Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - An Approach And A Study

III

Trends in Modern English Poetry

So far as poetical creation is concerned, the present is a period of transition, that is to say, there are many widely separate attempts, some fine and powerful beginnings but no large consummation, no representative work, no dominating figure. But it is a period full of hundreds of influences, many-motived, and therefore naturally rich in interesting and fruitful experiments. So far as the output of the modem poetry is concerned the new age is not yet. It is with Sāvitrī that the new age may be said to have arrived.

Among the precursors of this new age may be counted Whitman, Carpenter, Yeats, A. E. Meredith, Stephen Phillips, Tagore in whose works one can see clear indications of the new spirit and experiments with many forms of poetic expression. The nature of this change may be said to consist in the deepening and enlarging of the thought-mind of man, a more profound and intimate way of seeing life, of feeling and interpreting Nature. A greater "inwardness" seems to be the drive of the creative spirit. A greater subjectivity I than has yet found expression in poetry is becoming dominant. The subjectivity of the nineteenth century was an individual subjectivity but what seems to be coming after the appearance of Whitman is a I universal subjectivity, that is to say, we see the rise of creators in the field of poetry who, as individuals seem to be striving to live in the universal soul and the universal mind. This tendency naturally means a move towards a greater thought-element as material for poetry. Among the precursors of the new age, various tendencies have been trying to find expression, but behind them all, one sees the general element consisting of the acceptance of the greatness of man as an individual and as a community, of his life, of Nature, of the unity of mankind rising upto the divinity of man in rare moments of inspired sight. When we say "thought-element" we mean to

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imply that the creator will observe life and the whole field of his experience from the region of his clear intellect; he will be above the vital and the emotional mind which reacts more powerfully and immediately to life. The creation that comes out from the reactions of the life-spirit alone can give us the feeling of the power of the vital thoughts, force of passion and emotion, and all the multi- coloured play of the life-spirit in its intensity and grandeur. But this dear intellect as the creator gives us the feeling of a greater spirit which embraces life and is capable of showing what is behind life and what is more than life.

When we say that the thought or the intelligence would be the creator we do not mean that it will be devoid of force of life or vigour and it would be something remote and lifeless. It will be thought-element suffused with enthusiasm, giving a greater breath of life to poetical creation. A growing sense of a greater spirit in man and in Nature is one of the most fundamental tendencies of the coming age. It is that which breaks forth in one of those inspired out- bursts of Whitman wherein "he casts forward the ideal heart of this wider movement into the sense of the divine unity which is its completion": (Future Poetry)

"0 Thou transcendent,

Nameless, the fibre and the breath,

Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre

of them, Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving,

How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how

speak, if out of myself,

I could not launch to those superior universes?

Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,

At Nature and its wonders. Time and Space and Death,

But that I, turning, call to thee, 0 soul, 0 actual Me,

And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs,

Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,

And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space.

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Greater than stars or suns,

Bounding, 0 soul, thou journeyest forth;

What love than thine and ours could wider amplify?

What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours, 0 soul?

What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity,

perfection, strength?

What cheerful willingness for others' sake to give up all?

For others' sake to suffer all?

. Reckoning ahead, 0 soul, when thou, the time

achieved,...—

Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim

attained,

As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder

Brother found,

The Younger melts in fondness in his arms".

—Leaves of Grass.

In addition to the work of innovator of the new world here is an example from A. E. the Irish poet, inheritor of the old Irish culture:

"Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress;

Each chimney's vapour, like a thin grey rod,

Mounting aloft through miles of quietness,

Pillars the skies of God".

—A. E. George Russel.

This strain is present in more or less degree in all the writers whom we have named as precursors.

The old forms of poetic speech cannot contain entirely the new spirit and they must either enlarge and deepen themselves or under-go a transformation. In the actual process of poetical creation the originating inspiration comes from above the intellect. It might come through the intuitive soul or the soul of vision. Even when a truth either of mind or of life, of philosophy or religion, or science even, has to be expressed in poetry the creator has not merely to offer

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"a precise and a harmonious or forcefully presented idea" to the mind. He has, in fact, to suffuse it with life-force and therefore he would naturally turn to a more intimate and directly intuitive speech which comes from the deeper Soul. It is not mind that is the creator of the highest poetry. It is imaginative intellect that is the general basis of poetic creation, but at its highest, creation comes out of inspiration from above the intellect. But very seldom the whole body of poetry is received direct from the original higher source. The mind, the brain, the critical intellect and many other faculties generally mix up with the Over-head inspiration and mar the purity of the original form. It is when the Intuitive Soul can receive both the soul and the body, the spirt and the word, without ad- mixture in the transmission that we get "immortal tones of speech" and the highest creation. That is to say, the poetic creation has to rise from the imaginative intellect to the intuitive spirit, and even above it to what Sri Aurobindo calls, "the seeing mind" where the expression becomes illuminative speech, and if the poet can rise still higher, to the very home of creative force, he would there find that his creation rises to "the inevitable, absolute and revealing word". "The greatest poets have been those in whom these movements of a highest intensity of intuitive and inspired speech have been of frequent occurrence".—Sri Aurobindo.

It has been argued since Whitman that metre and rhyme are played out and have no future. It is even said that as modern life is large and many-sided and constantly changing, poetry to be sincere must also follow this movement of life and therefore should have no rigid bondage to metres or rhymes. It may be granted in justification of the impulse behind the modernist spirit that poetic form today needs a medium which can allow of a vast flowing movement of the spirit giving it liberty to express sudden turns and alterations indispensable in a complex context of life today. But it must also be borne in mind that art does not always follow life in its imperfect forms or in its chaotic movements. It always tries to impose a more perfect form upon its creation and it is this severe self-discipline which gives beauty and nobility to poetical expression. This self-restraint and

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obedience to a greater law of inner harmony gives to poetry its ideal perfection, and Sri Aurobindo is right when he gives a note of warning that whoever "in the name of freedom relaxes this effort" permits "a laxity and a dangerous downward movement".

The modernist movement can be said to begin with the frank denunciation of metre as a hindrance by Walt Whitman who regards it at best as a petty ornament. After him, poetry dominated by thought-element came in vogue. And now today, in the words of W. B. Yeats, "younger men are in revolt against irrelevant description of Nature, scientific moral discursiveness, political eloquence" and what they call "psychological curiosity". Many poets are trying something like poetic journalism and want to make it even striking; they are, that is to say, trying to be 'reporters'. Taking a survey of the present-day field of poetry one finds that though England has more poets than at any other time, except perhaps in seventeenth century, but there is no dominating figure. Yeats finds the whole field of modernist poetry made up of "soulless self-reflection of man's skill". It seems to be the result of "great boredom" and is trying "to force language against its will into powerful artificial vividness". In trying to arrive at "essential form" modernist poets resort to dry intellectual analysis which reduces the form to its bare vulgarity devoid of all force and beauty of life. It reduces man's life to that which is most persistent in him—"the bone"! Yeats says: "the symbol itself is contradictory, it is the horror of life—horror of Death!"

Apart from Yeats there are other modem critics who are quite critical of the modernist spirit in poetry. Here is what F. L. Lucas says, "Today, the high way of poetry is being blocked by laboriously eccentric gentlemen begging the public to stop and overhear them". He pleads for "the echo of a great soul" in poetry.

Alien Brokington, in his book, "Poetry and Mysticism" says, "The modernist poet hardly has any reserved areas though he is trying to create some with barbed wire of psychological jargon, or economic doctrine. Life is being psycho-analysed in verse, and consciousness tortured to yield new materials. Modernist poetry proves, however, that as yet no safe anchorage has been found and both the struggle for new forms of expression and the character of literary materials assembled show that the effort to introduce

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novel associations and links which lie below consciousness have yet to find its justification"... "In short, something more than a pursuit of process is called for". He says about Auden, "Mr. Auden's poems often demand from the reader the ingenuity of a cross-word puzzle expert used to ready handling of reference books, notes and current controversies". And he continues, "free verse has, indeed, come to stay within strict limits. But, it remains, and can never replace blank verse, rhymed lyric, or sonnet, today mainly as an evidence of the daring explorations of the modem craftsman rather than of major creative achievements".

Sri Aurobindo says about modernist poetry, "It is an error to regard metre as an artificial element. It is a natural form for certain states of creative emotion and vision". Further he says, "modern poetry lacks only two things: the inspired phrase and inevitable word, and the rhythm that keeps a poem for ever alive. It is not the irregular verses or rhymes that matter, one can make perfection out of irregularity. They write poetry from the cultured striving mind, not from the elemental soul-power". To Sri Aurobindo, "much of it seems to be mere flat objectivity, or, what is worse, an exaggerated—emphatic objectivity; emotion seems often to be replaced by intensive vital-physical sensation of the object.... Not only that there are no boundaries left in some arts—like poetry of ultra-modem school—but no foundation or no art either.... Obscurity and unintelligibility are not the essence of any poetry and cannot be its aim and principle".

While trying to estimate and understand the aim of modernist poetry he says, "the turn there is to suppress emotion, rhetoric, colouring, sentiment and arrive at something very direct, expressive recording either the thing exactly as it is or some intimate essential truth of the thing without wrapping it up in ideas and sentiments, superfluous images and epithets". He tries to find a psychological justification for the modernist and envisages even a possibility of advance. Says he, "all the same, there is behind, but not still successfully achieved, the possibility of a real advance, an attempt

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to get away from ornate mental constructions about things to the expression of the intimate truth of the things themselves as directly seen by a deeper sight within us. Only it seems to me a mistake to theorise that only by this kind of technique and in this particular way what is aimed at be done". Analysing further the largest trends in English poetry, he says, "the latest craze in England is either for intellectual quintessence or sensations of life, while any emotional or ideal element in poetry is considered as a deadly sin. But beautiful poetry remains beautiful even if it is not in the current style. And, after all, Yeats and A. E. are still there in spite of this new fashion of the last one or two decades".

Under the stress of modem psychological conditions brought about especially by the two world wars and the upsetting of the outer conditions of life, the modernist poet has found it very difficult to find the true centre of his inspiration. As a result we find the field of poetry full of many theories. While conceding that remarkable experiments have been made under some of them, it must be confessed that barring some creation of high merit the over-all picture of the modernist creation of poetry does not appear to be a successful performance nor does it seem to convey the impression of a lasting creation. Some of the theories are that poetry, mainly, should be the "expression of thought", that poetry should be the "expression of the personality of the poet"; while equally emphatic is the opposite theory that poetry is an "escape from personality". There are some who hold that poetry must deal with the "flux of life" and there are others who maintain that expression of "essential form" is the main business of poetry. There may be other theories with their votaries. We shall not discuss these theories in detail because the highest poetry is hardly written in strict conformity with any theory. But we can observe that all these theories tend to stress the subjective aspect of expression in poetry. In other words, the poet wants to convey his own thought-structure of life or cosmos, he wants to convey some special side of his nature or individuality, he wants to interpret to us the flux which he sees or notices around him, he wants to convey his subjective perception of the essential form. At times, he wants to convey even what he calls direct sensation of the object without

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any ornamentation, image or colour. In this attempt he very often becomes unintelligible, obscure, artificial and prosaic.

With the foregoing enumeration of the faults, shortcomings and imperfections of the modernist poet, let us try to see the deeper springs of his efforts and experiments and see if they are justified. In this connection, Sri Aurobindo's appraisal of the modem times gives us a profound view and psychological justification for these modernist attempts in poetry. In his book, "The Future Poetry", he says, "Everywhere there is a seeking after some new thing, a discontent with the moulds, ideas and powers of the past, a spirit of innovation, a desire to get at deeper powers of language, rhythm, form, because a subtler and vaster life is in birth. There are deeper and more significant things to be said than have yet been spoken and poetry, the highest essence of speech, must find a fitting voice for them".

While analysing the causes for such a seeking and such a discontent he probes deeper and says, "the human intelligence seems on the verge of an attempt to rise through the intellectual into an intuitive mentality". He already sees the signs of such a change not only in the modernist efforts but in the deeper and higher psychological and spiritual strains visible in the field of poetic expression. He observes, "a glint of this change is already visible and in poetry there is already the commencement of such a greater leading; the conscious efforts of Whitman, the tone of Carpenter, the significance of the poetry of A. E., the rapid, immediate fame of Tagore are its first signs. The idea of the poet who is also Rishi has made again its appearance". (P.P.) This new poetic departure will not necessarily be the old, ordinary, outer vital emotional and mental life of man but will contain, even when it deals with these fields, the deeper and the higher strains from the regions of the intuitive, the inspirational, the revelatory and the spiritual consciousness. The modernist is attracted by the subliminal, the subconscient and the abnormal of the vital and the lower vital regions of human consciousness by a kind of false subjectivism. But the real fulfilment of his efforts; the highest strains of his expression

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would be attained when he would contact, either deliberately or by accident, the higher levels of human consciousness which, though for him not constant and permanent at present, are still available and attainable and, in a way, are inevitable in the course of his upward evolution. That would be the true subjectivism enlarging him beyond the limits of the intellect, and opening him to higher levels of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo refers to this possibility in his following observation: "The poetry of Whitman and his successors has been that of Life but of Life, broadened, illumined, raised by the strong intellectual intuition of the self of man and i the large soul of humanity. At the subtlest elevation of all that has yet been reached stands, or rather, wings and floats in a high intermediate region, the poetry of Tagore not in the complete spiritual but amid an air that with its seekings and glimpses found in a psycho-spiritual haven of subtle and delicate soul experience transmuting the earth-forms by the touch of the Radiance". It is Sāvitrī that lifts us into the very body of that Radiance.

We have already spoken of the nature of the psychological tendencies that are at work behind the efforts and experiments of the modernist poets. As the lyrical form permits a rhythmic intensity of expression and as in the modem age the impulse is more lyrical than anything else, we should expect the new tendencies to find expression in the lyric. The lyric also permits an infinite variety of soul-experience within its mould. It allows also a great freedom and variety in its motives and cadences. It has even the capacity to rise to the height of an epic. Sri Aurobindo has himself made very striking and successful innovations in the lyrical form and has given us lyrics that set altogether a new pattern with regard to both the content and the form; but as we are here primarily concerned with Sāvitrī the epic, we shall not take up the study of his lyrics here. We shall try to survey the field of modernist poetry and see if we can discover in it the new inward turn of expression, a more subjective attitude and a new way of sounding the possibilities of the language. There are many among the modern writers who under the stress of life have given evidence of a capacity to

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rise to intuitive perception or inspired expression or psychic insight in their creation. There is the perception of the universal subjectivity on their part and it gives a new vision of nature—of the land and the sea and the earth and its objects—a new way of looking at human relations, a vision of the collectivity or of humanity—carrying altogether a new throb, and there is above all, in most of them, a perception of the supra-rational and a tendency to concretise, to objectivise, so to say, inner, states or spiritual experiences. Among these poets may be counted C.Day Lewis, George Barker, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Peter Yeats, Walter Alien, Edith Sitwell, David Gascoyne, J.A.Chadwic alias Arjava, K.D.Sethna, Sigfried Sasson, Herbert Read, to give only a few names out of the many.

Of these writers. Day Lewis stands out as a very remarkable poet embodying these inmost tendencies in the highest degree in his work. His 'Magnetic Mountain' and some other works which I had occasion to see in anthology have given me a very great thrill of delight to see in them a surprisingly ample element of conscious intuitive insight and expression. Some of his poems, notably, "The Poet", "Word Over-all", "The Revenant" are all remarkable in the faithful rendering of the spiritual experience or insight. The poet in him has caught the movement at its white heat of experience and has succeeded in casting it into an inspired utterance, the language and the rhythm,—the words and the image,—carrying with it a power of reality with the concreteness of the image. The location of the magnetic mountain is described thus:

"Somewhere beyond the rail-road,

Of reason, south or north,

Lies a magnetic mountain,

Riveting sky to earth".

There is here a positive feeling of the reality of a region of consciousness beyond reason and the concrete image of the Magnetic Mountain makes the experience real endowing the Supra-rational Reality with a power of an irresistible attraction. While developing the poem, the poet in fact brings out the elements that will draw him to this supra-rational Mountain,

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"Iron in the soul,

Spirit steeled in fire,

Needle trembling on truth,

These shall draw me there".

As is natural in a great poem, the unity and harmony are through- out maintained—the magnet, iron and steel are all there. Here is the "iron" that is "in the soul". There is perhaps the needle of the compass, conscience, trembling indecisively upon Truth trying to adjust itself in the direction of the Magnetic Mountain. These certainly are some of the elements in man that subject him to the attraction of the supra-rational Magnetic Mountain. The poet has evidently touched the plane of intuitive sight which has brought into his consciousness the symbolic image of the suprarational Reality as the Magnetic Mountain. The Reality, says the poet further, is not only suprrational but is beyond time and space, for there:—

"Compass and clock must fail

For space stands on its head there

And time chases its tail".

When he reaches the mountain the poet finds there will be enough girders "to take the leaden strain of a sagging sky" and he hopes to "build right over chaos a cantilever bridge" with the help of the material he will find in that "miraculous mountain".

His second poem, "The Poet" also moves on the plane of intuition where he feels the exaltation of the creative moment and in three brilliant images, each typifying a special process of poetic inspiration on a level higher than the mind, gives us almost the secret of the true poetic creation. First is "the moon's fitful sleep on a clouded bay"; second is "the maiden flight of white swans" coming down upon poet's mind, and third is the "ascent of the poet's consciousness to the height of intuition". Hear what he says about the ascent to the height of intuition, the third image:—

"Oh, on this striding edge,

hare-bell height of calm

Where intuitions swarm

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Like nestling gulls and knowledge

Is free as the winds that blow,

A little while sustain me,

Love, rill my answer is heard!

Oblivion roars below,

Death's cordon narrows: but vainly

If I have slipped the carrier word".

This stanza gives us a very faithful description of the poet's experience. The precipitous and precarious height of calm above the ordinary mind would lead him to the "swarms" of "intuition", and to regions of free knowledge, and it is from there that the poet would bring "the carrier-word". The description agrees so completely with that given by Sri Aurobindo of the creation of poetry from over-head inspiration! Really, the poet, here, has "in the forest of rime" plucked "eternity's single leaf".—C. Day Lewis.

Day Lewis is also remarkable in his faith in the Word,—the true poetic creation. The power of the Word is so well-known to the Vedic Seers but here we find a modem poet echoing the faith of the most ancient poets. The whole poem would be too long to reproduce here but it is one of those remarkable poems produced during the war-time which gives us a hopeful vision of the destiny of man. In effect, he says, that the poet who is obliged to live in the present cannot know all the forces at work which produce all kinds of results in that narrow slit of time. Besides, rime carries the stamp of impermanence, so even a catastrophe or collosal suffering may seem shifting and impermanent. In a sense, the dangers of the last world-war were temporary inconveniences to some, but they have left behind many in permanent destitution. In face of millions of refugees obliged to migrate, the poet says:—

"The real migrations,

Millions fated to flock,

Down weeping roads to mere oblivion—strike me

Dumb as a rooted-rock".

And, what a living and revealing image he gives us of the search- light! Says he:—

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"I watch when searchlights set the low-cloud smoking Like add on metal".¹

He gives us the description of the fear of the whole town under the bombs by two powerful images only, and conveys the poignant tragedy of the war:—

"The roofless old, the child beneath the debris,

How can I speak of these?"

After stating his inability to express his feelings, he affirms his faith in the Word:-—

"Yet words there must be, wept on the cratered present,

To gleam beyond it,"—

words born of intense sympathy with the suffering of man, rising not only to a pitch of intensity but to an image of extraordinary beauty! For, here there is not only an intensity of feeling but an inspired utterance in which the spirit and the word expressive of it come fused together under the white heat of poetic alchemy. The expression "cratered present" transfers the bombing from the objective to the subjective world, and the poet's hope that the words expressing his sorrow would gleam—like the splinters of the bomb —into the future does the same. A fine affirmation of the poet's faith in his mission and in the undying power of the Word!

Describing a chamber in the heart in his "Live you by love confined," he uses unconsciously an image of the Gītā, describing the self-gathered state of the soul—"as a lamp in a windless place wavers not"—before the moment of self-realisation. He says about the chamber of heart:—

¹ Compare Sri Aurobindo's living image.-—

"As when a searchlight stabs the Night's blind breast

And dwellings and trees and figures of men appear

As if revealed to an eye in Nothingness".

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 5.

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"There as the candle's beam

Stands firm and will not waver,

Spire-straight, in a close chamber,

As though in a shadowy cave, a

Stalagmite of flame,

The integral spirit climbs

The dark in light for ever".

Live you by love confined

The spirit even though surrounded by darkness ascends to the heights of inner life "in light for ever".

Stephen Spender also gives us remarkable touches of this in- ward subjective turn and of his perception of the worlds that are subliminal. Dissatisfied with the present European civilisation and condemning it to a well-deserved end, he rises to the vision of the collective soul in a world re-made. If some would say it is communism, it should be added that it is the perception of the inner spiritual reality which is the heart of communism. It is the poet's throbbing identity with the soul of man,—the most down- trodden man—that finds expression here. Says he:—

"Into the image of a heart

That feeds separate functions with blood they need

For what they make, we'll shape the wealth

Of the dispossessed world and let those riches pour

Their fertilizing river delta

Across the starved sand of the peoples".

The image of the wealth of the peoples as a heart feeding and nourishing all the different functions of the body social and enriching the dry starved and unproductive sands—the peoples and turning the sands into a fertilizing delta, is a proper acme to the poet's inspiration which invokes the peoples in the following words:-

"Rise, Will of life in brothers". The physical body serves as a very apt symbol of the body social. In contradiction to the theory of class war as the solution of social problems this symbol brings

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out the organic nature and interdependence of various social units like limbs of the human body. Rather than conflict it suggests mutual adjustment and co-operation based on a sense of living unity.

His another poem "A Trance" contains an image of human love. From mutual unity attained by the lovers

"Sometimes, apart in sleep, by chance

She falls out of my care alone

Into the chaos of a trance".

The person that moves in the trance goes through suffering and sorrow which is reflected dimly on the physical features of the sleeping partner. Suddenly there is a communication to this world from the world of trance and in her unconsciousness she asks:—

"Who blesses?

Or, 'I am pursued by time', she moans".

And the lover who hears these words "thundering at his heart like stones" says:—

"I watch that precipice of fear

She treads among her naked distresses".

He is perhaps sorry that he cannot participate in the suffering and all the other experiences of her distress which, however strong their unity of love in life, she must bear alone in that inner world. Probably the poet realises the difference, between the several personalities of his beloved and arrives at a deeper knowledge of the complex and mysterious personality of man.

"To that deep care we are committed

Beneath the forests of our flesh

And shuddering scenery of these dreams,

Where unmasked agony is permitted

And bones are bared of flesh that seems;

Our hands, unravelling beauty's mesh,

Meet our real selves, our charms outwitted".

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"The forests of the flesh" and the "shuddering scenery" of dreams permits some part of our being to suffer "unmasked agony"; and when the thick curtain of the physical being is removed, one stands face to face with his inner personalities—"real selves" which have lost all the charm which the external being had got. Man contains, like 'Jekil and Hyde' even contradictory personalities within him- self and the author hints at their integration by a power of love; that is not important. What is important is the coming out of the subliminal worlds into the world of poetry, with living, concrete and vivid experience which opens out a new realm of the subliminal and the occult to the present-day poetry.

David Gascoyne brings in a symbolic sense of the natural phenomenon with great poetic success. In his 'Snow in Europe' the hush of death that fell on Europe during the last world-war is symbolised by snow and throughout the poem, the poet works out the symbol in such a way as to make the inert operations of Nature capable of carrying a great and living and subjective significance. This is how he describes the fall of the snow symbolising the falling of the bomb:—

"Out of their slumber Europeans spun

Dense dreams: appeasement, miracle, glimpsed flash

Of a new golden era, but could not restrain

The vertical white weight that fell last night

And made their continent a blank".

While in this poem he endows a natural phenomenon with a symbolic significance of human events, in another poem, 'Winter Garden', he makes the natural phenomenon itself a living thing and turns it into a suggestive symbol of man's inner life. He describes "The Winter Garden", perhaps symbolising a desolate heart, as follows:—

"The season's anguish, crashing whirl-wind, ice,

Have passed"—

and yet says the author,

"In this garden there is more strife:

The winter's knife is buried in the earth".

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The winter is not visible outside. It has like a knife gone into the very earth. So that,—

"No blossom is reborn. The blue

Stare of the pond is blind", and no one is here to see—

"a restless stranger"

"whose eyes are tired of weeping, in whose breast

a savage sun consumes its hidden day". .

Poems such as these give us some idea of the outlook on seasons and all Nature which finds altogether a new orientation in Sāvitrī where it becomes an organic part of the complex system of worlds and seems to be a new revelation of earthly seasons, and Nature.

George Barker in one of his poems introduces a striking simile of the forest and a successful use of mathematical language to convey his poetical meaning. He almost implies that man as an individual is lovable, but in the mass is abominable. But it is not what he says, but the poetic turn which he gives to the experience and a new way of using the language that we are concerned with:—

"0 may I mourn the mathematics of man

Who when alone is lovely as the solitary tree

Evolving existence in an algebra of leaves

Against the thunderstorm and the appalling flash:

He is a magnificent one,

But the many of man makes darkness and deceives

Each other with shadow, so that none can see

The human for the flesh".

The following lines from W. H. Auden:—

"Alone the blue sky arching wide

Two black rocks on either side

On your left, and on your right

In the day, and in the night

We are watching you".

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seem to be telling a simple child-like story till we come to grasp the symbolism used by the poet,—the two rocks symbolising time and space, which accompany all operations of human mind. Over and above the use of such symbolism, Auden, like Spender, has the sense of the occult and subliminal levels of being and a perception of their influence on man. In his "In Memorium Ernst Toller" which is a war-poem, he mourns the death of Ernst and feels the inscrutableness of life and says:—

"We are lived by powers we pretend to understand;

They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end

The sickness, the enemy bullet, or even our hand.

It is their to-morrow hangs over the earth of the living

And all that we wish for our friends:"¹

That man is not the master of his acts, his likes and dislikes and that events on the physical plane are mostly manipulated by subtle powers behind or above the physical is a truth of the inner life of man which is gradually finding its way in the realm of poetic creation.

Peter Yates in his "Invocation" and "Word of Death" gives us the two most characteristic poems embodying the inmost tendency of the new age in which we find the spirit and the form indivisible. This spontaneous movement of making inner and spiritual elements concrete is successfully illustrated here. See how he invokes

"The star of eternal possibles and joy",

—for nothing is impossible to the Divine Eternal—so he prays,—

"vibrate the marble with your kiss".

¹ Compare—

"Artists minute of the hues of littleness,

They set the mosaic of Life's comedy

Or plan the trivial tragedy of our days,

Arrange the deed, combine the circumstance".

Sāvitrī, Book II, Canto 5.

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Probably he invokes the Divine Delight to come down and descend with its Love into the most material level,—the marble—, and make it vibrate to its love. He asks "the star of eternal possibles" to

"aim for the fringe, the thinnest curve

Where strength of possible despairs;

The missing but imagined arc

For which the circle aches,

The vistas waiting to be seen",...

In a situation where "the possible" gives way and the curve becomes thin and weak, he invokes the star to supply "the missing arc",—the crying need—of the circle in the form of some bright vision of the future. The last stanza embodies the most subjective turn and happily makes the inner experience potently objective:—

"O star of mind's dark inwardness,

Prolong the struggle with your force!

By your not being dare to be

More than the eye. can see,

A silence audible with growth".

The last line in which "silence" becomes "audible with growth" is a rare triumph of poetic expression. In his other poem; "The Word of Death" he finds —

"The pure mobility of endless concentration without Name"

—which is stronger than the mobility of thought or of the sex impulse. This nameless concentration, the author says,—

"Let it descend, rest in all thought;

Hear once again

offer Oneness like a bribe,

And haunt the windows of the world

With living's Prisoner imagined free".

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In this last stanza, the Oneness offered by Death seems to attract living human beings who really are prisoners of life but imagine themselves free. It is not Death but the Oneness of consciousness or soul that is offered by Death which acts as an attraction. A new way altogether of seeing the phenomenon of people hastening to war and to death!

Edith Sitwell in her poem, "One Day in Spring" speaks of love and its eternity in face of death. She transfers death from the dead beloved to the living one and endows the dead with life of the living. When the lover, who is a "living dead man" cries to his dead beloved to come home, he implores her in the following words:

"The Cold! How shall I bear my heart without its beat,

My clay without its soul?...! am alone—

More cold than you are in your grave's long night

That has my heart for covering, warmth and light".

Throughout the poem, there is a penetration into the occult worlds and an exchange between what is considered dead and the living and yet love affirms its eternity in the following words:

"The waters love the moon, the sun the day,

"Though all the lovers of the world

Grow old, and fail and die—

Yet how should you and I?

For the world was only made that we should love—

0 heart, 0 eyes, 0 lips that will never grow old".

The very fact of searching behind the phenomenon of death and the acceptance of man's self as free from the bonds of the body, the possibility of the disembodied existence as a subject of poetry has become frequent especially under the stress of the last world-war. It has opened a new realm of experience altogether to the future generations. The same author in "A Song of the Cold" mourns the

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loss of warmth in the hearts of men which has become a "world's fever". She laments "the ultimate cold within the heart of man". This agrees with David Gascoyne and others who have introduced a similar feeling for the seasons.

In this poem "Colliery Country", Walter Alien feels the

"heavy monotonous beat of the colliery pump" in the

darkness of the night, and then,—

"for the time it takes a match to burn out,

The pump was the heart's thump of the tilting earth,

And die earth a sleeping animal that would wake

One day, the whale that Sinbad walked; and I

Sinbad the parasite"....¹

In the presence of that thumping heart in the darkness, the poet feels a terror because it is "an inhuman alien heart". The last turn of the feeling is not a happy one which shows that the poet has not yet acclimatised himself to the presence of the spirit behind material objects.

In many ways very remarkable in voicing the inmost and spiritual tendencies of the new age is the poetry of Herbert Read. He seems to receive through an inner sight powerful images that are capable of expressing directly some spiritual Reality. In a poem which symbolises the three aspects of time,—past, present and future,—he gives a wonderful insight into the mystery of Time. There is an old man who holds "a severed head" like a lantern in one hand, and says:

"I am the storm, which, sunk in me

For a while evades your senses".

He also embodies, or rather is :

"The living point of all the dark forces of the past", and then says he,

¹ Compare the line from Sāvitrī—

"The great hammer-beats of a pent up world-heart".

Sāvitrī,, Book I, Canto 5

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"Yesterday, tomorrow and today

Are in my single glance".

The continuity of the process and the partial view which the mind of man takes about the past, present and future is effectively portrayed in this poem. His other poem "The Mutations of the Phoenix" is openly symbolic. It symbolises the human mind in the process of its rise in the nest of his finite mentality, gradually burning itself up and ending into the golden light of the regions of Reality. Through- out this poem there is a perception of the universal. The eye of the poet is able to penetrate behind the appearances,—even of differences and separation of the physical—and see the One Flame of life, as when he says:

"the blood bums in our limbs with an even flame.

The same sundering flame has burnt the world and

left this crumbling sands

One flame burns many phenomena".

A wonderful compactness in expression and yet it holds a world of significance. It implies the rise of Life from Matter,—some Flame of original Fire burning has left this material world and sands as remnants and given rise to Life that like a flame burns in our very limbs. The line "one flame bums many phenomena" reminds one of the Upanishadic revelation. "It is the one Fire that entered the world and has become every form that we see". The poet continues the figure of the Flame and finds that the Flame burning in the body of man rises in intensity of a mental perception, and then he asks:

"yet how persuade a mind that the thing seen

Is habitant of the cerebral cave

And has elsewhere no materiality?"

All knowledge of man is within his mind and belongs to the mind. The world is a flux and the flux takes place in the mind. He almost makes out that all knowledge is only a mode of the subject, Continuing the same line of feeling he says;—

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"Our world is invisible

Till vision

Makes a finite reflection.

Then the world is finite.

Cast in the mould and measure of a finite instrument".

The poet says it is an Infinite Reality of the world which takes the appearance of a finite world due to the limitations of man's instrument of knowledge. And then, as to the origin of this Phoenix that:

"burns spiritually" its ultimate spark is unknowable, because existence continues only so long as the spark lasts. His invocation to the Phoenix to spread its red wings:

"and soaring in the golden light

survey the world"—

is a call to the mind to rise above its limitations to the regions of golden Light that are above. He is among the modernists a very conscious witness of regions of consciousness beyond mind, for he says:

"But the same mind has seen

Beauties beyond its reach, perfections

Never to be attained. Some state of high serenity

Exist beyond the range

Of febrile senses".

His aspiration for the future of mankind also envisages a new age of perfection. About the new age he says:

"New children must be born of gods in

A deathless land",—and they must have

"No flaw in mind or flesh".

His presaging of the age of perfection gives us a glimpse of that vast new world which is native to Sāvitrī

George Herbert expresses the organic unity of mankind in a striking and illuminating analogy which not only includes the whole of mankind but exterds out to the whole material world.

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"Man is all symmetry,

Full of proportions, one limb to another,

And all to all the world besides:

Each part may call the farthest, brother:

For head with foot hath private amity,

And both with moons and tides"

Among young Indian poets who are writing English poetry, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, Armando Menazes, K. D. Sethna may be considered representative. J. A. Chadwick alias Arjava may be included among them, though an Englishman, on account of his affinity with them in spirit. In his poem the "Errant Life", Sethna touches unusual height and intensity of expression. "This errant life is dear although it dies"—says the poet; to him "human lips are sweet", and although "uncertain" he likes the adventurous spirit of the youth. With the strong bonds binding him to the earth, and yet with an irresistible attraction for the Divine, the poet appeals:

"Sky-lucent bliss, untouched by earthiness!

"If thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn Light no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow".

Pleading man's inability to rise to the Divine, he gives voice to one of the most sincere and powerful aspirations of the human heart, when he says:

"For it is with mouth of clay that I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all thy formless glory turn to love

And mould thy love into a human face".

The aspiration of the human soul for ascent to the Divine which found a powerful expression in one of the inspired utterances of Whitman and finds intermittent expression in several modernist poets is seen here in Sethna in the new form where the human soul supplicates the Divine to come down on earth. The double

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strand we find in the great epic Savitri—the ascent of the human soul to the Divine, and the descent of the Divine on earth and a promise of transformation of the earth-nature in a harmonious integral and organic expressions—seems to sum up in a grand orchestral music all the strands that extend far into the future of poetic creation.

How entirely different may be the spirit and the form of new creation can be seen from some of the poems of Chadwick of which we give here one as an example:

"The silent Deep all strewn with stars

Unswayably withholds

A moon to reap the star-fraught ears

That midnight's acre folds;

Through a sickle-blade in the harvest hour

Reap all the stars away,

And the gleamer maid of dawn shall leave

The stark bare field of day.

0 Siva-moon be swift and raze

Number and name and form,

Leaving the boon of Wideness bright

And Peace beyond all storm.

In spite of apparent differences in the subject-matter and form of poetry of the modem times, the major trend seems to be clear. It is striving for a subjective expression, direct and unhampered by any conventional considerations of fitness or otherwise of the subject and form of poetry. Often the new poetry deals with the sub- conscient, dream state, abnormal regions of man's consciousness, experiences of his vital and sensational being but its highest and greatest reach goes to the perception of the cosmic consciousness, to that of whole of mankind and to the regions of the supra-rational. Its most important and perhaps the most difficult task would be to contact and reveal in poetic form regions of consciousness which are at present super-conscient to man but are potential in him. In

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the passages quoted from modernist poets in this section one can see that this highest strain finds expression in many of them. What is an occasional inspiration and utterance in modernist lyrical poetry becomes in Sāvitrī an uninterrupted inspired vision, the Word coming out straight from the Spirit. What is lyrical intensity of a point of experience in these forms reaches in Sāvitrī its epic height and grandeur. In "The Future Poetry", Sri Aurobindo has indicated that man in his evolution is moving towards the subjective age and the poet who is the precursor and in his highest function, the prophet, would certainly enter into or ascend those higher regions of consciousness as yet unattained by man. This is what he says: ,

"And it (poetry of future) will open to and interpret not only man and terrestrial Nature, but other domains also, of our spirit. It will give the key of the worlds of supernature, and allow us to move among the beings and scenes, images and influences and presences of the psychic kingdoms which are near to us behind their dark or luminous curtain and will not be afraid to enter into vaster realms of the self and other universal states and the powers that stand behind our life and soul's eternal spaces. It will do this not merely in a symbol of greatened human magnitudes, as the old poets represented the gods, or in hues of romantic glamour or in the far-off light of a mystic remoteness, but with the close directness and reality that comes from intimate vision and feeling, and make these things a part of our living experience". (P. 568)

Sāvitrī takes as its theme the life of man and the movement of his soul over all the cosmic planes. The vision of the poet is like a search-light, turning its revealing light from plane to plane where it brings into our view worlds of being, unknown to the ordinary gaze, their workings and their influences upon earth and man, and the part they play in the evolution from the Inconscient to the Superconscient. In Sri Aurobindo's poetical expression taken as a whole, the movement towards a universal subjectivism gets released from the entanglements of intellectual theories, the uncanny attraction of the lower vital and the distorted view of the abnormal and flies steadily into the region of the higher inspirational consciousness and from there, views the whole of the cosmos including man, other Cosmic Powers and Nature. The spirit of the creator of Sāvitrī is cosmic, it is a world-builder.

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