On Savitri
THEME/S
VI
Last of all, let us turn to the poet. There are a few unusual circumstances here: Sri Aurobindo, a Bengali, brought up both in India and England till his twentieth year in ignorance of his mother tongue, became a classical scholar, and wrote verses in Greek and Latin—and also in English—in his Cambridge days. He had besides an intimacy with several European literatures, and after returning to India, he tried to gain an equal intimacy with Sanskrit, Bengali and some other modern Indian literatures. Apart from the undergraduate Greek and Latin exercises in versification, all Sri Aurobindo's poetry is in English.
The earliest pieces were probably written when he was in Cambridge, and some of the additions to Savitri were made a few weeks—almost a few days—before he passed away. This means a career extending over a period of sixty years. He was a poet before he became a teacher, a politician or a yogi and remained a poet all through. His Collected Poems and Plays appeared in two large volumes, making a total of over 600 pages, in 1942. Since then Savitri with its over 800 pages has been given to us. Of posthumous publications, of course, there seems to be no end. If all were collected together, the plays and poems, including the verse translations, should make the formidable bulk of about 3,000 pages. No mean achievement by any standards whatsoever.
One of Sri Aurobindo's most ardent admirers, particularly of his poetry, begins his study thus:
How shall we crown Sri Aurobindo? Is he greater as a yogi than
as a philosopher? Does the literary critic in him out-top the
Page 39
sociological thinker? Does he shine brighter as a politician or
as a poet? It is difficult to decide. Everywhere Mount Everest
seems to face Mount Everest. But when we study this Himalaya
of various extremes of height, the first eminence that strikes us is
Sri Aurobindo the poet.85
The first, as also the last eminence; for, if Sri Aurobindo's earliest efforts were the epyllions Urvasie and Love and Death, his latter-day preoccupation was Savitri, the great epic which he left all but complete. The corpus is, even on a first view, rich in variety as it is impressive (and more than impressive) in quantity. There are early lyrics included in Songs to Myrtilla, for the most part written during 1890-2, and summed up thus by the author in the Envoi.
Pale poems, weak and few, who vainly use
Your wings towards the unattainable spheres,
Offspring of the divine Hellenic Muse,
Poor maimed children born of six disastrous years!...
For in Sicilian olive-groves no more
Or seldom must my footprints now be seen,...
Me from her lotus heaven Saraswati
Has called to regions of eternal snow
And Ganges pacing to the southern sea...86
Few certainly, though not perhaps quite pale or weak, these early pieces have a disarming sensibility even when they are derivative, and the memorial pieces—to Goethe, Bankim, Madhusudan, Rajnarain, Parnell—really seem to rise to the occasion. In his later years he wrote numerous lyrics, but more and more these came to be charged with philosophical or spiritual import. There is, on the whole, an unflagging mastery both of language and rhythm. Western and Indian mythology agreeably mingle in a poem like Who in which Jupiter figures in one stanza and Brahma in the next, and the rhythm has an anapaestic swing as in:
We will tell the whole world of His ways and His cunning:
Page 40
He has rapture of torture and passion and pain;
He delights in our sorrow and drives us to weeping,
Then lures with His joy and His beauty again.87
This and the other poems in the volume originally published in 1915 have an intellectual and philosophical rather than a purely poetic cast, though there are also pieces like The Sea at Night that are powerfully evocative.
Nine Poems, Six Poems, Poems (1941), Poems Past and Present, Last Poems (1952) and More Poems—not to mention the pieces in quantitative metres—taken together constitute a rich treasure-house of lyric poetry Even of the latest volume, More Poems, a reviewer (usually allergic to Sri Aurobindo) writes: "From imitative exercises which reveal the tutelary inspiration of favourite poets—ancient and modern, Eastern and Western—to the playing of infinite variations on himself as sage and seer, we have here in this small volume gleaming gems scattered by a prodigal hand."88
But it is the mystic muse that is most typical of Sri Aurobindo at his best. Mystic experience by its very nature is incommunicable in words, and this is the challenge to the poet; it is-also a compulsive need. When the poet is able to find the right rhythm and sound, the right word and symbol, he succeeds in communicating the concentrated essence of his experience. To the poet it is a recordation of his experience; to the reader, an intimation of immortality. Only a few lines can be given here by way of illustration:
In that diamond heart the fires undrape...89
A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity's face,
in a fragment the mystic Whole.. .90
Rose of God, damask force of Infinity, red icon of might,
Rose of Power with thy diamond halo piercing the night!
Ablaze in the will of the mortal, design the wonder of thy plan,
Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in man...91
Time waits, vacant, the Lightning that kindles,
Page 41
the Word that transfigures:
Space is a stillness of God building his earthly abode...92
And a huddle of melancholy hills in the distance...93
In several of his letters, and more particularly in his book, The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo has referred to the uniqueness of the mantra, the rhythmic vehicle employed by the Vedic seers to communicate to their hearers the language of the Spirit:
The poetic vision of life is not a critical or intellectual or
philosophic view of it, but a soul-view, a seizing by the inner
sense; and the mantra is not in its substance or form poetic
enunciation of a philosophic truth, but the rhythmic revelation
or intuition arising out of the soul's sight of God and Nature and
the world and the inner truth...94
The seer is the soul, the creator is the soul, the hearer too is the soul; the mantra is seeing and articulating at once, and, at the other end, hearing and seeing at once. When yoga gave Sri Aurobindo this power of vision, the rhythmic word often came unbidden as it were from the overhead—the above-mental—planes of consciousness, and all he had to do was to listen and to transcribe. "There are poets", he once said, "who neither experience nor even understand what they have written. They merely transcribe."95 Again, on another occasion, "It is the inner hearing. Sometimes one hears a line, a passage, a whole poem, or sometimes they come down. The best poetry is always written in that way."96 The lines may be revised later on, to fulfil technical requirements; or one may have to wait, till the right phrase or line comes down again.
All this does not mean that poetry is a wholly unpredictable and illogical thing. It is, however, this intangible soul-quality—not its intellectual or philosophical content—that gives poetry its peculiar power to cause ananda or pure aesthetic bliss. In his later years, it was increasingly Sri Aurobindo's practice to listen to the rhythmic word from above or generally try to write from an overmental level. Poems like Thought the Paraclete and Rose of God and, of course, the greater
Page 42
part of Savitri could only have been written from an overhead plane of global consciousness.
Aside from the mystic note (or at least alongside of it, for it is really the Great Bass in Sri Aurobindo's poetry), other notes too are occasionally heard. When Hitler's armies were overrunning all Western Europe in 1940 and the future of civilisation seemed very bleak indeed, Sri Aurobindo indeed the powerful The Children of Wotan, the opening lines of which may be quoted here:
Where is the end of your armoured march,
O children of Wotan?
Earth shudders with fear at your tread, the death-flame
laughs in your eyes.
We have seen the sign of Thor and the hammer of new creation,
A seed of blood on the soil, a flower of blood in the skies.
We march to make of earth a hell and call it heaven.
The heart of mankind we have smitten with the whip
of the sorrows seven;
The Mother of God lies bleeding in our black and gold
sunrise."97
When most of the other leaders in India—Hindu and Muslim alike— were seized with a paralysis of the will and hence were unable to give the right lead to the country at the time of the war, Sri Aurobindo saw it at its deepest level as the struggle between the devas (the gods) and the asuras (the demons) and would have liked India to throw her weight whole-heartedly on the side of the Allies. Failing in his private attempt to persuade the Congress leaders, he contented himself with exerting his spiritual action on the side of humanity and progress. The Children of Wotan is charged with power as well as prophecy, not the less Aurobindonian for being so openly 'political'. Nor is it outdated for the edge of its criticism is directed, not against the Nazi alone, but against all apologists of Totalitarianism; don't the latter still boast wherever they may be entrenched in power:
Page 43
We mock at God, we have silenced the mutter of priests at
his altar.
Our leader is master of Fate, medium of her mysteries.
We have made the mind a cipher, we have strangled
Thought with a cord;
Dead now are pity and honour, strength only is Nature's lord.
We build a new world-order; our bombs shout Wotan's peace.
"That strain...was of a higher mood", but happily there are more enjoyable strains as well. One such is the sonnet, A Dream of Surreal Science:
One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink
At the Mermaid, capture immortality;
A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink
Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.
A thyroid, meditating almost nude
Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light
And, rising from its mighty solitude,
Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all right.
A brain by a disordered stomach driven
Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell.
From St. Helena went, perhaps, to Heaven.
Thus wagged on the surreal world, until
A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout.98
Nothing could be lighter in touch, or more serious in import. On the other hand, The Tiger and the Deer 99 is a vivid evocation of the Terrible and the Mild, concluding with the prophecy:
The mighty perish in their might;
The slain survive the slayer.
But, perhaps, the most enjoyable of the shorter poems is Despair on the Staircase which seems to have unaccountably strayed from T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats:
Page 44
Mute stands she, lonely on the topmost stair,
An image of magnificent despair;
The grandeur of a sorrowful surmise
Wakes in the largeness of her glorious eyes...
Her tail is up like an unconquered flag;
Its dignity knows not the right to wag.
An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,
Whether she is spirit, woman or a cat,
Is now the problem I am wondering at.100
Sri Aurobindo's translations form another distinctive group. There is so much of it that really merits detailed study, though, of course, this is not the place for such an undertaking. Sri Aurobindo seems to have followed no principle of exclusion, for he has turned into English (generally verse, occasionally rhythmic prose) whatever happened to catch his fancy or struck a responsive note in his heart. One of the earliest is from Meleager:
Now lilies blow upon the windy height,
Now flowers the pansy kissed by tender rain,
Narcissus builds his house of self-delight
And love's own fairest flower blooms again;
Vainly your gems, O meadows, you recall;
One simple girl breathes sweeter than you all.101
At Baroda naturally his interests first hovered round Sanskrit and Bengali poetry Renderings from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, from Chandidas, Vidyapati, Horu Thakur, Nidhu Babu and others, from Bhartrihari, from the Sagar-Sangit of C.R. Das, from the Vedas and the Upanishads, from Bankim Chandra and Dwijendralal Roy— all these make for both variety and volume. Sri Aurobindo was willing to turn his hand to these exercises in translation—more often than not they were "amplified transmutations" rather than mere word-for-word paraphrases—without prejudice to those occasions when the surge of
Page 45
inspiration carried him to the high nodal points of his truly creative work. But there is grace and a sufficiency of emotional intensity even in translations like:
I did not dream, O love, that I
Would ever have thee back again.
The sunflower drooping hopelessly
Expects no Sun to end her pain.
This is from the early Baroda period, and perhaps not revised for publication (it is from a posthumously published volume), but the touch is light, and the sentiment is sugary. Vidula (1907) from the Udyog-Parva of the Mahabharata has a deeper voice as befits the theme, and Songs of the Sea (which belongs to an even later period) are more satisfying still.There are forty pieces in diverse stanza forms and ranging over a whole world of sentiment. "The poet", says Iyengar, "approaches the sea as a friend, as a lover, as a loyal subject, as a devotee, as a shadow that must ever pursue the object, as a waif that would return to the bosom of the mother",102 and always is the articulation apt and adequate, as for example in the last 'song' of all:
This shore and that shore—I am tired, they pall.
Where thou art shoreless, take me from it all.
Pilot eternal, friend unknown embraced,
O, take me to thy shoreless self at last.103
The most ambitious, perhaps, of the verse translations are from Kalidasa. The rendering of Meghadutam in terza rima has so far not been recovered, but one hopes against hope it will be. The Hero and the Nymph, a verse rendering of Kalidasa's Vikramorvasie, was first published in 1911, and there is no better version—or one as good— in English. The prose patches are racy, and the blank verse is supple, full of modulations, and proves equal to the demands made upon it by Kalidasa. The scene in which the hero, Pururavas, moves distraught because of separation from Urvasie, is a prolonged improvisation, and there are echoes of Lear in the storm-scene:
Page 46
No, I must permit
The season unabridged of pomp; the signs
Of storm are now my only majesty;
The sky with lightning gilt and laced becomes
My canopy of splendour, and the trees
Of rain-time waving wide their lavish bloom
Fan me...the mountains are my citizens,
They pour out all their streams to swell my greatness...104
It is natural to pass on from The Hero and the Nymph to Sri Aurobindo's own plays. Of these latter, only one—Perseus the Deliverer—appeared in his own life-time. Four other five act plays— Vasavadutta, Rodogune, The Viziers of Bassora and Eric—and an unfinished play entitled Prince of Edur have been published posthumously. It is not surprising therefore that Perseus is the maturest, but there are fine things in all the plays.
Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster is a classical legend which has inspired poets and dramatists of the ancient as well as modern world. Sri Aurobindo has made the legend, "the nucleus round which there could grow the scenes of a romantic story of human temperament and life-impulses on the Elizabethan model... Time there is more than Einsteinian in its relativity, the creative imagination is its sole disposer and arranger; fantasy reigns sovereign; the names of ancient countries and peoples are brought in only as fringes of a decorative background; anachronisms romp in wherever they can get an easy admittance, ideas and associations from all climes and epochs mingle; myth, romance and realism make up a single whole. For here the stage is the human mind of all times.. ."105 These prefatory remarks of the author apply more or less to all five plays, whether they seem to have an Indian or an alien origin.
In Perseus the Deliverer, Polydaon the priest of Poseidon is the central figure; his very sanctity makes him wrong-headedly to assume (like Raghupati the priest in Tagore's play, Sacrifice) a cruel and vengeful role, demanding Andromeda's innocent blood.
Page 47
The central action of the play is Andromeda's releasing the prisoners in an act of pure compassion. This brings upon her head the wrath of Polydaon and Poseidon. She is chained and exposed to the sea-monster. But at the nick of time Perseus saves her. There are many passages of sustained eloquence, for example Polydaon in his mood of megalomania and Andromeda giving utterance to her despair as she is chained to the rock. Perseus speaks the epitaph over the dead body of Polydaon—an epitaph that would fit other fanatics too, a Hitler for instance! Perseus' also is the closing speech, underlying the evolutionary message of the play:
.. .the ascent is slow and long is Time.
Yet shall Truth grow and harmony increase:
The day shall come when men feel close and one.
Meanwhile one forward step is something gained,
Since little by little earth must open to heaven
Till her dim soul awakes into the Light.106
Less loaded with 'purpose', Vasavadutta is more disarmingly romantic, and harks back to the legend in Somadeva's Katha-sarit-sagara ("The Ocean of Story') and the famous play by Bhasa. King Udayan is held prisoner by his rival, King Mahasegn, and Princess Vasavadutta is the jailor. The inevitable happens, the jailor becomes Udayan's slave fulfilling her mother's warning:
Thou wilt know, my bliss,
The fiercest sweet ordeal can seize
A woman's heart and body O my child,
Thou wilt house fire, thou wilt see living gods;
And all thou hadst thought and known will melt away
Into a flame and be reborn.
Like Vasavadutta, Rodogune too is good romance and go-od drama, but unlike it, a tragedy. Rodogune is the darling of romance, in whom beauty and fatality meet; she can dream of happiness, but not attain it. She is a fragrant ineffectual flower crushed to death by the
Page 48
insane rivalry of the brothers, Antiochus and Timocles. Their mother, Cleopatra, the Chancellor, Phayllus, Cleone his sister, are a trio of evil-doers. The undemanding Eunice and the honest nurse, Mentho, brighten the picture, the one by her unselfish love, the other by her fearlessness. Antiochus the hero fails by his own excesses as much as through the perfidy of others and Rodogune dies because she will not—she cannot—survive him. There are echoes of Anthony and Cleopatra in lines like:
O wasp soft-settling, poignant, sting,
Sting me with bliss until I die of it...107
A god ! Yes, I have godlike stirrings in me...108
Timocles' song too has a faintly Elizabethan ring:
Will you bring cold gems to crown me,
Child of light?
Rather quick from breathing closes
Bring me sunlight, myrtle, roses,
Robe me in delight.
Give me rapture for my dress,
For its girdle happiness.109
Another play to be rescued from oblivion, The Viziers of Bassora (1959) is not the least rewarding of the group of four plays. Less poetic perhaps than Rodogune, less fierily pointed with purpose than Perseus the Deliverer, and less immediately effective than Vasavadutta, the play is nevertheless very readable with its well-constructed plot, its striking characterisation and its significant evocation of atmosphere.
There is a good Vizier and a junior bad Vizier; the former's son, Nureddene, loves the Persian slave-girl Anice-al-jalice, but the bad Vizier creates difficulties. The lovers are obliged to flee to Baghdad, where the great Caliph, Haroun al Rasheed (the Charlemagne of Persian History), conceives an instant liking for them and sets Nureddene on the throne of Bassora. "Romance" the play is called, and romance it is. There is no need to read between the lines for
Page 49
any lurking philosophy. The language has a rich sensuousness that succeeds in vividly evoking the atmosphere of ancient Baghdad and Bassora. Nureddene reminds us of Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV. Almuene the bad Vizier is sinister like Heathcliff, and Fareed is a shadowy Linton. Doonya has maiden-fire, and Anice walks in beauty, literally an "emperor's portion". And Harkoos the Ethiopian eunuch is both long-suffering and witty. As a sample of the quality of the verse, Haroun's speech comes handy:
Meanwhile remember
That life is grave and earnest under its smiles,
And we too with a wary gaiety
Should walk its roads, praying that if we stumble,
The All-Merciful may bear our footing up
In His strong hand, showing the Father's face
And not the stern and dreadful judge.110
The more recently published Eric (1960) projects the struggle for power between Eric the elected King of Norway and Swegn, the Earl of Trondhjem. The latter's sister, Aslaug, and his wife, Hertha, come to Eric's court dressed as dancing girls, seeking an opportunity to kill him. But Eric and Aslaug themselves fall in love, and old hatred and new love fight for mastery in the heart and soul of Aslaug. In the symbolic realms of the gods, there is likewise a struggle between Thor the ruthless and Freya the auspicious. Love triumphs, Thor's reign is ended, and Freya's begins; Swegn is captured and pardoned, Aslaug marries Eric, and the people of Norway are assured of a termless period of peace and prosperity. The kernel of the drama is the transformation of Aslaug. Changed herself, she effects a like revolution in Eric as well, who now realises that wisdom and power are not enough. Love is the ultimate secret, for it transcends both wisdom and power. In the central scene, she debates the issue between hatred and love:
Not hate,
O Eric, but the hard necessity
Page 50
The gods have sent upon our lives, two flames
That meet to quench each other.111
Twice she lifts the dagger to kill sleeping Eric, but she cannot do it; it is the climactic moment in the play. Although the dramatic situation, the vivid characterisation, and the precipitate movement of the action have all an Elizabethan vigour and vivacity, the stress is nevertheless on the poetry, for all—situation, characters, action—are seized poetically, and the "leap of love across the abyss of hate" is presented almost as a lightning flash, a blaze of revelation.112
The incomplete play, Prince of Edur (1961), is dated 1907, and thus belongs to the early months of Sri Aurobindo's editorship of Bande Mataram. It would be reasonable therefore to read in this unfinished play (only three out of the projected five Acts were actually written) some sort of political parable. The story is redolent of the romance and heroism enshrined in the pages of James Tod's Annals of Rajasthan.
Bappa among the Bheels is really the Gehelote Prince of Edur, and it is his destiny to get the better of all his rivals and enemies —Toraman the Cashmerean, Pratap of Ichalgurh, and Rana Curran the usurper of Edur—and also to marry Comol Cumary, the Rana's daughter. Is Toraman the puffed-up foreigner with a stranglehold on India? Is Rana Curran the local collaborator, ready to compromise with the enemy on terms however ignoble? Is Pratap the symbol of national self-respect and ineffectual courage? And, is Bappa really the preordained redeemer and 'Man of Destiny'? In Act III, Coomood says: "Tomorrow is the May-feast's crowning day"; and Acts IV and V should unfold tomorrow's crowning purpose, but the play breaks oft when Nirmol Cumary makes her affirmation of faith:
Coomood, our fragile flowers will weave
A bond that steel cannot divide, nor death dissever.113
It is clear the play was intended to have a happy ending—a purposeful Hamlet achieving his father's crown and marrying a determined Ophelia! The blank verse is colourful and the imagery is rich, and
Page 51
although we are reading verse that wasn't finally revised, the Aurobindonian touch is unmistakable:
Dare greatly and thou shalt be great; despise
Apparent death and from his lifted hand
Of menace pluck thy royal destinies
By warlike violence.114
A casual by-product of the political period, Prince of Edur has undertones that strike responsive chords within, and albeit the play is unfinished, one can infer the conclusion in terms of poetic causality. Love is the supreme reality—although it may assume different forms like compassion, adoration, love of the woman, love of the mother. Be it Andromeda, Vasavadutta, Rodogune, Anice-al-jalice, Aslaug, Comol Cumary, woman is love, and love has its varied forms and potencies. It is always love that sets the pace of the action; and love is a redeeming power, and poetry is the native language of love.
As for the narrative poems, Urvasie, Love and Death and Baji Prabhou, all belong to the pre-Pondicherry period, at least the first two to the Baroda period. Urvasie is an Aurobindonian narrative version of Kalidasa's play, Vikramorvasie. The Urvasie myth goes back to the Veda, and it has been treated variously by poets and dramatists. Tagore's lyric, Urvashi,115 has been described as "a sheer melodious and poetic cry", a hymn celebrating the Woman Beautiful, the archetypal Helen, glorious Aphrodite whose virtue, whose swabhāva, is "to ravish the soul of Paradise". But Sri Aurobindo's poem is epical in cast, and romantic in its impulsion. Love and Death is more compact but no less charged with romantic fervour. Love is the theme of both poems, love that dares everything, and sacrifices everything (except itself). Kshatriya or Brahmin, love is the great leveller. It is the sweet uncalculating madness, but of incalculable value Pururavas and Urvasie, Ruru and Priyumvada, come together, and they perceive that their union is,
...magically
Inevitable as a perfect verse of Veda.116
Page 52
Baji Prabhou, on the other hand, is about war and heroism and sterling patriotism; making their stand in "a tiger-throated gorge", Baji and his band of stalwart warriors resist the invaders and make a Thermopylae of Raigarh. It is Baji's "finest hour"; he has upheld Shivaji's trust, and he has changed a possible Mogul victory to a complete rout.
Love and war: the tried old themes of epic and romance; and in Ilion Sri Aurobindo attempted an epic on a much more ambitious scale. Lotika Ghose has recorded that to a query about Sri Aurobindo's poetry Frederic Spiegelberg of the Stanford University answered with the counter-question: "Isn't it entirely Greek?"117 I/ion at least is certainly Greek—though not entirely! While experimenting on classical metres, it was but natural that Sri Aurobindo should feel particularly attracted to the hexameter.
It appears that one of his classmates at Cambridge, Hugh Norman Ferrar, once read out a line from Homer or a line from Arthur Hugh Clough that was typically Homeric which he thought was the most characteristic line, and that gave Sri Aurobindo the swing of the metre.118
Beside developing his own theory of true quantity in English, Sri Aurobindo wrote Ahana in rhymed hexameters and the epic Ilion in unrhymed hexameters. Ahana is a sustained and nobly articulate philosophic poem of over 500 lines but cast in the form of a long supplication by humanity followed by Ahana, the Goddess of Dawn, responding, giving the categorical promise: "Lo, I come, and behind me Knowledge descends..."119
But Ilion, although left incomplete, is superb in its own way. Homer's Iliad begins with the tenth year of the siege of Troy and concludes with the death and funeral rites of Hector. The subsequent history of the Trojan War may be pieced together from references in other poems of olden times. The Wooden Horse episode is narrated by Aeneas to Dido in the Aeneid. The interval between Hector's death and the burning of Troy was filled with the achievements
Page 53
of Memnon and Penthesilea, the treacherous killing of Achilles by Paris, the quarrel between Odysseus and Ajax, the killing of Paris with the bow of Philoctetes, and other episodes since commemorated in tragedy and heroic poetry.
From the nine Books of Ilion now available it is difficult to say how Sri Aurobindo had planned to plot his epic. The editor's prefatory note says that the poem "deals with events on the last day of the siege of Troy". In these nine Books the centre of the action is the issue between Penthesilea and Achilles and the issue is not concluded in Book FX, which is itself extant only as a fragment. In the first Book of the Aeneid, Virgil makes Aeneas recall, among other episodes of the Trojan War:
...Penthesilea leading the crescent shields of
The Amazons and storming through the melee like a fire,
Her bare breast thrusting out over the golden girdle,
A warrior queen, a girl who braved heroes in combat.120
It was thus with a sure sense of epic appropriateness that Sri Aurobindo cast his epic as the clash between Penthesilea and Achilles, even as Homer had concentrated on Hector and Achilles. Probably, Ilion, had it been completed, would have ended with the death of Penthesilea at the hands of Achilles and of Achilles at the hands of Paris.
Ilion begins with Achilles sending word to the Trojans that they might still purchase peace with honour if they surrendered Helen and agreed to his own marriage with Polyxena, Priam's daughter. An assembly of the Trojan senators is called—"this last of Ilion's sessions"—and Antenor the aged statesman counsels a policy of lying low and secret preparation. Laocon and Paris, however, counsel defiance as Moloch does in Paradise Lost, and so the die is cast. There are partings on the eve of the battle—Anchises and Aeneas, Antenor and Halamus, Paris and Helen, Paris and Cassandra. Meanwhile Achilles has learned of the rejection of his offer and decides upon instant battle. There is a parallel assembly of the Greek chieftains, and
Page 54
after hearing Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus, they too decide to join the fray at Achilles' side. In a short Book Achilles takes leave of his mistress, Briseis. There is also a synod of the gods on Olympus, and the future is dimly determined after a long debate: "And in the noon there was night. And Apollo passed out of Troya."121 The battle at last begins, and now one side, now another seems to get the upper hand; when the poem abruptly ends, Penthesilea is not dead yet, and Achilles is still alive.
But although incomplete, Ilion is an astonishing work. It has a true epic surge, massiveness of conception and splendour of detail in execution. Homer's heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses, reappear somewhat altered in mien and raiment, yet clearly recognisble. And Penthesilea–who is portrayed as an Eastern, even an Indian, warrior queen– is superb. The debate s are elaborated with extravagance in true epic style, and the similes too are characteristically Homeric, at times indeed out Homering Homer without quite ceasing to be Aurobindonian. Even metrically the poem , especially the earlier portion which had received careful revision at Sri Aurobindo's hands , is strikingly articulate , the steady dactylic flow giving it a volume and power of movement not often found in English poetry. 122
Page 55
Home
Disciples
Dr Prema Nandakumar
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.