On Poetry
THEME/S
Indian Poets
and English Poetry
Indian Poets and
English Poetry
Correspondence between
Kathleen Raine and K. D. Sethna
Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Pondicherry
First Published 1994
(Typeset in Times 11/13)
ISBN HI-7058-398-5
© Kathleen Raine & K. D. Sethna
Published by and Printed at
Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press
Pondicherry 605002
PRINTED IN INDIA
The Collection of letters - The English Language and the Indian Spirit - preceding the present one was appreciated by "an audience fit though few" interested in the adventure of India's contribution to the varied world of English poetry. This audience is expected to welcome the cut and thrust of two idealistic friends on a much larger scale covering a greater field of literary reference fanning out essentially from the same central theme as before. This theme is the poetic vision and work of Sri Aurobindo, mostly exemplified in his epic Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol.
In the course of the main discussion a diversity of subjects, both personal and general, came up because of the wide-ranging minds of the two correspondents. This intrusion has not been rebuffed in the interests of a single-tracked concentrated controversy. Life in a broad sense, sweeping over both present-day issues and past history, has formed, along with literature itself in an extensive context, the subject of the letters.
It is with the glad permission of Miss Raine that her side of the correspondence no less than mine, running over nearly three years, has been brought out. In her letter of 2.3.1988 she said: "By all means publish whatever you like of our exchanges".
The sharing of these exchanges with the public has suddenly been achieved after a long wait, thanks to the remarkable enthusiasm of one reader of the earlier correspondence. I met him for the first time during his flying visit to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram on his way from England to East Africa. The topic of the old exchanges which he had happened to enjoy came up. I told him of the new ones which had stretched over more than double the length. He asked: "Why don't you bring them out?" My answer was: "Lack of finance." At once he exclaimed: "Why not let me have the privilege of standing the cost?"
I cannot be sufficiently grateful for this spontaneous burst of instant generosity bespeaking the heart of an ardent lover of literary quests - especially those bearing on a multi-creative spiritual figure he deeply revered.
K.D. Sethna
From Kathleen Raine
What a surprise and a pleasure to hear from you again after all these years, and I certainly thought the publication of our correspondence had been long forgotten. I look forward to re-reading your own letters but did quickly run through my side of the correspondence to see whether what I had then written was too foolish or far from what I now feel about these things.I found that on the whole I do think as I did, only with perhaps greater pessimism about the future of all the world and English as the world]-language not of Shakespeare and Wordsworth but of the television commercial. The vocabulary now in use in this country is I know not how many hundreds of words poorer than that used by Alfred the Great, not to name Marvell or Milton or, I imagine, the Romantics. But I still think we have to go on making every effort until the last day - which after all is not named on any calendar. One point - it was made by Ramchandra Gandhi whom I met in New Delhi earlier this year - is that it may be providential that so many Indians are versed in English because by the mastery of our language you may be able to teach the West. It's a point 1 had overlooked. Meanwhile it does look as if India is being increasingly westernized and if India is lost to traditional wisdom, we are all lost. I should think that as regards poetry there is little to be hoped on cither side of the world, but then the unforeseen is only obvious after the event and historic continuity is a trompe-I'ocil, seen in retrospect.
The question is whether in taking over our technology it is possible to reject materialist values, and the effortlessness of the technological age. Perhaps you can fight back - help us to fight back. Tides do turn. Your own presence - and Arabinda Basu's - in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram is one of those spiritual points of illumination in our world.
I hope you are well and still writing, as I am, at the age of seventy-nine, and still at work. My most recent book was on Yeats - 'Yeats the Initiate". I think I sent a copy to prof.
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Sisir Kumar Ghose. I also edit Temenos, which Arabinda may have shown you. But I have not seen him either for some time. I hope to do so at the end of February, at a conference in New Delhi on 'Tradition as Continual Renewal' which in fact takes up the themes - some of them -which we were discussing all those years ago - how to preserve in a secular world sacred values. If India is lost all is lost, and yet there are many of us here in the West who are much troubled by the way our world is going, a situation beyond the power of politics to heal. I enclose a programme of our recent Temenos conference at Dartington Hall in Devon - a companion foundation to Santiniketan.
It's interesting to me to read again in a letter my hope that some day I would 'make it' to India. I feel very much that one has to await the time, and not rush blindly here and there, like a tourist, gate-crashing other countries and their civilization. But visiting India has taught me a great deal, both about India and about myself, though not nearly enough of either.
But never do I forget the definitions of barbarism once given by the American classical scholar, Edith Hammerton: a barbarian is one who 'has no past' and her phrase 'effortless barbarism' is ever in my mind. The television-set is the purveyor and spearhead of the 'effortless' in all parts of our small world. We are all in the same mess now and must surely pool our resources. In which we can but look to you for wisdom, which we lack as you lack technology. Yet I feel that Mahatma Gandhiji's vision of India is far from what has happened and is happening. I send you a recent issue of Temenos which has Indian contributions you may find interesting. T.8 is now in proof - we hope to reach ten issues, perhaps twelve. We shall see.
I do wish you a very happy and fruitful 1987. Remember me also to Arabinda. He's for ever jetting around the world but it's now a long time since he called in on London.
I hope the book is a great success and widely read.
(5.1.1987)
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From K.D. Sethna
I was delighted to get your letter and to feel the warmth of it as well as the old idealism running through its words. An added joy was the immediacy of your response and the unusual celerity of the postal service. I sent you our book on December 31 and got your letter on January 10-quite a feat for the air-mail between Pondicherry and London. It is as if, knowing my eagerness to rush the book to you and yours to reciprocate with enthusiasm, the aerial spirits went all out to set up a record in quick delivery.
I would have written back on January 10 itself, but I waited to send the offprints of two essays by me which had appeared some time back in Mother India. I could lay my hands on one but searched in vain for the other. if I can't find my "W. B. Yeats - Poet of Two Phases" I'll bookpost you by air "Poetic Expressions and Rhythms - Greek and English" which reproduces some comments from two letters of mine, the first of which was apropos of The Penguin Book of Greek Verse.
Mention of "Penguin" brings me to your splendid gift of No. 5 of Temenos, which has among other valuable contents, nine poems of Tagore's, translated by William Radice and originally published by Penguin about a year and a half ago. I had learned from Arabinda Basu that you had expressed to him your keen appreciation of Radice's renderings which had for the first time given you a sense of Tagore's greatness as a world-poet. Although Basu had some copies of Temenos sent by you, I could not find anywhere the work you had praised. Your present gift is really a rich answer to my desire. Apart from your own article "Yeats and Kabir", these nine poems were the first things I plunged into: I liked most two out of the three mentioned in your introductory note: "Shahjahan" and "The Sick Bed - 6", and one not particularly marked there: "In the Eyes of a Peacock". "Shahjahan" is indeed superbly done. "The Sick Bed - 6" goes home to me not only for
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what you have termed its "revealing informality" but also because a pair of sparrows have built their nest in one corner of the cross-beam of my roof and the male bird usually chirrups me out of sleep in the morning from the top of the netting on my window. Judging from Radice's feel of the Tagorean style and form, I should expect a magnificent version of the finest of the Bengali poet's short masterpieces: "Urvashi." I have not yet come across the Penguin book-. Now I'll search for it to get at this poem.
Your "Yeats and Kabir" taught me several things. I had never realised Kabir's influence on Yeats. Now it is clear to me. Nor had I thought that Yeats had turned to the tradition of Indian spirituality resulting in his final unconcern with mediumship, magic and other secondary matters of occult lore. Your reference to Yeats's Indian studies having been coloured by the Shiva cult of the sacredness of sexuality explains why, in spite of his immersion in the Vedanta of the Upanishads under Sri Purohit Swami's tutorship, his last poems are markedly charged with what we may dub vitalistic energy. Perhaps his undergoing an operation according to the "Steinach Technique" (to be distinguished from the "Voronoff Method") was also responsible for the upsurge of the sexual strain in his verse? Your whole essay makes fascinating reading with its blend of esoteric interpretation and literary appreciation. Is your Yeats the Initiate available in India?
You have thrown new light on Yeats's self-epitaph1 by picking out as one important source a poem of Kabir's. Now I find, over and above the play of the "athletic will" and the aristocratic poise, a view of death which is apparently "cold", if not even "bitter", but is really "tranquil", as you say, a high detachment touched by the philosophia perennis. I would go a little further and, with the background you have noted, see the epitaph as being somewhat in the
1. Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by.
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Dantesque style, a forceful conciseness pregnant with a significant silence. What is said leaves an unsaid suggestion which is the heart of the meaning. When Yeats tells the "Horseman", by indicating a la Kabir that life and death are to be looked upon as having "no separation between them" any more than there is a difference between one hand and the other, he is not only hinting at "Unity and harmony" at the base of the world-movement: he is also pointing to a condition transcending this movement, a condition to which life and death are of equal inconsequence because it is beyond time itself. That which is the Unborn and the Undying, the Eternal, hovers inaudibly over the three brief lines. And the "Horseman" seems to be the witness-image, within the time-spirit, of the Eternal, moving with the passage of time but as Plato's "spectator of all time and all existence", casting "a cold eye" on the ever-changing transitory pageant. A kind of Shankarite Vedanta appears to be implicit in the Yeatsian indifference.
(14.1.1987)
Something is indeed at work between Pondicherry and London for your letter of Jan. 14th has arrived. I was very glad to have it, with your comments on William Radice's translations (they were in fact published in Temenos before the Penguin publication) and my own paper on Yeats and Kabir. Yeats's interest in India was lifelong but in later years he certainly abandoned spiritism and all those secondary occult practices for his study of Vedanta. I am interested in your comments on the relationship between the Shaivite teaching and the 'Steinach technique' operation. This extremely unwise and unphilosophic action of so great a poet and seeker for truth is troubling however regarded and I left it alone, but I don't think Yeats had quite caught up, humanly speaking, with what the poet knew. It seems to me this is a significant difference between the poet and the holy
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man, who lives his thought, whereas the poet sees from afar the beautiful land, knows it is there, praises that country in his work, whereas the saint or sage simply lives there in bliss, whereas the poet, being far off, weeps and mourns. He was a great but I think not a happy poet. But if what he believed be true, each life, each death, is a progression. For us all, I hope, for I shall be seventy-nine this year.
It seems I must send you a copy of my 'Yeats the Initiate.' I did not know that you, like myself, had moved from Blake to his greatest follower. In return perhaps you could review the book somewhere. I think it will interest you. A very brilliant Indian scholar, whose doctorate thesis I read for Delhi University, has a book on 'Yeats and the Sacred Dance' in which she derives Yeats's dance from India mainly: and she plans a further book on Yeats and India which should also be an eye-opener to both Western and Indian scholars. There is no doubt of the direction in which Yeats moved, and to which he looked. She knows far more about this field than I. In fact it was she not I who first traced Yeats to Foucher. I had reached the same result, so to speak, from Binyon, who no doubt put Yeats on to Foucher, whose book is in Yeats's library. Santosh felt that my general recognition of her work was not enough to cover that particular source, so I tell you of this now lest you should review my book in India.
I will post 'Yeats the Initiate' separately. I still have a very English trust in the post, unlike my Indian friends who always prefer to wait until a cousin is travelling on Air India.
I also enclose a photocopy of my review of Radice's Tagore for T. 6.
(23.1.1987)
From K. D. Sethna
I am happy that what "is at work between Pondicherry and London" is also at work the other way around. Your letter
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of January 23 is in my hands and has set me thinking along several lines.
Yes, I have been interested in Yeats for a long time but without any particular connection with Blake, though I could see that both he and Blake had equally sensitive entries into the "middle worlds'', the occult planes which are "behind" our physical-vital-mental cosmos rather than "beyond", where the true spiritual supernature is. The vistas the two poets "insight" of those worlds are different. Blake, apart from his "innocent" lyrics, seems to have found reflections of the truths of the "beyond" in a whole chiaroscuro universe in which the energies of Imagination fought with the forces of Mechanism and "Ratio". The early Yeats seized magical entities and runic rhythms that were swept into his mind by his empathy with the reveries of Celtic mythology crossed with vague shadows from Blavatskyan theosophy and the later Yeats touched the fringes of semi-Vedantic semi-Tantric mysticism from the East in a much more direct manner than was possible to dabblings in theosophical lore. I had no clear idea of the initiate Yeats. You have brought a new picture of him before me and your book (which you could send by sea-mail to save too much expense) will acquaint me more closely with his latest development and most profoundly enlighten me to the full on the theme of his having been, as you say, Blake's "greatest follower."
I am not sure whether the Shaivite teaching which seems connected with the "Steinach technique" Yeats underwent is that teaching in its inmost aspect. The sense of it which is coloured by the linga-symbol is the popular or exoteric one which has lent itself to frequent perversions. The creativity of Shiva and Shakti locked together is a hyper-sexual mystery. As a scripture "of the Shaiva-Siddhanta cult puts it: "Shiva begets Shakti and Shakti begets Shiva. Both in their happy union produce the worlds and souls. Still Shiva is [ever] chaste and the sweet-speeched Shakti remains [ever] a virgin. Only sages can comprehend this secret." Even the
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word linga (penis) carries in old texts the adjective jyotir, suggesting "a pillar of light". Besides, it is doubtful that the penis erectus in Shiva-representations is a pointer to sexuality in action. It has been contended that it really indicates the sexual force raised up, sublimated, turned towards its spiritual archetype in the over-world. In that case the organ limp would signify surrender to the lower life. The subject is rather complicated.
Going back to Yeats, I am prompted to a hypothesis which perhaps you may confirm or modify. It is as follows. The "Steinach technique" did not create the sex-zest we find in some of his later poetry but merely increased its incidence. Primarily this zest was a natural accompaniment of the wide-awake earth-grappling inspiration to which he turned from the old Celticism. The intellect masterfully drawing on mystical tradition and combining the speaking voice with the inner tone would also lead to a recognition of the genitals' claim: a poet who has fused the essence of the Celtic mood with a deliberate "modernism" and even flirted with an aristocratic mode of fascism cannot escape this claim on his life. One may wonder how Yeats could switch on to his second poetic phase when he had appeared to be drenched in the Celtic Twilight. Perhaps there was a dichotomy in his nature and the sensual side which looked quite submerged in the colourful sense-rarefying and heart-uplifting mistiness of the mid-world was never ineffective in Yeats the man as distinguished from the poet. Do you remember the incident of his proposal to Maud Gonne's daughter? When he found that Maud herself was out of his reach he offered marriage to her daughter and arranged to meet in a restaurant for her answer. The practical mind shown here and the matter-of-fact and even mundane atmosphere of the whole procedure and the subsequent marriage to a woman who is said to have had a sort of "barbaric" beauty were things not out of tune with the resort to the tying up of the vas deferens in order to super-vitalise the organism and intensify the mating power. You
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are right in differentiating the mere poet from the holy man but Yeats seems to give you the impression that one might have expected him at least to live out the holiness of his poetic vision. What I am trying to suppose is that the study of certain signs in his life-posture should have discouraged such an expectation. He strikes one as far from being another AE.
I don't know whether you have made as deep a study of AE as of Yeats. The general idea is that Yeats was a greater poet than AE. Some even believe AE was not a true poet. Yeats himself appears to have rated him rather low. No doubt he was not so creative a singer and Yeats in both his poetic phases, his earlier and later orientations, had more power, more richness of expressive art. But I think AE has not yet received proper appreciation as a poet. When English poetry comes to fulfil more consciously, more directly the particular mystic strain in it which gleams out in Coleridge and Shelley and most in Wordsworth and which is best designated as a secret Indianness of inner and outer perception, then AE will surely come into his own in the world's judgment as a profound pioneer of a new poetic age. In that age the poet will be at the same time "saint" and "sage". AE to my mind was one such, who could sincerely write:
Some for beauty follow long
Flying traces, some there be
Who seek Thee only for a song,
I to lose myself in Thee.
Before I close I can't help touching on some points in your letter to my friend Kishor Gandhi. When he showed it to me it really made me sad. You don't realise what you are missing because of some kind of mental block. And unfortunately the trouble is getting worse. Once you said that Sri Aurobindo failed as a poet on account of his having written in English instead of Bengali, his "mother tongue". You
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also suggested that the failure was due to the attempt to express in English verse things alien to the English genius. Now you assert that Sri Aurobindo is not a poet at all -unlike Tagore whom you feel to be a-pocl even through the most inadequate translation. This means Sri Aurobindo lacks the fundamental qualities of a poet: imaginative perception and harmonious expression. Hence it would make no difference what language he wrote in!
Of course, a philosopher and spiritual teacher docs not ipso facto become a poet, but neither is he debarred from the poetic utterance provided he does not versify bare philosophy and mere spirituality. Besides, a Yogi such as Sri Aurobindo is much more than cither a philosopher or a spiritual teacher. Vivid concrete visions and experiences of the inner life are the stuff of a Yogi-poet's expression. Philosophy and spiritual teaching are byproducts of his verse. Also, before launching on an exploration of "unknown modes of being", he was neither a philosopher nor a spiritual teacher. His absorption was in literature and history and politics, all three mostly of Western countries much before he turned to their Eastern counterparts. The same holds for his knowledge of languages. He spoke in English long before he spoke in Bengali. His education as a child started under English nuns at the Lorcto Convent in Darjceling and continued in England from the age of seven to his twenty-first year. Until he trained for the Indian Civil Service during his term at Cambridge he knew no Indian tongue. He heard and spoke English through the most formative period of his youth and up to the end of his life one could mistake his pronunciation for an Englishman's. When he began to write poetry in England he was not expressing anything Indian any more than when he wrote in Greek and Latin at Cambridge and won prizes for his compositions. In his English work too at that time he embodied the Classical spirit plus a sense of the English landscape and seasons. As an example of the Classical spirit in a happy mood I may cite two stanzas, titled "A Doubt":
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Many boons the new years make us
But the old world's gifts were three,
Dove of Cypris, wine of Bacchus,
Pan's sweet pipe in Sicily.
Love, wine, song, the core of living
Sweetest, oldest, musicalest,
If at end of forward striving
These, Life's first, proved also best?
Surely, the lines could have hailed from the Greek Anthology in one of its lighter aspects and the compact suggestive syntax at the close seems possible only to a budding master of English speech? I catch a hint of mastery also in the felicitous boldness of "musicalest".
1 may add that even during his later life Sri Aurobindo kept on exercising his in-feeling of the English language and his insight into themes Classical. Perhaps you are unaware that side by side with the nearly twenty-four thousand lines he wrote of his blank-verse epic Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol he worked at an epic in hexameters dealing with Homer's own subject: Ilion. To my ear it is a poetic revelation of the Greek genius passed most subtly through an Indian spirit and constituting a masterpiece beyond the range or passion of any Kazantsakis. Several years back a separate edition of it was published, prefaced by a long essay on the possibility of a truly English quantitative metre which would not be a mechanical copy of Greek and Latin rules. If I can lay my hands on the edition I'll post it to you. Please read just ten pages of it, ending with the line:
Capturing the eye like a smile or a sunbeam, Penthesilea.
In case after those ten pages you don't respond and can't go further, kindly pass the book on to your friend Philip Sherrard or somebody like him who is deeply conversant with Greek poetry both modern and ancient.
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As you may recall from our old correspondence, it was about Ilion that Herbert Read wrote to A.B. Purani on June 5, 1958: "It is a remarkable achievement by any standard and I am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality," Evidently Read, though in agreement with you on the general rule that people not of English origin cannot pen genuine English poetry, is prepared to grant - without any reservation - indubitable exceptions or at least one overwhelming exception.
(5.2.1987)
What a magnificent gift, your Yeats the Initiate! I realise I have such a lot to learn - and to enjoy. All the fourteen essays call me equally and I have been dipping into many of them. Your autobiographical sketch in "Yeats's Singing School" gripped me with its story of your progress from modern materialism and scientism, products of a passing phase, surface glimmers of time's flux, to the Eternity which the masters of insight like Plato and Plotinus and the adepts of the imagination like Blake and Yeats have felt in the depths of their being on the one hand and on the other in the urge of the endless that is the secret carried by the sweep of the ages.
I belong to the same generation as you, being only four years older and, though materialist science was not a roar in my ears as it would have been in Europe of the early twentieth century, it was a siren-song loud enough for one who from his earliest years had his mind steeped in the multifarious movement of modernism's self-expression in the English language. Plato was a voice I had heard from almost the beginning and his call to see the temporal as the changing image of the eternal was never quite forgotten, but it couldn't help becoming just a background music for
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several years while the assertive self-confident shout of the empirical and analytic scientist sprang from various directions at me and swayed me in spite of Plato from antiquity and the great Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats - from the near past. A new turn came only when I had on a few rare occasions the direct contact of India's still lived spirituality, and glimpses were dimly caught of the light treasured for ever in the Upanishads, glimpses as if through what a line in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri designates;
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
Soon followed the discovery of the Ashram of Integral Yoga at Pondicherry. I was doing my M.A. at the time. I had graduated in Philosophy, with Plato's Republic as my Honours-study. Now I had planned a thesis to embody the two sides of my nature which were equally dominant. The thesis was to be "The Philosophy of Art". But when I reached Sri Aurobindo's Ashram I didn't feel like continuing with my research and plunged into his writings which had given a philosophical form to his spiritual experiences and realisations in a language which was both profound and precise, literary at the same time that it was expository — a combination of qualities found in a mere handful of philosophers. The author of the Republic and the Symposium Berkeley. Fichte, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Bradley, William James are the ones that strike me at the moment. Then there was the fascination of the actual life aiming to plumb the In-world and penetrate the Over-world as well as move in step with the Universal Divine. Nor was the rapt experience the ultimate goal here: Augustine's "Beauty of ancient days yet ever new" was to be made active in all the waking hours and set at smiling play in all relationships; for this was a Yoga of earth-transformation. The Platonic archetypes which were ever high up and whose reflections alone could ride uncertainly the phenomenal flood below were to be felt as also "involved" in the very abyss and
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waiting to be "evolved" by the pressure from above helping out the upward push from the blind antres. The permeation of all our parts, finally even our most material part, by the Supreme Truth-Consciousness was the ideal, however strong might be the sense of impossibility. After all, the whole history of evolution gives such a sense: brute matter becoming alive and sentient, mere vitality and sentience becoming conscious and self-aware and God-oriented. So why should we demur at the extreme Aurobindonian vision of the future? I remember those two lines from Savitri, driving home an insight first with concentrated audacious richness and then with an utterly simple paradox:
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven.
The impossible God's sign of things to be.
To go back to your book: I liked your remark that you went to the early Yeats for delight and to the later Yeats for knowledge, along with your statement elsewhere that you have still not "renounced (like the Academics) the early Yeats, for of all poets in this century he was, even then, most aware that the Imagination does not reflect but creates its own universe". I go even further than you in my evaluation of the Celtic-Twilight period, as you will gather from the essay I wrote long back when I never knew anything of the wisdom and tradition you have traced in Yeats no less than in Blake whose greatest disciple you consider him. Perhaps you'll think my essay superficial by your present standards, but as you write that "the early Yeats spoke with the full power of magical incantation" and as you have, to my great joy, a keen appreciation of AE who seems to me to have moved on to a semi-Upanishadic seerhood along comparable Celtic lines, possibly you will appreciate the point I have tried to make. There is also what I may term the literary-occult view I have ventured to set forth in regard to the two phases of Yeats's poetry. I have an essay on AE too, written like the other about 40 years ago.
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which 1 shall send as soon as I can to be read at your leisure. I wouldn't have thought of sending it if I hadn't read your paper on this poet, though you have written on AE the visionary and mystic and haven't quoted a line of his verse. In this excellent paper there is one small oversight. The adoption of "AEON" as his name by George Russell does not explain how he came to be known as AE. The fact is that the name "AEON" put by Russell at the end of an article was accidentally turned into AE by the falling out of the last two letters because of a printer's negligence. When the writer saw the result he accepted it as a suitable abbreviation.
Now a few words on your review of Radice and Sisir Kumar Ghose. Your appraisal of Radice's work is just: the poems published in Temenos are indeed very well done. I agree also that Tagore's later books of prose-poems were rather thin in spite of the delicacy of perception in certain parts of them. But surely this was not due to Tagore's inadequacy in English? He fell into a semi-religious semi-romantic sentimentalism of expression which tried in vain to echo the beautiful rhythms and inner-heart responses of the Gitanjali. The Gitanjali will remain a classic in its kind along with The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran which achieves in terms of power what the Gitanjali does in terms of exquisiteness and, as far as 1 know, Yeats had very little to do with its English. In my old correspondence with you I discussed what he did with one of the Gitanjali's items for his Oxford Book of English Poetry and I found it a very mixed affair with its partly archaising, falsely biblical effects which outweigh the tautness he brings in one or two places. Tagore's original is on the whole better expression and more transparent to the spiritual sense and substance. As for Yeats's letter to Rothenstein 1 think it is ridiculous in saying: "Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English" - as well as patently self-contradictory when he ends with the declaration that Tagore "has published, in recent years, and in English, prose books of great beauty, and these
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books have been ignored because of the eclipse of his reputation as a poet."
Why the eclipse came about is not clear from Yeats's letter. He attributes it to Tagore's "sentimental rubbish" and this is intrinsically nothing to do with English as such. The contents of Tagore's post-Gitanjali writing was poor and no amount of good English could have essentially helped. Besides, the fault did not lie in Tagore's attempting English poetry: even the Gitanjali is not poetry proper: it has neither what you call "formal structures" such as Yeats clung to for all the modernity of his later phase nor the authentic swing of "free verse" such as Whitman and some followers of him practised triumphantly. It is poetic prose of a fine sensitive order and is not utterly cut off from Tagore's "prose books of great beauty" in English - evidently written without Yeats's help - to which Yeats refers soon after pontificating that "nobody can write with music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since the language of his thought."
In the wake of Yeats's confused letter - itself a species of xenophobic "sentimental rubbish" - you fall into the same trap, especially with your unfortunate and rather irresponsible indulgence in Aurobindo-baiting, forgetting that - as I explained in my previous letter - English was to Sri Aurobindo a language "learned in childhood" and always "the language of his thought". While I am about this subject I should like you to pick out a poem of Sri Aurobindo's maturity and tell me in precise terms why you rate it a failure, bearing the stigma you discern when you write: "English Romantic and late Victorian poetry (itself using a highly artificial diction and vocabulary) has set on Indian-English verse a stamp which makes it unacceptable to modern English readers..." If you come down to criticism cast in "minute particulars organized" and applied to one definite poem specially chosen from among those considered by your "Indian friends" to be his best, I shall be able to come to grips with your own literary mind in this sphere.
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So far you have indulged in generalities and off-hand judgments. At times you say that the Indian mind, all the more the Indian spiritual mind, is alien to the genius of the English language and yet you have told us in your new book on Yeats "of the great Hindu scriptures, of which, with his Swami, Sri Purohit, he made those fine translations of the ten principal Upanishads". How can there be a fine English translation by Yeats of something so alien to the nature of the language native to him? You have also said on other occasions that people like Sri Aurobindo don't know the subtleties of literary English enough to create genuine English poetry. Lately, you have brought up a new and different point: Sri Aurobindo fails to be poetic in English not because he writes in a foreign tongue but simply because he is no poet at all, which means that he would be a miserable versifier even if he wrote in what you regard (most mistakenly, of course) as his mother-tongue, Bengali. Don't you think it's high time you made up your mind and put your cards on the table? You are a person of remarkable talents amounting to genius in certain fields of scholarship (Blake-research and Yeats-study) and in the composition of poems like Invocation, To My Mountain, Envoi, A Strange Evening, A Kiss, etc. - the first two superb in every way. Vague sarcasms hardly befit you: give me something to bite on.
Taking up one of your poems, shall give you an example of what I mean - a close step-by-step appraisal? Here is the piece you have entitled "Prayer" (p. 58 of the volume Collected Poems which you presented to me in 1962 and which has a good number of pages annotated by me in some detail):
The laws of blind unrest, not art
Have built this room in time and space,
The furniture of human sense
That bounds my sorrow, curbs delight.
But to the grail, these fragile walls
Are thinner than a floating dream,
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And here the heart's full measure fills
With what is worldwide, yet within.
And gathering round me those 1 know
In the close circle of a prayer,
The sleepers, the forgetful, grow
In love, though not in presence, near.
My distant ones, this heart on fire
Is for a candle in your night,
While you lie safe within that care
Whose dark is sleep, whose waking, light.
COMMENT
Some lines are fine indeed. The opening two have a pointed power blended with a large sweep of significance. The next two also are well turned and the whole stanza with its diversified units of suggestive expression and its skilful placing of pauses has a distinct "art" governing its substance of "unrest". This art persists admirably all through the poem and, when one has finished reading, one notices that the first stanza stands apart from the others by the different way the half-rhymes are disposed - abba rather than abab - and one realises how appropriate the standing apart is because of the negative meaning here as contrasted to the positive mood developed out of it everywhere else, signalled by that "But" beginning the second stanza.
This stanza, even more than the first, is a poetic success, having a specially memorable moment in its third and fourth lines. The fourth is markedly perfect both by depth of suggestion and inevitability of sound. There is a telling counterpoising of "worldwide" to "within" and the entire phrase has a lift, a rapturous feeling accompanied by a most effective rhythm. The chief characteristic of this rhythm is the all-carrying alliteration of w's. The w-alliteration has always a widening movement, a sound-succession of spread-
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ing spaciousness. And a last felicitous auditory effect by which the spaciousness is, as it were, interiorised is brought by the two short vowels of "within" - the second with a sharp stress driving home the intcriorisation and, by its place at the line's end, making it doubly definitive. What further gives an intaglio-impression to the sound of "within" is that the word which stands out in opposition to it - namely, "worldwide"' - is itself a quantitative long, by natural vowel-length in the second syllable and by clustered consonants in the first. Yes, the two words get differentiated by their very constitution answering to their opposed meanings, but their inner linkage - one might even say the essential identity of state which they paradoxically represent and which that "yet" between them insinuates - is made living to us by the mutually echoing w's.
The third stanza is less of a success in its word-form, though quite effective in total sound. The final stanza is again strongly inspired. Perhaps its total quality is the best in the poem, with a mingling of strength and tenderness, the sense of the divine mystery enfolding all at all times and of the loving human presence casting its warmth afar from a small centre, steady in the midst of the earth's darkness and danger.
The only point a little opaque to me is the "grail" of stanza 2.I have a general response to its religious aura and the aesthetic grasp of its relevance, but I would welcome from you a bit of help making more precise for me its role in the poetic design.
*
You must have received by now the typed copy of the opening pages of Sri-Aurobindo's Ilion, the epic in hexameters moulded according to his insight into what this great medium of Homer and Virgil should be in a natural English form. Ilion is not ostensibly poetry of the sacred but it has still a depth of vision made dramatically vivid. Surely you
Page 19
wouldn't call this "Indian" poetry Victorian in any valid sense nor dub it imitative Romantic verse? Again, can one say that here themes or moods or experiences which are typically Indian and cannot be assimilated by the genius of the English language are sought to be forced into that speech and the result is a clearly non-English poetry? It is interesting to ask what critical comment you would make along the lines of your habitual running down of Sri Aurobindo as a poet.
To return to your review. I find the part dealing with Ghose's book as fine in its general treatment as the first and even more profound in its evaluation of the Oriental consciousness. All that appreciation of Mystery to the Hindu or the Buddhist mind is excellent. But the poem of Tagore -"Last Question" - which sparks it off is in my opinion rather poor stuff:
The first day's sun had asked
at the manifestation of new being -
Who are you?
No answer came.
Year after year went by,
the last sun of the day
the question utters
on the western sea-shore
in the silent evening -
He gets no answer.
May be the translation renders the poem vacuous, more a thing thought out than seen and felt though the image of the sun and the western sea-shore in the silent evening are meant to vivify the formulation. They remain a superficial ornament instead of being fundamentally woven into the depths of a discovery by the rapt imagination. I miss in these twelve lines the "enthousiasmos" which can be there in a
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subdued secret key as authentically as in a grand style. You have in several poems of yours an equal simplicity but it is a stirred and not a flat simplicity as here. I am afraid Ghose's impressive and valuable speculations apropos of the piece and his rhetorical summoning of Holderlin and Rimbaud and Rilke have led you astray in pronouncing : "The poem is neither question nor answer, but resonates, like Blake's 'The Tyger', with 'fathomless suggestions'." Indeed the theme is profound and has evoked a fine philosophical vision from Ghose: the triviality lies in the form the theme has acquired - the verbal and rhythmical shallowness. Even the phrasing is at fault: "the first day's sun" does not accord with "the last sun of the day". The second phrase should run: "the sun of the last day".
Trying to make the best of the same material I would cut out all that decorative Romantic padding of "the western sea-shore" as well as the overt references to the absence of an answer and the unnecessary inversion of "the question utters" and let the poem stand in a pared shape, more suggestive than assertive: .
Year after year went by:
the sun of the last day
repeats the question
in the silent evening.
Framed thus, it becomes a kind of extended or doubled haikku, a picture with its edges fading away into the ineffable instead of a disguised thesis propping itself on explanations : "no answer came... He gets no answer."
The Yeats-poem - "Lapis Lazuli" - you quote at almost the end is a typical example of this poet's later art, a fusion of inspired sight with perfect craftsmanship satisfying, as you
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have said in "Yeats's Singing School", "at once intellect and imagination" with the help of "his inimitable sound-patterns of vowels and metrics". It has. as you point out, "the same acceptance of Mystery" as Tagore on the whole, though there is no true parity of significance between it and his "Last Question".I cannot admire enough the linguistic skill and the metrical modulation with which the subtle psychology of "these Chinamen" is communicated:
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes with many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes are gay.
Very aptly you have shown the inner touch between the ultimate attitudes of the Irish master and the Indian with that splendid phrase from the Gitanjali that brings your admirable review to its close: "When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable."
Please forgive me if I have tired you with the length at which I have written. Let me thank you again for that masterpiece of both scholarly perspicacity and book-production: Yeats the Initiate.
(7.4.1987)
I received your card some time back, with its gallant
message:
"When I can face it I'll try to answer your long letter - a fine mounted attack! But you must send me a poem by Sri Aurobindo which you like and I'll read it without prejudice. I'll also reply to your analysis of the little Tagore poem which I like much more than you do and will explain why.
Greetings,
Kathleen Raine"
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You have asked me to send you a poem by Sri Aurobindo, More than two months back I posted you by sea-mail a typed copy of the first 380 lines of Sri Aurobindo's Ilion, an epic in quantitative hexameters. The hexameter in English, with a movement and a quality like those of this grand measure in Greek and Latin, has been a problem for centuries. There is no sustained hexametrical creation in English coming anywhere near the work of Homer and Virgil or even lesser Classical poets. Part of the lack is due, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, to the absence of a true conception of the form which a genuine English hexameter should have. All attempts have either transferred into English, with unreadable effect, the rules of "quantity" (that is, the speaking time taken by the vowel on which a syllable is based) natural to the ancient languages, or else worked exclusively by accent, ignoring quantitative values altogether in spite of the fact that they do play a subsidiary yet subtly telling role in English verse and that the quantitative spirit cannot come into its own unless the unstressed intrinsic "long" is counted in constructing the metre.
Perhaps Wordsworth's great line -
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone -
will serve, though it is not a quantitative hexameter, as a good illustration of some important points. What a letdown it would be if the long "through" were replaced by the short "in" or if "through" were given not a full but only a transitional inflexion which a monosyllabic preposition as the second component of an iambic foot would normally have! Again, there would be some loss in the sound-suggestion of the sense if the unstressed "a" in "Voyaging" were slurred into an "i" as in commonly spoken English instead of being given a value approximating to the "a" in the words "age" and "aging" to make it a significant part of a line which supports the sense of a subjective adventurous launching-out with a run of intrinsic longs, stressed or
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unstressed. Mark the skilful metrical structure starting with a plunging trochee and having in the middle an alliterative spondee whose consecutive stresses fall on a couple of intrinsic longs ("strange seas''). Then there is a loosening forth into the suggestion of an on-and-on with two clear iambs ("of thought, alone"), where also we have natural voice-lengths under the ictus.
In a detailed essay Sri Aurobindo has examined the whole theory of quantity and its various applications and arrived at what a true English quantitative metre would be like, neither neglecting the vertical voice-weight of stress nor overlooking the horizontal voice-stretch of the intrinsic long. I am sure anybody interested in prosodic questions would be glad to read this exposition. But finally it is not exposition but illustration that will count - illustration putting life into the guiding theory and employing this theory with inspired tact and flexibility and diversity in the development of a theme not out of tune with the genius of the measure exploited.
Some day I'll send you the essay I am speaking of. In the meantime there will be before you those 380 lines which begin Ilion. Please read them with an open mind and let me know whether they strike you as poetry or not. I shall be happy to have for the first time a critical appraisal instead of random summary opinions which give me, as I have already told you, nothing to bite on but simply "vague sarcasms" not at all worthy of the poet and critic you have been taken to be.
(4.7.1987)
...As for Sri Aurobindo's verse. I must find - surely there is one in London - a copy of his Savitri and try again. Many Indians I know admire it - Raja Rao for one - and I may be wrong. But my own judgement is that he writes correct verse, as any well educated man of his time might have
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done. This does not make a poet! Poetry is a living language of the imagination, and every time and place creates its own form. To write in this or that metre of another period is a skill indeed but not likely to be poetry because poets don't imitate, they create their language. Of course it was important before Independence for someone like Sri Aurobindo to master the language of the enemy - so as to beat him at his own game, or perhaps, indeed, so that, now, Indians can instruct us in your learning, philosophy, values by this also, to be sure. As Sri Aurobindo has indeed done to a very high degree.
Do you have my "The Human Face of God" (on the Job-plates)? I would exchange one for 'Savitri' if you like.
(17.8.1987)
...Recently I saw the report of an interview you had given while you had been in India. It made very sad reading for me - not because I was somehow made out to be a lady from Auroville but because you were so dogmatic and prejudiced over matters with which you are not sufficiently acquainted and about which you keep airing views you must have formed long ago on the strength of some poor stuff in English by Indians you might have come across. And, of course, your bete noire came in for a whipping. Your latest letters to me, including the one just received, show signs of a possible more balanced turn in the future. Still, some preconceptions die hard. Thus you say: "...every time and place creates its own form. To write in this or that metre of another period is a skill indeed but not likely to be poetry because poets don't imitate, they create their language."
First of all, creating one's language has nothing to do with writing in one form or another. If a poet has inspiration his words will have an original glow in any form. When I say "any form" I don't mean that true poetry does not take the right form for itself, but the right form is to be judged by us
Page 25
from the success the living movement achieves. If one's inspiration flows out in rhymed verse, can we assert that there is an artificiality from another age and the modern spirit is all for free verse and therefore the lyricism thus embodied is spurious? Take again blank verse pentameters. Are they outmoded? The epic spirit in English is most apt to adopt this form because it is organic to that spirit. Then there is the problem of the hexameter. This metre has carried the grandest flights of inspiration - it has held the "living language of the imagination" in the past which is really not the past at all. The tradition of poetry has a continuity over the ages and, when a surge of epic creativity comes with an organic turn towards what Tennyson has called "the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man" and when a profound interpretative insight visits one in connection with an old theme, one is not imitating but breathing new life into a measure that is really not for one or two ancient tongues but is ready for any tongue if one can use it from the inside instead of employing it from the outside as mostly English poets have done. From Elizabethan times the hexameter has tempted English poets. Somehow they lacked intimate contact with its spirit and did not know how to make it genuinely English. Even an established medium like pentametrical blank verse has failed to spring alive in most hands. We do not run across a Milton or a Keats in every century. An Arnold may triumph in a certain vein in a piece like Sohrab and Rustum, a Stephen Phillips (unfortunately a forgotten voice now) may draw forth an exquisite in-toned somewhat novel music in his Marpessa, but no poet with an authentic and sustained blank-verse soul has come after the writer of Hyperion. Just as the form gloriously exploited by him remains viable at all times, so also the hexameter keeps calling for its Keats and Milton. Whether its call is truly answered or not has to be seen by an open-minded sympathetic approach such as Herbert Read has tried with Sri Aurobindo's Ilion, a work to which he has given, however briefly, superlative praise.
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You appear to shirk plunging into the opening part of this poem which I sent you some months back. Please put aside the prejudice that here is an outmoded form which cannot but be artificial. Of course I'll try to send you Savitri, as you want, but I should like you to get down to sampling Ilion and let me know whether you can see eye to eye with Read.
(28.8.1987)
P.S. I am sending you by air a copy of Selections from Savitri, along with an offprint of "Letters from Aldous Huxley and Herbert Read on Sri Aurobindo" published in the August issue of Mother India.
Thank you for your last letter and for the selections Dick Batsford has made from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. I have long known Dick Batsford, who is a friend of my daughter's, who was at school with his wife. I know he is a follower of the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and that this selection must have been a labour of love.
Now to the question of Sri Aurobindo's poetry. I have read the book of selections. Perhaps the whole long poem contains narrative passages in whose absence there is a disproportion. I have not seen the poem for forty years, when I discussed it with Herbert Read. I note from the quotations from Aldous Huxley and Herbert Read that both wrote before having read the poem, and that Huxley's recommendation of Sri Aurobindo for the Nobel Prize was on the grounds of his-prose writings - The Life Divine in particular - and not as a poet. That Sri Aurobindo was one of the leading minds of his (and our) time is not in dispute. But a philosophic and metaphysical mind, with the discourse proper to philosophy, is very different from the poetic gift,
Page 27
which is something else. Poetry may be 'philosophic' in that poetry also is concerned with meanings and values but the method is different since the philosopher deals in ideas and abstractions, and the language of poetry is image and symbol and Blake's 'minute particulars'. Having read through the extracts from Savitri with great attention I turned to Sri Aurobindo's translation and commentaries on the Isha Upanishad, and immediately was transported from vague superlatives and abstractions interwoven with cliches of English nineteenth century verse, to beautiful clarity of thought and language.
I can but write what I see, and I may be blind to all kinds of background knowledge and assumptions that Indian readers, familiar with Sri Aurobindo's philosophy (and Indian philosophy as a whole), read into the poetry. But as I see it - and although indeed I am not infallible I have a lifetime's experience and knowledge of reading and writing poetry - I see it as follows. It was Sri Aurobindo's destiny to live at a time when India was still subject to British rule and he therefore was given an English education by his parents who saw this as the way to success in any profession he might follow. No doubt he himself also, as his nationalist convictions developed, saw English as a way to prevail over the occupying power. Later it has proved providential that his excellent knowledge of the English language enabled him to write Indian philosophy in English, thereby reaching the English-speaking world as a whole. To do this was doubtless his providential task. But for poetry the fact of his English education was disastrous, since it deprived him of an Indian language, essential to an Indian poet, as Tagore understood. Since I don't think Sri Aurobindo was a poet in that sense, it perhaps does not greatly matter; his great contribution was made in the way it was meant to be.
I like what you write about Blank Verse, and of course it is the essential poetic rhythm of the English language, and has been used both by Shakespeare and Milton, Keats and Tennyson with great narrative beauty. But I have heard
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Indian music (and Arabinda Basu used to expound its rhythms to me) and also heard Indian poetry recited (in Hindi and in Sanskrit too) and the rhythm of the Indian imagination is quite different, those long majestic slokas have quite a different movement. Sri Aurobindo was trying to 'pour a quart into a pint pot' in using Blank Verse. The metre of the Ramayana was 'revealed' to Valmiki, was it not, and is surely to India what Blank Verse has been to English poets, the very shape of the mind itself that created it. Not that Sri Aurobindo's blank verse is not perfectly correct - any well-educated student can write blank verse by the yard - but his thought is so essentially unlike that of any English poet that one is aware that his writing does not spring out of the same experience of 'this litel spot of erthe'.
That his sense of English is an abstract matter is even more evident in his vocabulary of words. There are scarcely any concrete images in the whole book. His lofty ideas find their natural expression in his very clear philosophic writing. But the language of the poet is a language of image and symbol - there must be forms to contain the abstractions which are, without these containing vessels, what Yeats has called 'Asiatic vague immensities'. Blake writes of the 'minute particulars' and of these there are virtually none in Sri Aurobindo's poem. One longs for a blade of grass, for Tagore's 'patient mother the dust' or for his 'morning sparrow.' In this sense Sri Aurobindo is not a poet, he does not think in images and symbols, his characters are as vague and abstract as his discourse. In the Vedic Hymns there is the poetry of images, in the Mahabharata what vivid Shakespearean characters Draupadi and Savitri are, and one can see the mysterious smile of the Lord Krishna and the mocking raised eyebrow of Duryodhana, and Kunti 'like a faded lotus-wreath' as she begs Radheya to spare her sons the Pandavas. You challenge me to give chapter and verse, so I do so. Open the book at almost any page and you find vague abstract words abounding in superlatives: p.54 for example, 'pathless heights', 'eternal arms', 'absolute bliss',
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'unimaginable depths', 'Immeasurable heights', 'bourneless change', 'Omniscient knowing without sight or thought', not to mention 'violent ecstasy', 'sweetness dire', 'stupendous limbs'. It all adds up to nothing in terms of poetic image or symbol, 'the Unknown's grasp' too - all these on one page. True, there are two lines where the paradox of:
'In a moment shorter than death, longer than time'
at least produces a grammatical figure of paradox that for a-moment brings the language to life. It's all like this, full of words like 'vast', incommunicable', 'timeless' - a multitude of words ending in '...less', a negative concept which may have its place in philosophy but has none in poetry. No, as poetry it just won't do.
Certainly Savitri is an ambitious and impressive attempt -an impressive failure if you like - like Bridges* Testament of Beauty perhaps. As to cliches, I again open at random: 'earthly tenement', 'pure abode', 'supernal light', 'surcharged with light and bliss', 'mystic stream', 'viewless summits', 'mighty Mother', 'trembling with delight'. And so on.
So, alas, I don't see Sri Aurobindo as a poet at all. I'm sorry to find that I cannot change anything of my earlier impression. Arabinda Basu used to hand me the book and ask me to read aloud the poem but I refused then to do so and I would refuse now. If he wished to relax and express himself in verse, well and good. But if you press the claim that Sri Aurobindo was a great poet - or, more than occasionally, a poet at all - you will only be detracting from his undoubted importance as a thinker and perhaps a saint. You will never persuade any Western poet or critic.
I repeat, this is doubtless an English response, and to Indian readers familiarity with a whole philosophic language may give substance to these imageless abstractions - but not poetic substance. Poetry is what David Jones calls 'incarna-tional' or as Shakespeare says, 'gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name'. I don't find this in Sri
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Aurobindo's writings, though I do richly in Tagore, in Kalidasa's wonderful Meghaduta, in the Vedic Hymns, even in Kabir, a religious poet.
In fact not all Indians of repute admire Sri Aurobindo as a poet either. Keshav Malik agrees with me - true, Keshav is perhaps a westernized and secular poet - but so does my friend and teacher Prince Kumar who has just been here -he was a friend of Tambimuttu's, wrote verse himself, taught Indian philosophy at Columbia University and now has a spiritual household (he refuses to call it an ashram but that's what it is). He naturally admires Sri Aurobindo as a thinker but not as a poet. In fact, it was and is his poetry which has made me hold back from aligning myself with Pondicherry as I might otherwise have done. As a poet I cannot.
Forgive me, I have to be truthful. I may only be revealing my English obtuseness, but I do know my own language of poetry, though not your Indian language of philosophy. You have asked me to explain myself and I have, in all friendship tried to do so. I know that Raja Rao admires Savitri and so does Professor Gokak of Bangalore. I wish I found it possible to do so, but having re-opened the Isha Upanishad, 1 shall at least re-read The Life Divine.
(10.9.1987)
I have just received your long letter of Sept. 10. 1 am glad you have written at some length on a subject which cannot be dismissed by casual summary remarks such as used to be your practice so far. It's good also that you have come down to 'minute particulars' and given me, as I had wanted, something to bite on. Quite a number of issues arise from the general opinions you have expressed on poetry and the special treatment you have accorded to Savitri.
Let me start with your comment on Aldous Huxley and Herbert Read apropos of Sri Aurobindo's writings. Of
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course, Huxley, a great admirer of The Life Divine, openly says he has not read Savitri, but how do you make out that Read wrote his letter without any acquaintance with the poem? You make him cut a very poor figure indeed if he could call Savitri 'undoubtedly one of the world's great poems' and refer to 'the sustained creative power of Savitri" without opening the volume and at least dipping into it in order to get some feel of its poetic quality, 1 have gone through quite a lot of Sir Herbert's writings and nowhere have I had the impression that he would make irresponsible statements on any work of art - especially statements couching the highest praise, however briefly - without the sense of its aptness. You do him gross injustice by suggesting that he was merely being polite to my friend Mr. Purani when he penned those phrases. We have touches of politeness in several parts of his letters and they are clearly recognisable, but it is impossible that a mind of his calibre and sincerity should indulge in the language he has used without meaning what he says. What is obvious is that he has not taken up the reading of Savitri in full - indeed he confesses that he can't do it because of a 'fault' in 'the nature of our present western civilization', its apparent 'lack of leisure' and 'at a deeper level... a failure of the capacity of contemplation'. It is surely very far from being evident that he has not opened Savitri anywhere. I refuse to consider him the hypocrite your words conjure him up to be. At any rate it is perfectly clear that he has gone through a fair part of Ilion before making the pronouncement: it is a remarkable achievement by any standard and I am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality.' Here he does not extol simply Sri Aurobindo's mastery of the English language: he ranks the hexameters of llion as equal to the finest poetry in English. In this he runs utterly counter to your position that Sri Aurobindo couldn't write English poetry at all, and to your sweeping announce-
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ment to me: 'You will never persuade any Western poet or critic' that 'Sri Aurobindo was a great poet.'
This announcement is given the lie not only by Read. Years back I drew your attention to the letter of Christopher Martin, Assistant Editor of Encounter. On 9.12.1959 he wrote to a friend of mine who had sent him a copy of Ilion: "I certainly am impressed by this masterly achievement in hexameters." On Savitri I may quote to you H.O. White of Trinity College, Dublin, who had to read the whole poem, nearly 24,000 lines, in order to examine a Ph.D. thesis on it from India: "I greatly appreciate the privilege of making the acquaintance of Savitri, a truly remarkable poem. I may add that I was immensely impressed by the extraordinary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modern cosmopolitan world." These are not twopenny-halfpenny minds. And I am sure many others might be found to have similar responses if Won and Savitri were more known in the West.
For my immediate purpose, Read alone is sufficient, and just because of his standing at the other pole to you without any reservation in the case at least of one long poem of Sri Aurobindo's I was anxious to make you attend to Ilion above everything. I never recommended Savitri to you. It belongs too much to what Sri Aurobindo has termed 'the Future Poetry' with unusual canons and uncommon modes of expression true to states of consciousness and spiritual experience much beyond the range of most people's actual life or even imaginative vision. This does not mean that Savitri has no contact anywhere with genuine past or present poetry. But even to judge the contact correctly one must have a broad open mind. You have certain hasty criteria which surprise me by their inapplicabteness to the matter in hand. I shall deal with them presently in some detail. Generally speaking, too, I find you enunciating a rule which is a half truth. Thrice you affirm "the language of poetry is image and symbol." Sri Aurobindo also has repeated the Vedic idea that the work of poetry is fundamentally to 'see'.
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But he does not forget what the Veda covered by such an idea. The Vedic poet is designated 'seer' - and as soon as we understand that word we realise at once that its significance cannot be confined to 'image and" symbol'. Images and symbols are one way of embodying seerhood in speech a very frequent way. But true poetry can come shorn of explicit imagery and symbolisation. What basically counts, within an intense mould of word and rhythm, is depth of feeling, height of thought, wideness of insight or, to use a noun less evocative of 'seeing', intuition. The quintessence of image and symbol is present in the last-named but it need not show itself openly. You can hardly trace image and symbol in the lines that occur to me at the moment from various literatures.
I may start with that snatch from the Odyssey:
Zenos men pais ea Kronlonos autar oixun
Eikhon apeiresien,
which I may approximate in English with:
I was the child of Zeus Cronion, yet have I suffered
Infinite pain.
Or take that equally poignant yet more reassured cry from
Virgil:
O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem,
rendered most sensitively by Sri Aurobindo:
Fiercer griefs you have suffered; to these too
God will give ending.
Then there is the Dantesque core of religious wisdom:
En la sua volontade e nostra pace,
whose simplicity-aim-sonority our less polysyllabic English
can only approach by something like:
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His Will alone is our tranquillity.
And here is Mallarme, the arch-symbolist, with one of his greatest lines, opening his sonnet on Poe's death with nothing visual:
Tel qu'en Lui-meme enfin 1'etemite le change,
which I may dare to echo with
At last to Himself he is changed by eternity.
(Did Mallarme happen to haunt you when you wrote in 'The Sphere':
Ourselves, perfect at last, affirmed as what we are?)
Coming to English poetry, where is any image or symbol in Milton's
Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering
I may add that great line of Dunbar's, mostly forgotten:
All love is lost but upon God alone,
as well as Sidney's
Leave me, O love, that readiest but to dust,
and Auden's less sublime yet still quietly piercing
We must love one another or we die.
We may well come to almost a climax with Shakespeare's masterstroke of metre responding to the meaning -
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Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain -
along with Wordsworth's profoundly pathetic
And mighty poets in their misery dead.
Now I take up your other charge that Sri Aurobindo deals in 'vague abstract words abounding in superlatives'. You instance 'pathless heights', 'unimaginable depths', 'bourne-less change'. You also jib at words like 'vast', 'incommunicable', 'timeless' - and conclude: 'No, as poetry it just won't do.' Well, you don't seem to remember one of the most memorable passages in English epic poetry, those lines of Milton's:
But first whom shall we send
In search of this new world, whom shall we find
Sufficient? Who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark unbottomed infinite Abyss
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his aerie flight
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive
The happy Isle...
The kind of locutions you condemn would be objectionable if they served as mere bombast without life in them. When they arc organic to a particular type of vision or experience they are reflexes of inner or higher realities. Even without involving such realities they can be proper to poetry. Haven't you yourself immeasurable complexities of soul' in Eileann Chanaidh (1), 'unfathomable skies' in Message, 'unfathomed heights and depths' in Moving Image, 'incommunicable selfish pain' in Seen in a Glass, 'grief inexpressible' in A Certain Moist Nature, 'flight unbounded' in Eudaimon? And the verbal sin you most condemn - 'a
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multitude of words ending in '...less', a negative concept which may have its place in philosophy but has none in poetry' - do you not commit it whenever you feel it necessary? I have come across 'boundless void' in Bheinn Naomh, 'boundless nature, sea and sky' in Eileann Cha-naidh (2), 'endless space' in Death's Country and 'inner spaces numberless' in The Hollow Hill (4). Your best poems bring us vivid subtleties, rarefied reveries, wafts of a secret air, and the examples I have cited fit in perfectly. I judge them with artistic as well as semi-mystic empathy and do not bring to them the narrow mind of a doctrinaire critic. When 1 turn to the page of which you fall foul, - namely, 54 - in Selections from Savitri I discover a most powerful evocation of a spiritual experience in an intensely inspired blank verse of the end-stopped kind, a difficult mould masterfully varied in internal structure and line-to-line linkage. One has to be in an unusually dense mood and aesthetic torpor not to be carried away by the passage:
A Might, a Flame,
A Beauty half-visible with deathless eyes,
A violent Ecstasy, a Sweetness dire,
Enveloped him with its stupendous limbs
And penetrated nerve and heart and brain
That thrilled and fainted with the epiphany;
His nature shuddered in the Unknown's grasp.
In a moment shorter than Death, longer than Time,
By a power more ruthless than Love, happier than
Heaven
Taken sovereignly into eternal arms,
Haled and coerced by a stark absolute bliss,
In a whirlwind circuit of delight and force
Hurried into unimaginable depths,
Upborne into immeasurable heights,
It was torn out from its mortality
And underwent a new and bourneless change ...
A mystic Form that could contain the worlds,
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Yet make one human breast its passionate shrine,
Drew him out of his seeking loneliness
Into the magnitudes of God's embrace.
Out of this burst of dynamic poetry possible only to a Milton doubled with a Marlowe and both swept beyond themselves from a starting-point in the latter's imagination
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
and in the former's
intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity -
out of such an outbreak of inspiration you could pick out just one verse
as 'bringing the language to life'! All here that carries speech to what I may call superlife passes over your head. It is nothing save abstractions to you in spite of the spiritual getting fused with the physical, as it were, at every turn. 'Flame', 'eyes', 'limbs', 'grasp', 'arms', 'whirlwind circuit', 'Form', 'embrace' give a concrete impression, and the verb-turns 'enveloped', 'penetrated', 'taken', 'haled and coerced', 'shuddered', 'torn out', etc. can hardly be regarded as a play of abstractions.
Some of the other targets of your disapproval in Sri Aurobindo's passage - 'violent ecstasy', 'sweetness dire' - or locutions picked out elsewhere which you dub 'cliches' -'pure abode', 'supernal light', 'surcharged with light and bliss*, 'mighty Mother', 'trembling with delight' - many such things are frequent occurrences in epic poetry which does not run after out-of-the way felicities or isolated gemlike phrases but has a broad current of energetic language aiming
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at a total novel effect. You may open Paradise Lost anywhere to see what I mean:
...till then who knew
The force of those dire arms? yet not for those
Nor what the potent victor in his rage
Can else inflict do I repent or change,
Though changed in outward lustre; that fixt mind
And high disdain, from sense of injured merit
That with the mightiest raised me to contend,
And to the fierce contention brought along
Innumerable force of Spirits armed...
or glance at this:
So spake th'Apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair:
And him thus answered soon his bold Compeer.
"O Prince, O Chief of many Throned Powers,
That led th'imbattled Seraphim to war
Under thy conduct, and in dreadful deeds
Fearless, endangered Heaven's perpetual King
And put to proof his high Supremacy,
Whether upheld by strength, or Chance, or Fate,
Too well I see and rue the dire event
That with sad overthrow and foul defeat
Hath lost us Heaven, and all this mighty Host
In horrible destruction laid thus low...
What a lot of cliches or easily found expressions Milton pours on us and yet achieves grandeur and force! Let me underline a few: 'dire arms', 'dire event', 'high disdain', 'high Supremacy', 'potent Victor', 'injured merit', 'fierce contention', 'deep despair', 'dreadful deeds', 'bold Compeer', 'sad overthrow', 'foul defeat', 'mighty Host', 'horrible destruction', 'laid low'. Insensitive to genres and their artistic implications or
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demands you bring your trenchant criticisms. Something akin to the situation you create happened a long time back when a friend of mine, a highly accomplished professor of poetry, passed some strictures on Savitri. Either from want of sympathy or from certain verbal penchants a rather finicky literary temperament may develop. A reference to the latter will be apt here. In a long apologia addressed to me Sri Aurobindo, dealing with all the issues raised by my friend, wrote on this point:
"I may refer to Mendonca's disparaging characterisation of my epithets. He finds that their only merit is that they are good prose epithets, not otiose but right words in their right place and exactly descriptive but only descriptive without any suggestion of any poetic beauty or any kind of magic. Are there then prose epithets and poetic epithets and is the poet debarred from exact description using always the right word in the right place, the mot juste? I am under the impression that all poets, even the greatest, use as the bulk of their adjectives words that have that merit, and the difference from prose is that a certain turn in the use of them accompanied by the power of the rhythm in which they are carried lifts all to the poetic level. Take one of the passages from Milton:
On evil days though fall'n and evil tongues ...
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
Here the epithets are the same that would be used in prose, the right word in the right place, exact in statement, but all lies in the turn which makes them convey a powerful and moving emotion and the rhythm which gives them an uplifting passion and penetrating insistence. In more ordinary passages such as the beginning of Paradise Lost the epithets 'forbidden tree' and 'mortal taste' are of the same kind, but can we say that they are merely prose epithets,
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good descriptive adjectives and have no other merit? If you take the lines about Nature's worship in Savitri [of which Mendonc,a has disapproved], I do not see how they can be described as prose epithets; at any rate I would never have dreamt of using in prose - unless I wanted to write poetic prose - such expressions as 'wide-winged hymn' or 'a great priestly wind' or 'altar hills' or 'revealing sky'; these epithets belong in their very nature to poetry alone, whatever may be their other value or want of value. He says they are obvious and could have been supplied by any imaginative reader; well, so are Milton's in the passage quoted and perhaps there too the very remarkable imaginative reader whom Mendonca repeatedly brings in might have supplied them by his own unfailing poetic verve. Whether they or any of them 'prick a hidden beauty' out of the picture is for each reader to feel or judge for himself; but perhaps he is thinking of such things as Keats' 'magic casements' and 'foam of perilous seas' and 'fairy lands forlorn', but 1 do not think even in Keats the bulk of the epithets are of that unusual character."
Before I proceed further, let me ask you to guard against a notion you may catch from so much allusion to Milton on my part and on Sri Aurobindo's as well. You may conceive that Sri Aurobindo is trying in so post-Miltonic an era as the twentieth century to revive some sort of Miltonic epos in a style reminiscent of Paradise Lost in various traits. One cannot be farther from the truth. Milton does illustrate preeminently certain basic features of epic composition, 'but Miltonism as such is a matter of technique strictly speaking -Latinistic language, flowing relation of line to line, large paragraph-building, rolling rhythmic resonance - over and above the type of mind: scholarly, energetically outward (despite his famous blindness), vivid and broad in its scope but not protean and penetrating like Shakespeare's. Technically, Savitri is non-Miltonic in an essential aspect. As Sri Aurobindo wrote to me in 1932: "Savitri is blank verse without enjambmcnt (except rarely) - each line a thing by
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itself and arranged in paragraphs of one, two, three, four, five lines (rarely a longer series), in an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English:"' Once when I charged him with Miltonism in style he replied: "Surely not. The Miltonic has a statelier more spreading rhythm and a less direct more loftily arranged language. Miltonically I should have written not
The Gods above and Nature sole below
Were the spectators of that mighty strife
but
Only the Sons of Heaven and that executive She
Watched the arbitrament of the high dispute."
Then there is the question of the habitual 'plane' constituting one's source of inspiration. Sri Aurobindo says in general: "Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence." The poetic intelligence "is only a high activity of the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it" and "the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic, though in a different cast of thinking, is nearer... than the ordinary intellect" to ranges of consciousness which are more inward or else above that intellect, and though Milton on the whole has nothing of the knowledge or vision of those 'planes' in either his style or his substance, "there is often a largeness of rhythm and sweep of language in Milton which has a certain distant kinship to the manner natural to a higher supra-intellectual vision, and something from the substance of the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry... and uplift it."
All this clears much of the road to what I have still to say, but one more citation from the letter inspired by Men-
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donca's reaction will help to lead better to it:
"One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that subject to say only what is indispensable, what is centrally suggestive and leave the rest to the imagination or understanding of the reader. Another method which I hold to be equally artistic or, if you like, architectural is to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness: that is the method I have chosen in Savitri. But Mendonca has understood nothing of the significance or intention of the passages he is criticising, least of all their inner sense - that is not his fault, but is partly due to the lack of the context and partly to his lack of equipment and you have there an unfair advantage over him which enables you to understand and see the poetic intention. He sees only an outward form of words and some kind of surface sense which is to him vacant and merely ornamental or rhetorical or something pretentious without any true meaning or true vision in it: inevitably he finds the whole thing false and empty, unjustifiably ambitious and pompous without deep meaning or, as he expresses it, pseudo and phoney.... I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced.... Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch; there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry. Moreover, if it is really new in kind, it may employ a new technique, not perhaps absolutely new, but new in some or many of its elements; in that case old rules and canons and standards may be quite inapplicable; evidently, you cannot justly apply to the poetry of Whitman the principles of technique which are
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proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of the old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We have to see whether what is essential to poetry is there and how far the new technique justifies itself by new beauty and perfection, and a certain freedom of mind from old conventions is necessary if our judgment is to be valid or rightly objective."
Your failure with the passage on p. 54 is typical of your unresponsiveness to Savitri as a whole. What, as I have said, "passes over your head" is precisely the characteristic sweep of the inspiration which Sri Aurobindo has titled "overhead poetry". This sort of poetry hails from regions of the Spirit above the mind - not only the perceptive, conceptive, imaginative intelligence through which the 'divine afflatus' blows in most of the poetry written in the world but also the inner reaches of poetic creativity available to us up to now -Blake's psychically delicate or mythically mighty explorations, Wordsworth's semi-Vedantic widenesses of thought and emotion or else his penetrating lyrical simplicities, Coleridge's occasional seizures of magic lights and shadows, Shelley's wingings in strange ethers, AE's quiet or intense echoes of God-haunted in-worlds, Yeats's early dream-drenched incantations or his later wide-awake gripping of secret significances, Mallarme's complex pursuits of the mysterious Form that no one is, Rilke's sensitive searches for beseeching or commanding presences in the Weltinnen-raum. 'Overhead poetry', while capable of contact with and absorption of all the play of the mental soul, is primarily the voice of 'planes' transcending it and mounting through varied word-revelation towards the Mantra about which Sri Aurobindo has written: "Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some
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fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater."
Overhead poetry in general and the Mantra especially are the speech par excellence for uttering spiritual states in their true and pure essence as well as in the diverse ways they adopt to manifest their powers: these states become dynamic in a multiplicity of forms which are divine beings and objects, 'minute particulars' of moulded light and bliss. On the one hand there can be simply a beatific blank which may seem an apotheosised abstraction, but on the other there are plenty of 'containing vessels' (to use your term). The phrase you quote from Yeats - 'Asiatic vague immensities' - is most misleading if the stress is laid on the epithet 'vague'. The vagueness comes to the Western philosophic mind which has little touch on the 'immensities' familiar and concrete to Asia. Indeed the very word 'immensity' makes the European intellect boggle and be on its guard - perhaps all the more because of Hugo's lavish sprinkling of it and of its likes over his poetry without sounding real depths, and because a number of cultist mystagogues have employed them cheaply. Here a reference to a correspondence between my friend Dilip Kumar Roy and AE and to some comments by Sri Aurobindo is likely to be of interest and profit. AE wrote from Dublin on 6.2.1932:
"Dear Dilip Kumar Roy,
Your letter has come at a time when I am too troubled in mind to write, as I would like, about the poems you send me. Yes, you have my permission to translate the verses or any others you may desire
.
I think the extracts from Sri Aurobindo very fine, and the verses you sent of Mr. Sethna have a genuine poetic quality. There are many fine lines like
The song-impetuous mind...
The Eternal glory is a wanderer
Hungry for lips of clay...
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Many such lines show a feeling for rhythm which is remarkable since the poet is not writing in his native but in a learned language. I refer to this because the only advice one writer can give to another rightly is technical criticism. The craft of any art, painting, music, poetry, sculpture, is continuously growing and much can be taught in the schools. But the inspiration cannot be passed on from one to another. So I confine myself to a technical criticism.
You, like many Indians, are so familiar with your own great traditions that it is natural for you to deal with ideas verging on the spiritual more than European writers do. The danger of this when one is writing poetry is that there is a tendency to use or rather overuse great words like 'immensity', 'omnipotence', 'inexhaustible', 'limitless', etc. By the very nature of the ideas which inspire you, you are led to use words of that nature because of a kinship with the infinity of the spirit. But in the art of verse if one uses these words overmuch they tend to lose their power just as a painting in which only the primary colours were used would weary the eye.
I would ask Mr. Sethna to try to reserve the use of such great words, as a painter keeps his highlights for sun or moon or radiant water and the rest of his canvas is in low tones. So the light appears radiant by contrast. English is a great language, but it has very few words relating to spiritual ideas. For example, the word 'Karma' in Sanskrit embodies a philosophy. There is no word in English embodying the same idea. There are many words in Sanskrit charged with meanings which have no counterpart in English: Dhyani, Sushupti, Turiya, etc., and I am sure the languages which the Hindus speak must be richer in words fitting for spiritual expression than English, in which there are few luminous words that can be used when there is a spiritual emotion to be expressed. I found this difficulty myself in finding a vocabulary, though English is the language I heard about my cradle.
I hope Mr. Sethna will forgive my saying all this, I do so because 1 find a talent in the verses you sent and do
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him to do without such burnishing as a fellow-craftsman can help to give.
Will you tell your philosophic friend who praises silence that with the poet the silence cannot be for ever? He sings and then keeps silent until the cup is filled up again by sacrifice and meditation and then he must give away what he gets, or nothing more will be poured into his cup. The secret of this is that through the free giver the song flows freely and whoever constrains life in himself, in him it is constrained. There is indeed the Divine Silence, but we do not come to that by being negative,"
AE's letter is both beautiful and profound, a clear mirror to his own great personality. His advice too is sound in so far as it would suggest that one should not be prodigal with highlight words just because they may be short-cuts to what is sought to be conveyed. The full truth about the subject you will see when you read Sri Aurobindo's second letter to me apropos of AE. Till then you may hold back from whatever hurrahing impulse rises in you as a result of AE's warning. Besides, he is surely not all on your side. Like Herbert Read with Sri Aurobindo the poet of Ilion, AE grants though on a smaller scale that one Mr. Sethna, in spite of English not being his mother-tongue, has "a genuine poetic quality" and, what is particularly rare, "a feeling for rhythm... in a learned language". He also allows from his own example that spiritual poetry is not alien to the genius of English, however difficult it may be to write - and we may remember that AE's verse has on one side an exquisite affinity with the Indian psyche while on another it has a colourful link with the Celtic soul. I was very pleased with his letter to Mr. Roy, but some kink in me dwelt upon his non-enthusiasm for a certain poem of mine in the lot despatched to him and I expressed to Sri Aurobindo my bit of disappointment without quite telling him all that AE had said on other matters. So the following is the note I received from Sri Aurobindo:
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"If you send your poems to five different poets, you are likely to get five absolutely disparate and discordant estimates of them. A poet likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament or taste, the" rest he condemns or ignores. (My own case is different, because I am not primarily a poet and have made in criticism a practice of appreciating everything that can be appreciated, as a catholic critic would.)1 Contemporary poetry, besides, seldom gets its right judgment from contemporary critics even.
"Nothing can be more futile than for a poet to write in expectation of contemporary fame or praise, however agreeable that may be, if it comes; but it is not of much value; for very poor poets have enjoyed a great contemporary fame and very great poets have been neglected in their time. A poet has to go on his way, trying to gather hints from what people say for or against, when their criticisms are things he can profit by, but not otherwise moved (if he can manage it) seeking mainly to sharpen his own sense of self-criticism by the help of others. Differences of estimate need not surprise him at all."
Realising I had somewhat misguided Sri Aurobindo 1 sent him a copy of AE's whole letter. Sri Aurobindo at once wrote back:
"Your letter suggested a more critical attitude on AE's part than his actual appreciation warrants. His appreciation is, on the contrary, sufficiently warm; 'a genuine poetic quality' and 'many fine lines' - he could not be expected to say more. The two quotations he makes certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are moreover of the kind
I. By saying "I am not primarily a poet" he means that first and foremost he is a Yogi who uses poetry not for its own sake but to express his spiritual realisations more and more adequately in terms natural to poetry. In a similar vein he has declared that he is not a philosopher in the current sense but one who has employed intellectual language to put together in a systematic form the comprehensive world-vision his many-sided Yogic experience has brought to him.
K.D.S.
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AE and Yeats also, I think, would naturally like. But the poem ["This Errant Life"] I selected for especial praise had no striking expressions like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would be no single feature standing out in a special beauty (eyes, lips, head or hands), but the whole has a harmoniously modelled grace of equal perfection everywhere as, let us say, in the perfect charm of a statue by Praxiteles. This - apart from the idea and feeling, which goes psychically and emotionally much deeper than the ideas in the lines quoted by AE which are poetically striking but have not the same subtle spiritual appeal; they touch the mind and vital strongly, but the other goes home into the soul.
"His remarks about 'immensity* etc . are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot apply to a new poetry dealing with spiritual things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. AE himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'highlight' words are few in the English language. His solution may be well enough where the realisations they represent are mental realisations or intuitions occurring on the summits of the consciousness, rare 'highlights' over the low tones of the ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not to the ordinary man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent the balance or harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere full of these highlights - in a consciousness in which the finite, not only the occult but even the earthly finite, is bathed in the sense of the eternal, the illimitable and infinite, the immensities or intimacies of the timeless? To follow AE's rule might well
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mean to falsify this atmosphere, to substitute a merely aesthetic fabrication for a true seeing and experience. Truth first - a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does "not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; it has to be made adequate. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express however new; it must now be urged to a farther new progress.''
In a note to me Sri Aurobindo asked what one was to do when one felt the Infinite, the Eternal, the Limitless constantly and he added: "AE who had not this consciousness but only that of the temporal and finite (natural or occult) can avoid these words, but I can't. Besides, all poets have their favourite words and epithets which they constantly repeat. AE himself has been charged with a similar crime."
Now you should have some inkling of what Savitri brings to the world of English poetry. Although it differs markedly from the Miltonic mentality and style, it carries on the general epic mode of articulation that has become a part of the English literary heritage through Milton's masterpiece. You argue that Sri Aurobindo's blank verse is no more than 'correct', an artifice with no genuine inspiration because, according to you, his thought is so essentially unlike that of any English poet that one is aware that his writing does not spring out of the same experience of 'this litel spot of erthe'. I am afraid here is a bit of ambiguity. As you who have written 'The Eighth Sphere' know, the last phrase is from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. You seem to suggest that it encourages emphasis on terrestrial matters and that English poets choose to be full of earthly sensations and feelings and that therefore they are able to write genuine, not merely 'correct' verse. In your poem you want to be 'like that other Cathie' (of Wuthering Heights) and, though drawn to heaven, you have learned through love earth's prime importance. I don't fancy any 'escapism', but was Emily Bronte, creator of 'Cathie', quite oriented like you? She wrote that
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stanza which holds the quintessence of her being:
Though earth and men were gone.
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
Doesn't her English experience spring from the same source as does Sri Aurobindo's 'Indian'? And Chaucer's phrase is related to the ascension of the slain Troilus's soul to the heavens from where he looks down on the small terrestrial scene: his viewpoint is of infinite time and space. From high above he laughs at the mourning of his friends over his death, people whose thoughts are entirely fixed on trivial transitory things. Contrary to your intention, you are directing me to a poet who stands at the very birth of English verse and brings up here a theme in tune with a sense of immortality, infinity, eternity - a tiny anticipatory flash of the Aurobindonian vision.
Long ago I joined issue with you on the non-Englishness you had asserted of poetry like Sri Aurobindo's and, comparatively in a minor key, Sethna's. I argued that English poetry is of two orders - one steeped in the English atmosphere, the other carrying a universal air, taking up any subject from any place or age and becoming its native speech. I suppose this is common sense and it could apply to any poetic literature. But it should apply all the more to English poetry by the very nature of the language concerned, the plasticity to which Sri Aurobindo has referred. We may be struck by this plasticity in the diverse styles English literature teems with - the individual element at almost riotous play as between author and author (Sir Thomas Browne, Addison, Gibbon, Ruskin, Carlyle, Meredith, Arnold, Chesterton, Shaw, etc.) with no persistent tradition of writing as, for instance, in France for both prose and poetry until very recent times when a rebellious 'modernism' blew winds of radical change over it. English
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poetry is a field of adventure, with abrupt starts and turns, as it were, from the homely and sunny work of Chaucer to the opulent exquisiteness of Spenser and the multi-toned passion of Shakespeare, from the Elizabethan period to the time of the Metaphysicals with their scholarly or mystic exercise of wit and on to Milton's Latin-moulded polyphony of a widely stored intellect and to the so-called Classical phase of the epigrammatic eighteenth century, then the sudden luminous outburst known as the Romantic Revival, followed by a deviation, as Sri Aurobindo has aptly observed, into 'an intellectual, artistic, carefully wrought but largely external poetry' which in turn was surprisingly intruded upon by a subtle strain of the Irish soul which, seeming to continue the Victorian aesthetic language, was really a breakaway into a new dimension of inwardness. This innovation appeared to Sri Aurobindo as the promise of a plenary voice of supreme depths and heights made possible on one side by the oceanic roll of Whitman from America and on the other by whatever rarefication or intensification of sight and insight could come initially from Tagore and finally from the practitioners of 'overhead poetry' bearing India's ancient genius to a novel fulfilment by turning to Yogic use the power of subtle suggestion and compact intuitive directness which are the outstanding qualities of the language developed during six hundred years by English poetry.
1 have spoken of abrupt starts, but there is still a secret continuity in the sense that certain movements of mind and its expressive medium are present in embryo form in one age and come to fruition in another. This double phenomenon is due to the pull this way and that of the two components of the English poetic consciousness, the mundane Anglo-Saxon and the aerial Celtic - the submergence of the latter by the former in one period and vice versa in the next and at the same time the shooting up of either here and there amidst the predominance of its opposite. Thus the usually down-to-earth Chaucer with his tempered lucid manner can amaze us
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now and again with, as Arnold noticed, 'the grand style' -
O martyr souded to virginity -
or with the imaginative felicity of the Elizabethans when he tells us, in 'The Knight's Tale', of a thick wood being cut down but adds that he will refrain from describing the plight of the nymphs and fauns, the beasts and birds,
Ne how the ground agast was of the light.
Or take some of the surprises facing us from the Elizabethan Age's general upsurge of the Life-Force presenting to us human motives vehemently criss-crossing. All of a sudden we find in the protean Shakespeare an almost irrelevant allusion to the Cosmic Spirit in a Wordsworthian vein -
Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come...
Here it is not only Wordsworth but also the Aurobindonian 'overhead poetry' that is anticipated. A similar prefiguration of it in again a semi-Wordsworthian feeling and form is met with in Vaughan's
But felt through all this earthly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
In Wordsworth's own time of the so-called Romantic Revival we get in the middle of Keats's hymn to Pan in the course of Endymion a snatch of ancient Indian Yoga and a clear Aurobindonian experience when the poet invokes the genius of the place:
Be thou the unimaginable lodge
Of solitary thinkings such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain.
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In passing, I may remark that this kind of poetry breathes nothing of the English scene or temper. None of the lines quoted from Shakespeare or Vaughan or Keats are English in experience. Nor does Wordsworth emerge as English, even though set in an English milieu 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey', when we get the inward pull of a waking samadhi
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened
and when we are told that with the organic functions being
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul.
What, again, corresponds to English experience even in the outward pull of Wordsworth's pantheistic vision of a mysterious Presence 'interfused' with all things,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air...'?
Aren't you yourself touched occasionally by a typical Aurobindonian intuition with some thrill of the 'overhead' rhythm, as when you conclude your 'Eden' with a line which has a universal bearing and passes beyond any recognisable English outlook:
Unsleeping the sky whose sight embraces all?
Let me end this series of brief citations with a reference once more to my favourite Wordsworth. His 'Ode on the Intimations of Immortality...' with its May morning in Cumberland comes with a mood essentially shot with non-English emotions and insights. The sense of the human
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soul's pre-existence in God, the impression of a child deserving to be addressed as
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity
or as
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the day -
have we not here something quite alien to any North-England mind, however religious it may be? Nor can that mind be anywhere near 'those shadowy recollections' which have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence.
Yet the English Wordsworth, using the 'tongue that Shakespeare spake', can pass from a prospect of North-England landscape to something which, while appearing to be part of a Cumberland dawn, belongs really to the deepest mystic region our consciousness can plumb. I am referring to those four lines on which I dwelt at some length in our old correspondence:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep...
We feel the tone suggesting distances and heights and bringing secret messages from them and the poet's heart forgetting all human sadness and responding to the strange joy that seems abroad and concentrated mysteriously everywhere. Then comes a drawing of the inner self into a hushed intense receptivity to some absolute Ineffable whose pre-
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sence from far off gets communicated as if by its breath of an all-pervading ecstasy. There is no missing the profound vibration of the last line and its sheer revelatory vision. But we may realise how in such verse every touch has to be right or else the final wonder will fail to reach us. It almost seems as though everything depended on how the state of the 'fields' were worded. Suppose we had: 'fields asleep'. At once the level of the inspiration would be disturbed. The profound sound effect would fall short of the sense towards which it should carry us. But it needs a special sensitivity to discern the difference. The ordinary literary critic would tend to consider the words 'of sleep' to be a mere prepositional phrase doing duty for the straightforward 'asleep'. Then automatically our stress would be on 'fields', whereas actually it is the 'sleep' that is to be emphasised. The 'fields', though hardly negligible and certainly necessary in lending concreteness to the vision that has started with the vague yet not impalpable 'Winds', is the support of 'sleep' and not the principal subject. It indeed points to a reality but what confers on the suggested expanses their true, their ultimate character is the expression 'of sleep'. This expression lifts the expanses beyond the physical to the arcane. To equal 'of sleep' to 'asleep' is to fall short completely of the revelation and end up with the explanation offered by one Professor Hales that Wordsworth is speaking of a breeze coming to him at an early hour of the day from the 'reposeful slumbering countryside.' Dowden, trying to exercise more imagination than Hales, inclines to the opinion that the line may merely mean that the west wind blows, the west where the sun sets being emblematic of sleep. However, he has some doubt and asks: "Are 'the fields of sleep' those deep and shadowy parts of our own souls which lie out of the view of consciousness?" A commentator on Dowden finds this suggestion too refined, landing us as it does upon Freud's subconscious mind and the 'Id' about which Dowden knew little and Wordsworth less. So there is an urge to play down whatever supernatural aura the line bears. One critic has
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sought the key to it in those two other lines of Wordsworth's:
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers.
Of course here is nothing supernatural, but in fact the picture is puzzling by its curious mixed imagery, and just the adjective 'sleeping' in the context of ]'winds' can scarcely throw light on the profoundly stirring obscurity in the Ode's phrase, A hint of the basic truth comes to us from the Mandukya Upanishad in which three grades of being - the outer human, the inner occult, the inmost spiritual - are termed Jagrat (Wakefulness), Swapna (Dream), Sushupti (Sleep), with a final utter transcendent state simply named Turiya (Fourth). Sushupti indicates the tranced condition at its deepest, in which the human soul partakes of a Super-consciousness described by the Upanishad thus: "The self of Sleep, unified, a massed intelligence, blissful and enjoying bliss, ...the lord of all, the omniscient, the inner control."
Ancient India that is also modern because it is undying lay behind Wordsworth's strange line as it lay behind several other utterances by him, just as it did with Keats's 'solitary thinkings' and Shelley's
One whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere
and
The One remains, the Many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly
and many other deliverances of the English Romantic poets to whom a supra-intellectual light beckoned from some ether of being in which Platonic and Plotinian presences mingled with 'Asiatic immensities' which were a little baffling at times yet never really 'vague'. What these im-
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mensities hold can be caught as a hint not only from the Mandukya Upanishad but also from a brief correspondence between Sri Aurobindo and me in 1948. When I had asked him to help me draw inspiration from the 'overhead' planes which he had named Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind, with the still unmanifested Supermind at the top, and whose distinguishing traits and powers he had explained, I was eager to get lines of English and European poetry elucidated both in suggestion and technique by him in terms of those planes. One of my letters ran:
"It is a bit of a surprise to me that Virgil's
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt1
is now considered by you 'an almost direct descent from the Overmind consciousness', the home of the Mantras. I was under the impression that, like that other line of his -
O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem -
it was a perfect mixture of the Higher Mind with the Psychic; and the impression was based on something you had written to me in the past. Similarly I remember you definitely declaring Wordsworth's
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep
to be lacking precisely in the Overmind note and having only the note of Intuition in an intense form. What you write now means a big change of opinion in both the instances - but how and why the change?"
1. The best failure in English with this untranslatable little masterpiece by Virgil seems to be C. Day Lewis's:
Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience.
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Sri Aurobindo replied:
"Yes, certainly, my ideas and reactions to some of the lines and passages about which you had asked me long ago, have developed and changed and could not but change. For at that time I was new to the overhead regions or at least to the highest of them - for the higher thought and the illumination were already old friends - and could not be sure or complete in my perception of many things concerning them. I hesitated therefore to assign anything like overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writings as belonging to this order. Besides, the intellect took still too large a part in my reactions to poetry; for instance, I judged Virgil's line too much from what seemed to be its surface intellectual import and too little from its deeper vision and meaning and its reverberations of the Overhead. So also with Wordsworth's line about the 'fields of sleep': I have since then moved in those fields of sleep and felt the breath which is carried from them by the winds that came to the poet, so I can better appreciate the depth of vision in Wordsworth's line. I could also see more clearly the impact of the Overhead on the work of poets who wrote usually from a mental, a psychic, an emotional or other vital inspiration, even when it gave only a tinge."
Now I come to a final point you have striven to drive home three times in your charge-sheet apropos of Selections from Savitri which, by the way, was not 'Dick Batsford's doing'. Actually "there ain't no sich person". You have made a portmanteau surname from Dick's own 'Batstone' and his wife M.E.'s 'Milford'. In the second place Dick Batstone is not the maker of the selections. He is only the writer of the Introduction. The selecting was done by Mary Aldridge who has written the 'Editor's Note'. By the way, you are facing a book over which an Englishwoman of culture and fine sensibility has worked and which an Englishman with an equally developed mind and aesthetic taste has introduced to the reading public. Their valuation of
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Savitri cannot be put down merely to their being Sri Aurobindo's disciples. Their Englishness and their knowledge of English poetry have also to count in the balance. They are not themselves poets but their critical sense cannot be brushed aside cavalierly. You have not given it even a passing thought. Mary Aldridge's name you have completely overlooked.
Of course the two collaborators are not professional critics and I won't harp on their claims. Let me turn directly to your criticism: "There are scarcely any concrete images in the whole book... But the language of the poet is a language of image and symbol... Blake writes of the 'minute particulars' and of these there are virtually none in Sri Aurobindo's poem. One longs for a blade of grass, for Tagore's 'patient mother the dust' or for his 'morning sparrow'," Do you mean to say that there are no earthly pictures in Savitri? Here are a few:
Often in twilight mid returning troops
Of cattle thickening with their dust the shades...
I caught for some eternal eye the sudden
Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool....
Or wandered in some lone tremendous wood
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry...
The colonnade's dream grey in the quiet eve,
The slow moonrise gliding in front of night...
As if at flower-prints in a dingy room
Laughed in a golden vase one living rose...
However, it is not only Nature that can show concrete images: concreteness can crowd Supernature too. And in between there is a concrete fusion of Supernature with Nature as in the Symbol Dawn in the first canto of the poem:
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A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
Here are images of the world we know, serving the ends of a visionary significance. Or look at this combination of the earthly hieratic, the subtly occult, the spiritually psychological to drive home both subjective and objective values of a highly Yogic state of embodied being, the Avatarhood of Savitri:
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple door to things beyond.
You cannot have a passage of poetry more thronged with images. A Shakespearean profusion and variety of sight meet us, each instance a different surprise and all coalescing towards a single total effect of opulent mystery. Technically we have on the whole the impression of end-stopped lines which yet have an interlinked mobility and a couple of skilful enjambments (lines 4 and 6) which do not interfere with the over-all Upanishadic or Kalidasian movement. The rhythm carries the inward-outward vision with a more and more deepening vibration until in the last line its soul-stirring flow reaches at once a culminating intensity and a breaking forth into some interminable distance which is felt to be both within and without. I would consider the passage a most vivid Mantra, the farthest one can think of from a series of abstractions. Doubtless, it does not bring us minute
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particulars such as we might expect from an English poet writing of English matters but if a supreme English poet turned to matters not specifically English we would certainly have something comparable though not in a vein of equally developed insight. Shelley's apostrophe to Emilia Viviani springs to mind:
Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath the radiant form of Woman
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light and love and immortality!
Sweet benediction in the eternal Curse!
Veiled glory of the lampless Universe: -
along with his idealistic description matching the intoxicated apostrophe:
...the brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless heaven of June,
Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon
Burns inextinguishably beautiful.
Back to Sri Aurobindo, let me affirm that denizens of a supramundane sphere do not become abstract just because they are not of the earth. What could be more precisely visualised than that constant companion of the young Savitri other than the humans around her? -
Almost they saw who lived within her light
Her playmate in the sempiternal spheres
Descended from its unattainable realms
In her attracting advent's luminous wake,
The white-fire dragon bird of endless bliss
Drifting with burning wings above her days:
Heaven's tranquil shield guarded the missioned child.
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I may observe that Sri Aurobindo has not merely given us a striking picture, a 'containing vessel' to hold the endless bliss: he has also employed an inspired technique of structure to vivify still further its character. I asked him: "Is an accumulating grandiose effect intended by the repetition of adjective-and-noun in four consecutive line-endings?" He answered: "Yes; the purpose is to create a large luminous trailing movement like the flight of the Bird with its dragon tail of white fire."
A seeing of the common terrestrial condition through eyes opened to a deeper reality, evil or good, behind or beyond it, is found again and again in Savitri. Thus we read:
An Inquisition of the priests of Night
In judgment sit on the adventurer soul...
A bond is put on the high-climbing mind,
A seal on the too large wide-open heart;
Death stays the journeying discoverer, Life.
Thus is the throne of the Inconscient safe
While the tardy coilings of the aeons pass
And the Animal browses in the sacred fence
And the gold Hawk can cross the skies no more.
This 'gold Hawk' is as living as Tagore's 'morning sparrow' and is part of a profounder world-consciousness. And where in Tagore can you find the ornithological vision that the Yogi's eye raises before us?
All things hang here between God's yes and no...
The white head and black tail of the mystic drake,
The swift and the lame foot, wing strong, wing broken
Sustaining the body of the uncertain world,
A great surreal dragon in the skies.
Nor will you be able to trace in Tagore a packed revelation that is simultaneously a far-shooting philosophy of the cosmos stated in a most simple manner immediately on the
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heels of the same thought flashed out in imagery audacious in the extreme - a packed revelation cast in the form of a paradox such as
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,
It is worth noting how the revelatory is conveyed by a cunning logic to the art-sense of the reader. In poetry logic is not confined to an argument a la Aristotle: it operates too by aesthetic devices. Assonances, consonances, rhymes or at least echoes and even transfigured puns are some of them. Metrical structures also serve to persuade and convince. In the lines before us, 'Earth's' and 'Truth's' make a marked echo by related sounds, the connective 'are' stands in the very middle of the first line so that the section preceding it is balanced by the succeeding one and, what is more, the scansion of the two is absolutely the same; the opening pair of words in either section is heavily stressed, constituting a spondee, and is followed by an iambic foot and one further syllable. An exact metrical equation is made to bear out the precise correspondence asserted of two dissimilar figures. The second line brings also a perfectly poised division 'God's sign' is right in the centre of the phrase, the third foot out of the five, its significance looking backward and forward with an equal eye, as it were, allotting two feet each to the earlier part and the later, suggesting a secret similarity of meaning within the disparate expressions. Over and above functioning in its own way like the 'are' of the first line, 'God's sign' builds again a spondee and by situating it in a prominent place communicates to us an affinity between the striking philosophical statement and the startling visual postulate leading to it.
Please don't think I am indulging in pedantry to impress you. I am trying to show the inspired craftsman going hand in hand in Sri Aurobindo's poetry with the illumined seer. As you appear to misconceive his verbal art all through, I
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feel urged to dwell on some technical details, when the opportunity has offered itself.
The second verse of the quotation I have discussed sets us on the track of lines that are great without an ostensible simile or metaphor, bare pronouncements which yet make us perceive verities and feel them on our pulses:
All can be done if the God-touch is there....
Our life's repose is in the Infinite....
A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest....
The One by whom all live, who lives by none....
But mostly a figurative element quickens the great single phrase:
Love is man's Iien on the Absolute....
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient...
Unweave the stars and into silence pass....
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Even when a transcendent experience is presented, such words as would shadow forth its living and substantial nature are pressed into service:
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
The third and the fourth lines which may appear to the ordinary reader as rather abstract after the vividness of the first two do not remain so as soon as the last which begins with a negative vocable springs into substantiality by means of another negation which is not subjective but objective and evokes the picture of a solid vacancy, as it were, one which could have paths yet refuses to have them and chooses
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to be remote. The livingness of this solitary state of the mind-surpassing peace-packed Divine is also impressed on us by the word 'lies' instead of 'is'.
Many 'superconscient' states, passive or active, many explorations of the in-world make their impacts on us in the course of the story of Aswapathy's Yoga and Savitri's sadhana side by side with her soul-romance with Satyavan and battle against Death for her lover's life. Still the ultimate stress is not on the Beyond. You misconstrue Sri Aurobindo if you think that his concern is not with 'this litel spot of erthe'. Aswapathy's invocation to the Supreme is all on its behalf:
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the Universe,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride,...
O radiant fountain of the world's delight
World-free and unattainable above,
O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within
While men seek thee outside and never find,
Mystery and Muse with hieratic tongue,
Incarnate the white passion of thy force,
Mission to earth some living form of thee.
One moment fill with thy eternity,
Let thy infinity in one body live,
All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,
All-Love throb single in one human heart.
As a result of this appeal, Savitri is born. She grows up, seeks and finds her mate, learns that Satyavan is fated to die within a year but still marries him, determined to fight Yama, the God of Death, and snatch his soul back to earth. She is not content that she should join him in some other world and be free of the toil, the trouble, the tangle, which the Divine has imposed on terrestrial existence:
Freedom is this with ever seated soul,
Large in Life's limits, strong in Matter's knots,
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Building great stuff of action from the worlds
To make fine wisdom from coarse scattered strands
And love and beauty out of war and night,
The wager wonderful, the game divine.
What liberty has the soul which feels not free
Unless stripped bare and cannot kiss the bonds
The Lover winds around his playmate's limbs,
Choosing his tyranny, crushed in his embrace?
To seize him better with her boundless heart
She accepts the limiting circle of his arms,
Bows full of bliss beneath his mastering hands
And laughs in his rich constraints, most bound, most
free.
When Satyavan has been granted back by Death, Savitri's ordeal has not ended. Her soul and his are transported to the domain of Everlasting Day and there the Supreme tempts her to abide with Satyavan and leave earth behind. She replies:
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven....
O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars
For victory in the tournament with death,
For bending of the fierce and difficult bow,
For flashing of the splendid sword of God!
O thou who soundest the trumpet in the lists,
Part not the handle from the untried steel,
Take not the warrior with his blow unstruck.
Are there not still a million fights to wage?
O King-smith, clang on still thy toil begun,
Weld us to one in thy strong smithy of life.
Thy fine-curved jewelled hilt call Savitri,
Thy blade's exultant smile name Satyavan...
The Supreme accedes to her prayer and sends the two of them back to the travail of Time, making them his instru-
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merits of the spiritual consciousness. She especially is marked out:
O Sun-word, thou shalt raise the"earth-soul to Light....
Awakened from the mortal's ignorance
Men shall be lit with the Eternal's ray....
My will shall be the meaning of their days; Living for me, by me, in me they shall live.
Look at the last line here. The whole of the Bhagavad Gita is summed up in its message of three steps to fulfilment - the spiritual self-dedication, the pervasion by the Divine's guiding will, the utter oneness with God, which is meant to be no escape into Nirvana but a dynamic living for earth's perfection. Savitri's ideal is allowed and enforced by the highest Wisdom:
Olasso of my capture's widening noose,
Become my cord of universal love -
the same ideal that she had declared in her debate with death:
A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
Iam a deputy of the aspiring world,
My spirit's liberty I ask for all.
I shall end here, with my hope that one day my delight in Savitri as a poem may come to be shared by all. Not that I consider it
One entire and perfect chrysolite.
There are variations in the poetic enthousiasmos, as is natural when the work is not only Legend and Symbol but also Philosophy. H.O. White, besides saying what I have quoted
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earlier, has marked that most themes of philosophical thinking have been touched upon in Savitri. Even scientific thought and experiment have not been missed. Sri Aurobindo has referred to
The rare-point sparse substratum universe
On which floats a solid world's phenomenal face
as well as to
The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force.
Though this last line affects my ear as being no less inspired, both verbally and rhythmically, than any that deals with the spiritual life, I do not claim that there are no comparatively arid areas; but, by and large, I cannot help being aware of "God's plenty".
However, let me press on you Sri Aurobindo's other epic more than this which may prove too much of 'the Future Poetry' for many. I repeat my request to you that you should look at Ilion and tell me how you react to it. After getting your reaction I shall close the chapter of my discussion with you on Sri Aurobindo the Poet.
(17.9.1987)
Please give me a little time to ponder your very eloquent and persuasive letter, in which you make some very true points. I have just returned from Paris, much work on my table awaiting me, but I now have beside me a copy of Ilion' sent me by Dick Batstone, 'Letters on Poetry and Literature' silently sent me "by Prof Gokak; a reproachful letter from Sisir Kumar Ghose; a photocopy of 'The Riddle of This World', sent from America; I have just re-read Aurobindo's commentary on the Isha Upanishad! Please give me a little time. These things are important. Your point
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about the 'overpoetry' which shines down from above this world's experience is an important one and indeed where that 'divine vision' is absent, where is the 'poetry'? What did Blake say? 'One thing alone makes a poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision'.
I will write at length when I can.
(20.10.1987)
Thank you for your acknowledgment of my elephant of a letter which I hope hasn't quite failed to be chryselephantine. From the generous bits of appreciation of some points in it by you I feel happy that you haven't taken it as an infliction.
It's most unexpectedly good news that you have received so many Aurobindonian presents. I am particularly grateful to Dick for having sent you Won. I am glad to remember, from your mention of re-reading Sri Aurobindo's commentary on the Isha Upanishad, that it was I who sent you this little book nearly 25 years ago. You liked it very much at that time for its clear systematic elucidation of the ancient knowledge and wisdom. Sri Aurobindo picked out the Isha because it forms a link between the Veda and the Vedanta, carrying into the more intellectualised intuition of the later seers the light caught by the ecstatic insight of the old Rishis to unify the temporal and the eternal. It also looks forward to Sri Aurobindo's own Integral Yoga of the Supermind's life-transformative power.
A few months back I posted to you by surface mail my latest publication: The Obscure and the Mysterious - A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry. It not only contains a series of essays on Mallarme the Man and the Poet but also attempts to translate a good number of his poems.
I keep dipping with great pleasure into your Yeats the Initiate. By the way, have you come across Swan and Shadow by Thomas R. Whitaker which is said to be "the greatest book yet written on Yeat's poetry"? I haven't, but I'll be looking for it.
(30.10.1987)
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Although I might postpone this letter for weeks until I had read or re-read all Sri Aurobindo's works, I don't suppose I could answer it better than by sitting down now - the first of the dark evenings of our winter when the extra hour of evening daylight is curtailed and I have the evening hours before me. I will make a few reflections and then turn to your letter and see where I get with that. It is a remarkable letter, full of eloquent, true, beautiful things. Many of these are inspiring and illuminating to me and I am privileged to receive such a letter and to be able to exchange thoughts, even in the role of the Devil's Advocate, with the imaginative mind of India which you represent. Also Professor Gokak sent me Aurobindo's Letters on Poetry where I find many true and beautiful things, and a scale of evaluation that surpasses anything in the West - the modern West especially - because it recognizes hierarchies, levels of consciousness, and that poetry may come from one or another of these. I find myself marking with approval passage after passage. I have just accepted for Temenos a short but full and beautifully concise paper from Professor Gokak on the Lord Surya and the six goddesses of poetry. I'm hoping he can provide some photographs of sculpture to accompany it, for if the philosophers and mystics discerned the Gods it was the craftsman who gave them their forms.
One is never aware of one's own cultural formation until one encounters another; and although I would no longer in any sense call myself a member of the Christian Church (although of course I regard the Lord Jesus as a Master, and especially the Master of my own civilization) I find that I am after all very Western in the sense in which David Jones (our
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great Catholic artist) called Christianity a very 'incarna-tional' religion, stemming of course from the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus in human form. We have indeed wonderful sculptures (Chartres Cathedral and hundreds of others) and the whole glory of Italian art and indeed you will at once understand what I mean by the Western tradition being 'incarnational'. Jesus did not teach any evolutionary 'superman' Way, but the discovery in mortal fallen man of the divine 'Presence'; and the love of all human beings, because in them is the imprint of the 'image of God' (as told of man's creation in the first chapter of Genesis) and the recovery and redemption of something already and for ever there, rather than an evolution towards some superrace. Our universe is the human universe, and loving our fellow-humans our task, in the light of the love of the Father who made us human, not superhuman. For some other race — superhuman if you wish - for indeed the angels, the animals, for every 'kind' its own universe and vision, but for us this universe, Blake's 'minute particulars'. So I tend to follow my culture in seeing rather in the degree of embodiment than in super-states the mark of achieved perfection. By contrast, you in India tend to aspire to 'higher' levels of consciousness which perhaps do not require the 'incarnational' dimension, or not in the same way, I know that to Indian metaphysicians fine distinctions and differences are clear as leaves on a tree and require no embodiment to be comprehensible. Sri Aurobindo speaks of 'higher' states of consciousness which I don't doubt he experienced. I don't doubt that Jesus also experienced these, but his Way was to feed the hungry, comfort the bereaved, heal the sick and so on. He 'came down from heaven' and this runs throughout all Christian art. insofar as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto Me' - the Divine Humanity. You know Blake as well as 1 do.
The second stumbling-block to discussion is that in India I discern that the idea that a man may be gifted in one direction but not in another is not acceptable. That a Saint
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might be tone-deaf or colour-blind would not in Christian terms make him the less a saint. But you do not see a master in this way, and if he happens to write verse it must therefore be great poetry, because he is a great metaphysician or even indeed a saint. I see the logic of this - an illuminated Master has access to higher levels of consciousness, therefore his poetry must come from these higher levels and is above and beyond criticism as poetry. Nothing will ever make me see Sri Aurobindo's poetic writings as other than occasionally successful as poetry, but I see your point, that to question his poetic gift is to question all. It would not seem so to a Western mind at all, or necessarily cast doubt upon his metaphysical gifts. He was a brilliant, clear, and articulate thinker. Poetry is something else altogether, as music, dance, and sculpture are something else altogether. Or is that again the limitation of my Western mind?
I have for some days now kept at my bedside Ilion; Dick Batstone sent me the whole poem. It is of course a tour-deforce, reveals (even though I imagine an early work) a tremendous mental energy and of course a command of the English language and the Greek hexameter. But why should any twentieth-century poet want to write in the metre of Homer? If I remember aright Valmiki's 'inspiration' came in the form of the metre in which he wrote the Ramayana. Homer may have used a metre current in his day or likewise have received that 'form', as the ballad metre is the expression of the Scottish border-ballads, or as the sonnet form came to the Renaissance mind with a kind of inevitability, as a thought-form appropriate to a certain way of thinking. Every culture has its music of verse. Why should Sri Aurobindo have written a poem in the metre of Greek epic poetry? Of course it can be done as an exercise - a piece of virtuosity (which Ilion is) but I do not find in that poem its raison d'etre, It is like a prize-poem set in a Public School or University, to write a poem in a certain language (Greek for example) and a certain metre. It is an imitation of poetry.
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not the newly created expression of a present vision. It lacks what David Jones calls 'nowness'. Would Virgil have been impressed, or Ovid (not to speak of Homer) by some clever schoolboy or graduate's imitation of the Aeneid or the Iliad? There is an astonishing virtuosity (of course Aurobindo would have carried off the prize, whether from Eton or from Cambridge or Oxford) but would any true poet have given his time and energy to such an exercise? There are of course fine .things; the concept of the sun rising for the last time on the doomed city; some passages from the speeches of Paris, for example, are profound as thought and better expressed in his philosophic writings. Yet I realize that to you and to many Indian readers the picture is different. I know that Karan Singh is a follower of Sri Aurobindo; Arabinda Basu is a fine philosopher (though not necessarily an expert on poetry); with my own ears I heard Raja Rao speak of Savitri as a great poem; and Professor Gokak sent me the 'Letters on Poetry'. Sisir Kumar Ghose likewise. I am confronted with the possibility that all of you see something I don't see and that 1 am entirely wrong. But I cannot say that I find myself moved or convinced by Ilion any more (rather less) than by Savitri. Whereas with Tagore (neither metaphysician nor Perfect Master) I find great poetry, and the mind of a poet ever at work. He found in the people, in the trees and skies and animals and birds and people of his lime and place the reality of the here and now which is ever present to the true poet. The true poet does not await Utopia or a superpoetry but gathers eternal beauty from the dust and the light his eyes see daily. 'A fool sees not the same tree as the wise man sees.' Blake had no need to await Superman powers to see the sun as 'an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty*. I admit my own profound suspicion of what (perhaps only superficially) resembles the Superman thought of Nietzsche, and the evolutionism of Darwin is also antipathetic to me. But there I admit that I am probably understanding in Western terms what Sri Aurobindo in-
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tended in a very different sense - as the 'evolution' of the divine principle innate in every man. In that sense it would of course be true and profound. And I suppose that, given re-incarnation, there also would be 'evolution' throughout history. In that case what is the kali-yuga? It would seem that the clear vision of the Golden Age is progressively darkened to the Iron Age where we now are. But these are mysteries far beyond poetry. But it might seem that from the Vedas and the Psalms and the epics of all civilizations there is rather a decline than an 'evolution'. But here I may simply not have understood Sri Aurobindo's thought, and I am as you know no philosopher.
Before 1 turn to your letter I suggest another possibility -that is, that poetry is the proper language of this world of conflict and duality and not at all of a vision of Nirvana. This was Yeats's view (again, like Tagore, a great poet but not at all a Perfect Master, or with as mystical a vision as dear AE, who was only occasionally a poet even approaching Yeats). And in Yeats's poem Vacillation this is clearly stated. What after all would the Mahabharata have been without the Great Battle? Is it not the record rather of our quest than of its term that makes poetry? Again, I could be wrong - this, dear Dr. Sethna, is a possibility of which India makes me daily aware, and not only in the matter of poetry - but this is what Yeats wrote (I don't really need to remind you):
The Soul Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
The Heart What, be a singer born and lack a theme?
The Soul Isaiah's coal, what more can man desire?
The Heart Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!
The Soul Look on that fire, salvation walks within.
The Heart What theme had Homer but original sin?
or in A Dialogue of Self and Soul the soul says:
Such fullness from that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
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That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known -
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
- and again the Poet chooses life in all its multiplicity and richness and confusion:
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman, not kindred to his soul.
Before I go to your letter, though, let me say what delight I have found in the poetry, even in translation (I have several different translations, and many volumes) of Tagore, whom I am prepared to believe may be a poet equal to Yeats. And even in translations, Kalidasa; and Valmiki, and many other Indian poets. I have searched in vain for a complete translation of the Mahabharata but I am prepared even from the several abridgements I know to believe it surpasses Homer as the Himalayas overtop the Alps. But even there, the Bhagavad Geeta is spoken on the field of the Great Battle! Perhaps I am simply unable to appreciate Sri Aurobindo as a poet, or perhaps it is a contradiction in terms - as Yeats suggests - to be a Perfect Master and a poet.
Another point I would like to take up - again you may see in my standpoint the 'incarnational' Christian attitude - is your comparison of Sri Aurobindo's 'The white-fire dragon bird of endless bliss. Drifting with burning wings above her days' with Tagore's 'morning sparrow'. I am totally un-
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moved and unimpressed by Aurobindo's super-bird. Tagore's sparrow performs perfectly the symbolic function (see Coleridge's definition of the symbol which reveals the eternal 'in and through the temporal'). The small, dusty humblest of birds is for the poet a daily epiphany of the mystery and miracle of Being, here and now, every moment. Or his little granddaughter who flings her arms round his neck in love, and in that moment of the Here and Now sweeps away all the melancholy reflections of all things passing away, the vanity of earthly existence when Tagore was considering the 'poet of Mohenjodaro' and the transi-toriness of all earthly things. It is the task of the poet to reveal such things, the daily miracle and mystery. As Blake did when he was able
To sec a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
That to me is visionary poetry, not Aurobindo's super-bird in superland. Or Blake's passage:
Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance &
sport in summer
Upon the sunny brooks & meadows; every one the
dance
Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave:
Each one to sound his instruments of music in the
dance.
To touch each other & recede, to cross & change &
return:
These are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on
mountains,
The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro' the
darksom sky,
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Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to
the sons
Of men: These are the Sons of Los; These the Visions
of Eternity,
But we see only as it were the hems of their garments
When with our vegetable eyes we view these wondrous
visions
Blake neither wanted nor needed super-flies, and neither I think did Tagore, nor Kalidasa, for the task of the poet is to see the eternal in the world as each day creates the marvels daily before our eyes. To the 'Man of Imagination' (Blake's phrase again) 'Nature is one continued vision of Fancy or Imagination.' It has been unsurpassable,' Tagore wrote. Not so to Sri Aurobindo, he always wanted something better. To the poet's eye it is unsurpassable. Or to quote Traherne,
'Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every
morning you awake in heaven, till the Sea itself floweth
in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and
crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the
sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because
men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as
you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as
misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never
enjoy the world.'
This world, seen truly. What is the poet's task but to reveal that world, in the midge's dance, in Traherne's pebbles on the path, or in Tagore's morning sparrow?
As for that superwoman Aurobindo's Savitri, without citing Wordsworth's
Woman not too great or good
For human nature's daily food,
here is dear Edwin Muir's poem to his wife Willa,
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Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good. An eye
That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea,
Not beautiful or rare in every part,
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.
Or Tagore's Bengali peasant girls; or Kunti, like a wreath of faded lotuses' pleading with her disowned son Radheya; or the fiery Draupadi; or the Savitri of the Mahabharata rather than Aurobindo's superwoman. It's unimaginative (in the poetic sense) to need Utopias and superwomen and super-birds and a superworld reached through 'evolution' and to miss the daily celebration in the Here and Now, the 'minute particulars'.
Dear Dr. Sethna, you challenged me to state my case and not to side-step with cold civilities, and about poetry I cannot lie. Neither can you. 'Opposition is true friendship,' Blake also says.
Now to your really marvellous letter. I hope you have kept a copy, you should publish it. I am prepared to act as your foil, for I have not your fire, I am old and tired and to see beauty is always better than (like myself) to fail to see it in a particular work. For as Shakespeare says, 'The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst no worse, if but Imagination do amend them'. I cannot of course speak for Herbert Read or say what he thought or did not think; I can be answerable only for myself. So, to begin about the point
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you make on your first page about the 'seer' and Aurobindo's claim that he does 'see' what he discerns in the invisible world, I would say that is what Yeats means by saying that poetry's theme is this world, not the 'higher' worlds where the enlightened seer may be at home, but lacks the concrete incarnational images. That world reveals itself through images and people (I return to my Christian 'incarnational' bias) and it does happen only rarely, I admit, and those 'bright shoots of everlastingness' that shine down, in Yeats's words 'That light / Though somewhat broken by the leaves'. You yourself give beautiful examples. But the passages you cite are one and all deeply tragic and human experiences, they are not supervision of the kind the Soul in the Yeats dialogue summons to, the pure vision of Nirvana. They are all rooted in the human condition, whereas Savitri attempts to evoke a superhuman humanity without that human paradox as old as the epic of Gilgamesh by which man is part mortal, part immortal.
You take issue (second point) about Milton's abstractions; Eliot, you will remember, criticized Milton himself for this. In the fine passage you cite I would suggest that the abstracts and negatives serve precisely the purpose of evoking 'chaos and old night' and must be read in the context of the wonderful concrete description of, say, Hell,
Anon out of the earth a fabrick huge
Rose like an exhalation, with the sounds
Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,
Built like a temple, where Pilasters round
Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid
With golden architrave; nor did there want
Cornice or Freeze, with bossy sculptures grav'n.
The roof was fretted gold. Not Babilon
Nor great Alcairo such magnificence
Equal'd in all thir glories, to inshrine
Belus or Serapis thir gods, or seat
Thir Kings when Aegypt with Assyria strove - etc.
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Not to mention L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, you know them too well for me to cite them. Or from Lycidas,
Under the opening eyelids of the morn
We drove afield, and both together heard
What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night...
Ye valleys low where the mild whispers use
Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparsely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes
That on the green terf suck the honeyed showers
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers,
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted Crow-toe, the pale Gessamine,
The white pink, and the Pansie freak't with jet,
The glowing violet,
The Musk-rose, and the well-attir'd woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flowre that sad embroidery wears...
I had meant to stop but those lines of superbly concrete and exact images draw one on with the superb music and perfect exactness of words. I find surely traces in the Ramayana ~ in the descriptions of the forest trees and pools that have the same loving evocation of the 'minute particulars' of an earthly landscape raised to the transmutation of a world of the imagination. The 'imaginal as Henry Corbin would say, the region where images take on meaning, and meanings become embodied in images. That surely is the poet's art.
Then, dear Dr. Sethna, you say what about me? What indeed can I say? You know my work so much better than I know it myself. I can but say 'Touche' or indeed 'Peccavi', can I not?
Then you go back to Aurobindo and mystic forms and bourneless changes, and I am lost again. I admit that 'A
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moment shorter than death, longer than time' is strong, 1 do cede to you that Sri Aurobindo conceived Savitri on a vast scale, it is a tour-de-force by any standard. I can but say that the 'superlife' does pass over my head. That may again be because I am an occidental and as 1 wrote earlier brought up in an 'incarnational' Christian tradition. Immeasurable heights and absolute bliss leave me utterly cold. Unimaginable depths too. And violent ecstasy. Perhaps in Sanskrit one could say what Sri Aurobindo wanted to say; but there again, I find the Vedic Hymns (as I know them only from Raymundo Panikkar's book) very wonderfully concrete.
You then speak of cliches in Milton! No. Milton was creating the English language and every word and phrase is precise and original, new-minted not only from the poet's imagination but from the matrix of the language itself. By the time all the minor Victorians had imitated Milton from afar, and Sri Aurobindo had received his education at an English school where at that time a highly artificial Victorian diction was the received mode of 'poetry' we are a very long way from Milton's welding and wielding of the very texture of language itself.
When you come to 'overhead poetry' I do grant you that this is an important element. I agree that there are many levels of poetry from the purely material (Auden who writes like an extremely gifted journalist) to Shelley, whom Sri Aurobindo discerns to be a poet with great translucence to the higher vision (and I deeply agree - in fact 1 find again and again Aurobindo's comments on the Romantics and other English poets highly perceptive and illuminating). I can but say I grant you all you say about the 'overhead poetry'. It is a very fine defence of that poetry you have written. I do however agree with AE's very interesting letter - he too couldn't take all those superlatives. I feel again and again that Sri Aurobindo tried to stretch the English language beyond its limits. It seems AE thought the same.
Well, we could quote passages at one another for ever.
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You quote Emily Bronte as she writes 'though earth and men were gone' etc. But what about the passage in Wuthering Heights where Catherine Earnshaw weeps in heaven and begs the angels to bring her back to Wuthering Heights? Emily is not a good example in support of your argument. However, on the 'overhead' 1 do think you win: without those gleams that come through from the Light where would poetry be? And to you our western poetry must often seem very opaque. And in present day England I'm bound to say that Blake's 'limit of opacity' has just been reached. Yet we have had Yeats and Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins and David Gascoyne too. But the gleams have to reach the darkness.
But I can't go on. I respect so much what you have written about poetry. Particularly about the 'overmind' for I too believe, as did Blake also, in a divine inspiration that comes from beyond the individual conscious mind. Sometimes from the 'collective unconscious' in which many memories of human experience are for ever stored and upon which we draw whether or not we know it. And sometimes from a higher source, from something beyond our normal definition of human. Not from the vital or from the psyche or the collective psyche, but from the Holy Spirit who (according to the Jewish and Christian teaching also) 'spake through the prophets.'
There I must leave it for I can't 'prove' such points as whether or not any poet was or was not thus inspired. Who can say? It is clear that to some - perhaps to Indian readers -Sri Aurobindo's poetry conveys something which does go, as you say, over my head. Forgive me. Savitri I must look at again - the whole poem, the sweep and scope of it is prodigious of course, Sri Aurobindo must have been gifted with a mental vital or perhaps super-energy in all his writings and compositions that it is difficult to imagine or possible to explain otherwise than through a degree of spiritual enlightenment that passes beyond any discussion of literature or poetry. Of that I cannot possibly judge and in my guarded
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attitude towards the suspicion of Western influence (Nietzsche and Darwin) in some aspect of his thought I think I have certainly misunderstood him. I am not a philosopher, or a mystic, or even a poet in the sense of Yeats or Shelley or any of the poets I love. I have done Blake some service perhaps. I see from afar the light in which the saints and sages and mystics walk. Do not expect of me more than my cup will hold.
With warm regards, and it has been a privilege to correspond with you about poetry, which you love and understand so well. We in the West have everything to learn from India in matters of the overmind. And that, for me, must await my next incarnation (if any. Who can be certain of Soul's destination?). With again my thanks for the privilege of our correspondence.
(25.10.1987)
I am so glad your promise of writing at length when you would have time has been fulfilled so soon. Your letter is both truthful and sympathetic, even if what you say from the deep heart with a fine aptness of language does not chime in every note with what is felt within me and "voluntary moves", if not "harmonious numbers", yet adequate prose. Our differences seem to be due to dissimilarities of background as well as frontal life-experiences and they need not breed ill-will or any sense of monopoly of the ultimately right. Frank friendly exchanges are bound to do good to either party and some modification of view on one side or the other is always on the cards.
I thank you for the compliment you have paid to my letter. Yes, 1 have kept a copy for future reference by myself to what 1 have so voluminously set forth. My memory is not "pelmanised" enough to retain all the thoughts riding on the surge of my enthusiasm. You tell me that I have written things worth publishing; but if I publish them I will never do
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so without letting you too have your full say - provided, of course, I have your permission to put you in print
May J - like you - make a few general reflections before attending to your self-defence and counter-attack? It is a bit of a surprise to me that you should bring in Jesus and Christianity, even if you don't belong to any Church proper, to support David Jones's notion of the "incarnational". I don't think he knew much of Indian religion and spirituality, but you do sufficiently not to fall into the trap of believing that all in them points beyond earth and towards a bodiless Nirvana, as compared to Christianity's alleged emphasis on Blake's "minute particulars" here and now, as well as on "the discovery in mortal fallen man of the divine Presence". Aren't you forgetting that in the Christian tradition the world is not an emanation of God's being but an artifact of his, created out of nothing - at best a mere "image of God", as you quote the first chapter of Genesis as saying, and never God himself in however veiled a form, waiting for the veil to be lifted by the in-dwelling divinity. The soul of man is never said by any Christian thinker to be a spark of God: it also is made out of nothing at the time of conception or else of birth. There is always a gulf between the Divine and the human. No doubt, in Christianity God is immanent no less than transcendent but he is immanent only by his power and never by being secretly one substance with the world and the soul. Neither the Old Testament nor the New has any inkling of God as Pantheos and at the same time the Beatific Beyond. Where in them will you find anything answering to those utterances of the Upanishad which compass both these aspects? Here is the first aspect expressed (in Sri Aurobindo's translation): "The Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the north and to the south of us and above and below and extended everywhere. All this magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal." The second aspect is voiced thus (again in the translation by Sri Aurobindo), "There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind. There these lightnings
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flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of his brightness and by his shining all this shineth." The Supreme Divine hidden in the human and realisable by looking inward is declared in the master-mantra: Tat twam asi - "thou art That". In the depth of us is the Divine as our own soul developing its potentialities through a series of lives. The Upanishad speaks of it: "The Purusha who is in the heart is no bigger than the thumb of a man, but he is like a fire without smoke and he is the lord of his past and his present. It is he who is today and it is he who shall be tomorrow. This is the thing thou seekest." Again, there is the enchanting statement about the Brahman: "Thou art man and woman, boy and girl; old and worn thou walkest bent over a staff; thou art the blue bird and the green and the scarlet-eyed." Aren't Blake's "minute particulars" here with a vengeance? The same multiple message about the "incarnational" divinity is to be found in the Gita: "Vasu-deva is all." And both in the Upanishad and in the Gita this divinity is to be realised not merely as an impersonal grandeur: he is also to be discovered as the One Person who is the truth of all personalities. And a special manifestation of that One Person the Gita calls the Avatar. The Avatar, as the Gita says, comes from age to age into our midst, a recurrent extraordinary "incarnation" - rather than just a single incarnate "Son of God" - to make life luminous and profound.
True, ever since Buddha and Shankara there has been a strong tendency towards the extracosmic in a large number of spiritual seekers. But the old intuition of life as God's happy play with man as man's Lord and Lover is still alive and Vaishnavism is more prevalent than any form of Mayavada in the Indian commonalty. And the whole drive of Sri Aurobindo is not, as you imagine, towards the supraterrestrial. As he has repeatedly pointed out, man's fulfilment is here on the earth. For the first time in spiritual history the ultimate is sought in earth-terms. In the past, even when life was taken as the field of God's manifestation,
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the final goal was always above. Only Sri Aurobindo has spoken of the full revelation of the Divine below. This revelation is to be compassed by calling the higher states of consciousness into the body. They have to be experienced not by spurning the body and flying into some spiritual ether. To rise beyond our normal mental condition is the means of bringing a greater power of knowledge and activity and beauty and harmony and love into our world. The Integral Yoga wants the embodied being on "this litet spot of erthe" to have
A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,
A Will expressive of soul's deity,
A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,
A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.
The "superman" Sri Aurobindo speaks of is the bringing forth of what is in divine seed-form within man. To make a contrast between the divine Presence in mortal fallen man and the human soul which, in Sri Aurobindo's yoga, has to evolve all its latent Godliness by entering into higher states of consciousness that are its own concealed possibilities - to drive a wedge between humanity as we find it and the super-humanity aimed at by Sri Aurobindo is to misconstrue his whole endeavour.
After saying you don't doubt that Sri Aurobindo experienced higher states of consciousness, you add: "I don't doubt that Jesus also experienced these, but his Way was to feed the hungry, comfort the bereaved, heal the sick and so on." The strange implication is that Jesus never asked his followers to experience higher states of consciousness but simply to go on doing what is commonly called good. If that is all his teaching, it is difficult to believe he experienced those states. And if you hold that man can do what Jesus asked them to, without man's making any move towards higher states of consciousness, all history contradicts you. The true "charity" (agape) which St. Paul praises is impos-
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sible to practise unless the Divine within awakens. Perhaps you may not have noticed that in the great passage in 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13 he has the curious sentence: "And though I bestow all my goods to feed 'the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." Here is a clear hint that agape is not proved by feeding the hungry, comforting the bereaved and healing the sick: it is a higher state of consciousness within one from which the works of goodness spontaneously flow. And indeed it is because people have not attempted to live in such a state that in spite of all moral injunctions religion has failed to make man act humanely. Not before the latent superman is evoked in man can the injustices, the cruelties, the selfishnesses that have been rampant in history cease. Just by himself being, by virtue of the higher states, the Divine Humanity, Jesus has no hope of leading successfully l'homme moyen sensuel to carry out that compassionate vision: "Insofar as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto Me." The Christian must be led to those states and made a mystic like St. Francis in order that the Word of this vision may become Flesh in him. The basic creative commandment is: "Be ye like your Father in Heaven" - "Love thy God with all thy heart and all thy mind and all thy body" - and from the realisation of it will come the ability to obey the other: "Love thy neighbour as thyself." Only by observing this sequence can the Christian religion be "incarnational" in the right sense - a "stemming" (to quote your phrase) "from the incarnation of the Lord Jesus in human form".
What you call "the second stumbling block to discussion" leaves me gaping with amazement. It suggests that I would accept as genuine poetry any piece of verse coming from a holy man. We expect a Master of Yoga to speak wisdom. We do not expect him to be a Kavi, a seer-poet. Utterance of spiritual truth does not necessarily involve being a true poet. I know that the poetic power does come at times with the growth in Yoga. John Chadwick, a fine intellect trained
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in mathematical logic to whom the famous Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad dedicated his book of acute exposition, The Mind and Its Place in Nature, turned a poet of remarkable insight and expressive force after a few years under Sri Aurobindo. Similarly, Dr. Nirodbaran, another disciple, became a greater expert at penning a sonnet than writing a prescription. But every medico here, by reaching out to higher inner states, has not automatically tapped the Pierian spring for himself while dispensing effective mixtures to others. How could you take me to be a fool assuming that simply because Sri Aurobindo embodied the Overmind or Supermind he would flood the world with poetic mantras? It is by using whatever aesthetic sense I may have and making a critical scrutiny with all available tones of the Muse flowing through my mind, starting with the morning freshness of "the well of English undefiled" centuries ago and ending with A Strange Evening today when
A little rain falls out of amethyst sky,
that I have listened to Sri Aurobindo's voice in rhymed or blank verse and felt in his work an abundance of what a line of his own sums up as mantric speech:
Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.
1 may be mistaken in my judgment but that would be due to my imperfect perception of the poetic accent. Surely you can't accuse me of not using at all an ear trained to appreciate the various ways in which functions the measured language of moved precision that is poetry? Do you really believe that I would just goggle at a God-man and never seek to ascertain aesthetically whether "the current passes" through, for example, a line like Keats's original draft of the beginning of Endymion -
A thing of beauty is a constant joy -
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or like his later version:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
In 1936 Sri Aurobindo, in response to an appeal from me, used to send me privately every morning a passage from Savitri. I would type it and make my comments. Mostly they were enthusiastic, for line after line brought
Words that can tear the veil from deity's face.
But now and then 1 pointed out whatever I thought fell short in imaginative subtlety or technical skill. My object was to anticipate all possible carping at this new poetry from the academic world. The perfectionist in Sri Aurobindo understood my motive. He never imposed any restraint on me and he answered every question. In the majority of cases he would show me where and how I had misjudged the "overhead" inspiration. Here and there he would modify a word or a phrase or else add a line. Years later I left for Bombay and our exchanges stopped. But when I visited Pondicherry for a few days he sent me again his writings through his attendant and scribe Nirodbaran. On getting back the recently composed matter from me he would ask Nirodbaran: "Is he satisfied?" This is the manner in which my relationship with Sri Aurobindo went on in the literary field. So I would request you to remember that when I combat your sweeping verdict - "Nothing will ever make me see Sri Aurobindo's poetic writings as other than occasionally successful as poetry" - I do it with a keen awareness of what poetry should be and not with any blind faith that if one is a super-yogi he must be omni-competent. The final decision will lie not between a wide-eyed critic-cum-poet from England and a blank-gazed devotee in India but between two readers who are lovers of poetry equally ready to bring to their task of appraisal as sharp an aesthetic discrimination as possible.
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Already my heart leaps up a little, glimpsing a faint rainbow in the generally void sky of your outlook on Sri Aurobindo. For, while meaning to be emphatically negative you have let in a small positive note - to the effect that on-some occasions, rare ones, Sri Aurobindo actually succeeds as a poet. This tiny concession assumes a huge significance against the background of your former stand that he is no poet at all. You couldn't help perceiving that here and there - in places however widely scattered - he manages to be one. Perhaps on getting more and more steeped in the kind of work which you are unfamiliar with, and even averse to, the small spot of appreciation will spread. A lover of Wordsworth like you must know that at times a poet has to create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. The very volumes in which such masterpieces as Tintern Abbey and the Immortality Ode appeared drew from Jeffries the crushing verdict: "This will never do!" Wordsworth has grown so much a part of your being that I am sure you will find nothing running against your grain in such a passage as the following from The Prelude (III) where he speaks of "turning the mind in upon herself" and feeling
Incumbencies more awful, visitings
Of the Upholder of the tranquil soul
That tolerates the indignities of Time,
And from the centre of Eternity
All finite motions overruling lives
In glory immutable.
Yet I am afraid you will see nothing save "abstractions" in a comparable snatch from Savitri which in fact is more shot with sight while treating a similar theme of inner experience beyond the common human range
:
In moments when the inner lamps are lit
And the life's cherished guests are left outside
Our spirit sits alone and speaks to its gulfs.
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Invading from spiritual silences
A ray of the timeless glory stoops awhile
To commune with our seized illumined clay
And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.
I am both charmed and encouraged by the picture you draw of your keeping for some days Won at your bedside. And the impression this poem has created on you verges on the One it made on Herbert Read. May I remind you of his pronouncement on this epic in quantitative hexameters? -"It is a remarkable achievement by any standard and 1 am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality." Now take your estimate: "It is of course a tour-de-force, reveals (even though I imagine an early work) a tremendous mental energy and of course a command of the English language and the Greek hexameter." Read alludes to an extensive stretch of genuine English poetry here: he does not make the least reservation in his praise and considers the work an "achievement" of a most noteworthy order. You refrain from any direct reference to poetic quality and in place of the word "achievement" you have the compound "tour-de-force" and suggest by it the play of a productive mind at astonishing tireless experimentation. Like Read you are impressed by the natural flow of English, but you cannot bring yourself to declare that it is much more than a manifestation of an immense experimenting power. You further grant a perfect skill in the technique of an English replica of the Homeric hexameter. Read makes no mention of the hexametrical mould: he seems to take it for granted that Sri Aurobindo's revival of this ancient mould is perfectly legitimate and is an authentic success. Your explicit pointing to it at the end has an inner connection with your labelling the poem as a tour-de-force at the beginning. Your very next sentence after the estimate lays bare the connection and the reason why you term Ilion a
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feat of strength or skill rather than a true poetic creation. For you ask: "but why should any twentieth-century poet want to write in the metre of Homer?" And you continue: "Of course it can be done as an exercise - a piece of virtuosity (which Ilion is) but I do not find in that poem any raison d'etre... It is an imitation of poetry, not the newly-created expression of a present vision. It lacks what David Jones calls 'nowness'."
I think you have raised a false issue. First of all, the criterion of "nowness" should have no relevance to any kind of creation. A poet picks out a subject which comes to him with a living force and such coming is the sole thing that makes his "nowness". Again, a poet feels a certain form as being the true body of this subject and it matters little whether the form is new-fangled and in fashion or belongs to a past tradition. All depends on the organic vitality with which he employs it. Has anyone a right to question Byron's use of the Spenserian stanza to vivid effect in his travel-narrative in verse, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, three centuries after The Fairie Queene - or Shelley's resort to it at the same distance of time in his highly imagined and deeply felt Adonais? Or look at Shelley's adoption of the still older terza rima of Dante for his Triumph of Life. Talking of subject, can we rightly disapprove of Chaucer or Shakespeare writing of Troilus and Cressida or Keats choosing to write of the fall of Hyperion or, on a smaller though not poetically inferior scale, Stephen Phillips conjuring up the story of Marpessa, Idas and Apollo? In our own day, Kazantzakis has written at a gigantic length (33,333 lines) a sequel to the Odyssey and in a form loosely reminiscent of Homer's. The only pertinent questions are: "Does the adopted form come alive and move with the true gait of poetry? Does the subject weave a significant design in which the poet expresses problems vital to himself as dreamer and doer, values vital to la condition humaine, aspirations and insights vital to the world's future?"
Secondly, it is an error to say that Sri Aurobindo is
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repeating in English the Greek hexameter. Homer wrote his epics in lines of dactyls and spondees based not on stress but on quantity (the time-length the voice takes over a vowel). All attempts to transfer such lines into English which, though admitting a meaningful element of quantity, is principally a language of stress, have failed. Structures which refused to be naturally fluent have been the result. Or else a purely accentual hexameter has been constructed with a rather monotonous effect on the whole. Sri Aurobindo got the intuition, the inspiration of a true English hexameter in which both voice-weight (stress) and voice-stretch (quantity) would come into play in a distinctive organic harmony and which would provide in a strong yet supple, a sweeping yet diverse and multi-toned totality the mould for a profound vision of life and its vicissitudes and its interactions of various characters. Inasmuch as the mould is new in several of its modes, Ilion is an experiment, but there is no artificiality about it. An afflatus as natural to English as was Homer's to Greek carries both the form and the content forward. If you lay aside your prejudices about "nowness", you will find real poetic genius and not mere virtuosity of verse, the depiction of a vivid human drama along with the deeper workings of more-than-human agencies.
Your Yeatsian view of poetry as "the proper language of this world of conflict and duality and not at all of a vision of Nirvana" will be fully satisfied here. Such a view need not rule out the role of what I have termed more-than-human agencies side by side with or at the back of crisscrossing men and women. You will be surprised to learn that Sri Aurobindo is not the poet only of the legend and symbol and philosophy that are Savitri. In addition to the different kind of poetic creation which Ilion represents, there are three long early narratives of greater "human" interest developed in another cast of blank verse: Urvasie, Love and Death, Baji Prabhou, the last-named a martial episode of the time of the great Mahratta leader Shivaji. Then there are dramas ranging over many epochs and types of human culture:
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Perseus the Deliverer, Rodagune, The Viziers of Bassora, Vasavadatta, Eric. The translation of a play of Kalidasa's, under the title The Hero and the Nymph, may be listed too. We have also a good number of short poems where the earthly scenes we know and the moods earth-creatures pass through are depicted.
In passing, may I quote a few lines from Sri Aurobindo's early work dating to 1899? I shall begin with this glimpse of morning in a wood:
(He) felt slow beauty
And leafy secret change; for the damp leaves,
Grey-green at first, grew pallid with the light
And warmed with consciousness of sunshine near;
Then the whole daylight wandered in, and made
Hard tracts of splendour and enriched all hues.
Take now this burst of emotion, in which my ear traces a Shakespearian elan:
For what is mere sunlight?
Who would live on into extreme old age,
Burden the impatient world, a weary old man,
And look back on a selfish time ill-spent
Exacting out of prodigal great life
Small separate pleasures like a usurer,
And no rich sacrifice and no large act
Finding oneself in others, nor the sweet
Expense of nature in her passionate gusts
Of love and giving, first of the soul's needs?
Next, I invite you to relish the psychological subtlety of word and rhythm, where to a basic Shakespearian note is added a sensuous felicity peculiar to Kalidasa:
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"Priyumvada!"
He cried, and at that well-loved sound there dawned
With overwhelming sweetness miserable
Upon his mind the old delightful times
When he had called her by her liquid name,
Where the voice loved to linger. He remembered
The chompuc bushes where she turned away
Half-angered, and his speaking of her name .
Masterfully as to a lovely slave
Rebellious who has erred; at that the slow
Yielding of her small head, and after a little
Her sliding towards him and beautiful
Propitiating body as she sank down
With timid graspings deprecatingly
In prostrate warm surrender, her flushed cheeks
Upon his feet and little touches soft;
Or her long name uttered beseechingly,
And the swift leap of all her body to him.
And eyes of large repentance, and the weight
Of her wild bosom and lips unsatisfied;
Or hourly call for little trivial needs,
Or sweet unneeded wanton summoning,
Daily appeal that never staled nor lost
Its sudden music, and her lovely speed,
Sedulous occupation left, quick-breathing,
With great glad eyes and eager parted lips;
Or in deep quiet moments murmuring
That name like a religion to her ear,
And her calm look compelled to ecstasy;
Or to the river luring her, or breathed
Over her dainty slumber, or secret sweet
Bridal outpantings of her broken name.
All these as rush unintermitting waves
Upon a swimmer overborne, broke on him
Relentless, things too happy to be endured.,,
Surely quite a lot of the earth-contact, the human touch
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that you miss in Savitri is here? Not that these things are really absent there. Deep concern for earth, poignant eagerness to make the heart of man find true bliss are the basic motives but what is built spaciously on the base and set vibrant in the inner being through canto after canto lessens their impact. Over and above the mighty adventure of love's conquest of death and its transformation of terrestrial life into a life divine by means of a new power brought from higher states of consciousness, an ample penetration and detailed impression of planes beyond the terrestrial are the aim of Savitri. I see no reason for rejecting such an aim as alien to the nature of poetry. I have already said that poetry essentially is the measured language of a moved precision. The theme to which this language applies itself can be anything in which the author is interested, anything about which he can be passionate. And whether we are directly interested or excited we should be able with our aesthetic sense to enter into his world and respond with delight -provided he brings to us those three desiderata Sri Aurobindo has emphasised: intensity of vision, intensity of word, intensity of rhythm. Conflict and duality and "original sin" are certainly legitimate to the poetic spirit, but can we confine this spirit to a traffic only with them? If Yeats meant us to do so we should have to put aside much of his earlier creation, his Celtic-twilight phase with its "sweet everlasting voices" and "the host riding from Knocknarea" and "calling":
Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand;
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
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Even Yeats of the later open-eyed phase of the intellect balanced against the inward reverie does not limit poetry, as you seem to suggest, to "The folly that man does / Or must suffer..." To press powerful poetry out of conflict and duality is not all of Yeats's aspiration. What about that grand invocation? -
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Here the words "mosaic" and "artifice" are I suppose, characteristic of the later Yeats, conscious of art moulding everything for the imperious mind. But the old longing to pass beyond the deed of his striving hand and the hope of his hungry heart is still looking afar for freedom from what in his non-Celtic days he often celebrated: "the fury and the mire of human veins".
If that fury and mire alone made poetry or were the sole themes for it, where would your own poetic work find a place? Like the other Cathy you have your keen earthward turn, yet not all or most of your poems are charged with it: the materially real is often a forefront of the invisible, the mysterious. As a reviewer in the TLS long ago remarked: "Miss Raine seems to value the actual mainly because it reminds her of 'those great presences who were not there'." As typical of the true You he pointed to lines like:
High, high and still
Pale water mirrors
Thin air and still the high
Summit at rest in white
Water-spaces empty as thought.
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Mention of the other Cathy brings me to your disapproval of my enrolling her creator, Emily Bronte, on my side. To counter my quotation of the lines in which she writes 'Though earth and men were gone" you ask me: "What about the passage in Wuthering Heights where Catherine Earnshaw weeps in heaven and begs the angels to bring her back to Wuthering Heights?" And you remark: "Emily is not a good example in support of your argument." Well, you have me there to some extent. I say "some extent"; because you are talking of a fictional creation in prose while 1 have in mind the personality revealed in the best of the poems. No doubt, these too originally belonged to the Gondal sagas, dramatic narratives Emily used to compose with her sister Anne, but it is to be noted that when she published them she removed all traces of the sagas as if what had been fictionalised had at its back a real-life movement. We have two almost opposite parts in Emily, a dichotomy of urge in which the Pennine moors and "the World behind the world" stand as keen rivals. It is not any Heathcliff who is finally figured as coming to the thought of Cathy's maker:
A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,
And offers for short life eternal liberty...
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost free - its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf it stoops, and dares the final bound.
Oh, dreadful is the check - intense the agony -
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb - the brain to think
again -
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the
chain.
In the face of the spiritual passion in these lines, as direct as
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the very wind on her wild moors, would you assert that I lose entirely in citing Emily as an example in my favour?
Now to your references to Milton. A rather complex situation they present to me. His "abstractions" and "negatives" you seek to excuse by saying that in the fine passage on Satan's flight across the void they "serve precisely the purpose of evoking 'chaos and old night'..." I have never doubted their poetic function nor do I overlook the concrete sense we have of an almost physical plunging of Satan through the abyss. I drew your attention to the same kind of sense Sri Aurobindo conveys in relating the experience his Aswapathy undergoes. And I submit that "Unimaginable depths" and "immeasurable heights" are exact expressions not only of Aswapathy's sudden overwhelming mind-boggling impressions of his rise and plunge into spiritual spaces but also of the actual infinity those spaces represent. As for "bourneless change", it is the exact result, both in feeling and in kind, of those ups and downs brought about by the Might and Flame and Beauty of the soul-grasping and bliss-enforcing Unknown in its own illimitable being. All that Aswapathy goes through may leave you "utterly cold", but that does not mean Sri Aurobindo is indulging in a grandiose verbosity. My whole self responds intensely to the picture of "the magnitudes of God's embrace" and perceives the utter aptness of each word to the reality poetically evoked.
An example of how wonderfully concrete Milton could be is offered by you in the rich description of "a fabric huge" in Hell. Quite a number of passages in Savitri bring equally rich descriptions of strange realities which may be termed supernatural "fabrics". Just because they are alien to your poetic vision they do not strike you as wonderfully concrete. Let me put one of them before you in the hope that it may at least impinge on your imagination's eye even if your intelligence cannot make head or tail of it:
A giant order was discovered here
Of which the tassel and extended fringe
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Are the scant stuff of our material lives....
Ascending and descending twixt life's poles
The seried kingdoms of the graded Law
Plunged from the Everlasting into Time.
Then glad of a glory of multitudinous mind
And rich with life's adventure and delight
And packed with the beauty of Matter's shapes and
hues
Climbed back from Time into undying Self,
Up a golden ladder carrying the Soul,
Tying with diamond threads the Spirit's extremes....
A hierarchy of climbing harmonies
Peopled with voices and with visages
Aspired in a crescendo of the Gods
From Matter's abysses to the Spirit's peaks.
Above were the Immortals' changeless seats,
White chambers of dalliance with Eternity
And the stupendous gates of the Alone...
You touch on Milton once more to prove me wrong in my attempt to match from him just the kind of phrases which you dubbed "cliches" in Sri Aurobindo. You answer: "No, Milton was creating the English language and every word and phrase is precise and original, new-minted not only from the poet's imagination but from the matrix of the language itself." A little later you allude to "Milton's welding and wielding of the very texture of language itself". I am afraid there is some mis-seeing of Milton's linguistic creativity. The English language was sufficiently developed by Milton's time. We have just to mark Milton's life-span - 1608-1674 - to realise how much poetic writing had gone before. Not only had Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson worked on English poetry; Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, Marston, Massinger, Shirley, Heywood, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Campion - all these were born fairly before him. Abundant development had preceded him in prose also, starting with Bacon and Raleigh and culminating
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in the Authorised Version (1611) which not only showed how much English had grown but also served as an unparalleled new-maker of it for centuries. "Cliches", in the strict sense, may be a misnomer; the more appropriate term would be "dignified common currency". What 1 meant was that Milton was full of expressions similar to the ones you criticised in Sri Aurobindo. And, to be sure, one does not need to be a mint-master to coin verbal turns like "deep despair", "dreadful deeds", "dire event", "foul defeat", "horrible destruction", "high Supremacy" (almost a stately tautology). I would agree with you that these combinations of adjective and noun are precise inasmuch as they communicate the nature of a situation correctly, yet on a level of correctness which can hardly be honoured with the compliment: "original". Originality is apparent in your quotations from Lycidas. At nearly every step felicities meet us. Such striking, out-of-the-way gem-work is rarely found in Paradise Lost. There are profoundly moving passages where glimpses of Nature like
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill...
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose...
are woven in to memorable effect, but when we examine them separately we miss the impression of the new-minted. Though Milton's ear for rhythm can convert even the commonplace or the conventional into a charm, yet magic and music do not often merge as they do in the Lycidas-invocation to "Ye valleys", which you have quoted.
It is as if in Paradise Lost Milton deliberately chose to be simpler, more natural, less outstanding in individual locutions and depended rather on the strength of his thought and the poignancy of his emotion and the splendour or delicacy of his verbal or metrical rhythm to create an overall impact of originality. Obviously he is putting into practice his conception of epic writing. It appears to be in the very
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character of such writing that a poet does not hunt after the rare, the jewel-like in speech: an epic poet achieves a wide flow of verbal energy directed towards a general novel totality. In composition of this sort we must not focus on individual phrases lest we should run the risk of making them look almost like cliches.
In Paradise Lost, Milton's "welding or wielding of the very texture of language itself consists in something quite different from what you suggest. Outwardly it lies in a frequent Latinisation of English as in the last word of this exclamation of Adam to Eve after she has eaten of the forbidden fruit:
How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!
Many sentence-structures may also be considered Latinised. Then there are the expansive architecture of his paragraphs and the organ-music in them with a host of internal variations of assonance and consonance. All this outward moulding of the English language was done by the hands of a genius attempting, as Sri Aurobindo tells us, "to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetical expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance and measured perfection of form". Inwardly, "the texture of language itself was affected by Milton through an importation of the manner of Greek and Latin epic creation into English, the expressive mode of the classical as contrasted to the romantic spirit. Milton - in the words of Sri Aurobindo - "has given English poetic speech a language of intellectual thought which is of itself highly poetic without depending in the least on any of the formal aids of poetic expression except those which are always essential and indispensable, a speech which is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it, adding at the same
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time that peculiar grandeur in both the soul and manner of the utterance and in both the soul and the gait of the rhythm which belongs to him alone of poets."
Not that the Elizabethans who preceded Milton lack in thinking. Thinking in abundance goes on in them, but it is not thought in its own right: Elizabethan thought rises out of the surge of passion and emotion: there is little of detached controlled intellectual activity. The Life-Force throws up ideas from its quivering entrails, as it were. Even Donne, with his metaphysical wit, is a semi-Elizabethan. Only with Milton comes the pure Mind-Force. We can easily mark the difference between the Life-Force and the Mind-Force by juxtaposing Shakespeare and Milton. Here is Claudio in Measure for Measure:
Aye, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world.
Now Milton's Belial advising his fellow-rebels, who have no hope of victory and are reduced to "flat despair":
we must exasperate
The Almighty Victor to spend all his rage.
And that must end us; that must be our cure,
To be no more. 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,
Devoid of sense and motion?
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I have wandered not through eternity but too far afield and must come back to Savitri. A word, however, before I do so. It is a bee in your bonnet that when Sri Aurobindo received his education in England "a highly artificial Victorian diction was the received mode of 'poetry' " at that time in a poor imitation of Milton at a distance - and so Sri Aurobindo learnt to write in a Victorian style. If you have read carefully the passages I have cited from the blank-verse narrative Love and Death (about 900 lines) he wrote in 1899 you will notice how little is any Victorian diction present in them. The old convention of putting a noun between two adjectives lingers here and there, but that is Miltonic no less than Tennysonian. Even in the earlier Urvasie, composed in his twenty-third year, no Victorian diction comes in to artificialise the poetry. Always there is a vivida vis - and it persists in Savitri, though this poem differs in general mould and temper from those narratives.
Perhaps it differs for the worse, you may opine, because it is wanting in so-called human interest, Savitri being, as you say, a "superwoman", unfit "For human nature's daily food" and never addressed by Satyavan in the manner of Edwin Muir's "poem to his wife Willa". But is the manner so very different? Doubtless, Edwin and Willa had a more down-to-earth relationship than Satyavan and Savitri. But, ultimately, is not Muir poetic by the visionary gleam with which he reaches the truth and the beauty in his wife? And, if that gleam calls the heart beyond the human to a divine arch-image, do we pass out of the realm of poetry and find our souls unseized? Is the ethereal passion of Shelley's Epi-psychidion less inspired than any Muiresque love? We should be capable of attunement to all possible notes of the poetic gamut - aware at least that there can be genuine poetry even though what is said and the fashion of saying may not appeal to the mood in which we habitually live. One may aver that Savitri with its constant vastnesses and strange intensities of a new inner life does not make an immediate appeal to us. Still, we should answer to it aesthetically
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enough to grant that a future humanity is sure to appreciate it. Dante, in the last Canto of his "Paradiso", invoked the Supreme Light, high above our imagining, to lend his memory and his tongue the power to leave but one sparkle of its "magnificence to future men". Because the "Para-diso" was wanting in the human interest with which the "Inferno" had teemed, it was much less popular if not often neglected except for its grand last line -
L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle
(The love that moves the sun and the other stars) -
which is likely to be understood by many of us as a pre-Shelleyan Shelley-revelation instead of what it actually is: a philosophical vision based on Aristotle and Aquinas, which takes the universe as moving towards God by the love arising in it for His irresistible beauty. Yes, "Paradiso" has never gripped the majority and possibly even now it waits for "future men". But its poetry is as marvellous as anything in the "Inferno". 1 hold that Savitri is no less a poetic marvel and the time to come will realise the fact. Even we of the present, who have stirred to Vaughan and Wordsworth and AE, can respond to and rejoice at its spiritual art. All Yogic experiences, explorations of all the subtle planes of existence with their forces and denizens and supernatural sceneries, are delineated in living detail. Sri Aurobindo has not let his imagination soar or dive from a merely human consciousness working as poet-artist. His consciousness has passed beyond the human range and known directly hells and heavens and the dynamic silences beyond them. We can say of him as he does of his Aswapathy:
Life in him learned its huge subconscient rear;
The little fronts unlocked to the unseen Vasts:
Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences
Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.
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In our ordinary moments we may not care very much for Sri Aurobindo's penetration and elucidation at full length of the hitherto "unmapped Immensitudes". But many of us have mystic hints and these may guide us at some hushed hour to open Savitri. Or else the increasing failure of human devices and all mind-made "isms" may drive us to this book of knowledge filled with winged words that go from the earth to the empyrean and sweep back to earth to give our familiar cosmos and our historical process a novel significance. This significance is not, as you may fancy, a sort of transmogrified evolutionism caught from Darwin or Nietzsche; it has its birth beyond their ken, they were only vague prefiguring signs of a forward-looking epoch prepared by a secret Time-Spirit which was to manifest the Avatar of the Supermind whose heart-beats spelled out the scripture of the ever-progressive Divine in the human and, charged with becoming its mouthpiece, had no real need to con The Origin of Species or Thus Spake Zarathustra.
1 who have lived in close warm contact with an actual Superwoman like the heroine of Savitri and with a living and breathing Superman such as Savitri envisions as the fulfilment of every evolving soul - I have not the least doubt that this epic dear to both the poetic dreamer and the Yogic doer in me and enshrining in a many-contoured art a mighty legend, symbol, philosophy and via mystica, may safely look ahead to "an audience" more than "few" and eager to be "fit".
The privilege of our correspondence is not only yours: it is also mine. Hence gratefully, with very cordial thoughts, I close.
POSTSCRIPT
You write apropos of AE's letter: "he too couldn't take all those superlatives. 1 feel again and again that Sri Aurobindo tried to stretch the English language beyond its limits. It seems AE thought the same."
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If you re-read the letter you'll see that AE didn't rule out the "superlatives": he merely wanted them to be spaced out: the great highlight words have to be reserved for special effects. You are also off the mark in attributing to AE the impression such as you have that Sri Aurobindo's spiritual poetry overstretched the English language. He was speaking of my poetry, not Sri Aurobindo's. There too, there is no question of his thinking like you. If he thought I was stretching the English language beyond its limits, he would not have written to Mr. Roy: "The verses you sent of Mr. Sethna have a genuine poetic quality." One example - "The song-impetuous mind" - out of the two he picked out for praise, adding that there were many fine lines like these, is from a poem of 24 lines which contains all the words against whose overuse he cautions me: "immensity", "omnipotence", "inexhaustible", "limitless" and the like. As four or five poems had been sent to him, we don't know whether the warning was aimed at this particular piece or applied in general. However, this piece by its excess of the highlights should serve as a test-case: "Is it a success in spite of that over-abundance? Did AE consider it such but, while doing so, wanted me to be on guard against the notion that such a feat could always or often be carried off?"
Here's the problematic composition:
NE PLUS ULTRA?
(To a poet lost in sentimentalism)
A madrigal to enchant her - and no more?
With the brief beauty of her face drunk, blind
To the inexhaustible vastnesses that lure
The song-impetuous mind?
Is the keen voice of tuneful ecstasy
To be denied its winged omnipotence.
Its ancient kinship to immensity
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And dazzling suns?
When mystic grandeurs urge him from behind,
When all creation is a rapturous wind
Driving him towards an ever-limitless goal,
Can such pale moments crown the poet's soul?
Shall he - born nomad of the infinite heart!
Time-tamer! star-struck debauchee of light!
Warrior who hurls his spirit like a dart
Across the terrible night
Of death to conquer immortality!-
Content with little loves that seek to bind
His giant feet with perishing joys, shall he
Remain confined
To languors of a narrow paradise-
He in the mirroring depths of whose far eyes
The gods behold, overawed, the unnamable One
Beyond all gods, the Luminous, the Unknown?
Whatever the verdict on this extreme packing together of your bites noires, I wonder if your feeling about Sri Aurobindo's attempt with the English language is justified. One has to be judged in such a situation according to both the nature of the medium and the ability of the artist. There is no questioning the extraordinary flexibility of English. Its proof is the very variety of the individual voice in English literature, the profusion of distinct manners strikingly answering to diverse moods, as though each author had his own tongue, an English exclusive to himself thrilling out of the mass of a common heritage and receiving with an intrinsic ease the stamp of his personal vision. The sense of an endless potentiality in "the tongue that Shakespeare spake", along with a host of fellow-poets who could turn their vocables this way or that as the fancy took them, prompted those lines of amazement at the multifold glory into which Elizabethan English had grown:
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Or who can tell for what great work in hand
The greatness of our style is now ordained?
What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command?
English certainly appears to lend itself to a lot of stretching. How far it can go rests with what degree of genius handles it. Not quite in the sphere with which we are concerned yet relevant in the general sense is Milton's bending of his expressive instrument to a Latinised shape for the purposes of his epic. At times his sentences have a structure which markedly strains the native idiom to follow Latin syntax. But except very rarely the effect created is dignified and serious, not gauche or artificial. His versatile genius is responsible for the triumph. Can we refuse a transforming genius to Sri Aurobindo in the sphere of spiritually poetic utterance? You have granted him a prodigious sweep and scope in Savitri and seen him as "gifted with a mental, vital or perhaps super-energy... difficult to imagine or possible to explain otherwise than through a degree of spiritual enlightenment". Can the extremely plastic English language have any limits for such a dynamic master of mysticism who is also admitted to be a master of this medium?
(3.11.1987)
You will by now I am sure have received my own poor attempt to reply to your most interesting letter on poetry. I have begun to learn from India perhaps the most valuable lesson life has to teach, that there are many things I do not know or understand, and that I MAY BE WRONG.
I shall be delighted to receive your book on Mallarme. It has not yet reached me. I had forgotten that the Isha Upanishad by Sri Aurobindo had in fact been your gift and had indeed thought it must have been an old friend who died some years ago who had possessed it with other books of hers I inherited at her death. I certainly enjoyed re-reading
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it. Also the Letters on Poetry which Prof. Gokak sent me. I agree so often that I have made endless ticks in the margins. Sri Aurobindo was very perceptive on modern English poetry and its limitations. Things are worse now. After all I did start Temenos in order to reaffirm the spiritual roots from which the arts must spring. I also liked Sri Aurobindo's recognition that each level of consciousness can have its appropriate poetry - the vital, the psychological, the archetypal (which he calls the over-mind) and so on. I did also -forgive me for reverting to our old dispute - find a passage in which he says he is not primarily a poet. This is what I have always felt about Sri Aurobindo, that he was a most remarkable man but not a poet. For not to be 'primarily' a poet is not to be a poet at all. May I even suggest that it is a matter of Dharma - even a matter of caste - the following of the 'leading gift' - and that Sri Aurobindo writing poetry was not in his case to follow his leading gift; and like Drona on the field of the great Battle who suddenly understood that he, a Brahman, however gifted in the use of arms, had no right to assume the role of a warrior? I don't think Tagore would have said he was 'not primarily a poet'. Or Shelley. Or any poet. Not to be primarily a poet is not to be a poet; as I understand it. But I am glad to have been made by you and my other Indian friends to read the letters on poetry, and other of Sri Aurobindo's writings on philosophy -spiritual philosophy that is - which have all the beautiful clarity his poetry seems to me to lack. The fact still remains that but for a line here and there I don't respond to it at all.
No, I have not read Thomas R. Whitaker's Yeats book. I have finished my work on Blake and Yeats and don't follow the field now - next year I shall be eighty. He appears to be an American and I find it hard to believe that any American can write a 'greatest hook on Yeats's poetry'. But there again I MAY BE WRONG. I have not in this case read the book. I have just received George Mills Harper's 'monumental' two volumes on the Making of Yeats's A Vision. I have not yet looked at it very closely. At my age one must be
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clear about priorities. Like Yeats I am setting my soul to study not what the professors write but what they write about. I did read an interesting book by John Drew on India and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford) with many valuable things about Shelley's indebtedness to India. (After all he called the soul-figure of Prometheus Unbound 'Asia', did he not?)
Yeats the Initiate was not a systematic book but papers written over the years. But I think WBY would have liked it.
(4.11.1987)
It is always a pleasure to hear from you. From the time which you are giving me I may guess that you don't mind receiving long discussions by me. The themes are of deep interest to both of us - the nature of poetry, the expression of the poetic vision, the various levels of the poet's matter and manner. Your detailed reply to my letter came several days back and drew from me a little lengthier response on "minute particulars", but much shorter than its predecessor. It must be in your hands now - perhaps while I am writing this aerogramme you are poring over my script.
I am glad you are appreciating Sri Aurobindo's literary criticism so much and reading it with great attention. But I don't think that in the course of your conning it you first came across the bit about his not being primarily a poet. It occurs in the middle of my "elephant" of a letter. There I quote Sri Aurobindo as writing to me that a poet likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament and taste and the rest he condemns or ignores, whereas Sri Aurobindo's case is different "because I am not primarily a poet and have made in criticism a practice of appreciating everything that can be appreciated, as a catholic critic would". Anticipating that you were likely to misunderstand this statement I put a footnote to the quotation, explaining what Sri Aurobindo had meant. He had meant that at the
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time he wrote that sentence he was first and foremost a Yogi who used poetry not for its own sake but to express his spiritual realisations more and more adequately in terms natural to poetry. He put himself at the service of the supreme truths compassed by his Yogic experience and not at the service of the merely poetic imagination which would give voice to whatever stirred it and would not make it a point to go in always for the mystical: your "world of conflict and duality" would be perfectly welcome to it. To Sri Aurobindo the Master of Yoga the situation would be what he depicts in the following stanzas from his poem "Descent" written in Sapphics:
Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces
Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;
Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions,
Blaze in my spirit.
Slow the heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;
Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway
Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,
Ecstasy's chariots.
Sri Aurobindo the Poet would be the mouthpiece only of Sri Aurobindo the Master of Yoga: the latter and not the former would have the primacy. This sense was all that was intended: there was no question whether Sri Aurobindo was a born poet or not. Surely a born poet can become a Master of Yoga and turn his innate gift to a Rigvedic or Upanishadic or Gitaesque use? In a vein similar to that of the pronouncement on which you have mistakenly fastened, Sri Aurobindo has declared that he was not a philosopher in the current connotation. There toe you may mistake him, for he has said that he is one who has employed intellectual language just to put together in a systematic form the comprehensive world-vision his many-sided Yogic experience has brought him. The sole difference is that in this context he has said
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that he never was a philosopher: he has not anywhere said he never was a poet.
There was a time when he could have affirmed like Yeats:
I am but a mouthful of sweet air,
and possibly, as a mere poet may do, he failed to recognise as sweet the mouthfuls different from his. To be more than such-a mouthful is not to be mouthless: it is to set the mouth at the disposal of the realised Divine in oneself rather than of "the human, all-too-human" (a term from your bugbear Nietzsche) invoking the Muse from a distance. Of course there is the doubt you sometimes entertain whether being the Perfect Master may not exclude being a poet. But you immediately contradict yourself if you accept as I am certain you do that poetry comes from a world of the Gods to which Homer and Virgil and Dante and Milton appealed for their inspiration. The furor poeticus is also the enthousiasmos, the "God-entry", To reach the world of the Gods is to be more directly capable of great verse. I do not mean that every attainer of it is necessarily a poet. But the chances are that he may miraculously flower into one. In any case, if one were already a poet he would become a greater one instead of finding his tongue a stone.
Sri Aurobindo has always accepted poetic activity as natural to him from the start. If you were to read his work from even his earliest days you would never venture your present view. The kind of poetry he wrote in Savitri is not to your taste. There is, too, your preconception that beyond our world is nothing save Nirvana. Actually one finds also -as I say in a poem of my own -
Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line
Where passion's mortal music grows divine.
(12.11.1987)
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It cannot be otherwise than that we differ about Sri Aurobindo as a poet, but let it at least be said that we respect one another's knowledge and love of poetry. I have read through Sri Aurobindo's letters on poetry, sent me by Professor Gokak, with the greatest interest also and much agreement. But I note that he himself does not claim to be primarily a poet but a yogi. In the hierarchy of things a yogi is doubtless higher than a poet (as Gray said of Shakespeare, 'Beneath the good how far, but far above the great') but the leading gift is a man's 'caste' surely, were he a carpenter or a musician or a yogi. It is really futile to go on arguing about Sri Aurobindo's poetry, whether it be like Milton or like Matthew Arnold or Tennyson, for my point about 'nowness' is that a poet should work with language as it comes to his own time and place. I find his style full of linguistic clutter -'well-loved', 'overwhelming sweetness', 'the voice loved to linger', 'half-angered', 'a lovely slave rebellious who has erred', 'touches soft' - the whole passage seems to me linguistically artificial and false - 'dainty slumber' - the whole thing so strikes me, but it impresses you otherwise and finally the discussion cannot be continued 'where you read black where I read white', to go back to Blake. Doesn't Yeats complain that all Indian writers wrote of 'beauteous maidens' where he writes of 'pretty girls'? 'What shall I do for pretty girls / Now my old bawd is dead?' I'm afraid I find in the passage about Priyumvada the sort of rather nauseous sentimentalizing of a romantic situation that Yeats's Crazy Jane would have had none of! 'Prostrate warm surrender' for example can be said perfectly simply in plain English - in perfect dignity and grandeur -
'Three dear things that women know,'
Sang a bone upon the shore;
'A man if I but held him so
When my body was alive
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Found all the pleasure that life gave':
A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.
The grandeur of the useless body of love is amply created in the context of the death of that body. I would have thought Yeats's vision is more Indian in that respect than the passage you quote from Sri Aurobindo which is more a piece of sentimental romantic eroticism than of a new super-spiritual vision of love. Besides, Yeats does it by the images he uses -the Bone on the shore (with all the implications of the oceanic vastness of life) and the intimacy of brief bodily love. I find Edwin Muir's love more spiritual also with its respect for Willa's human imperfection than any superlatives could have made the poem 1 cited.
Of course what is 'incarnated' comes from the spiritual source. Nature is the 'signature of eternal things', 'as above, so below', or the cabbalistic tree in which the divine circulates through the four Worlds and ten Sephiroth, the same divinity at all levels. It is when 'that which is below' becomes cut off from 'that which is above' that the lower world becomes trivial and a nihil, and the world 'above' a vacuum.
When I spoke of Christianity as an 'incarnational' religion I was not thinking of the doctrine of the Incarnation as such - of course there is the Lord Krishna and the Lord Buddha or some holy man, or indeed Indian thought does not limit incarnation to a single incarnation (which is indeed absurd) but culturally speaking the European-Christian emphasis has been incarnational, and whatever is sublime in Christian art has respected the 'minute particulars'. So indeed has much Indian art and I was thinking specifically of Sri Aurobindo who does not it seems to me respect those minute particulars, but rather sweeps them aside. I enclose a photocopy of a review I wrote of a recent Tagore translation from which you will see that I by no means apply to all Indian poetry this judgment.
I really feel that there is nothing more I can say to justify
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or damn myself as it may be in your eyes. As 1 wrote in my last letter, India confronts me so constantly with the fact that I may be wrong'. Indeed I have been freed from the burden of my Christian upbringing and the dualism of that religion by the slow process of learning however little from India.
One small P.S. about my own line that you quote, 'A little rain falls out of amethyst sky'. I must say that the line seems to me good just because of its exactness. Rain does not normally fall when the sky is 'amethyst' but from gray clouds. The fact that there was only 'a little rain' is likewise specific - not a downpour. One of these magical strangenesses that nature sometimes produces. One might turn to that greater poet Shelley's 'locks of the approaching storm' -
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm....
Shelley was being exact - he knew about electricity as well as Maenads - and one can sometimes see a cloud with tufts as it were pulled out, just as he describes, before a thunderstorm. And it is also exact because the hair of the Maenads may well have risen in their state of Dionysian inspiration. So the metaphor is exact both on the physical level, and as applied to the spirit of inspiration represented by the wind. There is a Vedic hymn to the wind very like Shelley -
Oh, the Wind's chariot, its power and glory!
It passes by crashing.
Out streak the lightnings, dust rises on earth.
The wind passes.
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The hosts of the wind speed onward after him,
Like women assembling,
The king of the world lifts them up in his chariot
Through lofty regions.
(I quote Raimundo Panikkar's translation.) I find there also the images exact and specific. No attempt to surpass 'the unsurpassable' - as Tagore describes this life.
To return to Jesus and his teachings, of course he did not reduce human duty to practising the commonplace virtues, for those acts we are told to perform are the incarnation of the divine holy spirit in terms of human life, 'inasmuch as ye shall do it to the least of these little ones, ye do it unto me'. This corresponds to the Christian prayer 'Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven'. That is the goal. No different there indeed from one form of Indian teaching, and you place Sri Aurobindo in that tradition, although I do nevertheless find him with little love of the minute particulars -the sparrow, the eye of the peacock, 'our humble mother the dust' - all of which Tagore loved and valued, for these are the forms worn by the mysterious self of the Bhagavad Gita and other texts of course. I feel that if you were to show Sri Aurobindo a sparrow, he would say, 'That's nothing, I will show you a super-bird.' To which I, Tagore, William Blake, would reply, 'I don't need a super-bird, this is the Creation that God found good.'
Meanwhile your book on Mallarme arrived yesterday and I look forward very much to reading it. I only dipped last night before sleep overcame me at the end of a busy day but I can see how much I am going to enjoy it.
(14.11.1987)
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I see that you want to cry halt to our discussion of Sri Aurobindo as poet. Very well. But some points about your general attitude to poetry and certain aspects of Sri Aurobindo seem to call for some comment from me. First, the mixing up of the romantic with the sentimental. Surely, sentimentalism and romanticism are not synonymous? Highly romantic is Shelley's
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.
Our modern taste for stronger meat, the more direct, the more down-to-earth may not relish such a vision and you are likely to make a face at verbal turns like "love-laden" and "music sweet as love". But there is nothing intrinsically unpoetic about them and everything is caught up in a magical rhythm which is peculiar to Shelley. I would hesitate to dub the stanza sentimental stuff. To sentimentalise is to indulge in emotional weakness, mawkish tenderness. The phrases you pick out from the Priyumvada-passage are certainly of the romantic order - the whole story is cast in the romantic spirit, but such a spirit does not preclude the essence of poetry: measured language of moved precision. You emphasise a certain temper of expression which you find in those lines of Yeats. This temper, enabling things to be said "perfectly simply in plain English - in perfect dignity and grandeur", can yield fine poetry, yet to aver that other tempers cannot do so is to limit sadly "the realms of gold". Yeats's own style is not confined to a woman confessing -
A man if I but held him so
Found all the pleasure that life gave.
Have you forgotten Early Yeats who has a man whispering-
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Beloved, let your eyes close, and your heart beat
Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,
Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest?
Here also is romantic poetry, but I don't believe you would charge it with being artificial and false or perpetrating "linguistic clutter". Does it satisfy your criterion of "nowness" if that criterion accepts only the manner of the three Yeats-lines quoted first? Perhaps you'll argue that the next three lines were written before your "now" appeared, belonging as they do to the volume Yeats published in 1899: The Wind among the Reeds. Well, Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death was written in 1899 too. If its style is not like work done in the generation when you started writing, it may not appeal to you personally, but what about judging poetry from an impersonal aesthetic standpoint - the same standpoint which would not shrink from Early Yeats and his Celtic Romanticism? Nor would you blame him because he is not putting his love-moment "perfectly simply in plain English". And is it possible that you would shrink from Keats's expression of the love-moment between secretly appearing Porphyro and just awaking Madeline? -
Beyond a mortal man impassioned far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet, -
Solution sweet....
I know we wouldn't write quite like this now, but our nowness in that respect shouldn't debar us from enjoying non-modern ways of the poetic art. There are numerous different ways to Parnassus and the direct mode of saying things which you favour to the exclusion of other approaches to a situation strikes me as self-impoverishment and critical
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misjudgment. Early Yeats and Keats write indirectly of the sex-act. Another kind of indirectness, an extreme of nothing save suggestion, a most delicate and moving fusion of speech and silence meets us in Dante's famous episode of Paolo and Francesca. Once during their period of unspoken and even unacknowledged love they read together the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Their eyes exchanged glances and their cheeks flushed. The book proved a tempter. And Francesca says to Dante no more than the words:
Quel giorno piu non vi leggemo avante.
(Upon that day no further did we read.)
Quite a contrast on the one hand to Early Yeats as well as to Keats of the nineteenth century and on the other to Later Yeats of the passage you admire so much for its touching directness. And yet all the various statements are poetry. Sparing language or rich utterance is equally valid in creating poetry. If I went by your comment on the Priyumvada-passage and your absolute tilt towards what you consider contemporary practice, I would have to discard all poetry of the time before my own. And is your condemnation of Sri Aurobindo legitimate? The locutions you fall foul of - "well-loved", "overwhelming sweetness", "the voice loved to linger", "half-angered", "a lovely slave rebellious who had erred", "touches soft" - are all such as would tend to occur in most poets from Spenser down to the period of World War I. To frown on this sort of writing as being "linguistic clutter" is to forget the Blakean beauty that is exuberance. Can there be a greater master of "linguistic clutter" than Shakespeare whenever it would suit an occasion? For instance, hear the ghost of Hamlet's father:
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
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And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine....
To come back to Sri Aurobindo: you are right to call the whole passage erotic and I am surprised at your imagining that Sri Aurobindo meant it to be "a new super-spiritual vision of love". I have pointed to "a sensuous felicity peculiar to Kalidasa" in it. Who would dream of ascribing anything "super-spiritual" to that supreme poet of artistic eroticism? The English critic Banning Richardson who reviewed at some length in The Aryan Path (March 1944) the two volumes of Sri Aurobindo's Collected Poems and Plays picked out Love and Death and the earlier Urvasie after writing: "These two volumes are rich in beauty and suggestiveness... Though the works are by no means of uniform quality - indeed what poet's are? - they reveal a true poetic spirit, and sometimes ascend to heights of great beauty and power. What will strike the English-speaking reader is the amazing mastery of the English language that the writer has attained." Richardson did not know of either Ilion or Savitri which were still unpublished, except for 380 lines of the former. He regarded Urvasie and Love and Death as Sri Aurobindo's greatest works, most abundant in imaginative expression, but he noted with a bit of regret that they were shot so much with erotic vividness. Nowhere did he impute to them sentimentalism. What is there along with the erotic element is an emotional idealism and either a sharp or a subtle delineation of the moods of the passionate heart. In one or two places we find a rare visionary power. But let me not diverge from my immediate concerns. They are connected with your sweeping misconstructions. The last one for me to underline is your fancy that "prostrate warm surrender" implies the sex-act. In normal custom how can the woman be "prostrate" in it? "Supine" would be the more appropriate word. But here it would be out of place. You will see why if you read the next phrase: "her flushed cheeks / Upon his feet." Not being Indian, you can't imagine
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a woman who, "half-angered", has "turned away" from her lover but who goes back to him with tender grace and, with her body in close contact with his, slides down to his feet and for a moment lies there with her warm face upon them, softly caressing them with her cheeks. Prostration is not looked upon in old-fashioned India as a humiliating act. It has deep associations. One prostrates oneself before the image of one's God, before one's Guru - and the traditional woman may do so before her husband in whom she feels the presence of the Divine. Of course in modern times much has changed, but Sri Aurobindo is dealing with a tale in the Mahabharata, filling out imaginatively what is merely hinted at there in a few lines. The sex-act, which you misread here, comes 16 lines later as a climax - and what a climax in a phrase at once forceful and subtle, suggesting the rapid breaths of ecstasy filled with a call to the beloved but unable to sustain it unshaken:
It seems to me a pity that a woman of your sensitivity should fail to respond to the art of such a line. Just think how worlds away from the spontaneity and yet the surprise of it would be something like
Bridal outpantings that break down her name.
This would be a case of the effective obvious. The inspired cunning of the original would be gone. And if you realised that the way Sri Aurobindo has cast the phrase is a culmination of the art leading up to it you would try to discern how the psycho-physical presentation everywhere works with an inevitable skill. Take the line:
Or her long name uttered beseechingly...
There is the spondee of the second foot slowing down the
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voice. Then the inverted third foot - a trochee instead of the expected iamb - expressing impatient concern in speech. Then the four-syllabled final adverb echoing the sustained continuous plea which is signified." I may mention too the enjambment:
the weight
Of her wild bosom...
The word "weight" stands at the line's end with a cumulative finality, the important terminal position reinforces the meaning technically by giving it weight. The sense, however, flows over to the next line as if the heaviness implied by the word had to drop the sense into it. Kalidasa would have rejoiced at all this craftsmanship brought by the afflatus.
While regretting that you have missed the "minute particulars" of both the heart and the art of the passage, I wonder why you have said nothing about the two other passages I had quoted - one with a detailed observation of physical Nature, the next with a vehement articulation of a noble sentiment. Both deal with earthly life of which the Tagorean sparrow by which you set great store would be an organic element. Here as well as throughout the poem there is no straining after any "super-bird". Actually Love and Death mentions
Cuckoo and rainlark and love-speak-to-me
A peacock with his melancholy cry
Complaining far away,
and mentions how, when Ruru sat in stunned and still absorption after Priyumvada's death and old memories before her arrival into his life "kept with long pomps his mind / Excluding the dead girl" (not "maiden", as Yeats would have supposed),
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The birds flashed by him with their swift small wings,
Fanning him....
The poem, whose tale is set in very early times, closes on a bird-note in the ears of the lovers reunited after Ruru has offered half his life to get Priyumvada back from the Underworld:
...the earth breathed round them.
Glad of her children, and the koil's voice
Persisted in the morning of the world.
I may add that before this we have a scene in which
He looked and saw all grass and dense green trees
And sunshine and a single grasshopper
Near him repeated fierily its note.
Sri Aurobindo's eyes and ears were always on the earth, even earth's smallest things, and there was never a turning away as you conjecture. In fact he is the only spiritual figure in human history who insists that ultimately we do not have to turn away from earth for our fulfilment - a fulfilment always placed by earlier spirituality in a perfect Beyond where after terrestrial life we have to go. You, Tagore, William Blake one and all are of this supra-terrestrial outlook, no matter how much you may value sparrows and 'the eye of the peacock" and "our humble mother the dust" in the Creation which according to you and Blake was found good and was never sought to be made better by a God whose substance is ever different from it and can therefore be never truly incarnated here and even whose supposed incarnation is limited to a single instance in the whole of earth's history, a uniqueness which you yourself consider "indeed absurd" (as I am sure Tagore also, though not Blake, did). This rather incoherent blend of Christianity and non-Christianity, which is further complicated by a mixture
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with it of the Hermetic-Alchemical-Cabbalistic tradition of "As above, so below", you somewhat cockily pit against Sri Aurobindo's vision of God and Soul and Nature. No doubt, the doctrine which you have somehow elicited from this strange uneasy combination of diverse lights has a striking truth: "As above, so below." And I am in sympathy with you when you sum up: "It is when 'that which is below' becomes cut off from 'that which is above.' that the lower world becomes trivial and a nihil, and the world 'above' a vacuum." But surely what is below is not a perfect counterpart of what is above? The above is hidden in the below and gleams out only partially. Most people don't even catch glimpses of the "imprisoned splendour" (to use Browning's phrase). Poets are delighted by the wonder shining forth through slits in the shadowy surface and, when a mystical turn accompanies the poetic eye rolling in its fine frenzy, there is the Tagorean sense of the "unsurpassable", for really the divine secrecy which is the Infinite and the Eternal is the ultimate Truth, Goodness and Beauty. But Yeats has to confess -
Man is in love and loves what vanishes:
What more is there to say? -
and a greater than Yeats has concentrated his majestic sadness in a Latin line at once profound and pithy, whose poetry I have tried to convey with a dash of more colour than the packed original carries:
Haunted by tears is the world and our heart by the
touch of things mortal.
The "unsurpassable" which is seen in Nature and life is such only in essence: it cannot be equated wholly with the existence which it assumes and whose depths it pervades and whose surface it pierces at several points. Mystics who can plunge into those depths can live with a superb inner
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happiness, and often behold an aura of eternal and infinite light around "things mortal" and "what vanishes". The vision recorded by Traherne and by those who, employing more Eastern terms, have expressed themselves out of the "cosmic consciousness" is a proof of the transfiguration the world undergoes in mystic experience. Yet it is only the aspect of the world which is transfigured: the world's substance has not changed. The flawless Above is never literally and totally a flawless Below. Will this imbalance be always there and will the souls who want "one entire and perfect chrysolite" have always to leave "our mother the dust" for some Nirvana, Goloka, Heaven? "Alas, yes" is the answer. Have you read Tagore's poem on the Cranes? After he has caught sight of them in their migratory flight he sees in all things cranes flying and the message everywhere is: "Not here, not here but ever somewhere else!" It is to save us from this tragic message inevitable hitherto for our beloved earth that Sri Aurobindo has explored the Beyond, the world above, while yet never losing hold on the world below -
Type of the wise who soar but never roam,
True to the kindred points of heaven and home.
The saviour key to the spiritual-material deadlock down the ages is the plane of dynamic divinity which he calls "Super-mind", a power higher even than the Overmind whence so far all the greatest forces, including the revelatory Mantra, have hailed. There in an ultra-Platonic sense are the Arch-images of all existence, which are not only creative in the beginning but also transformative in the end. To bring them down here on earth to change it into a form of godhead and fulfil and not annul its lovely yet pitiful travail by living in the midst of its activity, contributing to its manifold march while attempting to reach and bring forth the inner and upper Plenitude: such is the aim of Sri Aurobindo.
Excuse my digression from our immediate concerns. I
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shall wind up now with a few more remarks. You must have received the letter in which I explained the true meaning of Sri Aurobindo's assertion that he was not primarily a poet. To have become greater than a poet is not to cease being poetic: if one is born a poet one remains so when the man in one has undergone a new birth. Perhaps my point will be illuminated from another angle if I quote to you a part of a letter of Sri Aurobindo's to Dilip Kumar Roy when Radha-krishnan wanted a philosophical article for a compilation:
"Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher - although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the Yoga and came to Pondi-cherry - I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher. How I managed to do it and why? First, because Richard proposed to me to cooperate in a philosophical review - and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse; and then he had to go to the war and left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely self. Secondly, because I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there automatically. But that is not being a philosopher! (4.9.1934)"
Relevant to our subject, this shows that "primarily", in the connotation you read in the adverb, Sri Aurobindo had the poetic urge and the political drive.
Your remarks on that line of your own and on Shelley's West-Wind passage interested me. Exact imagery contributes to their poetic quality. The Vedic hymn to the wind has a certain vividness but except for the ending very little poetic-mystic significance in Panikkar's rendering.
You haven't said a thing about the poem I sent you as a test-case in the matter of highlight-words in spiritual poetry. Perhaps you want to spare my feelings or to avoid unnecessary discussion? As it is my own stuff 1 won't enter into any controversy. Just say your piece.
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Do you intend reading Ilion further? If even steeping yourself in it doesn't change your view, I'll stop pleading my case and leave you standing at the other pole to Herbert Read's enthusiastic response.
Now you may turn back to some older bones of contention - e.g., that Tagore poem on the answerless question. Also, if you feel like it, pronounce on my Mallarme book.
Let me thank you for the great pleasure you have afforded me of lively disputation on so large a scale about a theme so close to both our hearts: poetry.
(26.11.1987)
I've received the photo-copy of "A World-Poet?" This is the second time you've sent it. Now I have one to spare for circulation among friends who'll be much interested in the review.
I have at last finished reading 'The Obscure and the Mysterious' - in the run-up to Christmas you can imagine free time was limited. I have pondered it as I have explored with you Mallarme and his implications for poetry - the wonderful new perceptions which he explored - the affinity with Indian thought and how Sri Aurobindo saw him as the fountain-head of a 'future poetry'. It is a very fine contribution not only to the study of Mallarme but to the unfolding of poetry. You cannot imagine the density of materialism in this country at this time -
Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul whereas you in India see other vistas open to the Imagination. But the West in general (discounting the strong countermovement, of which Temenos is itself an expression) is 'sunk in deadly sleep', not believing that there is such a thing as the soul, let alone a spiritual order which the soul itself discerns. You have with great understanding seen, Mallarme's atheism notwithstanding, the actual perception
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of the universe of Blake's Imagination was possessed by him. I can see that a school of poetry in India might well look for its predecessors in the West among the symbolists, rather than among the Anglo-American reductionists of all to the crudest materialism. Sri Aurobindo saw that and let us hope he was prophetic. Of course that dimension has always cast its illumination on all true poets of the Imagination but it has been fatally lost in our time but for a few. Yeats also looked to the Symbolists and at the end of his poetic lifetime looked to India. The logic is clear and I hope indeed that there may be grounded in the work you yourself and Sri Aurobindo have done in this field which will flower.
I particularly have enjoyed your detailed readings of poems not only of Mallarme but of other poets - Yeats and Sturge Moore, you really see into poems in a way the academic critics, dissecting analysts, do not. To return into the world of Mallarme through your guidance has been a delight. I am a great Francophil, you know (or perhaps you did not) and have long been in contact with the school of the Imaginal' in France. For the Imagination, born in England with Blake and Coleridge and Shelley, and restored in the Irish renaissance of this century, has taken a new life in France, long deemed the 'rational' nation. On the contrary, white in positivist England the darkness deepens, in France there were the Symbolists, then the Surrealists, then Henry Corbin's school of the Imaginal' based on his studies of the Ismaeli poets and mystics; and Gaston Bachelard, and still Gilbert Durand and other followers of this tradition are doing fine work. Unfortunately, so far as I can discover, more in theory than the practice of poetry. I have published in Temenos critical writings by Sisir Kumar Ghose, and by Prof. Gokak, Kapila Vatsyayan, etc. and do find the Indian approach very congenial. I have a fine piece by Raja Rao in the next issue (he greatly admires Sri Aurobindo I know) and were it not that Temenos may end after twelve issues I would greatly like to invite a contribution. (But not on the poetry of Sri Aurobindo though I'd be glad to have a short
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piece on his view of poetry and the overmind etc. I wish he had not borrowed those 19th century Western terms like the overmind and the superman, carrying with them as they do associations with their origins.)
Now for some criticisms. As I read your book and your translations (whether your own or those of others) something became clear to me about one thing which seems to be wrong with Sri Aurobindo's verse from my standpoint, and that is that whereas he understands poetry in general, he has little sense of the precise - or rather of the associative magic of the words themselves. You also, who so well read the symbols in Mallarme's poems and understand their function, seem a little indifferent to precise uses of words. You throw into your translations words not used by the poet at all - I went through one chapter just marking a few - which 1 would regard as not permissible to a translator at all. This I feel is done because Indian-English is devoid of the resonances, the auras, the penumbras, the associations words have for English poets and readers with the whole language, one can't use a word without stirring these echoes and overtones. One of the disasters of the present time in England is that with the breakdown of education the language itself is being impoverished and destroyed because people no longer know the literature of our national inheritance. In a sense every poem is written not by an isolated poet but by a language - the language of the ancestors, not only in recorded literature but in the usages of a whole nation and depends therefore on history, on a whole culture. This is all being destroyed by the radio and television, the press, by commerce, which speak a language without a past, without resonances. 'Emptyings out of meaning' David Jones called it in Epoch and Artist. Thus I feel with Sri Aurobindo that with all his fluency in English - Indian users of English are sufficiently fluent - there is not a sense of these auras and overtones of the actual words. Images, symbols, are another thing, and Aurobindo has taught himself the metrics of certain English verse-forms, but his
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words are insensitive and used without much sense of their values. I don't mean simply music - though this too he lacks - and perhaps you also in writing of Mallarme and Yeats don't pay enough attention to the power of the sheer sound-music of their work. For example in a recent letter to me you cited a piece of Aurobindo and said (truly) that much early Yeats is also in the genre of romantic love poetry, but the difference - or one difference - lies in the music of such a poem as Yeats's The Rose of the World', 'Who would Go Ride with Fergus now', The Everlasting Voices', or from 'He bids his Beloved be at Peace'.
The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:
Beloved, let your eyes half-close, and your heart beat
Over my heart, your hair fall over my breast,
Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,
And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous
feet.
At nearly eighty the evocation of love means to me little or nothing any more, but oh the words! Who was it who said of Yeats that he took common words and 'knighted them'? So of course does Mallarme and the word magic of sound and association is the secret art of his work also, from which Yeats learned so much. Not what he says but how he says it.
Now to take you to task. P. 13, 'Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte" you render as Titaned night'. Where does that Titan come from? Not Mallarme. Why bring in Titans?
P. 14 'des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants' - why 'dawn-pure' as childhood's flesh. You will say it is the freshness of something young and new but 'dawn' is a word with a whole trail of other quite different poetic resonances and associations. It's not the idea but the use of words that I am pointing to. Or in the next line 'meadow-shroud'. To get a rhyme? But the introduction of the quite inappropriate word 'shroud' of which there is no suggestion in the French is inadmissible or 'choicely and richly proud'. Why 'choicely'
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and what does 'choicely proud' mean anyway? Or 'Winged with outflowing through the finite's mesh' is only a paraphrase not at all a translation of 'Ayant l'expression des choses infinies' and surely changes the meaning beyond what is permissible by the throwing-on of unnecessary and irrelevant words. Mallarme is economical in his use of words, as are all true poets. I could go on with many such examples, and it seems to me that the same disregard of words characterises Sri Aurobindo's use of the English language, and seems to be a blind-spot in your reading of him. Perhaps the best advice I ever received as a young poet was from Ezra Pound, on my one meeting with him - in St. Elizabeth's mental hospital, outside Washington DC while he was still confined there - as I went up to him, he started on poetry straight away, saying he'd been reading a poem of mine which he liked, but added 'there are too many words performing no useful function'. He then went on to describe a former session with Richard Aldington, who had brought him a longish poem, and together they had gone through the poem taking out all words performing no useful function, and, Ezra concluded, 'at the end we had just two-and-a-half lines left'. Since then I have gone through my poems word by word weighing each word and removing those with wrong resonances - like 'shroud' in 'meadow-shroud' or 'dawn-pure' or Titaned night' and it's a pity Sri Aurobindo didn't have Pound to advise him. I would pass on Pound's wise words to young Indian poets. Or any other young poets. I believe it may be for India to produce a poet of the overmind but I don't find that Aurobindo, for all his insight into the possibility of such poetry, is that poet.
(11.12.1987)
Thank you for your letter of Dec. 11. I am replying immediately to catch you around Jan. 1 and wish you a happy new year on time. Your appreciation of The Obscure and the
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Mysterious is both sensitive and deep, responding as it does not only to my perception of the in-world from which Mallarme" drew his symbolism but also to my reading of the interplay of image and word and rhythm which constitutes his poetry as well as the poetry of others whose work I bring into relation with his.
I didn't know you were such a Francophil. My amour with French poetry does not extend to the most recent mood and mode of that belle of unwithering youth and infinite variety. I have heard of the 'imaginal' school but ail the names you list are unknown to me. I shall have to bring myself up to date. But you say that theory rather than practice of poetry has been developed in recent France. This means that the new spirits are still hung up in a brilliant mental air and have not touched the life-founts by which the earth can be enriched with a palpable new creation, the embodied inspired word.
Your general remarks on "precise uses of words" and "the associative magic of words" bring up a number of issues. One is the aim and method of translating poetry. No doubt, literalness is a great value, but what is greater is a poet's essential spirit and the typical turn of his style. Also there is the need of the metrical movement to echo something of the original's structure and span. Most important of all is to render poetry as poetry. Face to face with these vital demands on a translator, your charge that words are thrown in which are not used by the poet becomes rather trivial. If the words concerned are not mere padding but are in affinity with the sense and the sound, does it matter if they go a little beyond the actual message? Take that line of Virgil's - one of the world's peaks of inevitable poetic expression:
O passi graviora! - dabit deus his quoque finem.
The basic call is to convey in the translation its blend of majesty and poignancy, force and euphony. How does C. Day Lewis try to answer this call? Is there anything of the
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supreme message and music in -
Worse than this you have suffered. God will end all this
too.
My comment is:
Worse than so flat a pancake no translator has ever fed
us.
Listen now to Sri Aurobindo's version:
Fiercer griefs you have suffered. To these too God will
give ending.
I cannot think of any translation bringing out more finely the "world-cry" of Virgil's brief masterpiece. Whether Sri Aurobindo has thrown in something which is not directly there in the compact generality of the line's opening phrase would seem to me trivial quibbling. And can one say that the controlled intensity here as well as in the rest of the line shows any lack in "the sense of the precise - or rather of the associative magic of the words themselves"? Can any English writer offer us better poetry than this bit of what you may dub "Indian-English"?
You have returned to your old charge against us poor benighted English-writing Indians by saying: "Indian-English is devoid of the resonances, the auras, the penumbras, the associations words have for English poets and readers with the whole language, one can't use a word without stirring these echoes and overtones". And then you swoop down on Sri Aurobindo once more: "I feel ...that with all his fluency in English... there is not a sense of these auras and overtones of the actual words. Images, symbols are another thing and Aurobindo has taught himself the metrics of certain English verse-forms but his words are insensitive and used without much sense of their values. I don't mean
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simply music - though this too he lacks..." In contrast to Sri Aurobindo's being tone-deaf and colour-blind, as it were, in handling English locutions you remind me of Yeats's music and magic of words in the lines I quoted to you in my last letter as belonging to the same genre of romantic love-poetry as Sri Aurobindo's early verse in the narrative Love and Death. I am as charmed as you by Early Yeats and attach, even from the subtle spiritual standpoint, more importance to his wizardry than you do, who are enamoured rather of his lilt than of his vision, but I would wish you could awaken to the mastery of rhythm which, along with a keenness of sight, is just the thing most noticeable in Sri Aurobindo's early work of 1899. Sometimes I despair at the failure of your ear. Let me make one more effort to open it with a short passage from Love and Death. Ruru has descended into the Underworld in search of his prematurely dead Priyumvada. A moan of profound pity escapes him when he sees anguished ghosts drifting on "the penal waters":
"O miserable race of men,
With violent and passionate souls you come
Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days
In fear and anguish, catching at stray beams
Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;
Then from your spacious earth in a great horror
Descend into this night, and here too soon
Must expiate your few inadequate joys.
O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads
Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,
The naked spirit here. Oh my sweet flower,
Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?"
Various tones of pathos and passion strike across a richly composite texture with a rhythm paced appropriately and subtle significant pauses - a tissue of art which is yet spontaneous as if the music of expressive blank verse came
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naturally out of the poet's imaginative seeing and feeling. May I draw your special attention to the last line's complex alliteration around an ever-changing vowel-play? As sheer sound it is for me a source of inexhaustible pleasure. To make your pulse respond better to the passage I'll cite a few lines of Tennyson that have some similarity of general theme and a touch of common phraseology at the start:
O purblind race of miserable men,
How many among us at this very hour
Do forge a lifelong trouble for ourselves,
By taking true for false, or false for true;
Here, thro' the feeble twilight of this world
Groping, how many, until we pass and reach
That other, where we see as we are seen...
This is mostly prose set to metre and where the prosaic is exceeded we get a conventional poeticising except for the first line which has some genuine poetic drive and the penultimate which hasn't much of poetry but brings a little originality of contour. Put Sri Aurobindo and Tennyson side by side and you cannot help marking the difference. In the one the verse-body moves with an organic flexibility - in the other it is loosely articulated and goes shuffling. Nor does Tennyson have the vision-vitality, the art-intensity of Sri Aurobindo.
Please don't think I am offering the snatch from the Enid-story as characteristic Tennysonese. Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate has many finer moments. My purpose is just to throw into relief the poetic quality of the earlier Sri Aurobindo. And not only to show how a tragic view of life can arise with a living vibrancy from imaginative sight and emotion instead of somewhat tamely from a deliberate attempt to think, but also to illustrate a subtle word-music as satisfying as in Yeats though not in the same lyrical fashion which is always more easily seizable.
Even a haunting lyrical word-music in what I may term a
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super-Yeatsian vein I can waft towards you from Sri Aurobindo - and, surprisingly, from the later Sri Aurobindo whom you consider a dealer in abstractions. The vein is super-Yeatsian in two senses. One has to do with the lyricism of the utterance: the other concerns the nature of the symbol lyricised. The lyric cry is more inward-tuned -the rhythm comes from the planes which Sri Aurobindo describes as "overhead", not from the mid-worlds whose strains were transmitted by Early Yeats with an amazing fidelity. The symbol is that favourite of Early Yeats: the Rose - which we meet in a variety of suggestive forms in the Celtic Twilight: "a rose in the deeps of my heart" or with a vaster pervasion -
Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the world!
or else
Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose.
But Sri Aurobindo's Rose is more than a symbol of ideal Beauty and Love. As he once explained to a disciple, the poem Rose of God uses the rose as the most intense of all flowers to symbolise the divine intensities of Bliss, Light, Power, Life and Love. A stanza of four lines is given to each of the intensities. The first two lines everywhere are charged with the Glory that is on high, the Reality above the human consciousness, ever perfect and always manifest. In the last two lines the same Reality is invoked to reveal itself by evolution in the human consciousness and to become progressively a part of earth or, rather, to make earth progressively a part of it. What is eternally in bloom in the Divine is asked to blossom anew in our time and space - a Brightness that, unlike in Nashe's phrase, never falls from the air. Now read the fivefold apostrophe, as Yeats wanted his own incantations to be read - audibly yet softly and slowly, letting each word get its full sound-value and stand
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distinct before linking up with its companions in an intuitively patterned syntax. Listen to your voice with what the Upanishads call "the Ear behind the ear", for this poem is to be heard in an eminent and extreme degree by that in-dweller, the Artist Soul, who in one way or another is the ultimate audience of all true poetry:
Rose of God, vermillion stain on the sapphires of
heaven,
Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the
ecstasies seven! Leap up in our heart of human hood, O miracle. O
flame,
Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical
Name.
Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of
being,
Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing! Live in the mind of our earthhood; O golden Mystery,
flower.
Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the
marvellous Hour.
Rose of God, damask force of Infinity, red icon of
might,
Rose of Power with thy diamond halo piercing the
night!
Ablaze in the will of the mortal, design the wonder of
thy plan,
Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in
man.
Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine
Desire,
Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colour's lyre! Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and
magical rhyme;
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Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless
the children of Time.
Rose of God like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face, Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of
Grace!
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in
Nature's abyss: - Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life
beatitude's kiss.
At first glance one may get a little bewildered and think that here are splashes of oriental hues and a luxury of decorative effects for their own sake. But really there is no riot in the splendour: we have a many-sided system in it, exploring the secrets of the Divine Rose. A mystical metaphysics and psychology unfold before us in the succession of vibrant images. Esoteric, no doubt, some of the expressions are, but they come to us like the actual sight of unknown yet undeniable objects. They are esoteric as the amazing actuality of the Aurora Borealis may be designated esoteric when viewed by a traveller from southern latitudes to North Cape. If I could encroach on your time I would take you to close quarters with the occult significance of each line, unravelling the implicit metaphysics and psychology. But I assume that even without a detailed commentary one can stir to some glorious presence and purpose at work. To miss the sense of a supreme spiritual reality borne on the profoundly moving language and rhythm and to say that we are face to face with abstractions covered up by ornate phraseology is to be deaf and blind and numb.
Now to your taking me to task for certain details of the Mallarme-translations. I am certainly open to correction and would like to know where exactly 1 have erred and how you would propose to set me right. Some deviation from the original is at times due to exigencies of metre and form and may be regarded as "permissible" if the fundamental spirit
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still breathes through. You are inclined to attribute the inaccuracy or the superfluity to "Indian-English". But it is ironical that the one instance you pillory in some detail is not by an English-writing Indian. The translation of Baudelaire's Correspondances is by a pukka Englishman, a brilliant professor from Trinity College, Cambridge, John A. Chadwick, who got the name "Arjavananda" in the Ashram, There is no question of his suffering from any insensitiveness to the English language and its word-associations. Evidently he had a different idea from yours about translating poetry. Sri Aurobindo's comment on the rendering was: "This is a fine translation and it keeps, I think, much of the inner atmosphere of the original." I have seen the attempt of Richard Wilbur and Allen Tate to english the same sonnet. The former's version of Baudelaire's
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte
is:
Huge as the night and as the light of day,
which is close to the French but has hardly the power and the interpretative feeling of Chadwick's
Vast as the day's width or as the titaned night,
while Tate packs force into his rendering but by an elaboration which departs completely from the original:
Vast as the night stupendously moonlit.
He seems to have taken "la clarte" to refer to the light in the nocturnal sky and not have any connection with daytime. You object also to Chadwick's a "dawn-pure" and "meadow-shroud" and "choicely". Tate has "childhood's naked flesh" for Baudelaire's "chairs d'enfants" and converts the French poet's "verts comme les prairies" into "green as a studded plain". Wilbur turns into "rich, corrupt, profound" the
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original's "corrumpus, riches et triomphants". Baudelaire's
Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies
appears in Tate as
Expansions to the infinite of pain.
which is unfaithful to the French besides lacking the poetic beauty of Chadwick's
Winged with outflowing through the finite's mesh.
You'll find all these departures from the original "not permissible" but you must have realised that none of them stems from any play of Indian-English. The "unnecessary and irrelevant words" are not in the least the sins of Indians following in the footsteps of Sri Aurobindo, repeating any insensitive follies of his. The strictures you pass on me in connection with Correspondances, mistaking a pure Englishman for K. D. Sethna, and the condemnatory judgment you pronounce on my master in both Yoga and poetry - "the same disregard of words characterises Sri Aurobindo's use of the English language" - prove to be themselves "unnecessary and irrelevant words". What you call my "blind-spot" in my "reading of him" turns out - if the present context discloses your general tendency - to be a failure on your part to look at my literary retina properly and thereby failing to see eye to eye with me the true nature of Aurobindonian poetry.
Please forgive my saying that for all your splendid gifts and wide culture you have let certain preconceptions and prejudices sway you. Led by them you appear to be always on the look-out to pick fault, so that any stick seems good enough to belabour your bugbears. If I were to sum you up I would say: "K.R. is a mind of most admirable insights and very deplorable oversights."
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I notice also that you get carried away by certain formulas. The latest is: "All true poets are economical in their use of words." If you mean that true poets avoid words that are not "justes", you are right, but can this imply their being always spare and simple in their expressions? Surely, when you ascribe economy of words to Mallarme, you can't attribute simplicity to him? Were he simple, the title of my book, The Obscure and the Mysterious, would be a colossal misnomer. Spare he undoubtedly is at times, but can we declare him economical when he writes, for instance:
Son ceil, a I'horizon de lumiere gorge,
Voit des galeres d'or, belles comme des cygnes,
Sur un fleuve de pourpre et de parfums dormir
En bencant 1'eclair fauve et riche de leur lignes
Dans un grand nonchaloir charge de souvenir!
(His eye, engorged with the horizon-light,
Travels where galley on swanlike galley shines
Somnolent over perfumed purple seas
Rocking the rich fawn shimmer of ship-lines,
Huge nonchalance surcharged with memories!)
English poetry is chockful of both economical and lavish wonders. Francis Thompson's In No Strange Land may be rated economical but can anybody apply the same epithet to his Hound of Heaven? I don't know whether you have dipped into William Watson, a wrongly neglected poet according to me. He can bring a memorable economy wedded to a striking vision of la condition humaine:
Magnificent out of the dust we came
And abject from the spheres.
He can also sound an equally unforgettable note with an opulent grandeur of style:
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...And over me
The everlasting taciturnity,
The august, inhospitable, inhuman night,
Glittering magnificently unperturbed.
Let me give one more illustration. Here's Crashaw economically picturing Christ's incarnation through the Virgin Mary:
Christ left his father's home and came
Lightly as a lambent flame.
On the surface the couplet looks over-simple, rather conventional and almost verging on prose except for the metrical beat and the rhyme. On a closer reading it reveals its poetry along with its place in the seventeenth century among the Metaphysicals. The "home" hints at the Saviour's abandoning the heaven natural to him and entering the earth as an exile and a wanderer. But this entrance of the Divine into the world of human beings is suggested to be a soft secrecy, a movement delicate and refined. Such is the point of the adverb "Lightly" which prepares the gentle light which the closing phrase indicates. "Metaphysical wit" is at play here. It is implicit also in the adjective "lambent" with its subtle allusion to the common phrase about Christ: "Lamb of God." The cleverness, however, is unobtrusive and does not spoil the poetic spontaneity, the religious sincerity. Quite a contrast to the sweet economy of the couplet is the dynamic outburst of Hopkins on the same theme in two lines directly suffused with the glory, the profundity, the awesome loveliness of the incarnational event:
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary of flame...
The whole first phrase is opulently adjectival, qualifying a richly compound noun in the next. Of course, the words "of flame" go with "miracle" and not with "Mary": the incarna-
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ting Christ is the Miracle of flame, within Mary. A picture concrete in several different ways is driven into our minds. We see Jesus' origin in paradisal divinity, from where he has come missioned as at once force and grace, pressure of power and largesse of love; we see his love's acceptance of humanity and humanity's acceptance of him in love; we see his preciously secret birth through deeply and tenderly guarded virginity; we see the prodigious Godhead that was the unborn child lying with all its light and fire in Mary's quickened earth-womb. In place of the chastely lucid which the economy of Crashaw presented we are offered the passionately complex by a verbal lavishness which makes imaginative poetry of the highest order.
I don't know what Ezra Pound would have done with Hopkins's language. What he taught you was certainly worth learning. His pruning hand became rightly famous by the catching shape of novelty it gave to Eliot's Waste Land. From the anecdote he recounted to you I can guess that he proved to Richard Aldington the latter's almost zero possibility as a poet. By paring you down he freed the poetic consciousness in you from the glib versifier encumbering it. But to learn from so sensitive a critic nothing save a lesson in economy in the use of words is hardly to do him justice. Pound had a many-sided mind and your bringing him in apropos of the art of translation is not quite appropriate. We may remember that he had praise for Binyon's renderings of Dante which were far from being always tied down to your notion of the "permissible". Not only is Binyon "mannered" at times in a pseudo Old-English vein: he is also over-free occasionally. Thus Dante's most naturally grand
which one may approximately render in metrical form
His Will alone is our tranquillity,
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comes out in Binyon with a bit of self-conscious quaintness:
And by His will is perfected our peace.
Pound cannot be identified with any such fetish as your emphasis on verbal economy. If he could be, he would have to turn his back on the multi-styled Shakespeare whom in my last letter to you I labelled as a master of what you, reacting adversely to one of the three passages I had culled from the early Sri Aurobindo, had misnamed "linguistic clutter". I gave an example from Hamlet. Perhaps your Pound would wag his beard in disapproval at the grandiose elocutionary excess of the third line in Macbeth's famous soliloquy after murdering King Duncan:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red...
Milton, too, with his frequent disdain of the Horatian maxim about art lying in concealing art, would fall under your mentor's ban. Does he not spurn economy of words when he tells us of Christ going forth with his attendants "to create new worlds"? -
They viewed the vast immeasurable Abyss
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heaven's highth, and with the Centre mix the Pole.
The single-tracked figure you conjure of your early tutor, a critic preoccupied with one limited mode of artistic creation, I am tempted to stigmatise with the pun: "Penny-wise and Pound-foolish." In addition to appreciating Pound's impact on the litera-
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ture of the first few decades of the twentieth century, I have been attracted by his perceptive distinction of three classes of poetry, each of them perfectly legitimate: Melopoeia, Phanopoeia, Logopoeia. Doubtless they overlap quite often, yet they can be distinguished by the predominance of one or another outstanding trait. In common parlance the three classes indicate poetry specially marked by either its music-making or its picture-making or its thought-making. If we question how thought-making can result in poetry we must note Pound's definition of Logopoeia: "It is the dance of the intellect among words." The term "dance" is vital, for, unless there are rhythm and harmony, posture and gesture along with the markedly intellectual theme, we cannot have living verse.
Are you aware of any choice by Pound himself of examples in each class? I have not come across them. My own preferences are many, but to mention them would draw me too far afield. I may pick out just a few short ones. There is Virgil's
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore
for both music and picture. Flecker has englished the line thus:
They stretched their hands for love of the other shore.
A fine rendering, but the purely verbal quality reinforcing the sense and the pathos in the Latin is rather missing. Although "stretched", with its intrinsically short e lengthened by being flanked by the voice-prolonging combinations of consonants, is admirable, it has no follow-up in technique to match the art of the original. The four-syllabled "Tendebantque" suggests the strain and the intensity of the stretching and the equally long or even slightly longer "ulterioris" carries home to us the farness of what is yearned for. Then there is the matchless Virgilian rhythm helped out
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by the freedom an inflected language allows of word-arrangement. Another favourite of mine is from Macbeth:
Duncan is in his grave.
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
A whole life-vision is caught here with both poignancy and resignation in a sound-pattern perfect in subtle communication. For a passage in which melopoeia and phanopoeia merge and reach their climax at the end I cannot do better than repeat the four lines I have quoted to you more than once of a dawn-moment physical and mystical at once:
That glowed along a fading moment's brink,
As an instance of logopoeia with phanopoeic touches, here is a fit offering from one past eighty to one approaching it:
Not as a tedious evil nor to be
Lightly rejected gave the gods old age,
But tranquil, but august, but making easy
The steep ascent to God. Therefore must Time
Still batter down the glory and form of youth
And animal magnificent strong ease,
To warn the earthward man that he is spirit
Dallying with transience, nor by death he ends,
Nor to the dumb warm mother's arms is hound,
But called unborn into the unborn skies.
For body fades with the increasing soul
And wideness of its limits grown intolerant
Replaces life's impetuous joys with peace...
This is fluent and powerful blank-verse movement, end-stopped and enjambed according to significant need -
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thirteen verses with twelve pentameters and the penultimate line an alexandrine breaking through the general mould in answer to the meaning which plunges across its six feet.
How do you like my selections? May I expect some comments on them?
I am happy to receive the collection of your latest poems: The Presence. The title reminds me of three earlier lines of yours which perhaps sum up on both the positive and the negative side your life's vision of the sacred and the secular:
Behind the tree, behind the house, behind the stars Is the presence that I cannot see Otherwise than as stars and house and tree.
I'll write to you more about the book.
(26.12.1987)
This is not a reply to your long letter, but merely to acknowledge it and to add one or two reflections. And to wish you a Happy New Year.
One reflection is, that those who see beauty where others do not must always in that respect be right - as Shakespeare knew - he the great poet - 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse,if imagination amend them.' It is the invisible beauty behind the words that is the true poem, words are at best 'rough magic' and a mere approximation to vision. They are a marvel of magic, in fact, in their power of communicating knowledge of a myriad kinds, especially knowledge of intellectual and intangible feelings and moods and perceptions. Therefore I must submit to that argument that to find beauty is better than not to find beauty in a work.
Second reflection (this again from my standpoint of not finding Sri Aurobindo a poet): I see a comparison with that very remarkable Western visionary Rudolf Steiner, whose
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works I have also read with great interest and profit (I hope) especially those in which he develops Goethe's scientific ideas on plant-growth and form and on light and colour. These extremely valuable writings oh colour and light revolutionize the materialist Newtonian view, and derive ultimately I suppose from Plotinus; or at all events do correspond to a spiritual vision of a universe in which consciousness itself rather than 'matter' is the creative principle of all that is visible. Steiner painted many pictures which illustrate this realization about the nature of colour, but I don't know of any artist who would give them much value as works of art. Though I do know artists - including my own friend Winifred Nicholson - who certainly valued and used Steiner's ideas on colour.
I have asked my friend Jean Mambrino, poet and critic, who greatly admires Sri Aurobindo and much of his writing on poetry, as well as the Mother, (but who shares my blind-spot in relation to the poetic writings) to send you one of his collections of verse, and also his book of critical papers, Le Chant Profond. He may not be a great poet but he is a good one and deeply cares for poetry and all the things of the imagination.
As to my queries of the Mallarme translations - especially the Titan - it makes no difference whether the translator be an Indian or an Englishman, there are bounds which should be respected in the re-creation of a poem in another language. I agree with you about Cecil Day Lewis, who recited and read poetry with a most sensitive ear, but who was, like his friend Auden, devoid of the kind of imaginative resonance you look for in poetry - or if I may say so in all humility, I also. They were Marxists and the invisible worlds play no part in Marxist theories of the arts. The resonances of the imagination are absent from C. Day Lewis's translations. He was however I believe the first translator of 'Le Cimetiere Marin' and we at the time were all very excited about what was obviously a very wonderful poem. Up to a point. But the translator should not paraphrase the poem.
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and a few of the translations in your book do approach paraphrase. But it is a very good book and I read it with much delight, I hope I made that clear.
My final reflection is this. I now have seen a certain amount of Indian criticism of poetry - your own, Sri Aurobindo's, Sisir Kumar Ghose's, Prof. Gokak's, All is characterized (as one might expect) by an exceptional sensitivity to the subtle and imaginative dimension; hence your own feeling for Mallarme and the Symbolists, This at a time when in this country that dimension is as if non-existent for the academic critics as a whole, and there are remarkably few others around; Herbert Read was one of the last, and of course the poets themselves - Yeats and Eliot and Edwin Muir - were most perceptive critics. Materialism in the West has reached, one might hope, its nadir; but often I think -Shakespeare's words again - 'there is no worst'. You feel very strongly that Sri Aurobindo's poetry is of the 'overmind'. That is a reality which you look for in his poetry and in poetry as such; Tagore's 'poetry of surplus'. It may well be that India is destined to produce such a poetry - not necessarily in English, that world-language of the marketplace, the multinationals, the television-screen - but in what language it is no matter. If India experiences a poetic renaissance, it must surely be that it will be that kind of poetry you will contribute, and, heaven knows, at a time when the world needs such a vision. I hope it will be so.
In closing this letter - 1 have not at this moment the time to go in detail into the many questions you raise - may I thank you for the lines about Old Age. Are they your lines or Sri Aurobindo's? 'Spirit, dallying with transience'. Yes indeed. But peace? When there is little time left we must strive the harder, don't you find? I shall never reach spiritual enlightenment in the Indian sense, though the poet sees far off that vision. But I have never worked harder in my life, what with editing Temenos, writing papers for conferences, and sometimes when time allows a poem or two. I shall need several more lifetimes. Or if you like the one Self will need
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many more lifetimes. Are you indeed past eighty? It seems that time has in no way impaired your mind or lessened for you the 'impetuous joys' of the world of poetry.
In the time-consuming problems of getting Temenos 8 to the printer, seeing about advertisements, writing the new pamphlet etc. a longer letter to you must wait meanwhile.
(7.1.1988)
Thank you for your interim letter. A good part of it has both sweetness and light. I appreciate your reiterating that The Obscure and the Mysterious is a valuable as well as enjoyable book. Your estimate of the Marxist poets chimes with my own, though, like you, I have shared the excitement over C. Day Lewis's rendering of Valery's most famous poem. Even his translation of the Aeneid for broadcasting has given me pleasure on the whole. Much can be forgiven him for giving us the least inadequate version in English of Virgil's untranslatable "Sunt lacrimae rerum..." which I have already quoted in one of my letters. But one can't quite overlook his muffing several other wonderful snatches of the great Mantuan's art. To the example I gave in my last letter I would particularly add his treatment of the line which Arnold Bennett considered the most rhythmical in all poetic literature - the phrase Virgil put in the mouth of Aeneas when that hero voiced his helplessness before Dido's request for the story of Troy:
Infandum. regina, jubes renovare dolorem.
Day Lewis converts this mournful magic into:
O queen, the griefs you bid me reopen are
inexpressible -
a beginning good enough but a rather flat ending, devoid of
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what you happily term "imaginative resonance". Facing almost the impossible, I may try to echo the original with a somewhat more sensitive cadence than was heard on the BBC:
Words cannot utter, O Queen, the grief you bid me
rewaken.
This brings me to your remarks apropos of the Mallarme translations. As 1 wrote to you, I am perfectly open to correction in rendering this most subtle of poets, provided the critic realises in full the difficulty the translator is bound to face here. The ideal translator, according to Sri Aurobindo, is one who, like his disciple and my friend Dilip Kumar Roy, "can carry over the spirit of a poem, the characteristic power of its language and the turn of its rhythmical movement from one language to another", even "languages so alien in temperament to each other as English and Bengali". But such translators are, as Sri Aurobindo recognises, "not many". And he is ready to grant: "A translator is not necessarily bound to the original he chooses; he can make his own poem out of it, if he likes, and that is what is generally done." Again, Sri Aurobindo wrote to D. K. Roy, "Truly you are a unique and wonderful translator. How you can keep so close to the spirit and turn of your original and yet make your versions into true poems is a true marvel! Usually faithful translations are flat and those which are good poetry transform the original into something else as Fitzgerald did with Omar or Chapman with Homer." A further statement of Sri Aurobindo's may be quoted. Looking at Roy's version of two stanzas of Shelley - "I can give not what men call love", etc. - he pointed out how the translation was "vulnerable in the head and the tail" and after dealing with the shortcomings, he ended: "If I make these criticisms at all, it is because you have accustomed me to find in you a power of rendering the spirit and sense of your original while turning it into fine
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poetry in its new tongue which I would not expect or exact from any other translator." Commenting on somebody's argument that a translator is not free to render a passage in a form not exploited in the original, -Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Pushed too far, it would mean that Homer and Virgil can be translated only in hexameters!" Sri Aurobindo also allowed the license of translating poetic prose into poetry, adding: "And what of the reverse cases - the many fine prose translations of poets so much better and more akin to the spirit of the original than any poetic version ever made? And what of Tagore's Gitanjali? If poetry can be translated so admirably (and therefore legitimately) into prose, why should not prose be translated legitimately (and admirably) into poetry? After all, rules are made more for critics than for creators."
I gather from all this that the chief elements to be observed by the translator are the spirit and the sense. In a genuine translation as distinguished from a transcreation, these should not be sacrificed - and, insofar as they are organically linked to a particular type of verbal turn as in Mallarmean Symbolism, there should be an attempt at close reproduction according to the genius of the new language. In the mature Mallarme" such linking is mostly present. So I grant your point in this context that "the translator should not paraphrase the poem" and that, if, as you say, "a few of the translations... do approach paraphrase", I must plead guilty. In your running letter you have said you went through one chapter marking all the words which in your view were not permissible. It will be profitable for me to know them.
However, in the piece you specially picked out as a glaring example of errors, thinking it was by me when actually it was by John Chadwick, I am not quite convinced that in the line -
Vast as the day's width or as the titaned night -
seeking to translate
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the adjective for "night" is such a gross sin as you make out with the remark: "Where does that Titan come from? Not Mallarme. Why bring in Titans?" First of all, the original sonnet is not Mallarme's though Mallarme himself could have inspired the Titan-image by a line like
L'avare silence et la massive nuit.
The sonnet is Baudelaire's and he had a penchant for hugeness: e.g.,
Et cette immense nuit semblable aux vieux Chaos
(And that enormous night like Chaos old)
or
ou de gigantesque naiades...
J'eusse aime vivre aupres d'une jeune geante.
(I should have loved to dwell with a young giantess.)
I don't remember Baudelaire to have used "titanique" or "titanesque" anywhere but it is curious how he easily evokes such an epithet in the minds of his translators or admirers. Thus Edna St.Vincent Millay elaborates his "de gigantesque naiades" into
Tall nymphs with Titan breasts and knees
and Swinburne, in his famous prematurely composed elegy on Baudelaire's death, Ave atque vale, has the lines:
Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet
Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover...?
Perhaps you are over-finicky with Chadwick's imaginative liberty with the original?
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In any case, what I was directly concerned with in my letter was not the issue of translation as such. There your defence that your mistaking an Englishman for an Indian does not essentially matter can stand, for then the issue is merely, as you put it: "there are bounds which should be respected in the re-creation of a poem in another language." An Englishman may overstep these bounds just as flagrantly as an Indian. But your defence sidesteps the real point of my contention. Apropos of the translation by Chadwick which you took to be mine you remark that here there is "the throwing-in of unnecessary and irrelevant words" and you add: "...it seems to me that the same disregard of words characterises Sri Aurobindo's use of the English language" and you compare my use of it in the translations to "one thing which seems to be wrong with Sri Aurobindo's verse from my standpoint, and that is that whereas he understands poetry in general he has little sense of the precise - or rather of the associative magic of the words themselves". Further, in your eyes, what I have done in my translations and what Sri Aurobindo does in his own work "is done because Indian-English is devoid of the resonances, the auras, the penumbras, the association words have for English poets and readers with the whole language; one can't use a word without stirring these echoes and overtones". The mistake in your argument lies in catching hold of an Englishman's work and applying to it your charge against Indian-English and relating this work to Sri Aurobindo as well as to all of us Indians attempting to write poetry in English. Here is a real whopper of a slip on your part. It betrays the urge to give us a whipping on any pretext. Whatever appears to come to hand serves you to run down Sri Aurobindo in particular and his school of Indian poets in general and by implication all Indo-English poetry. A sweeping obsession rather than any clear and patient perception is at play, as if it made no odds whether the occasion were truly pertinent or not. Just the belief that something is written by an Indian is sufficient to trigger an anti-Aurobindo judgment from you.
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Probably you will argue back: "Chadwick, simply by being an Englishman, need not be above insensitiveness to English word-values. Not all Englishmen have the required insight into them. And, failing to have it, Chadwick could perpetrate Indian-English, like Sri Aurobindo and his ilk. So my attack on Indian-English can be valid despite Chadwick's nationality."
I don't think this argument holds water. To assume Chadwick's "Indian" insensitiveness is pure fancy. He was a highly developed, widely literate, finely imaginative mind with a great command of his own language. His compatriot Ronald Nixon (known in Yogic circles by the name "Sri Krishna Prem"), himself endowed with an admirable literary and philosophic sensorium, has spoken - in his introduction to Chadwick's works - of "the delicate dream-like beauty" of the poems as well as of their dealing "with the mysteries of the inner life". Passing beyond the bounds of permissible liberty in translation is not to cease being the mind that Chadwick was. In a recent letter to the TLS (December 11-17, 1987, p. 1377) you imply essentially what Sri Aurobindo has said about translations. You say: "No translation, of course, can ever equal the original, yet there have been great translators who have, as it were, transposed some original into what is in its own right fine poetry - one has but to name Chapman's or Pope's Homer, Dryden's Virgil, Arthur Waley's Chinese poems, all of which have had a deep impact on the English language. Many excellent translations have done less than this but have brought something of the original - Leishman's Rilke, Eliot and others who have translated St. John Perse in such a way as to make a shining contribution to the art of translation." Surely Chapman or Pope or Dryden, in their remarkably successful compositions, cannot be considered truly "faithful" to their models and yet they have achieved genuine poetry. Chapman in particular has come in for praise. But an Elizabethan rhythmist like him of explosive and complicated splendour can never be Homeric in the ultimate sense. For
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one thing, the controlled power of the epic style, whether simple or ondoyant, whether Homeric or Miltonic, cannot be caught by the Romantic temper that pervades Elizabethan verse. Chadwick, by his non-observance of the bounds to which you refer, would not ipso facto fail to be a genuine poet with a sensitive eye and ear in his own manner of English expression. Departing in places from the verbal form of Baudelaire (or Mallarme, as you thought) he can still -achieve authentic poetry and even convey the inner spirit of the celebrated French sonnet, Correspondances. Or take William Radice on whose behalf you penned the TLS letter. What he has done for Rabindranath Tagore is essentially nothing different. He has created a profound impression on you just because his versions have true poetic power and convey the imaginative richness and depth of the Bengali master in really inspired language. It is not that he has anything of the music which is peculiar to Tagorian Bengali - a gift as of a "Gandharva" incarnate, a transmission to our world of a celestial strain proper to a specific non-human plane known to Indian occult lore, a plane of super-euphony beyond the verbal traffic of the earth at even its most harmonious. 1 am certain our friend Sisir Kumar Ghose would tell us of the liberties Radice has taken and how the absence of the Bengali rhyme-schemes must tell in the total effect of the expressive inevitability in spite of Radice's skilful choice of metres broadly equivalent in English to those in Bengali. What counts on the whole is the poetic quality of the rendering in regard to both the overall vision and the details of interpretative sight. I contend that Chadwick's sonnet is good poetic stuff in itself besides communicating, as Sri Aurobindo says, much of the inner atmosphere of the original - no matter how some minutiae of phrasing may import different visual suggestions here and there. These suggestions may, to a surface look, appear non-Baudelairian in scattered places, but by themselves they cannot imply any lack of the linguistic resonances, etc., one would expect an Englishman of Chadwick's stature to be
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aware of. Even if the poetry did not quite come up to the mark for some reason or other, the natural English sense of them in individual phrases and lines would be at work. By no means can the charge of "Indian-English" as conceived by you be laid at his door. As soon as you thought an Indian (I, in this case) had rendered Correspondances the bee in your bonnet on "Indian-English" started buzzing and stinging indiscriminately - with Sri Aurobindo brought in at all costs and made the fundamental victim.
To introduce associations which are alien to Baudelaire in some respect is to be more free in translation than you are prepared to allow. It does not mean that the translator is using words without a proper sense of them, nor does it unpoetise the language as such. You have yourself guessed the poetry of "dawn-pure as childhood's flesh" - namely, "the freshness of something young and new". Merely because the idea differs from "des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants", we don't get a kind of verse which is poor in imaginative resonance. Perhaps what most sticks in your gullet is the expression "meadow-shroud". You protest: "the introduction of the quite inappropriate word 'shroud' of which there is no suggestion in the French is quite inadmissible..." I wonder if you realise what this word connotes here. The first thing you must have thought of is "winding-sheet, garment for the dead" or else "a concealing agency". Looking at the whole phrase - "green as meadow-shroud" — one should get clean beyond the common associations. Chadwick was a sort of word-fancier. In several of his poems he revived beautiful or striking neglected terms, sometimes dialectal, such as only a mind steeped in all the shades and grades of English speech could exploit to poetic effect. To conceive of him as lacking in awareness of linguistic auras and penumbras and associations and to pick him out as an exemplar of "Indian-English" running riot would be indeed a piece of gaucherie. If you consult the OED you will find among the very first significances of "shroud": "vesture in which the world or the things of
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nature are clothed." An illustration is in Chaucer's Romance of the Rose, 64:
And then bicometh the ground so proud
That it wol have a newe shroud.
Obviously, what Chadwick's "meadow" is clothed in and what makes it "green" thereby is grass. It may be a roundabout way of echoing "verts comme les prairies", but we can't fault it on the score of poetry proper. And how from an over-free English treatment of a French original do we get on to Sri Aurobindo's own original work in English? By hook or by crook he must be made out a poetaster!
(By the way, there is a misprint in my book's reproduction of Chadwick: "vista's gloom" should read "vista'd gloom.")
Now a new attempt with the same purpose of debunking Sri Aurobindo pulls Rudolf Steiner into the picture. The reasoning goes: Steiner. for all his being a remarkable visionary and a valuable developer of Goethe's ideas on plant-growth, form, light and colour, was yet no great shakes when he painted many pictures to illustrate his realisation about the nature of colour: similarly Sri Aurobindo, though an outstanding spiritual figure, made a poor show in the poetry in which he sought to express his mystical vision and experience. In a letter to Kishor Gandhi you even compared Sri Aurobindo to Pope John Paul II who, though reckoned a holy man, can make no impression with the verses he writes. Here is just the general principle that one who is eminent for his high inner life is not necessarily successful in channelling it into art. But you forget that there is no intrinsic impossibility in combining art with holiness or visionary inwardness. So the argument by analogy from the exponent of Anthroposophy or the Head of the Catholic Church carries no convincing force. Besides, the comparisons betray little insight into Sri Aurobindo's achievement in supernormal consciousness. You might as well speak of the avatars and rishis and prophets in the same
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breath as Steiner or the present occupant of the Vatican. Furthermore, the ranges of occult and spiritual being attained and explored by a master Yogi like Sri Aurobindo are precisely those in which the mysterious founts of great art lie, so that if one has already an artistic turn one is very likely to find it enhanced and even supremely activated. These are the ranges from which the Rigveda's mantras, the Upanishads' slokas, the Gita's srutis - the most glorious utterances of poetic spirituality - have issued. And when we read The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and the countless letters to Yogic aspirants we discover a body of unparalleled knowledge of the hidden dimensions of existence, an intimate sight of superhuman planes and an exploration of their details, a familiarity with their soul-scapes, their denizens, their creative potencies such as you come across nowhere else in the world's literature of religious, occult, spiritual realisation. Where except in Sri Aurobindo does one find precise and extended accounts not only of the in-worlds but also of the worlds above the mental level - the "overhead" planes which Sri Aurobindo distinguishes and describes as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition. Overmind and, beyond the last-named, the still unmanifested Supermind which is the dynamic face and front of the utter Absolute? Isn't there the greatest possibility, the utmost probability, that the genuine poetry of the Spirit, even the sovereign inevitability of the Overmind where the ultimate springs of all poetic speech are to be traced, should have its outlet in one who lived continuously both in the in-worlds and in the over-worlds, one whose consciousness had broken through the limits of the human ego and was at home at once in the Cosmic and the Transcendental, not only in the static Self of Selves but also in the crowded immensities of the active Godhead, the expressive Superconsciousness whose Words are Worlds? Isn't such an outlet very much on the cards in at least some part of the amazingly prolific and varied work of one who was reared on the masterpieces of verse in many western
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and eastern languages and who, speaking and thinking in English from early boyhood in England up to his twenty-first year there, had himself the poetic urge throughout his life of English-writing? I hope you will understand how irrelevant and inappropriate is any analogy from Steiner or Pope John Paul 11.
I am glad you were happy with the lines about Old Age. They are another excerpt from Sri Aurobindo's narrative of 1899, Love and Death. Naturally they go home to people like us who can't help wondering how long we shall continue being "Spirit, dallying with transience"'. Yes, indeed I am a little ahead of you: I completed my eighty-third year on last November 25. Neither of us has lost the "impetuous joys" of youth so far as poetry is concerned and youth is with us also in point of energy. You must be surpassing me there, what with "the time-consuming problems" you mention. But why do you hold that the peace of old age which those lines speak of is out of your reach? Activities such as yours need not come in the way of the state Sri Aurobindo hints at in Savitri:
A poised serenity of tranquil strength,
A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest
Faced all experience with unaltered peace.
Perhaps you will repeat as a reason for not having peace: "I shall never reach spiritual enlightenment in the Indian sense, though the poet sees far off that vision." The second part of this sentence provides for some reflection of the profound calm that spiritual enlightenment brings as one of its boons. What must help that reflection is the disclosure you make apropos of the lines of Yeats's you quoted in your letter of December 11: "At nearly eighty the evocation of love means to me little or nothing any more..." I am reminded of Sophocles who said on his eightieth birthday: "At last I am free of passion." The case was quite different with Hugo and Goethe. Around eighty Hugo was still a
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skirt-chaser, and Goethe at that age had his last heart-flutter over a girl of eighteen although he had also the glorious intuition, half Sufi half Tantric, with which the second part of Faust closes:
Das Ewig-weibliche .
Zieht uns hinan,
which may be rendered:
The Eternal Feminine
Is leading us upward.
Goethe's uplifting as well as penetrating phrase brings to my memory the figure of Sri Aurobindo's co-worker, the Mother of our Ashram, and I am led to quote to you two passages from an article I wrote on her in 1958:
"On February 21 she completes her eightieth year. It would be the extreme of ineptitude to say she is eighty years old. Timeless is she not only in her inmost being but also in all the expressions of it in her outermost activity. Few of her disciples are up in the morning as early as she, and few turn to repose as late. It is hardly four or five years ago that she used to be on her feet, without a moment's respite, from five in the morning to nearly two in the afternoon - meeting people, ministering to their spiritual needs, considering their physical requirements, attending to the reports of numerous departments, giving flowers charged with the soul's secrets, making those secrets breathe out more sweetly with that flower of flowers, her smile. In the evening again, from four she would be active, with a little recreation by way of tennis for an hour and then with a large amount of re-creation of lost joy or clouded light in the thousand disciples who would move past her for a couple of hours to receive from her hands a nut or a sweet through which their very bodies could absorb grace. Even today, her manifold activity is of one who is ever young, and at the day's end there is none who
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leaves the Ashram Playground with a fresher face and a lighter step.
"Watching her, day after day, we realise that more than mere words are what she once spoke oh old age. She said, in effect: 'The coming of old age is due to two suggestions. First, the general collective suggestion - people telling you that you are getting old and can't do one thing or another. There is also the individual suggestion which keeps repeating, I am getting old, I mustn't attempt this or that. The truth is quite different. Before thirty, the energy goes out in a spendthrift way because of the play of impulses. After thirty, there is a settling down and one is expected to have a plenitude of energy. At fifty, blossoming begins. At eighty, one becomes capable of full production..' "
I shall end on this note, only adding two points. First, Jean Mambrino has sent me four books of his which I shall thankfully acknowledge soon. A friend of mine here is very much interested in Temenos and wants to know whether it is a quarterly, six-monthly or yearly.
With the warmth of the heart's friendship which always accompanies the heat of the mind's quarrel I close.
(18.1.1988)
This letter has nothing to do with our discussion. It records a dream or rather the part of a dream which has stuck in my memory.
A little before 4 a.m. this morning - which means about 11 p.m. of the previous day in London - I seem to have met you on a subtle plane. The meeting was extremely vivid and very friendly. You have with you some books and a few personal articles, of which I can remember only a comb. With these things in your hands you pass from one room to another, with me accompanying you. We chat about a book-review in the TLS. You remark that the TLS has four Indian reviewers on its staff and that a linguistic characteristic of
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theirs is the word "whatsoever." spelt with a hyphen after "what" and "so". I mention a book-title, which you fancy: "Dalliance with eternity." Then I tell you the source of it - a couple of lines which, as I remind you, I have already quoted in one of my letters:
White chambers of dalliance with eternity,
And the stupendous gates of the Alone.
There is a smile of satisfaction on your face. I tell you that these lines recall a phrase from those on Old Age I recently sent you: "Spirit dallying with transience" - a phrase with which you were particularly pleased out of a passage the whole of which had made you happy.
After exchanging some more words we go back to the first room. But, before you come there, you open a box of mine and, taking a hair-brush from it, pass it over your own hair. I am at the same time surprised and glad at this gesture. Then I wake up and look at the clock on my bedside table. It shows exactly 4 in the morning.
Fearing lest 1 should forget the details of the dream-meeting if I fell asleep again, I got out of my bed and noted them down on a piece of paper. They may appear trivial except for the literary strain in them bespeaking a deep-ingrained trait in both of us. What has impressed me even more than this is the closeness between us. There was no sense of any controversy lingering. Even now, while I am typing I am aware of your presence almost physically and find it very congenial.
(30.1.1988)
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We live in a very mysterious world, in which thoughts are realities that communicate in ways other than print. Of course any dream contains many elements but I have no doubt that there was indeed some meeting between us in yours. I enclose the book review in last week's TLS which as you see is extremely hostile and malicious (besides being a typical example of the decline in values in this country over the last years) and I was very distressed about it - more than I at my age should have been, but I had hoped that a review in the TLS might have made our work in Temenos better known to more people who might share our concern to restore true values in this decline of standards. I also enclose a friendly review from the Times of Pakistan - by way of contrast, which should reassure you if you are in any doubt about the better values prevailing on the subcontinent. And part of a letter from Laurens van der Post. So you see your information in the subtle body was so far correct. The comb? That too is a strange if trivial detail. I had broken my ivory comb many years ago and had seen one exactly like it, which I had asked my daughter to enquire about for me (it proved too expensive!). But as a trivial but accurate detail it is nevertheless remarkable.
As to books, you and I would both be likely to be carrying them! Dalliance with Eternity is a good theme. So is Dalliance with Transience. Is that your judgment on me? Which do I do? As a poet with both I suppose. If there is any difference. Incidentally I have been deep in reading Pupul .Jayakar's Life of Krishnamurti. Profound, but austere, his teaching. I find in it deep thoughts on Being; and on Consciousness; but where is the Bliss (ananda)? How do you find him? I have to review the book for Resurgence. I am very surprised that I took the liberty of using your hairbrush but glad if you did not mind!
I intend to reply to your most recent letter when I have got certain urgent things out of the way. I've been writing of my impressions of India in the course of my three visits, not to say correspondence with you and a few others and how 'the India of the Imagination' and the India of the temporal here and now compare and contrast. One might say that the England of the Imagination is very far from the degenerate England of the temporal present. I have of course only
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dipped my feet in the ocean - or river - of India - but even that is transforming. India must save the whole world's soul, or we are all lost. It is already happening, of course. I represent but a drop in that tide. But Temenos at least is on a significant intellectual level; it is easy to dismiss the children of the various New Age movements. But these changes must come at all levels.
It is at present uncertain whether Temenos will continue after our tenth issue; but I would be happy to publish something of yours on the theme of The Future Poetry, the idea of the various levels on which poetry operates. Something entirely forgotten here, where poetry operates only on the lowest level, or lower still were that possible. There are of course some exceptions but all too few.
I am very moved by your letter. Although you are often in my thoughts I
(February 1988)
I was very happy with your response to my dream-experience. Yes, those two little points - the TLS and the comb -touch physical realities connected with you and seem to imply an actual meeting in our subtle bodies. There appears to be a symbolic matching between your comb and my hairbrush. The matching would have been perfect if, just as you used my hairbrush, I had used your comb. As it is, I wonder what a Jungian psychologist would read in what you did. Both the comb and the brush bring the theme of hair into prominence.
Mallarme, as my book may have reminded you, was much preoccupied with this theme. It gets treated at some length in the sonnet La chevelure vol d'une flamme... There the hair stands for the one life-energy in two forms of beauty: the uncoiling of it is the symbol of the profane, the erotic
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mode whereas the binding up of the tresses indicates the sacred, the aesthetico-mystic way. But in my dream we are in the dimension of literature with a sort of spiritual light falling upon it and the head of hair seems to represent the mental being with its manifold self-expression of whatever ideative enlightenment it may have. Your gesture may have more than one meaning. Apparently it is a movement of friendliness with a shade of deepening into a spontaneous intimacy. No wonder I was filled with gladness at the same time as surprise.
All that happened in the dream-experience suggests at least that our long controversy has ended or should end. Both of us have had our flings about Sri Aurobindo's poetry. We may leave it and our debate to the future's judgment. About one whale of a letter of mine you said that it was worth publishing. I replied that I would never publish it without letting you have your say as well. If somebody finances the venture, do I have your permission to bring out another collection like The English Language and the Indian Spirit? It would start with the very first letter you wrote to me on receiving a copy of that book - at the beginning of last year. We went on to discuss Yeats and the subject became livelier with the arrival here of your remarkable Yeats the Initiate and brought in many other topics, including Tagore in Radice's translation, and in and out of the to-and-fro of our opinions and arguments the subject of Sri Aurobindo as a poet kept moving before it took the centre of the stage and along with its pros and cons brought up a host of general questions on poetry which are sure to interest many readers - at least in India. With the hope of interesting readers in England and the USA I sent copies of our first book both to the TLS and the New York Times Book Review. I believed that your fame would induce them to take notice. But there has been a dead silence. The same holds for The Obscure and the Mysterious and the earlier publication "Three Loves" and "A Worthier Pen": The Enigmas of Shake speare's Sonnets. Would you like me to send you the last-
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named study? If you have time to spare 1 would be glad to get your reactions to my utterly novel identification of the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet. Anyway, I'll post you a copy and if ever you have a bit of leisure you can dip into it.
The TLS review of Temenos 8 by a rather pretentious Scotsman criticising what he dubs "Elitism" in a style which is a specimen of falsely elitist writing should not have bothered you so much. Sometimes a markedly prejudiced comment is as good an encouragement to adventurous readers as a strikingly perceptive eulogy. What exactly do you mean when you say that you were more distressed than you should have been at your age? Perhaps you mean that you have had a fighting life and should have been inured to slings and arrows - having become a toughie by now. But, of course, when things we hold precious in our hearts, the causes we consider sacred are treated with subtle disdain, there is a deep pain in the sense that the depths in us are hurt. Possibly by 80 you should have known what to expect from a decadent age and not set your hopes so high: is this what you had in mind? As you know already, the Indian subcontinent and especially the Hindu part of it are still far from being cynical about matters of the Spirit and we have a spontaneous feel of high endeavour, an instinctive sympathy with the arduous attempt to catch in life or, if not in life, at least in art a concentrated outbreak of the Divine Presence ethereally pervading the universe. Every truly typical Indian is a Wordsworth in some degree or other, sensing a Cosmic Revelation in various forms, more distinct in some aspects of Nature than in others as the seer of the Lake District knew when he spoke of the secret universal Being
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
Do you know that Tennyson regarded this line as the grandest in English poetry? He may well be nearly right, for to my mind both the art and the heart of it are superb. Take the vowellation to start with. A softly penetrating sound
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meets us the first thing as if leading us into some far depth, a delicately stretched-out heavenly home in the distance figured to our ear and eye by the word "dwelling" with its finely yet firmly expansive first syllabic based on the widening quality the w gives to the short e and with its in-drawing second syllable which is short but at the same time given weight by the conjunct consonants following it. The same initial e-sound though without any expansive touch and . the same terminal i-sound recur in the adjective "setting" balancing in the midst of different consonants and six monosyllables the two-syllabled "dwelling" and thereby imparting to us the justness of the imaginative insight which puts together the universal Being's abode and the day's departing glow. This glow itself serves the balancing by being caught in sound-value by the markedly long-vowelled "light". The phrase "setting suns" picks up the sibilancc with which the line commences and with a triple occurrence masses it into a soothing and silencing effect on the ear while the eye receives the impression of a glory-burst before a final fading away. One may ask: "Why setting suns and not rising ones?" It must be a profound instinct in the poet that made the choice, for here the passage is from splendour into mystery, the bright visible is the guide to the fathomless invisible which is to Wordsworth the trance-goal of all conscious seeking for the divinity interfused with the world.
Mention of Wordsworth of the "Tintern-Abbey" period brings me to your question whether I would ascribe to you dalliance with eternity or dalliance with transience or, taking you as a poet, both. At first blush one might doubt if one can speak of dalliance apropos of so serious-minded a singer as Wordsworth. But surely serious-mindedness doesn't preclude the light-hearted romantic temper. It only precludes romancing with life's superficialities. Even in common things the Wordsworthian mood searches for a deep chord of living. And this chord, a music of time coming from a silence of eternity, makes for a persistent happiness. Didn't Wordsworth say, "Even Coleridge didn't understand me,
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for he was not happy enough"? As you are steeped in Wordsworth's poetry it is no mis-step to move from him to you. But there seems to be a difference of shade between his dalliance and yours. He loves the eternal in the transient, you the transient in the eternal. To him eternity is always there in front, to you it is ever there in the background. It is constantly present for both of you, but for him it is a felt reality whereas for you it is a visioned one, he was a born mystic, the mystic in you is waiting for her birth. Meanwhile the shadow of the sacred floats upon your poetry: the sacred is not yet a swimmer in it. This does not necessarily make for a defect in the verse. Poetry as such does not need to be mystical in order to be first-rate and the visioning of eternity as contrasted to the feeling of it can also create an exquisite happiness in the poet, but this happiness will come and go and the dallying spirit will not find its whole life answering to that perception or experience of Vaughan:
A quickness which my God hath kisst.
You have asked me how I find Krishnamurti. His early life has always fascinated me - the way he broke out of the mould created for him by Mrs. Besant and Leadbeater and, as if inwardly drawn to the future by some projection from the past which had held the timeless Buddha, he launched on the adventure of what he has called "pathless reality" to which, according to him, there can be no guide except the deepening of one's own self into a quiet detached inner presence which is ever "mindful". A vague figuration seems to have been touched by him of what the seer-creator of Savitri has set before us as one ultimate aspect of the manifold Eternal:
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I say "a vague figuration" because I am afraid the word "mindful" does not indicate merely a mode of approach but also the level on which the realisation is reached. If this realisation is permanent, it is no small achievement and yet how far from the all-transcending Nirvana in which the mental consciousness is overpassed, the infinite self-luminous abyss of the Silent Brahman beyond the time and space of the entire "sevenfold chord" of manifested existence! I have no quarrel with this limited status as such but I don't feel happy with the clever word-play that goes on with topics like "change", "time", "thought" and "question". The verbal game is meant to divert the mind from its usual track and, blocking its ordinary thinking, veer it inward, but it often sounds like a bit of superficial trickiness and covers genuine ignorance on the part of the teacher. In the hands of the teacher's followers it generally becomes an irritating irrelevance and once when I had the occasion to meet some of them in Bombay years ago I found it a mockery of the deep soul's movement. There I was, all aflame with longing for the Beauty of ancient days yet ever new, and they were twitting me with little cries of "Oh you are now speaking from the time-consciousness" and similar sophistries. I could see they were quite surprised that a man could be in love with the immense Unknown as if that Unknown had a hidden face and a secret smile and words of sweetness and light and strength waiting to be heard in the depths of the seeker's heart. You have well said about Krishnamurti: "Profound, but austere, his teaching. I find in it deep thoughts on Being and Consciousness; but where is the Bliss (ananda)?" The Upanishad has said in effect: "There is an ether of Bliss in which all is hung. If it were not there, who could take a single breath?" I remember also the other Upanishadic utterance: "From Bliss is everything born, in Bliss everything lives, to Bliss everything goes back." The searching eyes of the lover, the straining lips of the poet are doomed to remain unfulfilled by Krishnamurti. They want the Divine who will stoop down from the Beyond and give
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them the enchantments of Form, the intoxications of Name. From all that 1 have read I gather that Krishnamurti was a warm helpful person, but his teaching strikes at the very root of the soul's movement towards the Personal Divine or His representative the enlightened Guru. Throughout India's history the Master is the fount of the spiritual life. Krishnamurti, in a paradoxical gesture, says: "Refuse to have any teacher, learn at no one's feet. Never forget this teaching of mine when I am not there for you to learn it from." Behind the guru in India stands the Supreme Lord or the World-Mother. Under Krishnamurti's persuasion we have to forget the call of Krishna Himself through the Gita: "You that have come into this transient and unhappy world, love and worship Me" - or: "Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone. I will deliver you from all harm and evil. Have no fear" - or else: "Dear are you to me and I shall reveal to you my most secret word."
Please excuse the length at which I have written. Here is only my individual response to your inquiry. It need not colour your review.
(21.2.1988)
Your letter is very comforting. When contact is made on the subtle planes one must be serious. I, of course, was unaware of this contact - being more deeply 'sunk in stony sleep' of the natural body than you who have travelled far on the spiritual path which I see only far off and am aware of intellectually. But the evidence of the TLS and the odd confirmatory detail of the comb 1 mildly coveted on that very day is incontrovertible. I did not get it (the comb), it was too expensive, and have not given it a thought since, but it is proof of an actual, not a merely symbolic contact don't you think? As to symbolic interpretation, since the dream was yours that aspect of the dream relates solely to you - the symbolism of hair, etc. I presumably represent for you some
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aspect of the Poetic Muse and also your interest in English (and French?) poetry, not surely to forget William Blake who was our first and remains an enduring link. So I would read your dream as suggesting that the Muse is well disposed to your work and that I had the honour, in one dream, of being the mask under which Saraswati appeared to you! Not that names and masks matter, but the feminine muse has ever been important to poets.
As to why I was so upset by the TLS I think there are several strands. First, I ought not at my age to mind blows -the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and so on - and should meet adversity and its opposite with 'equal mind'. I thought my equanimity would have been equal to the situation. Second, I was outraged on behalf of our distinguished contributors who have supported Temenos without being paid a penny for contributions. Third, I was ashamed for my country. There was a time - as you know -when the TLS represented the best, the most authoritative critical judgments of current publications. Now it is a cheap ignorant nasty little clique of journalists inspired mainly by envy, and by no means wishing to be confronted with a journal that affirms quite other standards, albeit these standards are closer to the universal norm of all human civilizations. And finally, I felt 1 had failed in our venture, a vain one in a country whose culture has declined to a nadir of decadence and has no future. In part this is a decline in standard of education - the schools (state schools) impart the barest literacy, and the English public is really educated - 'conditioned' rather - by the television-set whose purpose is to impart news of a violent and ignorant world and to sell sell sell everything from cars and after-shave lotions to convenience foods and contraceptives. The England of Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Shelley is barely remembered. Yet it seemed to me that Temenos, reaffirming a standard which at other times - or even now in France -might have seemed but a norm - might have drawn to our standard those who still are concerned with these things. But
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civilizations do after all come to an end, why should our own (Not yours, I speak of the secular materialist West) fare better? Would I not do better to live in a cottage with roses round the door etc. and write verse? Or leave this world where my task is all but finished? However, Temenos 10 shall be published.
You do not say whether you are willing to contribute a paper on poetry from the standpoint of Sri Aurobindo and yourself, who rightly understand that there are different levels from which poetry speaks. This is a most important thing to understand, and I would like to publish such a paper if you are willing to write one. Albeit here there seems to have been a continual lowering, not raising, of the level of consciousness. Materialism prevails and the language itself has been impoverished and debased. As you say, India is by no means cynical about things of the spirit, endangered though you inevitably are by multinational commercial imperialism. If India is lost all is lost but I can't believe that will happen. On the contrary it is surely time for India to play an active part in saving the soul of the world. Which of course you are already doing in many ways. So what about such an article for probably our last issue of Temenos?
You are right about Wordsworth and 'happiness', and 'ananda' being absent from the thought of Krishnamurti. I too am all too far from happiness, I see it afar off but never deny it, I never forget lost Paradise and regard it as one task of the poet never to forget, never to break faith with that country poets see afar and only saints inhabit. I realize more and more that unless poetry can give joy we should be silent. Yet sorrow itself is a far-off way of keeping faith with ananda, for if like the purveyors of Mercedes-Benz cars and shampoos and cigarettes we consented to their world of material satisfactions-all would be lost. As in the Psalm of the Jews in exile, 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning' etc. 'By the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept.'
I like your young friend's piece on Kubla Khan, and it
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may well be that she has indeed settled the date of the poem. I can't see Coleridge as likely to be accurate about dates. He may well have read Wordsworth's letter. The thing about poetic images and metaphors and symbols is not that it is either from this source or from that, but and, as in the imaginative world a crystallization takes place of this waterfall seen by Wordsworth, another described in Purchase, the first wondrous waterfall we saw as a child, and perhaps some archetype in the soul itself, a sort of map of Paradise each carries within, together with the Mountain, the Four Rivers, the Gates of the Temple, and the inner light that comes from no sun or moon but from the Source itself. Plotinus sees 'Nature' as a projection of the soul itself made in order to contemplate itself. This in the West seems a very far-fetched notion but not 1 think in India. But if the Eternal India, the India of the Imagination is lost, then the world might just as well destroy itself without further delay for the attempt to live without soul or spirit disseminated by Western materialist civilization is the end of our humanity.
As to "dalliance' I think of myself rather as on the field of the Great Battle in a beleaguered outpost, with little opportunity for dalliance! Rather like seeing Tagore's 'jasmin-spray' as the missiles and bullets whizz past. All the dearer its beauty indeed, but one wants rather to tell the grass and the leaves and the waters and the very soil of the earth that we are sorry and ashamed for what we have done to earth and its creatures; and the holocaust within is even worse.
By all means publish whatever you like of our exchanges. This letter also if you so wish. I don't mind my thoughts on my own country being known; or on India. I think India is perilously exposed to the cancer of consumerism but yet there arc many here in the West who are ready to learn from India. Material power is finally so ineffectual and self-defeating. But how long will it take the world to discover that unless we build on the foundation of eternal Spirit our cities will crumble. Or it may be that we should not resist the Destroyer when the time has come to destroy.
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My dear friend, let us remain in correspondence even if we may have exhausted the theme of Savitri. I am reading a very bad American translation of the whole text of the Mahabharata, but translated without a gleam or glimmer of poetry and what a waste of industry. However, Peter Brook's dramatized version, which is said to be wonderful, is coming to Glasgow - not London, England couldn't care less - in May. I'm not sure when it goes to India.
As to ananda my own life is a write-off (not perhaps my work) but those like myself must be content to know that Paradise is there, and that there are happy souls like William Blake who are 'inhabitants of that happy country'. The lost also bear witness to the sorrow of that loss.
(2.3.1988)
Your letter of March 2nd is perhaps the most beautiful you have written and it is all the more so because it is a-glow with your passion for the "sacred" which has kept the torch of Temenos "burning bright" for the last so many years. I share your concern over "the forests of the night" springing up everywhere. Even India feels their shadow falling here and there, but the "distant deeps or skies" from which the saviour "fire" has to be caught are more clearly seen than elsewhere and the "wings" on which the soul has to "aspire" towards them have never been quite folded in the land where even in our materialistic times a Ramakrishna could arise, tripping like a haloed child with a spontaneous intensity of heart into all the known courts of heaven, a Vivekananda could come like "a lion of the Vedanta" spreading with his own illuminated mind his master's message in the West as-well as the East, a Raman a Maharshi could embody the eternal Peace which would enable the commonest man to reach out to that rare Wordsworthian ideal -
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Our destiny, our being's heart and home
Is with infinitude and only there -
and a Sri Aurobindo could stand like a Colossus with all-visioning, all-revealing eyes, his head exemplifying the realisation which one of his disciples has illustrated with the lines —
The core of a deathless sun is now the brain
And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold -
and his feet planted firmly yet most lovingly on the earth, the patient compassionate mother of our lives, to whom he sought ever to transmit through his upward-yearning limbs the freedom, the glory, the beatitude of high heaven where he had discovered the secret of secrets, the archetypal Truth-Consciousness, the ultimate Gnosis. That secret, by which in "the long results of time" the very body has the chance to be divinised by the light of the perfect model of it pre-existing in the "Supermind", has been vaguely dreamt of in various guises - the elixir vitae, le corps glorieux, the final alchemy achieved by the philosopher's stone, the esoteric sense behind the legend of Jesus' resurrection (quite different from mere physical resuscitation) - ever since the Rigveda spoke of liberating the sun buried in the earth and the Upanishads called Matter itself Brahman.
You may wonder why in my list of recent spiritual luminaries I have not mentioned Krishnamurti. From my last letter you must have gathered how during my search for God I was disappointed by his followers and was convinced that some occult power was using him with the gift of a certain semi-Buddhist experience on the mental plane to fix down to an ambiguous imitation of the Witness self (sakshi purusha) the many-sighted far-venturing soul of the world, particularly plastic and versatile in its Indian mood. Through him this power attempts to confuse and limit that soul, even to cut the ground from under its devotion to the One whom
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through the ages it has hailed as Lord and Lover and Guide and whose representative it has always recognised in the enlightened Guru. On deeper thought 1 am inclined to withdraw whatever little admiration I gave Krishnamurti in regard to his break-away from his own Gurus, Mrs. Annie Besant and Leadbeater.
I now see that this break-away was not really a plunge into freedom beyond the narrowing hold of these two mentors of his but an escape into an independence conducive to the aggrandisement of his own self. He sought to make himself the path to the "pathless Reality" about which he talks at so much length: a vast ambition possessed him and it was an ambition to destroy all past spirituality of Guru-worship and God-adoration. Rather I should say that the occult Force at work through him made his ambition a tool for its own purpose. You must be aware that Mrs. Besant and Leadbeater had trained him to be the vehicle of "the World-Teacher" and indeed those who heard him at a certain grand gathering were struck by the mediumistic way he addressed them. I believe that "the World-Teacher" and he became fused, as it were, when he severed his connection with those two theosophist leaders. Across Krishnamurti's attractive personality the preter-natural mission went on very effectively to counteract all movements of the soul's sweetness and light, all gestures of humility before the Superhuman, all ego-surpassing by means of submission to the "One who has shaped the world" and "is still its Lord", surrender to the Incarnate Divine, the Ishwara-Shakti manifested in the flesh. Apparently what Krishnamurti did was to set aside the Theosophical Society: actually it was an individualistic drive towards the demolition of India's aeonic tradition of master-disciple relationship and particularly her beauty-haunted love-enchanted Yoga of Devotion, her cult of the rapturous inner dance with the flute-player of Brindavan, her profound pull towards the many-sided word of wisdom and dynamism and compassion enshrined in the Gila with the towering figure behind it of the Divine Driver of Arjuna's
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war-chariot and life-chariot as the Personal Godhead to whom all one's being has to flow.
It is an ironical situation that the contemporary figure who is subtly most subversive of the Truth-revelatory Ananda, the variously illuminating Bliss with its expressive corollaries of Beauty and Love which Sri Krishna channelled to the earth should be addressed by his disciples as "Krishnaji." The irony comes home to me rather acutely because of some words of Sri Aurobindo's to a seeker who had been a Vaishnava but had somehow felt drawn to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Sri Aurobindo wrote to him that there should be no conflict or contradiction, for what was being done in the Ashram was Sri Krishna's own work. Of course, by this he did not mean that the Ashram was an ultra-Vaishnavite centre and was repeating the teachings of the Bhagawata Purana or even the Bhagavad Gita in an intense form. What he meant was that the Ashram was carrying further the lines along which Sri Krishna had proceeded -the lines of a synthesis of Yoga, the coalescence of the Paths of Knowledge, Work and Devotion, crowned by an utter self-giving beyond all Paths, beyond all Dharmas, to the Supreme Divinity who is both within and without, both here and above, and with whom a multitude of relationships, mind-heightening, heart-deepening, life-widening, can be established. Those lines would terminate in an "Integral Yoga" by which there would be the descent into us of the Supreme Divinity's hitherto hidden highest status - Super-mind - and there would be the action of an all-transforming power so that a new earth-existence would flower, fulfilling all that is finest here and bringing a magic and a music which are as yet a faintly intuited mystery to us. If Sri Krishna's work is being furthered by Sri Aurobindo and endowed with a consummation greater than any possible in the past, I cannot help regarding Krishnamurti as essentially anti-Aurobindonian in motive and influence no less than anti-Indian in general by his single-tracked drift towards a heart-drying thought-impoverishing "void" in the inner
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consciousness of the mental self.
I am sorry if you find me too negative - and sorry too that I have taken up so much space about a matter which may not be of much interest to you. Let me turn to my dream of us. The occurrence of the comb and the reference to the TLS were indeed proofs of the reality of our contact, but to me the sense of the meeting was so concrete that I needed no proofs. I have some experience with dreams of various kinds as well as some familiarity with other planes and their objects and denizens. The feel of reality in these subtle things is quite different from the experience of mingled fantasies and memories which we get in our ordinary sleep. The reality is of two sorts: an entry into supraphysical worlds and a meeting with human beings on an inner level of consciousness. There is no intrusion of fantasy when one enters other ranges of existence than the physical; one sees what is actually there. Fantasy and symbolism come into a bit of play when one gets into touch with fellow humans on an inner conscious level; the subjective dream-element is not quite excluded, but symbolism has a greater role here than fantasy and neither of them takes away the actuality of two subtle bodies meeting and, through that meeting, passing somewhat into each other's mind. It was impossible for me to doubt that I had walked and talked with the real Kathleen Raine, or that I had become aware of what you are in the inner recesses of your being. Not only the subtle bodies but also the subtle consciousnesses were communicating and the thoughts were going over from one to the other both directly and through symbolic acts. Your attempt at reading my dream splits it into two parts - the hair-element as relating solely to me and the you-me element as representing something more general. You write: "I presumably represent for you some aspect of the Poetic Muse and also your interest in English (and French?) poetry, not surely to forget William Blake who was our first and remains an enduring link. So I would read your dream as suggesting that the Muse is well-disposed to your work and that I had
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the honour, in one dream, of being the mask under which Saraswati appeared to you! Not that names and masks matter, but the feminine muse has ever been important to poets." In this reading, what stands out for you is the Muse being favourable to me under the mask of KR: what may stand out for someone else may be KR figuring with favour in the image of the Muse. In either case, but especially in the latter, there seems to come into your association with me a more sympathetic, more encouraging, more accepting attitude to my work. Saraswati masking as KR or KR in the Saraswati-part of her being is, as you put it, "well disposed" to my activity as a poet, either myself creating verse or the verse-creator in me responding to the inspiration of fellow poets. Something in the secret places of your heart appears to come close to the work that is near my own heart
in the realms of gold...
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
But how can that be? The outer KR has been often at loggerheads with me. Could the inner KR be less headstrong? And here arises as if with a natural affinity the picture which took me quite by surprise in my dream: KR brushing her head of hair with my hair-brush in a spontaneous gesture which filled me with great pleasure. The two parts into which you split the symbolism of the dream may not be so divided as at first sight you think.
Anyway, there is no doubt that the dream bears testimony not only to an actual inner-plane contact but also to a warm intimate relationship in a common love of literature - poetic literature in particular - to which our happy talk of "dalliance with eternity" bears evidence.
The turning of our talk to the TLS shows the deep interest with which one naturally approaches a periodical with a great name in the past. As you told me afterwards the reference to the TLS pointed to your own actual concern at that time over the semi-cynical manner in which it had dealt
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with the high cause to which you had dedicated yourself for years. Surely the TLS has fallen in my estimate no less than in yours by the sly philistinism of its review of Temenos. But perhaps all is not so dark and hopeless as you see and feel at present. Competent and enlightening reviews still meet us from its columns. 1 remember two long ones treating of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sarah Coleridge. Certainly such things don't excuse cleverly nasty sneers at a noble venture like yours. In the old days they would have been impossible. All the same they have served a purpose they could have never thought of. After the first pain they brought you they have put your back up most unexpectedly. I cannot admire sufficiently the spirit in which you confront the decay of standards and the general prospect of your country's civilisation coming to an end. You say: "Would I not do better to live in a cottage with roses round the door etc. and write verse? Or leave this world where my task is alt but finished? However, Temenos 10 shall be published." That's real courage and a superb creative deployment of the emotion of the ideal.
The brief suggestion you make of your ideal is very penetrating: the refusal to forget lost paradise, the poet's one task being never to break faith with that country, no matter if only saints can inhabit it and poets can but see it afar. Not to be satisfied with material comfort and profit and pleasure, ever to ache for the eternal Loveliness, the perfect Presence that glimmers out to us from beyond the all-too-human and to strive to catch a sense of it from the strangely glinting transiences in both outer and inner experience: this seems to me the life of the true poet. And here is at the same time joy and sorrow. The vision of Eden, however distant, and the discovery of its wandering reflections, its passing echoes, in what impinges on our eyes and ears in the movements of our days and nights are surely sources of happiness, and through every genuine poem we receive the flow from these secret fountains. But no poet can rest content with fragments of beauty; the ecstatic whole, the
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undying fullness are always his dream, his desire. Their lack leaves him perpetually yearning, their fragmentariness breaks his own heart. But this sorrow is most precious to him, for without it his imagination would be deprived of its wings and he would lose the urge to concentrate in flawless abiding word-form the fleeting and dispersed wonders that keep calling to him from the world of mortality. Unless he lived smitten by the unreachableness of the perfection, the archetype, the paradisal plenitude haunting his reverie, he would never be able to achieve that inevitable form which alone is the consummation of his art: the sorrow of what cannot be seized in life spurs him to mirror in faultless artistry the remote Platonic realm. This does not mean that unimpeachable poetry can be written only by the pang of alienation the poet feels from the Utopia of his dreams. If it is this Utopia from which inspiration streams, those who inwardly inhabit its ''happy climes" (to use a Blakean phrase) cannot be debarred from being its singers. Provided they have the poetic gift, their song should be the most glorious, whether common humanity can manage to cope with its extraordinary revelations or not. But for the poets who have not begun to live directly in those climes, the searing sense of separation from them is the goad to their endeavour to transmit through symbol and rhythm a rapturous hint of "forms that divinise the sight" and "music that can immortalise the mind" (as Savitri somewhere puts it).
Your mention of the Mahabharata prompts me to compliment you on your power of persistence and endurance face to face with the whole text of it translated by some totally unpoetic American. Even otherwise the total Mahabharata is not what its traditional author Vyasa actually composed. Of course it is all interesting and instructive as a picture of the Indian consciousness in its numerous aspects down the ages. But the original epic attributable to whoever is named Vyasa can be deduced from two passages in the Prolegomena (Adiparva, 118 and 102-107) to have been a poem of
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24 to 26 thousand slokas and not the mammoth it now is of 100,000 slokas, I should like to share with you some of the conclusions at which Sri Aurobindo arrived when he made a study of the poem in the period most probably in Baroda -long before he came to Pondicherry:
"All that we know of the Mahabharata at present is that it is the work of several hands and of different periods... Yet to extricate the original epic from the mass of accretions is not, I believe, so difficult a task as it may at first appear. One is struck in perusing the Mahabharata by the presence of a mass of poetry which bears the style and impress of a single, strong and original, even unusual mind, differing in his manner of expression, tone of thought & stamp of personality not only from every other Sanscrit poet we know but from every other great poet known to literature. When we look more closely into the distribution of this peculiar style of writing, we come to perceive certain very suggestive & helpful facts. We realise that this impress is only found in those parts of the poem which are necessary to the due conduct of the story; seldom to be detected in the more miraculous, Puranistic or trivial episodes, but usually broken up by passages and sometimes shot through with lines of a discernibly different inspiration. Equally noteworthy is it that nowhere does this poet admit any trait, incident or speech which deviates from the strict propriety of dramatic characterisation & psychological probability. Finally, in this body, Krishna's divinity is recognised but more often hinted at than aggressively stated. The tendency is to keep it in the background as a fact to which, while himself crediting it, the writer does not hope for a universal consent, still less is able to speak of it as of a general tenet & matter of dogmatic belief; he prefers to show Krishna rather in his human character, acting always by wise, discerning and inspired methods, but still not transgressing the limit of human possibility. All this leads one to the conclusion that in the body of poetry I have described, we have the real Bharata, an epic which tells plainly and straightforwardly of
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the events which led to the great war and the empire of the Bharata princes....
"...Tradition attributes it to Krishna of the Island called Vyasa who certainly lived about this time and was an editor of the Vedas; and since there is nothing in this part of the poem which makes the tradition impossible and much which favours it, we may, as a matter both of convenience and of probability accept it at least provisionally....
"...Vyasa is the most masculine of writers. When Coleridge spoke of the feminity of genius he had in mind certain features of temperament which whether justly or not, are usually thought to count for more in the feminine mould than in the masculine.... Yet Goethe, Dante and Sophocles show that the very highest genius can exist without them. But none of the great poets I have named is so singularly masculine, so deficient in feminity as Vyasa, none dominates so much by intellect and personality, yet satisfies so little the romantic imagination. Indeed no poet at all near the first rank has the same granite mind in which impressions are received with difficulty but once received are ineffaceable. In his austere self-restraint and economy of power he is indifferent to ornament for its own sake, to the pleasures of poetry as distinguished from its ardours, to little graces and self-indulgences of style; the substance counts for everything & the form has to limit itself to the proper work of expressing with precision & power the substance. Even his most romantic pieces have a virgin coldness & loftiness in their beauty. To intellects fed on the elaborate pomp and imagery of Kalidasa's numbers... Vyasa may seem bald and unattractive. To be fed on the verse of Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron and Tennyson is no good preparation for the severest classics. It is indeed I believe, the general impression of many 'educated' young Indians that the Mahabharata is a mass of old wives' stories without a spark of poetry or imagination. But to those who have bathed even a little in the fountain-heads of poetry, and can bear the keenness and purity of those mountain sources, the naked and unadorned
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poetry of Vyasa is a perpetual refreshment. To read him is to bathe in a chill fountain in the heats of summer....
"The style of this powerful writer is perhaps the one example in literature of strength in its purity; a strength undefaced by violence and excess yet not weakened by flagging and negligence. It is even less propped or helped out by artifices and aids than any other poetic style. Vyasa takes little trouble with similes, metaphors, rhetorical turns, the usual paraphernalia of poetry; nor when he uses them, is he at pains to select such as shall be new and curiously beautiful; they are there to define more clearly what he has in mind, and he makes just enough of them for that purpose, never striving to convert them into a separate grace or a decorative element. They have force and beauty in their context but cannot be turned into elegant excerpts; in themselves they are in fact little or nothing. When Bhima is spoken of as breathing hard like a weakling borne down by a load too heavy for him, there is nothing in the simile itself. It derives its force from its aptness to the heavy burden of unaccomplished revenge which the fierce spirit of the strong man was condemned to bear. We may say the same of his epithets, that great preoccupation of romantic artists; they are such as are most natural, crisp and firm, best suited to the plain idea and only unusual when the business in hand requires an unusual thought, but never recherche or existing for their own beauty. Thus when he is describing the greatness of Krishna and hinting his claims to be considered as identical with the Godhead, he gives him the one epithet aprameya, immeasurable, which is strong and unusual enough to rise to the thought, but not to be a piece of literary decoration or a violence of expression. In brief, he religiously avoids overstress, his audacities of phrase are few, and they have agrace of restraint in their boldness. There is indeed a rushing vast Valmekeian style which intervenes often in the Mahabharata; but it is evidently the work of a different hand, for it belongs to a less powerful intellect, duller poetical insight and coarser taste, which has yet
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caught something of the surge and cry of Valmekie's Oceanic poetry. Vyasa in fact stands at the opposite pole from Valmekie....
"Strength and a fine austerity are Then the two tests which give us safe guidance through the morass of the Mahabharata; where these two exist together, we may reasonably presume some touch of Vyasa; where they do not exist or do not conjoin, we feel at once the redactor or the interpolator.... The love of the wonderful touched with the grotesque, the taste for the amorphous, a marked element in Valmekie's complex temperament, is with his follower something like a malady. He grows impatient with the apparent tameness of Vyasa's inexorable self-restraint, and restlessly throws in here couplets, there whole paragraphs of a more flamboyant vigour. Occasionally this is done with real ability and success, but as a rule they are true purple patches, daubs of paint on the stainless dignity of marble. For his rage for the wonderful is not always accompanied by the prodigious sweep of imagination which in Valmekie successfully grasps and compels the most reluctant materials. The result is that puerilities and gross breaches of taste fall easily and hardily from his pen. Not one of these could we possibly imagine as consistent with the severe, self-possessed intellect of Vyasa. Fineness, justness, discrimination and propriety of taste are the very soul of the man."
I hope I haven't tired you with these excerpts. Before 1 close let me thank you for permission to publish whatever I like of our exchanges. I may touch on three other topics. My friend V. Seturaman, late of Annamalai University, has written to me: "Dr. Indira (one of my students) has gone to U.K. on a short assignment and she would like to have an appointment with Kathleen Raine. She may discuss one or two problems connected with Coleridge and Miss Raine's own poetry and its relationship to the Coleridgian tradition of romantic poetry. Indira is likely to be in London between 1st May & 8th May. Just now she is working in Cambridge. She is expected back here on the 12th May." I have asked
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my friend to tell Dr. Indira to phone to you and take an appointment. I trust this will not inconvenience you much.
Eira Dyne was very pleased to hear from me that you liked her piece on "Kubla Khan" and that it may well be that she has indeed settled the date of the poem.
Now the last point. You have asked me whether 1 am willing to contribute to Temenos a paper on poetry from the standpoint of Sri Aurobindo and myself, "who rightly understand that there are different levels from which poetry speaks". But if I get round to writing such a paper and expound what Sri Aurobindo calls "the Future Poetry", of which the inspiration and illumination from what he has termed "the Overhead planes" would be the major element, I shall inevitably have to give illustrations from his own work, notably Savitri. You have forbidden me to do so or else if you let me go ahead you are likely to put in a note expressing your disagreement with my choice. Under such conditions I would have to stand afar from Temenos with my riches undelivered, struck as if with
The silence that is in the starry sky.
(18.4.1988)
Thank you for your eloquent letter about many things that concern us both. I write by return of post but will re-read at leisure. However, I want to repeat my invitation to contribute a paper on Sri Aurobindo's and your own view of poetry as coming from different levels. You must of course be free to illustrate such a paper at your own wish, and if by Aurobindo so be it; but I would ask you to use also other examples, especially from English or European poets who are known to our readers. That you would in any case do, of course. If your paper were to come within the next six or eight weeks it could go into the tenth issue, to be published
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this year, which would be appropriate as this year is the centenary of Sri Aurobindo. There is no more important theme in the present depressed state of poetry in this country than the question of the levels from which it comes and to which it speaks.
To go back to your dream, I am interested and must agree with what you say about a symbol working both ways - you would not dream of Saraswati under the symbol of a cook or a female athlete! I hope some of my poems are such as She would accept as an offering. I had with me today, as it happens, a Professor Dalai (Suresh) from Gujarat, who has translated poems of mine into Gujarati - he has chosen well, too, which gives me great pleasure. One has even been made into a song, so perhaps Saraswati is well-disposed to me also. Have you received 'The Presence', the recently published book I am almost certain I sent you? If not please let me know and I will send another copy.
To proceed to Krishnamurti. I am deeply interested in what you write, for in reviewing Pupul Jayakar's book, I found myself turning page after page wondering when I would come to the point of vision which I somewhere expected to find. It never came. No ananda as 1 think I wrote. I was surprised - I had expected to find that vision of beatitude in some form. Blake too said we can only worship God as a Man - the Self, the figure of 'Jesus, the Imagination', for that is the only form in which we as human beings can receive or conceive the living Self. Krishnamurti is much admired here, and my friend and co-founder of Temenos has built a chapel at Brantwood. Perhaps he brought with him the associations of the Indian 'Master' without possessing the attributes; and of course his having renounced the role of 'world-teacher' was admired in the West for possibly the wrong reasons - the West would not have thought of the possibility that he simply fell short of that attainment of 'perfect Master' which others in India have, even in this century, attained. Remember that for Christians there is but one Perfect Master, and for huma-
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nists, no possibility that there is any perfect Master at all. Comparisons with the Buddha are often made, I notice, yet surely the Lord Buddha did receive enlightenment? Certainly the world has received it through him, in India and beyond? I am not myself drawn so strongly to Buddhism as to the completeness of the Indian vision, which is at once life-affirming and also sees life as maya and is apt to produce also asceticism and renunciation - it includes Buddhism, and is not in any case a historical religion, as I think you have pointed out.
Or maybe that point is one made by Raja Rao in 'The Serpent and the Rope', which I have just re-read in order to write a piece on it for an American journal on the occasion of his award of the Neustadt Prize for his new novel 'The Chessmaster and his Moves', which I have not yet read. I am glad the prize went to a writer who upholds the India of the mind and soul, and not to one of those reductionist secularized Indian novelists so much admired here precisely because they have renounced what is most centrally and sacredly Indian. Certainly I felt that these extraordinarily anguishing encounters with transhuman forces could not surely be with the life-giving bliss-bestowing Lord known to so many who bear witness to Him. His visions seem to have been more in the nature of torture than of enlightenment. Or maybe he simply lacked love. Yet many people loved and revered him.
As to the Mahabharata, I am most interested in Sri Aurobindo's description of Vyasa as a supremely masculine writer. Certainly Valmiki has more flowers of beauty, yet dramatically and psychologically Vyasa is extraordinary. I am going with friends to the dramatized version of the Mahabharata by Peter Brook, now playing in Glasgow (Brook failed to receive support to play it in London but it has, even in this indifferent country, deeply impressed all who have seen it). My American version is dreadful, but includes many fine things and one realizes that the whole work is about dharma and adharma, and works these out in
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a thousand ways. And India's great gift is the knowledge of dharma, here lost for this time. Peter Brook gave a radio interview in which he said that the Mahabharata was like a work of Shakespeare; but a work in an earlier incarnation, not a later one. The persons of the epic and the things they do are certainly Shakespearean. And the Kauravas too are marvellously Shakespearean - the hypocritical old father, Duryodhana himself, and Radheya, Kunti's abandoned son who- is so noble but thrown onto the side of adharma because of his mother's sin against dharma. And so with all. But Shakespeare never created a Lord Krishna nor could any Western poet have done so or included the divine within a human world. True, it is in the Gospels, and the story of the death of the Christ, but differently. That story too is one of the great creations of the human spirit.
I must now go and post my letters, including this most inadequate reply to your own. I do hope you will write something for us.
(26.4 1988)
This morning, at about a quarter to six, I woke up from another dream of you. It must have been a little past midnight in London and you must have been asleep - and perhaps dreaming. I wonder whether you have ever tried your hand at painting. I saw you showing me several paintings of yours. One of them struck me especially. It had two trees, one in the foreground and the other at a distance at the back. Both had somewhat thick trunks. I admired in particular the tree in the background - noting the fine significant strokes of the brush building up the trunk. As there were several pictures, you had to look for this when I expressed my admiration. I joined in the search but we failed to find it. Instead I saw another picture which had a tree whose thick trunk had a big hole running right through it. At this point I woke up. What I remembered to have seen
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in the dream was a sequel to something which had slipped from my memory except that we were in a room where there was another lady present, a friend of yours with whom you were perhaps living or who had come to visit you. My contact with you was to me as concrete as in the earlier dream-experience.
Yes, I received your gift of The Presence and dipped into it immediately but it got left to one side because of some urgent work. I have looked at it again this morning, again dipping. Turning the pages I came across some phrases which shot out at me - the stars saying "The woods are always" - "Immemorial woods" - "Vistas of winter woods where we will go no more". My dream of your painted trees must have served as a magnet to these expressions.
The mood pervading the book appears to be a strange one - a sad joy. You are looking at the past, reviving in your mind the loved things that are gone or about to go - and this induces sadness. But there is a pleasure in realising that you once had moments of deep happiness. The general idea in such matters is the one voiced by Francesca of Rimini to Dante:
...the greatest of all woes
Is to remember days of happiness
In misery - as well your sage guide knows.
The guide, of course, is Virgil with his "sense of tears in earthly things" as Matthew Arnold puts it, Tennyson, in a lovely poem of nine-foot lines attempting to echo the Latin hexameter, hails him:
Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of
humankind!
Tennyson has also tried to echo Dante directly, though in a different style in the second line of that couplet from "Locksley Hail":
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Comfort? comfort scorned of devils! This is truth the
poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering
happier things.
But in your case there is a quiet exultation, a proud smile on your lips while the eyes are tearful. When brightness falls from the air. you have a different mood from Nashe's: the dusk deepening towards night gets studded with little glimmering memories of the brightness you have known. You are sure that nothing can take them away and the varied beauty witnessed and felt along the pulse will remain in your being, no matter if it has vanished or even was an "illusion":
Reality or dream
What difference? I have seen.
This is a triumph-cry of joy although the mouth may be wrung. It is possible only if there has been an inner life which can capture some touch of the Eternal from things that live a day. A poet who is dedicated to the Sacred, however far he or she may be from the full mystical life cannot help having the grace of this ananda in some measure. Naturally the actual mystic will have the plenitude of it and if the mysticism is of the Aurobindonian kind which believes not only in the reality of the manifestation but also in the ultimate value of it, the very transience of things will be lit up and leave in the soul an intense revelatory aspect of the Eternal's own infinite variety.
I am glad you are drawn to the Indian vision rather than to Buddhism or any other partial experience. The core of Buddhism is already there in certain utterances of the Upanishads just as the mayavada of Shankara is anticipated in some deliverances of the same scripture. Buddha and Shankara turned into mighty monoliths what were complementary columns in a many-chambered edifice of spiritual realisation. But each of these teachers was exceptionally
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great and in the circumstances of his time his single-track message had a valuable work to do. Shankara had even a bhakta-side to him: he composed splendid hymns to the Divine Mother and his call towards a featureless transcendent Atman-Brahman was deemed a final necessary step from a world which for all its teeming labour seemed to him incapable of lasting reformation. Knowing that in its central drive Buddhism itself in spite of its exaggerations was not alien to the Indian ethos, India has absorbed its twin movements - a grand liberation from phenomenal selfhood and a boundless compassion for creatures caught in it - and looked upon Gautama Siddhartha himself as an emanation of the supreme Godhead, while rejecting the lopsidedness that was due to the peculiar conditions of a past age. The India of spiritual history is best summed up in the figure of Krishna, at once the ravishing flute-player of the Brindavan legends and the master-charioteer of men's lives emerging from the Bhagavad Gita and, in general, the Mahabharata story. I am glad you feel him to be a unique all-synthesising culmination of the world-soul's turn upward, inward, outward, onward so far. From this feeling the next natural step would be to understand what Sri Aurobindo meant when, as I wrote to you last time, he said that in his Ashram Krishna's work was being done - in the sense that it was being carried further. Here Krishna's unified triple path of spiritual Knowledge, Love and Action issues into the total life-consecration which Sri Aurobindo has designated "the Integral Yoga" and which, evoking the inmost soul whose spontaneous turn at all times is towards the Highest, aims ultimately at drawing through what he has called "Overmind" or "Krishna-Consciousness" the sovereign Truth and Bliss, Peace and Power of what he distinguishes as "Super-mind", a divine dynamism of the All-Beautiful not only world-creative but also world-transformative.
Peter Brook is right in saying that the Mahabharata is like a work of Shakespeare and you correctly point out the vividness and individuality of the various characters, the
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true-to-reality depictions of their tendencies and acts. We are face to face with human beings and their diverse motives. A strong dramatic element is almost everywhere. But we have to note a difference in two respects. First, in the overall vision. The intense issue of dharma versus adharma stands out in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata far more recognisably than in the more complex and colourful world of the Elizabethan master. Shakespeare's style also differs. Multi-imaged, swiftly intuitive with the surge of the Life Force, his thought rising not in its own right but as thrown up by passion and emotion, Shakespeare may have some affinity with the wide-glancing prolific Valmiki. His manner, marvellous though it be, is too rich and romantic to compare with the intellectual masculinity of Vyasa's. Sri Aurobindo writes: "Be its limits what one will, this is certain that there was never a style and verse of such bare, direct and resistless strength as this of Vyasa's or one that went so straight to the heart of all that is heroic in a man. Listen to the cry of insulted Draupadi to her husband: 'Arise, arise, O Bhimsena, wherefore liest thou like one that is dead? For nought but dead is he whose wife a sinful hand has touched and lives...'It is a supreme utterance of insulled feeling, and yet note how it expresses itself in the language of intellect, in a thought. The whole personality of Draupadi breaks out in that cry, her chastity, her pride, her passionate and unforgiving temper, but it flashes out not in an expression of pure feeling, but in a fiery and pregnant apophthegm."
I must stop now. I thank you profoundly for the free hand you have given me with the article you wish me to write for Temenos within eight weeks. Let's hope I can do something adequate in the stipulated period.
(3.5.1988)
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The regions of the mind are truly mysterious. No, I have never painted, but you describe a painting in my bedroom of which I am very fond, of a group of trees, one in advance of the group, so to speak, and another tree behind it, before the whole composition merges into a little grove. I don't have a tree with a hole through the trunk, but I do have a group of Japanese rather gnarled alders by a stream, and yet another tree picture entitled 'The Gate of the Forest' with a sort of tunnel under the canopy of leaves. I also have a fine engraving of a beech tree with a bold beautiful trunk (but no hole through it) and a fir and a rowan, growing together. You mention a second friend staying with me - I have had Santosh Pal, a Yeats scholar from Delhi, with her son, for several weeks - she went back this morning by the Air India morning flight. So although not so precise as your first sighting of me in your room, I consider that there has again been a real contact. You may be interested to hear that although many people did write to the TLS in protest, no notice was taken, except when Laurens van der Post wrote personally to the editor, telling him that he considered the review insulting and disgraceful, and received an embarrassed reply, asking him if he himself would like to write something about us in a forthcoming issue. L. van der Post is of course a famous man, a friend of the Prince of Wales and so they took notice of him. I was unduly hurt, but also ashamed of my country, and angry and sad that we have come to this.
I am leaving this afternoon for Devon, where a group of us are meeting with the object of discussing a possibility to start a University of the Spirit - a small university - a sort of Santiniketan - where the teaching will be grounded in the view of man as a spiritual being and not in the materialist humanism that has brought so low our present universities and schools and media and journalism, and indeed the arts themselves which for the most part only reflect the disease
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that the arts should exist in order to cure. I am delighted therefore that you will write us something about the Indian (and especially Sri Aurobindo's) view of the hierarchic nature of the worlds from whence the poets receive their inspiration. I was always aware of that in India - that an audience listens, in the first place, to catch the vibration of the level on which a poet is speaking. It is something that has to be said, and rediscovered in the secular modern world, for reality remains what it always is, and there is no food for the soul in work that has no resonance of the higher worlds.
I will leave this letter open, for we are proceeding to Glasgow from our Devon conference, and I will write more when I have seen the Mahabharata, I am reading a dreadful American translation in a mixture of slang and archaisms, but it is the complete text. The only full text I have been able to get. Yes, the theme of dharma and adharma is very evident in every episode. But it all becomes so very complex - indeed Shakespearean - in such a character as Kama, thrown by the adharma of Kunti his mother into the camp and service of the enemy. And one feels that modern civilization has become so entangled in the complexities of adharma that where can we begin to disentangle the web? Always at every point, I suppose, each in ourselves. But the web weaves on and on and on. What Christians call 'the Fall' of course. We need some sort of counter-measure to be taken - Redemption - it might seem. It is not enough to be the perfect 'dharmaraja' and just never become involved in the web at all. Not that I can accept Christian cancellations and divine interventions either.
Well, I continue this letter after my expedition to discuss the Dartington small university project - I believe it may come about, for the need is as desperate as when Hanuman brought to the dying army the mountain with the healing herbs - and then some of us went on to Glasgow; where a
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derelict transport-museum, itself doubtless made from a derelict warehouse or factory, had been converted into INDIA, by the magic of Peter Brook's brilliant theatrical imagination. London had not responded to the proposal to bring here the most marvellous theatrical experience this generation is likely to see, ever - nine hours was a timeless moment. The cast was international, and when one had become accustomed to Kunti as a Korean, Yudhisthira as an Englishman, Bhima a Negro, Arjuna an Italian, and two handsome middle-eastern twins, and much besides, one saw that Peter Brook's vision of the Mahabharata as the story of mankind was justified. The dedication of the actors was total and the beauty and imagination of the lighting and magic by which illusion was created would have pleased the architect Maya who built Indraprastha himself. But it is indescribable. No-one who saw it can be the same again. I wonder if that would be so in India. The bare ruined Industrial building in a derelict city became a region of the imagination truly boundless. A wonderful Krishna; and the narrative was told by Vyasa to a child - a young boy - about his ancestors. A stroke of genius, for all the time one saw innocence commenting and questioning the great battlefield of life. I hope you will manage to see it when it goes on to India. I see that Russia has given Peter Brook an honour - he is of Russian descent - and only England seems determined to allow nothing to disturb the complacence of prevailing mediocrity. My mother came from Scotland, so I am glad that proud poor country that has never lost its poetry had the opportunity to enter that world, through Peter Brook.
I am now setting to work on getting Temenos 10 to the printer. If we have your paper within the next six weeks it will go into this issue, which will I think be one of our best. I'm also waiting for a Copy Raja Rao has promised to send me of his new novel 'The Chessmaster and his Moves', which I am glad to learn has just been awarded an international prize, in preference to those reductionist Indian novels on Western lines like 'Midnight's Children', and 'A
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House for Mr. Biswas', which the English like so much. But Raja Rao writes of the India of the Imagination which, he says, is not a nation like England or France or Germany but a state of mind. India must change the" world. Am I mistaken in seeing signs that the world wants to change, is ripe for change? At least Temenos has done its best. I am glad that you will be numbered among our illustrious contributors.
You are very perceptive as well as kind about my poems. I do indeed see the maya of appearances as a theophany - the lila of God, as you do. Only the vision is clouded by human sorrow and ignorance. I don't believe India has any equivalent of the Christian doctrine of 'the Fall' but it is hard for any Westerner not to see human nature as 'fallen', inexplicably imperfect, therefore unable fully to perceive and rejoice in what we nevertheless know is there. The poet sees from afar what the yogi sees and experiences totally. But all poets of the imagination know that world as the soul's native country and that it is here and now for whoever is able to reach it.
I wonder what more of my secrets you will penetrate in the 'interworld' of the astral in which the soul strays in sleep? We are indeed surrounded by unseen realities and powers that we should never forget, be it for good or ill they touch our lives. One can only hope to commit no crimes of the soul in those regions.
I look forward to receiving your paper on that most important theme.
(13.5.1988)
I was very happy to receive your latest letter with its many interesting and apt reflections. Yes, there was definitely a contact again between us on the dream-plane though, as you remark, not so precise as on the earlier occasion. One little item I forgot to mention in my last letter. You were wearing a white or near-white dress. I wonder whether this is your
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usual preference or it happened to be such on the day whose night held our contact or else it was symbolic of your general state of mind these days, echoing the mood of that line of AE's -
White to Thy Whiteness all desires burn.
Perhaps a sense of whiteness together with a sense of trees is woven into your life because of a Proustian search for times past. I remember those touching lines of yours:
And I already in early morning sometimes wake
Upon the threshold of some long past day;
A tree stands on the brink of light White with blossoms as once beside a house long
desolate,
Maybe 1 am letting my imagination run too freely along albescent themes. And in your lines it is the tree with the dawn-glimmer upon it that is centrally significant. At least from the numerous pictures among which you live one can guess you must be extremely fond of treescapes. I also have loved them - trees are my passion next to horses, and both of them Phave enjoyed intensely, most in my young years when the Sethna family used to go three times a year for long stays to their cottage in the "hill-station" named "Matheran" (meaning "that which has a forest on its head"). In India the forest has a spiritual association and not only a poetic one. It is the penultimate stage of life: after all the human work is done a man is expected to retire from the world and practise God's presence in a forest. Once he has fulfilled his threefold destiny he is free of everything and the last stage sees him wandering without any fixed home, no one place holds him for more than a day or two except of course in the rainy season. This is the traditional scheme and, though it is no longer followed, spirituality as the true goal of life is still an idea haunting the Indian consciousness
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and the old potentiality of going deeper and higher than the mere mind has never been lost. In India of the past, trees have always invited inwardness. There is that lovely little snatch from Buddha:
Here are trees.
Here let us sit down.
Here we shall meditate.
In India Temenos would at once be recognised for what it is. Perhaps Laurens van der Post's letter to the editor of the TLS will have a general effect. I see in one of the latest issues a big advertisement of Temenos. It made my heart glad to read it. But why wasn't van der Post's letter publicised? No letter protesting against the semi-cynical tone of the review has appeared.
Your observation of how an Indian audience would naturally respond first of all to the vibration of the level on which a poet speaks is very acute. It shows your own sensitive inner perception of things. My article, if it manages to get written within the dead-line you have given, will try to show the various typical vibrations of the different planes from which poetry hails. All the planes are capable of transmitting genuine poetry, but while there is a certain equality of inspired art in the midst of the diversity of expressive plane - subtle-physical, vital, mental, "overhead"' - there is a widening of the possibility of revealing the hidden Soul or Spirit in its authentic accent. Perhaps one may best suggest this in a few words with the point Sri Aurobindo made long ago when he wrote that while poetry in the broad sense is well hit off by Meredith's definition - "our inmost in the sweetest way" - the fulfilment of this art, psychologically speaking, would come when poetry becomes "our inmost in the inmost way".
Your idea of "a University of the Spirit" is quite thrilling. It is not only beyond the present-day notion of a great unfoldment of knowledge but also beyond the finest New-
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manian 'idea of a University". If teaching is to be grounded in the view of man as a spiritual being, then what could be more apt than a course of certain writings of Sri Aurobindo which hold this view and apply it to several fields of man's activity with a vast and penetrating knowledge and with a mind fully modern at the same time that it is charged with an ever progressive spirituality: The Foundations of Indian Culture (your friend Raja Rao considers Sri Aurobindo the best expositor of Indian culture) - The Human Cycle, originally titled The Psychology of Social Development (about which the famous Dr. Schweitzer wrote to the Ashram that he found it extremely important) - The Ideal of Human Unity - The Synthesis of Yoga (which expounds all the past Yogas and goes on to the Yoga of Self-Perfection) -Commentaries on the Isha Upanishad and the Kena Upanishad - The Future Poetry & Letters on Poetry, Art, Literature. These books have the rare quality of literary charm on top of profound thought.
Coming to the wonderful Mahabharata show, I may draw your attention to quite a perceptive review of it in the TLS of May 13-19, p. 531 under "Commentary", entitled "Destinies and deities". One John D. Smith is the reviewer. I learnt from it that Jean-Claude Carriere is associated with Peter Brook in the adaptation made for the Western stage: Smith writes: "It is magnificent - but is it the Mahabharata! The answer is a resounding Yes. The work of Carriere and Brook is remarkably faithful to the events, sometimes even to the wording, of the Sanskrit original, but, more important, it stays true to its spirit." From the enthusiasm it has engendered in you, I feel it is something never to be missed if it comes one's way. Smith's commentary is all the more valuable because of a few bits of criticism in it. Discussing the paradoxical figure of Krishna, Smith contradicts Carriere saying in his programme notes that "in the Mahabharata, at least in those parts of the poem generally thought to be the earliest, nothing clearly indicates that he is an avatar, one of the earthly incarnations of Vishnu". Smith
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declares: "Mahabharata 5.22 is a chapter that can be shown on internal (metrical) evidence to be uniformly early: at Stanza 10 Krsna is referred to as 'Visnu the unassailable, the great overlord of the three worlds'. 'Unlike the Ramayana, the other great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata acknowledges its central god's identity with Visnu from the start." Smith is full of praise for the way the necessary condensation has been done by Carriere and Brook, but he notes "a single omission": it is "Bhima's vow to break Duryodhana's thigh, made after Duryodhana insults the heroes' joint wife Draupadi by baring his thigh at her and paralleled by Bhima's vow to drink Duhsasana's blood to avenge another similar insult. Both insults arc included in the play, as are both of Bhima's terrible deeds, so it seems a pity to have lost the thread of motivation in one case."
The court scene where the two vows were made is a favourite of mine, but not because of them. Here I have a query for you. I don't have a complete rendering of the epic. I have at the moment in my hands what is regarded by competent scholars as the best condensation running to 741 pages: Kamala Subramanian's Mahabharata, third edition, 1977 (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay). My query pertains to Draupadi's invocation of Krishna when the heinous disrobing of her in front of the gathering starts. Subramanian's account does not contain the details I remember to have come across somewhere, details which marvellously combine a deep spiritual truth with a touch of humour most dramatically blended with the terrible seriousness of the event. Let me tell you what has stuck in my memory. While the sari is being pulled, Draupadi appeals to Krishna: "O Lord of the highest heaven, come to my help!" There is no response. The poor girl becomes more desperate. She sends out again a cry: "O Master of the three worlds, help me!" No reply still - and more and more folds of the sari come out. Once again Draupadi raises her heart's plea: "O Ruler of the four quarters of the earth, rush to my rescue!" All in vain - nothing results. Draupadi is really at a loss. Then she
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cries out in a final intensity: "O You who dwell in my own heart, come!" At once Krishna appears before her secretly, with his hand gesturing abhaya - "Have no fear." The sari goes on unwinding endlessly. In a later scene Draupadi chides Krishna: "Why did you take so long to come?" Sweetly and coolly he replies: "If I had to come from the highest heaven or from the three worlds or even from the four quarters of the earth, wouldn't it take some time? But when you summoned me from your own heart, there was no distance to be crossed. Naturally 1 came out once."
Do you have this story in the complete American text before you? If Brook had staged it, it might have been quite a hit. Perhaps it does not belong to Vyasa's version but to Tulsidas's Hindi retelling or else it figures in some popular Vaishnava evocation of the scene?
You have indicated the nationality of some of the cast in Brook's masterpiece - a Korean as Kunti, an Englishman as Yudhisthira, a Negro as Bhima, an Italian as Arjuna, etc. But was there no Indian in any role? What country played Krishna? I wonder how India will receive Brook. The first impression may be as of something rather fantastic - not quite because of the different accents of the players' English but because a certain homogeneity of emotional gesture stemming from a traditional background may be missed. I should think the depth with which the varied cast renders the drama would lead to India overlooking whatever surface incongruity she may find. The film Gandhi was very well received, but it wasn't so bold an experiment as Brook's.' Let us hope the sincerity and force of the acting, the magic of the setting and the psychological widening of the story's range will carry all before it.
I hear that the Mahabharata in 52 episodes will soon be on the Indian TV just as the Ramayana has been. The latter was beautifully done and was popular on an international scale: it seems it was shown in England to school children and greatly appreciated. Archaeologists are trying to make out "Lanka" to have been a small patch of ground loopedc
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round by a stream in Madhya Pradesh, and Ravana a Gond aboriginal who took away the wife of an Aryan princeling. The traditional Lanka - Ceylon - is said to be a late fiction. A crude folk-tale is made out to be the nucleus of the epic. Although I have a lot of interest in archaeology I am not convinced here. What the Ramayana embodies is a great crisis in the evolution of human consciousness. On one side is the animal mind, on the other the titan aberration and in between is the natural man, his line of development threatened - most by the well-equipped titanism represented by the ingenious powerful Ravana, king of a sort of Indian Atlantis in the form of an insular land-mass where now Sri Lanka is situated. Rama Dasarathi is the Avatar of the Dharmic Mind fighting to establish this psychological level in the race. Valmiki, according to Sri Aurobindo, has truly caught the nature of the Avatar who acts not from the individual standpoint but from a universal plane, the plane of supreme mental ideals. Of course a lot of myth is mixed up with the historical crisis or perhaps facts of a non-physical occult dimension get fused with occurrences of the earth and we meet with part romance, part allegory, part reality, part spiritual vision, a kind of super-Faery-Queene by a poet far greater than Spenser in imaginative thought, rhythmic expression, character-creativity and quantity of quality.
The Christian parable of a Fall is seen differently by the old Kabbalists. They conceive a Rise from the self-sufficient state of man the mental animal, a peer of non-mental animals that live instinctively without any vexing questions of right and wrong, true and false, good and bad, to a state of self-conscious inquiring aspiring mentality which is transitional between the animal's instinctive absolute and the absolute of the intuitive godhead which is the goal of striving and struggling human idealism. This Rise is a Fall from a vital harmony until a harmony beyond the mental grope is found. The esoterics picture the Serpent as an iridescent being, a gracious power of secret evolution.
(5.6.1988)
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Your letter of June 5th is, as always, a great pleasure. Alas, I seldom wear white, black more often. I have a white Irish knitted jacket, I might have been wearing it, but this time I think it is at best symbolic. But I love white flowers, white blossoming trees. Yes, I had understood that forest-dwellers in India are something more than wood-cutters, it is woven throughout Indian literature, those blissful forest-dwellers in their hermitages in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata too, and when I looked up into the hills above Rishikesh I knew there were still holy-men who come down to worship at Hardwar, where indeed I bought a string of one hundred and eight beads made from some kind of wrinkled nut whose name you no doubt know. Having myself reached my eightieth year only this week I know I should become a forest-dweller myself but I seem to be still occupied by karmic - or maybe dharmic - tasks. The immediate one is getting the material for T.10 to the printer, so I hope to receive your paper before too long. It would be good to have it within Sri Aurobindo's centenary year.
But I did not picture my learned correspondent as a horseman! That radically changes my picture of you. Though from Indian art and folk-art, and the famous 'horse-sacrifice' I realize that the Horse too plays a central part in Indian life, though a very different one from the Forest. As to the last stage of life few surely can face that solitude, Indian spirituality is so absolute in its affirmation that finally all this earth and all that it inherit must fade. I love it all so much, and see may a not as illusion so much as epiphany - the continual self-revelation of the living spirit. But I am now toiling through the 700 pages of Raja Rao's new novel, 'The Chessmaster and his Moves', and that too I find as chilling as the icy peaks of the mountains. He contrasts civilizations based on 'infinity' - the 'reign of quantity' I suppose, i.e. the West - and those based on 'zero' - nirvana - yours. Blake of course understood the myste-
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rious 'punctume' through which everything emerges into manifestation so perhaps he understood the Indian Zero Raja Rao is talking about. I am here considered an elitist, etc., but I confess myself no match for the supersubtlety of a brahmin who knows the West also. I can read with ease his French and relative ease Provencal, his Latin and Greek, just, his mathematics, Sanskrit and Pali and Hindi not at all. I find his novel so impressive that I wonder who his readers will be, even in India. He's rather like the 'Boston Brahmins' where the Vanderbilts speak only to the Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God. However I promised to review the book for Temenos and must persist. The 700 pages are closely printed in smallish type and many need to be re-read in order to be understood.
The 700-page condensation of the Mahabharata by Kamala Subramanian I found excellent. The American so-called translation by van Buitenen is bad, inaccurate, and I found in it no trace of the calling upon the Lord Krishna as you describe it in that very profound and profoundly Indian passage. In fact Krishna is not even mentioned in the passage of the unwinding of the sari and although it is certainly immensely long I wonder what 'editing' means to the translator and whether he has not just cut out certain things. Only two volumes have hitherto appeared - I am at present reading the section about the exile in the forest -and I shall not order any more. As to Peter Brook, I agree with the TLS reviewer, that he seems to have got it all in, in essence, I will post you the text of the dramatized version. Knowing as I already did Bhima's vow to break the thigh of Duryodhana, I did not even notice that the vow was not made. In the performance, the point was I think sufficiently made when in the gaming-hall Duryodhana says to Draupadi 'Look at my thigh', and deliberately parts his robe and raises his thigh. It is a dramatic moment and not one an audience would have forgotten. Such things can be done in the production. Even so I find the savagery of Bhima as a character pretty hard to take. And even Krishna, when he
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tells Arjuna to slay Kama while he is trying to free his chariot wheel, and indeed again when he tells the terrible Bhima to strike Duryodhana on the thigh, is hard to reconcile with the words of the Bhagavad Geeta. Or perhaps not, since there is no death, and it is all maya.
The only Indian actor was Mallika Sarabhai, Draupadi, who was extremely beautiful, and she at least had to be Indian. Krishna - Bruce Myers - is English and acted very finely. A middle-aged Krishna, not at all the lover of Radha, but severe, as befits the part of the charioteer of the great Battle. 1 don't know how an Indian audience will take Peter Brook's conception of that battle as universal but he makes his point that the whole world is involved in it. All the same, Kunti's children are as multicoloured as a litter of kittens.
As to Temenos, the TLS rightly recognizes us as the enemy of the trivial reductionism it now has come for the most part to represent. Laurens van der Post's scathing letter brought a response only because of his repute. Other letters of protest sent went into the waste-paper basket, no doubt. He has told me not to send a copy to the TLS next time, but to him, so that he can send it with a personal letter to the editor, which is nice of him, but it will be about as much use as the Lord Krishna's peace overtures to the Kauravas. They are the Kauravas. (You see we are all digesting the lessons and symbols of the Mahabharata in this island this summer.)
Arabinda Basu has sent me a book by Vilas Patel whom I hope to see this week; she is bringing with her the mother of the young scholar who wrote that piece on Coleridge which you sent me. I was disgusted but not surprised to hear that Oxford was scornful. That is but another instance of the falsification of values that has inspired the idea of a University of the spirit at Dartington Hall. I hope it will come about. Arabinda writes that it must be based on spirituality not 'idealism' which was of course the trouble with the original Dartington Hall venture, which was purely secular; much good was done, especially in music, but it all
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ends in decline. The school, founded in the great days of 'free' schools and Bertrand and Dora Russell has now been closed because of scandals and drugs getting into the school and so on. The need is such that I believe it will come about. Please God it may. It is a great mistake to suppose that in these days Oxford and Cambridge are 'better' than the newer Universities. Even they lead the field in secularization and destructuring. And Indian universities go on copying them, they retain it seems in the Indian memory the prestige they once (and perhaps deservedly) had.
I will post the Claude Carriere (English Translation) separately.
(18.6.1988)
1 was waiting for the text of the dramatised version to arrive before replying to your fine letter of June 18. But it has not reached me yet. So I have decided not to delay further. After you wrote to me that you had just reached your eightieth year a friend told me that your birthday fell on June 14. As I shall be eighty-four next November 25,I am 3 years, 6 months and 19 days older than you - if my mathematics is not far out. I was never good at numbers, except, I hope, those which Milton had in mind when he wrote of dwelling "on thoughts that voluntary move / Harmonious numbers". In regard to arithmetic what seemed the truth of the matter dawned on me when on failing miserably in the exam to qualify for the 4th standard at St. Xavier's High School at Bombay I was favoured with a special test by the Principal Father Hetting in consideration of the important historical fact that my papa had been a Xavierite. To buck me up papa accompanied me to the test. I was given four sums to do. Twenty minutes later I submitted my results. They proved to be all wrong. Father Hetting looked grave and passed the papers to papa. Papa glanced at them and said with a smile: "See, his method is
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perfect everywhere. He knows exactly how to approach a problem. Doesn't that show an acute intelligence? The only thing he doesn't know is addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Surely they can be learned in time. Just for failure in them, will you hold back a boy so bright in finding his way in the subject?" The Principal was so stunned by the originality and acuity of this argument, which any Schoolman of the Middle Ages might have envied, that he broke a minute's silence with the sporting words: "Oh well, let him go up with his master mind and tackle the trivialities later."
Your reference, apropos of your surprise that I was a "horseman", to the horse as an important part of Indian life gives me a cue to some observations on Indian spirituality. As you know, this spirituality has its fountainhead in the Rigveda, the earliest religious document of the Indo-European linguistic family to which both of us belong. In the Rigveda the cow and the horse are the two central animal symbols. The word go or gau for the former meant both the female bovine and "ray". The cow stood esoterically for Light, the spiritual illumination. The horse, on the other hand, stood for the Life-force and the highest symbolic figure of the equine is the white horse Dadhikravan which is said to march ever towards the Dawn: here is the purified and enlightened Life-force. Both cow and horse are integral portions of the spiritual realisation. Both the animals which lent themselves to spiritual symbolisation were woven closely into the old Aryan existence and when this existence took on a spiritual dimension it remained still something earthly. There was no talk of flying away from earth. One rose into the subtle planes, reaching up to the world of the Sun, the Truth-world where all the multiplicity is harmonised and unified and has its divine original or source, but one still kept one's hold on the"terrestrial scene. Mother Earth and Father Heaven were never disjoined. The Rishis who were the mystics of that remote age were also the guides and teachers of the community. They did not think of the terrestrial scene as something to be escaped from: it was
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something to be led to its own truest significance here and now. The very word "maya" in the Rigveda has no inevitable association of an undivine unreality. It connotes the power of the Supreme Reality to outline, measure out, mould forms in the formless, psychologise and make know-able the Unknowable, geometrise and seem to make measurable the limitless. By this power static truth of essential being becomes ordered truth of active being. In a less exalted sense maya meant knowledge, skill, intelligence. Only later it acquired the pejorative sense of cunning, fraud or illusion in ordinary parlance and philosophically an inexplicable phenomenon in which an unreal cosmos appears with its unredeemable multiplicity from a Oneness which is timeless, spaceless, featureless and which counterpoises a Nirvanic beyond of beatitude to the many-motioned teeming Here and Now of mixed shadow and shine. But even later the Shankarite world-negation was never the sole spirituality in the Indian field. Various world-affirming outlooks and disciplines flourished, especially the Bhakti movements and the Tantrik experiments and, above all, the synthesising message of the Gita which swept together the Yogas of Knowledge, Devotion and Work. To them the earth "and all that it inherit" are an epiphany in the same way as to you - "the continual self-revelation of the living spirit". (Raja Rao's vision is Shankarite: it is hardly representative of all of India's Godward turn.)
But I must say that though the epiphanic nature of the world is undeniable the soul's passion for "one entire and perfect chrysolite" is not wholly satisfied. There is something missing in world-affirmation just as in world-negation. Neither in concept nor in experience has an answer been found for that demand of the soul until the advent of Sri Aurobindo. He alone has gone from his initial Nirvanic experience to a vision of the Divine at a revelatory play in the world and then to the Supermind which bears in itself not only the original creative power but also the final transformative power, for it is at the same time the home of
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the perfect originals of mind, vitality and matter and the evolver of these very originals within their imperfect forms in earth-history because they are already "involved" in the evolving phenomenon. The Supermind is hidden below in the primeval darkness no less than it is secret above in the ultimate light. By its pressure and pull from on high and by its pressure and push from the nether pole all evolution takes place - the free forces descending and the bound ones ascending. First, the multi-linked material universe emerges from what the Rigveda calls the chaotic ocean, then life makes its appearance, then mind shows itself and the next step will be the manifestation of Supermind, bringing about a super-epiphany. Mind will fulfil its urge for all-knowledge. Life-force its nisus towards all-capacity, matter its straining for durability, immunity, flawlessness of form. The path to this fulfilment cannot be totally smooth. How can anything be quite easy when the Supreme has undertaken the tremendous adventure of beginning its own self-expression from what it has posited as its own opposite, a dense Inconscient, the Rigveda's chaotic ocean in which, as that scripture says, "darkness is enwrapped within darkness"? Yes, there are hurdles to be crossed, yet, as Sri Aurobindo says, "the advent of the Supermind is inevitable by the very logic of things". But man as a being conscious of himself has to give his willing co-operation if this advent is to be soon. Hence the need for the Aurobindonian Integral Yoga to embody the Supramental Divine both individually and collectively. A mantra of this Yoga's aim is the great invocation which I once quoted to you and which ends with the profoundly moving mysticism of the words:
Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,
Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's
abyss:
Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude's
kiss.
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Perhaps I have been flying too high and tiring you. Let me come down to a theme nearer our general discourse - the Mahabharata. At almost the conclusion of your excellent comment on Peter Brook's show you allude to the savagery of Bhima and say that you find it hard to take. Then you add: "And even Krishna, when he tells Arjuna to slay Karna while he is trying to free his chariot wheel, and indeed again when he tells the terrible Bhima to strike Duryodhana on the .thigh, is hard to reconcile with the words of the Bhagavad Geeta." Nor are these the only incidents in which Krishna seems to act out of accord with that scripture's commands. Duryodhana, after he has been beaten by means not agreeing with the Kshatriya code, lists some more deeds of Krishna that stand out as "unfair". But we must remember those declarations of Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita: "...whenever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then 1 loose myself forth into birth. For the deliverance of the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the enthroning of the Right I am born from age to age" (IV.7-8). The victory of the Kauravas would have spelled the death of Dharma. Unrighteousness would have ruled. But they were so strong that they could not have been destroyed by the ordinary modes of warfare. To follow strict Kshatriya standards would have frustrated the very purpose of the Avatar Krishna's birth in that age. He tried his best to avoid the war. Several times when he is accused of employing stratagems for the Pandavas to come out victorious, he asks: "Have I not strained my utmost to prevent hostilities? Did not the sons of Dhritarashtra turn a deaf ear to my pleas? Was Duryodhana willing in the least to put aside his unjust ambition, his gigantic lust for power?" He declares that his sole purpose was to save good men from harm, from death at the hands of incarnate demons. Even so, we may mark that he let the Pandavas fight fairly and do their best to overcome their enemies. Only when he realised that they would ultimately go under did he resort to unconventional methods. If Dharma could be established by
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generally approved means, they were certainly welcome. The fullest chance should be given to them. But if they seem bound to fail, one who was born for the destruction of evildoers could hardly stand by. What was clearly visioned by the Avatar to be wicked the Avatar had the right to dethrone by whatever means his wisdom and superhuman insight deemed valid. His exceptional right to overpass common standards was implicitly recognised, for none of those who obeyed his command to act unkshatriya-like would have acted that way on his own. His friends who became his instruments knew that he was more than human and that he could act from a motive inherently right and that in his case the end would justify any means. Unless we enter into the sense of his Avatarhood and understand intuitively his mission we shall fail to perceive the utter intrinsic inevitability of his deeds.
You have mentioned Vilas Patel. She will be carrying to you some news of me just as Dr. Indra carried to me interesting news of you. She was very happy to have met you and spoke highly of your cordiality and hospitality. I was delighted to see the picture she had taken of you. Yes, it is on the whole like my dream-impression of you. Perhaps by now Vilas has already been to see you and my friend Ms Sonia Dyne must have met you. When during her recent visit to the Ashram I showed her the TLS review of Temenos she was very indignant and even thought of writing a letter of protest to the editor. I hope she brought her daughter Eira along with her to your place. Ms Dyne is one of the finest, most cultured, most generous and deeply poetic persons I have come across. If Vilas shows you the Video she filmed here you will both see and hear me and, in the course of reminiscences of various kinds, get into the secret of the one infallible system of winning at Races! A horse-lover and especially a horse-rider (at one time) could scarcely be expected not to revel in the glorious pageant of godlike gallopers that the racing season in Bombay used to make available to him.
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The article you have asked from me is dragging its feet. I have covered 12 double-spaced typed sheets so far but the theme and the treatment don't seem to get their self-identity quite clearly and confidently yet. This may be because I have a lot of work on my hands which keeps interrupting the article and prevents it from shaping naturally towards the full deliverance of its many-levelled vision. Please don't delay Temenos 10 because of it. Perhaps it is not meant for it but for Temenos II. By the way, what made you think the current year marks Sri Aurobindo's centenary year? Sri Aurobindo was born on August 15. 1872. His 75th birthday got declared most significantly - thanks to Lord Mount-batten's blind intuition spurred by his memory of Japan's surrender in World War II - as India's Day of Independence. A seal appeared to be set on the political work, during his early career, of one who was the first to formulate total independence as the ideal of his country's fight against British rule. A deeper seal may be seen in the fact that Sri Aurobindo wanted free India to be the centre of a new era of spirituality with
A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams.
(10.7.1988)
Now that I know you are so much my senior I must treat you with added respect! My oldest friend is Marco Pallis, the Buddhist and musician, who is 92 and makes me feel positively young! I intend to make my great age a pretext for not doing what I don't want to do, and shall otherwise continue as before. I hope to see twelve issues of Temenos, then I shall discontinue, even if I'm still here. Twelve is a
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sacred number, I'm told by Keith Critchlow and other mathematical friends, more so than ten. So if your paper does not arrive in time for T. 10 it shall go into the eleventh issue. But there is still time, should inspiration flow. It is a most important theme. I don't know what gave me the idea that this was an Aurobindo special year of some kind. Like you, I have no head for numbers, but I can't have invented such a concrete piece of information, something must have put it into my head. I too could never do addition and subtraction and multiplication and division, but I remember vividly that once I came top of the form at the end of term examination in geometry, at which the rest of the class laughed and cheered! But I feel I could understand geometry were 1 to start again - it has great beauty. Too late now.
I much enjoyed the visits of Dr. Indra, and then Vilas Patel, who unfortunately was not able to bring Mrs. Dyne, with whom I had a longish telephone conversation. Apropos her daughter's piece on Coleridge, we agreed that a new University is needed - evidently you at Pondicherry are giving true education, and something of the kind is needed here, and there is a project brewing for a small private University, possibly in the school building of Dartington Hall - the school has been closed - which was as you know a companion foundation with Santiniketan. It is urgently needed here to send out a few prepared educators to combat the miseducation of both schools and universities - Oxford and Cambridge not least - as these are now totally (or almost) in the hands of the secular materialist world. Many people would like to see a change, and it has to begin somewhere. Weekends and occasional lectures are not enough, it should be a two-year course. We could probably supply an excellent staff from contributors to Temenos, some of whom are themselves discontented academics. The idea was fortified from our recent visit to India, of which you know. Keith Critchlow and Satish Kumar and John Lane were there, and are all implicated. The proposal came from
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Satish, who having as a youth spent eight years as a Jain monk is a good hand with a begging-bowl and thinks funds could be forthcoming.
To come to the foul play of the heroes of the Mahabharata, it's a question that comes up towards the end of every war, surely, and if the Dharmaraja is allowed to tell a lie (about the death of Drona's son Aswatthama) at what point does he forfeit the right to be called King Dharma? I think of the last world-war when Churchill ordered the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. Of course the Jesuits said (or were said to have said) that 'the end justifies the means' but once war is engaged foul play is certain, and vengeful atrocities. Prof. P. Lal gave me his translation of the Bhagavad Geeta, and he thinks Arjuna was quite right not to want to slay the heroes of both sides, to see all his family wiped out in a war. I was interested to read that point of view from an Indian scholar; but Mahatma Gandhi might arguably be seen as an avatar of a new age? His nonviolence won the respect of the whole world and even though wars go on no one now glories in them (as in 1914-18 I remember it was). But of course it is true that the Lord Krishna did his best to prevent a conflict, A belief in reincarnation also makes the classical position more acceptable - after all even Duryodhana reached the heavenly world on account of his bravery in battle. (I hope by the way that the text of Peter Brook's version has now reached you?) But right action is in this world like walking blindfold for (that too is in the Geeta) in this world we know neither the beginning nor the end of things. Meanwhile 1 am still working my way through my bad American translation, and not without reward. In the wonderful section about the Pandavas in the Himalayas I have just read the marvellous meeting of Bhima with Hanuman. And Hanuman's account of the Four Yugas, in each of which one-quarter of the whole of reality is lost. It certainly feels as if we are living only in a quarter of reality. Blake had the same view of course, 'single vision and Newton's sleep' but the successive
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loss of a quarter I had not previously seen set forth. Plato, Cabbala, Swedenborg, all know of the four 'worlds'. Perhaps we are beginning the reascent - Sri Aurobindo would presumably have taken this view. As these things (coincidences) happen, I am reading a book by a psychical researcher and doctor, Mary Scott, who points out how little of ourselves we know, or of our world - that is 'we' as a materialist society - and she cites Sri Aurobindo as an exponent of Tantra rather than Vedanta, She goes at great length into the Tantric account of the 'sheaths' and the chakras - she has also written a book on these. I don't think it is any longer questioned, least of all among physicists, that naive materialism is an untenable view. And next on my list is another long book, sent me by Aravinda, on Sri Aurobindo's social and political thought. I have just realised where I got the wrong idea that this was a centenary year -the book is a centenary volume, but that was, as you say, 1972. Such is old age (you see I am using that good excuse!).
I never thought of maya in a negative sense; as I suppose the Buddhists do. Rather I see this world as a perpetual epiphany - theophany. Not to see it so is perhaps maya? To see the world, as Traherne says, 'aright' is to see its divine radiance. The via negativa could never hold me, loving the natural world as I do. I hope you are right about a 'supermind epiphany'.
Of course the horse is to be seen everywhere in Indian art and folk-art, and the 'horse-sacrifice' is in the ancient stories. The horse (or mare) is also to be found in Celtic mythology - do you know Vernon Watkins' fine 'Ballad of the Mari Lwyd'? And in the West highlands of Scotland 'water-horses' are believed in to this day - like the steeds of Poseidon they emerge from the water, and sometimes befriend farmers by pulling their plows. But on the whole the "white horse" is associated with death, I suppose from the Book of Revelation, but water-horses certainly don't come from the Bible. Nor the Mari whose skull is carried round the Welsh village (or until recently was) asking
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riddles. 1 just had not associated you with riding before an army, riding to hounds, or the like. Nor of course do 1 suppose you did, nor polo I imagine! My father too loved horses dearly, though he never placed a bet in his long life.
To return to the loss of three quarters, one does, I find, in old age, become more aware of surrounding presences beyond the visible and audible spectrum. Often a friend - or my daughter - will telephone just as I was about to do so, or a letter come - nothing so concrete as your experience of the TLS and the comb when I appeared in your room, but more than coincidence, and 1 know that there are many more psychically gifted than I - mediums and healers, not to mention advanced spiritual people. When I was in Southern Arizona where friends took me to visit the Hopi Indians, the village head-man (whose mother had been a seer) told us that there will be seven ages of the world, and that this is the fourth and lowest. Here and there, he said, the fifth world is beginning to appear, and that is the turn upwards again to repossess what we have lost on the descending gyre. Strange how these things are known to civilizations so far apart, who could never have had contact in the natural way.
Or perhaps you were a horseman sixty years ago? Did you yourself take part in those god-like races?
I've just been reviewing David Gascoyne's collected poems; with the title 'England's last great poet?'. His poetry certainly has prophetic moments.
I look forward to your paper, in due course.
(16.7.1988)
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I have been a little slack in replying to you, but the procrastination has brought me to a very important day on which to launch my letter. August 15 has for India two far-reaching significances to commemorate. There is the birth of Sri Aurobindo whose fight for freedom was seminal in many respects, not least the first clear-cut demand for total independence, and to whom India's political freedom meant a chance for her to develop without any impediment or distraction a spiritual light for the world. According to him, this light has to gather together all the various past shades and generate the vision of an ultra-violet reaching out to the all-transformative "Supermind" and of an infra-red plunging down to the same archetypal Power waiting secret in Matter to break forth a divine life on earth. Sri Aurobindo's birth on August 15 in 1872 is celebrated today on its 116th anniversary. This is the prime significance of the date in view of India's basic genius of many-lustred spirituality.
Harmoniously along with it comes the 41st anniversary of her rising free of British rule and announcing her freedom, through Nehru's mouth, to the world in the very language of her erstwhile rulers, the language which in fact had served her best in her struggle for liberty and which had communicated to her many a modern ideal, one of the chief having been the ideal of national independence and unshackled individuality so dear, according to Wordsworth, to the English-speaking heart:
We must be free or die who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake...
And it is most meaningful that the choice of August 15, 1947, a birthday of Sri Aurobindo's, was made for India's Independence not by any Indian but by an Englishman, the last British Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten.
What gives further suggestiveness to the choice is that Mountbatten picked out August 15 because two years earlier that date had seen the end of World War II with the surrender of Japan to him, the war which Sri Aurobindo had singled out as a crucial confrontation between forces controlled from behind the scene by preternatural anti-divine beings and those which, for all their defects, were on the side of the Gods helping the evolving soul of the world
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towards a future of non-regimented diversified depth-expressive unity.
Openly Sri Aurobindo supported the Allied Cause despite the British component in it which had been responsible for the foreign imperialist yoke in India. There was a lot of criticism in our country: "Why is a spiritual figure participating in what is apparently a clash of titan Egos bent on their own interests and aggrandisements? Should he not keep apart as an impartially disapproving Witness instead of favouring by both downright word and financial contribution a contesting party which includes India's own alien masters?" For Sri Aurobindo to keep apart would have meant in a super-Keatsian sense
Standing aloof in giant ignorance.
It was precisely because he possessed a mighty spiritual knowledge of unseen things instead of being totally in the dark about what was below the surface that Sri Aurobindo, along with the Mother, declared that fundamentally this war was theirs and not merely a conflict of the Western democracies with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy and, towards the concluding period, militarist Japan. For the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was for a new spiritualised earth building dynamically a greater beauty of the visible and the concrete, a tangible progressive embodiment of the Divine and not just a flight of the Inner to the Higher, leaving the Outer to the poor devices of a groping and stumbling mind. A victory of the totalitarian powers would have spelled a tremendous setback to the Vita Nuova that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were striving to realise for the earth.
Thus from various points of view today, to which my delay has led my reply to you, is the recurrence of an occasion of multiple momentousness. You should be proud and happy that I have kept you waiting!
My mention of Japan's surrender, signalling the end of World War II, brings me to your reference to Churchill in
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connection with the order to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. There's a slip here on your part. The atom bomb was made by America and it was dropped by the order of Truman, not Churchill, though it had the approval of Churchill - and not only Churchill but also Stalin who had been told at Potsdam about its getting ready to be dropped. You have also implied that its use was an example of the "foul play and vengeful atrocities" unavoidable once war is engaged. I think you have not been fully informed of the circumstances of its creation and its use. It has been hotly discussed time and again, mostly with a condemnatory attitude, and its use has even been compared to what was done in the Nazi concentration camps, Hitler's holocaust of six million Jews. In the East one has also heard that it was tried out against Japan because Japan is an oriental country: the suggestion is that it would never have been dropped on Western people. May I briefly set right the main misconceptions?
Einstein's famous letter to Roosevelt to develop the bomb stated explicitly that strong rumour had come of Nazi Germany being busy with experiments to make an atom bomb. The dreadful weapon was made by the U.S.A. specifically to forestall Hitler. After the war it was discovered that Hitler had been pushing every bit of government money towards the manufacture of long-range guns, anti-aircraft and small cannon. So the scientists researching in nuclear energy and wishing to utilise the uranium-supplies from Czechoslovakia received little help. There is no doubt that if Germany had not surrendered on May 7, 1945, the threat of atomic destruction would have been levelled at her as soon as the first experimental bomb was exploded in the New Mexican Desert on July 16. The threat was diverted to Japan when it was reported in the summer of 1945 that in spite of reverses she was in no mind to make peace and had more than two million soldiers and thirty million citizens prepared to die rather than be dishonoured by surrendering. A grandly suicidal mentality was here, but it involved also
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the possibility of great losses on the American side if the war was allowed to continue in the teeth of America coming into possession of a super-weapon which might terminate the war. Even so, in late July a warning was issued to Japan from Potsdam where Truman, Churchill and Stalin had conferred. Radio Tokyo broadcast that the Japanese government would treat with "silent contempt" any call for "unconditional surrender", It was then resolved to bring the atom bomb into action in order to avoid the huge toll of American lives which the plan of invading the Japanese homeland would involve. One may add that even Japanese casualties might have been more than the results of the attack on Hiroshima. It had been calculated that in the event of an invasion of the Japanese islands the probable casualties would be half a million Americans out of an invasion force of five million, and ten million Japanese from the combined effects of battle, bombing and starvation. The cumulative effect of the bombing of both Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki was over 100,000 people killed outright, a further 100,000 horribly maimed and over 200,000 left homeless. By 1950, the additional count of those who, without knowing it, were mortally sick with radiation disease, brought the total number of casualties directly attributable to the double bombing to 300,000, about half the population of the two cities combined. Even so, the loss of life was much less than the certain deaths in the wake of a non-atomic invasion. As for American deaths, whatever the possible smaller number than the half million calculated, once the bomb was available its employment was imperative for the American government. Shirking the use of the atom bomb, how could Truman have explained his choice to the families of the soldiers who in whatever numbers would subsequently have died? How could he have excused the continuation of the war at their expense when he had a weapon to bring about a swift end? I don't believe we can stigmatise the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as "foul play and vengeful atrocities".
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Only two questions may be raised: "Why was Nagasaki bombed in the same way when it had been thought that the bombing of Hiroshima would suffice? How can a weapon with such a catastrophic radiation effect be humanly justified?" Both the questions admit of easy answers. In relation to Nagasaki, there was the enemy's mentality to be reckoned with. The doggedness with which the Japanese defended Okinawa was a lesson to the Americans: they inflicted 50,000 casualties and themselves lost 110,000 dead. Every Japanese was a potential Kamikaze pilot, sworn to be suicidal in the defence of the Japanese cause. The idea of surrender under known conditions of warfare was impossible. An analogy from Okinawa is not just the American view. Kawamoto and most other Japanese today feel that nothing short of a total disaster would have made Japan's military government surrender. Even the terrible casualties of the Hiroshima bombing did not lead her to surrender at once. It took her three days to do so. At last the Japanese Prime Minister told his cabinet: "The only alternative [to being destroyed] is to accept the Potsdam Declaration and terminate the war." But this decision was taken one minute before the Nagasaki bomb was dropped - and therefore too late to prevent this drastic measure to force the hand of an unrelenting enemy. The bombing of Nagasaki was unavoidable. And here I may put down the fact that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets. Hiroshima, for instance, was serving as a rail-terminus and port, regional army headquarters and a major producer of synthetic oil and industrial war-materials.
As to the difference between accepted means of destruction and the atomic bomb with its catastrophic radiation effect, the simple truth is that nobody knew beforehand how much damage would be inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was no conception of its unusually dire consequences. The scientists responsible for its development never stressed that their product might unleash radioactive fall-out that would make it the most sinister weapon imagi-
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nable. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the master-mind of the project, who in the later "witch-hunting" McCarthy era was suspected of Communist sympathies, gave short shrift to those scientists working under him who proposed that this super-destroyer should not be employed. What Truman and his advisers were told was simply that the explosion would be phenomenally large. Naturally they believed that it would be no more morally repellent than the tremendous firebombing of Tokyo. The "conventional" raid on Tokyo on March 9 of the same year had killed 84,000 people and left a million homeless. And this was merely the curtain-raiser to a future offensive which killed or wounded 750,000 Japanese and destroyed the homes of nine million. Such devastation, including the mutilation of civilians, was in keeping with the horrific principle of "total war" which had been accepted by all the parties concerned in World War II. In the minds of Truman and company the question was of degree and not of kind: the atom bomb seemed as legitimate as any other deadly weapon of modern war. When Einstein wrote his letter to Roosevelt and even after the test at Alamogordo this new weapon was considered to be no more than an ultra-efficient explosive. Hence the question of the morality of the American action never arose and could not arise.
When the full awareness of the horror dawned on America with the piecing together of all the reports, she learnt the lesson from them as an unforgettable one. This is shown by her non-use of the bomb and its more dreadful successors ever since. She never even held the overawing weapon as a threat against any nation although she had the monopoly of it until 1949: that is, until the formulas stolen from her by Russia-inspired spies enabled the Soviet Union to make its own bomb. Clearly the later nuclear programme of the U.S. did not stem from an aggressive motive. It stemmed from a distrust of Russia based on the latter's moves in Eastern Europe soon after World War II. At present, thanks to the profound inspiration of Gorbachev,
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the distrust is fading as also the long-standing Russian suspicion of capitalist scheming by the U.S.A. I see here the first turn in world-affairs towards the future which Sri Aurobindo has foreseen. I remember referring to it thirty-seven years ago when you had written to me of "the destroyers" who are our masters today, and you had asked: "How much longer will this world itself last?" I had reminded you that the nuclear age is also the age of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I wrote: "I, small and insignificant in myself but blessed with the rare good fortune of having known Sri Aurobindo and the Mother intimately for years, make bold to assure you that all shall be well with the world these two have made their home and that in spite of the menacing destroyers you may gaze tranquilly into the future, for the future will never be theirs." Harking back to a line of yours which I had quoted at the start of my letter -
This world you with the flower and the tiger share -
1 continued: "I do not prophesy that everything will be smooth and safe in a short while. The time of a turning-point in evolution is never a comfortable one, to say the least; but - also to put it mildly - a turning-point that leads the Supermind in cannot result in the 'tiger' preventing the 'flower' from sharing 'this world' in which you find yourself."
I am digressing from our theme of Hiroshima. Let me wind up my long discussion by asking you not to regard the dropping of the first atom bomb as merely a matter of the end justifying the means, as you opine. The means was as legitimate as the end. The use of it cannot be equated to Hitler's atrocities at Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz and other centres of systematic genocide. There was no pursuit of atomic bombing as there was of "the final solution" - the persistent multiple murder of non-combatant Jews as a matter of policy. The latter stands in a category of its own, with neither the means nor the end justifiable.
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In passing, you have alluded to the Jesuits as having "said (or were said to have said) that 'the end justifies the means'." Poor Jesuits! all kinds of iniquities are charged to them. Maybe some Jesuits in the pastdid employ foul means to secure religious ends which they considered most worthy, but what is generally attributed to them is a sheer travesty of the motto 1 used to find on the labels stuck by the European Fathers of St. Xavier's School in Bombay to the prize books I would earn year after year in English Composition or History or Latin. The motto ran: "In omnibus respice finem" The translation simply is: "In everything look at the end." I take it to signify: "Don't judge anything in mid-career. See how it finally turns out. A man may approach great things with small steps. One may falter on the way and yet arrive at a glorious goal. Little deeds may sum up to a memorable achievement," For the motto to mean that one could commit any crime in the name of an ideal would be the height of bare-faced cynicism. The Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola, would have been condemned at its very inception if it had set out in the name of a saint with so shameless a guide-line. Not that their historical record is all white; far from it. Not only has Voltaire scathed them with his irony: Pascal before him scalded them in his famous Provincial Letters and even the Popes have repeatedly condemned them (1710, 1715, 1742, 1745). Their Order was dissolved several times, but they somehow came up fighting and rendered signal services to the Church and proved most proficient educationists. In any case, for all the skill and ingenuity and even cunning with which they managed their own revivals, nobody can show that they ever advocated evil means as a defensible path to reach an end which may be deemed good.
Touching on the Mahabharata, you have asked: "If the Dharmaraja is allowed to tell a lie (about the death of Drona's son Aswatthama) at what point does he forfeit the right to be called King Dharma?" It is true that Yudhisthira let Drona believe his son was dead, but the Mahabharata
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depicts this circumstance with greater subtlety than your words suggest. Take the whole complex of events in proper significant sequence. First is the fact of Drona harassing the Pandavas with a divine "astra", a weapon not permissible in a conflict among Kshatriyas. Krishna emphasises the unfairness of the fighting and declares that an unfair counter can be made to it. He tells his comrades that if somehow Drona can be led to believe that his son has died he will drop his illegitimate weapon and get killed or else the Pandavas, the upholders of Dharma at whose head is the greatest of Dharmic men, Yudhisthira, would be wiped out. Now there happens to be an elephant who bears the same name as Drona's son. Bhima slays this elephant so that one may truthfully announce that Aswatthama is dead. The announcement as composed of words will be true but its sense will be false. Knowing its double nature Bhima, "with shame suffusing his face" exclaims to Drona: "Aswatthama is dead." Drona is upset and feels faint, yet he fights on. He will cease only if he hears the news from the lips of Yudhisthira who has never told a lie. Drona turns to Dharmaraja. Krishna has already anticipated this emergency and has put before Yudhisthira the fact that if the false suggestion does not come from his ever-truthful lips the Pandava army will be decimated. He has also assured him that the suggestion will not cling to him like a sin. So Yudhisthira has been made ready. Now mark what exactly is exchanged between Drona and him. Drona asks: "My child, I want you to tell me if it is true that my son has died." Yudhisthira answers: "Aswatthama is dead," and softly adds, "The elephant called Aswatthama." Yudhisthira has not only uttered a verbal truth: he has expressed the true sense as well, though in a whisper which Drona is too distraught to hear. The Mahabharata has brought out a subtle shade in the falsehood which converts what would otherwise be a direct lie into that delicate hoverer between straight truth and straight falsehood: equivocation - and a special one too with a slight tilt towards the former. The
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poet Vyasa has too clear a mind to deny that something wrong is done by his paragon. So he says: "The chariot of Yudhisthira which was always four inches above the ground because of his dharma, touches the" earth as soon as those words are spoken. He is now like any other mortal." But with his psychological fineness of perception Vyasa has depicted the paradox of dharma's essence surviving dharma's loss of existence. We have to remember also Krishna's persuasion of Yudhisthira: "You have to deceive Drona for the sake of saving your army, a vast multitude of men."
1 am amazed at Prof. P. Lai thinking "Arjuna was quite right not to want to slay the heroes of both sides, to see all his family wiped out in a war." First of all, Arjuna was asked to fight the Kauravas, the heroes ranged against the side of the Pandavas. Only a part of his family was to be wiped out by him. And Krishna explains to him at great length and from various angles the necessity of the drastic action. And, over and above the socio-political need, the Divine Charioteer seeks to instil the high spiritual mood in which the mighty work has to be done. The Gita is not just a call to war, however righteous: it is a call to a many-aspected Yoga which is not after a static realisation alone but combines an unalterable inner poise of peace and a dynamic identity with the Divine Will at work in the world, work which at times may involve actual conflicts demanding difficult decisions. How could Lal have translated the Gita without entering into its spirit? He is a good translator as a rule but to do justice to spiritual writings one has to catch their inner afflatus and empathise with their supra-intellectual vision. You have referred to Mahatma Gandhi in the Lai-context. His doctrine of Non-violence is a commendable one, but in certain circumstances it has no validity. Thus Gandhi, during the Battle for Britain when the Luftwaffe was pounding the country and preparing the way for an all-out invasion by Hitler's armies, advised England to practise non-violence, submit to Hitler, welcome him and thereby
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melt his heart. He had no insight into the Rakshasik Force that was making Hitler its instrument. As all occultists know, the Rakshasa, the Asura, the Pisacha, by their "typal", non-evolutionary nature, cannot be mended: they have to be ended. The British in India, for all their superior airs and occasional brutality, were manifesting human traits gone awry: they could be touched by non-violence, though even they at times required to be tackled differently, and basically it was a change in world-conditions and in Britain's own fortunes that created the ground for India's independence. And unlike the Nazis quite a number of Englishmen had a mind of their own: they were themselves in favour of India's freedom. There is a time for non-violence and there is a time for active resistance. All efforts should be made, as by Krishna, for a peaceful solution, but, when they fail, a call to arms is inevitable if mankind is to progress. Extreme adherence to the Gandhian line would be a backward step. Of course, the ideal would be to fight after one has fought with one's own common nature and got in touch with one's deepest self which is in contact with the Infinite, the Eternal who is the world's Lord and Lover. In short, to follow the light which is shed by Avatars like Krishna and in scriptures like the Gita.
Reference to Krishna and the Gita is an appropriate approach to the theme of the Kaliyuga on which you have made interesting comments. According to tradition, the Kaliyuga came the moment Krishna's "lotus-feet" left the earth. The message of the Gita is, therefore, the last spiritual summons to us from the pre-Kali epoch. I am not speaking of the historical date of this scripture. Whatever that may be, spiritual tradition has to look on it in this manner. And I should think that no other scripture has hailed from the past with so comprehensive and synthetising a revelation of the secrets of Reality. The vision of the successive loss of a quarter of Reality with the series of the four yugas is an old Indian insight. One version speaks of a cow originally standing on her four legs but with the passing
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of each yuga losing one of them until in the Kali she is precariously poised on a single leg. We may consider the Gita's threefold message - Karma, Jnana, Bhakti - as supplying the spiritual support in"an epoch in which the Time-cow has lost three of its upholding limbs. How shall we understand the occult import of the last of these limbs? A fancy of mine has it that the Gita itself provides the answer. What is its culminating word? The triple path of Work, Knowledge and Devotion has been elucidated and a varied disclosure of Divinity has been given to Arjuna by Krishna, including the apocalypse of the World-Form and the Time-Spirit where we have those phrases which occurred to Oppenheimer during the experimental explosion at Alamo-gordo, "Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven". Now in the last chapter the Divine Charioteer prepares the final revelation by telling the disciple: "Further hear the most secret, the supreme word that I shall speak to thee..." Then the great secret is voiced: "Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone, I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve" (XVIII.66). This seems at first sight a somersault of a statement. Hasn't Krishna declared the Avatar's role to be the restoration of dharma in a time of its decline? What then does he mean now? He has also insisted on a man following his own nature's dharma instead of trying to foist a foreign one on himself. What does he intend now? I believe we have to attend to the plural number used: "all dharmas". There is, as every student of Hinduism knows, a dharma that is sanatana, "eternal". Surely there should be no abandonment of that. What is to be abandoned is the multitude of norms that spring up from time to time according to occasions. These norms are called "dharmas of the heart", the promptings of the surface being, the common natural reactions or responses to particular situations, and they depend also on the psychological state of an individual, like the state of Arjuna when he saw the unpleasant work he was asked to do as a protagonist of the Pandavas against the
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Kauravas - the state in which his heart prompted him to refuse to fight. An additional nuance of temporary or occasional dharmas relates to certain conventions of an age: these conventions may be passing social conveniences or legal technicalities. A further shade would refer to the outer trappings of religion - its observances, rituals, customary practices. To be told to transcend such dharmas would not contradict the clinging to what the Avatar periodically comes for in order to maintain terrestrial harmony. But I would go a step beyond, I would say that along with asking Arjuna to relinquish such non-eternal dharmas, Krishna has a still deeper command. It is as though he were laying bare to Arjuna an inner spiritual movement which, if resorted to with absolute intensity, would bring in a single blaze the luminous results of the triple path already set forth. Work, Knowledge, Devotion would yield their superhuman sense spontaneously, without involving their special disciplines, by means of an all-compassing self-surrender to the Divine -the will fused with Him, the thoughts plunged into Him, the emotions rapt by Him through one sustained sweeping soul-gesture. This is how in the Kaliyuga the God-seeker can make the Cow of existence afford to lose all its legs except one, the last remaining limb concentrating in itself the strength of the other three and giving them a new energy of simplified significance going straight to the spiritual mark.
My somewhat complex attempt to read in the apparent negatives of the Kaliyuga a hidden positiveness seems to find support in an insight of Sri Aurobindo's apropos of the idea that from aeon to aeon God "manifests himself in an ever-evolving humanity which grows in experience by a series of expansions and contractions towards its destined self-realisation in God". Sri Aurobindo comments: "That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of Yugas. Each age in the Hindu system has its own line of moral and spiritual evolution, and the decline of the dharma or established law of conduct from the Satya to the Kaliyuga is not in reality a deterioration but a detrition of the outward
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forms and props of spirituality in order to prepare a deeper spiritual intensity within the heart. In each Kaliyuga mankind gains something in essential spirituality. Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact. The wheel of Brahma rotates for ever but it does not turn in the same place; its rotations carry it forward."
The psychical researcher and doctor Mary Scott is both right and wrong. I remember a statement of Sri Aurobindo to the effect that his Yoga does Tantra through Vedanta - a paradox at first sight. In Tantra the subtle centres - the chakras - are sought to be activated by the rising up of the coiled "Serpent Power", the Kundalini, at the base of the subtle-physical body's spine, to which the tail-end of our gross material body's spinal cord corresponds. The Shakti. the Mother-Force, in its course towards the top of the head, activates the chakras. The body, both subtle and gross, is the field of experiment. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is Tantric in the general sense that it takes the body into its scope and in the particular sense that it calls upon the Mother-Force, the Shakti, to work on the body. But it is Vedantic because all the experiences compassed by the Vedanta are included so that the whole system undergoes purification and the consciousness undergoes a profound peace and there is an invocation of the Divine who is above the mental level together with the Divine who is deep within and the Divine who is universally around - but in as much as this Divine is figured as the Supreme Mother one with the Supreme Lord we get again a strong Tantric stress except that the Divine Mother works from above downward and not from below upward to open the Yogi's consciousness to the hidden potentialities of his embodied being. The push upward from below is not ruled out: indeed no occult or spiritual discovery of the past is neglected, all is drawn into a wide unifying scheme to bring about in diverse ways the development of the inner self and the permeation of the outer self by the light from within and above.
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I am glad Celtic mythology lets loose wonderful horses into the English imagination. I have read a bit of Vernon Watkins but not come across his "Ballad of the Mari Lwyd". I have enjoyed Chesterton's "Ballad of the White Horse" but no actual white horse takes part in the story: only the location of the tale is indicated by that name. It's sad that so fine a symbol spells only "death" for the Christian mind. Down from the Rigvedic Dadhikravan through the Puranic animal on which the last Avatar Kalki is figured as riding onto earth to establish the Golden Age - down from hoary antiquity to the time of KDS the equus has played a spiritually suggestive part. As you know, KDS has several poems on his favourite quadruped. As your father loved horses dearly, perhaps you will enjoy reading one of my pieces which might have gripped your father's fancy though I am afraid his more esoterically-minded daughter would have had to run a commentary to him at certain places.
White Stallion
White stallion champing the barley
Of silent bliss -Gathering into thy heart's
Vermillion abyss
A power outrunning time,
As if to a witching west Out of a wizard east
Racing were one with rest,
A calm that suddenly views
Here grown to There, A wide-awake sleep devouring
Aeons with a single stare!
Fastest of all the flames
Born of the Cave beyond sight,
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Bringing on starlike nostrils
Neigh after neigh for night -
Carrier of immortality" Between blue wings,
Yet hooved with a hurry to spurn Imperishable things -
On all the tracks of truth
Speed without peer, Yet unappeased by winning
God's Derby every year!
O never-ageing stallion,
Down to lean-breasted earth
Thou comest like a lover
Through the low gate of birth,
Renouncing the vast triumphs, Graciously gone to stud
For mixing nameless nectar
With sobbing mortal blood!
Alone among the godheads Thy soul was never drunk
With self-infinitudes,
But saw the Den far-sunk
Where weak yet restive fetlocks Were secrets without keys.
Unknowing why for all the weakness The running would not cease -
Why the dim quiver of fatigue Was a tremble of blind joy
As if behind the fallen ears
There rose a heavenly "Hoy!"
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Thou on thy thunderous hill
Couldst hear the strange despair
In those four tottering mysteries Of the black-bodied mare.
Many a groping steed
Sought her for dam Of darkling colts and fillies,
But like an oriflamme
The mane on her neck of night Fluttered to a wind of dream,
And never from her heart ran forth The future's shadowy stream.
But now the lives to come
Take singing start In the crimson distances
Of the deep heart.
The laugh of the mountain Cave,
The sigh of the Den below Have married their mystic sounds:
Their children shall grow
A wonder-dappled pack,
Love's rich surprise Even to the gaze of grandeur
That is paradise!
Let me not tire you with further poetry or prose. But my impression of you is that you are an indefatigable reader. Recently you wrote to me that you were going through Raja Rao's Chessmaster and His Moves, which, I believe, is quite a mass (or mess?) of fiction-shot philosophy and a display of multi-lingual would-be wisdom, Greek and Latin and French rubbing shoulders with English, the latter being for
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all I know deliberately Indianised. The fifty-fifth anniversary of your twenty-fifth birthday - if I may discreetly refer to your latest birthday, since a woman never admits growing beyond 25 - has not affected the infinite variety of your interest in reading matter. Nor has it dammed in any manner the energy with which you have indulged the cacoethes scribendi with which you were born. I hear that you are busy with a new volume of your autobiography. Or has it already come out? I have read with great admiration and fascination the three earlier volumes. Some other members of the Ashram have also shared your ecstasies and agonies. I am glad that the increase of years has sensitised you more to subtle presences and who knows you may come to feel them in themselves in addition to feeling them as transfigured tree and house and star as hinted in the two lines of your verse I quoted some months back to you.
Alas! the Brook which left its "haunts of coot and hern" has not yet been able "to join the brimming river" of my daily post.
(15.8.1988)
Some time ago I made this copy for you of one of Vernon Watkins's poems about horses - his best-known poem as I think 1 wrote you is The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd - the ballad of the living and the dead, the dead led by a mare's skull adorned with ribbons etc. The mimers came to every door in the village seeking admittance, with a rhyming contest (in Welsh) and his Ballad is a wonderful poem in the form of this contest. I believe it is now extinct in Wales, but was still a living tradition when Vernon was writing. The Ballad is too long to make a photocopy. 1 send the poem on the opposite page as well because I know you will recognise that this is true poetry of a very high order. Brian Keeble of the Golgonooza Press recently published Vernon's Collected Poems, disregarded, need I say, by our Sunday Paper
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culture. You will at least appreciate his use of language and verse-forms. He was of my generation but died twenty years ago. A better - more profound - poet than Dylan Thomas, his friend, I would maintain. There is a section and a review of his work in Temenos 8, if you have it.
Proofs of T. 10 are coming through now - or would be but for the present postal strike. I hope they come soon since I'll be leaving for New York and Massachusetts - the pretext is an invitation to lecture and read poems but the real reason is because I want to see my dear American friends once more. I owe much to that country whose politics are so endangering to world-peace, but where there are so many marvellous people. England is still (or again) 'sunk in deadly sleep' as it was in Blake's day. No wonder our national archetype is King Arthur, who is said to sleep in a number of different places, awaiting his call to return, America is more alive.
I do hope to have a paper from you to go into our eleventh issue, for the theme of the different levels from which poetry derives and which resonate within it is not only important in itself, but the least understood aspect of poetry in this materialist country at this time. Not that we will change the attitude of 'the literary world' but here and there one finds a reaction, a stirring in the grass-roots of another understanding. Or at least a search, a dissatisfaction with the dull, dreary positivism currently in fashion, in a number of groups and communities, Sufi or Buddhist or many inspired of course by India.
Your interesting letter about the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, on Yudhisthira's prevarication about 'Aswatthama', and the ethics of war raises questions I cannot answer. I only know that my own instincts are all against war of whatever kind, yet I see that the Lord Krishna answered Arjuna, and the Great Battle is eternal, it seems to be a part of the destiny of this earth. I suppose I would see it as Blake does, that Governments seek to promote natural and depress 'spiritual wars'. In the Spiritual War we are all engaged, and I am myself much in the front line here in
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England - Blake's war, and all our war of the eternal against the temporal truths. As for Yudhisthira, Blake wrote,
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
You would say, the intent of Yudhisthira's lie was not 'bad' since he stood for Dharma against Adharma, but all the same, once a war is engaged, both sides believing they represent dharma, all standards are apt to break down, as with Hiroshima. I do believe that we had to wage the last war against Hitler and the genocide of the Jews in the cause of dharma, but Hiroshima seems to have (as I feel it) gone beyond what any dharmaraja would be justified in allowing. Your knowledge of the sequence of events is more accurate than mine. I speak, in a feminine manner, simply on instinct: When that bomb was dropped, an irrevocable step towards the nihil was taken. You in India take long views and I hope your faith in 'evolution' may be justified; but having reached that section in my bad American translation of the Mahabharata where the last phase of the kali-yuga is described, I wonder if that is not where we are. Would that Kalki, the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus, etc., be at hand. But 'what rough beast/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'. Yet how wonderful this world is, how rich, 'O brave new world that has such people in it'. I have known so many wonderful people, many faces of the one Face whom I have loved. Of course if - or must I say since - Spirit is indestructible, all must pass, yet nothing can be destroyed finally in our mock-battles here in 'the world of generation'. So Blake would have seen it, yet how grieved and indignant he was at the wars of his day and the slaughter of armies of young men, the crimes of power against the 'meek' who will 'inherit the earth'. But these things you know as well as I. I don't exactly despair but I don't see how we can go on as we are without destroying this earth. First the seals began to die in our waters, and now the beautiful dolphins are dying. It is
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all too close to our Christian Book of Revelation, apocalypse is in our daily news-bulletins and no one stops the destructive course. But there are, as I've said, little groups here and there, grass-roots seekers for a different reality.
I've now at last finished a fourth volume of my life. No volume about any life could be conclusive but mine ends with my 'passage to India'. The India, that is, of the Imagination. Here I must stop, there is much to be done before I leave for U.S.A. Then our Temenos conference in October. There will be twelve issues. I still wish Arabinda would send me something on Indian music but I don't suppose he will. However, I've just had a letter from him, which is very nice, I used to see him much more often than of late since he began to jet round the world at such a speed. Please give him my love and tell him I'm just ready to attack the book he sent me.
I hope you like the Vernon Watkins poems.
(4.9.1988)
Please forgive me for being a little slack in replying. I received at last the Mahabharata play and find it fascinating. Thank you very much. I have been an admirer of Vernon Watkins, but what I like more in him is the Yeatsian side and not the side that has an affinity to Dylan Thomas. Thomas has a spontaneous picturesque strangely suggestive verbiage which is not easy to echo. Even he himself often falls short of his best moments of a medley of colour and sound. In those moments unforgettable thoughts are caught from the images and rhythms that are running away: there is no attempt to think or work out a theme - in fact the thoughts that arise are vague and, though they linger in our minds, we cannot define them apart from the singing stream upon which they have arrived to us. Watkins is more mental than Thomas and tries consciously to call forth the Dylan-effect. Sometimes he strikes out a mysterious beauty to
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which something in our depths resonates:
Darkness is not dark, nor sunlight the light of the sun
But a double journey of insistent silver hooves
And he slips from that mother to the boundless
horizons of air
Looking for that other, the foal no longer there.
But often the poet seems to be contriving the Dylan-effect. His Yeatsian contrivances seem to me more successful:
Blake, on the world alighting, holds the skies,
And all the stars shine down through human eyes -
Beggar of those Minute Particulars,
Yeats lights again the turmoil of the stars.
But he is at his best when he catches a spark of the Yeatsian grey matter into which an intuitive flash has fallen and the result is verse that is simple and direct and yet profoundly cunning with "the artifice of eternity". I remember your writing to me that he is the finest heir of Yeats. I don't have Temenos 8 where a review of his poetic work appears. In fact I have had access to only two numbers of Temenos - one of them was sent by you, containing your article on Kabir and Yeats and Radice's splendid translations of Tagore.
I am interested to learn of your coming visit to America. You speak enthusiastically about the people there, but when I mentioned Thomas R. Whitaker's Swan and Shadow as having been hailed as "the greatest book yet written on Yeats's poetry" you were openly sarcastic, holding that no American could ever write anything worthwhile on poetry
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like Yeats's. When you are in the States, try to take a look at this book and let me know your considered opinion.
Apropos of Hiroshima you have developed a heroic pessimism. But surely you have seen the recent moves of Gorbachev in conjunction with Reagan. A definite turn has taken place towards the future envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. They knew very well - and much better than anyone else, since they had spiritual insight - how dangerous the times have been and still they held out glowing hopes for the future. By the very logic of evolution the Supermind is inevitable. When the Kali Age is ending or has ended - as I believe - there is a terrible period in which all the hidden evil comes out or is drawn out in order to be dealt with by the divine forces. We have been passing through this period and now the first signs of God's dawn are faintly visible. We may have a fairly long wait but the result is sure:
Streak on gold streak wounding the illusive night.
When Sri Aurobindo has appeared in our world, there can never be what you deem "an irrevocable step towards the nihil". Behind the dark look of things there is preparing, however gradually, the irreversible step towards the Plenum. The Shakespearian phrase you have used "O brave new world that has such people in it" - has a deeper and wider significance than you imagine. Of course our earth is full of wonderful people - as you say, "many faces of the one Face whom I have loved" - but what you are referring to is the brave old and not new world. The really new world towards which the finger of Sri Aurobindo is pointing will show the Divine directly shining through the human, a straight revelation of the One Face of many faces. Be sure that a Shakespeare of the future will vision not time's "dark backward and abysm" but its bright forward and empyrean. And a hint or glint of what is to be may be glimpsed in the dreams and desires of those whom even your Jeremiah
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mood cannot help noticing: "little groups here and there, grass-roots seekers for a different reality", in whose midst there is undoubtedly that part of you which is "much in the front line" of "the Spiritual War... of the eternal against the temporal truths".
It's indeed good news that you have at last finished a fourth volume of your life-story. When you say that it ends with your "passage to India" - the India of the Imagination a la Blake - do you not mean that it contains an account of all that your mind has mirrored and your heart echoed of the Mantra-vibrant Light which still persists in our ancient country? Do write to me about the Temenos Conference and your latest impressions of the U.S.A. I'll convey your message to Arabinda Basu.
(24.10.1988)
It was a pleasure to get your letter, it is a long time since 1 had heard from you, I'm glad the Mahabharata stage version reached you and that you think well of it. Peter Brook did seem to capture the essence of the whole, although of course wonderful incidental things - Savitri and Sakuntala, and the meeting of Bhima with Hanuman and much besides - don't appear. I wonder if it will be performed in India and if so how India will take this internationalization of India's most Indian of epics. My friend Prince Kumar, a descendant of the Udaipur family, told me, quite casually, that his relations had tried to poison him when he was a child and I said 'just like the Mahabharata' and he replied 'They haven't changed!' Something to do with the succession and inheritance of course.
Would you like me to send you Vernon Watkins's Collected Poems, or do you have most of them - your letter suggests you have at least some of the Faber collections. As always your perceptiveness goes straight to the significant detail, and you are very perceptive about Dylan Thomas's
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poems being wonderful but at the same time vague in thought and a blend of delusive verbiage and that singing stream. I don't really think Vernon imitated Dylan, Wales and its language is a common inheritance. I would not say Vernon was more derivative from Dylan than Dylan from him. I would say Vernon was the more complete poet, envisioning as he does the full human range of life and death and rebirth. But will never be popular, he's less dazzling. I'm posting separately a copy of Temenos 8 with Vernon Watkins material and Philip Sherrard's review of him. It also contains material about Peter Brook and the Mahabharata production. Will you let me know if there are other issues of Temenos you would like to have and I'll send them to you. (See leaflet for contents.) And I hope you will let us have your thoughts on Sri Aurobindo's views of The Future Poetry for our eleventh issue - T.10 just going to press now.
1 heard sad news today from my friend Santosh Pal, in Delhi - that Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay has died. She was most generously friendly to me in India, and what a privilege to have known this great uncrowned queen of the new Indian nation. A woman of the theatre, and the arts, a friend of Gandhiji, she is part of history. It will be deeply sad to revisit India without her presence.
America - I have many dear American friends and I find New York intoxicating but frightful, and the woods of New England in the Fall one of the beauties of the world. But it is a totally chaotic society, relationships don't hold, whether of marriage or of family, everything is relative and unstable, and everyone as a matter of course seems to be 'under analysis' with some psychiatrist instead of living their lives properly or even joining the local church choir or reading seriously or otherwise cultivating their gifts. Gandhiji's remark when asked 'what do you think of Western Civilization' seems particularly applicable to U.S.A. at present, 'It would be a good idea'. On the other hand they are open, idealistic, generous, much more so than here - less apathetic, less 'sunk in deadly sleep'. I had a lovely time but it's a
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terrifying thing to think of the power of that great nation being in the hands of such uncouth ignoramuses, and a nation in which 96% of the population lives in these great towering cities and only 4% on the land is another terrifying thought. And yet they are all 'in search of a soul' and those who are not 'under analysis' have some sort of guru, Zen or Indian, or something less reputable, and really want to discover some spiritual path, just so long as it does not involve any control of their 'way of life' especially in sexual matters, where total democratic freedom prevails. It's a mad society but at the same time so many sincere young people trying much harder than not more than a few try here. Though even here there are stirrings in the grass-roots, and much interest in 'Green' economics. I'm off at the end of this week to give a paper at the annual meeting of the Schumacher Society - a big event that takes place in Bristol. I'm going to point out that 'nature' is the environment of the soul as well as of the body and that caring for our earth is not merely a matter of expediency.
You ask about the Temenos Conference at Dartington Hall. I enclose the programme. It was a wonderful and profound experience, and every place was taken and the open air concerts of the Dagar Brothers, the Noh troupe from Japan, and the English choir, overflowing and many could not get seats. Great beauty was there - our poet this year was David Gascoyne - and Kapila Vatsyayan was given a standing ovation, for her paper left us all far behind. A young film director who has just completed a film on Edwin Muir is going to make a film about Kapila - he's planning one on me at present - and India carried the day, for we all left, uplifted on the sound-current of the Dhrupad music of the Dagar Brothers. Arabinda knows their music and I expect so do you. They brought a son and daughter who will, please God, continue that great tradition for another generation. What pleased me above all was that after their concert they said 'we came because we love you'. Their presence was a great delight throughout the conference, and
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our own very gifted musician, John Tavener, and also Joscelyn Godwin the musicologist, were delighted to talk with them about music. So I hope it was worth it to them also to have come. Dartington as you probably know is a companion foundation (by the Elmhirsts) to Santiniketan.
The Conference papers, including my own on the theme of 'Poetry as Prophecy', will all be published in Temenos 11-T. 10 just going to press. It contains Raja Rao and Professor Gokak. I try to include India in each number, and next time we will have Kapila and I hope your own paper also.
Tell Arabinda, if you see him, that, having now completed all these outstanding tasks, I shall set to work in earnest to read the book he sent me. Your friend Mrs. Dyne came to the Conference, and can tell you more about it if you see her -I think she is now on her way to Singapore. I think she must have enjoyed it for she generously contributed to our expenses, in response to a request at the end of the Conference. We do it all on a shoestring, even though we have but to request Japan's greatest actors and India's great singers and they come! Now I'm wondering what to sell next in order to pay the printer once more for Temenos 10.
As you may imagine I have had little time to read, still less to write, but now see a little leisure opening in the coming weeks. 1 must try to find time for poetry - with my India Seen Afar book finished. I shall try to concentrate on poetry in such time as remains to me.
As to the future, be that as it may, our task lies always in the present. I hope it is true that the future will bring the divine nearer, to shine 'directly through the human* but as you know I don't feel much enthusiasm for the idea of Utopia, under whatever form. I think I share Edwin Muir's liking for 'wheat and tares together sown' of this present world of Good and Evil. As to India, yes, India is a state of being, seen afar, and indeed it echoes in that 'mantra-vibrant light' which still persists in your ancient country, 1 was struck, hearing the Dagar Brothers again, that, supreme
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musicians as they are, it is the same music that sounds in every village festival, every home, everywhere, some more some less skilled, but India is that 'sound-current'. 1 hope the destructive music of the modern West never supersedes that great OM that is the sound of India. We need India to civilize the world. I agree with you about Mr. Gorbachev -perhaps in Russia also - from Russia also - the Spirit will be re-born. For the rest we can but pray, in the words of the American poet-novelist Wendell Berry, 'God preserve us from the consequences of our own acts'.
(31.10.1988)
As always with your letters the latest one of October 31 was very welcome - and it is full of stimulating thoughts showing the wide range of your interests and the varied activity of your eye which is both observant and visionary.
Your little chat with Prince Kumar - rather frightening in its implications - reminds me of the differing views I have come across on the subject of sati - wife burnt along with her dead husband. The immediate link is the rumour the Greek historians of Alexander's invasion of north-west India has left to us. There are two items. One is about the reported origin of the Sati-institution. Here the origin is traced to men trying to protect themselves. Poisoning of husbands by wives who had extra-marital lovers was said to be so common that the male legislators had to make it the wife's duty to burn herself on the dead husband's funeral pyre, so that the lascivious lady would be deterred from envisaging her lord-and-master's early demise. Another Greek peep at sati in about the same B.C.-period discloses the rivalry among the several wives of a high-ranking military man who had fallen in battle. Each of the widows claimed the privilege of immolating herself with his burning corpse. This verbal and perhaps even physical fighting bespeaks either genuine devotion or a keen desire for posthumous honour. The
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ancient Indian idea that the bond between husband and wife was not only sacred but a lasting relationship beyond the earthly life and might even mean a relationship continuing through the complex of rebirths may have been at the back of the sati-phenomenon. The widow would long to go with her deceased mate in order to carry on her devoted duty. Here the question would arise with us: what about the husband's attachment to his wife in the light of the sacred? There was no call on him to commit the male equivalent of sati for the sake of the relationship. I believe the inequality was due to two reasons: (1) the patriarchal character of the Vedic society and (2) the male polygamy prevalent down the ages. The husband, being nominally the head of the household and not being tied down to one spouse, was under no obligation to accompany any wife through the gates of death. A third reason could be the misreading of a certain hymn of the Rigveda. There, when a man is put on the funeral pyre, the wife is told to go and lie down beside him before the fire is lit. The phrase in which it is added that she, after this gesture of reverence and devotion, should get up and join the group of the living had one syllable wrongly articulated by the tradition-keepers which precluded the going away from the pyre. There is no corresponding hymn pointing to the husband's attitude in case of the wife's death.
So far I have touched only on the masculine angle. There is a feminine aspect of the sari-problem. The life of a surviving widow was one long series of miseries. She would be looked upon as an inauspicious presence and openly shunned, even ill-treated and subjected to various disadvantages which would make her life a protracted painful process of dying. It would be much better to get burned at one shot with the departed husband and be saved from the ignominy of a widowed existence, as well as winning posthumous fame for courageous self-sacrifice. This view makes sati a consummation devoutly wished for by the woman: in other words, sati was a wife-prompted institution.
In any case, the institution has a side of horror along with
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that of glamour and glory. The latter side has been vividly presented in those two lines by Butler, the poet of Hudibras, about
Indian widows gone to bed
In flaming curtains with the dead.
All forward-looking minds in India today are against the institution. Even now there are scattered instances of sati -often suspected to have been engineered by the husband's family to get for themselves whatever financial rights the wife might inherit. Our legislators and public opinion in general are up in arms against the aura some parties are trying to wrap the sati practice in.
I am afraid I have been drawn into quite a digression apropos of Prince Kumar's reference to the attempt to poison him when he was a child. Perhaps the subject hasn't proved an absolute bore to you?
I shall be glad to have Temenos 8 with the Vernon Watkins material. The review of Rilke will also interest me. And there are many other things worth knowing in this number. I see the name of Jean Mambrino. As recommended by you, he sent me four books of his some months back and I wanted to thank him, but, search as 1 might, I could not find either his address or the address of his publisher. Will you please let me know where to find him? Temenos 9 also holds a lot of meat. T 7 attracts me by the piece on David Gascoyne. But how much shall I count on your generosity? I suggest that you send me these issues not by air mail but by surface post. I can afford to wait. What I am most looking forward to is the new volume of your autobiography.
You are certainly right in considering Vernon Watkins a more complete poet. As between Dylan Thomas and him, I should say that the true poetic spirit touched Thomas now and then with brilliant effect but it never quite moulded his mind to make it a home for its profound values and for a
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permanent sense of its presence in a steady harmonised mind capable of inspired thought no less than inspired sensation and, linking both, a fine feeling for what I may call the divine shadow in the human substance. I am not sufficiently versed in Watkins's work to make a definitive detailed pronouncement. Perhaps some matter coming from you will confirm or modify my general impression left by lines like
For death has burst upon you, yet your light-flooded eyes
do not tremble...
I am not surprised at your sadness on hearing of Kamala-devi Chattopadhyaya's death. She was an unusual woman and she contributed much to India's varied cultural consciousness. Did you know that she was the wife - long separated - of one of India's most gifted poets writing in English: Harindranath Chattopadhyaya. He wrote remarkable things until he turned Communist. Since then 1 haven't come across anything of his which would stick in my mind like that brief phrase which gives us at once a subtle unforgettable picture and the elusive atmosphere of a mystic mood, where the time-consciousness "forgets to roam" -
grown sudden unaware,
Offering up its noontide and its gloam,
Withdrawn in a lost attitude of prayer.
You have evoked for me an image of America with a penetrating as well as comprehensive accuracy - a huge fumbling giant semi-chaotically managing its individual and social life and yet "in search of a soul". I know that the soul sought for is still not put above sexual excitement, but the spiritual hunger, however vague and incompletely purified, is genuine. It has led several young men and women to the true path, as I can see from their presence in our Ashram.
Will you send me a copy of the paper you were to read at
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Bristol? India too needs to learn the truth of your thesis -that "nature" is the environment of the soul as well as of the body and that caring for our earth is not merely a matter of expediency. I read the other day about the great Himalayas being in danger because of the unlimited deforestation going on.
Your account of the Temenos Conference at Dartington is quite thrilling. I must come to know more about the Dagar Brothers and Kapila Vatsyayan. I recollect that once you referred to her in a letter of yours, but I forget the context. I think it was when we were discussing Yeats. By the way, if you can lay your hands on an offprint I had sent you of my article "Yeats: Poet of Two Phases" I shall be thankful to have it posted back at your convenience. I am not sure you have read it. As it presents a somewhat unorthodox vision of Yeats's work I would like to have the opinion of so insightful a scholar of Yeats as you are.
My friend Mrs Dyne hasn't written to me yet. She had said she would be somewhat of a nomad in England and she didn't tell me when she would be back in Singapore ("Lion City"). She has a very generous nature but it is also governed by a discriminating mind so that her generosity does not run away with her and go helter-skelter. It is she who financed the publication of our old series of letters: The English Language and the Indian Spirit. Her most wonderful, though some might call it most blunderful, act is her being after me to bring out that far-from-marketable commodity, my Collected Poems!
(14.11.1988)
It's a pleasure to find a letter from you in my morning's post. You have been in my mind of late because I met Mrs. Sonia Dyne, who came to our Temenos Conference at Dartington Hall, which I hope she enjoyed -I think she must have done so since she afterwards sent me a generous contribution to
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our expenses - we have no 'funding' and do it all 'on a shoestring'. That only goes to show that it is not in fact 'funding' that enables things to be done, but the wish to do whatever it may be, 1 have edited Temenos now for nearly a decade, and we have had several substantia] gifts but no regular funding of any kind. I don't know how I shall pay the next printer's bill, but in need I can sell another painting. When my friends were young and unknown I sometimes bought paintings which now have become extremely valuable -Cecil Collins, Winifred Nicholson. David Jones I shall keep till my last resource is exhausted!
Not deterred by this we now contemplate setting up a small College to be called the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies. Perhaps I do not need to tell you that the Universities, in the arts and subjects which involve values rather than information, no longer fulfil their task. Indeed I realized that this is also the case in India, whose Universities tend to be geared to the English or, even worse, the American models. Cultural imperialism is perhaps more insidiously effective than the other kind. Many Indians still seem bewitched by Western values instead of (which would be very valuable to the West also, or in particular) bringing more enduring values to bear on Western culture. One young woman in Delhi was working on (heaven help us!) Sylvia Plath, and I heard from my friend Santosh Pal of another whose marriage had broken up after her return from Cambridge (England) where she had been working on a thesis on Dr. Johnson! So, if our Academy comes to pass-only perhaps 50 full time students each year - we would want always to have an Indian philosopher on our staff. But so far this is not a certainty but a scheme we're working on. I feel that perhaps here the time is ripe, many grass-roots movements in search of better values than those that prevail are to be found, not of course hitherto discoverable in the University Establishment. We can but try.
Well, the West has always made a great deal of Suttee (sati) in boasting of the better values the West brought to
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India. I do think it is a sad criticism of Indian society that widows, had they lived, would have had no place in a household they had entered. What about their children, deprived of two parents at once? But every nation has its dark underside and widow and (worse) bride-burning seems to be India's. However, your point about husband-poisoning goes to show that not all men are wicked and not all women are beyond reproach. Here marriages don't seem to hold any,more, one in three ends in divorce and on the whole young people tend not to marry in the first place at all and the illegitimacy rate is high, with so-called 'single parent families', where mothers never married and men come and go, very common. It's the children of course who suffer. I don't know what the figures are in America. However, many young people here are 'in search of a soul' and Buddhism, Sufi communities and other groups attempting to replace the old stable family and village communities are springing up, some of them very serious and dedicated people.
As to my friend Prince Kumar's family I suppose the Kshatriyas don't like too many heirs around - exactly as in the story of the Pandavas and the Kauravas. He told me about Kamaladevi's husband the poet, whom he knew in U.S.A.; in fact he used to put him up in his apartment. She must have been very different as a young woman, passionately interested in theatre and indeed all the arts. She still was. of course. I remember seeing her at a rather imperfect performance of Shakuntala, half empty theatre, and only about three of the cast proficient in the traditional acting and speaking, with a flower in her gray hair, a true woman of the theatre. I shall miss her very much if I return to India, where she held court at the India International Centre. She was very friendly to me and enabled me to see and do many things I would never have seen otherwise.
I can't remember whether I sent Temenos 8 airmail or surface, but I shall today post you 7 and 9 surface mail, for posting to India costs a fortune.
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At our Temenos Conference we had Kapila Vatsyayan, who for once had written her paper, and she was given a standing ovation. So often she is too busy to write anything down and speaks extempore with an armful of books in which she searches for quotations, but when she has prepared her material she is splendid. Another of India's wonderful women. Her husband too is a poet - I've asked her to let me have some of his work. I just met him the first time 1 went to India but barely took him in. I hope that we will not end our series (the twelfth issue will be our last) without your presence in our Temenos. I asked Sonia Dyne to say a word on our behalf. To me Indian participation is most essential since India is (as Raja Rao said to me) not a nationality but a 'state of consciousness' and that state the goal not of one race only but of all. Alas, how far we have to travel on that way! And meanwhile Westernization, for all its practical benefits, represents the easy, effortless way, insidiously attractive wherever it may be in the world. However, you say Sri Aurobindo believed in a progression, not a regression, and one can but hope he was right. Meanwhile we all do our best.
1 am interested to hear that there is a project to publish your Collected Poems. I hope you will not fail to send me a copy. No, poems are not marketable, in this country they are something multitudes of people write but nobody reads. You and I belong to the late literate generation. Unless India is very different. I have written in T.10 a review of David Gascoyne's Collected Poems entitled 'England's Last Great Poet?'. The reason I think there can be no more great poets in the tradition of our culture is because of the impoverishment of the language itself. Words no longer resonate with a whole tradition, no one knows the myths any more, or even the bible, words are flat and factual, a kind of instant language as used on the television and the daily press. But the question demands another letter and meanwhile I must post this one, and the two copies of Temenos. I'd be glad to send you any others, we may well have copies
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left at the end of the series. Our sales have slowly risen but even so. Therefore do not hesitate to ask for any of the back issues still in print.
P.S. Jean Mambrino's address is,
Etudes, 15 rue Monsitur 75007.
Paris.
(21.11.1988)
Your letter is full of hope for the future in spite of there being a great deal to despair about the present. In this you are an Aurobindonian without quite knowing it. I say "quite" because there is a touch of knowing since you write sympathetically after recounting the bad-to-worse process all around you: "However, you say Sri Aurobindo believed in a progression, not a regression, and one can but hope he was right. Meanwhile we all do our best." Sri Aurobindo, speaking from inner experience as well as from insight into the world-movement across the ages, declares that the Supermind is a thing decreed for the earth and that its advent in the course of evolutionary history is inevitable. According to him, an evolution of divinity cannot but take place since there has been an involution of divinity at the very start of earthly time. If biology has any intuitive light in its eyes it should see the seemingly impossible occurring at every step: sentient life breaking out of apparently brute matter, conscious mind emerging from instinctive and sense-chained vitality, an aspiration towards what the Rigveda called the True, the Right, the Vast {Satyam, Ritam, Brihat) gleaming forth in the midst of mental man's preoccupation with making his mortal existence tolerable by the help of his analytic wits, his synthesising skills, his speculative ingenuities, his clair-obscur creations. This aspiration which has been vocal from far antiquity is inherent in man and a sure sign of superhuman things to come. Not that they can arrive
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cheaply. An evolution beginning from as complete an involution as can be conceived could hardly be an easy climb, but the involutionary fact itself, implying (in Aurobindonian words) that
The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives
And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone,
yields the promise of a divine efflorescence one day. The day will dawn sooner if we keep the fire of idealism burning and not let adverse circumstances make us down-hearted or complacent, leading to a situation in which one would have to lament (again in Aurobindonian phrases):
Lost was the storm-stress and the warrior urge,
Lost the titan winging of the thought.
Kathleen Raine, carrying on with Temenos through year on year and planning new institutions where values will acquire meaning and being ready to sell her cherished possessions for their sake, helps the luminous future to come nearer. Since the vision of Sri Aurobindo is never sectarian and sees the involved Godhead everywhere seeking liberation and the free Godhead from beyond the mind seeking incarnation wherever it can and the evolving Godhead seeking to fuse the two by a hundred means, there is nothing incongruous in my regarding you as an Aurobindonian according to your own lights. I am such in a direct conscious manner, having accepted the all-covering yet flexible discipline of the Integral Yoga which looks forward to a transformed collectivity no less than to a divinised individual. But that does not lead any avowed follower of Sri Aurobindo to look down his nose at any idealistic endeavour on earth just because it is not openly allied to the aims of the Pondicherry Ashram. Did not the Mother once send you a spray of the Tulsi plant as a token of her blessing and her protecting power? May the coming New Year bring us closer to the realisation of our
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deepest dreams! With my best wishes and a lot of warmth from the inmost heart and thanks for the back numbers you have posted of Temenos I end.
(23.12.1988)
When yesterday I found your letter written on Dec. 23rd in my post it seemed to me very auspicious, and it is a pleasure to be replying to you on the first day of this as yet undisclosed year. Not that one year is in any sense different from another, but in ourselves there is surely some kind of symbolic change through writing 1989 instead of 88 or 69 or 29 or 1919 - I can remember heading my letters 1919! Think of it! And that really was in a different world, though whether a better or a worse one I would not like to say. Sri Aurobindo saw an evolving universe, and so did Teilhard de Chardin, but other prophetic books see the end of the kali yuga in terms of desolation and destruction. Perhaps both are true, for you in India are always aware of many levels which exist simultaneously. That is a profound difference between Indian and Western ideas of evolution, here it is a purely natural material process. I may well have quite misunderstood Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary ideas. Jewish Kabbalah also presents four 'worlds' with a descent to the lowest world and a reascent of the divine to the Source. You say that Sri Aurobindo was made aware of these things by a higher consciousness, and that is something one must accept. Blake knew it, but in the West 'knowledge' is always a process of acquiring and relating more facts, more information, not, as with you (and as it should be) opening the eyes of the mind by spiritual work, meditation and the rest. I do hope you will write me that piece about Sri Aurobindo's view of poetry as operating on different levels of consciousness. There too - and never so much as at this time - poetry (so-called: there is not much poetry in it) is all greater refinements of an exploration of smaller and smaller sectors
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of consciousness, not a discovery of the heights and depths; as was still the case with the Romantics, up to and including Yeats, with poets like Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins and perhaps still David Gascoyne and myself remembering at least in what we attempt a greater view of poetry. You will find some new poems of mine in T.10, delayed once again because the printer hasn't got the right paper. However, that gives me a breathing space in which to raise the next printing-bill. We never cover costs. Yet we do reach many people who do care. Today were posted the prospectuses for our proposed Temenos Academy of Integral Studies; and it includes a clause saying that while we would like to have visiting lecturers from many countries, we would wish to have a teacher of Indian philosophy and culture always. India must assume the task of teaching the West or all is lost. But of course this is already happening and I believe the time is ripe and we are at last - some of us, and as Arabinda knows many in America - are prepared to listen. We at last begin to learn our ignorance. The very desperation of the situation creates its own reaction perhaps.
Thank you for allowing me to be an honorary follower of the Integral Yoga. I stumble as best I can where the Golden String seems to lead - maybe 'next time' - or after many 'times' - I may be born in India. Where no doubt I would find a different set of difficulties. I see India as a deeply wounded culture - wounded first by the British, now by American multinational capitalism, but all those distinctions of culture are melting away for better or for worse. Better insofar as knowledge is shared, worse insofar as much is lost. But we are at best instrumental in a purpose we cannot know, but in which we must trust. When I was a student there was a phrase much in vogue as a means of demolishing any positive standpoint, such as religious faith, 'wishful thinking'. I don't remember who invented it - Freud perhaps - but it inculcated a habit of mind that denigrated faith and hope, making them not, as for the Church, 'theological virtues' but moral weaknesses. Perhaps I never
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fully recovered, for I still find it difficult to believe that the desirable might be true. Yet of late it has become clear to me that we could not in our nature desire unless that desire has an object. Otherwise we would" simply be unaware that there is anything to desire. Our wishes therefore are perhaps in their way a measure of reality - since we wish for these things, they must, somewhere, be. Just as in the shell a bird's wmgs have no function, but only in relation to a future of which the unhatched bird is unaware. I use this rather clumsy metaphor but perhaps you see what I am trying to find words for - yet the desirable paradisal state seems to exceed hope - or there I go again with the ghost of Bertrand Russell or someone of that kind muttering 'wishful thinking'. Or maybe it is for us to create that which we desire. Thereby making a reality of a wish? Who knows. To 'Build a heaven in hell's despite'. But what terrible dreams mankind has, star-wars and weapons of destruction and all kinds of material power and tyranny. All the same there are signs of hope as this year begins, many of them. Despite all. I hope Sri Aurobindo is right. Though what he calls 'superman' I think I would prefer to call 'man', since in our nature we are already what we should become. A matter, perhaps, of words.
May this year bring you the fulfilment of your wishes, and the collection of poems of which you spoke in your last letter. Please remember me to Mrs. Dyne. And to Arabinda Basu and Sisir Kumar Ghose if you see either of them. Sisir has fallen silent of late.
I hope my christmas-poem reached you. I sent it a long time ago, knowing the uncertainty of Indian posts. Indeed our posts here are getting worse and worse - here in Chelsea the letter-boxes have been sealed up for the last fortnight because the post-office had an overtime dispute with the postmen and the mail has simply not been cleared.
So I send you my thoughts, and if I should stray into your dreams I hope my presence may be auspicious and that I shall not be carrying a copy of the TLS. I might have been
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carrying a very good paper by Tagore, on 'Personality' based on his interpretation of the Isha Upanishad. No doubt you know it.
(1.1.1989)
Your letter of Jan.l was a pleasure with its varied looking before and after and its basic optimistic note in spite of ambiguous appearances. The current month marks the beginning of the third year of our renewed correspondence after a long silence. We have covered a wide range of topics spanning thousands of years if we count Sri Aurobindo on the one hand and Sri Krishna on the other. This pair of names standing at the two time-extremes of our subject-matter seems significant. Hasn't Sri Aurobindo said, "It is Sri Krishna's work that is being done in our Ashram", meaning not just a continuation of old traditional Vaish-navism but a new extension of an all-round spirituality as in the Gita with the Yogi's eye rolling super-Shakespeareanly with the finest frenzy possible both from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth? There is the prophecy put in the mouth of Savitri:
Life's tops shall flame with the Immortal's thoughts,
Light shall invade the darkness of its base.
Then in the process of evolving Time
All shall be drawn into a single plan,
A divine harmony shall be earth's law,
Beauty and Joy remould her way to live:
Even the body shall remember God...
Of course, this does hot imply that everything in the evolutionary process will look bright enough to draw from us Bertie Wooster's "Oh it's bung-ho!" Difficult times may have to be gone through before the path to the supramental future is openly struck. India is in a pretty bad mess because
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of the Punjab problem. Terrorism on an unprecedented scale is going on there with a view to frightening the Government into granting Khalistan, a seperate Sikh state. After the colossal folly of letting Pakistan take shape India has learnt her lesson and, come what may, there will never be a Khalistan. Economic conditions too are not very cheering. Public life too can hardly be thought clean. But India with all these scoriae is still the horizon at which the sun of Sri Aurobindo's vision of Supermind is to be discerned:
A long lone line of hesitating hue...
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal....
An experiment is proceeding with ups and downs and zigzags but with a gradual movement forward on the whole to develop a new consciousness resulting in a new life. The word "Superman" connected with Sri Aurobindo's work has to be properly understood - in the very sense in which you speak of "man" "since in our nature we are already what we should become". Yes, in Sri Aurobindo's spiritual experience not only man in his inner being but also apparently brute matter holds the supramental light and love and bliss secret within. That is why evolution follows as a natural consequence of involution of divinity. There is, no doubt, a pull by the free uninvolved Supermind from beyond earth combining with the push of the same power from below -and because matter is itself inwardly divine the outcome of evolution upward will be something of matter's own dharma, own inmost nature, own intrinsic law of existence and therefore something permanent and not something imposed on it by means of a siddhi, a special Yogic capacity. To be supramentalised will not be a forced perfection: it will be the realisation of a native possibility. "Even the body shall remember God" in the sense that God was always there in it and was simply forgotten: He has to be brought up from within and not to be learnt from without, even though the remembering may need a luminous touch from its never-
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forgetting counterpart in the empyrean Reality.
Exactly like you I as a student felt the impact of the cult of "wishful thinking". I don't know whether Freud introduced the phrase: he talked of dreams as wish-fulfilments, but the practice of calling all our highest beliefs - all the dreams of our souls - nothing save wishful thinking dates back to the late nineteenth century, the heyday of atheism and materialism drawing sustenance from mechanistic science. The early part of the present century when you and I had our school-days and college-days lived still under the shadow of the preceding century's doubts and denials. Science was undergoing a new influence - relativity theory and quantum theory had brought some strangeness into the Newtonian and Laplacean universe, but the hold of post-Darwinian biology was very strong and the stress on our animal origin made religion and mysticism and poetic idealism look like fantasies. Yet now and again the great aspirations refused to be brushed off as being "wishful thinking". A poem of Laurence Binyon asked very pertinently the question:
Eternity! how learnt I that strange word?
In the Middle Ages there was the famous Ontological Argument that the very idea of God the Perfect Being entailed His existence since one could not be perfect if one did not exist. Kant is said to have refuted Anselm's logic but I don't think he could touch the question: "What makes us conceive of anything like God at all?" Imagination can conjure up
Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire
because they are made of elements known separately and can be put together in our minds but God is not a composite construction in our thought: He transcends all that we can think of and is an unimaginable completeness, unimaginable because we know only finite and flawed entities except in
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the realm of abstractions where by extending in thought our limited experience of time and space we can conceive them as endless and boundless. Even there the notion of perfection is absent. Works of art give a feeling of faultless form, but form is itself a coming short. God alone can contain everything as well as exceed it and fill us with a sense of the Primal, the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Unsurpassable. Binyon's "Eternity", we may say, sums up the essence of the God-idea, the God-word, which go clean out of all possible learning by us. A reality corresponding to them seems an inevitable conclusion from our failure to account for them on the basis of all that we know, all that we can mentally construct.
Shadows of the deific in terms of our time-space world of facts are the ideals we cherish and work for beyond the facts - what you call in general "the desirable" and feel to be necessarily true and somehow realisable, even if it appears to our common state as "beyond hope", a fanciful figure of "wishful thinking". We have to cleave to these ideals as though without them we could not live, just as Wordsworth felt that
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.
It makes me happy to know that you, my friend, have been carrying on Temenos for years against heavy odds and are at present launching the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies where you would like to have a teacher of Indian philosophy and culture always.
You write of having sent me your Christmas-poem. I never received it. Everything ever sent by you has come here, but this has somehow vanished. My projected book of collected poems, which is really a dream of Sonia Dyne, is getting prepared. I have kept also the Temenos article in mind, half a dozen or more pages need to be written to
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round it off. You have not strayed into any dream of mine of late but you arc often in my thoughts and my best wishes go to you for this year that has just begun, a hopeful year indeed for the world in the wake of Gorbachev's break with the divisive past and its narrow formulas which have stood so long in the way of a multi-productive peace and an internally rich and varied world-oneness.
(22.1.1989)
You will no doubt be surprised to receive a letter from me in Delhi! I came for a small celebration put on by the Yeats Society of India of the half-centenary of the death of W.B. Y., and I am staying on for a week or two. Anne Yeats came (his daughter) and his daughter-in-law Crania, a singer and harper of the traditional music of Ireland. It was a small but pleasant celebration. Prof. Bushoni of Lebanon (now Kahlil Gibran distinguished professor in Maryland University) gave the Yeats Memorial Lecture which we all enjoyed very much. Unfortunately I brought with me a virus infection that has been afflicting England this winter, and although I can now see and speak I still cannot hear, and this deafness (it must mean something) alas prevents me from listening or conversing with anyone at all. I'm told it will go in a day or two, but it shows no sign of doing so. What a waste of being here in India!
After many delays the printer of Temenos managed to bring me a box of the first twenty copies the day before I left, so I am able to send you one. Not a great deal from India in this number, Islamic rather, but I hope you will find some things to enjoy. As you know, I'm still hoping you will write on Sri Aurobindo's perceptions of the different levels from which poetry comes. Only two more issues of Temenos still to come! I hope I shall not now remain deaf for the rest of my life, or even the remaining weeks of my visit to India. I am sure if 1 could only discover the Karmic cause 1 could
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overcome it - or perhaps not so.
This is the wheel of sharp weapons returning
Full circle to punish the wrongs you have done!
England seems diminished to a small spot on the world's surface, infested by salmonella in eggs, listeria in cheese, water infected by artificial fertilizers & insecticides, and by leaded petrol, acid rain, etc., the seas polluted so that our beautiful seals and dolphins are dying and I feel infected myself! And the physical poison is as nothing to the mental and spiritual poison that kills less by violence than by the trivialization of all that is highest in human kind. And here in India how will you prevail over the American television channels raining down their pollution from the skies themselves? It saddens me to see that it has already arrived.
I brought with me the first vol. of the letters of T.S. Eliot, recently published, which I am reviewing for Temenos. I knew him, though slightly and only in his later years. His childhood, youth, and ill-advised marriage make sad reading, yet doesn't a poet choose just that sorrow his work requires to temper it in the fires of life? What seems chance is choice, what seems a mistake is necessity. At least it is well to know how happy his last years were, married to Valerie, who loved him (and who has so admirably edited these letters). And T.S.E. did not evade his suffering, but endured and transmuted it. He was, surely, the last great poet of Christendom and the old civilization? Yeats spoke for a more universal, timeless reality, and the future. He too fell short of wisdom, and perhaps did not die happy? He was insatiable - his daughter Anne agrees about that. How can any of us be satisfied by a small share of the All (and at eighty my long life seems only a moment) unless we be saints?
(10.3.1989)
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The handwriting on the envelope was so familiar, indeed so unmistakable but that row of Indian stamps stood in such a stark contradictory posture of suggestion that if 1 were to poetise the situation I would speak of my state of mind in William Watson's words on a certain phase of the evening as
Pendulous 'twixt the gold hour and the grey.
The moment I opened the envelope it was all "the gold hour" - the sight of the latest beautifully designed Temenos and the enclosed most welcome letter. Thank you for both the gifts.
I never dreamt there was a "Yeats Society of India". The next thing I'll hear of will be a Blake Society! And that would bring you to India just as imperatively. Perhaps the two poets will be juxtaposed for you if in the "week or two" that you will be in India my long-waiting book - Blake's Tyger: A Christotogical Interpretation - which is at the stage of its cover getting stuck to the bound pages leaves the Ashram Press soon enough for a copy to catch you in Delhi. If I happen to be remembered in the literary world by posterity, perhaps next to being connected among my more famous contemporaries with Sri Aurobindo for his gift to me not only of the Integral Yoga but also of "overhead poetry" my name will get linked with yours on the one hand because of the already published correspondence between us as well as the still-to-be-published greater recent bulk of it and on the other hand because of our detailed dealings with Blake's enigmatic beast of prey. I think our different readings of that symbol will remain the only ones in the field and future critics will have to choose either your hermetical-alchemical-cabbalistic insight or my Christological-Miltonic vision -unless perchance, as a hint of mine in the long Introduction to my study has it, Blake may be considered to have made in two alternative ways his meaning not "explicit to the idiot".
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Is it possible to let me have the text of Prof. Bushoni's Yeats Memorial lecture? You say you all "enjoyed it very much", but you must have been in the same position as I shall be if 1 get the text; that is, you must have enjoyed it by reading it rather than by hearing it, since that blasted bug which has been afflicting England this winter has somehow disastrously affected your ears - for the time being, as we all hope. Having gone through a partial impairment of hearing after a bout of flu some months back - a defect luckily gone now - I can well understand your greater predicament. Although one may pride oneself on being in the august company of Milton in his fifties no less than of
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old,
or on receiving the same stroke of adverse fate as that superman of music, the aged Beethoven, it is surely preferable to be less distinguished but fully able to appreciate "Summer's rose" and the "human face divine" as well as thrill to the presence of "the wakeful bird" which
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note,
or revive through your friend Crania's plucking the strings the sense of
The harp that once through Tara's halls
The soul of music shed.
Please excuse my bubbling over with poetry, but it all comes of the joy of hearing from you and feeling that you are almost next door. Coming from so nearby, your reminder to me of the article you have asked me to write for one of the last Temenoses has had the effect of making me dig up the already written sheets from my archives of oblivion and try to get in tune with them. Your reference to Eliot and Yeats has prompted several thoughts but I must stop now and express them later lest I should miss reaching you in Delhi with this letter.
(18.3.1989)
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I have received and read your Blake's Tyger with delight. I must, I think, concede you the victory - your laying out of the whole map of Blake's inner world and its dynamics in the context of Milton's poem does convince. Whether when Blake wrote The Tyger he himself as yet saw that whole universe as a whole scarcely matters, since it was already implicit, as the oak within the acorn. You have woven every symbolic term into the complete pattern. Perhaps in the Milton chapter I was tempted to think that you had done little more than show that Blake uses a Miltonic vocabulary, that all those grand Miltonic words in The Tyger are simply that - a Miltonic symbolic and linguistic vocabulary - but your chapter on Los, his 'furnaces', and the 'fires' in general throughout the poem do convince me. It all fits together. Yours is a scheme of advaita, mine dualistic, and finally the non-dual universe must be right and we know that for Blake heaven and hell, good and evil, the 'contraries', must be married in 'Jesus, the Imagination'.
I find myself reflecting on the 'wrath-fires' of the Father, as the matrix of creation (Boehme) as surely depicted in the Milton diagram of the Four Worlds with these fires without; in this scheme Jesus, the Son, is the principle of Light, whose origin is in the fires but whose nature is different -mild and gentle. The 'fires' of creation are 'humanized' only in Jesus, and is not the Tyger one of the 'dehumanized' denizens of the Forests? But you may well be right, that fire is Urizen's enemy, and Los, who 'kept the divine vision' is the Smith who dared 'seize the fire' - the agent of Jesus the Imagination. I am bound to admit that I did not give enough
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place to Paradise Lost as a source - laziness, lack of thoroughness in tracing the symbols - and of course Blake's Jesus is not Milton's Son ('reason') but rather the 'first commander of the heavenly host' from whom 'the Messiah fell* and made a heaven for himself in the Abyss (Urizen's world).
In a few details I shall disagree - 'And did those feet in ancient time' are universally taken to be those of Jesus, who according to legend visited Britain with Joseph of Ari-mathea, who planted the legendary 'Glastonbury Thorn' which blooms at Christmas. Not that it matters. Jerusalem remains his 'bride'.
You have certainly shown that Blake and Milton's mythological world - the same inner universe, in many essentials - is the terrain of the Tyger. I would still put in a plea for the Gnostic-Hermetic sources, for Blake was, after all, immersed in Boehme and Paracelsus at that time. Also for my view that the symbols of the poem are inseparable, you can't say the forests existed 'before' the tyger, they go together. Blake was after all a Swedenborgian, and Sweden-borg described how surroundings, in the spirit-world, come into being as 'correspondences' of some 'state' (state of mind) and tyger and forests of the night are a single 'correspondence' just as are lamb and meadow. But, finally, yes, I must concede that the Tyger-fire is the divine wrath, at however many removes, that for Blake fire is creative, destroyer of darkness and evil, Christ the Judge in his 'Chariot of Fire'.
Little did I imagine that I would finally read Blake's Tyger in Tiger-land. - Just back from the Radha Soami Ashram in N. Punjab (where on Sunday there were nearly 500,000 -half a million - people present, in a sort of peaceful kingdom of the Golden Age, of which their Master is like a King of the Golden Age) with plan to visit a nature reserve in which there are tygers - if I have the good luck to see one.
I think I told you that I had been stricken with deafness, this seems slowly to be improving. I don't wear my hearing-
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aid all the time now by any means. What if we are deaf to many unheard sounds, blind to many unseen visions? It has been a useful demonstration. The deaf could well argue that birds do not sing!
I'm to pick up in Connaught Circle Sisir Kumar Ghose's new books. Have also been collecting Kapila Vatsyayan's magnificent publications from the Indira Gandhi Centre for the Arts. So in the next Temenos I shall have a long review of Indian publications - India has something unique to tell us about Blake, about poetry, about the roots of the arts. I hope to have your paper also by then. I think I'il have to review your book and S.K. Ghose's myself, I can't trust anyone else in England to do that task. Kapila's Lexicon of Sanskrit basic terms I shall merely, with infinite respect, describe. But these terms - Brahman, Purusha, Atman, etc. etc. - we of the West will have to learn if we wish to think about that universe to which they relate, Blake himself lacked such a vocabulary, but after all what a magnificent mythology he forged from such sources as were available to him. It is not surprising that it has taken an Indian mind (your own) to see the whole as a whole, and in context. I did my best, but in this match I must, as I said, concede you victory. A pity you can't add this to your appendix!
Santosh Pal, by the way - a Yeats scholar - much admires your Shakespeare book which I have not read!
Now also from your photograph I can glimpse a corner of your book-lined room, which you say I visited!
Very warm and delighted congratulations.
(6.4 .1989}
I must be quite a Michael Ventris to have read your handwritten letter. Have you heard of him? He was a scholar in Greek who deciphered the famous Linear B script for which there is no bilingual inscription. There is no such inscription in regard to the Harappa Culture, either. Many
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attempts have been made to read the Harappa script, but none so far has been satisfactory to all scholars. I have myself made a small suggestive effort in my book Karpasa* in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue, in which, as in my earlier study The Problem of Aryan Origins - Prom an Indian Point of View, 1 argue along several separate lines that the Rigveda was much earlier than the Harappa Culture and that the latter was at once a derivative, a development and a deviation from the former. Ventris, as the master code-breaker, was requested to tackle the Harappan problem. Within a month of this request he died in a motor accident, as if the Harappans who lived c. 25001500 B.C.. were bent on leading modern Indologists a dance.
I believe I have managed to get all your hieroglyphs correct except one word which too I would have deciphered if I had still had with me the copy of Blake's complete works which Sir Geoffrey Keynes had presented to me after reading the first draft of my book. Unfortunately, the paper on which Blake was printed contained some acidic material and the whole book turned dark brown and started to crumble. Cutting out Keynes's words on the fly-leaf I had to throw the book away. The word which has baffled me is in the sentence: "...and of course Blake's Jesus is not Milton's Son ('reason') but rather the 'first Commander [?] of the heavenly host' from whom 'the Messiah fell" and made a heaven for himself in the Abyss (Urizen's world),"
What you have said about my work is extremely gratifying. Thank you for such generous praise. Coming from you it is not only generous: it is also authoritative and enlightening. I deeply appreciate the spirit in which you write about your letter: "A pity you can't add this to your appendix!"
I have read about the Radha Soami Ashram. It was Paul
* Cotton.
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Brunton's Search in Secret India which first introduced me to it. Its original creator was still alive at the time, a remarkable man.
Tigers are a familiar sight in all Indian zoos, as are lions, though rarely their joint offspring - Tigons or Ligers. I have the honour of having caught the tail of a lioness in the Madras animal park. She had flung it out of the bars of her cage in a sitting posture. 1 just couldn't resist the temptation of touching it. What a burst of thunder followed, and like a streak of lightning leaping back into a cloud the tail was pulled in.
I am glad your deafness is decreasing. Perhaps by the time you return to England you'll be in full possession of your hearing ability. Surely deafness is much less of a misfortune than blindness. I have posted you my Shakespeare book, hoping it won't prove a disappointment in your eyes. Read at least the part which deals with the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet - and, of course, the exposition of the system of internal chronology which comes at the start.
Now to the "few details" in which you "disagree". You say: " And did those feet in ancient time' are universally taken to be those of Jesus..." But stanzas 1 and 2 are obviously built on the same plan, implying two figures -except that in the second stanza Jesus ('the Countenance Divine') comes in the two opening lines whereas in the first 'the holy Lamb of God" comes in the two closing ones. A pair of persons is apparently present in both. According to the "universal" reading, Jesus is twice mentioned in stahza 1, though two questions are asked as in stanza 2, with the second question introduced in both the stanzas by "And..." just as the first question is. It's clear to me that Blake intended a parallel design with a small change in the constituent sequence of characters. Besides, if Jerusalem is one of the two characters in the poem, as surely the second stanza makes explicit, it should be most natural to see her in the first stanza when Blake elsewhere writes of her feet walking and never those of Jesus doing so? -
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The hills and valleys felt her feet -
(Another lyric in Milton)
How distant far from Albion! his hills & his valleys no
more
Receive the feet of Jerusalem...
(Jerusalem 4, 79, lines 14-15)
Please reflect again over my interpretation: it is more relevant as well as more symmetrical. Besides, the first of the other lyrics in Milton which are the sequel of this famous one, mentions Jerusalem walking with Jesus who, as in our poem, is called the Lamb of God:
She walks upon our meadows green,
The Lamb of God walks by her side.
It is the same scene. The only variation is that here meadows are green while there mountains are and that the two walkers who are together here in one place are shown walking in apparently different places though "mountains green" could be themselves "pleasant pastures".
As for the Gnostic-Hermetic sources for which you have entered a plea, Blake was certainly under their influence in the period when he wrote The Tyger and we see their influence in the poem itself in the description of the tyger's making. The Fifth Book of the Hermetica describes the cunning of the demiurgic Workman who frames man in the womb: "Who circumscribed and marked out his eyes?... Who opened his mouth and tied together his sinews?... Who hardened and made strong the bones... who made the heart like a Pyramis?" The imagery of forests of the night also resembles the Gnostic-Hermetic vision, but I have tried to show at some length that Blake, even in other works than The Tyger, is never fully Gnostic-Hermetic nor Sweden-borgian. We have Urizen himself recalling after his fall his former happy state in Supernature:
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Then in my ivory pavillion I slumber'd in the noon
And walked in the silent night among sweet-smelling
flowers...
So we have night in Heaven. Albion recounting what happened to him when he lost his supernatural wholeness
says:
First fled my Sons & then my Daughters, then my Wild
Animations,
My Cattle next, last even the Dog of my Gate; the
Forests fled...
In my book I have commented: "Mark the phrase 'the Forests fled'. It proves that unfallen Albion, the Eternal Man, contained in his divine existence the very forests which come to symbolize the temporal world split from the light of the All." Night and forests don't come into being with the Fall from Heaven: their divine counterparts are in Heaven itself. Furthermore, we have a Fall in Heaven before the Fall from it. There the heavenly "silent night" is perverted by Urizen and we are told of "that deadly night" and "the night of councils dark". The pre-existence of night and forests in a divine form is not the vision of the Gnostic-Hermetic or Swedenborgian Blake but of the Miltonic Blake, and their perversion preceding the Fall from Heaven echoes also Book VI of Paradise Lost.
When you write: "You can't say the forests existed 'before' the tyger, they go together" you are not wrong, but their togetherness need not be taken exclusively in the Swedenborgian sense. The tyger as part of the forests of the night is Swedenborgian, but the tyger fighting against them is Christological-Miltonic. This tyger of fiery divine wrath is indeed fashioned at the same time the forests of the night spring into being in Heaven, and their togetherness there is of mutual opposition. Similarly, if the forests of the night which first sprang up in Heaven as a perversion have their
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symbolic reflex on earth, the tyger which burns bright in them would still be their enemy. One more point: though the tyger of fiery divine wrath and the forests of the night cannot be separated in existence and though they make an antithesis together, there could be a synthesis of them, or a pair of inseparables, in a happy Edenic way - a tyger of mobile splendour in a forest of rooted mystery. Perhaps Albion's "Wild Animations", as contrasted with his "Cattle" and "Dog", refer to paradisal Tygers and Lions?
Now a truce to discussion. My Shakespeare-book which should soon be in your hands has on its back-cover a larger replica of the picture in which you have marked my book-lined background. I must explain that the glasses which look darkish are really ordinary specs on which light has not fallen.
You haven't said how long still you will be in Delhi. I surmise this means that no flying back soon to Paultons Square is in prospect.
It's great news that you would be reviewing Blake's Tyger along with some other Indian publications in the next Temenos. Do you think it is possible for Jean Mambrino to review The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry? The TLS completely ignored it just as it had ignored the book of our old correspondence in spite of your renown. My Shakespeare-book too got no notice. I have sent my Blake-study to the Blake Trust in England and the Blake Quarterly in the USA.
By the way, I haven't forgotten the article for you. More than two-thirds has been written.
(12.4.1989)
Thank you for your letter of 12.4.89 and hope my script too may bear a remote relation to the primordial human quest-ings and questionings of the Rig Veda. What is civilization but an unending conversation and exchange of our treasures
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with one another from the beginning of time until now? "Why read novels?' an American friend said to me, a propos the stories one hears every day, and Ramchandra Gandhi said only yesterday that 'Satsang' is the essence of civilization.
I too don't have my Blake with me but I believe the passage in the marriage of Heaven and Hell reads 'the first commander of the heavenly host (Lucifer that is) the Messiah fell, and made a heaven for himself from what he stole from the Abyss'. Deeply true, if the Messiah is 'reason'! As to tygers, I still have not seen one in India, we have postponed our visit to the nature-reserve, no Tygons or Ligers either. We have deferred our plan because a painter here - Kishori Kaul, whose work 1 much like - wants to paint a portrait of me. Seeing a Tyger in the Forests of the Night is not given to any tourist. Charan Singh, the Master of Beas, says that each time a V.I.P, visits a reserve, one Tiger is drugged so as to be easily on show, A great shame -I prefer to leave such epiphanies to the divine Master of Tigers & Tygers.
Well, the Feet on the hills of Albion could be either those of Jesus or Jerusalem, and are plainly both! If one counts feet there must be four. Did the Tyger's feet as well as the Lamb's walk those hills? If not, it is time that beast appeared in England's polluted and unpleasant land as it has become. Not altogether so, of course, there are still many 'golden builders' at work and the Daughters of Albian sing Jerusalem at all Women's Institute gatherings with heartfelt gusto. As to the 'forests of affliction' and 'the ancient trees' you are doubtless right to point out that, unfallen, all things are 'in their eternal forms' in the Divine Humanity. It is in the created world that evil appears. As an Indian you cannot do otherwise than affirm advaita.
Piloo pointed out to me that Sethna is a common Parsee name (she herself is a Parsee) and the only other Sethnas I know are the family of General Sethna whose daughter, Shirnaz, is writing her doctorate thesis on Blake and Zoroaster - she has found a surprising number of possible
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Zoroastrian elements in Blake. Your affinity with the 'fire' would in that case be one more link with the Tyger.
I much look forward to read the Shakespeare book but am at present in the middle of Sisirkumar Ghose's book on mysticism. Your, and his, writings are what India should be contributing to learning; not the carbon-copy culture of your Universities which for the most part adopt and copy western attitudes and values, adding only to the darkening of the light. Sri Aurobindo was an evolutionist and optimist & I hope he may be right, but the possibility of a different outcome looks very real. And so it is foretold in the Bible, the Koran and other Islamic texts, I understand, and in the Mahabharata, most vividly.
(19.4.1989)
You keep me hard at work. I have now read most of the "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" book and again admire your skill in setting piece to piece, words, phrases, and reconstructing a complete picture, with recognizable human features. I am entirely convinced by your argument for William Herbert - in my garden you'll get two kinds of marjoram, sweet marjoram, and 'knotted marjoram' and of course you are absolutely right about the tight-curled hair! It would help if academics ever looked at nature! I'm not so happy about the 'dark lady', having been strongly inclined to think A.L. Rowse is right in his identification - the Italian musician fits so well the picture of the kind of social milieu from which Shakespeare would have been likely to choose a mistress - not, certainly, the courtesans and bawds. And a young lord could also have been charmed by her gifted playing. Of course I'm not an authority but I favour Emilia Lanier rather than your 'Anastasia' who seems rather a featureless young lady. But who knows? I have not yet read your chapter on the 'worthier pen', but I will do so.
Our Tyger expedition fell through, because a painter
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here, Kishori Kaul, wanted to paint my portrait. She will presently be going to Auroville for a while as a 'painter in residence' so I am sure you will meet her. I sent you messages through her sister-in-law's husband, Mr. Jayant Patel, who came in while the painting was in progress, and will I hope remember to carry my greetings. Kishori's portrait is liked by all - I feel she has captured my essence, although I cannot judge since none can 'see oursels as ithers see us'. It is an evanescent face, and indeed she is a painter who dissolves all things into light. I am deeply happy to leave this likeness in India. She is a very gifted painter, and strangely enough my first publisher, Tambimuttu, wanted to give her an exhibition in London, but their meeting took place just three days before he died. So strangely do the threads of life weave us all together in a pattern of which we are only a part whose whole is so much vaster than we can know.
It's an impressive piece of Shakespeare scholarship - I wonder if Muriel Bradbrook has the book? If not I will lend her my copy on my return to England - on May 6th.
(27.4.1989)
I have three letters from you, one of them a Temenos postcard asking me to send a copy of Blake's Tyger to Piloo Jungalwallah, a fellow Parsi. I sent it to her at once, marking it "For Favour of Review" but at the same time inscribing her name with my compliments. Do you know what "Jungalwallah" means? It means either "one who owns a jungle" or "one who hails from a jungle". My name "Sethna" stands for "one who belongs to, or else is associated with, a family of masters". My imagination likes to trace my line to the third son of Adam - "Seth" - with a Gujarati suffix - "na" -added! I wonder what the etymology of "Raine" is. Does the word derive from the French "reine" or is it an Old-English form of "rain"?
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The thesis of Shirnaz Sethna on Blake and Zoroaster is bound to be an original contribution. The Fire-worshippers attracted several Romantic poets - Byron in Giaour, Moore in a part of Lolla Rookh and Landor in Gebir. I shouldn't be surprised if Blake's preoccupation with "fires" had a Zoroastrian touch somewhere.
Yes, the word I couldn't quite make out must be "commander". As for seeing a Tyger, why do you have to visit a Nature-Reserve where this great animal will have to be drugged for a V.I.P.'s visit - even if these initials would stand now for "Very Inspired Person"? An ordinary Zoo should serve your purpose.
I am glad you grant that "those feet" could be Jerusalem's, even though you may think Jesus's more likely. When you write that the Daughters of Albion still sing Jerusalem with heart-felt gusto, I may fancifully say that their gatherings represent the Sanskrit SATSANG interpreted Englishly: they SAT and SANG.
I incline to look upon them and others of their kind in all parts of the globe not as desperate fighters for a lost cause in a time which, according to "the Bible, the Koran and other Islamic texts" as welt as the Hindu Mahabharata, is the beginning of the end, a Gotterdammerung, a Pralaya, a universal holocaust. I look upon them as scattered harbingers of the Day Sri Aurobindo has prophesied of earth's fulfilment - not merely Sri Aurobindo as, in your words, "an evolutionist and optimist" but also Sri Aurobindo as the seer and realiser of the Supermind. the archetypal Truth-Consciousness which is both the primal Creator and the ultimate Transformer of earthly existence, a supreme status and dynamism of the Divine with which none of the past religions or philosophical or poetic visionaries had concretely come in contact. Sri Aurobindo did not live in cloudland; he was realist enough to know how bad were things at present and how much worse they could get. If in spite of his latter-day preoccupation not with the "Empyrean" but what he called the "Abyss", the common world-stuff which had to
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be illumined, he held out the promise of a divine life, a full descent of the 'Empyrean", I cannot help having faith in what he foresaw as coming to pass no matter what difficulties and even disasters might be met with on the way.
Now for my Shakespeare-book. I am so glad you have read most of it and find it skilful scholarship. I think my most solid contribution comes in the last part, which is concerned with "A Worthier Pen". If I have convinced you of William Herbert, it's surely something accomplished. You consider my "Anastasia" "rather a featureless young lady", but don't you believe it is some achievement to have given, if not "a local habitation", at least "a name" to what has been so "airy" a "nothing" - a name conjured from the poet's own words in the sole context in the Sonnets where he mentions the word "name" in connection with his dark enchantress? And the point about her being dark is of central importance where a historically located person like Rowse's Emilia Lanier whom you prefer is concerned. You forget that Rowse's reading of the word "brown" for her in Simon Forman's diaries was proved wrong by Stanley Wells in the TLS of May 11, 1973, p. 628. Going straight to the manuscript in the Bodleian, Wells finds Rowse's description of Emilia as "very brown" to be a gross misreading, like several other instances of careless transcription on Rowse's part. Forman calls her not "brown" but "braue" ("brave" in modern orthography). According to Wells, "braue" probably means "handsome", "flamboyant", perhaps shading into "promiscuous". And is not Wells talking good sense when, referring to Rowse's quotation from Forman, he remarks: "This is a more plausible statement than that a woman aged twenty-seven was once 'brown'"? Wells's case was so strong that Rowse himself had to concede the correction in The Listener of June 10, 1973. An indirect proof of Emilia's non-brunette feature comes from another TLS pointer. In the issue of June 7, 1974, p. 604, col. 3 we read: "That Forman does not in fact remark on her coloration is especially unfortunate for, as this book (Rowse's Simon Forman)
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shows, he often enough observes the complexion of female clients who were unfashionably dark,"
Here I may remind you that even the other prop Rowse had offered - namely, that in accord with the punning "Will" sonnets Emilia was married to William Lanier - has broken down. Mary Edmond has proved that Emilia was married not to William but to Alfonso Lanier. This, again, was admitted by Rowse. And yet he felt so strongly that Emilia had to be Shakespeare's Dark Lady that he cast about for any reed to lean on. He finds it "not surprising that Shakespeare's mistress should come to consult Forman, since his known landlady, Mrs. Mountjoy, did so." There is not the slightest logic here. Besides, Rowse believes that Emilia's affair with Shakespeare was over before she entered Forman's parlour in 1597: how then can she be connected with Mrs. Mountjoy with whom Shakespeare had lodged some time between 1602 and 1604? Finally there is the argument which Rowse considers very impressive. Emilia was a bit of a poet and once wrote, as though echoing Shakespeare's famous "All the world's a stage",
For well you know, this world is but a stage
Where all do play their parts and must be gone.
Rowse's argument boils down to saying: "If Emilia echoed Shakespeare's idea, she must have been his mistress." Surely, hundreds of people heard his plays and the expressed idea must have been a platitude in so markedly dramatic and stage-struck an age as the Elizabethan?
What seems to have bent you in favour of Emilia is simply the fact that Shakespeare's Dark Lady, as Sonnet 128 tells us, used to play on a musical instrument and that Emilia was the daughter of Battista Bassano, one of the Queen's Musicians. No doubt, here is a better "social milieu", but can it suffice to solve our problem?
I'll be very glad if you will be kind enough to show my book to Muriel Bradbrook. On pp. 13 and 14 of my study I
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have quotations from her Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (Penguin Books), pp. 94 and 103-04. A comment from her will mean much to me.
Where will Kishori kaul's portrait of you be? Will she be bringing it along with her to Auroville? If so, I would very much like to take a look at you as a being of light, your true self. Jayant Patel is well known to me. So is his wife Aster who is a permanent resident of Auroville. Is your portrait in oils or water-colour? I believe water-colour can catch better the pervasion of things by light, but the great Impressionists to whom light meant the very substance of nature were oil-painters, weren't they?
I hope this letter catches you before you vanish to England. I hope also you'll catch a glimpse of my "Rival Poet" while still in Delhi.
It has been a delightful time receiving letters from you at such short intervals.
(1.5.1989)
It seems strange to be writing to you from London where everyone is saying what a hot summer - little do they know! But it is pleasant Shakespearean weather with may-blossom and early roses, not to say 'lilac-time'. Your letter to Delhi has been forwarded to me - I have not yet had time to read your 'worthier pen' detection, but I still favour Emilia Lanier. No need to 'prove' she was dark, if she was Italian, that is dark by English standards - dark hair and that 'brown' olive skin. Just as to say 'Indian' would by English standards (especially in the 16th century) be to say 'dark' even though your marriage-advertisements ask for 'fair' brides, meaning Aryan light-brown rather than tribal dark skins. I can't see Shakespeare expressing surprise that a lady who had invited a 'blind-date' with Burbage and had submitted willingly enough to the playwright instead of the actor proving false, since she was clearly promiscuous from the
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start. A court musician is much more likely to have enchanted Shakespeare - and the aristocratic Mr. W.H. - than a London adventuress - after all the Dark Lady was a gifted artist, and music clearly enchanted Shakespeare. As it doubtless did William Herbert. However I am not a Shakespeare scholar and all I am really saying is that an Italian player of the virginals at the court of Elizabeth strikes me as the Dark Lady I would invent if I were a fiction-writer. I will let Muriel Bradbrook read your book, I'm sure she will enjoy it whoever her own candidate may be.
1 hope you will have by now met - or will soon meet -Kishori Kaul, whose portrait of me is in oils but full of light. It reminds me a bit of the Elizabethan 'mask of youth' but 1 do feel she has captured 'the face I had before the world was made'. She is a true artist, I hope you will meet her. I did a television conversation with Ramu Gandhi. in which it is shown.
1 am back to a mountain of letters which make me wish I had stayed in India and never come back. But here lies my task, whether what is at hand is the destruction of earth and sea and our beautiful world and ultimately ourselves, or Sri Aurobindo's opposite picture of the future, or maybe both, in some mysterious way we do not understand — that we may outgrow this planet, or mode of apprehending it. Be that as it may our tasks are plain.
Your being a Parsee must in part explain your affinity with the beast of fire and that fiery principle you delight in. Piloo is a very devout practising Parsee, and so is Shirnaz's family (General Sethna is her father). I gave - with Keshav Malik - a poetry-reading in the beautiful garden of another Parsee lady - Mrs. Freny Billimoria, a painter, the night before I returned. There were green parrots flying over the trees. and mosquitoes over the grass It was all very beautiful, and alas a few hours later I was flying over the rocky wilderness of Afghanistan then Russia for hours and hours, and arriving here was like descending to another planet. You all suddenly seem very far away, like people dwelling in
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Blake's Sun singing 'Holy, holy holy is the Lord God Almighty.'
(10.5 .1989}
It is so long since 1 last heard from yon that I wonder if all is well with you? 1 do hope that neither illness nor any other of life's ills has touched you? It seemed so easy to exchange letters when I was in Delhi - under the rays of Surya - and here in England psychologically as well as physically in another land. 1 wonder if you met Kishori Kaul who was going to be in Auroville, and who painted a beautiful portrait of me?
1 am now getting together Temenos 11 and Piloo Jungal-wallah's review of the Tyger will go in - 1 think she sent you a copy. She is herself deep in Blake and enjoyed plunging into the 'wars of Intellect'. She is in England at present and we are going up together to a Sufi community in Scotland to whom I have promised a week on Blake's Job engravings, Blake's final word on the transforming power of the Imagination. I am still hoping that your contribution on Aurobindo's view on poetry may reach me in time to go into this number. I very much look forward to including something from you in Temenos, and it would be good to have it in this issue, where your book is also discussed.
I have been in USA for the last three weeks, the most total contrast possible with India, with its high standard of living and low standard of life, the hideous flabby bodies, uninhabited by soul, the atrocious clothes, the excess of food and every kind of proliferation of machine-made goods of the utmost vulgarity. And yet a country of such great natural beauty, which the American Way of Life has not succeeded in destroying. And with it all, a great desire to learn, an energy and desire for spiritual teaching, and more rishis and lamas and rinpoches than in their own countries. Seeds of every religion and cult and sect in the world there
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falls on fertile virgin soil. So long as it in no way interferes with personal freedom (written after all into the American constitution) Americans will try anything - for a time. For some crazy sect they will without a backward thought leave spouses and children (especially the women) and of course marriage is a very tenuous relationship, and children are brought up by the television-set. There is still an echo of an older, more dignified America of course and there is much sincerity and generosity. And whatever is happening to our world is happening in that country. Whether they will destroy the world or see the beginnings of a sort of univer-salism that would be something better than our old sectarian and nationalist cultures you and I may not live long enough into the next century to see. Just as well perhaps.
But the Lindisfarne Press, with whom I was staying for a time, have published an excellent book by Robert MacDer-mott entitled The Essential Aurobindo, which I read while I was there.
Dear Dr. Sethna, I do hope all is well with you.
The lilies were in my garden earlier this year.
(6.8.1989)
I have two letters of yours - May 10 and August 6, the latter with a fascinating coloured photo of "Lilium regale in Kathleen's garden". Both the letters express your concern about me, the second rather intensely because of my long silence. Piloo Jungalwalla also conveyed by a hurried letter how anxious you had been to be assured that all was well with me. Thank you very much for the worry. It feels good to have a heart in far England remembering one so warmly. Why do I say "far"? England is the one country to which I am deeply attached - to its own depths where Shakespeare has always his ecstasy and agony over the Dark Lady and the Fair Friend, Donne's voice keeps ringing -
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Batter my heart, three-person'd God, till now
You have but knock'd -
and Wordsworth can say about the very stones on the highway, "I saw them feel" and even the jolly Chesterton within earshot of the familiar North Sea washing his beer-swilling island can wander back in legend and write of a Celtic chief:
He heard the noise of a nameless sea
On an undiscovered isle.
Perhaps I am thinking of an England that has passed away, but I cannot help the dream of an inner reality that will persist as long as an idealistic project like Temenos is carried on by a soul whose "evanescent" face has been caught for ever in line and hue by Kishori Kaul.
We met some time ago when she visited me from Auroville with an album of her paintings. Looking at your portrait and feeling the subtle presence it conveyed, I asked a technical question: "Did Kathleen really wear a blue dress or is it your creation in order to match the visionary blue of her eyes?" I was glad to hear that the colour of the dress was her own inspiration. We swapped impressions of you -mine, of course, derived from your letters and your poems. In the course of our talk I happened to mention that I too at one time had the urge to be a painter. She asked me if I would show her anything I had done. I said: "Once I had the idea to make a picture of every poem I wrote - but did not go further than illustrating just two poems. One was about the two birds made famous by the Upanishads - a red agitated bird below on a wide-spreading tree of Nature, eager to eat fruit after fruit but never satisfied, and high above on the topmost bough it could see the other:
Lost in a dream no hunger broke,
This calm bird, aureoled, immense,
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Sat motionless: all fruit it found
Within its own magnificence.
The second picture showed a large expanse of land under a deep grey sky pricked with some stars. Below, a long winding road climbs gradually a hill and reaches its end between two peaks jointly haloed by a full moon. Kishori appreciated the technique as well as the theme. Coming from so gifted an artist, the compliment pleased me very much. The next day she dropped in again and gave me a cassette of your poetry recorded by yourself. Before I could play it, friends snatched it away, promising to return it soon. I am eager to hear you.
On July 15 I had to go to Madras for the extraction of a wisdom-tooth embedded in the gum in the right jaw. The expert dentist took nearly an hour to get it out. The trouble was that its root had stuck to the jaw-bone. So a regular excavation of the bone had to be made. The night was very painful. When the Pondy doctor saw the X-ray picture he was aghast at the bigness of the hole made. He advised I should live on semi-liquid food for two months and talk as little as possible. After a fortnight I threw all caution to the winds and lived naturally. I am none the worse for it. 1 suppose I'll carry the excavation all my life. In terms of sadhana, 1 can now say that at least my right jaw-bone has become hol(e)y.
For the last month or so 1 have been at my typewriter making a long comment on the latest paper (70 printed pages) of the well-known Finnish scholar Asko Parpola. The subject is Indological. It is almost "Finnished" now, perhaps a good match to his own work.
One of these days I must turn to the article you have asked me to write. Much of it is ready but the grand finale has still to be managed. I must invoke Sri Aurobindo's help to get it done soon.
Have you passed my Shakespeare book on to Muriel Bradbrook? Her opinion will be valuable. 1 can understand
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your sympathy with Emilia Lanier. But history is not made on such preferences. I think it was Miss Bradbrook who once wrote that not a shred of evidence exists that Emilia and Shakespeare ever met.
(12.9.1989)
I was so relieved to hear from you - I don't know why I had felt that a somewhat sudden interruption of our lively exchange of letters while I was in Delhi was because something was amiss. It was, of course - I am so sorry about your painful experience with the 'holey' tooth - have you caught the punning habit from Shakespeare? By the same post I received a letter from Kishori Kaul, who had felt much enriched by her visit to Auroville, and had news of you also. She is a lovely, gifted painter and her portrait of the face I had/before the world was made is very much better than the one I have now; though she has, I feel, caught something of the poet I should have been. In the end I realize that I should have followed the guidance of my Daimon and not allowed a thousand things to distract me; even Blake? I can't go so far as that, and what happiness scholarship also has been; but in a hundred years four lines of true poetry will outlast all the hard work editing Temenos and writing books and attending conferences. Don"t you feel the same? The poetic vision whether expressed in verse or in some other art is more enduring than all else. But, again, it sometimes flowers out of the more mundane things. Yet I wonder, I've given too much heed to lesser things, in part because my sense of guilt at pursuing the vocation of the poet has been very great. I did so at the expense of much pain given to others. I doubt whether a woman can or should assume that part at all, the price is too high, to ourselves or to others or both. But perhaps the price of beauty and poetry is always high, Shakespeare suffered and Blake was alone, and Shelley, and Mozart, Milton too. Donne, whom
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you cite? All I fear have paid the price of suffering, or others have. The two worlds obey different laws. But I've just been rereading Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge (I'm giving four seminars on the Duino Elegies) and he sees woman as the custodian of the soul's love, and of the beauty of la dame au Licorne. Something the modern world so greatly lacks, the receptive not the active genius - he would have deplored 'women's lib'. As I do, although I have lived it all too much.
Yes, the England of the Imagination is eternal and no poetry is greater than ours has been. It all seemed to end with the last war - before that war there were Eliot and Yeats and David Jones and Dylan Thomas and Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins and de la Mare and many fine poets of lesser stature. Now there is no-one; David Gascoyne stands alone. I do my best which is not good enough. Otherwise a celebration by commonplace writers, of the commonplace, for commonplace readers. The commonplace is for those who will not look higher; and that is why I do hope you will be able to finish your paper on the necessity for a hierarchic universe. Materialism and technology level all. Jeremy Reed is gifted but not great: Peter Redgrove forceful but falls short of humanity. After ten years Jeremy is the only poet of truly imaginative quality Temenos has found in this country. Scotland a little better, and John Montague in Ireland, but there too Yeats's words 'We were the last romantics, chose for theme/Traditional sanctity and loveliness' are true enough. I found nothing of that quality in India either and found the many imitations of the worst elements in a decadent English and American poetry with so little to offer very depressing. People here are deaf to the cosmic music, and why need India follow suit just in order to be in the fashion? When you have so much to teach us, and we so great a need to be reminded.
I did send your book to Muriel Bradbrook. She was going to stay with me this weekend but a close friend who lives with her is seriously ill and so I have not been able to ask her about your book. I know she does not believe there ever was
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a 'dark lady'. I think she is wrong, those sonnets are written in blood and anguish, not just a warning to young courtiers. I still think it was Emilia Lanier. But now the fashion is that Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford (isn't it?) so we have to start all over again. It seems to me that people can't believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare because it's almost impossible to believe that any human being could do so. It seems like a stream flowing from the cosmic ground itself of which Shakespeare was but the vehicle. So in a sense no-one wrote Shakespeare. Don't you like my theory? No-one could have written his works, it would have been humanly impossible to know what he knew! I have been deeply moved by the 'India of the Imagination' which the new Indian nation seems to be letting go just as modern England the England of the Imagination. Both are eternal but meanwhile the Reign of Quantity threatens us both. Perhaps that tide will turn. Perhaps it's too late to save this lovely earth. We can't know. Meanwhile our souls are nourished by nature and these great works of the imagination and we sustain one another with our best thoughts.
Piloo Nannavutti's review of your Tyger is now with the printer and will go in the next Temenos, which will be delayed, again, by the time it will take to have plates made of work by Cecil Collins, a wonderful painter - he died in June, when there was a big retrospective exhibition of his work at the Tate. It was like seeing the fields of Paradise disclosed in the heart of London's opening streets.
Muriel Bradbrook is knowledgeable about Shakespeare's England, but a bit unimaginative, you know!
I'm so glad to hear from you once more and that, the tooth apart, all is well.
(1.10.1989)
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