The first edition of this biography in 1945 contained corrections by Sri Aurobindo himself. The third edition in 1972 was rewritten in the light of new material
Sri Aurobindo : Biography
THEME/S
CHAPTER 7
I
During his stay in Baroda, Sri Aurobindo wrote a number of shorter poems, most of which owed their primary inspiration to his growing familiarity with India's philosophical and spiritual heritage, especially the Vedanta. The Upanishads and the Gita had swum into his ken and stimulated in him a spirit of restless philosophical inquiry into the "first and last things" and the realm of "ends and means". Religion, humanism, science: God, man, Nature: Providence, foreknowledge and fate: rebirth, evolution and progress - what did they mean? He would not take things simply on trust. He must think things out for himself, he must come to grips with them, feel them, become one with them - if possible! As he pondered thus, as he perceived or experienced a particular movement of thought, as he glimpsed in the prevalent obscurity and confusion some star-image, some inspiring vision, he endeavoured to express his reactions in rhythmic or poetic language. Mere wonder, puzzlement or exasperation gave place to a mood of inquiry, and inquiry to speculation or a dialectic of doubt, and these again to something like Faith. At the least, on the merely intellectual plane, the doubts are stilled, the crust of agnosticism and the coating of an imposed culture are cast aside, and the true self has now safely come through.
But as yet Sri Aurobindo was grappling with ultimate Reality mainly - if not solely - with the aid of the intellect and the imagination. He was, no doubt, groping towards spirituality - he had had two or three momentary "hot links" with Reality - he had had nameless stirrings within and ineffable, if transient, realisations - but he had not made (or even tried to make) spirituality the ruling principle of his life. Thus these early poems, even those with a pronounced philosophical slant, are not - strictly speaking - mystical outpourings. The poems have come - to use the phraseology of his later writings - from the levels of the Higher Mind or the Illumined Mind, perhaps even of the Intuitive Mind, and give us only philosophical generalisations or images of vividly perceived facets of the truth. Sri Aurobindo himself has remarked that "the mental intuitions of the metaphysician or the poet for the most part fall far short of a concrete spiritual experience; they are distant flashes, shadowy reflections, not rays from the centre of Light".1 But even these - the flashes and the reflections - the formulations and the recollections - are of considerable value to the spiritual aspirant, and for ever valuable as poetry. To quote from Sri Aurobindo again, although a mere philosophical statement about the Atman may be no more than a mental formula,
yet sometimes the Divine takes it as a channel of touch; strangely, a barrier in the mind breaks down, something is seen, a profound change operated in some inner part, there enters into the ground of the nature something calm,
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equal, ineffable.... Similar touches can come through art, music, poetry to their creator or to one who feels the shock of the world, the hidden significance of a form, a message in the sound that carries more perhaps than was consciously meant by the composer. All things in the Lila can turn into windows that open on the hidden Reality.2
II
Some of these early philosophical poems - the long In the Moonlight, for example - are more intellectually than imaginatively sustained, and hence the articulation is not uniformly on a high poetic level. Others like To the Sea and The Vedantin's Prayer, for all their packed thought and mastery of phrase, do not seem to employ the absolutely appropriate rhythm, divinely appointed as it were for the communication of mystic truths. But even these pieces display an admirable metrical craftsmanship and a tightness and precision in language that compel attention. On the other hand, there are poems like A Child's Imagination, Revelation, The Sea at Night and the sonnets on Death that are poetry first, and philosophy only afterwards. Finally, a dialogue like The Rishi and poems like Who and A Vision of Science have an Upanishadic ring, and come to us like whispers and communications from another world, the world of the archetypes and the superconscient self-luminous Truth.
Here is a simple poem entitled. God:
Thou who pervadest all the worlds below,
Yet sitst above,
Master of all who work and rule and know,
Servant of Love!
Thou who disdainest not the worm to be
Nor even the clod,
Therefore we know by that humility
That thou art God.3
The inversion "the worm to be" instead of "to be the worm" was perhaps necessary in the interests of rhyme; otherwise there is no ambiguity about the meaning. The sense is that God, while he is the ruler of men of action, power and knowledge, is really the servant of Love; it is Love that compels Him to give himself to everyone everything. He may be the greatest of the great, yet He is one with all the worlds below, he does not disdain to dwell in the clod and the worm; and, as Sri Aurobindo himself has explained it, "the vast impartiality shown in this humility is itself the very sign of the greatness of the Divine".4 Not only does He descend into and fill the obscurest figures of Nature, but He also animates them
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with the Divine Presence. God is certainly power, knowledge, infinity and omnipresence, but He is even more essentially Love.
In the longer poem, Parabrahman, the Ultimate is unravelled as the triune splendour, sat-chit-ananda:
Within Himself He shadowed Being forth,
Which is a younger birth, a veil He chose
To half-conceal Him, Knowledge, nothing worth
Save to have glimpses of its mighty cause,
And high Delight, a spirit infinite,
That is the fountain of this glorious world,
Delight that labours in its opposite,
Faints in the rose and on the rack is curled.
This was the triune playground that He made.. .5
The drama of Becoming is His lila and comprises labour, failure, strife, forgetful knowledge divining itself, surfeit of bliss curdling into pain, unity of existence dividing into life and death. To get back to the unity, the knowledge, the pure delight is the Vedantin's aspiration, but while the spirit is willing the flesh is weak; the Vedantin can but send this prayer forth to the Supreme:
Let not my grey
Blood-clotted past repel thy sovereign ruth,
Nor even delay,
O lonely Truth!
Nor let the specious gods who ape Thee still
Deceive my youth....
O hidden door
Of Knowledge, open! Strength, fulfill thyself!
Love, outpour!6
If the Vedantin's eyes are really awakened, distant flashes can reach him testifying to the one Omnipresent Reality. The sight of a tree makes him view the "soul of man" as being "earth-bound, heaven-amorous".7 Human love breaks its bonds and grows immortal dimensions:
Immortal to immortal I made speed.
Change I exceed
And am for Time prepared.8
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marvels of sound and sight - a bird's song at dawn, lustre in midnight - e a reminiscence of the drama of creation.9 The celebration of the child Basanti's birthday becomes an occasion for the inference of immortality in mortal things:
O dear child soul, our loved and cherished,
For this thy days had birth,
Like some tender flower on some grey stone portal
To sweeten and flush with childhood immortal
The ageing earth.10
It is a new kind of seeing, a new gift of vision, and anything seen - a woman sleeping in her garden, someone leaping from the rocks and running away, the hushed hour of evening - becomes the take-off point to lose oneself in Eternity:
The wind walked softly; silent moved a cloud
Listening; of all the tree no leaf was loud,
But guarded a divine expectant hush
Thrilled by the silence of a hidden thrush.11
Like a startled bright surmise
Visible to mortal eyes...
Someone of the heavenly rout
From behind the veil ran out.12
A golden evening...
Such hour is nearest God, -
Like rich old age when the long ways have all been trod.13
First impressions and the last wisdom merge into one another, and poetry comes to be charged with something akin to apocalyptic power.
Man no doubt looks out of the windows of the senses, and he needs must receive impressions of the phenomenal world through the same doors of communication; but presently the mind intervenes, it processes the impressions, organises them, deduces conclusions from them, and builds 'systems' out of them. Yet the intellect, and science that is the handiwork of the operations of the intellect, do not - alas, they cannot - by themselves pluck the heart of the mystery of existence. In A Vision of Science, as also In the Moonlight, Sri Aurobindo shows how science itself is now being, driven to recognise its limitations, thus transcending the materialistic dogmatisms of the nineteenth century. Three Angels seem to strive for mastery in the world, and this strife is seen reflected in man's consciousness. Religion held sway first, then Science slowly pushed it to a corner. The secrets of Nature were wrested one by one, and they were sorted out,
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categorised, and all but taken for granted:
Man's spirit measuring his worlds around
The laws of sight divined and laws of sound,
Light was not hidden from its searching gaze,
Nor matter could deny her myriad maze
To the cold enquiry; for the far came near,
The small loomed large, the intricate grew clear.14
There was no end to the ingenuity and pertinacity of Science: earthquakes were foretold, storms analysed, earth's history was traced, great distances were bridged, and even the mind's movements were charted. But the other Angel ventured to suggest: "...if thou wouldst live, know first this thing./Who thou art in this dungeon labouring." And Science confidently answered:
"Nothing am I but earth,
Tissue and nerve and from the seed a birth,
A mould, a plasm, a gas, a little that is much.
In these grey cells that quiver to each touch
The secret lies of man...
Shakespeare was this; this force in Jesus yearned
And conquered by the cross; this only learned
The secret of the suns that blaze afar;
This was Napoleon's giant mind of war"15
This may be compared with a later sonnet, A Dream of Surreal Science, in which the same idea is expressed in even more pointedly satirical terms:
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....16
On the eve of the atomic blast, Sri Aurobindo could be downright devastating as
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the sonnet, but thirty or forty years earlier he preferred to be more insinuating, ' re persuasively positive in his affirmation. That man's mind should reduce humanity to cells, glands and plasms was like the infinite denying infinity! While (in Vision of Science) the two Angels were caught in their dialectic, there came the third Angel and tore away the film of ignorance that had clouded the vision till then The march of science, the march of science! - but who is to get beyond science's bafflement, who is to out-miracle the miracles of science? Slow and sure the assurance comes: man is not gene or germ or gland or plasm; he is "infinite moving mid infinities"; he is verily the Eternal concealed in the finite and the temporal. It is also this third Angel of Intuitive Vision that infers and affirms the Divine Presence and the Divine Play in the variegated multiplicity of phenomenal life.
An experiment in the galloping anapaestic measure, another poem, Who, is one of the splendidly effective among Sri Aurobindo's earlier pieces, and is cast in the form of question and answer. The master-painter, the wonder-worker, the mystical mathematician, the marvellous machinist - who is he, where is he, what is he? And the answer peals resoundingly:
He is lost in the heart, in the cavern of Nature,
He is found in the brain where He builds up the thought:
In the pattern and bloom of the flowers He is woven,
In the luminous net of the stars He is caught....
Alt music is only the sound of His laughter,
All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss;
Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal
Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss....
In the sweep of the worlds, in the surge of the ages,
Ineffable, mighty, majestic and pure,
Beyond the last pinnacle seized by the thinker
He is throned in His seats that forever endure....
It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is throws;
When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone.17
Elsewhere it is the Divine Actor - who is the Lord-Dancer on the stage of the universe - that invites man too to participate in the ecstatic play (from Invitation, composed in the Alipur Jail):
I sport with solitude here in my regions,
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Of misadventure have made me a friend.
Who would live largely? Who would live freely?
Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.
I am the lord of tempest and mountain,
I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side.18
In the Triumph-Song of Trishuncou, the king is not daunted by the fear of death, he is not appalled by the thought of the tomb, for he knows that he had no beginning and could have no end. What wastes and may have to be cast away is the covering or the case, not the undying self:
Ere the first seeds
Were sown on earth, I was already old,
And when now unborn planets shall grow cold
My history proceeds.
I am the light
In stars, the strength of lions and the joy
Of mornings; I am man and maid and boy,
Protein, infinite.19
In The Fear of Death, again, there is the firm declaration:
Death is but changing of our robes to wait
In wedding garments at the Eternal's gate.20
In one of the sonnets also, Sri Aurobindo dismisses the finality of death by calling mortality and pain "mere conventions" of a "mightier stage":
As when a hero by his doom pursued
Falls like a pillar of the world uptorn,
Shaking the hearts of men, and awe-imbued
Silent the audience sits of joy forlorn,
Meanwhile behind the stage the actor sighs
Deep-lunged relief, puts by what he has been
And talks with friends that waited...
Even so the unwounded spirits of slayer and slain
Beyond our vision passing live again.21
This is a simile apt enough, but not the same thing as the recordation of a mystical
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experience of the transcendence of death; and this applies also to the two companion sonnets "To weep because a glorious sun has set" and "I have a hundred lives before me yet"22 - sonnets that otherwise have almost- a Shakespearian ring. The shorter Life and Death is likewise hardly anything more than a brilliantly succinct intellectual statement:
Life, death, - death, life; the words have led for ages
Our thought and consciousness and firmly seemed
Two opposites; but now long-hidden pages
Are opened, liberating truths undreamed.
Life only is, or death is life disguised, -
Life a short death until by life we are surprised.23
This of course is rather more than a metaphor ("long hidden pages are opened"), and there is the intimation of the surpassing of the seeming opposites and dualities, but the poem itself has a severely intellectual cast; it doesn't bite or bum into the consciousness. In Rebirth, on the other hand, the idea of "I have a hundred lives before me yet" is elaborated with some wealth of detail - as if surmise and memory have fused in the crucible of the imagination - and the result is satisfying poetry:
Not soon is God's delight in us completed,
Nor with one life we end;
Termlessly in us are our spirits seated
And termless joy intend....
Old memories come to us, old dreams invade us,
Lost people we have known,
Fictions and pictures; but their frames evade us, —
They stand out bare, alone....
Our past that we forget, is with us deathless,
Our births and later end
Already accomplished. To a summit breathless
Sometimes our souls ascend,
Whence the mind comes back helped; for there emerges
The ocean vast of Time S
pread out before us with its infinite surges,
Its symphonies sublime;...24
There is no question here about the genuineness of the inspiration; what is lacking is the incandescent finality of poetic utterance.
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III
Two of the longest of the earlier poems. In the Moonlight and The Rishi, return to a serious consideration of the "first and last" questions, and cover the entire philosophical ground; but they follow different paths, for The Rishi is Upanishadic in cast while In the Moonlight is more of a meditative reverie. Although distantly reminiscent of Tennyson in his speculative vein and even of Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam in some places. In the Moonlight is rather more typically of Amoldian vintage - the Arnold of "high seriousness". The poem opens with an evocation of a moonlit scene: "How living a stillness reigns!" Only three things disturb the silence - the slow wind, the cricket's cry and the frog's discord:
Yet they but seem the silence to increase
And dreadful wideness of the inhuman night.
The whole hushed world immeasurable might
Be watching round this single spot of peace.25
It is an ideal moment for purposive introspection. To what end is human life? Where have we come from? Whither are we bound? Man is a veritable siege of contradictory pulls, for two genii "wrestle and strive" in his "dubious heart", and this has been going on "since the race began":
One from his body like a bridge of fire
Mounds upward azure-winged with eager eyes;
One in his brain deep-mansioned labouring lies
And clamps to earth the spirit's high desire.26
The brain has been on the ascendant of late, and has been deflating the heart's rosy fancies and soaring hopes. Death is affirmed as the inevitable end, and things grow only to decay and disappear at last:
Stars run their cycle and are quenched; the suns
Born from the night are to the night returned.
When the cold tenebrous spaces have inurned
The listless phantoms of the Shining Ones.27
The origins of human life can only point to an icy conclusion, and yet - how frantic our efforts, how futile the results!
Watering the ages with our sweat and blood
We pant towards some vague ideal state
And by the effort fiercer ills create,
Working by lasting evil transient good.28
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Were it not better done, as the Hedonists and Epicureans advise, to seize the moment - live in it, dive in it - eat, drink and be merry - for tomorrow may be our turn to die!-
The wine of life is sweet; let no man stint
His longing or refuse one passionate hope.
Why should we cabin in such infinite scope,
Restrict the issue of such golden mint?29
Can Science at least point to a worthier goal? But Science first denies man's immortality - then assumes what she rejects - and is at last baffled by her own sophistries. That is not the way at all! Truth cannot be contained by Science's "material finds" alone, for Truth is larger than formulas, and subtler than the sophist's pleas:
The intellect is not all; a guide within
Awaits our question. He it was informed
The reason He surpasses; and unformed
Presages of His mightiness begin.30
Science has helped us, - science mustn't consign us to the clouds of unknowing. Beyond the near horizon of mere intellectual inquiry and scientific hypotheses, there loom other horizons, "the orange skies of the mystic mind" - soul-immensities, ineffable realities:
Freedom, God, Immortality, the three
Are one and shall be realised at length;
Love, Wisdom, Justice, Joy and utter Strength
Gather into a pure felicity.
It comes at last, the day foreseen of old,
What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed,...
The Iron Age is ended, the Age of Gold must begin -
Only now
The last fierce spasm of the dying past
Shall shake the nations....31
When the strife and pain are over, man shall rise to greater heights, and he shall "build immortally with mortal things".
In this poem of about 200 lines, there is a structure of argument that impresses, there are flashes of poetry that impinge on the receptive consciousness,
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and the whole dialectic steams forward towards the flagstaff apocalyptic vision of the Golden Age ahead. It is a notable intellectual statement in poetic terms, but the philosophy cannot be said to have been wholly consumed in the poetry.
The Rishi is an even longer poem, and perhaps a more ambitious one as well. The situation is significant: King Manu of old seeks knowledge from the Rishi of the North Pole, and what follows is the Upanishadic conversation between Manu and the Rishi. It is with Manu's magnificent invocation that the dialogue begins:
Rishi who trance-held on the mountains old
Art slumbering, void
Of sense or motion, for in the spirit's hold
Of unalloyed
Immortal bliss thou dreamst protected! Deep
Let my voice glide
into thy dumb retreat and break that sleep
Abysmal. Hear!32
The King, whose gait is an empire and whose eye is Dominion, has come to learn from the Rishi the ultimate truths - to acquire the power of penetrating vision - that mankind had possessed in the morning of its racial history, but has since lost, as if irretrievably! The Rishi at first recapitulates his own early life:
I too, O King,
In winds and tides
Have sought Him, and in armies thundering,
And where Death strides
Over whole nations. Action, thought and peace
Were questioned, sleep,
And waking, but I had no joy of these,.. .33
He had had fleeting glimpses, but the miraculous moments had passed, and were not to be recalled. He couldn't retain the force, the light; and so he had retired to the arctic heights where "pride could not follow, nor the restless will come and go". Manu now asks whether the Light isn't more likely to show itself in the haunts of human life, in the midst of Nature's seething life, than in the "great dumb night" on the "cold unchanging hill" of the arctic regions. The Rishi simply says that for the loss of human company and Nature's loveliness, the gain is Silence, for The One is silence; on the snows we hear/Silence tread."34 But what exactly has the Rishi learned? What are the pointer readings and the definitive findings of his tapasya?
An exciting colloquy follows, and the King is thereby enabled to zigzag his way to the shining tablelands of the ultimate Truth. When the Rishi had won mastery over the fear of the body's death, a hidden Power within had found release,
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and his winged soul had soared to the stars. But neither the sun nor the planets nor the other heavenly bodies could tell the Rishi the way to the abode of God; they no doubt knew how to go their respective ways careering through the vasts of space, they knew not their origin. Then the Rishi had sought the clue from the Devas, the bright denizens of Heaven. But they were ignorant too: "How shall they tell of Him who marvel at sin/And smile at grief?" The angels themselves knew Him tot they only feared His frown, and they had static constricted minds. At least, at least the Trinity - Vishnu-Brahma-Shiva - could enlighten the Rishi? But no! they too were content to rest on their respective lonely eminences. What then? Had the Rishi but travelled in vain among the "unwonted stars" and covered the infinite spaces? The Rishi answers:
King, not in vain....
... I saw
How earth was made
Out of His being; I perceived the Law,
The Truth, the Vast,
From which we came and which we are; I heard
The ages past
Whisper their history, and I knew the Word
That forth was cast
Into the unformed potency of things...35
Perhaps, after all, poor insignificant earth is alone His auspicious abode? Not the material earth; nor the vital force called life; not yet the mind of man - none of these entirely holds Him. Winging beyond all these, and beyond all the ranges of human thought, the Power within - the Rishi's inner light - had made him soar and roam and seek, and find Him too at last:
Higher, O King, the still voice bade me rise
Than thought's clear dream.
Deep in the luminous secrecy, the mute
Profound of things,
Where murmurs never sound of harp or lute
And no voice sings;
Light is not, nor our darkness, nor these bright
Thunderings,
In the deep steady voiceless core of white
And burning bliss,
The sweet vast centre and the cave divine
Called Paradise,
He dwells within us all who dwells not in
Aught that is.36
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He is everything essentially because He is nothing in particular. The One remains, the many change and pass; the true Light forever shines, the transient shadows chase one another and scatter away. The King cannot help wondering at this stage of the argument whether - if this were all - life isn't mere illusion, a teasing phantasmagoria? The Rishi assures Manu that such is not the case. There are degrees of reality, although the one Truth sustains them all:
Yet, King, deem nothing vain: through many veils
This Spirit gleams,
The dreams of God are truths and He prevails....
Even as a ship upon the stormy flood
With fluttering sails
Labours towards the shore; the angry mood
Of Ocean swells,
Calms come and favouring winds, but yet afar
The harbour pales
In evening mists and Ocean threatens war:
Such is our life....
Grieve not for wounds, nor fear the violent storms,
For grief and pain
Are errors of the clouded soul; behind
They do not stain
The living spirit....
To bring those heavens down upon the earth
We all descend,...
Shrink not from life, O Aryan, but with mirth
And joy receive
His good and evil, sin and virtue....37
Manu asks again where - whether in heaven or on the earth - he should seek God, and firm comes the Rishi's answer:
Seek Him upon the earth....
Perfect thy human might.
Perfect the race.
For thou art He, O King. Only the night
Is on thy soul
By thy own will. Remove it and recover
The serene whole
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Thou art indeed, then raise up man the lover
To God the goal.38
If is a memorable finale which underlies one of the' cardinal elements in later Aurobindonian thought, namely that it is not by escaping into Heaven but by bringing it down, it is not retreating from life but by confronting, mastering and transforming it, that the Life Divine or the Earthly Paradise is to be established here. The Rishi is full of echoes from the Upanishads (for example, "thou art He, O King" after "thou art That, O Svetaketu!"; and the fourfold scheme of experience in the poem after that in the Mandukya), and the very cast of the dialogue is Upanishadic; but the main conclusion at least is distinctly Aurobindonian. Further, the Rishi's travels in the worlds might be a first foreshadowing of Aswapathy's more extensive travels in Savitri. On a total view, then, it may not be wide of the mark to describe The Rishi as the comprehensive poetic testament of the first phase of Sri Aurobindo's career as a laureate of the Spirit.
IV
Some of the pieces included in Sri Aurobindo's Collected Poems — the dialogue, The Birth of Sin, and the three speculative poetic exercises. The Rakshasas, Kama and The Mahatmas: Kuthumi - probably belong to the political period, though it is possible that they were conceived during the last years at Baroda. In any case, the poems go naturally with The Rishi, A Vision of Science and In the. Moonlight. Ahana received considerable revision before it was reprinted in 1942 in the collected edition; a long poem in rhymed hexameters, it may be more appropriately discussed in a later chapter, along with Ilion, the unfinished Homeric epic in unrhymed hexameters.
Of the projected earlier drama, The Birth of Sin, only a scene (Prologue) from Act I has survived and is now included in Volume 7 of the Centenary Library Edition. In the Dramatis Personae figure Lucifer, Sirioth, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Belial, Baal, Moloch, Ashtorath, Meroth, Sun and the Elohim, but the dramatic fragment itself opens with a dialogue between Lucifer and Sun - Lucifer compelling obedience on the part of Sun - followed by a conversation between Lucifer and Belial, the Angels of Power and Reason respectively. Lucifer puts forward his theory of Divine Growth: the old God must give place to the new, and Lucifer albeit the younger is greater than the "Power from which I sprang; the new excels e old.... For God shall cease and Lucifer be God". It is of course difficult to inter from the fragment how Sri Aurobindo intended to complete the play. Armed with his new insights, Sri Aurobindo seems to have abandoned the drama and reduced it to the Sirioth-Lucifer dialogue - or the confrontation of Power and e - and authorised its publication as The Birth of Sin in the Collected Poems and Plays (Volume II) of 1942. [Now included in Volume 5 of the Centenary Library Edition.]
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In The Birth of Sin, Sirioth and Lucifer discuss the obscure causes of their undivine discontent (or is that also divine?). Lucifer is tired of service, and he desires Power: He asks whether there are any comers of existence God has forgotten to rule
that I may seize
And make myself an empire as august,
Enjoy a like eternity of rule?39
Sirioth advises against rebellion; instead of "eternity of rule" which Lucifer desires, "eternity of dreadful poignant pain" may become his fate! Lucifer would prefer even that to a dull eternity of service driven by pitiless iron necessity. As yet, however, these thoughts of rebellion hover in the region of feeling and have not settled to determined action. On the contrary, Sirioth has other indistinct but irresistible cravings:
But I have felt a touch as sweet as spring,
And I have heard a music of delight
Maddening the heart with the sweet honied stabs
Of delicate intolerable joy.40
Lucifer's motive-force for action had in the first instance been the desire to help, to serve, though later the unending monotony of compulsion and subordination had soured him. With Sirioth it had been otherwise:
To embrace, to melt and mix
Two beings into one, to roll the spirit
Tumbling into a surge of common joy, -
'Tis this I seek.
But this - would not this lead to what somebody had called "sin"? When Lucifer and Sirioth - the hunger for Power and the thirst for Love - when the morning and the evening star meet, when revolt meets change in close embrace, "sin" must needs be born into the world. And Sirioth describes the beautiful and terrible vision:
And I beheld as in a dream
Leaping from out thy brain and into mine
A woman beautiful, of grandiose mien,
Yet terrible, alarming and instinct
With nameless menace. And the world was full
With clashing and with cries. It seemed to me
Angels and Gods and men strove violently
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To touch her robe, to occupy the place
Her beautiful and ominous feet had trod,
crying, "Daughter of Lucifer, be ours,
O sweet, adorable and mighty Sin!"41
The dialogue ends vaguely with Lucifer's "We will consult once more what we shall do". This fascinating speculation on the origin of "sin" - Sin the charmer who delights all the hosts of heaven and earth - is a far more attractive version than Milton's in the Second Book of Paradise Lost where, when Satan confronts his daughter Sin and their son Death and feels repelled, she reminds him of her origin:
Hast thou forgotten me then, and do I seem
Now in thine eye so foul, once deemed so fair
In Heaven, when at the assembly, and in sight
Of all the Seraphim with thee combined
In bold conspiracy against Heaven's King,
All on a sudden miserable pain
Surprised thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzy,...
Likest to thee in shape and countenance bright,
Then shining heavenly fair, a goddess armed,
Out of thy head I sprung?
In Sri Aurobindo's view, of course, every "fall" is a means to a greater rise. In the spiral of involution-evolution, we fall only to rise - are baffled only to fight better - and sleep but to be up and doing again. The union of Power and Love, instead of ending in "sin" and everlasting punishment in one of the circles of Hell, could really be the means of change and growth and transformation, a bringing together and fusion of heaven and earth. But this idea is only suggested in The Birth of Sin, not fully set forth.
The Rakshasas is another daring exercise in poetic speculation. The prefatory note explains that the Rakshasa is the "violent kinetic ego" that displaces the animal soul, and antecedent to the Asura who is the "controlled and intellectualised but unregenerated Ego". But every type and level of consciousness, however crude or imperfect it may be, nevertheless "sees the Divine in its own image". Like Browning's Caliban upon Setebos, Sri Aurobindo's The Rakshasas too is a poetic rendering of a similar partial or imperfect theology. Caliban imaginatively builds Setebos in his own image -
Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
'Thinketh, He dwelleth'i the cold'o the moon.
"Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise.
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Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives, and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same. ;
'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache...
He made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
Grovelling in filthy discomfort, Caliban equates his Setebos with monumental discomfort and views the world as the projection of his sneezing! Ravana, Lord of Lanka, is less crude but not less self-centred and his conception of God is that of a mighty Rakshasa:
O Rakshasa Almighty, look on me,
Ravan, the lord of all Thy Rakshasas,
Give me Thy high command to smite Thy foes;
But most I would afflict, chase and destroy
Thy devotees who traduce Thee, making Thee
A God of Love, a God too sweet to rule.42
He has won his right to rule the earth for a term, but only for a term; he has taken an aeon to evolve, and an aeon he may rule; but at last he will be superceded by the Asura, and he too will one day be surpassed by another, by greater Man who will see God in himself and not himself in God, and who will see in existence more than life and body - who will see in it the dimensions of mind and Spirit as well. The Rakshasa, the Asura, and the mental man - these would be the necessary steps on the steep ascent to the summit of the future Man Divine.
Kama is an interesting variation of The Birth of Sin. Not Power and Love, but Ignorance and Desire start the grand experiment of Creation. If one passes beyond Ignorance, one beyonds Desire as well: and one beyonds the phenomenal world itself, and returns to the undifferentiated Divine Reality. Kama too is a force derived from the Bliss of Brahman, and to be able to master and surpass it is verily to return to the pure ineffable of Brahmananda. Kama's blessings are exciting and sweet enough, and deserve to be enjoyed - enjoyed, but also, ultimately, to be consumed and transcended; and this may be inferred from Kama's own exhortation:
Thou, O solid earth,
Enter into all life, support the worlds.
I send forth joy to cheer the hearts of men,
I send forth law to harmonise and rule.
And when these things are done, when men have learned
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My beauty. My desirability, My bliss,
I will conceal myself from their desire
And make this rule of the eternal chase,
"They who abandon Me, shall to all time
Clasp and possess; they who pursue, shall lose."43
The Mahatmas: Kuthumi is described by Sri Aurobindo as "a play of the imaginative, a poetic reconstruction of the central idea only of Mahatmahood". Kuthumi, the Kshatriya Yogin, having steadily risen in consciousness from birth to birth and gathered the folds of knowledge incommensurable, comes to Vyasa "our great original sage". As directed by the sage, Kuthumi does Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga, each for three days: not the Yogas of our degenerate Kali Age, but the Hatha Yoga of Ravana, Dhruva and of the old Lemurian Kings, and the Raja Yoga of Chakravarti Bali and of the old Atlantic Kings. Directed now by Vyasa to seek out Krishna, make total surrender to Him and then manifest the Divine Truth on earth - an easy task enough till the Iron Age of Kali when the fight against Darkness must prove more and more difficult - Kuthumi finds the Lord concealed in a "hermit mad" and loses himself in Him:
I fell before him...
...and out of me
All knowledge, all desire, all strength was gone
Into its source. I sat an infant child....
Then full of light and strength and bliss I soared
Beyond the spheres, above the mighty Gods
And left my human body on the snows....
Then to my human frame awhile descend
And walk mid men, choosing my instruments,
Testing, rejecting and confirming souls -
Vessels of the Spirit; for the golden age
In Kali comes, the iron lined with gold,
The Yoga shall be given back to men,
The sects shall cease, the grim debates die out
And atheism perish from the Earth,
Blasted with knowledge; love and brotherhood
And wisdom repossess Sri Krishna's world.44
It is clearly the Mahatmas' destiny - as seen by Kuthumi, one of them - to preserve and activise the Truth age after age till the Truth can possess and transform humanity altogether and make earth an extension of Heaven.
The quartet of poems discussed in this Section, although they were perhaps Imposed a little later, are really of a piece in spirit with The Rishi. They are Poetic projections of psychological realities and show the influence of ancient
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Indian thought on Sri Aurobindo's modem sensibility. The poems, however, may be enjoyed as much for the energy of the thought as for the memorability of the recordation. The language and the rhythm too show a mastery and a potency appropriate everywhere to the movement of thought or play of fancy.
V
The bulk of Sri Aurobindo's poetical output during the Baroda period - including some that properly belong to the years immediately following - has now been surveyed, in the present and the three previous chapters, in considerable detail. The many translations from Greek, Bengali and Sanskrit; the metrical romances, Urvasie and Love and Death; the heroic poem, Baji Prabhou; the dramatic romances and fragments; the many philosophical and spiritually oriented poems - amounting to many thousands of lines of verse, excluding the pieces lost in the "house-searches, trials, hasty displacements and other vicissitudes" of the political period, and also excluding the pieces that lie scattered in magazines and journals or those still lying in manuscript form, not yet deciphered and published. And it should also be remembered that this impressive mass of creative work was the achievement of hardly more than fifteen years of poetical activity when Sri Aurobindo was also simultaneously pursuing the profession of teaching and engaging in secret revolutionary action and, towards the end, in combative journalism and national politics.
What is specially remarkable in these early poems and dramas is Sri Aurobindo's attention to verbal and metrical craftsmanship. A stay of fourteen years in England during the most impressionable years of boyhood and youth had given Sri Aurobindo an impeccable ear for English sound values and an instinctive response to nuances of meaning and rhythm. And a prolonged and intimate familiarity with Greek, Latin and Sanskrit had also facilitated a mastery of regular metrical forms. But the realised at the same time that poetry was not language or metre merely but only used them as its fit vehicle for forceful utterance. As he once remarked, "Poetry, if it deserves the name at all, comes always from some subtle plane through the creative vital and uses the outward mind and other external instruments for transmission only."45 If the inspiration is not urgent enough, or if the metrical craftsmanship is not consummate enough, we have either verse that is pleasing and faultless or poetry that just misses its name and vocation. As Sri Aurobindo pithily put it, without bhāva - without the creative vital itself participating in the poetic creation - all metrical melody can only be a "melodious corpse".46 But whereas the breeze of inspiration bloweth where it listeth, metrical mastery can generally be acquired and pressed into the service of poetic composition. Meanwhile the poet can but wait for the unpredictable moment when inspiration will impinge upon the creative vital and enkindle the mere dry bones of verse into the unfading incandescence of poetry.
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Sri Aurobindo, it has been claimed, "was born as a poet and he is a born poet";47 but even a born poet cannot always write at the top of his form. Poetry should give us, not a system of thought, but the poetry of thought, not philosophy, but the poetry of philosophy - in other words, thought or structure of ideas touched by emotion and transfigured by the imagination. Even during the Baroda period, Sri Aurobindo frequently achieved this feat of transfiguration. The failures are unimportant, the successes alone should invite our attention and compel our admiration. The true poet is a creator in his own right and in this imitates God's relation to His creatures. As the Rishi explains to Manu:
The poet from his vast and labouring mind
Brings brilliant out
A living world; forth into space they wind,
The shining rout,
And hate and love, and laugh and weep, enjoy,
Fight and shout,
King, lord and beggar, tender girl and boy,
Foemen, friends;
So to His creatures God's poetic mind
A substance lends.48
In his plays, Sri Aurobindo's own "vast and labouring mind" has brought out worlds of living men and women. And in many a poem, rhythm and phrase are seen to fuse again and again into the splendour of poetic communication. A Child's Imagination, that effusion of pure melody, embodies at the same time a nectarean revelation:
O thou golden image,
Miniature of bliss,
Speaking sweetly, speaking meetly!
Every word deserves a kiss....
God remembers in thy bosom
All the wonders that He wrought.49
Not less satisfying, and rather more strident in utterance, is To R. (On Her Birthday):
The repetition of thy gracious years
Brings back once more thy natal mom.
Upon the crest of youth thy life appears, -
A wave upborne.
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Amid the hundreds thronging Ocean's floor
A wave upon the crowded sea
With regular rhythm pushing towards the shore
Our life must be.50
And so on, ten nobly articulate stanzas. The entire poem is sustained by the metaphor of the sea, and this fascination is seen no less in poems like To the Sea and The Sea at Night. The former has an aggressive cast, for the poet dares the thunderer and offers to "outbillow" its battering waves:
Take me, be
My way to climb the heavens, thou rude great sea.
I will seize thy mane,
O lion, I will tame thee and disdain;...
I come, O Sea,
To measure my enormous self with thee.51
But The Sea at Night, an almost perfect lyric in which sound and sense cohere into a purposive unity, is subdued with its circles of widening peace:
The grey sea creeps half-visible, half-hushed,
And grasps with its innumerable hands
These silent walls. I see beyond a rough
Glimmering infinity, I feel the wash
And hear the sibilation of the waves
That whisper to each other as they push
To shoreward side by side, - long lines and dim
Of movement flecked with quivering spots of foam,
The quiet welter of a shifting world.52
The longer poems and the dramatic romances, partly on account of their length and also on account of the unavoidable variation in interest, are not on an even level of inspired utterance throughout. As Sri Aurobindo himself once wrote, summarising "futurist" views on the question: "Length in a poem is itself a sin, for length means padding... a long poem is a bad poem... only brief work, intense, lyrical in spirit, can be throughout pure poetry."53 On the other hand, Keats has remarked that "a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Pole-star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder". Even in Milton's, and certainly in Wordsworth's, poetic output, stretches of verse can be sighted which, while they may be relevant and serious enough or even eloquent in their own way, may yet fail to touch the electric level of pure poetry. That this is so in the vast body of Sri Aurobindo's verse should be hardly surprising. Passages of impassioned poetry sometimes alternate with passages less indubitably packed with suggestion,
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and as in The Rishi, for example, some of the longer poems fail to maintain throughout the sheer magnificence of the opening. The writer of a long poem, a metrical romance or a blank verse drama can always give us melodious or memorable verse; he can be consistently and effectively articulate; but he may not be able all the time to transport us with the piercing sublime of pure poetry. It is no derogation of Sri Aurobindo's poetic art or craftsmanship to say that such too is our experience when exposed to the whole vast body of his early poetry and verse translations.
As a metrical craftsman, Sri Aurobindo is probably without an equal in Indo-Anglican literature; and not many practitioners of verse among his exact contemporaries in England have given proof of the same facility and dexterity in wielding the instrument of blank verse as is evidenced in Urvasie, Love and Death, Baji Prabhou and the several dramas (including The Hero and. the Nymph). The late Lytton Strachey aptly compared blank verse to the Djinn in the Arabian Nights story: it is either the most tyrannical of masters or the most obedient and efficient of slaves. But one must know the mantra of metrical mastery to be able to awe the Djinn into utter obedience - and there is very little doubt that Sri Aurobindo had easy access to the mantra, and hence he could, since the early years at Baroda, command the Djinn's services. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, they all knew the secret, and they all could breathe into the seeming irregularity of blank verse the norm of iambic rhythm - a norm that permitted a hundred and one fluctuations and yet challengingly remained itself. The shifting caesuras, the unexpected substitutions, the sheer weight of occasional polysyllables, the startling inversions, the stinging wrenched accents, the sense often triumphantly overwhelming and overflowing the metrical pauses, these and other "tricks of the trade" make many a blank verse passage in Sri Aurobindo's poems and plays partake of the character of a symphony that is as contrapuntally rich as it is a beautiful whole. The agonised heart of an Andromeda or Aslaug or of a Pururavas or Ruru finds in blank verse a splendid medium for self-expression; the vaunts and demonic imaginings of Polydaon or Humber, the rages and curses of Cassiopea or Timocles, the sweet-sad virgin ecstasies of Urvasie or Vasavadutta, the exultations and jealousies and distractions of lovers, all, all are conveyed by Sri Aurobindo through his blank verse rhythms, possessing almost always the qualities of flexibility, charm and innate vitality. What K.D. Sethna finds in Love and Death is nothing less than a superb mastery, something quite out of the ordinary:
So much modulation and change of pace connect up with the art of Lascelles Abercrombie and Gordon Bottomley. These poets have a more colloquial turn of phrase: Sri Aurobindo, free though he is from making a cult of the precious, is less inclined to the homely than they, but like them he turns his medium daringly elastic. Where he differs from them is for the better, since he avoids the modem faults arising from a penchant for the colloquial: the flat and the anaemic on the one hand, on the other the crudely impetuous.
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There is also a more complete harmonisation.54
And, generally speaking, Sri Aurobindo's blank verse of the Baroda period - in the context of the late Victorian and early Edwardian era when conformity was more usual than freedom of experiment - was satisfyingly elastic and resilient, the verse of a master quite sure of himself.
At times, Sri Aurobindo's muse throws out gem-like single lines that one might treasure long - or for ever - in one's memory:
O iron throated vast unpitying sea... 55
Titanic on the old stupendous hills. 56
Bridal outpantings of her broken name. 57
Thundering remote the clamourous Arctic surge... 58
Looking through all vast time for one brief hour... 59
She trailed her raiment as the river its foam...60
Such lines almost sing themselves out in the chambers of the subconscious long after the poem or passage has been read and all but forgotten. More rarely, one comes across a blank verse paragraph whose architechtonics imprint themselves on the fabric of one's memory for ever and for ever. Quite a few such paragraphs have been cited in the preceding chapters, but one more may be given here:
In a thin soft eve
Ganges spread far her multitudinous waves,
A glimmering restlessness with voices large,
And from the forests of that half-seen bank
A boat came heaving over it, white-winged,
With a sole silent helmsman marble-pale.
Then Ruru by his side stepped in; they went
Down the mysterious river and beheld
The great banks widen out of sight.61
And, then, like other masters of the epic style, Sri Aurobindo too can make marvellous poetry out of mere proper names:
Python and Naga monstrous, Joruthcaru,
Tuxuc and Vasuki himself, immense,
Magic carcotaca all flecked with fire.. .62
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but it is no mere catalogue of the names of fabulous pythons and fearsome snakes. Sri Aurobindo has just waved his wand, invoked the mantra of blank verse, and turned what are apparently exotic names into the magic of imperishable poetry. In his passion and in his scholarship, in his classicisms and in his inversions, in his austerity and in his sublimity, in his organ-voiced puissance and in his inspiring solitariness, Sri Aurobindo is the most Miltonic of the Indo-Anglican poets; and yet, Miltonic as he is, he never ceases to be Sri Aurobindo also, - and this is the measure of his distinction as a great English poet.
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