On Savitri
THEME/S
Milton marks an august and robust departure from the past in poeticcai form, expression and diction. He marks a new era in poetical style, method, the use of the language with a new synthetical approach. All this is due to his genius, his masterful personality and his extraordinary control over the languages both English and continental. Whatever did not agree with his views, his method, he rejected. Whatever advanced his concepts, ran along his egoistic lines, expressed his vital personality that he accepted freely. Thus his style is closely linked with his character, his way of looking at things and his singular approach to problems. The reason why he did not copy the past poetical examples is twofold. First, his individualism stood against any servile following of the past, which would have meant the obliteration of his original style; and, secondly, his incapacity to bend, submit and learn as a pupil where he thought he was a master. In both cases his intellectual growth and stout egoism came in the way.
But the style he produced was not faulty. It reflects his intellectual maturity. It also shows a great preparation, for he could not, in a matter of a few months, create this epoch-making style. And he did not venture to write until his style stood apart as a striking factor.
Sri Aurobindo's method and style reflect the inner perfection. But his was not so much a studied attempt at perfection as a spontaneous outflowering of his genius, and this in its wake created the needed style. Savitri is separated from his Love and Death and Baji Prabhou by an enormous gulf. While the earlier work shows a poet who has already found his footing in English and is not influenced by the late Victorian age of poetry, the latter shows a poetical genius turning into a seer, whose utterances were symbolic and prophetic. The style in consequence changes and makes room for the inwardly growing prophet. Milton had, by his intellectual vigour, to get rid of the contemporary influence. But in Sri Aurobindo this evasion is easy and spontaneous, because the Victorian tradition was too ornate, shallow and being studied to become the vehicle of his expression, too artificial to house his
genius, and unnaturalness ran against his very being. Yet the maturity of both Milton and Sri Aurobindo derived from a classical training, which gives the necessary self-control, restraint and mastery. But in Milton the ego reveals itself most clearly, while in Sri Aurobindo there is an aloofness and largeness from the very outset which allows the style to remain unmutilated.
Style in poetry is the expression, the manifestation of the thing within. It is the vehicle of the inner inspiration, vision, thought, mood. It could easily be compared to style in painting. If we could conceive Milton to be analogous to an Ingres or a Delacroix, Sri Aurobindo would be seen as similar to a Chinese master: one is bold, grand, having large ideas, heroic concepts, with a method full of vigour; while the other is subtle, mystic, wonderfully soft, having hidden depths of music. One needs the punctilious artistry of a craftsman to achieve an effect which the other attains by a single significant stroke. There is, in Milton, colour, light and shade, the poignancy of sudden and surprising effects, but the whole process is a studied one. In Sri Aurobindo the colour, light or shade comes as a natural phenomenon.
Austerity is the first characteristic of Milton. He exercises masterly self-restraint where he could easily have been flamboyantly effusive in details.
Heaven opened wide
Her ever-during gates, harmonious sounds
On golden hinges moving, to let forth
The king of Glory, in his powerful Word.
And Spirit coming to create new worlds.
Whatever detail is here is inevitable. A lesser poet would have used a more voluminous expression. But Milton is content with "King of Glory" without any amplifying adjectives. With just a few and suggestive words he describes here the process of creation.
Or describing hell, he writes:
Hell, their fit habitation, fraught with fire,
Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain.
Here too we get a vivid, but compact description. It at once evokes the image of the pang, the loneliness, the ceaseless thirst, the vastness of Hell with its unending despair. Listen to this majestic roll:
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One spirit in them ruled, and every eye
Glared lightning, and shot forth pernicious fire
Among the accursed, that withered all their strength,
And of their wonted vigour left them drained,
Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fallen.
Here Milton reveals the wrath of God. The energetic yet controlled expression speaks more than a volume of emotional verbiage. Each word has a place and a significance; each image is unomate; each adjective is inevitable. It is due to this packed austerity that he achieves a great eminence in tone and poetical structure. Also it limits repetitions to the minimum and adds to the grandeur and dignity and does not allow the fullness of poetical intensity to be vitiated by futile effervescence. This is one of the reasons for which Milton stands among the supreme in spite of his semi-failure as a whole.
The second characteristic is his nobility. He never becomes vulgar, nor does he allow himself to be drawn to a lesser pitch. Even when the inspirational surge has become weakened, he does not cease to be chaste. He had ample occasion to be of low taste or sensuous or even vulgar in the description of the primal couple, in the account of the outbreak of lust in Adam, in the picture of the Hellish hosts. But nowhere does he weaken the verse by striking a baser chord or suggesting some low sentiment. Here is the description of Adam and Eve: they,
God-like erect, with natural honour clad,
In naked majesty, seem lords of all.
Or
For contemplation he and valour formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace.
Nor does Milton become vulgar to describe things of which he has no direct knowledge, like God or the angels. He gives a general description, but never rises to speak in detail. By this he exercises both rectitude and chastity. Take
From the pure Empyrean where he sits
High throned above all heights.
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This shows his fidelity to the Christian faith where God is never described except as a distant unapproachable presence. Milton does not transgress this tradition. We can compare this with Kalidasa's description of Shiva in Kumārasatnbhavam, where he makes of this godhead almost an earthly being. Also it stands against the Homeric tradition of anthropomorphism. Or read
Meanwhile at table Eve
Ministered naked and their flowing cups
With pleasant liquours crowned.
Things of sense Milton speaks of with aloofness, but he does not disdain them as futile:
Of elements:
The grosser feeds the purer: Earth the sea;
Earth and the sea feed air; the air those fires
Ethereal, and, as lowest, first the moon.
A few lines later he speaks of the healthy appetite of the Angel and this account, or the description Eve's nudity, or the dissertation on food does not become vulgar or sound a contrary note and is in keeping with the total Miltonic concept of perfection. On the contrary, to the whole he gives a philosophical turn, and sees all with a nobility of vision, that excludes vulgarity. We shall examine one example:
flowers were the couch,
Pansies and violets and asphodel
And hyacinth, — Earth's freshest softest lap.
There they their fill of love and love's disport
Took largely, of their mutual guilt the seal,
The solace of their sin, till dewy sleep
Oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play.
Adam and Eve, after their fall, lapse into animal ways. But Milton is chaste in his description: he does not amplify, but with reserve and aloofness depicts the scene. Of animal enjoyment he makes a poetical use. He does not vitiate the animality by going down to its vulgar abyss, rather uplifts it by his poetical reticence and nobleness to a domain of pure poetry. Thus he converts the base metal of low sexuality to the pure gold of poetical beauty, but he is
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aware of the baseness. He does this consciously; also not to lower his poetry he makes this phase a phase of first fall — not a violent break from the original note of harmony, but a slow and gradual decline starting with the love-play.
The third characteristic that he gives us is that of boldness. He never stoops to effeminate lyricism, romanticism or vagueness. His tender moments have their strength. His finenesses have their vitality. His lyrical moods are replete with energy. Power is the mainstay of his existence. And each line of his epic reflects this singular aspect. But boldness devoid of austerity or nobility would be stark and ugly, it could jar on the ear of the finer sentiments. This does not happen with Milton.
His boldness does not deafen one's ear, the deeper musical hearing, nor does it clash and sweep away all before its vigorous impetuosity. Rather his strength is like a God "indifferent in might". He does not impose it, but it, but it comes as a natural expression of his character. He needs no external effort to make it apparent. It is there with all he writes, as the very breath, the very soul of his existence.
His boldness never slackens. He never gives way to sentimental emotions betraying weakness of character. He considers Reason to be the highest status: this he amply reveals in his poetry. In fact, because he has this singular characteristic, he is in a position to look down on emotionalism and make Reason the supreme Godhead. Standing behind this is his will, the strength that builds and creates, that forms and stands out as the sole reality amid the chaos of a pell-mell human existence.
Books I and II are packed with power. Listen:
All is not lost — the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me.
There is expressed here an indomitable courage, like Milton's own, and it reflects the dire opposition he had to face in his own life. Or read:
For the mind and spirit remains
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Invincible, and vigour soon returns,
Though all our glory extinct, and happy state
Here swallowed up in endless misery.
There we have the heart of his being speak out against the tyranny of fate, the wrong of all the gods. Again hear this description:
...but his face
Deep scars of thunder had entrenched, and care
Sat on his faded cheek, but under brows
Of dauntless courage and considerate pride
Waiting revenge.
The note of strength is unmistakable. Behind, as an undertone, we hear the notes of an unfallen passion. This heightens Milton's character of strength and greaten his side of unfallen reason. Splendid too are these lines:
Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night.
Here boldness stands up, revolts and permits no influence to curb it. It defies all; its power is a living presence, an organic reality. It has deeper roots than a common rational mind. It is vibrant, intense; it strikes and awakes. There is grandeur, a sweep, a rich uncurbed energy.
But his boldness never overshoots its mark or becomes ugly or discordant. Study the Satanic council in Book II and you will find no ugliness in this power, no distorting clumsiness that mars by its impudent and disharmonic puissance the texture and drama of the epic. Rather there is a control in all his passionate utterances. There is nobility in all his power. Further, Milton is conscious of his strength and uses it with skill and subtlety. Instead of becoming a boorish manipulation in an arrogant and self-conceited poet, it becomes an instrument of great variety. In this sphere he does not allow his ego or his dominant mentality to rule him. He is conscious that a note of single unchanging boldness results in monotony. He therefore introduces lesser vibrant notes, with a louder diapason, with a soft monolinear melody — as here:
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Long is the way
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.
Such effects are possible only when the poet has an ear for music and is conscious of the musical tonal values. In fact Milton's music is almost unsurpassed in English and this imbues even his dull and awkward lines with a grace which makes them felicitous reading. This leads us to forget his defects in theme and ideology, his views, beliefs and theological dogmas. But this music is bold, a heroic chant; it has the grace of a well-built muscular man. It is vital, strong, aware of the strength yet not displaying all its power and using it at rare moments to give a special tonal effect, a special value in rhythm and cadence. There are large paragraphs overflowing with energy while there are short well-defined rhythmic lines. Grace, strength, energy and word-pattern are the mainstay of his music. Here is energy:
I fled, and cried out 'Death'.
Hell trembled at the hideous name and sighed
From all her caves, and back resounded 'Death'.
Note the repetition of 'Death' coming like a recurrent theme of musical phrase to balance and harmonise another phrase. The alternate use of liquid and hard consonants, the alternate and skilful use of long and short vowels turn the music to dramatic effect of a strange and sweeping energy. Here is grace:
And o'er the Celtic roamed the utmost isles,
or
Scout far and wide into the realm of Night;
again
Covers his throne, from where deep thunder roars;
also
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
The first line's beauty of music lies in its superb varied vowellation plus contrasted consonants — all producing together a magical grace and softness. The second example is unusual, beginning with a hard consonant followed by a long vowel and ending with a
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clipping consonant. The beginning and ending consonants balance each other with internal vowels following up like a recurring beat in a musical composition. The whole pattern is not so much graceful as bold. In the third there is break after 'throne', like a pause in a musical composition within a pattern where a new tonal movement starts ending with the two hammer-beats of 'thunder' and 'roars'. Here we have the notes of power, but of a latent and not an exuberant puissance. The last example's beauty lies in its recurring n's and d's with a sonant balanced by a short and well-defined word 'lost'. If we examine these examples closely, we shall discover a unity of pattern of word-movement, tonal harmony and the total effect caused by these. There is a conscious artistry, a living idea of musical design displayed in verse. This design and music become apparent when we read him aloud; Milton's beauty and rhythm and word-magic are then alone fully revealed.
Sri Aurobindo is no less a stylist than Milton. As there is character and personality in Milton's verse, there is a definite style in Sri Aurobindo's which is a departure from all contemporary poetry. This is all the more true because of the peculiar approach he makes. In Milton the verse becomes an expression of his dominant mind; in Sri Aurobindo it is the expression of his soul, the deepest and highest achieved by man's inner being. Milton manipulates consciously the word-patterns, the paragraph-settings, the tonal inflexions. But Sri Aurobindo allows a higher power, which has become a resident of his being, to dominate and do the work of creation. His mind stands aside. His life-parts enjoy the thrill of creativity. Thus he approaches poetry not so much for self-expression as for God-expression. The style and method are formed by this constructive superior power. He uses poetry as a vehicle for the highest Truth; he approaches it, as one approaches the presence of a deity, all still and calm to receive the inspirational outpour. He has no need to invoke the daimon of inspiration as Milton does. His silent opening works miracles.
If we study Savitri we can trace five characteristic elements, which are: height, serenity, wideness, grandeur, and delight. A greater scrutiny can elucidate others. But these are almost general. We shall examine each in turn.
Height is one of the chief characteristics of Sri Aurobindo's poetry. Listen:
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To marry all in God's immense delight,
Bearing the eternity of every spirit,
Bearing the burden of universal love,
A wonderful mother of unnumbered souls.1
There is a sweep, a fulfilling vision, a height of spiritual experience. There is a spontaneous winging beyond the normal mode of existence. Or:
A great Illusion then has built the stars.2
Man in the world's life works out the dreams of God.3
In both these examples there seems a breaking of bonds, there is a release and an escape, a large and living height is here. Again:
A flaming warrior from the eternal peaks
Empowered to force the door denied and closed
Smote from Death's visage its dumb absolute
And burst the bounds of consciousness and Time.4
We feel in these lines a vibrant and intense altitude, a movement of supernatural wings, as it were.
Let us take a few more examples:
Midst those encircling lives her spirit dwelt,
Apart in herself until her hour of fate.5
Thy spirit's strength shall make thee one with God,
Thy agony shall change to ecstasy,
Indifference deepen into infinity's calm
And joy laugh nude on the peaks of the Absolute.6
Both these reveal some prophecy, some flight that throws open the doors of unforeseen heights by their word-rhythm, word-suggestion and symbols. Sri Aurobindo strikes keys that are seldom heard in English, those of rare and poignant visitations of the Muse. These lines convey a sense of height; we feel as if we were listening to enchanted echoes from the empyrean.
1 Savitri, p. 695. 2 Ibid., p. 442. 3 Ibid., p. 479, 4 Ibid., p. 21. 5 Ibid., p. 368. 6 Ibid., p. 454.
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In Milton this prophetic element is absent. He has a breadth and a sweep. He rises by the strength of his austere force, but that cannot match the height to which Sri Aurobindo rises most spontaneously. This is because he cannot usher in that intensity, that freedom, that revelatory wonder with which we meet at every step in Sri Aurobindo. Milton's approach and method are too mental to allow such an act.
As there is sweep and breadth in Milton, there is a breadth and roll in Sri Aurobindo as well. For example:
A vision came of higher realms than ours,
A consciousness of brighter fields and skies,
Of beings less circumscribed than brief-lived men
And subtler bodies than these passing frames,
Objects too fine for our material grasp,
Acts vibrant with a superhuman light
And movements pushed by a superconscient force,
And joys that never flowed through mortal limbs,
And lovelier scenes than earth's and happier lives.7
Here the sweep and breadth are magnificent. Sri Aurobindo pours out scenes of beauty, light, force and joy with ease, heaping joy on joy, revelation over revelation, bringing a greater and greater influx of magic word-images that are like bright and cadenced enchantments. And before we have time to feel and absorb the beauty and the intensity, out comes another image and yet another in quick and revealing succession, till one feels intoxicated with the flow and breadth, the span and the sweep that carry us along, surprised and panting with the unceasing glory. And we have a sense that all this would never stop. In contrast here are a few lines from Milton:
Meanwhile, upon the firm opacous globe
Of this round world, whose first convex divides
The luminous inferior Orbs, enclosed
From Chaos and the inroads of Darkness old,
Satan alighted walks.
There is a flow; but the whole rendering is mental, and we miss the winging cadence that gives us the idea of breadth. There are longer passages, especially those of similes where there is a great sweep; but that sweep is tied to material objects and to sense, hence
1 Ibid., p. 28.
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they lack the overwhelming rhapsody of movement we meet with in Sri Aurobindo. In the latter the breadth is subjective, of the consciousness that thrills to inner touches, feels the impact of aerial substances and lives and moves in the spirit's pure air. That is why there is so much felicity, richness and intensity in his span. Let us hear him again:
He has learnt the Inconscient's workings and its law,
Its incoherent thoughts and rigid acts,
Its hazard wastes of impulse and idea,
The chaos of its mechanic frequencies,
Its random calls, its whispers falsely true,
Misleaders of the hooded listening soul.8
This is the regard of the awakened man on the turbulent, eerie and mechanic device of the Inconscience. Here too we see the expanse of vision that grasps the totality of the inconscient world in one look. Such span of vision and penetration, such stretch of universal experience are only possible on that level of consciousness where one sees all things in their totality, yet not missing the differentiation, the different constituting factors, the different facets, possibilities, moods and patterns of existence. But Milton sees with the mind's eyes; he marks only the difference but misses the inherent unity which is known only by rising beyond the stature of reason. Whatever breadth he achieves is due to his mind's withdrawing from momentary things, his preoccupation with greater objects than merely those of sense and those closer to the soil than mind's native height. But he fails to go further beyond the impenetrable dome of ethical thinking. Hence we get clipped utterances; we feel that he attempts to rise, but the magnet-pull of the ethico-religious sentiment and thought drags him down.
As Milton is noble, so Sri Aurobindo is serene. This harmonious serenity seems to be omnipresent in Savitri. Whether he rises to great power or intensity or sweetness or breadth or grandeur, the serenity is never lost. It runs through the epic like a magic harmonious stream flowing across the peaks of power, the spans of magnificence, rising into waves of beauty, deepening into seas of felicity. Felicity seems to be the connecting link, the very condition under which he writes. Here for example:
8 Ibid., pp. 449-50.
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He builds on her largesses his proud fortunate days
And trails his peacock-plumaged joy of life
And suns in the glory of her passing smile.9
Repose in a framework of established fate,10
and again:
Return sheer joy to joy, pure light to light.11
We notice the note of serenity pervading these lines. There is an inevitable ease, a natural sense of harmony, a consciousness that is steeped in the sun of spirit. Nothing seems to disturb its unmoving poise, its smile and its gladness. This joy is joy of existence, the joy of creativity and the joy of self-manifestation. Sri Aurobindo has it even while describing the Void:
This is my silent dark immensity,
This is the home of everlasting Night,
This is the secrecy of Nothingness
Entombing the vanity of life's desires,12
or while expressing Nirvana
Empty of thought, incapable of bliss,
That felt life blank and nowhere found a soul...
That made unreal the world and all life meant, 13
or while picturing the sense of darkness
Vast minds and lives without a spirit within:
Impatient architects of error's house,
Leaders of the cosmic ignorance and unrest
And sponsors of sorrow and mortality
Embodied the dark Ideas of the Abyss.14
All these lines show that Sri Aurobindo never leaves his native altitude of serenity. Calmness seems to be the very basis of his poetical creation. All are panoramas before him, all are aspects of the same unchanging Reality. He is not ruffled by error or sin, nor overjoyed with rapture, nor heart-stricken with fate. Yet he does
9 Ibid., p. 63. 10 Ibid., p. 103. 11 Ibid., p. 128. 12 Ibid., p. 586.
13 Ibid., p. 534. 14 Ibid., p. 220.
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not forget to be one with his subject. He feels calmly the inner substance of all he describes or portrays. His serenity is not a withdrawal, that is, indifferent to the impact of the different facets of reality presented to him. Rather, he calmly enjoys all that comes before him and his soul relishes the variations, the contraries, the struggle, the harmony, the moods, the surprises, the invasions of light and felicity, the descent or ascent as conditions, facets, masks of the one unique consciousness. His serenity comes from his total detachment from things or their modes. He has seen the single unalterable Reality. It is on that background of his experience that he sees and feels things and that too is the background of his expression. This in turn modulates his style. Perhaps this aspect cannot be readily grasped on a cursory vision. If one went deep enough and penetrated sufficiently, the serenity and poise would become apparent.
The fourth characteristic of Savitri is grandeur. Grandeur in power, grandeur in height, grandeur in joy and beatitude, grandeur in intensity. These are some of the aspects. Grandeur as we see it in Sri Aurobindo is the intensification, heightening, raising up of his native mood to its utmost fullness when it acquires a majesty of its own. It no longer remains an isolated facet of expression but becomes an almost cosmic entity reaching its loftiest status. Such intense passages in Milton are rare in this peculiar sense in which we are using the term. But in Sri Aurobindo there are numerous lines, passages, sometimes whole pages which are electrified with grandeur and nobility. For example:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.15
Here we hear the strains of grandeur in solemnity. The whole passage breathes of a measureless solemn vastness that seems to roll itself to eternity. Or
A Voice calls from the chambers of the soul;
We meet the ecstasy of the Godhead's touch
In golden privacies of immortal fire.16
An occult grandeur is here. We seem to hear something that is intangible and ineffable. Not heights but depths seem to unveil
15 Ibid., p. 2, 16Ibid. p. 48.
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themselves here. Again
A paean swelled from the lost musing deeps;
An anthem pealed to the triune ecstasies,
A cry of the moments to the Immortals' bliss.17
A highland world of free and green delight.18
Again
And the delight when every barrier falls,
And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.19
In all these lines we hear the intense and occult rhythms of felicity and sweetness. But what about power?
I bow not to thee, O huge mask of Death,
Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,
Unreal, inescapable end of things,
Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit.20
Another example:
I am the living body of his light,
I am the thinking instrument of his power.21
Yet another:
Eternity looked into the eyes of Death,
And Darkness saw God's living Reality.22
There is an unmatched greatness of rhythm, of substance, a grandeur of theme and inspiration, a wide outbreak of power in these examples. The words themselves seem to become the vehicles of unforeseen energy and passion; the rhythm and work-pattern seem to bear the load of strange and living waves of splendour. Each syllable resounds with vitality quite opposed to what we have listened to in our earlier examples. Yet this splendour is not outward or physical-vital; this force or beauty or joy or felicity is subjective; they are manifestations of some mystical and hidden sweetness and rapture and power. Nor is this subjectiveness something vague or ethereal or too frail to endure the impact of physicality. Rather
17 Ibid., pp. 90-91. 18lbid., p. 389. l9 Ibid., pp. 416-17. 20 Ibid., p. 588.
23 Ibid., p. 634. 22 Ibid, p. 665.
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is seems living, true, self-existent and more enduring than the objective reality to which Milton's poetry ever recalled us.
There is a uniform height throughout Savitri. But sometimes there come at frequent or infrequent intervals superb lines replete with sudden, vibrant grandeur. Sometimes it is one single line: at other times it is a passage or else it is only a few syllables at the close.
Now we come to the fifth and the last of Sri Aurobindo's poetical characteristics: that of delight. What we feel is his delight of self-expression. It has no cause to be or seeks nothing as an exchange. This is one aspect which is almost totally absent in Milton, for his ethical attitude veils all joy to be and he shuns delight because he is there to speak of man's awe of his disobedience and also because joy is something profane and sacriligeous to the pious grimness of his Protestant spirit. Such a sentiment is absent in Sri Aurobindo. He takes delight as the cardinal principle of all existence and specially in a great poetical endeavour this comes as the foremost underlying basis, for creation born of sorrow is the creation of Ignorance. This delight is not extravagant or licentious. Neither is it shallow. These two qualities were the causes of Milton's not accepting delight as the basic creative principle. For he associated delight with sensuous joy, or joy born from a cause or as an effect and not as in Sri Aurobindo something which is causeless and eternally existing for itself. And had there been no music, austerity, nobility and chasteness, Milton's poem would have been the dullest in the English language. The case is the reverse in Sri Aurobindo. Had there been no other element, delight alone would have carried along the sweep of his epic.
Awaiting the Voice that spoke and built the worlds...23
The voice that chants to the creator Fire...24
And large immune entangled silences
Absorbed her into emerald secrecy
And slow hushed wizard nets of faery bloom.25
Compare these with Milton's
The golden sun, in splendour likest heaven.
23Ibid., p. 297. 24 Ibid., p. 310. 25 Ibid., p. 380.
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Now gentle gales
Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense
Nature perfumes and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils.
If we read the examples of the two poets, one thing becomes apparent. While the one flows on lucidly, on the stream of delight, the other moves amid physical realities devoid of the roll in the first. There is no joy or delight to lend its wings. Milton is afraid lest he should cross into the fairyland of delight and imperil his poetical doctrine. Whereas Sri Aurobindo has so made his lines and words infused with delight that, instead of feeling the outer inflexions and linguistic modulations caused by seemingly ignorant speech, we feel the cadence of Elysium, the wave-roll of the river of paradise. This transformation is caused by the presence of delight which is the true poetical creator.
He foundered drowned in sweet and burning vasts:
The dire delight that could shatter mortal flesh,
The rapture that the gods sustain he bore.26
On the single spirit's bare and infinite ground.27
Here each vowel and consonant represent the inevitability of a mood, a phase, a condition. This inevitability gives delight, the delight of poetic creation, the delight to be amid the perfection of tones, the harmony of colour or picturisation, of music and self-existence. This perfection and this harmony can come only when the source is felicity and the end is joy.
So far we have traced the general and basic principles of the style and method of Milton and Sri Aurobindo without going into any elaborate details. But these principles are vital in the understanding of their styles. With them as the background, we shall attempt to discuss some of the main features of style and method of the two poets. The first and foremost is the blank verse form. This is the basis of the structure of these epics.
We know that Milton discarded rhyme deliberately considering
26 Ibid., p. 237. 27 Ibid., p. 297.
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that an impediment to the heroic style. First, it has a tendency to end-stopping and hence to a monotony which is absolutely essential to avoid in a larger poem. Secondly, it has the tendency to make the lines weak and distract too much the attention of the reader to the recurring and identical syllables. Thirdly, it may hamper the freedom of the poet in his use of verse, making him a slave to the habit of sound-echo, which affects the poetical flow, the sweep, the sense and the largeness of strength and generous outbursts of energy, and thus he cannot divert his poetical skill to other metrical subtleties which can enrich the poem. We may say further: rhyme adds to the sweetness and English, a natural language of vigour, can use this for lyrical purposes; but when strength is needed, sweep and grandeur are aimed at, we can dispense with it, provided we substitute this loss by other technical devices like enjambement, verse-paragraph, stress-modulation and inflexion. Chaucer and Spenser, prior to Milton, had retained rhyme, obviously because they had not outgrown the French influence. Also the language had not grown virile enough for the load of blank verse. It is not that Milton was incapable of using rhyme or even a stanza form like Spenser's; his earlier poems are studies in metrical perfection; but he rejected rhyme because he found it unnecessary. Still, he did not follow Shakespeare's dramatic blank verse. Most probably, he had before him the verses of Homer and Virgil — these served as his models. But what is possible in Greek or Latin is impossible in English. The reasons are often repeated, so I refrain from stating them.
Sri Aurobindo's blank verse is different from Milton's by its end-stopped lines. He makes each line complete and perfect and the lines seem to flow and form a natural paragraph without altering this basic principle. Enjambements are few and to keep variety in such a form calls for a greater skill and a greater technical mastery. Why did Sri Aurobindo choose such a form ? Let us try to analyse the situation.
Blank verse prior to Sri Aurobindo had become perfect as far as it could go with the group of poets that came after Milton: Wordsworth, Keats, Arnold, Tennyson, to name only some. Each gave something to it, some lucidity, grandeur, beauty, sweetness or flow. Sri Aurobindo's earlier attempts, like Love and Death, Urvasie and Baji Prabhou, reveal part influence of these poets. But in Savitri there is a total break from the past. Just as Milton cancelled the past licences which had made blank verse a love or
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lyrical or rhetorical structure, Sri Aurobindo too cancels the enjambement, the elaborate construction that needed several lines to complete the sense; he makes each line a flawless jewel needing neither the push of the previous line nor the pull of the succeeding one. Yet many lines are interlinked, many lines have bearing on other lines without changing the basic structure of the end-stopped scheme. This method gives a greater architectural perfection and calls for great technical grasp. It also adds to the beauty of each line, each verse becoming a faultless unit placed between other such faultless units, like a house of perfect harmony whose each stone, corner, cornice, opening, door or window possesses beauty of its own apart from the beauty of perfection of the whole edifice. But he avoids masterfully the obvious limitations connected with such a scheme.
Also, lines by their end-stopped character can give a rare mantric quality due to their inevitability, precision and their tuning themselves to the highest possible intensity. It needs a greater ear for subtler Overhead rhythms and a consummateness of technique that can endure the strain of their high inspiration.
Further, such lines have a double character. They are both lyrical and epical. They are both sweet and heroic. Sri Aurobindo had seen the blank verse form of the past and he had no intention to repeat its ways, methods or styles. This pattern he chose could be used for all types of mystic poetry, for narrative verse, for all kinds of lyrical or epical forms. We can distinguish, not as in Milton's heroic style, or as in the heroic couplet of Pope or as in the lyrical verse of Keats, a style that was used for one purpose alone, but a style that is universal. Used in one context it is epical, in another it is narrative and in yet another it is lyrical. Such is Sri Aurobindo's style that it can absorb all the main types of poetry. Pope's heroic couplet was suitable for mock-heroic poems only. Shakespeare's blank verse could embody dramatic poetry alone. Milton's blank verse could not be used either for romantic or lyrical poetry. But the blank verse of Sri Aurobindo can be used for any of these forms; in fact he does use it differently. Sometimes it is highly mystical as in the first book. It is descriptive as in the second. The third book is again mystical. Book four is narrative while book five is lyrical, book six is dramatic, and so on. Such variety is only possible in a form that is elastic on one hand and highly exacting on the other.
Now we shall study some typical lines. Milton has pauses or
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ends almost anywhere except in the middle which breaks the line into two, and this he avoids, as here:
And now his heart
Distends with pride, and hardening in his strength,
Glories.
The whole sentence keeps true to the pentametric base except for the fourth foot of the second line. The next line begins with a trochee. These variations eliminate monotony and give richness to the poetical pattern. Here he starts with trochees:
Thrice he assayed, and thrice in spite of scorn
Tears, such as angels weep, burst forth.
The end of the second line — the fifth foot — is a spondee. This, like the initial trochees, gives us a dramatic effect.
No ! let us rather choose
Armed with hell-flames and fury all at once
O'er heaven's high tower to force resistless way,
Turning our tortures into horrid arms
Against the Torturer.
Such a sentence form is typical of Milton. He begins with the third foot and ends in the middle of the line. This not only lends a flow, it also aids variety.
Milton gives full value to weaker words and conjunctions and prepositions except for some words which he shortens for metre's sake, such as 'o'er' 'gav'st' 'e'er', etc. This adds to the roll of his blank verse and gives dignity, as here:
Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire ?
Say they who counsel war, "we are decreed,
Reserved and destined to eternal woe."
Sometimes he breaks up his sentences into two or three parts. Sometimes he runs at a great length; sometimes there are abrupt pauses in the middle of a line. As a rule he does not use a single line complete in itself; this is because his thought needs expansion and it needs several lines to complete one idea. He uses parentheses
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to break up further his paragraphs. These are more a comment on the main idea or event or situation.
The speeches that are there are not dramatic but there is eloquence and rhetoric in their turn. He does not use these in these in the same way as the dramatists of his period. They are part of the whole poem and he does not intend to change the tonal quality or the blank verse pattern:
Whether of open war or overt guile
We now debate, who can advise may speak,
hat can be worse
Than to dwell here driven out from bliss, condemned In this abhorred deep to utter woe?
There are some breaks in the first two books and there are dramatic effects due to loud outburst of passion. But the later speeches are very sedate and they do not read any dramatic pitch:
Some I have chosen of peculiar grace
Elect above the rest.
Even the eulogy or Jehovan is in the same vein.
Thou, Father, first they sung omnipotent,
Immutable Immortal, Infinite,
Eternal King.
Milton rarely uses such high-key words in such quick succession: unless inevitable, he refrains from using them. This is because the four-syllabic words tend to be a burden instead an aid. Also they break up the pentametric base. But he uses more often two-or three-syllabic words and rarely uses single syllables all in a row. The two-or three-syllabic words are subject to greater modulation by their position. The single syllables are almost invariably too light and can create monotony if not used with care, but in a fit place they heighten the poetical quality by their even tread and quick succeeding beats.
Another element: be never stops a phrase with an uneven syllable or in the middle of a foot. Such variation is too violent or dramatic; for each foot has a definite stop — a right we cannot trespass upon to create an unnatural break in the formation of a foot. For example, hear:
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A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven.
We mark that he stops his phrase with the second foot and begins a new sentence with the third, and an anapaest modulation at the end of one sentence balances a trochee at the beginning of the next and the line maintains a harmony in this manner.
But Milton rarely uses three-syllabic feet and almost never four-syllabic ones. As we have remarked earlier, such feet tend to become heavy if not used with skill and measures like the paeons can be used only for special effects. Further, these paeonic measures are foreign to the Anglo-Saxon tongue where shorter and clipped definite syllables are in use; such measures need slurring, liquid and gliding consonants and vowels as we find in Sanskrit or Latin. Thus it would be hazardous to use the paeons.
This ends our brief survey of Milton's blank verse. We have not attempted anything original but these remarks will be useful when we study the blank verse of Sri Aurobindo as a means of comparing and contrasting various elements.
Sri Aurobindo, like Milton, avoids the dramatic turn although all the manifest themes of it are present in his lines. This he does deliberately in order not to lessen or dilute the high intensity and the pitch to which he keeps his poem tuned. Milton's dialogues reveal his knowledge of parliamentary procedure; but the dialogues of Sri Aurobindo have no such implications. They reveal the struggle of consciousness against consciousness. While the dialogues in Milton are short, those of Sri Aurobindo are long, some of them covering many Cantos.
The blank verse of Sri Aurobindo is not ornate with rhetoric or Miltonic inversions. He avoids these, because they lend an artificial air. He does use inversions at places but more for tonal effect than anything else. This is one cardinal point in which he differs from Milton.
Although he uses end-stopped lines, and the meaning seems to be complete in each line, the whole paragraph runs on for several lines. The whole is one mass or pattern and yet each line has its perfection. Milton's single lines lack this perfection because what he aims at is the expressive paragraph. Although Sri Aurobindo does not break lines and his enjambment is very rare, yet there is no monotony for lack of a Miltonic pattern. Also, he brings at the
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end of his paragraph an intense, rich and high-pitched line like the finale of an orchestral composition to mark the close of a passage. Further, the thought-content in each line is so intense, that it attracts all attention and one forgets the larger form or paragraph pattern. This too aids the removal of monotony, because we find something new in each verse, something which is in one line but not there in another, something which reveals itself more and more, a new mood, a new thought, a new perception, a new feeling: all these give variety and enrich the blank verse.
Milton on the other hand does not have this variety of subjective moods, these phases of feeling, these bursts of revelation. Hence he must use all rhetorical devices, to bring in freshness and spontaneity. While Sri Aurobindo is keyed to subjective realities, Milton is tuned to outer facts of life. Thus one is simple in his verse form while the other is complex in his poetic execution.
If we analyse Sri Aurobindo's verse, we are struck by its simplicity; and yet such simplicity does express a miraculous mystic poetry. That is because he does not allow a set convention, dogma or heritage to dominate him, while Milton has his fixed code of poetics, his laws of diction and his rhetorical principles. Sri Aurobindo is utterly ruled by inspiration and the form we see is the creation of this and not the result of a mental idea of form. But this does not mean he lacks definite form, and that his method is fluid and amorphous.
The inspiration that comes brings with it the needed form and the form created is definite and possesses a character. Let us see how he builds his paragraph:
The golden issue of mind's labyrinth plots,
The riches unfound or still uncaught by our lives
Unsullied by the attaint of mortal thought
Abide in that pellucid atmosphere.28
The verb for the first line occurs in the fourth and grammatically we have quite a complex construction but the whole seems absolutely natural. The paragraph ends with a line's end and we do not feel any rhetorical effect aimed at. Or listen to this:
A Wisdom governing the mystic world,
A Silence listening to the cry of Life,
It sees the hurrying crowd of moments stream
28 Ibid., p. 103.
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Towards the still greatness of a distant hour.29
There is a pause after the first and second lines, but the third and fourth form one unit and yet, if analysed, both the final lines have completeness. In the next example all lines are complete pictures and have no continuing effect:
A divinising stream possessed his veins,
His body's cells awoke to spirit sense,
Each nerve became a burning thread of joy:
Tissue and flesh partook beatitude.30
There is no great use of any variations here. All is a plain pentameter. Yet we feel the surge of ecstasy; we do not sense any lack of variety. In the first example there are two trisyllabic feet in the second line: The riches unfound or still uncaught by our lives. These, as in Milton, are there deliberately to give a sense of wideness — the last balances the first.
It would be wrong to say that Sri Aurobindo never used enjambment. But it is rare indeed, as here:
A cry of spheres comes with thee and a song
Of flaming gods.31
Even here the line seems complete as it is: 'Of flaming gods' heightens the sense. Here is another example:
If our time-vexed affections thou canst feel,
Earth's ease of simple things can satisfy,
If thy glance can dwell content on earthly soil,
And this celestial summary of delight,
Thy golden body, dally with fatigue
Oppressing with its grace our terrain, while
The frail sweet passing taste of earthly food
Delays thee and the torrent's leaping wine,
Descend.32
The whole is a closely linked phrase. Images of different kinds are knit together, and the last "Descend" comes almost inevitably. Because Sri Aurobindo does not use overflowing lines, these rare uses come as breaks and they are there to heighten the poetical quality. He gets out of them the maximum possible effect.
29 Ibid., pp. 159-60. 30 Ibid., p. 334. 31 Ibid., p. 408. 32 Ibid., pp. 401 -02.
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We have an intenser line at the end of a phrase to mark the end of a train of thought — as a great climax:
In a thousand ways he serves her royal needs;
He makes the hours pivot around her will,
Makes all reflect her whims; all is their play:
This whole wide world is only he and she.33
Or hear:
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,
Outpoured the revelation and the flame.34
Again:
Great, patient, calm it sees the centuries pass,
Awaiting the slow miracle of our change
In the sure deliberate process of world-force
And the long march of all-revealing Time.35
Mark how the last line sums up the content of the previous lines in the first example; it gives the essential meaning, the inner bearing and forms the close of a set of images and thoughts by putting forth one line that is intenser, louder, and yet deeper than the rest. After this he begins a new train of images. In the second example the intensity increases suddenly and we have the climax of the "revelation and the flame" that justifies the "rift" and the "trickle". In the third there is no heightening, but a widening at the close. The last line symbolises in short all that has gone before. There is a dramatic quality in all these final lines. The previous lines are preparatory; they lead up to the close.
Milton is rich in similes. They not only enrich his poem, but lend grace and give a sense of expansiveness by their reference to subjects not related to the poem. Similes also come as refreshing elements and in a tale of pathos, strife, revolt and resulting sin, they for a brief moment make us forget the dreariness and the overshadowing presence of Satan. Sometimes they uplift the act, the image, the gesture by widening the scope. Finally they reveal the vast knowledge Milton had and the great amount of classical tradition he had imbibed.
Similes that we come across here are mostly pictorial or refer
33Ibid., p. 63. 34 Ibid., p. 3. 35 Ibid, p. 48.
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to sensuous objects. Milton reveals his art of picturisation. Sri Aurobindo's similes refer to subjective experience. They express some inner state, some psychological mood. Rarely does Sri Aurobindo point to some physical act, scene, occurrence, condition, and his similes are not there to enrich the poem. But they are there to make living the subjective experience, by reference to another living vibrant and subjective experience. He has no need to elevate the brooding atmosphere by other non-textual references; for such gloomy states of consciousness or atmosphere are absent in Savitri. Lastly, he has no need to reveal what his mind has imbibed through classical education. He does not want to show how much he has garnered in his mind, or how broad is the scope of his intellectual grasp. Rather he would reveal what states of consciousness he has passed through, what the extent of his inner realisation is. He speaks only of what he himself has realised.
This is the background from which we should see the similes of our two poets. Now we shall examine a few examples. Satan is compared to a vulture which,
To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids
On hills where flocks are fed, flies towards the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams.
The comparison makes vivid the picture, the situation and the purpose. Or this:
As when a scout,
Through dark and desert ways with peril gone
All night, at last by break of cheerful dawn
Obtains the brow of some high climbing hill,
Which to his eye discovers unaware
The goodly prospect of some foreign land.
This is the "gleaming metropolis" with shining "spires". This is Satan's view of Paradise after a difficult journey. This simile is classical and breathes an atmosphere which intensifies the effect of travail and the sudden hope of the end of his ordeal. Let us see how Sri Aurobindo uses a simile:
As a sculptor chisels a deity out of stone
He slowly chipped off the dark envelope,
Line of defence of Nature's ignorance.36
36Ibid., p. 36.
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Sri Aurobindo does not resort, like Milton, to a long-winded simile. He makes a brief reference to a physical fact that leads swiftly to some psychological inference. The reference does not distract the mind from the central theme, the leading idea. Not all of Milton's similes are long, as here:
He, in delight
Both of her beauty and submissive charms,
Smiled with superior love, as Jupiter
On Juno smiles when he impregns the clouds
That shed May showers.
Here the reference is to Greek mythology and the analogy between Jupiter and Adam is a happy one. Again, from Sri Aurobindo as a contrast referring to the same theme of love:
As if a whole rich world suddenly possessed,
Wedded to all he had been, became himself,
An inexhaustible joy made his alone,
He gathered all Savitri into his clasp.37
There is no depth of feeling in the Miltonic simile. We feel as if we were a distant onlooker, a witness to something which did not concern us; while in Sri Aurobindo we feel the sudden surprise, the sudden overwhelming joy to possess and be possessed. Again, from Milton:
A globe far off
It seemed, now seems a boundless continent,
Dark, waste and wild, under the frown of Night,
Starless, exposed to ever-threatening storms.
Mark how successful is Milton in sombre picturisation. The darkness, the desolation come home with matchless power; the feeling of foreboding is intense as opposed to his joyous themes which do not somehow bring that impact of reality and intensity. In contrast:
As if from a Silence without form or name
The Shadow of a remote uncaring god
Doomed to his Nought the illusory universe,
Cancelling its show of idea and act in Time
And its imitation of eternity.38
37Ibid., p. 410. 38 Ibid., p. 565.
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How palpable is the feeling of silence, the formless and nameless god that cancels everything ! We get a double feeling here: one, of intense reality bom from a psychological union with the subject; two of a witnessing regard, an aloofness that does away with fear and awe. Milton's similes possess neither while describing happy scenes, but in his sombre ones there is a sort of union with the subject which makes them so real-toned. Milton is more successful when he refers to classical themes, as here:
To Palès, or Pomona, thus adorned,
Likest she seemed — Pomona when she fled
Vertumnus — or to Ceres in her prime
Yet virgin of Prosperina from Jove.
This reference to Greek mythology and its deities in relation to Eve at once gives another colour and heightens her personality and she sheds some of that ethical sheath in which Milton had originally enwrapped her.
Before we end this topic, we may glance at one more example to show that Sri Aurobindo's similes are not always subjective and that yet he gives a strange turn to a physical image in order to bring home a psychological truth, a thought trying but failing to enter a silent mind:
As smoothly glides a ship nearing its port,
Ignorant of embargo and blockade,
Confident of entrance and the visa's seal,
It came to the silent city of the brain
Towards accustomed and expectant quay,
But met a barring will, a blow of Force
And sank vanishing in the immensity.39
Although he uses a simile, yet to the conscious mind which has got the necessary preparation and training, this picture is not an abstract image but a figure of reality.
A last word about Milton's similes. Generally they are long and we have chosen only the briefest and those that seemed to us to be representative.
Our next topic is the metaphor. Milton is not as rich in this rhetorical
19Ibid., p. 544.
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device as Sri Aurobindo. Metaphor makes palpable and real all that would otherwise be abstract imagery. It is not so much an analogy as a transference of an alien image to the subject. This device is largely used in Sanskrit. Its purpose is to harness the imagination to untracked fields of figures whereby the subject acquires a different status and personality. It is, to use psychological terms, transference of the personality of one to another which may have no distinct relation or association with it. Such a process is indeed necessary in mystic poetry owing to its very nature that is opposed to the epic or dramatic and needs aids to undo its likely effect of abstraction. Milton employs it as a rare and passing feature but Sri Aurobindo utilises it to strengthen and make clear his experience. The reason why Milton does not employ it is obvious. This transference of quality, personality, character of an object was to him in itself a falsehood. While he found similes stimulating and entertaining, he found metaphors an unpractical and false device that created an unreal impression. A cloud was a cloud, a flower a flower. The character of the one could not be passed on to the other in his view — all the more so because he stood against all falsities in any form of mode, and most of all in poetry.
Further, the physicality and the objectivity that are in Milton oppose this psychological method. It needs imagination and a strong living power of visualisation to conceive the sky as a sea and the stars as its foam. Also, such metaphors have no place in descriptive poetry like Paradise Lost where we find recounted event after event, action after action, one wave of deeds following another wave of deeds. In such poetry metaphors would not only be out of place but hamper the swift progress of incidents. In Savitri, where the subjective has a larger and prominent share, metaphorical devices aid, for they point to something deeper by their transference, and their subjective tone and psychological make-up help create a mystical atmosphere. We feel the passage of parallel realities: the inner and the outer.
Metaphors in themselves are not false, as Milton conceives them. Things and objects, as we see them and sense them, reveal to us one side of their character, the material and the formal. In that formal aspect there is no possible interchange of character or personality. But seen from a subjective point of view, a deeper way of looking at things, these formal natures, these hard crusts of forms are replaced by a fluid interchangeable stuff that permeates all things, and then the sea does not shut out the sky and the hills
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do not hesitate to become the supine body of a god. Then, names do not become impermeable walls of idea but all things grow symbols of one single undivided reality. Because the thing behind is real, is representing symbols too are real; only the hard, unchangeable characters that we impose on objects by our mental idea vanishes. Take the lines:
In tapestried chambers and on crystal floors,
In armoured town or gardened pleasure-walks,
Even in distance closer than her thoughts,
Body to body near, soul near to soul,
Moving as if by a common breath and will,
They were tied in the single circling of their days
Together by love's unseen atmosphere,
Inseparable like the earth and sky.40
The whole turn is metaphorical. Or consider:
Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,
Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.41
The metaphor is clear, the image if it were used as a simile would not achieve this directness of expression. Another example:
Her youth sat throned in calm felicity.42
The metaphor is not obvious, but its indication is clear. Further:
His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres
Into our province of ephemeral sight,
A colonist from immortality.43
This metaphor brings home the truth of the divine descent. How revealing is the following!
Her lifted finger's keen unthinkable tip
Bared with a stab of flame the closed Beyond.44
It looks like a simile, but its use is as of a metaphor. Her finger-tip is the dagger of flame that cuts open the veils of the Beyond — such a supernatural labour no far-fetched simile could compass. Materially this phenomenon may appear an impossibility. But, seen from the occult point of view, such an occurrence is a tangible
40 Ibid., p. 533. 41 Ibid., p. 15. 42 Ibid, p. 16.
43 Ibid, p. 22. 44 Ibid, pp. 38-39.
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reality and Sri Aurobindo is describing it in a most vivid vision which we, in linguistic terms, would call a metaphor. Again, another mystic experience couched in luminous words:
She was all vastness and one measureless point,
She was a height beyond heights, a depth beyond depths,45
and
The world was her spirit's wide circumference.46
Also:
She was a subconscient life of tree and flower,
The outbreak of the honied huds of spring...
She was Time and the dreams of God in Time.47
Such is the scope of the metaphor; its direct transference can result in a spontaneous expression of the mystic truth, from which our language as a medium of expression debars us otherwise. In fact, the whole gamut of spiritual experience is opposed to the physical way of looking at things. Language, bom from mind's pragmatic need to express itself, and syntax, which has its iron-clad rules to aid this expression, are futile restrictions on the spirit's freedom. Metaphors are modes through which the spirit is freed of the encircling rules of syntax and the result may be a chaos to the physical-minded listener, but to one with mystical leanings they open at once vistas of undreamt-of realities.
A whole epic poem cannot be made up of metaphors or similes; the larger body of it consists of descriptive passages. They not only carry the story along by their ever changing panorama of objects and characters and actions and by their texture of ideas, feelings, moods all types; they also give a coherence and stability, an organic concreteness. Into their varied context are woven the jewels of similes, the ornaments of metaphors, the dramatic speeches, and the highlights of tragedy.
In Milton all descriptions are happy even though he may be painting a tragic situation. Nowhere is he more at home than in this — nowhere does his poetical genius stand out better. As a poet of outer action and as an extravert, Milton is at home when describing scenes, people, the struggle of evil, the dramatic gestures of Satanic hordes, and in all descriptions of darkness or light, of
45 Ibid., p. 555. 46 Ibid., p. 556. 47 Ibid., p. 557.
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God or the Devil, or of justice and law. He is a worshipper of the concrete, and abstractness is his bugbear.
But Sri Aurobindo shines equally great in descriptions and in abstractions. In a real sense, even his psychological, occult and mystical experiences are description; they are a different type of description — the description of inner fields of reality, and of phenomena of psychological being. But there are pure abstract reflections which, because they come as experiences, become living. Nevertheless, whether he is describing physical Nature, or an occult event, he is supremely at ease.
The description of Nature is one of the main assets of a poet. Here is one of Milton's:
Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks,
Grazing the tender herb, were interposed;
Or palmy hillock; or the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store,
Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose.
Although Milton does not touch the depths of feeling that is Wordsworth's his account though objective is felicitous. Now look at the description of Nature in Sri Aurobindo:
The sylvan solitude was a gorgeous dream,
An altar of the summer's splendour and fire,
A sky-topped flower-hung palace of the gods.48
And rain fled sobbing over the dripping leaves
And storm became the forest's titan voice.49
The description here is not merely an objective one. There is a deeper note: Nature reveals something greater than her plain exterior aspect. For example:
There was a glory in the least sunbeam;
Night was a chrysoprase on velvet cloth,
A nestling darkness or a moonlit deep;
Day was a purple pageant and a hymn,
A wave of the laughter of light from mom to eve.50
48 ibid, p. 468. 49 ibid. 50 ibid.
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This description is neither romantic nor heroic — it is typically Aurobindonian, with its suggestive quality, its revealing of Nature as something divine and superhuman, its intensity of visionary feeling. How does Milton describe an event ? —
Ten paces huge
He back recoiled; the tenth on bended knee
His massy spear upstayed: as if, on earth,
Winds underground, or waters forcing way,
Sidelong had pushed a mountain from its seat
Half sunk with all its pines.
Light as the lightning-glimpse they ran, they flew;
From their foundations, loosening to and fro,
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops
Uplifting, bore them in their hands.
The whole is packed with energy and this vigour is typically Miltonic. There is a sense of the dramatic in such impetuous descriptions of events. In contrast is Sri Aurobindo's:
Then trembling with the mystic shock her heart
Moved in her breast and cried out like a bird
Who hears his mate upon a neighbouring bough.
Hooves trampling fast, wheels largely stumbling ceased;
The chariot stood like an arrested wind.51
This one event changed the life of Savitri — the meeting with Satyavan. The description reveals something that transfigures a life and alters fate. Yet there is no dramatic exuberance, nor any extravagance of feeling. But Sri Aurobindo can be forceful too as when he speaks of Death's defeat:
Assailing in front, oppressing from above,
A concrete mass of conscious power, he bore
The tyranny of her divine desire.52
As a result
His body was eaten by light, his spirit devoured.53
51 Ibid., p. 396. 52 Ibid, p. 667. 53 Ibid
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Power with all its majesty, but without its harshness we feel in these lines. In Milton the power is tangible, something very physical with the image of a crashing hill. There is a vital grandeur in all his energy, while in Sri Aurobindo there is a sublimity and it is subtle as opposed to Milton's physicality. Milton's force is the falling of a cliff; Sri Aurobindo's the sweep of light.
Now we shall examine how Milton and Sri Aurobindo describe a mood. Here is anger in Milton:
So frowned the mighty combatants that Hell
Grew darker at their frown; so matched they stood.
And here is amazement:
Adam, soon as he heard
The fatal trespass done by Eve, amazed,
Astonished stood and blank, while horror chill
Ran through his veins and all his joints relaxed.
Also other passions are depicted:
Nor only tears
Began to rise, high passions — anger, hate,
Mistrust, suspicion, discord — and shook sore
Their inward state of mind, calm regions once
And full of peace, now tosst and turbulent.
The first two examples are vivid but the last lacks vigour and reads like a poetical statement instead of a graphic presentation. Milton excels in describing violent moods; but he is not so successful in finer or subtler ones.
The amazement of delight in Sri Aurobindo runs:
O Thou who com'st to me out of Time's silences,
Yet thy voice has wakened my heart to an unknown bliss —54
and love:
She felt her being flow into him as in waves
A river pours into a mighty sea —55
and fear:
54 Ibid., p. 400. 55 Ibid., p. 410.
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She in her dreadful knowledge was alone.56
Still another mood:
She like a pantheress leaped upon his words
And carried them into her cavern heart.57
And Savitri facing Death:
All grief and fear were dead within her now
And a great calm had fallen. The wish to lessen
His suffering, the impulse that opposes pain
Were the one mortal feeling left. It passed:
Griefless and strong she waited like the gods.58
This is not only a mood; it is a state of soul. In fact, all that Sri Aurobindo describes are not fleeting moods; they are expressions of conditions of soul and deeper life, that feel the passing wave of moods like something vibrant and something that can inaugurate a great event. Milton's moods are more linked to the earth and hence they are more gross. He does not penetrate deep enough like Sri Aurobindo to feel the inner core of a mood. He is too preoccupied with the external aspect to have room for subtler vibrations. Had he the Aurobindonian power of penetration, his characters would live like living personalities, having a distinct soul, and he would give a sense of reality far beyond that which a physical or a mental presentation can.
More than description are the words themselves, the very bases of all poetry, the stones of sculpture, the colours of the artist. Upon the choice of them depends the success or the failure of the poet. Words in themselves are neutral; but when used rightly and in their proper place they can wield great power as instruments of expression, as revealing moods, or states of poignancy of feeling or modes of the intensity of poetical creativity. They embody something elemental in their vibrations and can, by their manifestation, call down superhuman vibrations. That is why the Veda calls the word the primal power, a god.
Now we shall examine how words are used by the poets, and the effects they achieve. Take Milton's
Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze
56 Ibid., p. 470. 57 Ibid., p. 563. 58 Ibid., p. 564.
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Far round illumined Hell.
Mark how each word is care fully chosen. Each adjective is most apt; the arrangement of vowels and consonants goes on to express the effect of wonder, power and splendour. If Milton had used "Thousands" in place of "Millions", both the tonal effect and word-suggestion would not have achieved that finality of effect. "Flaming swords" suggests a heavenly origin and any other epithet would not have borne the same vigour. Suppose he wrote:
Unnumbered vigorous blades, drawn from the thighs
Of splendid Cherubim; the titan flare
All round enlightened Hell.
hese lines are not bad; but they do not convey the same effect as Milton's original lines. Here are other four lines:
To sit in hateful office here confined,
Inhabitant of Heaven and heavenly-bom —
Here in perpetual agony and pain,
With terrors and with clamours compassed round.
There is a roll in these. This is due to words that are inevitable in their places and hold the exact shades of sense — all go to create a particular effect of pathos. Here "brood" would not convey the same as "sit"; "hateful" is very suggestive and "distasteful" or "abhorred" would be either too weak or too strong to be in this position; "office" has a peculiar sense which "condition" or "state" cannot give; "confined" conveys a sense of imprisonment, but suggests a state created by the speaker's own will and not as an imposition; "inhabitant", a four-syllabic word coming after shorter words, conveys a sense of difference, a sense of an alien. So too "perpetual" is a very suggestive and apt word and, joined with "agony" and "pain", stands out in contrast to the preceding "heaven" and "heavenly-bom."
Milton is very conscious, as a poet, of the value and power of the words as we see in the examples given above. But he is most effective while speaking of proper names and he uses them with great skill. The proper names assume an exotic beauty, adding a rare charm. He discloses in them a vibration that we ordinarily miss or pass by; we are not drawn to their real beauty of tone. This, Milton by his skilful use, discovers for us. Thus he speaks of all who
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Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban,
Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore
When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabbia.
The roll of sounds and the vibration evoke a strange and remote atmosphere. It makes of historical and legendary hell a living citadel of romance. Here is another example:
Abhorrèd Styx, the flood of deadly hate;
Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;
Cocytus, named of lamentation loud,
Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegeton,
Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.
Milton conjures up the atmosphere by epithets that increase the power and significance of the names. The word "Styx" seems a cruel word, its hard consonants recall hate. "Acheron" appears to be, by its open vowels, reminiscent of sorrow, the choking sound of grief. "Cocytus" carries a sharp yet prolonged burst of suffering breath. "Phlegeton" reminds one simultaneously of fire and water by its fricative and cutting consonants followed by a nasal sound. All these names he had culled from Grecian legend, adding a fresh beauty to the Biblical lore. Now hear:
The unchanging blue reveals its spacious thought.59
This example from Sri Aurobindo evokes a different atmosphere. There is a natural felicity in this line. Suppose he had written thus:
The constant sky unveils its measureless thought
We have kept the meaning the same — but the new words do not call down that atmosphere. This proves that no thought-substance alone creates great poetry. It also proves the inevitability of the words; when we get the right ones, the greatest poetry is created. Here again:
He seemed the wideness of a boundless sky,
He seemed the passion of a sorrowless earth,
He seemed the burning of a world-wide sun.
Two looked upon each other, Soul saw Soul.60
59 Ibid., p. 422. 60 Ibid., p. 683.
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Here there is no such exotic beauty as Milton evokes. The whole passage reads like a great spiritual discovery. Each word seems to bear a weight of divine felicity; each word, even in its utter simplicity, opens up a world of undiscovered beauty. If Milton uses his words like a great and conscious craftsman, a connoisseur of tonal values, the value of vibrations, Sri Aurobindo uses them as a prophet; he not only uses the magical tones, but touches the source from where words have their birth, thus getting something primal, something veridical and rare. Yet the simplicity seems magical. The unsophistication is garbed with a heavenly felicity. He does not need any verbiage, any sonorous diction to create a lofty effect.
The words Milton uses are chosen for their tonal content and he masses them together and groups them for their music and effect. But Sri Aurobindo does not choose his words: they come to him packed with the power, the bliss, the grandeur, the richness of another world. He invokes them, and makes silent his vessel for their reception.
How is the style of these two poets a departure form other poets? We shall examine this briefly. Here is Tennyson:
The great band
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern mom,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the Northern sea.
Compared to Milton, these lines lack the grandeur and the severity. They appear facile; Tennyson's poetry does not soar, it lacks the music in which we revel in Milton. With strength and splendour, gone, blank verse loses half its dignity. Even the intense lyricism is lacking which can compensate the loss of grandeur.
In comparison to Sri Aurobindo, Tennyson's example appears lacking in depth and intensity. It seems to skim the surface and not dive deep to give us the pearl of felicity that Sri Aurobindo possesses.
Wordsworth, the godson of Milton, wrote his blank verse thus:
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth
And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay
Beneath him: — Far and wide the clouds were touched,
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And in their silent faces could he read
Unutterable love.
The beauty of Wordsworth lies in his thought and his description of Nature. Here he is more deep than Tennyson. Compared to Milton, he can stand his ground by his contemplative strength and his love of Nature. He has no power; but he attempts sublimity. As blank-verse form, his poetry lacks the architectural hand of Milton, the conscious hand of the artist. Here he allows the thoughts to lead him and form becomes a secondary matter. But in Milton there is balance of form and substance. Also the physical element that is in Milton is absent in Wordsworth.
Wordsworth stands between the spirituality of Sri Aurobindo and the rationality of Milton. Yet Sri Aurobindo is nearer to Wordsworth than Milton in his subjective approach to things. Wordsworth's style is that of a contemplator, Milton's is that of a conscious artist, Sri Aurobindo's that of a seer. In greatness either of thought or style or form Tennyson does not come near to these three poets. Here is Shelley:
Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favour my solemn song, for I have loved
Thee ever and thee only; I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries.
Shelley comes nearest to Sri Aurobindo and is farthest from Milton. His approach is that of an intuitive poet, a half-way to a seer. Here too he is not conscious of his form and does not employ it as a conscious medium. But he is not so apparently loose like Wordsworth or facile like Tennyson. One example from Matthew Arnold:
But the majestic river floated on
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved
Rejoicing through the hushed Chorasmian waste,
Under the solitary moon.
This is Victorian blank verse at its best. There is felicity of description and a beauty belonging to the romantic order. Arnold too in not so austere as Milton, but nevertheless has a capacity for
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description. But we miss the heroic grandeur which is replaced by a depth of feeling and a happy artistry. Arnold is deeper — and he comes more near in profundity to Sri Aurobindo. As an artist employing the blank-verse form, he is conscious of the form and uses it with care. But the mastery and craftsmanship we find in Milton are absent. Let us pass on to Keats:
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of mom,
Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star,
Sat gray-haird Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud.
What strikes one is the difference of approach: if Milton is grand, Keats is entrancing; one has the intensity of power, the other has the intensity of beauty. Both are great; but the greatness of both are poles apart. But while Milton's verse has the breath of a true epic, the poetry of Keats is essentially lyrical. This comment holds true for Shelley and Wordsworth as well. Length does not determine the real characteristic of an epic. It is the approach and the style, the subject treated and the way of treating it. Wordsworth's poems are long — but they are of a contemplative nature and do not encompass a global subject. His approach is personal; this takes away his claim to epic poetry. Tennyson is voluminous, but his style is lax and the narrative quality is too narrow in scope (dealing with English heroes only) and this debars us from calling his Idylls of the King an epic. His verse seems undignified and lacking in self-restraint. Shelley and Keats are too romantic and purely lyrical; they never had the ambition to write an epic. Their approach and method were not suited for this purpose. Matthew Arnold has written admirable long poems but they are mere episodes and not concerned with any that changed fate or created history.
Thus we come back to the two poets we started with. We brought in these poets and their short examples purposely to show the difference of approach, the difference in style and the difference in managing the blank-verse form.
Sri Aurobindo, we have seen, conforms to the standards of the above poets, not to those of Milton, and yet he is the only poet who can be successfully compared with Milton owing to his original blank-verse style, his word-music, his great artistry of
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seeing all things from a subjective viewpoint, his grandeur, his felicity and lastly his world theme that is at once cosmic and intensely personal. He is lyrical on one side and epical on the other but avoids the heroic drumbeats of Milton. This blending of two opposite methods is his special feature. Milton can never be lyrical. His heroic approach debars this. But Sri Aurobindo can be lyrical without losing his epic dignity. Milton is severe as a rule and on this is based his element of strength. But Sri Aurobindo is ever felicitous, and on his felicity are based all other elements: beauty, music, grandeur and power. Both use words for a special end and both differ from other poets in their approach and style. But the chief difference lies in the rationality of Milton and the spirituality of Sri Aurobindo. This rationality is based on physicality, and objectivity is its aim. The spirituality of Sri Aurobindo does not debar physicality as such, but avoids its grossness; also it encompasses in its scope all phases of life, mind and consciousness. This is the fundamental difference of the two. Milton has attempted to be universal; but his universality is limited by the limitation of technical knowledge of his age and the sensuous physicality which, along with Christian scriptural lore, he terms truth. Sri Aurobindo's universality is the universality of consciousness and spirit and he is not limited by any religion or idea, the objective knowledge of the age, the dependence on mental reasoning, or deductive logic. In style he is utterly simple and this simplicity is not monotonous. His effects are not manoeuvred or guided by the law of rhetoric. His inspiration creates the needed effect, creates the necessary variety. In style Milton is sonorous. His mastery of language, metre and his awareness of the tonal value of words create the heroic style — a thing that never has been equalled in its austerity, power and grandeur by any other English poet. Only Sri Aurobindo, at the other pole of felicity, by his sustained role of Overhead poetry equals him and surpasses him in sheer flights of inspiration, in heights of grandeur, in the sweep of his magnificence and delight.
ROMEN
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