Mother's Chronicles - Book Four

26

Poets All

"Have you written any stories?" asked a curious Nirod.

"I have," replied Sri Aurobindo, "but they are all lost." He explained how it happened. "When there was the rumour that our house would be searched by the [Pondicherry] police, my trunk was sent off to David's¹ place. After some time when they brought the trunk back it was found that all my stories had been eaten away by white ants. So my future fame as a story-writer perished." The way he said that made everyone burst into laughter.

"But it is a pity I lost two translations of poems," Sri Aurobindo said more seriously. "One of them was a translation of Kalidasa's Meghaduta in terza rimas. It was rather well done."

"Yes, indeed a pity," sympathized the poet in Nirod.

"But the stories were nothing to speak of—except one. I can say something of this one because I have still two pages left of it. All my stories were occult."

1. David Rassendren. Some stories were found later, many of them incomplete, and have been published.

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One of his main occupations at Cambridge was writing English poetry to' which he had devoted much of his time the last two years he was at St. Paul's School. Sri Aurobindo's lifelong poetical career, let us recollect, began in Manchester when he wrote for the Fox Family Magazine — "an awful imitation of somebody I don't remember." Brother Mano was also a contributor to the Family Magazine. "Then I went to London," said Sri Aurobindo, "where I began really to write." He admitted later, in Pondicherry, when he was besieged with disciples and did not have much time to himself, that "in England indeed I could write a lot every day, but most of that has gone to the Waste Paper Basket." Whatever could be salvaged went in Songs to Myrtilla, which was published in 1895 from Baroda for private circulation. Also much of what he wrote in the first years at Baroda —poetry, translations from the Sanskrit in blank verse and heroic verse —"has disappeared into the unknown in the whirlpools and turmoil of my political career."

When he was seventeen, he translated from Greek a passage titling it Hecuba. Mano's friend Binyon happened to read it, then asked the young man why he was not writing more poetry? "I dare say," acknowledged Sri Aurobindo, "my brother stimulated me greatly to write poetry."

Stephen Phillips, a Victorian poet, made a considerable impression on Sri Aurobindo. Phillips (1868-1915), also a playwright and actor, was a cousin of Binyon's and a very close friend of Manmohan's. The three of them along with Arthur Cripps "who did not come to much in poetry afterwards, brought out a book in conjunction. It was well spoken of," recalled

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Sri Aurobindo. This was Primavera (May 1890), and it was reviewed by none other than Oscar Wilde. "A young Indian of brilliant scholarship and high literary attainments who gives some culture to Christ Church," he wrote of Manmohan in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1890. "His verses show how quick and subtle are the intellectual sympathies of the oriental mind, and suggest how close is the bond of union that may some day bind India to us by other methods than those of commerce and military strength. Mr. Ghose ought some day to make a name in our literature." Oscar Wilde's glowing review had its impact, and Primavera ran into a second edition in no time at all.

At the Memorial Meeting held after the death of Manmohan Ghose in January 1924 Tagore, in his presidential address, paid him rich tributes. Speaking of his long-standing relationship with the late Manmohan's family he said, "I was in England when Manmohan, Aurobindo and their other brothers arrived with their mother. So I saw them even in their earlier days." Rabindranath was there for his studies; his first sojourn in England being from November 1878 to late 1880; he was in fact in Manchester in 1879, when the three brothers came there. "I renewed my acquaintance with Manmohan after his return to India —through my own poetry. I was reading my Sonar Tari (The Golden Boat) on the verandah of our Jorasanko house and Manmohan made illuminating comments on the idea and metrical peculiarities of the poem. Even though unacquainted with Bengali, he could intuitively grasp the inner significance of the poem .... A poet is of no particular race," averred the Poet, "he is a poet of all countries." Winding up

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his speech, Tagore said simply, "Today I pay my respect to his memory. I have some acquaintance with his poetry which he would often read out to me. I used to listen in delighted wonder. ..."

Sri Aurobindo also fully appreciated his brother's poetic merit. In June 1890, one month after the publication of Primavera, when Mano asked Binyon to send him four more copies — "I want to send one copy to Lord Ripon" —he did not forget his young brother: "Would you also mind giving my brother a copy, with your name and Cripps' inscribed on it in your own handwriting ?"

Prolific reader that he was, Sri Aurobindo knew Shakespeare and Milton to the full. "I read Shelley a great deal and took an intense pleasure in some of Coleridge's poetry." Keats too, specially his Hyperion. Among the Victorian poets, Stephen Phillips made a considerable impression on him. "I read Marpessa and Christ in Hades, before they were published and as I was just in the stage of formation then — at the age of seventeen — they made a powerful impression which lasted until it was worked out in Love and Death." Sri Aurobindo noted, "The only romantic poets of the Victorian Age who could have had any influence on me, apart from Arnold whose effect on me was considerable, were Tennyson perhaps, subconsciously, and Swinburne of the earlier poems, for his later work I did not at all admire. Still it is possible that the general atmosphere of the later Victorian decline, if decline it was, may have helped to mould my work and undoubtedly it dates and carries the stamp of the time in which it was written." These influences may

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have helped in moulding the 'poet' in Sri Aurobindo before he had entirely found himself.

Poets are born and not taught, goes the saying, and metre is not taught at school, so how did Sri Aurobindo learn it? "I have never studied prosody myself—in English at least; what I know I know by reading and writing and following my ear and using my intelligence." Sri Aurobindo later amplified his remark. "Moreover, my intelligence was inborn and so far as it grew before the Yoga, it was not by training but by a wide haphazard activity developing ideas from all things read, seen or experienced. That is not training, it is natural growth."

Sri Aurobindo explained what he meant by 'following my ear.' Alluding to the Alipore Bomb Case when he was undergoing trial, and on whose bench was his former friend Beachcroft, Sri Aurobindo said, "Another intimate English friend of mine, Ferrers, came to see me in the court when the trial was going on. We, the accused, were put into a cage for fear we should jump out and murder the Judge. Ferrers was a barrister practising at Sumatra or Singapore. He saw me in the cage and was much concerned and couldn't conceive how to get me out. It was he who had given me the clue to the real hexametre in English." It was his recitation of a very Homeric line from Clough that gave Sri Aurobindo the real swing of the metre.¹

1. Hugh Norman Ferrers was admitted scholar at King's College on 4 October 1889, became a barrister and practised in Malaya States, then served in the First World War.

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But Sri Aurobindo's greatest debt was undoubtedly to his brother Manmohan. In 1899, after six years in Baroda during which he had delved deep into Sanskrit literature, he wrote his long poem Love and Death based on a theme from the Mahabharata, and dedicated it to his brother. He sent him an accompanying letter in which he tried to soften Manmohan's indictment of Hindu legend, which he found 'lifeless' compared to the 'warm' Greek myths. At the end of his long apology of Sanskrit literature, Sri Aurobindo generously concluded : "Will you accept this poem as part-payment of a deep intellectual debt I have been long owing to you? Unknown to yourself, you taught and encouraged me from my childhood to be a poet. From your sun my farthing rushlight was kindled, and it was in your path that I long strove to guide my uncertain and faltering footsteps. If I have now in independent surroundings departed from your guidance and entered into a path perhaps thornier and more rugged, but my own, it does not lessen the obligation of that first light and example."

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