On Savitri
THEME/S
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Every great poet or artist is an explorer who discovers new lands and oceans in his imaginative vision, reveals new truths and beauties and hidden routes and pathways quite unfamiliar and unknown to the workaday humanity, and his word acts, what Keats would say, as
... the leaven That,
spreading in this dull and clodded earth,
Gives it a touch ethereal — a new birth.
Thus Mayakovsky, the modem Russian poet, who was "bombarding with verses the horror of every day" and "Everything ossifying and assifying living", observed:
One must snatch gladness from the days that are
In this life it's not difficult to die
To make life is more difficult by far.
And to this humanity aimlessly pursuing a daily humdrum existence which T.S. Eliot describes in his poem The Waste Land —
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many —
are addressed these terse but powerful lines of Mayakovsky:
The word of a poet — is your resurrection
Your immortality — citizen clerk!
How does the poet achieve this miraculous power? Is it not by revealing heaven in earth and earth in heaven, the inner world of the soul in the brute, blind and senseless world of objective reality, that he makes us live and breathe in a purer and finer air? I have said, a great poet is an explorer who either discloses to us some new realm of experience on a higher plane or reveals a new
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splendour in something that custom had made stale and void of savour. Newton, absorbed in his arid mathematical problems, must have been a sight without any colour and beauty but in Wordsworth's imagination he is transformed into a sailor:
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
A similar experience of perusing a book has again been transformed by Keats in his famous sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. Here a book becomes a realm of gold, a state and kingdom
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Spelling his way through this duty and musty volume, he felt the exhilaration of breathing in "pure serene of a wide expanse" and the two magnificent similes in the sestet of his sonnet have superbly articulated the thrill that possesses us when we follow the trail blazed by the poet:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He started at the Pacific — and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
We are transported from poet's study to the majesty of the star-strewn sky, the endless stretch of the watery wastes by the heavenly chariot of the poet's imagination. Sri Aurobindo has himself described this transporting power in these lines:
Imagination called her shining squads
That venture into undiscovered scenes
Where all the marvels lurk none yet has known.1
In Keats's sonnet Cortez and his followers perfectly symbolise the great poet and his readers or other lesser geniuses who follow in his footsteps and body forth with often even more minute care and detailed perfection what he has revealed in a wide sweep. Herein perhaps lies the difference between a poet and a versifier, an artist and a craftsman — a Shakespeare and a Dryden.
It would be, perhaps, more correct to say that the poet is a revealer of greater but hidden splendours than that he is a creator
1 Savitri, p. 242.
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of new things. His creative imagination only shadows out what has flashed on his inner sight. Now this work of transcription calls forth the faculty of the formative imagination. He has to render the unknown in terms of the known as the Classical poet does, or the known in terms of the unknown as the visionary Romantic poet alone does, making
...sense a road to reach the intangible.2
He has, in a way, to be like the skylark of Wordsworth:
Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam —
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!
If he lives only in the visionary world and has no contact with the earth, he will be like Arnold's Shelley beating his wings in the void. And if he is of the earth earthy, then he will not be able to
add the gleam,
The Light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream, —
and thus shall fail to achieve the one great end of poetry—"to make this much loved earth more lovely" — so that we see it
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
The essence of poetry then is "the fusion of observation and imagination, of sight and insight."
The poet turns out to be a discoverer in another sense. By his keen observation and awakened sensibility he is able to reveal to us invisible connections and relations existing between events of the inner world and material objects. All of us have passed long spells of anguish and, passed by a ringing bell but only Shakespeare could through, observe that
Sorrow's like a heavy-hanging bell
Once set on ringing with his own weight goes....
Hounds relentlessly chasing a quarry, unfoiled by its dodges, is a well-known spectacle amusing and revolting—especially the sight of the terror-stricken hunted beast seeking shelter in bush and
2Ibid., p. 236.
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thicket, ultimately succumbing to its inevitable Fate. Yet it was to Francis Thompson alone that the privilege was vouchsafed to see in it the whole enigma of human life with its agonies and torments seeking refuge in temporary joys and supports, ultimately recognising the Divine pursuer in the fearsome mask of the eternal Hound of Heaven. We suffer because we flee
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat — and a voice beat
More instant than the Feet —
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."
This one metaphor sustained with vigour and unflagging imaginative flight reveals to us the whole meaning of the chequered drama of human life —
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears....
and the reason for the failure of all our frantic efforts to protect ourselves against "this tremendous lover."
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Simile and metaphor have often been considered as serving a decorative and ornamental function in poetry though often they are quite burdensome and dispensable accessories. But their true purpose is illustrative and revelatory, they aim at communicating the poet's experience in all its power and glory. We can see the difference in the above quoted sonnet of Keats, on reading Chapman's Homer. Keats first wrote:
Yet could I never judge what men could mean
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold;
but then he changed the first line to
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene.
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And we can see the vividness and freshness with which the experience comes home to us. Thus we find that metaphors and similes are inherent in the poet's work of exploration of experience and its interpretation. Poets with their wide and universal power of love and sympathy are able to detect those subtle gossamer-like links lurking between the hidden and the visible reality which make the subjective and objective universe a continuous, a delicately woven web and they also see the universal spirit of love and beauty that animates and informs even those creatures and objects which appear grotesque and bizarre to the ordinary sight. Shelley the pantheist saw everywhere
that sustaining love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea
Bums bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst.
When Shakespeare tells us that
Love's feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender homs of cockled snail,
we are not only made aware of the delicate sensitivity of the lover's feeling but also made to see a verminous creature enhaloedTjy the warm radiance of love. After this we can no longer look disdainfully at that slowly creeping worm. The ennobling and enhaloing of the earth by a wide spiritual love is the essence of the poetic image so that watching a bird we ring out in ecastasy, like Blake:
Arise you little flashing wings and sing your infant joy!
Arise and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy.
And we have not to
ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there.
Because, as Francis Thompson perceives,
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!
The drift of pinions would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
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The angels keep their ancient places;
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
'Tis ye,'tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
Thus in Yeats's vision, "the sudden thunder of the mounting swan" is
Another emblem there! that stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning's gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.
Thus "To one who has been long in City pent" a day spent in the open country might, as Keats would say, seem to have glided by
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear
That falls through the clear ether silently.
In summing up we can say that the function of simile is not merely to illustrate and explain the subject, but to ennoble and enrich it and make it more impressive and vivid and also to reveal the hidden correspondences and kinships that exist between earth and heaven so that even though
... all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,
yet we with Hopkins feel thrilled by the truth that
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
To put otherwise in Keats's words: "The poetry of earth is ceasing never," and in summer
a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead,
That is the Grasshopper's,
and
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stone there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
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And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
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Sri Aurobindo, who was a poet first and then the divine master of Integral Yoga, is therefore not only an explorer and a discoverer but a conquistador and
A colonist from immortality3
and his spiritual poetry, especially the epic Savitri, is charged with mantric power which at every step overwhelms us with
Sunbelts of knowledge, moonbelts of delight4
revealing ever
Homelands of beauty shut to human eyes5
and telling us earth-bound mortals that
Our souls can visit in great lonely hours
Still regions of imperishable Light,
All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power
And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss
And calm immensities of spirit Space.6
In another poem, The Life Heavens, he describes his ascent:
Dissolving the kingdoms of happy ease
Rocked and split and faded their dream-chime.
All vanished; ungrasped eternities
Sole survived and Timelessness seized Time.
Earth's heart was felt beating below me still,
Veiled, immense, unthinkable above
My consciousness climbed like a topless hill,
rossed seas of Light to epiphanies of Love.7
Who would not feel a wistful longing kindled in his imagination on reading the following description of the ascent of Thought in
3Savitri, p. 22. 4 Ibid., p. 91. 5 Ibid., p. 91. Ibid. , p. 47.
7 Collected Poems SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 575.
Thought the Paraclete?
...Sun-realms of supernal seeing,
Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss
Drew its vague heart-yearnings with voices sweet...
Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,
Climbing high far ethers eternal sunned...8
It will be seen from the few lines quoted above how spiritual experiences have been rendered vivid, concrete and intimate by the imagery employed by Sri Aurobindo, so that our souls run of themselves like his Aswapati:
As one drawn to his lost spiritual home
Feels now the closeness of a waiting love,
Into a passage dim and tremulous
That clasped him in from day and night's pursuit
He travelled led by a mysterious sound.9
For we hardly feel the sense of strain and labour when we are drawn by the charm of something supremely beautiful. Thus he has
Made sense a road to reach the intangible.10
Now, we can launch on the subject of similes and metaphors in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. An epic is a narrative poem with a wide sweep dealing with high and noble actions. Therefore, it demands from the poet an equally noble and elevated treatment. Sri Aurobindo also takes up very commonplace events and happenings and by the device of simile invests them with a spiritual glory. I will now pick out two instances of an identical event — a chariot speeding towards its goal. The first instance is from his epic Ilion written in majestic, rolling, melodious hexameters. Talthibius is the messenger chosen by Achilles to carry his peace offer to the Trojans. "Worn with his decades," "one and alone he arrived, insignificant, feeblest of mortals," driving the car of the errand. This is the scene as it must have appeared to the ordinary passers-by. But who knows that this shrunken man is
Carrying Fate in his helpless hands and the doom of an empire.11
Not only that but this is rider in the chariot is the focal point which will let "loose vast agencies" radiating through the millenniums
8 Ibid., p. 582. 9 Savitri, p. 289. 10 Ibid., p. 236.
11 Collected Poem, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 392.
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down to the present day. Troy will turn down the offer; Achilles will join the fray, reduce the city to rack and ruin; Aeneas, the man of destiny, will set sail from Troy to found Latium and the Latin race and thus lay the foundations of the Roman Empire and the modem European civilisation. All this chain of events will be touched off by this charioteer. And this is how Sri Aurobindo presents it:
Even as fleets on a chariot divine through the gold streets of ether,
Swiftly when life fleets, invisibly changing the arc of the soul-drift,
And, with the choice that has chanced or the fate man has called and now suffers
Weighted the moment travels driving the past towards the future.
Only its face and its feet are seen, not the burden it carries.
Weight of the event and its surface we bear, but the meaning is hidden.
Thus, a chariot hurtling down earthly pathways serves as a ringing echo of the divine chariots speeding down gold streets of ether unretarded by any friction of matter. Notice how in the fourth line, driving as a metaphor is invigorated by the fact that a chariot is actually being driven.
The second instance comes from Savitri. Savitri the heroine has set out in quest of her companion soul after a night's rest:
But mom broke in reminding her of her quest
And from low rustic couch or mat she rose
And went impelled on her unfinished way
And followed the fateful orbit of her life.
How?
Like a desire that questions silent gods,
Then passes starlike to some bright Beyond.12
What an infinite vista of suggestions breaks upon out speculative imagination! What can be the nature of that desire which leaves the high gods dumb and speechless? Is it the same boon about which Sri Aurobindo has elsewhere hinted:
The boon that we have asked from the Supreme is the greatest that the Earth can ask from the Highest, the change that is most difficult to realise, the most exacting in its conditions. It is nothing less than the descent of the supreme Truth and
12 Savitri, pp. 384-85.
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Power into Matter, the supramental established in the material plane and consciousness and the material world and an integral transformation down to the very principle of Matter. Only a supreme Grace can effect this miracle.13
We make this conjecture because of the image of the star in the last line. The star-image makes it clear that this desire is not just a dim, muddy phosphorescence on the surface of life but something luminous, following its orbit in the unmapped immensities of the soul.
The star-image recalls to the mind another magnificent simile. The point to be illustrated is that the great are strongest when they are alone:
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone.14
A host of unspoken things are suggested by this simple image. A great man is directed to his goal by his own light and not by the pressures of time and environment; he is not deterred by the vast Time-barrier that has to be traversed before he reaches his ideal and he is strongest when alone because then he is most sustained by his inner divinity. The same idea is expressed by Sri Aurobindo in his sonnet The Divine Worker with greater austerity and less picturesqueness:
In this rude combat with the fate of man
Thy smile within my heart makes all my strength;
Thy Force in me labours at its grandiose plan,
Indifferent to the Time-snake's crawling length.15
Keats once wrote of poetry and its reader: "The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the sun come natural to him — shine over him and set soberly, although in magnificence leaving him in the luxury of twilight." Nowhere does this apply with such appositeness as in many passages of Savitri. Here are two instances. Aswapati is shown ascending from plane to plane in the second book, The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds. Coming out of The
13The Hour of God, SABCL, Vol.17, p. 46.
14Savitri, p. 460. 15Collected Poems, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 143.
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World of Falsehood, The Mother of Evil and the Sons of Darkness he enters The Paradise of the Life-Gods:
Apart stood high Elysian nameless hills,
Burning like sunsets in a trance of eve.16
In the next Canto his passage is further described:
A memory soft as grass and faint as sleep,
The beauty and call receding sank behind
Like a sweet song heard fading far away
Upon the long high road to Timelessness.17
In The Book of Love, Satyavan is telling Savitri how the visionary power began to grow in him:
As if to a deeper country of the soul
Transposing the vivid imagery of earth,
Through an inner seeing and sense awakening came.
A visioned spell pursued by boyhood's hours,
All things the eye had caught in coloured lines
Were seen anew through the interpreting mind
And in the shape it sought to seize the soul.18
And then follows a concrete instance of this transmuting power:
...trooping spotted deer
Against the vesper sky became a song
Of evening to the silence of the soul.19
Trooping spotted deer against the vesper sky is a visual image but the alchemic touch of the poet's imagination has transformed it into an auditory image, — a song of evening to the silence of the soul.
In the very opening Canto of the epic, in which is described in sublime symbolism the passage from night to twilight and from twilight to daybreak, we meet his simile:
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god.20
For a while we shut the book and unleash our imagination to soar in the celestial worlds where gods are seen reclining draped in
16 Savitri, p. 234. 17 Ibid., p. 239. 18 Ibid., p. 404.
19 Ibid., pp. 404-05. 20 Ibid., p. 3.
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cloaks of some ethereal fabric which with a swish slips from the body and dazzles us with the vision of a radiant form . But there are vestures and vestures of divinity. In the second Canto a different epiphany meets us. Till the approach of the hour of Satyavan's death, fated to strike one year after their marriage, Savitri had not tasted the bitter cup of grief. A soul of universal love and sun like purity, how could she know of the thousand torments that afflict this "Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race" of
... petty adventurers in an infinite world
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity?21
How had her childhood and early youth flowed on?
A glowing orbit was her early term,
Years like gold raiment of the gods that pass.22
And from now on we know that gods flash past the seer's vision draped in gold raiment leaving him in an ecstasy tranquil and calm and the impression of those timeless moments of unalloyed bliss and happiness. And we have confirmation of this in Book IV Canto I where all the seasons of the year have been described with a supreme graphic freshness and visionary power. Monsoon is
A traveller from unquiet neighbouring seas23
burning
A surge and hiss and onset of huge rain,
The long straight sleet-drift, clamours of winged storm-charge,
Throngs of wind-faces, rushing of wind-feet
Hurrying swept through the prone afflicted plains.24
But this is a titanic onslaught, not the way of the divine beings. They come gently and bring peace and calm and bliss and warm sunshine. So we await the mellowing touch of Autumn:
Earth's mood now changed; she lay in lulled repose,
The hours went by with slow contented tread:
A wide and tranquil air remembered peace,
Earth was the comrade of a happy sun.
A calmness neared as of the approach of God,
A light of musing trance lit soil and sky,
21 Ibid., p. 370. 22 Ibid., p. 16. 23Ibid., p. 350. 24Ibid.
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And an identity and ecstasy
Filled meditation's solitary heart.25
In this passage of rare verbal music echoing the harmony of Autumn we are again shown the hidden passages that make "sense a road to reach the intangible." This earth with its beauty appealing to our physical senses is no longer a snare to lure us away from heaven but a pathway to
...luminous tracts and heavens serene
And Eldoradoes of splendour and ecstasy.26
Later in the year follows Spring, the season of joy and festivity when everywhere there is freshness and bloom and flowers splash their colours against the brown earth. Here is a description packed with sensuous richness:
Then Spring, an ardent lover, leaped through leaves
And caught the earth-bride in his eager clasp;
His advent was a fire of irised hues,
His arms were a circle of the arrival of joy.27
But this Springtime is neither a harbinger of the merry ring time, nor is that "ardent lover" a wakener of our dormant passions. On the contrary, his is a clarion call to arise and awake and set forth on the upward journey:
His voice was a call to the Transcendent's sphere
Whose secret touch upon our mortal lives
Keeps ever new the thrill that made the world,
Remoulds an ancient sweetness to new shapes
And guards intact unchanged by death and Time
The answer of our hearts to Nature's charm
And keeps for ever new, yet still the same,
The throb that ever wakes to the old delight
And beauty and rapture and the joy to live.28
The Spring, too, gives us a faint foretaste of the rapture that seizes the human soul when it meets the divine beings:
His grasp was a young god's upon earth's limbs,
Changed by the passion of his divine outbreak
25 Ibid., p. 351. 26 lbid., p. 46. 27 Ibid., p. 351. 28 Ibid., pp. 351-52.
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He made her body beautiful with his kiss.29
And
The sunlight was a great god's golden smile.30
For a short while heaven and earth met together and
Immortal movements touched the fleeting hours31
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Savitri with its 23, 837 lines is a vast epic, unique in its sustained grandeur and sublimity revealing to us plane after plane of spiritual illumination and each plane a tier-terraced mountain:
The unfallen planes, the thought-created worlds
Where Knowledge is the leader of the act
And Matter is of thinking substance made,
Feeling, a heaven-bird poised on dreaming wings,
Answers Truth's call as to a parent's voice,
Form luminous leaps from the all-shaping beam
And Will is a conscious chariot of the Gods,
And Life, a splendour-stream of musing Force,
Carries the voices of the mystic Suns.32
And yet this is only a description of the Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind. The great vistas of the Overmind and still higher regions
Await discovery in our summit selves.33
But the road is narrow, precipitous and full of perils. Sri Aurobindo has himself hinted at its ruggedness in a smile in the poem. The Bird of Fire. The Bird in the poem "is the symbol of an inner Power that rises from the sacrifice, i.e., the Yoga... it has the power of going beyond mind and life to that which is beyond mind and life... It reaches the Eternal and brings back to the material world that which*is beyond mind and life." And here is a description of its red breast.
29 Ibid., p. 352. 30 Ibid.
31 Ibid. 32Ibid., p. 263-64. 33 Ibid., p. 46.
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Rich and red is thy breast, O bird, like blood of a soul
climbing the hard crag-teeth world, wounded and nude.34
Such is the nature of the path but there is one solace and that springs from the fact that these pilgrim feet are so much loved by the Gods that even they might offer their bodies for being trodden upon. Here is a passage describing the Heavens of the Ideal:
At each pace of the journey marvellous
A new degree of wonder and of bliss,
A new rung formed in Being's mighty stair,
A great wide step trembling with jewelled fire
As if a burning spirit quivered there
Upholding with his flame the immortal hope,
As if a radiant God had given his soul
That he might feel the tread of pilgrim feet
Mounting in haste to the Eternal's house.35
Such is Savitri —
Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres
The word was used as a hieratic means
For the release of the imprisoned spirit
Into communion with its comrade gods.36
This is the meaning of that time-hallowed word Mantra, of which Savitri is, in Keats's lines,
An endless fountain of immortal drink
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
But how to derive the fullest benefit from this nectar? He has himself spelled out in a long, elaborate simile the whole process by which the Mantra opens for us the floodgates of the spiritual Ganges:
As 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:
34 Collected Poem, SABCL, Vol. 5, p. 571.
15 Savitri, p. 277., 36 Ibid., p. 360.
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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
He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,
Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech.37
The Future Poetry was written as a series of essays in the Arya (from 15 December 1917 to 15 July 1920). In these essays Sri Aurobindo had traced the course of the English muse and shown how it is destined to culminate in spiritual poetry of the greatest depth and height. There we were given a foretaste of the nature of this epic in these prophetic words:
The epic, a great poetic story of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action; the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination of the epic creator. The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will be by an intuitive poetry, are his greatest possible subject, and it is this supreme kind that we shall expect from some profound and mighty voice of the future. His indeed may be the song of greatest flight that will reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe.38
The expectation and the prophecy have been amply fulfilled and the profoundest and mightiest voice has spoken and the Destiny of Man has been revealed to him in the most luminous rhythmic speech.
RAVINDRA KHANNA
37 Ibid., p. 375. 38 The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 267.
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