Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 2

WHAT is the world that Sri Aurobindo sees and creates? Poetry is after all passion. By passion I do not mean the fury of emotion nor the fume of sentimentalism, but what lies behind at their source, what lends them the force they have­ – the sense of the "grandly real," the vivid and pulsating truth. What then is the thing that Sri Aurobindo has visualised, has endowed with a throbbing life and made a poignant reality? Victor Hugo said: Attachez Dieu au gibet, vous avez la croix – Tie God to the gibbet, you have the cross. Even so, infuse passion into a thing most prosaic, you create sublime poetry out of it. What is the dead matter that has found life and glows and vibrates in Sri Aurobindo's passion? It is something which appears to many poetically intractable, not amenable to aesthetic treatment, not usually, that is to say, nor in the supreme manner. Sri Aurobindo has thrown such a material into his poetic fervour and created a sheer beauty, a stupen­dous reality out of it. Herein lies the greatness of his achieve­ment. Philosophy, however divine, and in spite of Milton, has been regarded by poets as "harsh and crabbed" and as such unfit for poetic delineation. Not a few poets indeed foundered upon this rock. A poet in his own way is a philosopher, but a philosopher chanting out his philosophy in sheer poetry has been one of the rarest spectacles.¹ I can think of only one instance just now where a philosopher has almost succeeded being a great poet – I am referring to Lucretius and his De Rerum Natura. Neither Shakespeare nor Homer had anything

¹ James H. Cousins in his New Ways in English Literature describes Sri Aurobindo as "the philosopher as poet."

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like philosophy in their poetic creation. And in spite of some inclination to philosophy and philosophical ideas Virgil and Milton were not philosophers either. Dante sought perhaps consciously and deliberately to philosophise in his Paradiso. I Did he? The less Dante then is he. For it is his Inferno, where he is a passionate visionary, and not his Paradiso (where he has put in more thought-power) that marks the nee plus ultra of his poetic achievement.

And yet what can be more poetic in essence than philo­sophy, if by philosophy we mean, as it should mean, spiritual truth and spiritual realisation? What else can give the full breath, the integral force to poetic inspiration if it is not the problem of existence itself, of God, Soul and Immortality, things that touch, that are at the very root of life and reality? What can most concern man, what can strike the deepest fount in him, unless it is the mystery of his own being, the why and the whither of it all? But mankind has been taught and trained to live merely or mostly on earth, and poetry has been treated as the expression of human joys and sorrows – the tears in mortal things of which Virgil spoke. The savour of earth, the thrill of the flesh has been too sweet for us and we have forgotten other sweetnesses. It is always the human ele­ment that we seek in poetry, but we fail to recognise that what we obtain in this way is humanity in its lower degrees, its surface formulations, at its minimum magnitude.

We do not say that poets have never sung of God and Soul and things transcendent. Poets have always done that. But what I say is this that presentation of spiritual truths, as they are in their own home, in other words, treated philo­sophically and yet in a supreme poetic manner, has always been a rarity. We have, indeed, in India the Gita and the Upanishads, great philosophical poems, if there were any. But for one thing they are on dizzy heights out of the reach of common man and for another they are idolised more as philosophy than as poetry. Doubtless, our Vaishnava poets sang of God and Love Divine; and Rabindranath, in one sense, a typical modern Vaishnava, did the same. And their songs are masterpieces. But are they not all human, too human, as the mad prophet would say? In them it is the human significance, the human manner that touches and moves

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us – the spiritual significance remains esoteric, is suggested, is a matter of deduction. Sri Aurobindo has dealt with spiritual experiences in a different way. He has not clothed them in human symbols and allegories, in images and figures of the mere earthly and secular life: he presents them in their nakedness, just as they are seen and realised. He has not sought to tone down the rigour of truth with contrivances that easily charm and captivate the common human mind and heart. Nor has he indulged like so many poet philosophers in vague generalisations and colourless or too colourful truisms that do not embody a clear thought or rounded idea, a radiant judg­ment. Sri Aurobindo has given us in his poetry thoughts that are clear-cut, ideas beautifully chiselled – he is always lumi­nously forceful.

Take these Vedantic lines that in their limpidity and har­monious flow beat anything found in the fine French poet Lamartine:

It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,

And into the midnight His shadow is thrown;

When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,

He was seated within it immense and alone.¹

or these that contain the metaphysics of a spiritual life:

King, not in vain. I knew the tedious bars

That I had fled,

To be His arms whom I have sought; I saw

How earth was made

Out of his being; I perceived the Law,

The Truth, the Vast,

From which we came and which we are; I heard

The ages past

Whisper their history, and I knew the Word

That forth was cast

Into the unformed potency of things

To build the suns.

Through endless Space and on Time's iron wings

A rhythm runs

¹ Sri Aurobindo: "Who".

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Our lives pursue, and till the strain's complete

That now so moans

And falters, we upon this greenness meet,

That measure tread.¹

or take again such daring lines as:

One from of old possessed Himself above

Who was not anyone nor had a form,

Nor yet was formless. Neither hate nor love

Could limit His perfection, peace nor storm.

He is, we cannot say; for Nothing too

Is His conception of Himself unguessed.

He dawns upon us and we would pursue,

But who has found Him or what arms possessed ?²

This is sheer philosophy, told with an almost philosophical bluntness – may be, but is it mere philosophy and mediocre poetry? Once more listen to the Upanishadic lines:

Deep in the luminous secrecy, the mute

Profound of things,

Where murmurs never sound of harp or lute

And no voice sings,

Light is not, nor our darkness, nor these bright

Thunderings,

In the deep steady voiceless core of white

And luminous bliss,

The sweet vast centre and the cave divine

Called Paradise,

He dwells within us all who dwells not in

Aught that is.³

It is the bare truth, "truth in its own home", as I have said already using a phrase of the ancient sages, that is for­mulated here without the prop of any external symbolism. There is no veil, no mist, no uncertainty or ambiguity. It is clarity itself, an almost scientific exactness and precision. In

¹ Sri Aurobindo: "The Rishi".

² "Parabrahman" .

³ "The Rishi".

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all this there is something of the straightness and fullness of vision that characterised the Vedic Rishis, something of their supernal genius which could mould speech into the very expres­sion of what is beyond speech, which could sublimate the small and the finite into forms of the Vast and the Infinite. Mark how in these aphoristic lines embodying a deep spiritual experience, the inexpressible has been expressed with a luminous felicity:

Delight that labours in its opposite,

Faints in the rose and on the rack is curled.¹

or

He made an eager death and called it life,

He stung Himself with bliss and called it pain.²

To humanise the Divine, that is what we all wish to do; for the Divine is too lofty for us and we cannot look full in­to his face. We cry and supplicate to Rudra, "O dire Lord, show us that other form of thine that is benign and humane". All earthly imageries we lavish upon the Divine so that he may appear to us not as something far and distant and foreign, but, quite near, among us, as one of us. We take recourse to human symbolism often, because we wish to palliate or hide the rigours of a supreme experience, not because we have no adequate terms for it. The same human or earthly terms could be used differently if we had a different consciousness. Thus the Vedic Rishis sought not to humanise the Divine, their pur­pose was rather to divinise the human. And their allegorical language, although rich in terrestrial figures, does not carry the impress and atmosphere of mere humanity and earthliness. For in reality the symbol is not merely the symbol. It is mere symbol in regard to the truth so long as we take our stand on the lower plane when we have to look at the truth through the symbol; but if we view it from the higher plane, from truth itself, it is no longer mere symbol but the very truth bodied forth. Whatever there is of symbolism on earth and its beauties, in sense and its enjoyments, is then transfigured into the expres­sion of the truth, of the divinity itself. We then no longer speak in human language but in the language of the gods.

We have been speaking of philosophy and the philosophic

¹"Parabrahman".

² Ibid.

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manner. But what are the exact implications of the words, let us ask again. They mean nothing more – and nothing less – than the force of thought and the mass of thought content. After all, that seems to be almost the whole difference between the past and the present human consciousness in so far at least as it has found expression in poetry. That element, we wish to point out, is precisely what the old-world poets lacked or did not care to possess or express or stress. A poet meant above all, if not all in all, emotion, passion, sensuousness, sensibility, nervous enthusiasm and imagination and fancy: remember the classic definition given by Shakespeare of the poet

Of imagination all compact.. . .

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling.¹

The heart and its urges, the vital and its surges, the physical impulses – it is these of which the poets sang in their infinite variations. But the mind proper, that is to say, the higher reflective ideative mind, was not given the right of citizenship in the domain of poetry. I am not forgetting the so-called Metaphysicals. The element of metaphysics among the Meta­physicals has already been called into question. There is here, no doubt, some theology, a good dose of mental cleverness or conceit, but a modern intellectual or rather rational intelligence is something other, something more than that. Even the meta­physics that was commandeered here had more or less a decorative value, it could not be taken into the pith and sub­stance of poetic truth and beauty. It was a decoration, but not unoften a drag. I referred to the Upanishads, but these strike quite a different, almost an opposite line in this con­nection. They are in a sense truly metaphysical: they bypass the mind and the mental powers, get hold of a higher mode of consciousness, make a direct contact with truth and beauty and reality. It was Buddha's credit to have forged this missing link in man's spiritual consciousness, to have brought into play the power of the rational intellect and used it in support of the spiritual experience. That is not to say that he was the very first person, the originator who initiated the movement; but at least this seems to be true that in him and his authentic

¹ A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Sc 1.

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followers the movement came to the forefront of human con­sciousness and attained the proportions of a major member of man's psychological constitution. We may remember here that Socrates, who started a similar movement of rationalisa­tion in his own way in Europe, was almost a contemporary of the Buddha.

Poetry as an expression of thought-power, poetry weighted with intelligence and rationalised knowledge – that seems to me to be the end and drive, the secret sense of all the mystery of modern technique. The combination is risky, but not im­possible. In the spiritual domain the Gita achieved this miracle to a considerable degree. Still, the power of intelligence and reason shown by Vyasa is of a special order: it is a sublimated function of the faculty, something aloof and other-worldly­ – "introvert", a modern mind would term it – that is to say, something a priori, standing in its own authenticity and self­sufficiency. A modern intelligence would be more scientific, let us use the word, more matter-of-fact and sense-based: the mental light should not be confined in its ivory tower, however high that may be, but brought down and placed at the service of our perception and appreciation and explanation of things human and terrestrial; made immanent in the mundane and the ephemeral, as they are commonly called. This is not an impossibility. Sri Aurobindo seems to have done the thing. In him we find the three terms of human consciousness arriving at an absolute fusion and his poetry is a wonderful example of that fusion. The three terms are the spiritual, the intellectual or philosophical and the physical or sensational. The intellec­tual, or more generally, the mental, is the intermediary, the Paraclete, as he himself will call it later on in a poem¹ magni­ficently exemplifying the point we are trying to make out ­the agent who negotiates, bridges and harmonises the two other firmaments usually supposed to be antagonistic and in­compatible.

Indeed it would be wrong to associate any cold ascetic nudity to the spiritual body of Sri Aurobindo. His poetry is philosophic, abstract, no doubt, but every philosophy has its practice, every abstract thing its concrete application, – even as the soul has its body; and the fusion, not mere union, of the

¹ "Thought the Paraclete".

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two is very characteristic in him. The deepest and unseizable flights of thought he knows how to clothe with a Kalidasian richness of imagery, or a Keatsean gusto of sensuousness:

. . . . .O flowers, O delight on the tree-tops burning!

Grasses his kine have grazed and crushed by his feet in the dancing!

Yamuna flowing with song, through the greenness always advancing!

You unforgotten remind. For his flute with its sweetness ensnaring

Sounds in our ears in the night and our souls of their teguments baring

Hales them out naked and absolute, out to his wood­ lands eternal,

Out to his moonlit dances, his dalliance sweet and supernal;¹

And it would be wrong too to suppose that there is want of sympathy in Sri Aurobindo for ordinary humanity, that he is not susceptible to sentiments, to the weaknesses, that stir the natural man. Take for example this line so instinct with a haunting melancholy strain:

Cold are your rivers of peace and their banks are leafless and lonely.

or,

Come to our tangled sunbeams, dawn on our twilights and shadows

or again,

Skies of monotonous calm and his stillness slaying the ages?

All the tragedy, the entire pathos of human life is concen­trated in this line so simple, yet so grand:

Son of man, thou hast crowned the life with the flowers that are scentless,

¹ From "Ahana" in Sri Aurobindo's Ahana and Other Poems. There is a later version of the poem in Collected Poems and Plays, Vol II.

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And the whole aspiration of striving mortality finds its echo in:

A song not master of its note, a cry

That persevered into eternity.¹

And what an amount of tenderness he has poured into his little poem on childhood, a perfect piece of chiselled crystal, pure and translucent and gleaming with the clear lines of a summer sky:

O thou golden image,

Miniature of bliss,

Speaking sweetly, speaking meetly!

Every word deserves a kiss.²

And yet, I should say, in all this it is not mere the human that is of supreme interest, but something which even in being human yet transcends it.

And here, let me point out, the capital difference between the European or rather the Hellenic spirit and the Indian spirit. It is the Indian spirit to take stand upon divinity and thence to embrace and mould what is earthly and human. The Greek spirit took its stand pre-eminently on earth and what belongs to earth. In Europe Dante's was a soul spiritualised more than perhaps any other and yet his is not a Hindu soul. The utmost that he could say after all the experience of the tragedy of mortality was:

Io no piangeva, si dentro impietrai –³

I grieve not, into a stone I grew within.

We have in Sri Aurobindo a passage parallel in sentiment, if not of equal poetic value, which will bear out the contrast:

My mind within grew holy, calm and still

Like the snow.

¹ "Reminiscence."

² "A Child's Imagination."

³ Inferno, xxxiii. 39.

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However spiritual a soul, Dante is yet bound to the earth, he has dominated perhaps but not conquered.

The Greek sings of the humanity of man, the Indian the divinity of man. It is the Hellenic spirit that has very largely moulded our taste and we have forgotten that an equally poetic world exists in the domain of spiritual life, even in its very severity, as in that of earthly life and its sweetness. And as we are passionate about the earthly life, even so Sri Auro­bindo has made a passion of the spiritual life. Poetry after all has a mission; the phrase "Art for Art's sake" may be made to mean anything. Poetry is not merely what is pleasing, not even what is merely touching and moving but what is at the same time, inspiring, invigorating, elevating. Truth is indeed beauty but it is not always the beauty that captivates the eye or the mere aesthetic sense.

And because our Vedic poets always looked beyond humani­ty, beyond earth, therefore could they make divine poetry of humanity and what is of earth. Therefore it was that they were pervadingly so grandiose and sublime and puissant. The heroic, the epic was their natural element and they could not but express themselves in the grand manner. Sri Aurobindo has the same outlook and it is why we find in him the ring of the old-world manner.

Mark the stately march, the fullness of voice, the wealth of imagery, the vigour of movement of these lines:

What though it's true that the river of Life

through the Valley of Peril

Flows? But the diamond shines on the cliff-side,

jacinth and beryl

Gleam in the crannies, sapphire, smaragdus the

roadway bejewel,

Down in the jaws of the savage mountains granite

and cruel.

See, how the coursers divine champ spirited

pawing the mountains!

Look, how the wide-pacing river of life from its

far-off fountains

Flows down mighty and broad like a war-horse

brought from its manger

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Arching its neck as it paces grand to the gorges

of danger.

Headlong, o'ercome, with a stridulent horror the

river descending

Shudders below into sunless depths, along chasms

unending,­–

And the majestic sweep and the wide rolling cadence of­

These wanderings of the suns, these stars at play

In the due measure that they chose of old.. . .

The superb and the right imperial tone instinct with a con­centrated force of

Who art thou, warrior armed gloriously

Like the sun?

Thy gait is an empire and thine eye

Dominion.

This is poetry salutary indeed if there were any. We are so often and so much enamoured of the feminine languidness of poetry; the clear, the sane, the virile, that is a type of poetry that our nerves cannot always or for long stand. But there is poetry that is agréable and there is poetry that is grand, as Sainte Beuve said. There are the pleasures of poetry and there are the "ardours of poetry". And the great poets are always grand rather than agréable, full of the ardours of poetry rat her than the pleasures of poetry.

And if there is something in the creative spirit of Sri Auro­bindo which tends more towards the strenuous than the genial, the arduous than the mellifluous, and which has more of the austerity of Vyasa than the easy felicity of Valmiki, however it might have affected the ultimate value of his creation, ac­cording to certain standards,¹ it has illustrated once more that

¹". . .it cannot be said that Aurobindo shows any organic adaptation to music and melody. His thought is profound; his technical devices are commendable; but the music that enchants or disturbs is not there. Aurobindo is not another Tagore or Iqbal, or even Sarojini Naidu." – The Times Literary Supplement, July 8, 1944.

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poetry is not merely beauty but power, it is not merely sweet imagination but creative vision – it is even the Rik, the mantra that impels the gods to manifest upon earth, that fashions divinity in man.

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