Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 25

Poet of Yoga

I

While examining the implications of Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Future, we saw how the probable divinisation of man the individual - the emergence of the Gnostic being - will necessarily inspire his immediate environment leading to a better social order and also accelerate the urge towards the realisation of global human unity. But the new Man would also evolve his own theory of poetry and of art in general, and the poetry and art of the Gnostic Age must have their own distinguishing vitality and significance. Here, again, Sri Aurobindo's contributions - as futurist critic no less than as futurist poet - will form no mean foundations on which the edifices of the future may be safely and greatly reared.

The refreshingly stimulating series of articles that Sri Aurobindo contributed to the Arya from December 1917 to August 1920 under the general caption 'The Future Poetry' began as a critical review of Dr. James H. Cousin's New Ways in English Literature. The review, however, was only a starting-point. The rest was drawn from Sri Aurobindo's ideas and his already conceived view of Art and Life. And, ultimately, the "review" became a treatise of thirty-two chapters, and has since been posthumously issued as a book. We learn from the Publishers' Note that Sri Aurobindo had intended revising the series of articles so as to give them the form of a book, and he had also planned to add a few more chapters, including one on the Metaphysical Poets. But actually he could write only a few supplementary paragraphs here and there, and these have now been incorporated in their proper places in the published volume (1953).

What sort of work is this 400-page book. The Future Poetry? Literary history, aesthetic criticism, appreciations of individual English poets classical and modern, speculations on the future of poetry in general and of English poetry in particular, discussions on themes like "The Essence of Poetry", "Rhythm and Movement", "Style and Substance", "Poetic Vision and the Mantra", "The Ideal Spirit of Poetry", "The Sun of Poetic Truth", "The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty" and "The Word and the Spirit", all these are thrown into the melting pot, and the result is a fascinating adventure in creative understanding, - an unconventional but truly prophetic work of criticism embodying the manifesto of the new "overhead aesthesis".

Sri Aurobindo was a seer rather than a coldly rationalist practitioner of literary criticism, and accordingly he doesn't laboriously or intellectually formulate a scheme for the future; he merely glimpses the very head and front, and he seems to feel the very heart-beats, of the Future Poetry - and for the nonce we too see with his eyes and hear with his ears. Characteristically does he call the series of articles, not "The Future of Poetry", but simply "The Future Poetry"; it is a thing

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as good as decreed even as the Supramental Descent is an event preordained and inevitable that the future poetry should partake of the nature of the mantra, "that rhythmic speech which, as the Veda puts it, rises at once from the heart of the seer and from the distant home of the Truth".¹ In his book, Cousins, himself had speculated on the possibility of the discovery of the word, the rhythm, the configuration of thought proper to the reality which "lies in the apprehension of a something stable behind the instability of word and deed, something that is a reflection of the fundamental passion of humanity for something beyond itself, something that is a dim foreshadowing of the divine urge which is prompting all creation to unfold itself and to rise out of its limitations towards its Godlike possibilities".² Such mantric poetry had no doubt found occasional utterance in lightning flashes or luminous radiations in the past; but Sri Aurobindo's inquiry is whether the mantra could become for the future poet "a more conscious aim and steadfast endeavour", whether it could become the rule and not merely the rare exception.

After laying down the quintessential law that the true creator as also the true hearer of poetry is the soul, Sri Aurobindo maintains that the poetic word acquires its extraordinary intensity and evocative power because "it comes from the stress of the soul-vision behind the word".³ Words in poetry are not just words picked at random from a dictionary and joined together somehow. Although words are nowadays written or printed and hence catch the eye, words were not always written or printed, and words in poetry are not really meant to be only seen or read. Words are often spoken, and they are then heard by the human ear; but words need neither be spoken by the human mouth nor heard by the human ear. What, then, is the true content of the poetic word? It does have a particular look when written or printed, it does convey a particular sound to the ear, it does communicate something akin to an idea to the mind; but the word is more than what is appears and what it sounds and what it seems to mean. The poetic word is verily a symbol, it is a wave that floats in the ocean of Eternity, sometimes carrying a whisper from God to man and sometimes a prayer from man to God. Any word has a fairly definite denotation, and it could also acquire an almost limitless connotation, a potency and mystery and magic of its own. The true poetic word thus strives to catch the inward eye, to reach the inward ear, and to sink into the deeper profundities of the awakening or awakened soul. The real aim of the arts architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry is to speak to the spirit of man through meaningful images, and only the media vary in the different arts, the poet's being the word that is charged with power and purpose. Most people are content to live in the outer mind and senses, but the aim of art and especially of poetry is to help us to live in the soul, to enable us to see into the utter truth of things. And the poet has to find the words and the rhythm that would achieve this aim:

He is, as the ancients knew, a seer and not merely a maker of rhymes, not merely a jongleur, rhapsodist or troubadour, and not merely a thinker in lines and stanzas. He sees beyond the sight of the surface mind and finds the revealing word, not merely the adequate and effective, but the illumined and

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illuminating, the inspired and inevitable word, which compels us to see also. To arrive at that word is the whole endeavour of poetic style.⁴

To see the truth of the life in the soul and to convey this truth, the right words in the right order or rhythm are needed. Just as the poetic word is much more than the Dictionary word, the poetic rhythm too is much more than the regular metrical beat; it has to try to "bring out an echo of hidden harmonies, a secret of rhythmical infinities within us".⁵ Since the purpose of poetry is to see and make others see, "Vision" is the poet's essential native endowment, and the mantra his means to reach the sahrdaya and make him also share the vision:

Vision is the characteristic power of the poet, as is discriminative thought the essential gift of the philosopher and analytic observation the natural genius of the scientist. The Kavi was in the idea of the ancients the seer and revealer of truth.... Therefore the greatest poets have been always those who have had a large and powerful interpretative and intuitive vision of Nature and life and man and whose poetry has arisen out of that in a supreme revelatory utterance of it.⁶

The poet's is not just a view of life - intellectual, philosophical, political, sociological - but a direct vision or soul-view of life, "a seizing by the inner sense"; and the mantra is not a matter of sound-recordation only but the rhythmic transmission of the soul's sight of God and Nature and the world to the receptive soul. But Sri Aurobindo adds that "this does not depend only on the individual power of vision of the poet, but on the mind of his age and country, its level of thought and experience, the adequacy of its symbols, the depth of its spiritual attainment".⁷ A poet, even a very great poet, is to a considerable extent the product of his age; and he too is implicated in its limitations, even as he is heir to its possibilities. He is also a representative of his race, of his nation, of his people; he is a flower that blooms upon that tree, that branch, among those leaves, - he cannot wholly tear himself away from his bases:

The soul of the poet may be like a star and dwell apart; even, his work may seem not merely a variation from but a revolt against the limitations of the national mind. But still the roots of his personality are there in its spirit and even his variation and revolt are an attempt to bring out something that is latent and suppressed or at least something which is trying to surge up from the secret all-soul into the soul-form of the nation.⁸

Sri Aurobindo devotes the next few chapters to a survey of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon to our own times. It is no academic history, however; it is a personal, temperamental, quintessential survey lighted up everywhere by a sovereign understanding and glowing with the warmth of life. Everywhere one comes across an unfailing intuition into the real nature of poetry, the genius for seizing and stating the utter truth, the infallible sixth sense for detecting sound values and delicate movements in rhythm, and the mastery of language that weaves derogation and appreciation, criticism and prophecy, illustration and generalisation into a captivating fabric of sinuous and enchanting prose. Sri Aurobindo begins his  

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survey by subscribing to the general opinion that of all the modern European tongues the English language "has produced the most rich and naturally powerful poetry, the most lavish of energy and innate genius".⁹ After two chapters on the "character" of English poetry - chapters that are very perceptive and bring out both the cardinal virtues and the still thwarted purposings of English poetry - Sri Aurobindo starts assessing, with the same sustained insight and weight of authority, the work of some of the greater or more well-known English poets. We have no space here to refer to or comment upon the several individual estimates, each with its own percipience, crystalline phrasing and air of judicial finality, but one or two at least deserve to be sampled here. Thus, for example, about Chaucer:

Chaucer has his eye fixed on the object, and that object is the external action of life as it passes before him throwing its figures on his mind and stirring it to a kindly satisfaction in the movement and its interest, to a blithe sense of humour or a light and easy pathos. He does not seek to add anything to it or to see anything below it or behind its outsides, nor does he look at all into the souls or deeply into the minds of the men and women whose appearance, action and easily apparent traits of character he describes with so apt and observant a fidelity. He does not ask himself what is the meaning of all this movement of life or the power in it or draw any large poetic idea from it; he is not moved to interpret life, a clear and happy presentation is his business... neither his poetic speech nor his rhythm has anything of the plastic greatness and high beauty of the Italians. It is an easy, limpid and flowing movement, a stream rather than a well, - for it has no depths in it, - of pure English utterance just fitted for the clear and pleasing poetic presentation of external life as if in an unsullied mirror, at times rising into an apt and pointed expression, but for the most part satisfied with a first primitive power of poetic speech, a subdued and well-tempered even adequacy. Only once or twice does he by accident strike out a really memorable line of poetry; yet Dante and Petrarch were among his masters.^1O

Of the Elizabethans, Sri Aurobindo writes with total understanding, and no more than a few sentences are enough to fix Shakespeare and his lesser contemporaries in their proper relationships:

The great magician, Shakespeare, by his marvellous poetic rendering of life and the spell his poetry casts upon us, conceals this general inadequacy; the whole age which he embodies is magnified by his presence.... Shakespeare is an exception, a miracle of poetic force; he survives untouched all adverse criticism, not because there are not plenty of fairly large spots in this sun, but because in any complete view of him they disappear in the greatness of his light. Spenser and Marlowe are poets of a high order, great in spite of an eventual failure. But the rest owe their stature to an uplifting power in the age and not chiefly to their own intrinsic height of genius; and that power had many vices, flaws and serious limitations which their work exaggerates wilfully rather than avoids. The gold of this golden age of English poetry is often  

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very beautifully and richly wrought, but it is seldom worked into a perfect artistic whole; it disappears continually in masses of alloy, and there is on the whole more of a surface gold-dust than of the deeper yield of the human spirit.¹¹

Generous in appreciation but not blind to the dark spots, his eyes uncannily observant enough but not so as to miss in the woods the twisted, fallen or darkened trees, Sri Aurobindo's criticism is unexceptionable indeed. As with the Elizabethans, with Milton too - and notably with Paradise Lost - Sri Aurobindo merely holds the mirror up to the man and his work, and the high magnificent face is caught in it and so are the warts:

Paradise Lost is assuredly a great poem.... Rhythm and speech have never attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement, seldom to an equal sublimity.... His aim too is high, his subject loftier than that of any one of his predecessors except Dante.... To justify the ways of God to man intellectually is not the province of poetry; what it can do, is to reveal them. Yet just here is the point of failure. Milton has seen Satan and Death and Sin and Hell and Chaos; there is a Scriptural greatness in his account of these things: he has not so seen God and heaven and man or the soul of humanity at once divine and fallen, subject to evil and striving for redemption; here there is no inner greatness in the poetic interpretation of his materials. In other words, he has ended by stumbling over the rock of offence that always awaits poetry... the fatal danger of a failure of vision.¹²

There is then a hurried but meaningful glance at the poets and poetry of the eighteenth century, followed by a grand swerving movement bridging the old and the new, and on the threshold of the Romantic Age we meet with thrilled excitement the "Poets of the Dawn". In these pages, Sri Aurobindo is more than ever in his element, his touch was never surer, or the brush-strokes clearer. Here, for example, Byron and Wordsworth are snapped together as it were:

Byron and Wordsworth are the two poets who are the most hampered by this difficulty of finding and keeping to the native speech of their greater self, most often depressed in their elevation, because they are both drawn by a strong side of their nature, the one to a forceful, the other to a weighty intellectualised expression; neither of them are born singers or artists of word and sound... but doubled here by a man of action and passion, there by a moralist and preacher... both in the deepest centre or on the highest peak of their inspiration are moved by powers for which their heavily or forcibly intellectualised language of poetry was no adequate means. It is only when they escape from it that they do their rare highest work. Byron, no artist, intellectually shallow and hurried, a poet by compulsion of personality rather than in the native colour of his mind, inferior in all these respects to the finer strain of his great contemporaries, but in compensation a more powerful elemental force than any of them and more in touch with all that had begun to stir in the mind of the time.... Wordsworth, meditative, inward, concentrated in his thought,  

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is more often able by force of brooding to bring out that voice of his greater self, but flags constantly, brings in a heavier music surrounding his few great clear tones, drowns his genius at last in a desolate sea of platitude. Neither arrives at that amplitude of achievement which might have been theirs in a more fortunate time, if ready forms had been given to them, or if they had lived in the stimulating atmosphere of a contemporary culture harmonious with their personality.¹³

Mark the subtle variations the suggestive qualifications, the many parentheses on the way; mark too, how in such masterly appraisements comparative criticism acquires a convincing fervour and finality. And The Future Poetry is full of such perceptive pieces of critical analysis and appreciation that could have been turned out only by the creative force of a truly plenary understanding.

The chapter on the Victorian, Poets concentrates on the big three - Tennyson, Browning and Arnold - and then follow four chapters on "Recent English Poetry", the focus of interest being on Whitman, Carpenter, Tagore, A.E., Phillips and W.B. Yeats, all of whom were "recent poets" enough over fifty years ago when these articles were contributed to the Arya. Whitman, not unreasonably, is given the largest amount of space, and Sri Aurobindo interprets his poetry and his art with percipience as well as with an understandable gusto. One of the most eloquent and illuminating passages in the whole book is the one in which Sri Aurobindo elaborates an unexpected, but not unconvincing, comparison between Homer and Whitman:

Whitman's aim is consciently, clearly, professedly to make a great revolution in the whole method of poetry, and if anybody could have succeeded, it ought to have been this giant of poetic thought with his energy of diction, this spiritual crowned athlete and vital prophet of democracy, liberty and the soul of man and Nature and all humanity.... His is the most Homeric voice since Homer, in spite of the modem's ruder, less elevated aesthesis of speech and the difference between that limited Olympian and this broad-souled Titan, in ' this that he has the nearness to something elemental which makes everything he says, even the most common and prosaic, sound out with a ring of greatness, gives a force even to his barest or heaviest phrases, throws even upon the coarsest, dullest, most physical things something of the divinity; and he has the elemental Homeric power of sufficient straightforward speech, the rush too of oceanic sound though it is here the surging of the Atlantic between continents, not the magic roll and wash of the Aegean around the isles of Greece. What he has not, is the unfailing poetic beauty and nobility which saves greatness from its defects - that supreme gift of Homer and Valmiki - and the self-restraint and obedience to a divine law which makes even the gods more divine.¹⁴

Sri Aurobindo wrote these articles before the work of Hopkins, Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Auden and the later Yeats achieved publication, and even as regards the poetry of Meredith, Phillips, A.E. and Yeats, Sri Aurobindo had mainly to depend  

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on the quotations in Cousin's book. With all these limitations, however, Sri Aurobindo has been able to notice certain trends, certain possibilities, and get almost something of a faint foretaste of the future poetry. He sees a kind of push or straining - obscure yet, and feeble, though unmistakable - a straining towards new horizons:

And what it must lead to in the end if it gets to its end... must be some direct seeing by the soul of the soul or self everywhere in its own delivered force of vision, - the direct vision of Indian aspiration, ātmani ātmanam ātmanā, - not the sensuous or the imaginative or the intellectual or the vital insistence, but a greater Potency using and surmounting them, the Soul's own delivered self-vision in all things and delight of its own greatness and light and beauty.¹⁵

English poetry has had its vicissitudes, a supreme crest of achievement in Shakespeare, then a decline and an undulating flow; but Sri Aurobindo sees in "more recent verse" an attempt at the recovery of a commanding power of speech. Shakespeare yet remains the out-topping name in English poetry, but there is still no reason why the next wave shouldn't carry poetry to higher points of achievement than even Shakespeare's. Sri Aurobindo finds in Meredith and Phillips vague hints of a new voice, and in the Irish poets, A.E. and Yeats, something more too: an intimation of the filiations between man's earthly life and the unseen psychical life; an intimation of an ideal eternal beauty beyond the real and the evanescent; and an insinuation of finer soul-values through the facade of material actualities.

Having thus brilliantly surveyed the broad spans and the luminous crests in the course of English poetry from the Anglo-Saxons and Chaucer to Whitman and Yeats, Sri Aurobindo turns to the probabilities of the future. "We can see where we stand today," he says, "but we cannot tell where we shall stand a quarter of a century hence."¹⁶ Sri Aurobindo nevertheless believed that the day was not far off when the rending of the veil that obscures the mental vision would be accomplished at last and the new poet would hymn his songs in the voice of the innermost spirit and truth of things:

An intuitive revealing poetry of the kind which we have in view would voice a supreme harmony of five eternal powers. Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and the Spirit. These are indeed the five greater ideal lamps or rather the five suns of poetry....

The poetry of the future, if it fulfils in amplitude the promise now only there is rich hint, will kindle these five lamps of our being... make them not any longer lamps in some limited temple of beauty, but suns in the heavens of our highest mind and illuminative of our widest as well our inmost life. It will be a poetry of a new largest vision of himself and Nature and God and all things which is offering itself to man...¹⁷

Sri Aurobindo devotes the next few chapters to a more detailed consideration of the 'five powers' - Truth, Life, Beauty, Delight and the Spirit - that should inhabit, inform and forge the harmony of the future poetry. What is Truth?

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What is the "Sun of Poetic Truth"? Sri Aurobindo doesn't flinch from the task of answering the question:

Truth, as she is seen by us in the end, is an infinite .goddess, the very front and face of Infinity and Aditi herself, the illimitable mother of all the gods. This infinite, eternal and eternally creative Truth is no enemy of imagination eleven of free fancy.... Now it is something of this infinite Truth which poetry succeeds in giving us with a high power, in its own way of beauty, by is own opulent appointed means.¹⁸

To seize beauty at the soul's level of apprehension, to thrill with delight in contemplation of this beauty, this is not given to everybody; a leap of intuition' »a surge of inspiration is called for. "The poet," says Sri Aurobindo, "his eyes frf6»d on life, shows us as if by accident the seed in our normal nature which can grow into the prodigious spiritual truth of universal love."¹⁹ The Sun of Poetic Truth is a phosphorescent splendour, beauty and delight in an ecstasy of wedded bliss, but t is not knowledge, nor teaching, nor doctrine. And the "life" on which the Sun of Poetic Truth should shine is not the complex of outward actualities alone, but, more importantly, all - all the invisible worlds below and above - that may lie behind our apparent material life:

What man sees and experiences of God and himself and his race and Nature and the spiritual, mental, psychic and material worlds in which he moves, his back look upon the past, his sweep of vision over the present, his eye of aspiration and prophecy cast towards the future, his passion of self-finding and self-exceeding, his reach beyond the three times to the eternal and immutable, this is his real life.^2O

Such a total or integral vision of life would not reduce the actuality of our earthly life but heighten it rather, and make it "more real and rich and full and wide arid living to men".²¹ The Sun of Poetic Truth shining on the Greater life - which is. also the totality and oneness of life - sees in it the soul of Beauty and thrills with Delight at the sheer rasa or quintessential aesthesis of this discovery:

But this Ananda, this delight, this aesthesis which is the soul of poetic beauty works like other things, like poetic truth or the poetic breath of life on diff&rent levels, in different provinces of its actions with the same law that we have observed in the rest, of the emergence of a richer and profounder face of itself the more it gets inward and upward from the less to the more occult powers of its revelation.²²

It was Sri Aurobindo's conviction that the new or the awakened man of the future would not be satisfied with the pleasures of the senses or of the intellect, d would demand something deeper, truer, and less evanescent, something allied to the deeper beauty and delight of Existence, something partaking of the rasa or taste of the Bliss of Brahman. Already the latter-day poets of our time had rebelled against and tried to break through the bounds - relating to the choice of theme, language, form and rhythm - accepted by the poets of the past. But mere uncharted freedom, unaccompanied by a new wide range and great intensity of

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vision, would accomplish but little. Total freedom from all restrains would be viable only when it was based on a total identification with the power of the Spirit:

The one thing that man sees above the intellect is the spirit, and therefore the developed intellect of the race, if it is at all to go forward, must open not to an understanding and seeing spirituality, other than the rather obscure religionism of the past... an illumined self-knowledge and God-knowledge and a world-knowledge too which transmuted in that greater light will spiritualise the whole view and motive of our existence.²³

A new poetry of the spirit that has shattered the older poetic 'forms' would still have to work towards the evolution of new forms: no superimposed 'forms' now, but 'forms' that are the natural expression of the spirit in its each individual movement. Lyric, drama, epic, all would suffer a change, but this change will have to be brought about from within; and the lyrics, dramas, epics of the soul would thus take the place of the traditional genres. Like the 'form', the verbal expression too must change so as to keep pace with the change in intention and spirit:

It will be the language of a higher intuitive mind swallowing up the intellectual tones into the closenesses and identities of a supra-intellectual light and Ananda.... The voice of poetry comes from a region above us, a plane of our being above and beyond our personal intelligence, a supermind which sees ' things in their innermost and largest truth by a spiritual identity and with a lustrous effulgency and rapture and its native language is a revelatory, inspired, intuitive word limpid or subtly vibrant or densely packed with the glory of this ecstasy and lustre.²⁴

In the concluding chapter, Sri Aurobindo gathers the sinuous silken threads of the discussion into a reasoned statement of recent trends and future probabilities. The intellectual idea of man's unity with man and man's intimate relationship with Nature, the psychic responses and experiences on the basis of this intellectual idea, and experiments in the use of language elastic and powerful enough for the expression or recordation of the idea and the responses and the experiences, - these things some of the "recent" poets had given us indeed; but for the trend to culminate in a complete fulfilment, something more was needed, "the pouring of a new and greater self-vision of man and Nature and existence into the idea and the life".²⁵ The idea and the response and the experience had also to pass into an integral spiritual realisation, thereby imprinting themselves in the deeper consciousness of the race and acquiring a natural and general currency in everyday human thought and feeling.

The signal for the start of the aesthetic inquiry, the intuitive enunciation of poetic theory, the careful examination of the evidence, the uncanny inductive reasoning, the legitimate conclusions regarding the "recent" trends, the prognostication about the future: there is in all this the entire unfoldment of the " scientific method":, and hence The Future Poetry deserves to be described as a scientific treatise doubled with an emanation of prophecy. It is all of a piece with Sri Aurobindo's metaphysical, sociological and political speculations: man must change, his world must change, society must change, world polity must change,  

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and art and poetry must change - one change inevitably leading to or linked with the other changes, and all cumulatively ushering in the new heaven and the new earth of our inspired imaginings. The same honoured place that the Poetics holds among the works of Aristotle - "the Master of those who know", as Dante describes him - The Future Poetry holds in the total Aurobindonian canon. The Arya sequences all hang together like the many continents comprising our global habitation; and these treatises are but the divers shining facets of a marvellous single diamond beyond price. The necessary dynamic of the Aurobindonian Weltanschauung was the decisive drift from the egoistic or merely individualistic to the universal or cosmic consciousness, and it was Sri Aurobindo's firm view that this should apply as much to the future poetry as to the future man or the future society or polity:

It is in effect a large cosmic vision, a realising of the godhead in the world and in man, of his divine possibilities as well of the greatness of the power that manifests in what he is, a spiritualised uplifting of his thought and feeling and sense and action, a more developed psychic mind and heart, a truer and a deeper insight into his nature and the meaning of the world, a calling of diviner potentialities and more spiritual values into the intention and structure of his life that is the call upon humanity... ²⁶

It is this spiritual realisation that the future poetry has to help forward by giving to it its eye of sight, its shape of aesthetic beauty, its revealing tongue and it is this greatening of life that it has to make its substance.²⁷

II

At no period of his life was Sri Aurobindo unaware of the spiritual reality behind the material actuality. Never did he countenance either of the classic negations, the denial of the materialist or the refusal of the ascetic. In some of the philosophical poems discussed in the chapter 'Musa Spiritus', there are doubtless intimations of an intellectually formulated world-view, but this is merely ancillary or antecedent to the satisfying world-view to be reared on the sure foundations of his mystic or Yogic experiences. The section entitled 'Nine Poems' in the second volume of Collected Poems and Plays (1942) occupies roughly a middle place in the evolution of Sri Aurobindo's poetic art, and several of the poems have been discussed already. By far the most ambitious and the most nobly evocative of 'Nine Poems' is Ahana, in rhymed hexameters. First published in 1915, it was probably written some years earlier, it could therefore be looked upon as somewhat of a palimpsest, a convenient bridge between the imaginative and sensuously evocative poet of Urvasie and Love and Death on the one hand and the yogin-singer of the The Rose of God and the

* The reader is referred, for a fuller discussion, to the present writer's article on Ahana in the Sri Aurobindo Circle, Third Number (1947)  

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futurist bard of Savitri. The poem included in this collected edition is a revised and enlarged version of what had appeared in 1915, and it has received an accession of new light and weight of thought that sets the poem apart as almost an Aurobindonian poetic encyclopedia in dazzling miniature.*

The earlier (1915) version. The Descent of Ahana, now included in Volume 5 (Collected Poems) of the Centenary Library edition, was in two Parts, both in dialogue form. In the first Part, Ahana is shown as being apparently reluctant to return from her transcendent retreat to the turbulent ways and wants of the world. The Voices of the Earth, however, who are Ancients of Knowledge and Sons of the Morning, tell her that she cannot choose but submit to the prayers and purposes of the world. Imperfect it may be, but the earth carries the seeds of perfection; joyless it may be, but it is instinct with the potentiality of bliss; and the earthly rose is yet capable of the forms, colours and perfumes of the Rose of Heaven. "Come, come down to us", the Voices cry. But Ahana is the mighty goddess, she is Ashtaroth, she is Aphrodite. What need for her, then, to return to the earth? What attractions there, what compensations? In answer, the Voices raises a compulsive chorus, greeting her as Diana, Usha, Delight, Latona, Yakshini, Gandharvi, Durga, hundred-ecstasied Woman, Daughter of Heaven, and her descent is peremptorily invoked:

Come from thy summits, Ahana, come! Our desire unrelenting

Hales thee down from God and He smiles at thee sweetly consenting

Lo, she is hurried down and the regions live in her tresses,

Worlds, she descends to you!

"Calm like a goddess, alarmed like a bride", Ahana is in readiness to descend, though not actually descending. But the moment has almost come! In the second Part, following a further pull of irresistible prayer from the "Voice of the sensuous mortal", Ahana descends at last, and prepares to guide Man anew to Brindavan. The first Part is riotously magnificent as poetry and is very little weighted with philosophy; it is more like Tagore's Urvasi, and Ahana is invoked tantalisingly as Woman and Goddess, as Beauty and Love, as rapture and rupture, as Harlot and Virgin, and as the bane and boon of all. The second Part is less Dionysian, more Apollonian, and it is" this section that is recast and elaborated and infused with illumined thought as the Song of Dawn, Ahana, that appeared in 1942 in Collected Poems and Plays.

Ahana has a perspective dramatic cast. 'Ahana' is Dawn - "the Dawn of God" -.and her advent is the occasion for universal rejoicings. As she appears on the mountains of the East, the Hunters of Joy greet her first, and behind them are the Seekers after Knowledge and the Climbers in quest of Power also. Even at its most puissant, human power is half-rooted in the earth-crust, human knowledge at its most luminous is yet half-blinding because of its exuberance, and only Joy born of Love has the undimmed vision to recognise and not deny the dawning Light. It is appropriate therefore that the Hunters of Joy should lead the pilgrim-throng and hymn their hallelujah praise and welcome replete with evocations of  

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sound and colour and inwrought with felicities of dhvani:

Vision delightful alone on the hills whom the silences cover,

Closer yet lean to mortality; human, stoop to thy lover....

Tread through the edges of dawn, over twilight's grey-lidded margin;

Heal earth's unease with thy feet, O heaven-born delicate virgin.²⁸

The hour has arrived at last, and the labour of the ages is over; man must no more be divorced from God, nor heaven be separated from the earth; and the Divine should lean closer to man and respond to his love. As an exordium, the first ten lines of Ahana are splendidly articulate with their opulence of apt imagery. The heaven-born delicate virgin is wooed as a woman should be wooed, and she is also invoked as a goddess should be invoked. Virgin and goddess, Ahana is now quite at home in her new surroundings - and her adoring devotees can pour out their feelings and thoughts to her.

Separated on earth from their divine source, the Hunters of Joy are nevertheless conscious of the fact of their origin; but the separation has made them earthbound and reduced their life to "a brief incompleteness". Perhaps the carefree gods are incomplete too, after a fashion, even like incomplete men afflicted with desire and incapacity and hovering death. Ahana should draw close "to the breast of our mortal desire", for the earth too has a part to play in the forging of the final cosmic harmony. No mere desert is our earth, for she has "beatitudes warmer than heaven's", and she has her own heritage of sight and sound:

Music is here of the fife and the flute and the lyre and the timbal,

Wind in the forests, bees in the grove, - spring's ardent symbol

Thrilling, the cry of the cuckoo; the nightingale sings in the branches,

Human laughter is heard and the cattle low in the ranches.²⁹

Earth is indeed crammed with loveliness, and it cannot all be a vain emptiness, an enormous futility. Earth declaims in Sri Aurobindo's The Life Heavens:

I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;

My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys,

A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven; -

My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.³⁰

Earth's lap has pleasures of her own - and pains no less. The cycle of birth and death and birth again strikes us at first as an endless futility. But one day the gods shall meet men half-way, and a new harmony shall be established here.

The illusionist on the one hand and the materialist on the other both affirm an Everlasting Nay, though for opposite reasons. "Magic of Maya" says one; the other affirms that all passion and aspiration, all love and delight, all vision and  

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high striving, all poetry and drama, all, all are nought but gases and glands and genes and nerves and brain-cells:

Science, philosophy, head of his mystical chemical stature,

Music and painting revealing the godhead in sound and in colour,

Acts of the hero, thoughts of the thinker, search of the scholar,

All the magnificent planning, all the inquiry and wonder

Only a trick of the atom....³¹

It is childish to suppose that the blind nether forces, through a maddening whirl of blundering chances, have reared this bitter-sweet phenomenal world on the shifting sands of Time. The source-of-all womb-of-all phenomena can be none other than the Spirit;

Surely no senseless Vacancy made it, surely 'twas fashioned

By an almighty One million-ecstasied, thousand-passioned.³²

The materialist might argue that, first life and then mind, have evolved out of inconscient matter and given rise to the million forms of earth-life from mere matter to thinking man. No blind accident this, but merely the progressive awakening after the initial "trance of the Eternal". Coiled and hid within ourselves is the Spirit, and to awaken it wholly should be the aim of our endeavour. Although the pessimist, the sceptic and the stoic reject the vision of a divine future possibility, and are content to forge a limited destiny for themselves, the dreamers have continued to dream and have pinned their faith in man's evolutionary future. Petal by petal, the hidden powers open out with their lure and fragrance, and although humanity has yet to march through "whirl-wind and death-blast and storm-race", the forward movement, has been steadily maintained; and what are agonies but austere disciplines, what are fallings but fresh springing-boards, and what are failings but needed felicities! Clear and strident is the Divine Charter whose accents permit no misunderstanding:

Mortals, your end is beatitude, rapture eternal his meaning.

Joy, which he most now denies, is his purpose: the hedges, the screening

Were but the rules of his play; his denials came to lure farther.³³

Suffering too is the grace of Grace, it is the hammer of God raining refining blows on the anvil, beating us to the desired shape. If Rudra is mighty and fierce and ruthless, Shiva whispers in his tenderness his murmurs of understanding and pity. Wherefore are we afraid, then? Of whom are we afraid?

Time was when, in the Garden of Eden, Man and Woman lived happy -  

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Adam, the goodliest man of men since born

His sons; the fairest of her daughters. Eve - ³⁴

but it was goodness and happiness in a vacuum, a toy perfection; it couldn't last. Driven out of sheltered Eden, Adam and Eve commenced their chequered career, running uncertainly between the wicket-gates of truth and falsehood, good and evil, and joy and misery. They and their progeny for countless centuries have sought the lost key to the vacant Paradise - but all in vain. Redeemers have come and gone and not one "has availed to deliver"; and indeed there is no going back to the doll-house perfection of ancient Eden. Although once begun in Eden, human life must now steer towards other horizons. Perhaps the Flute-Player of Brindavan gives us the clue to the secret; didn't the Divine and the devotees - God, man and all nature - achieve a perfect harmony, an absolute bliss? Earth-life met the Eternal "with close breast", and glory assumed a million faces in Brindavan's woodlands. There life acquired a "deeper power than heaven", realised a more integral truth, and experienced a more valued joy than elsewhere attainable.

But Brindavan too has passed away, though it fitfully returns to us in our dreams as we hear Krishna's song, and "all our being goes back as a bride of his bliss to the Giver". The heart yearns, the soul is in an anguish of expectation, and in our auspicious dreams, as if a trap-door has opened above, the miracle is repeated in an occasional drench of bliss. And yet there is no firm return. Life the river of the Spirit dashes against the hills, leaps into the ravines, and struggles hard to escape into the ampler and purer valleys beyond. But -

A stony and monstrous resistance ;

Meets it piling up stubborn limits. Afflicted the river

Treasures a scattered sunbeam, moans for a god to deliver,

Longing to lapse through the plain's green felicity, yearning to widen

Joined to the ocean's shoreless eternity far-off and hidden.³⁵

This striving for self-exceeding is the central drama of the universe, but played on the Earth for stage and with Man as the protagonist. Nor is all this striving - even admitting all past failures and present difficulties - a saga foredoomed to defeat for ever. The Powers of Light are on our side, they are watching the struggle, awaiting the appointed hour when victory shall crown our efforts, when the mists shall clear, when the gates of Brindavan shall open to receive us;

There amid flowers

We shall take pleasure in arbours delightful, lengthening the hours,

Time for our servitor waiting our fancy through moments unhasting,

Under the cloudless blue of those skies of tranquillity resting,...

Fruit of our joy rear tall strong sons and radiant daughters.³⁶  

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The very inhabitants of Heaven, gorgeous in their golden raiment, might then freely fraternise with us, bringing with them "life-giving garlands plucked by the fountains of Paradise". Fate would then diminish into unimportance, Rudra would cast aside his ferocity, and "life in our limbs shall grow deathless" and heaven and earth shall marry and mingle and endure for ever. Are these only dreams, idle dreams? But the dream shall come true and "the truth shall be greater".

In the course of the long welcome song, the Hunters of Joy - speaking for themselves and for their brother-pilgrims lower on the slopes or on the plains - have covered the entire winding course of human history and compressed into the mould of an apparently formal invocation the trials, struggles, self-exultations and self-lacerations of humanity, the defeatist moans, the stoic endurances, the heart's surge of hope and the brain's soulless speculations, the contradictory negations and the great affirmations, the loss of old Eden and the promise of a new Brindavan. Ahana listens and visibly changes countenance, and is impatient to descend. And so the Hunters of Joy crown the variegated munificence of their song with this superb chaplet of adoration and entreaty:

Form of the formless All-Beautiful, lodestar of Nature's aspirance,

Music of prelude giving a voice to the ineffable Silence,...

Come! let thy sweetness and force be a breath in the breast of the future

Making the god-ways alive...

Vision delightful alone on the peaks whom the silences cover,

Vision of bliss, stoop down to mortality, lean to thy lover.³⁷

Ahana too is charmed by the "voice of the sensual mortal" - his "heart of eternal longing" has pursued and won her - his age-long tribulations and travail have pierced her armour and awakened her pity. She makes the decisive god-appointed motion and vouchsafes, the prayed-for divine-human response:

But I descend at last....

Lo, I come, and behind me Knowledge descends and with thunder

Filling the spaces Strength, the Angel, bears on his bosom

Joy to thy arms... ³⁸

Ahana embodies, as indicated above, a dream and a vision - a dream that is humanity's inveterate habit to dream, and a vision that the Yogi sees from the Pisgah heights of his creative writing. It is a song of songs in the Aurobindonian world, it is notable for its mighty sweep and its melodic richness, and it comes to us with memories that linger, dreams that ripen into visions, visions that shall be exceeded by the Reality to come. Perhaps the poem is just a little too long; the inspiration occasionally flags a little and poetry seems to give place to intellectual padding - but this is, after all, inevitable in a long poem. And yet which modern poet has given us lines more nobly articulate than these:  

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Deep in our being inhabits the voiceless invisible Teacher;

Powers of his godhead we live; the Creator dwells in the creature.

Out of his Void we arise to a mighty and shining existence,

Out of Inconscience, tearing the black Mask's giant resistance;...

High on the summits of being ponders immobile and single,

Penetrates atom and cell as the tide drenches sand-grain and shingle.³⁹

As when a stream from a highland plateau green mid the mountains

Draws through broad lakes of delight the gracious sweep of its fountains,

Life from its heaven of desire comes down to the toil of the earthways;

Streaming through mire it pours still the mystical joy of its birthplace,

Green of its banks and the green of its trees and the hues of the flower.⁴⁰

Science and philosophy, introspection and interrogation, fact and myth and symbolism, hope and aspiration and ecstasy, all course through Ahana's universe of poesy to overwhelming effect. Now and then, and again and again, the resounding cataract crystallises into dazzling images and striking evocations: "Brooded out drama and epic, structured the climb of the sonnet"; "All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle"; "Time's doors shudder / Swinging wide on their hinges into Eternity"; "Dupe of a figment of consciousness, doped with behaviour and feature". Studded with iridescent lightnings, Ahana is one long reverberation of music, a feast alike for the physical and the inner ear.

Ahana is also one of the poems in which Sri Aurobindo has experimented on classical quantitative prosody and tried to naturalise it in English. Thus one of his later poems, Descent, is written in sapphics; another. Ocean Oneness, in alcaics; and a third, Thought the Paraclete, in phaleuciackes; but these can only be called preliminary skirmishes with the problem, and complete success may be claimed only when the hexameter too has been tackled and mastered. And it would appear that in two long poems —Ahana and the unfinished epic, Ilion - Sri Aurobindo has largely mastered the elusive and leonine hexameter as well. Ahana's verse, however, has the additional embellishment of rhyme, while - as we will see later - Ilion is unrhymed like the normal hexameter. Rhyme is used in Ahana because it is a poem partly of reflective thought and partly of lyrical feeling, swinging between the poles of statement and prayer, argument and prophecy. Ilion, on the other hand, is an epic in its comprehension and majestic movement, and Sri Aurobindo has accordingly eschewed rhyme from its more elemental thunder-inspired verse.

The history of English poetry is strewn with the unsuccessful attempts to acclimatise the sensitive and subtly individual rhythms of the hexameter to the ruggeder terrain of English verse. In Tennyson's words -

When was a harsher sound ever heard, ye Muses, in England?

When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon?  

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Hexameters no worse than daring Germany gave us,

Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters.

It is doubtful though if Tennyson would have stood by this generalised derogation if he had had a chance of reading Ahana or llion, in which Sri Aurobindo has put into practice his own "sound and realistic theory" of true quantity.

In his long essay 'On Quantitative Metre' printed as Appendix A to Collected Poems and Plays. Sri Aurobindo has discussed in considerable detail the entire problem. "If we are to get a true theory of quantity," he says, "the ear must find it; it cannot be determined by mental fictions or by reading with the eye..."⁴¹ He is firmly persuaded that in any scheme of quantative verse in English, all three elements - accent, stress and quantity - should be harnessed for the purpose and "united and even fused together". There are several long-vowel syllables in English, which according to orthodox classical rules, will be taken to be intrinsically long; but their number is insufficient to construct quantitative metres in English. Sri Aurobindo therefore advocates the addition to their number of stressed syllables as well, arguing that stress invariably confers "weight-length" which is as legitimate as intrinsic length. Accordingly, Sri Aurobindo reduces his system to a set of four rules:

1. All stressed syllables are metrically long, and so are long-vowel syllables.

2. All short-vowel syllables, when not stressed, are short except when they have a heavy load of consonants.

3. As regards sounds of doubtful or variable quantity and quantity within individual syllables, the ear must judge and decide about the length.

4. As in accentual metres, in quantitative metres in English too modulations should be freely permitted.

While these rules must apply to all quantitative metres in English, the hexameter is a class by itself and "stands as the central knot of the problem; if that is loosened, the rest follows".⁴² If the hexameter is to be naturalised in English, certain pre-conditions are called for. Firstly, a suitable theme is needed - either one of epic magnificence and comprehension or one instinct with largeness of spirit and high-arching thought, expressing itself in luminous flashes, mighty iridescences, ecstatic cries and jewelled epigrams. Secondly, a system of true quantity as outlined above. Thirdly, a wide-ranging modulation has to be accepted as the bye-law of the English hexameter. The classical hexameter is a falling rhythm of six feet, - five dactyls and a culminating spondee; but spondees are permissible substitutes for the first four dactyls - though not the fifth - and occasionally a trochee takes the place of the final spondee. But while Sri Aurobindo categorically declares that the hexameter, being a dactylic metre, "must remain unequivocally and patently dactylic", he nevertheless advocates, taking into consideration the genius of the English language, a large number and variety of modulations.⁴³* 

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Freedom, yes, but only the freedom that answers an imperative rhythmical or emotional need, the freedom that moves within the prescribed confines of the mould with puissance as well as with restraint, the freedom under whose confident play the base-plank of the hexameter doesn't crack. In a word, therefore, the hexameter has a chance of naturalisation in English only when a superlative poetic genius comes forward, takes in his firm grip the noble instrument fashioned by Homer and Virgil, adjusts the keys a little and the strings, and plays on the hoary instrument a rich modern note, holding in a charmed easy balance the twin pulls of law and impulse, achieving an yet unaccomplished harmony between theory and practice, tradition and experiment, meaning and melody. And one may perhaps hazard the opinion that in Ahana and llion the hexameter has at last found its true and proper stride, its sovereign organ-voiced puissance, its unique evocative power.

This is not the place to make any close critical study of Sri Aurobindo's deft handling of the hexameter in Ahana or to discuss and illustrate all the minutiae of' his prosodical technique. It is enough to state that he wields this ancient metre with a rare mastery, and line after line offers evidence of his uncanny sense of semantic and sound values. Here is a significant passage:

The last foot is always a trochee, giving thereby a completeness to the falling rhythm. The first four feet and even the fifth - normally dactyls or spondees - are variously modulated, keeping in mind, however, the torrential dactylic motion of the verse. The first line above is made up of a dactyl, a trochee, a molossus, two

* In a letter written on 24 December 1942, Sri Aurobindo returned to the theme and pointed out that "natural length in English depends, or can depend, on the dwelling of the voice giving metrical value or weight to the syllable;... both weight by ictus (stress) and weight by prolongation of the voice", and he concluded affirming: "My quantitative system... is based on the natural movement of the English tongue, the same in prose and poetry, not on any artificial theory." [SABCL, Volume 5 p 552-3]

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consecutive dactyls, and a final trochee. In the second line, the laboured motion of the syllables brings powerfully to life the breathless climb. Apart from the trisyllabic substitutions like anti-bacchius (--˘), the cretic (-˘-), and the molossus (---), there are a couple of tetrasyllabic substitutions (--˘˘; -˘˘˘: ionic a majore and first paeon) for the dactyl, in the second and fifth lines respectively. The pauses too are located at different points in the different lines - at the end of the first foot in the fifth line, which suggestively overflows into the next line, while there is hardly any pause in the course of the second line, and the third, fourth, and seventh lines. The chief prosodic sin in English, whether the base is the five-foot iambic line or the dactylic hexameter, is the deadly sin of monotony. A too mechanically contrived dactylic line has a fatal tendency in English to shed its characteristic falling rhythm and assume rather an anapaestic rising rhythm. Sri Aurobindo has saved his hexameter from such a fate. The true movement of the hexameter is "a swift stream or a large flow, an undulating run, the impetuous bounding of a torrent, an ocean surge or a divine gallop of the horses of the sungod".⁴⁵ And when one reads a passage like the following, although the tongue may make a slip at first, presently the ear will guide the tongue and the hexameter will adequately fulfil itself:

III

Six Poems (1934), Poems (1941), the sixteen pieces that are printed at the end of Collected Poems and Plays and the 'metrical experiments' included in the Appendix to the posthumous collection More Poems (1957) are all attempts to adapt divers classical quantitative metres to English verse, and several of the poems are also examples of a primary 'overhead' inspiration achieving fullness of articulation as the mantra. Mystical experience, being by is very nature untranslatable in terms of logical categories, has perforce to borrow, significance from the use of words and rhythms as symbols of and as intimations of something above and beyond  

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themselves, and at the same time as something springing from the mystic's innermost psychic depths, deeper than ever plummet sounded. The great mystic poets of the world are thus inveterately "obscure", trafficking in symbols that perplex all except the initiated or chosen few who are able or willing to catch the lucent rays that emanate from the supernal Light.* Such poetry has but rarely been achieved in the past, especially in English; but Sri Aurobindo held the view, as explained in an earlier section, that the future poetry - even or especially in English - will more and more approximate to the mantra, and that it will minimise, if not altogether eliminate, the operations of the meddling middlemen - the intellect, the senses, the imagination itself- and will effect in one swift unfailing step the business of communication from the poet to the reader:

A divine Ananda, a delight interpretative, creative, revealing, formative, - one might almost say, an inverse reflection of the joy which the universal Soul has felt in its great release of energy when it rang out into the rhythmic forms of the universe the spiritual truth, the large interpretative idea, the life, the power, the emotion of things packed into its original creative vision - such spiritual joy is that which the soul of the poet feels and which, when he can conquer the human difficulties of his task, he succeeds in pouring also into all those who are prepared to receive it.⁴⁷

With the mantra the poet's soul communicates with the sahrdaya's soul: the mind and the senses are nothing, the message goes through meeting with no resistance on the way. Sri Aurobindo has poetically described the process as follows:

...when the mantra sinks in Yoga's ear,

Its message enters stirring the blind brain

And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;

The hearer understands a form of words

And, musing on the index thought it holds,

He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

Then, falling silent in himself to know

He meets the deeper listening of his soul:

The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:

Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self

Are seized unalterably and he endures

An ecstasy and an immortal change;

He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,

All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:

Transmuted by the white spiritual ray

* Nolini Kanta Gupta describes symbols as "a translation in mental and sensual (and vocal) terms of experiences that are beyond the mind and the sense and the speech and yet throw a kind of echoing vibrations upon these lesser levels" (The Approach to Mysticism, p. 17).  

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He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,

Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech.. .⁴⁸

The Taittiriya Upanishad speaks of the five sheaths - body, life (prāna), mind, supermind (vijñana) and Ananda - and if mantric poetry is soul communing with soul, it has irresistibly to penetrate, much as X-rays do, the divers outer sheaths and reach vijñana and lose itself in Ananda. Between mind and supermind, Sri Aurobindo has located various "overhead" planes - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - and a reaction of consciousness from any of these "overhead" levels that helps us to experience the rasa or essential taste of some fragment of experience or other, to make it the means of global comprehension and delight ineffable, this could be the overhead aesthesis of that level of consciousness. Overhead aesthesis is thus really the functioning of a trinity of powers, rasa, bhoga and ānanda: starting from the essential taste of a thing, a word, a sound, a thought, a fragment of memory or of current experience, it is presently seen like the Sun to send out its rays in all directions: the sensibility is thrilled into total wakefulness, it misses nothing, it takes in everything: the deeper self is awakened to more than ordinary aesthetic delight, and out of this consummation or bhoga comes the true delight of existence, the self-forgetful bliss of the innermost of the five sheaths, ānandamaya. As Sri Aurobindo explained in the course of a long letter written in 1946:

It is the universal Ananda that is the parent of aesthesis and the universal Ananda takes three major and original forms, beauty, love and delight, the delight of all existence, the delight in things, in all things.... As we climb beyond Mind, higher and wider values replace the values of our limited mind, life and bodily consciousness. Aesthesis shares in this intensification of capacity. ... As it enters the Overhead planes the ordinary aesthesis turns into a pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a large or a deep abiding ecstasy.⁴⁹

It is also necessary to remember that all overhead poetry is not necessarily mystic poetry, and all mystic poetry is not necessarily mantric poetry. At the overhead heights, of course, mystic poetry born of the utter experience of Reality irresistibly breaks out as the mantra which is experience, recordation and communication in one.

Nevertheless, many of these poems have puzzled readers, partly because of their overhead inspiration, and partly because they either handle classical quantitative metres or they seem to sway uncertainly between the patterns of traditional English prosody and the exasperating vagaries of modernist free verse. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to draw the hasty conclusion that because poems like Ocean Oneness, Trance of Waiting, Flame-Wind and Descent are given at the end of the Appendix on Quantitative Metre in the Second volume of Sri Aurobindo's Collected Poems and Plays and because he has indicated the metrical scheme of several of his poems, therefore these poems are no more than a  

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prosodist's experiments in quantitative verse. The soul of the poem, which is the sovereignty of the poet's unique experience, is the main thing, the rest is only the covering - or the system of outer sheaths - which is. the 'technique'. As Sri Aurobindo explained in a letter:

The search for technique is simply the search for the best and most appropriate form for expressing what has to be said and once it is found, the inspiration can flow quite naturally and fluently into it....

There are only two conditions about artistry: (1) that the artistry does not become so exterior as to be no longer art and (2) that substance (in which of course I include bhāva) is not left behind in the desert or else art and bhāva not woven into each other.⁵⁰

As for 'obscurity', it is apparently there - in several of these poems - but it is unavoidably there. Poetry is always the expression of a mood or a movement of thought or a fragment of experience in an outer objective or an inner subjective or spiritual mould. Like technique, obscurity too can be condemned only when, instead of being integral to the 'substance', it is merely a superimposition upon it. When a poet has subtle or uncommon thoughts or experiences to communicate, he might find a certain amount of obscurity unavoidable. The point has been clarified in an article in the Times Literary Supplement:

As writing is designed to be read, it is evidently a merit in it to enable, rather than to impede, the reader's understanding, but it is true also that lucidity is not an absolute but a relative virtue - relative to the reader's sympathy and to the complexity and remoteness from ordinary experience of the thought OF vision to be communicated. If we find Scott's verse more lucid than, say, Blake's we are by no means entitled to reproach Blake with failure in lucidity. The question is: is he as lucid as possible under the circumstances?... A new secret may demand a new idiom, and we must have ears to hear it.⁵¹

And the overhead poet - from whatever level or intensity of overhead consciousness he may react to the impact of phenomena - has a "secret" to impart and he is thus often compelled to invent his own idiom and his own rhythms; and even in the matter of "invention" of the technique, word and rhythm are more given to him from above than hammered out or structured laboriously from below. When the mystic or the overhead poet tries to communicate what is reality or felt experience to him to others to whom such experiences are foreign, strange or opaque, he can only use symbol-words and rhythms that come with a compulsive force, and the vibrations of this poetry - if they have potency enough - penetrate the mental and vital sheaths and reach the sahrdaya's soul. A poem like Francis Thompson's The Hound of Heaven makes on the reader an impact that is not capable of precise intellectual formulation. And this applies even more to Sri Aurobindo's Thought the Paraclete, Rose of God and other poems. These are mantric incantations of lesser or greater intensity that have an effect upon us - that do something to us - and yet do we understand them in every particular, do we gauge the plenty in every crevice, or measure the significance of every turn of thought and every shade of symbolism?  

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All our elaborate attempts at prosaic explication are apt to prove mere heaps of mental stuff so long as the poet's experiences - the climbs of aspiration, the summits of attainment, the beatitudes of ānanda — are largely foreign to the reader himself.

The best thing would be, perhaps, to read these poems simply as poems, forgetting for the nonce the Aurobindonian theory of quantitative metres as well as his theory of overhead aesthesis. All that is needed is an attentive ear, an inner receptivity, a mood of concentration, and a surrender to the mantra - the Word will then be Power, not a body that blurs the vision nor a sound that obscures the meaning. It is thus alone that one should expose oneself to a poem like The Bird of Fire which is almost an emanation of primordial music:

Gold-white wings a-throb in the vastness, the bird of flame went glimmering over a sunfire curve to the haze of the west,

Skimming, a messenger sail, the sapphire-summer waste of a soundless wayless burning sea.

Now in the eve of the waning world the colour and splendour returning drift through a blue-flicker air back to my breast,

Flame and shimmer staining the rapture-white foam-vest of the waters of Eternity.⁵²

The 'Bird of Fire' is the Agni-bird, "the living vehicle of the gold fire of the Divine Light and the white fire of the Divine Tapas and the crimson fire of Divine Love - and everything else of the Divine Consciousness".⁵³ As for the form of the verse, it is claimed to be a compromise between the stress system and the foot measure and lines of twelve and ten stresses alternate, and four such lines make a stanza, and there are four stanzas in all. In poem after poem, the surge of aspiration rises to the Timeless - to coax it to consort with what is implicated in Time or in "travailing earth". It is a double movement, the aspiration from below and the response from above, and either movement implies the other too. Thought the Paraclete has been described as "a vision or revelation of an ascent through spiritual planes", but the ascent of consciousness is suggested by the imagery and the music rather than closely argued out in terms of logical reason:

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.

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 bourneless 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.

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.⁵⁴*

We are expected to proceed from light to light, from revelation to revelation, till we arrive at and are lost in the rich illimitable calm of the last line. The transition from a purely vital consciousness to a mental one is as noticeable as the change from "green" to "orange" in the third and fourth lines above; but Thought rises higher still, seeking other colours in the spectrum of its steep ascent. The next ten lines constitute the second great movement, from Mind to Higher Mind, then Illumined Mind, then Intuition, then Overmind - "glimmering wings" "gold-red seeking" "pale-blue-lined" "crimson-white" - beyond conceptual thought, beyond intermittent visions, beyond lightning flashes, beyond "sun-realms of supernal seeing". The third movement snaps the leap to the supermind, but this final canter to the goal is truly beyond the resources of language or logic. Thought the Paraclete - our mediator or intercessor between the inconscient and the superconscient - having won the "white-fire-veiled" secrets of the last Beyond disappears into it "slow-singing the flame-word rune". This is paralleled by the last lines of The Bird of Fire:

One strange leap of thy mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind

and life, arrives at its luminous term thy flight;

Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire

thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face.⁵⁵

The last line of Thought the Paraclete - "Self was left, lone, limitless, nude, immune" - is the concluding movement and spray of revelation; with the realisation of the infinite self, the ego is dead, and only the "illimitable Permanent" remains.

In Thought the Paraclete, Sri Aurobindo has attempted an interesting variation

* For a fall discussion see my 'A Note on Thought the Paraclete' in The Advent, Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 1944). This was printed as an appendix in the two earlier editions of the present book (1945, 1950), but is not included in the present edition.  

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of the hendecasyllabics of Catullus; but instead of a spondee followed by a dactyl and a succession of three trochees, Sri Aurobindo begins with a trochee, the spondee and the dactyl follow, and are followed by two trochees, and the last syllable of the closing trochee is generally dropped altogether:

Perhaps the rhythm itself is meant to suggest the idea of evolution-involution or ascent-descent inherent in the poem. And the rhyme-scheme too - aa; bcdcdebe; fgfg; hiijjh;kk - is suggestive of a rising movement intersecting again and again a falling movement, as if the two movements are involved in a prolonged and purposeful embrace. But these analytical evaluations do not really touch the heart of the matter. As Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple. "There is no thought-structure in the poem; there is only a succession of vision and experience, it is a mystic poem, its unity is spiritual and concrete, not a mental and logical building."56* What this mantric poem does to us is to revive the vision and reproduce the experience.

If in Thought the Paraclete, the theme is the experience of the flight from; Here to Eternity, in pieces like Musa Spiritus, Bride of the Fire and Rose of God- as also in The Bird of Fire - there is the reiterated aspiration that the Eternal should manifest itself in Time. Such poems are more like mystic incantations (to quote M. Abbe Bremond, though written in a different context) "each by the mediation of its proper magic, words, notes, colours, lines - they all aspire to joint prayer".57 And "prayer" or mantric chant is much more than a poem:

And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

By the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.⁵⁸

The sense of Musa Spiritus and Bride of the Fire comes out easily enough even on' a first reading, though successive readings may enable one to see much more in the poems:

O word concealed in the upper fire,

Thou who has lingered through centuries,

Descend from thy rapt white desire,

Plunging through gold eternities.

Into the gulfs of our nature leap,

* Regarding my own analysis Sri Aurobindo wrote in the course of the same letter: "Iyenger's geological account... is probably as good as any other is likely to be.... A mystic poem may explain itself or a general idea may emerge from it, but it is the vision that is important or what one can get from it by intuitive feeling..."

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Voice of the spaces, call of the Light!

Break the seals of Matter's sleep,

Break the trance of the unseen height.⁵⁹

And so on, in the seven stanzas following. Bride of the Fire has an even simpler cast, it is a poignant cry calling on the Eternal to respond to the earth:

Bride of the Fire, clasp me now close, '-

Bride of the Fire!

I have shed the bloom of the earthly rose,

I have slain desire.⁶⁰

But it is in Rose of God that mysticism rises, in Sethna's words, "to a climax of the incantatory art".61 It is a pure mystic cry of the soul, and the triune capacity of the inspired word to utter Being, to name and thank the Holy - in the Heideggerian sense of the words - breaks out as mantra, and rhythm, form and phrase and meaning coalesce perfectly into an utter and absolute harmony:

Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven,

Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven!

Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame,

Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name.

Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being,

Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing!

Live in the mind of our earthhood; O golden Mystery, flower,

Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour.

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.

Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire,

Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colour's lyre!

Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme;

Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the children of Time;

Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,

Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!

Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss:

Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude's kiss.⁶²  

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As in Dante, here too the 'Rose' is the supreme symbol of the essence and efflorescence of God. Bliss, Light, Power, Life, Love are the five essences that fuse as the integral perfection of God. In every stanza, the first half names a Power above and the second half invokes that Power to inhabit, inform and re-create the corresponding instrument below. Bliss for the human heart. Light for the human mind, Power for the human will. Life for the body terrestrial, and Love to "make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beautitude's kiss": such is the vast content of the prayer. Between the first and last stanzas, there is a suggestion of the great theme making a marvellous full circle: from the Rose of Bliss that is the ultimate expression of the seven-fold Knowledge to the Rose of Love that is permitted to bloom out of the ooze of the seven-fold Ignorance of terrestrial life. Not there in Heaven alone, it is here on earth too - particularly here - that the Life Divine should be enacted. In Book XI of Savitri, the heroine asks "for earth and men" His peace. His oneness. His energy. His joy; and in an earlier Book ('The Book of Yoga'), Savitri is herself described as "the image of the Whole" - as one might say, the entire Rose of God descended into clay but only to transform it:

What seemed herself was an image of the Whole.

She was a subconscient life of tree and flower,

The outbreak of the honied buds of spring;

She burned in the passion and splendour of the rose,

She was the red heart of the passion-flower,

The dream-white of the lotus in its pool....

Eternity looked out from her on Time.⁶³

What is exceptional in Savitri is expected to become the Law in fullness of evolving Time.*

The real problem in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is not so much to invade the Invisible and be lost in it or even to invoke the Eternal to walk in the corridors of Time; the problem is rather the far more crucial one of earth's transformation in Heaven's image. The Divine might become an avatar amidst us and raise us to His level for a brief term; but in the long run He too has found earth-nature not easily amenable to transformation. It is not simply the transformation of the psyche or of the mind - that is, perhaps, not so very difficult to achieve - but of the vital, of the physical, of the subconscient, of the inconscient. It is in A God's Labour that Sri Aurobindo has described in its entirety his integral Yoga of man's and earth's transformation:

A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!

* For an illuminating commentary on the mysticism and poetry of Rose of God, see K.D. Sethna s Sri Aurobindo -The Poet, pp. 264-88.  

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Dig deeper, deeper yet

Till thou reach the grim foundation stone

And knock at the keyless gate."

I saw that a falsehood was planted deep

At the very root of things

Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep

On the Dragon's outspread wings.⁶⁴

The poet of Yoga describes things vivid to him, ever present or significant to him, and these might comprise happenings in our world or in the occult worlds above and below, insights and inscapes and intensities undreamt of by the average human mentality; and unless the reader brings to the task of poetic appreciation a similar ardour for the Invisible and a total imaginative attention facilitating the opening of an inner door of understanding, the needed link is unlikely to be established and the poetic communication is unlikely to be effected. Sri Aurobindo composed most of these poems in a condition of complete cerebral calm, in a trance of waiting as it were. "...I receive from above my head," he wrote to a disciple, "and receive changes and corrections from above without any initiation by myself or labour of the brain. Even if I change a hundred times, the mind does not work at that, it only receives."⁶⁵ It is as though these poems have written themselves out in terms of an ordained inevitability. But if one could read such poems and listen to them in an attitude of inner calm and austere silence, it would not be difficult to re-enact the Yogi's ardours and experiences, and share the visions splendid and beatitudes ineffable:

My mind is awake in stirless trance,

Hushed my heart, a burden of delight;

Dispelled is the senses' flicker-dance,

Mute the body aureate with light.⁶⁶

Earth is now girdled with trance and Heaven is put round her for vesture.

Wings that are brilliant with fate sleep at Eternity's gate.

Time waits, vacant, the lightening that kindles, the Word that transfigures:

Space is a stillness of God building his earthly abode.⁶⁷

Slow the heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;

Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway

Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots.⁶⁸

At rest in the unchanging Light, mute with the wordless self-vision,

Spirit, pass out of thyself; Soul, escape from the clutch of Nature.  

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All thou hast seen cast from thee, O Witness.⁶⁹

I saw the spirit of the cosmic Ignorance;

I felt its power besiege my gloried fields of trance.⁷⁰

Hill after hill was climbed and now,

Behold, the last tremendous brow

And the great rock that none has trod:

A step, and all is sky and God.⁷¹

I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart

And heard her black mass' bell,

I have seen the source whence her agonies part

And the inner reason of hell.⁷²

There are, again, single lines like "A quiver and colour of crimson flame"... "In that diamond heart the fires undrape"⁷³... "The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives."⁷⁴... "Time is my drama or my pageant dream"⁷⁵... "A dance of fire-flies in the fretted gloom"⁷⁶... And the gold god and the dream boat come not"⁷⁷... "And a huddle of melancholy hills in the distance"⁷⁸.. ."And high omnipotence come near our grasp"⁷⁹... "A dire intrusion wrapped in married cloud and flame"⁸⁰... "To the hill-tops of silence from over the infinite sea"⁸¹ - these lines are mini-miracles, miracles like the fresh sticky spring foliage or the incredible sweetness of the honey in the comb. In a world paralysed by fear and hatred, the only countervailing power is the still small but potent voice of the Yogin-singer, whose mantric words are verily a dance of creative life and a nectarean promise for the morrow.

IV

When Collected Poems and Plays appeared in 1942 on Sri Aurobindo's seventieth birthday, readers were overwhelmed at once by the rich and varied content of the two sumptuous volumes. But easily the most unexpected item was llion - an epic fragment running to 381 lines - at the end of the second volume, given as if in illustration of Sri Aurobindo's views on the adaptability of quantitative hexameters in English verse. The footnote described it as the opening passages of "a poem left unfinished". Fifteen years later, the whole work was published as llion: An Epic in Quantitative Hexameters, comprising eight Books and an incomplete ninth Book. Except for the portion published in 1942, the rest of the poem hadn't evidently received final revision at Sri Aurobindo's hands. The conclusion too remains unconcluded, but K.D. Sethna - who has carefully examined the manuscript and seen the poem through the press - thinks that perhaps Sri Aurobindo did complete the poem, though the "last pages have somehow got lost". ⁸²

Both Purani and Nirod record a conversation with Sri Aurobindo on 3 January  

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1939 when the discussion was on the hexameter. Sri Aurobindo mentioned that it was one of his Cambridge contemporaries, H.N. Ferrar, who had first given the clue to the hexameter in English by reading out a line from Arthur Hugh Clough - perhaps the line: "He like a god came leaving his ample Olympian chamber" - and this had led to the composition of llion at Pondicherry. Nirod records that Sri Aurobindo also recited four lines from the poem:

One and unarmed in the car was the driver; grey was he, shrunken,

Worn with his decades. To Pergama cinctured with strength Cyclopean

Old and alone he arrived, insignificant, feeblest of mortals,

Carrying Fate in his helpless hands and the doom of an empire.⁸³

Perhaps some passages had been privately seen by Amal Kiran and Arjava, and they had found the experiment a success.*

Whatever else it may or may not be, llion is certainly a tour-de-force, a Homeric exercise in the heroic but almost out-Homering Homer in the fullness of the delineation and the gorgeousness of the imagery. In attempting a continuation of the Iliad of Homer, Sri Aurobindo was taking no small risk, but it was also an irresistible challenge. George Steiner has described the Iliad as "the primer of tragic art", for the Western sense of the "tragic" has been woven out of its motifs and images: "the shortness of heroic life, the exposure of man to the murderousness and caprice of the inhuman, the fall of the City".⁸⁴ If the action of the Iliad is spread over eight days ending with the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles, llion covers the events of a single day, the last day of the doomed city of Troy. The Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna mentions how, after Hector's death, among those that rushed to help Troy was Penthesilea the Queen of the Amazons. Later writers have spun heroic romances round the figures of Achilles and Penthesilea, and in Heinrich von Kleist's tragedy (18O8) - a classic of German poetic drama - Penthesilea first kills Achilles on the field of battle in an outburst of lust and hate, then kills herself in revulsion and remorse; and the other struggle between Hero and Amazon is paralleled by the intestine inner struggle between the conscious and the unconscious selves of the heroine. In Sri Aurobindo's poem, Penthesilea is an Indian Queen who has been lured to Troy to fight Achilles on the opposite side - and she hates as well as loves the Phthian hero. Here, however, the outer struggle is obscurely - but none the less definitively - controlled by the cosmic purposings of the gods on Olympus. In the Iliad the "wrath" of Achilles with Agamemnon starts the action (or occasions the impasse that is the prelude to the action); in llion, the action comprises the "offer" of Achilles to Troy conveyed at dawn, its rejection in the morning by Troy's assembled chieftains, the call to arms, the partings, the synod of the gods, and the fateful death-grapple and the culminating catastrophe. Dawn rises over Ilion's "mysteried greatness" -

* Purani says 'X and Y', Nirod refers explicitly to Amal and Arjava.  

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High over all that a nation had built and its love and its laughter,

Lighting the last time highway and homestead, market and temple,

Looking on men who must die and women destined to sorrow,

Looking on beauty fire must lay low and the sickle of slaughter.⁸⁵

The words "the last time" come with an unexpected but fatal emphasis, and from time to time the words of doom are repeated in divers contexts - in Troy, in the Greek camp, on Olympus - this last time, the last of our fights, for the last time, my last dire wrestle; and "like the insistent tom-tom in an impressionistic play like Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones, to quote Prema Nandakumar, "these periodic hammerings of emphasis... organise the cumulative effect of approaching inevitable doom".* Sinister and ominous. Doom is the shapeless ruthless unseen - it nears, it glowers, it prepares for a swoop - and Doom is the dark and terrible monster of surprise and finality:

...Doom in her sombre and giant uprising

Neared, assailing the skies: the sense of her lived in all pastimes;

Time was pursued by unease and a terror woke in the midnight: ...

Under her, dead to the watching immortals Deiphobus hastened

Clanging in arms through the streets of the beautiful insolent city,

Brilliant, a gleaming husk but empty and left by the daemon.

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.⁸⁶

Troy is doomed, Deiphobus is doomed, and he is already dead in the eyes of the gods though not as yet in the eyes of men. A man is dead, but till the news appear people think he is alive. A star is extinguished, but people see it shining still since the light takes long to travel the infinite spaces and reach their eyes, like a letter being received days after the death of the writer. "It is a question," says Sethna, "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."⁸⁷ The whole poem reverberates with this sense of doom, for although the principal characters talk most eloquently, make striking gestures and engage in desperate actions, it is as though they are thistledowns carried hither and thither, now lifted up now cast on the ground, by a prepotent force that has decreed the doom of Troy on this last day of her proud history.

When, after the death of Hector, Achilles retires once more to sulk in his 

* Sri Aurobindo Circle, Number XX (1926), p. 59; in the article "Approaches to Ilion'. This excellent 30 page study and K.D. Sethna's 'Sri Aurobindo and the Hexameter' (included in The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, 1947) are indispensable to an understanding of Ilion.  

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tents, Penthesilea presently proves a terror to the Greeks. She is the fierce new hope of the Trojans-

Noble and tall and erect in a nimbus of youth and of glory.

Claiming the world and life as a fief of her strength and her courage.. ⁸⁸

The Penthesilea-Achilles motif had been obscurely essayed by Sri Aurobindo earlier in the narrative poems Uloupie and Chitrangada, both incomplete, referred to in an earlier chapter (IV. vi). The warrior-woman, and the heroic hero - the forged antagonism, the fateful attraction! In Ilion, Penthesilea pursues Achilles in love and in hate, but Achilles is in love with Polyxena, daughter of Priam, and for her sake would gladly spare Troy. There are hawks and doves both in Troy and in the Greek camp, and even Olympus is divided on the issue. Like the debate in Hell described in the second Book of Paradise Lost, the speeches in the Trojan Assembly, as also those of the Greek chieftains, present forcefully divergent attitudes that have a universal currency. In Troy, the elder statesman Antenor and his son Halamus advise the acceptance of Achilles' offer, but the hawks - Laocoon, Penthesilea, Paris - carry the day. Rebuffed by Troy, Achilles sends an insolent message to Agamemnon, and the Greek chieftains debate whether they should join Achilles in his attack on Troy or sullenly stand aside from the conflict. Menelaus feels demoralised and strikes a wholly defeatist note, some of the chieftains rail against Agamemnon and some rage against Achilles. It is left to Odysseus to show the way of prudence and calculation. Agamemnon, fallible mortal though he may be, remains the chosen leader of Greece, not "a perfect arbiter armed with impossible virtues", but "a man among men who is valiant, wise and far-seeing". Achilles' prowess is another asset that shouldn't be cast aside in a mood of petulance but exploited for the success of the common cause. Like Paris in Troy, Odysseus wins here, and the climactic death-grapple becomes inevitable.

For almost ten years the war has been going on, this see-saw between victory and defeat, and hope and despair:

All went backwards and forwards tossed in the swing of the death-game.

Vain was the toil of the heroes, the blood of the mighty was squandered.

Spray as of surf on the cliffs when it moans unappeased, unrequited.. .⁸⁹

And now, on the eve of the final battle, the gods too assemble in full force to confabulate and decree:

Hera came in her pride, the spouse of Zeus and his sister.

As at her birth from the foam of the spaces white Aphrodite

Rose in the cloud of her golden hair like the moon in its halo.⁹⁰

And others too, "aegis-bearing Athene, shielded and helmeted", "Artemis, archeress  

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ancient", "immortal Apollo", Themis, and Ananke, and Hephaestus, and the "ancient Dis", "into the courts divine they crowded, radiant, burning". In Sri Aurobindo's play, Eric, as we saw earlier (Chapter VI), the end-note is "not Thor... but Freya"; in Perseus the Deliverer, the change is from ruthless Poseidon's to enlightened Pallas Athene's rule. There is on the terrestrial as well as the cosmic scale a continual push of evolution - from war and revenge to peace and compassion, from the reign of violence and hate to the rule of reason and enlightenment - and behind the monumental clash of arms and the destruction of the towered city and the doom of empire, obscure forces are at work to usher in a new era, to compel new life to rise phoenix-like out of the ashes of the old. On a superficial view, some of the divinities - Ares, Aphrodite, Apollo - are on the side of the Trojans, while others, Poseidon and Hera and Athene, are with the Greeks. And above them all are the "awful three" - Themis, Dis and Ananke - and Zeus of course is above everybody. These gods and goddesses have their divers powers and personalities, yet they are not the ultimate Power - as Agni, Vayu and Indra are made to realise in the Kena Upanishad. In the Council of the Gods when Zeus tells Athene that she shall rule as the light of reason the Greek and the Saxon, the Frank and the Roman, the goddess answers that she knows that she too (like the rest) is but a subordinate power ordained to function only for a limited term:

Zeus, I see and I am not deceived by thy words in my spirit.

We but build forms for thy thought while thou smilest down high o'er our toiling;

Even as men are we tools for thee, who are thy children and dear ones. ...

This too I know that I pass preparing the paths of Apollo

And at the end as his sister and slave and bride I must sojourn

Rapt to his courts of mystic light and unbearable brilliance.⁹¹

Earlier during the debate, "the beautiful mystic Apollo" had accepted his temporary fading out and also prophesied his future resurgence:

Zeus, I know that I fade; already the night is around me. ...

I will go forth from your seats and descend to the night among mortals

There to guard the flame and the mystery....

Jealous for truth to the end my might shall prevail and for ever

Shatter the moulds that men make to imprison their limitless spirits.

Dire, overpowering the brain I shall speak out my oracles splendid.

Then in their ages of barren light or lucidity fruitful

Whenso the clear gods think they have conquered earth and its mortals,

Hidden God from all eyes, they shall wake from their dream and recoiling

Still they shall find in their paths the fallen and darkened Apollo.⁹²

Mystic Apollo will withdraw awhile and leave the stage to Pallas Athene and the reign of reason - but reason too will one day be compelled to recognise its insufficiency,

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and then will come the time for Apollo's return signifying the age of sovereign intuition. Apollo will be all the purer and stronger for a temporary eclipse, for this will be the means of tempering on the anvil of intellectual reason his old oracular insights and thereby evolving the higher intuitive or (shall we say) supramental intelligence. From magic and mystery to reason and science and so on to the supramental light and force! The language is recognisably Homeric, but the Aurobindonian touch of creative thought gives the whole debate the look of a dialectic and even of a prophecy.*

It is Sri Aurobindo's deeper artistic intention to insinuate through hints and nuances of surmise that human motives and actions are not autonomous but are involved in the movements and purposings of the gods. Poseidon heaven within us. Ares starts fires in us. Aphrodite causes a mad flutter in our hearts, Apollo kindles a sudden transfiguring light. The occult and the terrestrial planes intersect unexpectedly, the subliminal is a sea within and without us, there are invasions from the 'overhead' planes, there are minglings, matings, meltings, partings. In the foreground is played the shattering last act of the Trojan War. The women - Helen, Hecuba, Cassandra, Polyxena, Creusa, Briseis - are carefully delineated. The Trojan heroes are mythic figures, and of them Aeneas alone stands apart - he is the hope of the future. For the rest, the chieftains and warriors are so many, on the field of the battle there are advances and retreats, there are alarms and diversions, but the foci of attention are still Penthesilea the Indian warrior Queen and the intrepid irresistible Achilles. As the battle proceeds, what grips the reader's gaze is the tantalising progress of the murderous courtship of Penthesilea and Achilles - yet the poem breaks off before they meet face to face. Their cars approach each other and yet fail to meet:

Even in defeat these were Hellenes and fit to be hosts of Achilles, -

But like a doom on them thundered the war-car of Penthesilea

Pharatus smote and Surabdas and Sambus and iron Surenas,

Down the leaders fell and the armies reeled towards the Ocean.

Wroth he cried to his coursers and fiercely they heard and they hastened;

Swift like a wind o'er the grasses galloped the car of Achilles.⁹³

The last we hear is the Hellene shout and the name of Achilles, but the end of the affair is left to be inferred by the reader.

It is probable enough that Sri Aurobindo intended to conclude the poem following the main lines of tradition. Achilles kills Penthesilea after a fierce engagement, Paris kills Achilles by aiming an arrow at his vulnerable heel with Apollo's connivance, and the Greeks practise deceit and enter Troy the same night and set fire to it. All this is prefigured in Cassandra's prophecies and Briseis' visions and Aeneas' dream. Thus his prophetic sister to Paris about Achilles:

* See also Sethna, Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, pp. 319ff.

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Yes, he shall fall and his slayer too shall perish and Troy with his slayer..

Thou shalt return for thy hour while Troy yet stands in the sunshine.

She then returns to her chamber and cries in her pain:

Troy shall fall in her sin and her virtues shall not protect her...

Woe is me, woe for the flame that approaches the house of my fathers!⁹⁴

Aeneas dreams that Ilion's streets are on fire and foemen are around him, and Briseis sees thrice a bow releasing an arrow that strikes Achilles' heel.95 And Cassandra sees "centuries slain by a single day of the anger of heaven".

Like the Iliad and the Aeneid, llion too - whether left incomplete, or is now found incomplete - is a monumental relation of events, of intimate human interest underlining the play of human egoism, pride and hatred and the mysterious workings of destiny. As other epics do, llion also occasionally weaves the magic of poetry out of exotic proper names:

Astyoches and Ucalegon, dateless Pallachus, Aetor,

Aspetus who of the secrets divine knew all and was silent,

Ascanus, Iliones, Alcesiphron, Orus, Aretes....⁹⁶

Hyrtamus fell, Admetus was wounded, Charmidas slaughtered;

Cirrhes died, though he faced not the blow while he hastened to shelter.

Itylus, bright and beautiful, went down to night and to Hades.⁹⁷

As for the similes in llion, they are no doubt immediately explanatory and decorative, but they are also integral to the scheme and texture and meaning of the epic recital. The best epic similes, besides answering the demands of the narrative through the employment of apt images and detailed description, become (in B.A. Wright's words) "substantial parts of the story.... They are not digressions the poet can forget as soon as they are over; he cannot afford to forget any image or word he uses, for each at once becomes an element in the growing forces of the narrative".⁹⁸ There is, for example, the simile in the opening Book about the herald Talthybius' urgent summons:

High and insistent the call. In the dimness and hush of his chamber

Charioted far in his dreams amid visions of glory and terror,

Scenes of a vivider world, - though blurred and deformed in the brain-cells,

Vague and inconsequent, there full of colour and beauty and greatness, -

Suddenly drawn by the pull of the conscious thread of the earth-bond

And of the needs of Time and the travail assigned in the transience

Warned by his body, Deiphobus, reached in that splendid remoteness,

Touched through the nerve-ways of life that branch to the brain of the dreamer,  

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Heard the terrestrial call and slumber startled receded

Sliding like dew from the mane of a lion.⁹⁹

The invasion of Deiphobus' world of privacy by the intrusive summons of the outside world is compared to the invasion of the bitter-sweet infinitudes of the subconscious dream-world by the aggressive pull of everyday actuality. The dreams melt away, slumber slips away - and isn't "life" itself "such stuff as dreams are made on", to be shattered any time by the assertive will of the immortals who pull the strings of the human drama from the occult world behind?

Sometimes double similes occur to produce particular effects. For example. Antenor's speech in the Trojan Assembly is likened to the billows that are like "the hooded wrath of serpent".¹⁰⁰ Odysseus in the Greek camp is likened to an oak, a peak, a conqueror, a mortal Atlas, and finally to

.. .the Master who bends o'er his creatures,

Suffers their sins and their errors and guides them screening his guidance;

Each through his nature He leads and the world by the lure of His wisdom.¹⁰¹

The similitudes come not single but in battalions - it is a superb passage.

As regards the metre, what was said about Sri Aurobindo's handling of the hexameter in the section on Ahana applies to the maturer parts (notably Book I) of llion as well. Some scattered lines that have caught the true hexametric rhythm - its majestic heave and flow - are cited below:

Long I had heard in my distant realms of the fame of Achilles...

Men, these are visions of lackbrains; men, these are myths of the market.

Back to the ships and the roar of the sea and the iron-hooped leaguer.

Peal forth the war-shout, pour forth the spear-sleet, surge towards Troya.

Lo, in the night came this dream; on the morn thou arisest for battle.

And in the noon there was night. And Apollo passed out of Troya.

Loud with the clamour of hooves and the far-rolling gust of the war-cry...¹⁰²

Most of llion didn't receive finishing touches at the poet's hands, and accordingly the tongue trips off and on, and the dactylic changes unawares into the rising anapaestic rhythm. But a little practice helps, and in any case there can be no question about the total effect which is over-powering. It is, however, only when reading a passage of some length - like the magnificent Exordium - that the full force of the rhythmic plenitude can slowly sink into the awakened consciousness.

Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of mortals,

Dawn the beginner of things with the night for their rest or their ending,  

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Pallid and bright-lipped arrived from the mists and the chill of the Euxine.

Earth in the dawn-fire delivered from starry and shadowy vastness

Woke to the wonder of life and its passion and sorrow and beauty,

All on her bosom sustaining, the patient compassionate Mother.¹⁰³

As if by sleight or artistic intention, Ilion has been shaped by Sri Aurobindo as the saga of the Indian Queen, Penthesilea. It is she who fills the ample spaces of the epic with her aggressive and radiant power and presence. In the opening Book she is seen coming out of her chamber of sleep "capturing the eye like a smile or a sunbeam". To Laocoon in the Trojan Assembly, she is heaven-sent and a continent in herself. We see her in Priam's Palace surrounded by her chieftains - Surabdas, Surenas, Pharatus, Somaranes, Valarus, Tauron, Sumalus, Arithon, Sambas and Artaboruxes. Her challenge to Achilles is delivered by the herald in Book V:

Sea of renown and of valour that fillest the world with thy rumour,...

Dread of the world and my target, swift-footed glorious hero!

O, I have longed for thee, warrior! Therefore today by thy message

So was I seized with delight that my heart was hurt with its rapture,...

Nay, if thou has that strength, then hunt me, O hunter, and seize me,...

But if thou canst not, death of myself or thyself thou shalt capture.¹⁰⁴

In the Greek camp, Menelaus despairingly asks: "Who in the dreadful field can prevail against Penthesilea...?", while the Locrian swift-footed Ajax calls her "this hell-bitch armed by the furies". Zeus himself takes in his eternal gaze "the beauty of Penthesilea". And Book IX is mostly filled with the ambience of her prowess and personality. The bold "unwomanly" woman, woman as uncompromising Shakti, had been sketched earlier by Sri Aurobindo in Vidula (after the Mahabharata), in Chitrangada, in Cleopatra of Rodogune, in Aslaug of Eric, in Cassiopea of Perseus the Deliverer; and Andromeda was the portrait of a woman fearless as well as compassionate, her Shakti playing the role of triumphant Grace rather than that of ruthless power. But Penthesilea still stands apart in her fiery epic grandeur. She comes partly as the would-be saviour of Troy and partly - or chiefly - as the seeker of Achilles, half in hate and half in love. Staking all, daring all, she is the committed uncalculating woman made up of beauty and love and valour and hate. Nevertheless, she is neither the whole nor the really wholesome efflorescence of Woman as" Shakti. In the Western tradition, Penthesilea could be linked with Atlanta and Artemis and even Ishtar of the still earlier myths. But Sri Aurobindo sees her in other possible lights as well. In European literature, the Iliad and the Aeneid led up to The Divine Comedy and its sanctified heroine, Beatrice. "Sri Aurobindo's Penthesilea too," writes Prema Nandakumar, "is but the forerunner of the more than Beatrice-like power of Savitri, the immaculate woman who redeems Satyavan, the besieged Troy of the triune Satyam-Sivam-Sundaram. Beyond the 'tragic art' of Ilion looms in white radiance the 'divine comedy' of the spiritual action in Savitri."¹⁰⁵  

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V

All streams in Sri Aurobindo's Himalayas of achievement seem to lead to the puskarinī - the nectarean pool - of Savitri. The narrative poems, Urvasie and Love and Death, with their preoccupation with the problem of death and of human felicity, find their remote consummation in the legendary and symbolistic tale of Satyavan, Savitri and Yama; the dramatic heroines, Andromeda, Rodogune, Aslaug, the warrior-queens, Chitrangada and Penthesilea, are all included and exceeded in Savitri; the philosophy of The Life Divine and the "ten limbs" of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga find superb enactment in Savitri; the whole history of earth and man and society and human polity, the past failures, the present confusions, the future possibilities, are also dramatised on the multi-tier stage of Savitri; the evolution and architecture of the occult worlds - the worlds of light above, the regions of darkness below, the twilight realm between - are presented in Savitri as compellingly living realities; and, finally, whatever was of universal relevance in Sri Aurobindo's personal, political or spiritual life finds memorable recordation in Savitri.

During 1938-40 and later, Sri Aurobindo wrote a number of sonnets (sixty or more), most of them snaps of spiritual autobiography, and what is essential in these has also gone to enrich the total content of Savitri. But these sonnets have their distinctive character too, and some of them at least are among the best of their kind, comparable indeed to the finest work of Donne or Hopkins. It would thus be rewarding to read Sri Aurobindo's sonnets as the rhythmic diary-notes of an integral Yogin's experiences ranging from the Inconscient to the Superconscient realms. 'The Conscious Inconscient', 'The Dumb Inconscient', 'The Inconscient Foundation' and 'The Inconscient' are so many probings and proddings into the density of the inconscient so as to provoke it to reveal its true nature. Although the "dumb Inconscient" is "a night of all things, packed and infinite", - although the "inconscient blind Infinity" might throw up

Masters of falsehood. Kings of ignorance,

High sovereign Lords of suffering and death....

Cold propagandists of a million lies,

Dictators of a world of agony...¹⁰⁶

nevertheless it is out of the Inconscient itself that the glories of our earth and state ultimately emerge. And Homo Sapiens -

Man is a narrow bridge, a call that grows,

His soul the dim bud of God's flaming rose.¹⁰⁷

The 'Conscious Inconscient' is "a mathematician Mind that never errs... an adept of a thousand mysteries".¹⁰⁸ When the mind in indrawn concentration peers microscope-like 

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into the "inconscient foundation" of our life, what does it see except "the black Inconscient's enigmatic script... the tables of the Ignorance... the scriptures of Necessity and Chance"?¹⁰⁹ All these insights and illuminations are gathered and coalesced into the mature revelation of 'Inconscient' dated 21 March 1944:

Out of a seeming void and dark-winged sleep

Of dim inconscient infinity

A Power arose from the insentient deep,

A flame-whirl of magician Energy.

Some huge somnambulist Intelligence

Devising without thought process and plan

Arrayed the burning stars' magnificence,

The living bodies of beasts and the brain of man.

What stark Necessity or ordered Chance

Became alive to know the cosmic whole?

What magic of numbers, what mechanic dance

Developed consciousness, assumed a soul?

The darkness was the Omnipotent's abode,

Hood of omniscience, a blind mask of God.¹¹⁰

The exciting journey of consciousness - the great leap from Inconscience to Superconscience, from Ignorance to Omniscience - is the whole mechanics of the evolutionary endeavour. In his first sonnet on 'Evolution', Sri Aurobindo addressed unfinished or transitional Man:

All is not finished in the Unseen's decree!...

O Thou who climbedst to mind from the dull stone,

Turn to the miracled summits yet unwon.¹¹¹

But the later sonnet on the same subject written the day following the composition of 'Inconscient' is more of a mantric evocation of an epiphanic experience:

I passed into a lucent still abode

And saw as in a mirror crystalline

An ancient Force ascending serpentine

The unhasting spirals of the aeonic road.

Earth was a cradle for the arriving god

And man but a half-dark half-luminous sign

Of the transition of the veiled Divine  

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From Matter's sleep and the tormented load

Of ignorant life and death to the Spirit's light.

Mind liberated swam Light's ocean-vast,

And life escaped from its grey tortured line;

I saw Matter illumining its parent Night.

The soul could feel into infinity cast

Timeless God-bliss the heart incarnadine.¹¹²

What is this "Power" and "flame-whirl" mentioned in 'Inconscient' and the "ancient Force" mentioned in 'Evolution'? There is, perhaps, a kinship between this Force or Power and the "Combatant" of Nikos Kazantzakis:

Then suddenly a great light was born within me: the transmutation of matter into spirit. Here was the great secret, the red ribbon followed by the Combatant.... I now clearly saw the progress of the Invisible, and suddenly I knew what my duty was to be: to work in harmony together with that Combatant; to transmute, even I, in my own small capacity, matter into spirit. ¹¹³

If Evolution is the adventure of consciousness, world-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva - of Kali - of Krishna. While, Kali's feet measure "in rhythms of pain and grief and chance. Life's game of hazard terrible and sweet", Krishna's dance will radiate "sweetness, laughter, rapture, love".¹¹⁴ When Shiva turns to the Mighty Mother,

Half now awake she rises to his glance;

Then, moved to circling by her heart-beats' will,

The rhythmic worlds describe that passion-dance.

Life springs in her and Mind is born; her face

She lifts to Him who is Herself, untill

The Spirit leaps into the Spirit's embrace.¹¹⁵

This ecstasy of world-existence is not the gods' alone but is also within reach of the realised man. Mortal man can find in himself "the door to immortality", and he can with his cosmic consciousness see himself in all things and all things in himself:

I am a single Self all Nature fills.

Immeasurable, unmoved the Witness sits:...

The burning galaxies are in me outlined;

The universe is my stupendous whole....

I share all creatures' sorrow and content

And feel the passage of every stab and kiss. .. .¹¹⁶  

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I contain the whole world in my soul's embrace:

In me Arcturus and Belphegor bum. ...

The world's happiness flows through me like wine,

Its million sorrows are my agonies....¹¹⁷

I have learned a close identity with all,

Yet am by nothing bound that I become;

Carrying in me the universe's call

I mount to my imperishable home...¹¹⁸

Each finite thing I see is a facade;

From its windows looks at me the Illimitable.

In vain was my prison of separate body made;

His occult presence bums in every cell. ...¹¹⁹

To have won this light of cosmic consciousness is also to participate in the 'Bliss of Brahman', to "become a foam-white sea of bliss... a curling wave of God's delight".¹²⁰

It is natural for the materialist to imagine that the so-called "marvels of modern science" have emptied existence of all significant mystery. But isn't it an over-simplification to declare that the world is run by "electric hordes", that "an algebra of mind, a scheme of sense, a symbol language" can really pluck the heart of the cosmic puzzle?121 In 'A Dream of Surreal Science' Sri Aurobindo has summed up the Materialist Denial with a touch of whimsy:

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. Helens 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.¹²²

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This sonnet is dated 25 September 1939, and was thus written nearly five years before atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fact of the matter is that what we think is the end of the affair-is rather the beginning. Our science "sees all things in outward carved relief and doesn't realise that "the visible has its roots in the unseen".123 The deeper insights find recordation in the sonnet 'Electron':

The electron on which forms and worlds are built,

Leaped into being, a particle of God.

A spark from the eternal Energy spilt,

It is the Infinite's blind minute abode.

In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides....

Atom and molecule in their unseen plan

Buttress an edifice of strange onenesses,

Crystal and plant, insect and beast and man, -

Man on whom the World-Unity shall seize,

Widening his soul-spark to an epiphany

Of the timeless vastness of Infinity.¹²⁴

And so, in sonnet after sonnet, the scientist and the thinker are surpassed by the mystic, and the mystic sees what the eye cannot see, what the most complicated machines cannot record, what the latest sophistication in mathematical physics cannot infer. From the depths of Inconscience to summits of Superconscience is one marvellous arc of existence, one tremendous spiral of evolution; and the many worlds are also One World, even in the deepest mire the Divine is veiled or coiled, and even the giddiest Everests of the Spirit are susceptible to the obscure pulls towards the stark densities of Matter. If in 'Though the Paraclete' there is graphed the ascent to the "vasts of God", in sonnets like 'The Pilgrim of the Night' there is described - as in 'A God's Labour' - a determined plunge into the Abyss:

I made an assignation with the Night;

In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:

In my breast carrying God's deathless light

I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.

I left the glory of the illumined Mind

And the calm rapture of the divinised soul

And travelled through a vastness dim and blind

To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.

I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime

And still that weary journeying knows no end;  

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Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,

There comes no voice of the celestial Friend,

And yet I know my footprints' track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality.¹²⁵

The first draft of the above - describing the descent into the Night (more fully and overwhelmingly described in Savitri, Book II, Canto vii) - was made in July 1938 and the final draft in March 1944. Here all is dull slime and tartarean dark, although Hope lingers still; in "The Infinite Adventure', written in September 1939, the worst is already over, and there is seen a pointing light:

An unseen Hand controls my rudder. Night

Walls up the sea in a black corridor, -

An inconscient Hunger's lion plaint and roar

Or the ocean sleep of a dead Eremite.¹²⁶

In subsequent mystic affirmations, the poet is revealed as being equally at home whether on the peaks or in the depths:

Light, endless Light! darkness has room no more,

Life's ignorant gulfs give up their secrecy...

I move in an ocean of stupendous Light

Joining my depths to His eternal height.¹²⁷

Arisen to voiceless unattainable peaks

I meet no end, for all is boundless He,

An absolute joy the wide-winged spirit seeks.

A Might, a Presence, an Eternity.

In the inconscient dreadful dumb Abyss

Are heard the heart-beats of the Infinite.

The insensible midnight veils His trance of bliss,

A fathomless sealed astonishment of Light.¹²⁸

All forms are Thy dream-dialect of delight.

O Absolute, O vivid Infinite.¹²⁹

Revelatory, epiphanic, these pointer-readings in the interior occult countries the world-stair are the prelude airs to the Divina Commedia that is Savitri.  

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