homer—-has a majestic falling rhythm, while the range of modulations gives the verse a certain natural mobility and grace.

      While the hexameter is in the main an epic measure and needs a corresponding amplitude for the language or rhythm to "rise to any great heights or reach out into revealing largenesses",⁷⁸ there are other classical metrical forms—about half a dozen of them at least—that Sri Aurobindo thinks can be suitably transplanted into English. Some of his short experiments on these lines are also among his very best. Here the rather novel rhythm and the distinct inspiration seem to fuse to high creative purpose and one feels almost that "a wide field to the large and opulent estate of English poetry" has been opened by Sri Aurobindo. Thus Ocean Oneness is in alcaics, Trance of Waiting is in elegiacs with rhyme in the pentameter, Soul in the Ignorance in dactylic tetrameter, and The Lost Boat in ionic a minore pentameter with an overflow of one short syllable. Descent in Sapphics is justly admired as being in, "the best of Pindar's style and Sappho's... coloured by a mystical experience of the 'overhead' type."⁷⁹ Here are two out of its seven marvellous stanzas:

      Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces

      Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;

      Thoughts that left the Ineffables's flaming mansions,

      Blaze in my spirit...

      Mind and heart and body, one harp of being,

      Cry that anthem, finding the notes eternal,—

       Light and might and bliss and immortal wisdom

      Clasping forever.⁸⁰

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In Ascent, however, the human soul is exhorted to pass into the silence and presently to pass beyond the silence; here the movement is dactylic though there is no rigid metrical scheme:

Outclimbing the summits of Nature,

Transcending and uplifting the soul of the finite,

Rise with the world in thy bosom

O Word gathered into the heart of the Ineffable.⁸¹

What is probably the most astonishing of Sri Aurobindo's short poems, Thought the Paraclete is in modified hendeca-syllabics, remotely reminiscent of Catullus. In the Aurobindonian version, the ten syllables in the line are made up of a trochee, followed by a spondee, a dactyl, a trochee again, and a final long. The idea behind the poem is that, as human thought (which is man's mediator or paraclete between earth and the beyond) rises from the mental to the overhead planes, it becomes successively higher thought, illumined thought, intuitive thought, overmental thought, and so, ever climbing higher still and higher, vanishes into the transcendental. First, thought rises above the vital and mental planes:

As some bright archangel in vision flies

Plunged in dream-caught spirit immensities,

Past the long green crests of the seas of life,

Past the orange skies of the mystic mind

Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God.⁸²

An inspired opening: like an archangel winging homeward to God, my Thought raced beyond the green seas (the vital) and the orange skies (the mental horizons) and plunged into the vasts of God (the overhead planes of consciousness). The next movement covers the planes upto the Overmind:

Sleepless wide great glimmering wings of wind

Bore the gold-red seeking of feet that trod

Space and Time's mute vanishing ends. The face

Lustred, pale-blue-lined of the hippogriff,

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      Eremite, sole, daring the bournless ways,

      Over world-bare summits of timeless being

      Gleamed; the deep twilights of the world-abyss

      Failed below. Sun-realms of supernal seeing,

      Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss

      Drew its vague heart-yearning with voices sweet.

Through suggestive imagery and symbolism Sri Aurobindo has tried here to objectify what must, after all, defy such attempts. The key words —'wings of wind', 'gold-red', 'the face lustred.. .gleamed', 'sun-realms of supernal seeing'—make a chain of significant advance and indicate the flight through the worlds of Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, and Overmind. The hippogriff, the "fabulous griffin-like creature with body of horse",⁸³ naturally calls to our mind the Aswins of the Veda rising upward in the "wide-shinings of the Dawn"; and since the hippogriff is also a winged creature, it is seen affiliated to the hamsa, the golden-winged swans that carry the Aswins to their goal of liberation and realisation. Sri Aurobindo has, however, conceded that, "these lines have not the vivid and forceful precision of the opening and the close and are less pressed home", though he has also maintained that, albeit rather vaguely, "the description is true, the epithets hit the reality and even the colours...are faithful to experience."⁸⁴The third movement in the poem describes the climbing of the Everest of the Supermind and daring beyond it and disappearing in the transcendent:

      Hungering, large-souled to surprise the unconned

      Secrets white-fire-veiled of the last Beyond,

      Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,

      Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned,

      Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete

      Disappeared slow-singing a flame-word rune.

      Self was left, lone, limitless, nude, immune.⁸⁵

 The limited ego is dead, but the self is lost in the Self, zero has become infinity.

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