On Savitri
THEME/S
ON SRI AUROBINDO'S
SAVITRI
On
Sri Aurobindo's
Part One: Essays
AMAL KIRAN
(K.D. SETHNA)
Clear Ray Trust
Puducherry - 605 012, India
First Published 2010
(Typeset in 10.5 /13 Palatine.)
Price: Rs. 380/-
ISBN: 978-81-87916-10-9
© Clear Ray Trust
Published by Clear Ray Trust, Puducherry - 605 012
Printed at All India Press, Puducherry
DTP by Prisma, Auroville - 605 101
To
mentor and guide,
in gratitude and respect
Amal Kiran, (K.D. Sethna), still with us in his 106th year, is acknowledged to be one of the greatest authorities on Sri Aurobindo's revelatory epic poem Savitri: a legend and a symbol. Yet although he has been a prolific author, with 52 published books on a wide range of topics, he has never dedicated an entire book to the poem with which he had such a special relationship. His writings on it have appeared over more than 50 years in various books and journals.
The intention behind this compilation is to make easily available to the general interested reader everything written by Amal Kiran on Sri Aurobindo's epic and published by him during his long active career. To this end a careful search has been made through all his published works, as well as through other collections to which he has contributed and the journal edited by him for 50 years - Mother India. The collection is presented in two parts. The first consists of complete essays, which have appeared in full as chapters or sections of books or as independent articles in journals. The second part contains passages relating to Savitri that have been extracted from articles or letters authored by Amal.
In preparing the text of this collection we did not feel competent or willing to edit in any way the words of such an accomplished and meticulous wordsmith as Amal Kiran. So it has been decided to retain the texts exactly as published by him, including all spellings, quotations, references and notes, even though revised versions of some of these are now available. Where necessary for accuracy and the convenience
of the reader such variations have been clarified in an editorial note, in italics and between square brackets.
While the pieces reproduced in this book have been arranged as far as possible in chronological order of first appearance, different versions of certain texts have appeared in the course of time. In such cases, we have chosen the latest version known to have been revised by Amal personally, considering that this represents the author's final wishes. This means that the texts appearing in this collection have been taken from the following editions:
The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo 2nd rev. ed. 1974
The Thinking Corner - Causeries on Life and Literature, 1996
Sri Aurobindo - Letters on Savitri, edited by K.D. Sethna, 2000
Sri Aurobindo - The Poet 2nd ed. 1999
Inspiration and Effort: studies in literary attitude and expression, 1995
The Inspiration of "Paradise Lost", 1994
The Sun and the Rainbow: Approaches to Life through Sri Aurobindo's Light, 2nd ed. 2008
Aspects of Sri Aurobindo, 2nd ed. 2000
Our Light and Delight: Recollections of Life with the Mother, 1980
Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture, since 1949
The quotations from Savitri made by Amal came from different versions over the years. In this collection we have kept the text of these quotations as they appear in the editions listed above. But for the convenience of the reader, page references have been given to the Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo version of 1993.
This work was initiated in 2004, Amal's centenary year, but would not yet be available but for the dedicated labour of Tatiana Tasheva who has sought out, checked and arranged all the texts collected here. We are very grateful to one of
Amal's close associates who has gone through the book as it was growing and made many valuable suggestions. Our gratitude also goes to the Trustees of the Clear Ray Trust for sponsoring publication of this collection, which we feel will be of great and lasting value to all students and lovers of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.
Shraddhavan
Savitri Bhavan
29.05.2010
SRI AUROBINDO - A NEW AGE OF
MYSTICAL POETRY1
Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway
Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,
Ecstasy's chariots.2
These three lines make a most magnificent picture, Vedic and Upanishadic in its symbolism, and the sound-strokes of the words leave reverberations that are mantric: the impulsion of the supreme Spirit is poetised in language and rhythm which are themselves received from the immense Overworld known to the ancient Rishis. They are the aptest and most inwardly representative summing-up possible of the afflatus that creates Sri Aurobindo's Savitri and of the impression left by that afflatus on the sensitive reader.
When we speak of Savitri we speak of a unique adventure in poetic creation. From a certain standpoint the only parallel to its development is the second part of Goethe's Faust. Goethe kept it with him for several decades, adding to it, revising it, making it run along with the growth of his own mind, and the last touch was given just a few days before his death. Here the parallel ends. Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is
1[This is the last part of an essay which appeared in the 1946 issue of Sri Aurobindo Circle, Bombay and was then published in the book The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo in 1947. In this part of the essay Savitri was introduced to the public for the first time]
2[from Descent, SABCL 5:563]
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not merely a work drawn out over a great number of years: it is a work re-written more than half a dozen times and each time re-written not simply because of poetic defects. Each version might be poetically satisfying: the difference was of the plane of consciousness from which the writing took place. Nor was Sri Aurobindo growing and maturing only as Goethe did during the composition of the second part of Faust; he was moving from plane to plane of Yoga. Not alone the ideas and the emotions were undergoing a change and reaching to ripeness as with Goethe: the very stuff of consciousness was turning increasingly from human to superhuman. Savitri was originally composed with a good deal of the kind of inspiration which flows through Sri Aurobindo's early narratives Urvasie and Love and Death, the inspiration of the life-force with its surge of passion and emotion, the mind-energy with its lucid or recondite sweep of thought and here and there an outbreak of occult sight, a piercing by the bright poignancies of the psychic, a lifting into the large ideation of the Higher Mind. In Savitri the last three elements were more active than before, since the poet was now deep in Yoga. More frequent too were sudden visitations by the rhythm which passes through lines like the one from Love and Death:
Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind,
or by the vision as of that other from Urvasie:
Time like a snake coiling among the stars.
But Sri Aurobindo soon struck beyond the level from which he had written the original poem. He grew master - at all moments and not solely in the trance-state - of the plane the traditional Yogas posit above the mind-centre in the brain, the famous "thousand-petalled lotus" of spiritual light. A recast was made in the terms of this poise of consciousness.
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Another became necessary when he rose to an illumination yet more profound - and whenever definitely higher levels were his he infused the poem with fresh values of significance and sound. Sometimes, from one and the same level differing versions were set forth - on every occasion the scope extended and the writing laden with more matter. The last few, spread across thirty-five years or so, have been such ramifications and "pithings". The very final, which for want of leisure is still incomplete, is an endeavour to be comprehensive to the maximum with a continual command of the intense and immense spiritual directness of the Vedas and the Upanishads.
The ancient Indian scriptures are pervaded by an ever-present awareness of a living Infinity, an illimitable Oneness deploying itself in a myriad modes, remaining not only transcendental and static but throwing itself out in a cosmic dance, a dance that is divine on the higher planes but shot with shadows on the lower. On the lower there is a tremendous hide and seek, the soul has to pierce through masks and meet its own white truth. Once the piercing is done, the light is seen even here as ubiquitous and all Nature as secretly bathed in an ether of bliss. The Vedas and the Upanishads were chanted by those in whom the veil of division had fallen away. They spoke from the depths of the all-suffusing Spirit and from the heights of the Spirit's Truth-world whose dim reflex is in our space and time. These scriptures, therefore, brim with a concrete seeing and complex manifestation of forms which the mind cannot wholly explain but which seize at once the inner heart, or a mighty burst of harmonious intuitions in which the mind discovers the consummation, the absolute of its own fumbling concepts. In either case, what is found is, as it were, three-dimensional - far from the merely abstract: there is a solid touch of revelation, a burning throb of realisation. All poetry deals in the tangible and the pulsing; but here what is supposed to be immeasurably remote comes intimately near, impinges on our members and affects our
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blood-stream. The whole body of us seems to thrill to the Eternal, feel itself as a play of the Eternal, in contact with the Eternal's luminous stuff, the Eternal's rhythm of vastitude. Yes, a new stuff of being, a new rhythm of experience press to incarnate themselves, so that our limited consciousness may not view the Beyond as from behind unbreakable glass but find windows and doors flung open in the crystal walls of the imagination for the breath of the shining Mystery to blow in and our mind and heart to rush out. That gigantic intercommunion and that boundless freedom are what the Vedic and Upanishadic poetry is composed of. It is these things that are also Savitri.
But Sri Aurobindo brings again and again the accent and vibration of the Mantra and a general mantric atmosphere playing round whatever other overhead planes find voice, to convey him to a goal further than any the Vedas and the Upanishads envisaged. His poetry traverses regions on which the steps of the ancients never fell. The afflatus of the planes from which the Rishis chanted serves him to reveal a knowledge unattained by the Rishis. Savitri is at the same time a harking back and a springing forward. Its very conception shows this double movement. In the Mahabharata the story of Savitri depicts a fight between love and death somewhat similar in outward intention to the episodes of Priyumvada and Ruru as well as Urvasie and Pururavus which Sri Aurobindo had already poetised. The Mahabharata relates that when Savitri chose Satyavan for her bridegroom she was told of the prophecy that his life would be short and that soon she would be widowed. She clung to her choice, resolved within herself to pit her love against the fatality by which she was being dogged. Knowing the heartbreak concealed for her behind the rapture of love she faced the future: hers was the hope of triumphing over the dread Adversary of man's existence. At the back of this tale of conjugal devotion armed with an extreme Will to Life, Sri Aurobindo intuited a wealth of symbol; for the name "Savitri" the Rig Veda
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had given to the supreme creative consciousness emblemed forth as the Sun. It means the Truth-force of the divine Light, and by analogy "Satyavan" would mean that Light's Truth-being. So the carrying away of Satyavan by Yama the God of Death and the combat of Savitri's heart and mind with that inscrutable darkness were felt by Sri Aurobindo to be hinting vaguely the effort celebrated in the Vedic hymns to reclaim by means of Yoga what they call the lost Sun, the divine Light that has got submerged in a material Nature which seems to begin as a blind unconsciousness and out of which evolve various forms of Ignorance struggling to live and see. In Sri Aurobindo's poem the term Death regains its Vedic and Upanishadic connotation. Death, in the Vedas and the Upanishads, is the world's ignorance of its own divine Self: the falling asunder of the body and the blowing out of its little day are only the most external aspect of the Night that has hidden from us our own Godhead. But Sri Aurobindo does not rest with this connotation. He goes beyond the old Indian idea of what God-attainment is. The Rishis spoke of liberating the soul from its bondage and of the liberated soul bringing the light of the Infinite into its erstwhile prison. They, however, put a limit to that enlightenment. A certain mixture of shadow was accepted as inevitable. At rare moments a flashing doubt about this grey inevitability escapes their lips: Earth then appears to be a divine Mother waiting for some final apocalypse of herself. But the vision of that perfecf life is never clearly held before the consciousness: fugitive symbols of its possibility float down from the high trances of the seers without yielding their inmost essence or becoming dynamic. Though sufficient support is given to regarding the cosmic scene as a field for manifesting the Spirit, complete spiritual fulfilment is said to come only after the gross body has been doffed and a status reached outside the cosmic round of rebirth. According to Sri Aurobindo, the Supreme must be possessing the basic and perfect reality, the flawless archetype, of everything set going in our space
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and time. To couple with a liberation into the Self of selves an attainment of this archetypal Truth and to evolve the divine counterpart of each side of our complex constitution is the full aim of Yoga: in such an aim, even the gross body with its energies cannot be neglected as untransmutable into a luminous and immortal vehicle. Consequently, Sri Aurobindo, while reading the Vedic and Upanishadic sense in the term Death, does not overlook its common physical sense which the Mahabharata kept in view. Unlike the old scriptures, he refuses to recognise the physical breaking-up as an unescapable destiny. The Aurobindonian Yogi does more than transmute his inward instruments: he conquers too the limitations imposed on the corporeal frame at present by age, disease or accident: he incarnates a divine body-archetype, his very stuff of matter flowers into a miraculous novel substance. So Savitri, fighting Satyavan's death, is in Sri Aurobindo's hands an Avatar of the immortal Beauty and Love plunging into the trials of terrestrial life and seeking to overcome them not only in herself but also in the world she has embraced as her own: she is sworn to put an utter end to earth's estrangement from God. Her story grows a poetic structure of incident and character, in which he houses his special search and discovery, his unique exploration of hidden worlds, his ascent into the deific ranges of the Spirit and his bringing down of their power to divinise man's total nature.
The technique of Savitri As attuned to the scriptural conception at work. It accepts the principle of metre and does not cut any modernistic zigzag of irregularity. Sri Aurobindo is not an enemy to free verse, but he does reject the free verse that has no underlying rhythm to unify its wanderings. A unifying norm, no matter how inexplicit, is the sine qua non of successful poetry, particularly in rendering overhead values. For, unity of measure is not just our mind's arbitrary demand: Nature operates on such a basis, all her multiplicities have fundamental types behind them - individuals grounded in
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species, species grounded in genera. A wide variation playing upon a persistent pattern is her creative mode everywhere. The overhead planes hold that basic oneness most intensely. Conscious being there does not forget as in our lower hemisphere the universal Self: every movement is fraught with awareness of the Infinite. The principle of metre translates most strikingly into speech Nature's law of manifestation, the Spirit's method of self-deployment: the Many modulating upon the basis of the One. Savitri adopts the iambic five-foot line of English blank verse as the most apt and plastic for harmonies like those of the Vedas and the Upanishads. Its blank verse, however, has certain special characteristics affining it still further to them. It moves in a series of blocks formed by a changing distribution of correctly proportioned sentence-lengths - lengths of one line, two lines, three or four or five lines, many lines. Scarcely any block breaks off in the middle of a line; the sentence seldom makes a full pause except when its last line is complete. Hence the blocks, connected as they are, have still an independence, a kind of self-sufficient structure like stanzas distinct without being equally long. And what applies to the sentence-unit applies in a general way to every part of it. Each line-unit seems itself a block on a small scale - telling in its own mass and force as if it could stand in vacuo and at the same time join in a concordant sentence-totality to develop the story and its spiritual perspective. Though enjambment is not avoided on any strict principle, it is less ingenious and precipitate than in Urvasie, Love and Death or Baji Prabhou. The scriptural mood demands a graver, more contained movement. To such a mood end-stopping comes with greater naturalness. But Sri Aurobindo does not make a fetish of end-stopping. What he does is a most careful moulding of the individual line so that it may not merely serve the broad scheme as in much present-day verse but be as well a power and perfection in its own right, without of course the least rhythmic monotony occurring in the passage and impairing the vitality of the broad scheme.
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8On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge....
The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
The power and perfection of each line of Savitri lies in utter faithfulness to the fact, the atmosphere, the life-throb found on the overhead planes. Not that the poetry refuses to descend anywhere: there are lines which the ordinary mind recognises as akin to its coinage, but these are deliberately introduced as helpful connecting-links between flight and flight on the supernormal levels. Even these have usually a vague breath of the Overworld about them. In any case they are so few that the generalisation about overhead power and perfection is practically unaffected. From the very start we have the full grip on profound realities, the expanse and richness of a revelation beyond the mental meaning. Savitri, like Ilion, that experiment by Sri Aurobindo of nearly four hundred lines in the quantitative hexameter, begins with a picture of darkness passing into day: here it is the last dawn in Satyavan's life, a phenomenon packed with significance of the immortal light which Savitri has to win for earth by challenging the decree of death so long accepted by man. The daybreak of Ilion combines the spirit of Greek myth and epic with the spirit of Indian Yoga. It is a vision charged with the illumination of the occult Orient but naturalising itself to the atmosphere of heroic Hellas. Savitri knows no such tempering: its mysticism is naked to the depths, the Orient shows its true inward colour, India's Yogic antiquity lives again to fill out with enormous rhythmic suggestions the Aurobindonian message. But the poem's prelude is too lonr to quote in uninterrupted sequence; only a number of "views", brief or extended, can be set together to limn the chief features of the symbolic dawn:
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Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;...
Something that wished but knew not how to be,...
Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,
At peace in its subconscient moonless cave
To raise its head and look for absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire....
As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the universe,
An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.
Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep....
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
A sense was born within the darkness' depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time
As if a soul long dead were moved to live:
But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,
Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,
And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt
And old experience laboured out once more.
All can be done if the God-touch is there.
A hope stole in that hardly dared to be
Amid the Night's forlorn indifference.
As if solicited in an alien world
With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,
Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,
An errant marvel with no place to live,
Into a far-off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
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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
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
One lucent corner windowing hidden things
Forced the world's blind immensity to sight...
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,
Outpoured the revelation and the flame.
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.
An instant's visitor the godhead shone:
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood
And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve.
Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.
Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed
Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;
A lonely splendour from the invisible goal
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.
Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;
Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven;
A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,
The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths
That wrap the fated journeyings of the stars
And saw the spaces ready for her feet.
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Once she half looked behind for her veiled sun,
Then, thoughtful, went to her immortal work.
Earth felt the Imperishable's passage close:
The waking ear of Nature heard her steps
And wideness turned to her its limitless eye,
And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.
All grew a consecration and a rite.
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;
The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind
Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky.... [pp. 1-4]
The impression is at first as of music afar and above -beautiful but not very distinguishable in its notes. There is, however, a pervading intensity which cannot be missed even at a distance: the notes may not be clear at once but they are no blur, they stand fully formed, diminished without being dissolved. A little concentrated hearing - and the music takes a grip on us, stirring strange secret places within to echo the rhythms that float down and to mirror the visions that fall across gigantic spaces. When our consciousness grows receptive enough, we observe that the spiritual and the material move here as one. Most of us who, when the night had run a long course but was still thick, have waited in the ambiguous atmosphere with our faces to the East, have had an inkling of a vigil by some cosmic Ignorance and have been faintly filled with the unplumbed prevision of a deific change because of both a tendency in the gloom and a beckoning from some masked splendour. Also, when watching daybreak, we have felt a deific revelation in the making, a beauty that was too great to be borne by earth-eyes and was soon lost in the familiar bright outlines of our world. Either of these two perceptions is caught by Sri Aurobindo with the utmost suggestive precision; we face occurrences we might see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands. It is the
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combined sense of the closely possessed and the supremely illimitable that is the mark of true overhead poetry. For, the Spiritual is never tenuous or empty: it is dense and rich, containing the essence of all that we regard as substantial: whatever has shape and colour can therefore interpret it, bring it to a focus for our minds, be its revelatory figure. But shape and colour so often tend to overlay the Spirit's secret values. Sri Aurobindo's art is free from that tendency: he nowhere loses in the terms of Nature the stuff of Super-Nature. A striking example of his success are the lines:
That glowed along a fading moment's brink
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.[p. 3]
A keen atmosphere of Supernature bathes what we are accustomed to look upon as natural objects - hand, panel, hinge, gate. And they are thus bathed not merely by being used as metaphors. There has happened a merging of them in realities of planes beyond the earth, a spiritual concreteness fuses with their material concreteness and makes them affect our senses with forms instinct with an unearthly significance. Perhaps it will be easiest to appreciate this art of mystical fact by noting the lines immediately preceding the above:
[Ibid.]
It is possible to play the critic and ask: "Should there not be a restraint in the double adjective? On top of a general
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teeming of single 'qualifiers' two epithets are put before a noun in the same way twice in three lines here and two lines further one more pair of similarly yoked adjectives is seen in 'pale enchanted light': would it not be an improvement if some variety were introduced and a less obvious method followed?" Sri Aurobindo, in a private letter, makes a most enlightening statement on the point at issue:
"If a gradual wealth-burdened movement is the right thing, as it certainly is here in my judgment, the necessary means have to be used to bring it about - and the double adjective is admirably suited for the purpose. Do not forget that Savitri is spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure. Done on this rule, it is really a new attempt and cannot be hampered by old ideas of technique except when they are assimilable. Least of all by a standard proper to a mere intellectual and abstract poetry which makes 'reason and taste' the supreme arbiters, aims at a harmonised poetic intellectual balanced expression of the sense, elegance in language, a sober and subtle use of imaginative decoration, a restrained emotive element. The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psycho-physical concreteness. According to certain canons, epithets should be used sparingly, free use of them is rhetorical, an 'obvious' device, a crowding of images is bad taste, there should be subtlety of art not displayed but severely concealed - Summa ars est celare artem. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton wherever he chooses. Such lines as
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire
or
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Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge
(note two double adjectives in three lines in the last) - are not subtle or restrained or careful to conceal their elements of powerful technique, they show rather a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing language to its utmost power of expression. That has to be done still more in this kind of mystic poetry. I cannot bring out the spiritual objectivity if I have to be miserly about epithets, images, or deny myself the use of all available resources of sound-significance. The double epithets are indispensable here and in the exact order in which they are arranged by me. The rich burdened movement might be secured by other means, but a rich burdened movement of any kind is not my primary object, it is desirable only because it is needed to express the spirit of the action here; and the double epithets are wanted because they are the best, not only one way of securing it. The 'gesture' must be 'slow miraculous' - if it is merely miraculous or merely slow, that does not create a picture of the thing as it is, but of something quite abstract and ordinary or concrete and ordinary - it is the combination that renders the exact nature of the mystic movement, with the 'dim appeal' completing it, so that 'gesture' is not here a metaphor but a thing actually done. Equally a 'pale light' or an 'enchanted light' may be very pretty, but it is only the combination that renders the luminosity which is that of the hand acting tentatively in the darkness. That darkness itself is described as a quietude which gives it a subjective spiritual character and brings out the thing symbolised, but the double epithet 'inert black' gives it the needed concreteness so that the quietude ceases to be something abstract and becomes something concrete, objective but still spiritually subjective. Every word must be the right word, with the right atmosphere, the right relation to all the other words, just as every sound in its place and
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the whole sound together must bring out the imponderable significance which is beyond verbal expression. One can't chop and change about on the principle that it is sufficient if the same mental sense or part of it is given with some poetical beauty or power. One can only change if the change brings out more perfectly the thing behind that is seeking for expression - brings out in full objectivity and also in the full mystic sense. If I can do that, well, other considerations have to take a backseat or seek their satisfaction elsewhere."
A free diversity of style is practised by Sri Aurobindo to attain his goal. He does not immure himself in any one formula - not even the formula of lavish technique which he has defended. Where the spiritual mood and situation demand it, he can be quite sparing in epithet and image and sound. And not only differences in the texture of style does he exploit: he has in addition different tempers of it. The texture consists in simplicity or complexity, austereness or lavishness, concision or diffusion: the temper lies in a particular receptive attitude and exploratory process of the visioning word. One sort of temper may run through many sorts of texture, for its quality resides behind the obvious characteristics of the word-body. Roughly, there are four kinds of temper that can be described to some extent, while a fifth eludes all analysis and is the inmost circle of style, the magic of inevitability at its diamond point. The other kinds also can be inevitable, but here is, as it were, the sheer quintessence of their inevitabilities and we can say about it when we meet it that there it is but what exactly it is we cannot say. In the field of the definable style-tempers we have first the visioning word doing no more than equate itself to a mood and a situation: it accepts the mood, acknowledges the situation and gives them a just expression with any style-texture the poet is moved to adopt. Thus Sri Aurobindo writes:
Something that wished but knew not how to be, [p. 2]
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An errant marvel with no place to live.[p. 3]
This stylistic temper is mixed with a second type in the lines about "an old tired want" being given room
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory
And only meets the corpse of his desire.[p. 2]
Now the visioning word is not merely just, not merely equated to its contents: it has pressed out of them a vigorous subtlety: it does not stop with a felicitous possession of their appearance, it goes under their skin, so to speak, and startles them into throwing up effective suggestions of their inner vitality. A third temper of style is shown us, infused into the second, when Sri Aurobindo comes with:
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.[Ibid.]
The visioning word has begun to quicken with an inside glow - there is, besides the vividness and the subtlety from under the skin of mood and situation, a kindling in which many nuances from within arise and play and merge, the pulse of things becomes a gleaming varied flow of intense significances and not only a strong suggestive leap. This process arrives at its acme in a passage like:
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours. [pp. 3-4]
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Nor is the process, of which I have spoken, the sole element in the above passage. Joined with it is another which bears the visioning word in a spelled exaltation of deep discovery, a fourth temper of style instilling into the theme a rapt self-transparency of meaningful design and vital inwardness. It is not easy to disengage this temper: more than the rest it must be felt by an instinct, for it is nearest the absolute style which refuses to be analysed. That absolute style is in the exquisite lines already cited about the fixing of "a gate of dreams". There it comes into being with a kinship to the third temper, while it confronts us with a kinship to the fourth in the poignant wizardry of:
The wide winged hymn of a great priestly wind
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky,[p. 4]
or the august enchantment of:
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven.[Ibid.]
It can also have a kinship to the first and second tempers. The first seems quietly alchemised into it by
All can be done if the God-touch is there.[p. 3]
One of the lines from a group omitted in our quotation of Savitri's prelude illustrates a mighty mutation into it from the second:
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite.[p. 1]
Of course this indefinable super-inevitable style is poetically the ultima thule, just as the Mantra is spiritually so. But in an
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epic of great length it cannot be present everywhere "neat"; nor can the Mantra. And the very plan of Savitri, comprising as it does the entire expanse of evolution into deity and covering most subjects of philosophical search and every possible aspect of mystical living, demands for the richness and completeness of the treatment variation of style-temper no less than of style-texture and inspiring plane. The only condition which cannot be waived is the overhead afflatus: it must be there in one form and degree or another if a direct poetising of the Divine is to be accomplished.
A direct poetising of the Divine runs through Savitri from end to end. But that does not imply a rejection of human interest: what is implied is an "unmasked" pervasion and interpenetration of it by the beyond-human. In fact the human element is unavoidable, since the figure from which the poem derives its name is the divine Consciousness descended into flesh. Her work is among terrestrial creatures: it is among their joys and travails that she awakes on that fateful morning. Trees and animals and humans hold her in their midst, an Immortal prisoned in mortality, the high potencies of her soul wedded to a living that is but a slow dying:
At first life grieved not in her burdened breast...
In a deep cleft dug by silence twixt two realms
She lay remote from grief, unsawn by care,
Nothing recalling of the sorrow here.
Then a slow faint remembrance shadowlike moved
And sighing she laid her hand upon her bosom
And recognised the close and lingering ache
Deep, quiet, old, made natural to its place.[p. 9]
The origin of these lines is not the sheer overhead, they have not the masterful seeing through an amplitude of light. Still, they have a general overhead influence and their difference from fine poetry of the mental order can be marked if we put side by side with their last three verses a snatch from Keats
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which has a similar motive. In Hyperion an action almost identical with Savitri's is given to Thea, the companion of Saturn during his fallen days:
One hand she pressed upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain.
Sri Aurobindo has a more profound tone; the language is charged with suggestions that go below the thought-meaning; the tragedy of a luminous soul enduring the darkness of earth, taking upon itself the heartbreak that is mortal existence, finds voice in the very rhythm of that ancient heartbreak. The emotion in the excerpt from Keats does not draw upon this intense psychic sadness, it neighbours it in the phrase, "that aching spot where beats the human heart", but passes on to the imaginative idea of the Immortal's pain instead of plumbing the actual pathos of the entombed sweetness. Nor is there in it the sense of the height from which the celestial sweetness has fallen: the mere words, "though an Immortal", convey no more than the conception, while Sri Aurobindo infuses into his less explicit yet keener turns some breath of the overhead atmosphere. The poetic seeing is from some psychic centre, and therefore not sweepingly large, yet like a sharp flame the poetry rises to touch the air of the Overworld and burn a little with a colour beyond its own mood.
This phenomenon plays in and out of Savitri. At times an occult feature joins in and assumes prominence, as when Savitri is further described as remembering the wrestle, within her heart, of huge dim figures - earth and love and doom -and then the image of some cryptic greatness emerges, with a psychic effluence of sweetness and light falling across the dread and the secrecy and also with a hidden sense of the Spirit's overhead amplitude, but the main impression is of the puzzling occult:
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At the sombre centre of the dire debate
A guardian of the unconsoled abyss
Inheriting the long agony of the globe,
A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain
Stared into space with fixed regardless eyes
That saw grief's timeless depths but not life's goal. [p. 10]
A similar composite inspiration of three-planed poetry is offered us a little later when another vision, picking up the abyss-element, is brought forward, a vision even more mysterious whom Sri Aurobindo gives no name:
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great...
Assigner of the ordeal and the path
Who chooses uses in this holocaust of the soul
Death, fall and sorrow as for the spirit's goads,
The dubious Godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss. [p. 17]
But in these lines there is a crescendo of the overhead seizing the occult and the last three are tremendous both in sight and vibration. They conjure up from royal heights of the overhead the scene of the earth-drama in which Savitri is the chief protagonist. The rhythm courses with a huge intensity and makes us actually hear the workings of the divine mysteries which the language puts into the picture of Savitri as well as of the dark evolving universe she has come to help. Just as we compared Keats's lines with Sri Aurobindo's in order to feel the latter's differentia, so we can best note the peculiar overhead envelopment and absorption of the occult by comparing to the style and the sound here those of the famous finale of Francis Thompson's sonnet The Heart. Thompson recalls the act of that fierce Roman patriot Sextus Curtius who jumped, horse-backed and full-armoured, into the deep trench which according to the augurs had to be
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filled with what Rome deemed most precious if she was to escape heavenly punishment. Thompson creates an image magnificently profound about the human heart's unrealised grandeur:
The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink —
Yet shall that chasm, till He who these did build
An awful Curtius make Him, yawn unfilled.
As sheer poetry this is equal to the Aurobindonian lines and the spiritual word-significance is as admirable. Word-significance, however, is not the sole ingredient of poetry. There is what Sri Aurobindo calls the imponderable significance beyond verbal expression. The rhythm set up by the words brings it home and awakes in us the reality they strive to portray. Thompson's rhythm, like his expression, has grip and strength, it shakes up broad tracts of the mind but except a little at the end it does not break through the mind into the infinite overhead. A precisely moulded and forcefully imaged thought goes winging through us, stirring mystical suggestions with the aid of an historical incident. We are moved by the brilliant originality which enlarges that incident and strikes into it an inward spiritual truth, yet save for the effect produced by the sound and the meaning of the words "awful" and "yawn" we miss the cosmic unfathomable reverberations Sri Aurobindo induces in some concealed spaciousness of divine being. Technically we might say that the second line in Thompson fails to be overhead because of the crowdedly repetitive clipped sounds "till" and "did" and "build". The overhead rhythm needs a different art - and behind the art a different psychological disposition. Thompson's opening line has nothing markedly counter to the overhead art; somehow the right psychological disposition is still lacking. In the last line he is on the verge of both, yet comes short because there is not the overhead lift completing the semi-
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overhead wideness; so the imponderable significance beyond verbal expression is much less spiritual than in Sri Aurobindo's
Unmistakably mantric seems this note - and that too in full measure. The pinions of the Mantra beat often in Savitri, but everywhere they are not completely unclosed to occupy the entire line. They mingle with wafts of other overhead utterances - the Spirit ideative or illuminative or intuitive. The Spirit in nothing else than its identity is difficult to sustain for more than a few lines. Though in the Dawn-description it is a frequent presence, even there it is interspersed with a less direct substantiality of the Spirit. The passage, however, where the Avatarhood of Savitri is painted keeps the unalloyed Mantra ringing for dozens of lines! It is worth special attention both for this reason and for being poetically the longest and most comprehensive mystical portrait in all literature.
To lead from darkness into light, from ignorance of God to knowledge of Him is the work assigned by many poets to woman. There is the praise by Goethe of the Eternal Feminine calling us onward and upward. And there is Dante's music about the santo riso, the saintly smile, of Beatrice which guided him from the sins of the flesh to the soul's ecstasy of worship. Crashaw wrote a hymn in honour of St. Teresa, lauding her devotion to Christ and her transforming influence on men. Francis Thompson made a shrine for Alice Meynell: she was the religious calm-centre to the storm of his much-tossed and vagrant career. Wordsworth imagined how the "overseeing power" of Nature would build up the child Lucy into a woman aglow with a soulful beauty and character that would be in tune with pantheistic harmonies of wind and water. But none of these poets has left us a sustained mystical portrait. A few phrases pregnant with mysticism are all we have from them
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in the midst of a general diffused suggestion of goodness or else of religious zeal. There is also the imaginative picture drawn by Shelley from brief glimpses of Emilia Viviani in a convent, no nun herself but kept as a charge of the nuns by a tyrannical parent. Who among us, in the days of youthful dreaming, has not been intoxicated by the romantic idealism shot with Platonic mysticism in the apostrophe? -
Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that 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!
or in the description? -
... 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.
But such passages are rare in Epipsychidion: most of the poem is idealistically romantic rather than mystically Platonic. And even in the exceptional places the mysticism is not what I have designated as direct. The language is of the poetic intelligence visited by the rapture and radiance of an occult sphere of mentality behind it: both vision and rhythm are, for all that occult visitation, indirect in their mystical import and impact: they are the outward mind thrilling to the occult yet rendering it in terms not altogether native to it. Nor does the attraction of the overhead, which is marked in patches, get full response. Indirect also are the excellent lines by a poet of our own day, Robert Hugh Benson, depicting a contemplative of St. Teresa's Order:
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She moves in tumult; round her lies
The silence of the world of grace;
The twilight of our mysteries
Shines like high noonday on her face;
Our piteous guesses, dim with fears,
She touches, handles, sees and hears.
In her all longings mix and meet;
Dumb souls through her are eloquent;
She feels the world beneath her feet
Thrill in a passionate intent;
Through her our tides of feeling roll
And find their God within her soul.
It is again the poetic intelligence speaking - with a difference in two respects from Shelley's passages. First, the inner mind has contributed a certain intuitive intimacy of contact with mystical experience rather than a wash of bright and colourful vision. Second, the emotion does not so much rise upward to echo something of the wide overhead power as plunges inward to touch the profound delicacy of the psychic.
All that is indirect in Shelley and Benson grows a directness the most complete and at a stretch not found in either the Vedas and the Upanishads, when Sri Aurobindo builds up the portrait of Savitri as one in whom the Godhead of Love finds a perfect incarnation. Everything in her pointed to a nobler kind than the human:
Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.
Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;
Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,
Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
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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.
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.
A wide self-giving was her native act;
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
Enveloped with its greatness all that came
And gave a sense as of a greatened world:
Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,
Her high passion a blue heaven's equipoise...
A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;
Love in her was wider than the universe,
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.
The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:
Vacant of the dwarf self's imprisoned air
Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath
Spiritual that can make all things divine.
For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.
At once she was the stillness and the word,
A continent of self-diffusing peace,
An ocean of untrembling virgin fire,
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.
In her he found a vastness like his own,
His high warm subtle ether he refound
And moved in her as in his natural home.
In her he met his own eternity.[pp. 14-16]
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It is not necessary to understand the passage in detail in order to feel its magnificence. The phrases have an enormous weight of vision that strikes us to our knees, as it were, impressing us with a finality we dare not question. The rhythm has an overpowering fidelity to the inner thrill of the experience suggested and symbolised. Here are the figures and values of a superhuman state of consciousness at the very top, breaking upon us in their own stuff and vibrancy through the medium of language. This is not the mind imagining the highest it can beyond itself. This is an Overmind actually holding all the magnitudes that are pictured; its vision is from within, composed of its own substance and lit up with its own vast vitality. As a result, the pictures are at once extra-immediate and extra-remote: they make, as A.E. Housman would have said, an impact upon our solar plexus as no mental reflection of mystical realities can, but while convincing us of their living concreteness they dodge our mental apprehension by refusing to yield their meanings easily and to affine themselves to what our thought can size up. To adopt Sri Aurobindo's own turn, the ways of thought are overflown, worlds of splendour and calm above the human level are crossed and unborn things reached. Not that everything is difficult to conceive: Savitri's "magnanimity", "kindly care" and "inward help" reach us through emblems that are not resistant to analysis, though we shall be deprived of a considerable amount of their stimulus .unless we use the Eye behind the eye and the Ear behind the ear to sense that the elemental, cosmic or supramundane analogies and metaphors with their supporting breadth of phrase and sonance are no eloquent exaggerations but are accurately intrinsic to the special nature of Savitri's "self-giving". The "sea of white sincerity" too is within our imaginative grasp and so, again, in this era of the psycho-analysed subconscious are the gulfs which are "secrecies of light". No less steeped in the Overmind run the language and rhythm of the lines where they are mentioned and it would be poor
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justice to them if we did not thrill to the rapturous wideness drowning all thought in the one case and in the other the ecstatic opening of depth beyond depth unsounded by the Freudian intellect; but we are able to adapt ourselves without much strain to the general vision. The two lines driving home Savitri's being at the same time the stillness and the word -
have an expressive force more hard to absorb. Savitri's word-aspect could have been served well enough by being called an ocean of virgin fire and her stillness-aspect a continent of peace without the two epithets "untrembling" and "self-diffusing". As soon as the fire is "untrembling" and the peace "self-diffusing", the intense movement is seen as superbly steady, the extreme rest as gigantically spreading its influence. So in the very fact of movement there is rest, in the very fact of rest movement: the two are a single miracle most aptly figured to suggest, by their playing into each other's hands, the omnipotent essence of the Divine. Our mind has usually little experience of opposites meeting, much less coalescing; even Thompson's poetic idea -
Passionless passion, wild tranquillities
falls slightly outside easy conception. Sri Aurobindo's direct mystical sight, packed with an inward sense of the superhuman, is still more enigmatic: it grips us by its intimacy with its object but we do not grip it enough by our ideative powers.
In the central picture of the passage - the nine lines, beginning with "As in a mystic and dynamic dance", which are perhaps Sri Aurobindo's grandest achievement in mantric poetry - there is no obstacle to our imaginatively realising how apt are the glorious figures - "a parable of dawn", "a
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niche for veiled divinity", "a golden temple door" - for Savitri's body with its finite-looking beauty admitting us into a Presence that has no limit. Nor is there any bar to our conjuring up "a priestess of immaculate ecstasies". But what is "Truth's revealing vault" inspiring and ruling her? Is the sky used here as a symbol of the light of Eternity? Evidently some infinitude of being that stretches above like a sky and is higher than our obscure and erring consciousness is meant. Yet immediately afterwards we have the "prophet cavern of the gods": it is in a cavern that the priestess is moving and a cavern by definition cannot have a sky, it must be a closed place. The word "vault" is admirably dual and suits the cavern-suggestion no less than the sky-suggestion, but how are we to mingle the two? We must think of the cavern as having a "revealing" roof, which means really a roof that, instead of shutting out light, is one dense mass of light, Truth's own stuff. Such a cavern with such a roof is neither closed in nor dark: it is somewhat like our universe as viewed from the earth at midday, an immense "inverted bowl" of brightness under which we seem cooped. What special point is made by bringing in that cavernous view? The answer is that no other will present the profound secrecy of the world Sri Aurobindo is speaking of - a spiritual state which is to be entered by drawing the consciousness further and further away from outward phenomena as into a cavern but which, when entered, is discovered to be a boundless space of being, full of a knowledge capable of prophecy, a time-transcending knowledge which is a radiance poured from above where Truth is like some huge sun. This strange world appears to be a fusion of two levels. It is not quite removed from what Sri Aurobindo elsewhere hints as "an aureate opening in Time". The "aureate opening" refers to the psyche, the gate of communication between our ignorant time-process and the splendour of the eternal Spirit: it is the authentic soul or divine spark as distinguished from the élan vital and the mind-force, behind and between which it is hidden and upon
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which it sheds its mystical influence. In Yoga the psyche is found at the back of that juncture of the élan vital and the mind-force - the emotional being whose physical effects we feel in the heart-region. It is the true heart of us, of which our emotional being with its physical counterpart is an outward diminished representation. It has its own experience of the Divine, exquisite and passionate, yet it has not in itself the amplitude and puissance as experienced in the overhead planes, the amplitude and puissance which attain their extreme in the consciousness whence the Mantra comes. This consciousness is implied in Sri Aurobindo's mention, of Truth's inspiring and ruling vault as well as of the gods in whose cavern the priestess is dancing. The spiritual state he describes is, therefore, a domain where the psyche has opened up to the Overworld and got suffused with the highest light. Savitri has an embodied emotional being that is not merely merged in the psyche; it is merged also in a denizen of the Overworld's top-range descended into the psyche and making the inspiration of that Height one with it. The double character is suggested again when the "heart of silence" is said to be in the "hands of joy". Usually in Yoga a poise free from aching desire is taken hold of and enveloped by a vast bliss that is independent of finite objects and circumstances, but here more is meant than this mystical experience: the in-drawn dedicated stillness caught by a masterful bliss as though with hands commanding and directing, corresponds to the samadhi-rapt prestess rhythmically swaying to the luminous and beatific will invading her from Truth's empyrean.
All this, of course, is just an effort at an imaginative recreation of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual symbols. It can serve merely as a prop, it cannot deliver the full sense of them. Intuitive vision is the means to compass both their subjective and objective values, for they are plucked from Supernature with an absolute loyalty to its extreme altitudes. We must go very far indeed from the imaginative intellect's grasp in
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order to feel their coherence and their living force. Without submitting ourselves in intuitive sympathy to an invasion from worlds of a Consciousness that is divine and deathless, ours will be a surface appreciation, at most admiring certain similes and felicitous turns of language, scarcely stirring to the hidden immensity of the revelation and its concrete mystical drive and scope. And if we do not read the passage aloud like a spell of superb potency and let the rhythm break through secret sound-spaces within us we shall never awake wholly to the fact that the entire description of Savitri and especially the part I have been commenting upon is word and vibration charged with actual deific states - the highest spiritual plane with its own native accent.
Failure to tackle the Mantra, and in general all overhead poetry, in the right receptive way will lay its contents, more than those of any other type of mystical verse, open to the accusation of being what Yeats called 'Asiatic vague immensities". For in it Asia's difference from the European dealing with God is most prominent. Europe finds its natural element in definite philosophical ideas, it governs even the Infinite by the laws of logic and constructs a self-consistent picture by following a single track of thought. Asia is at home in multiple tracks: though philosophers have tried to be logically bound down to systems clear-cut out of one dominant trend, the instinct is to give way to multitudinous incompatibilities harmonising and uniting in a supra-logical vision. Overhead poetry, particularly at its apex, is supra-logical vision embodied without the intellect playing the interpreter. Whatever is seizable by the intellect is an adaptation by the overhead planes of themselves to its mode and not its shaping of them according to its own desire and proclivity. Much must escape the intellect almost altogether and call for a very extended development of the faculties in us which respond to poetic values through intuition and rhythm-feeling. Large ambiguities, therefore, arise in the mind, especially the European. But, on the other hand, from
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the standpoint of intrinsic character we may say that overhead poetry is the least exposed to the Yeatsian accusation, since in it the supra-logical seeing is mated with an expression springing from the very planes on which that seeing is inherent in consciousness. The expression is organic to the sight and consequently carries an authentic and convincing power. If the word and the rhythm are from elsewhere, there is for the reader either a medley that floats unconvincingly on the mind's surface or a spaciousness that can be reflected only by blurring its infinite contents. The many-sided nature of the Divine becomes "confused", the essential unity "thin": in short, both turn "vague". No matter how much we yield to the poetry through intuition and rhythm-feeling, the supra-logical will never quite achieve in non-overhead language the needed degree of directness, of substantial and detailed presence. We may get complete intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure - the meaning may stand out clear and the beauty may be vital and absolute; yet neither the meaning nor the beauty may do justice to what we cognise as pressing for poetic manifestation. The suggestive aura round the significant phrase and round the aesthetic form will not be dense and tense enough with the sheer Godhead.
Even the inspiration from the occult and the psychic is, in comparison to the overhead speech, attenuated in its suggestive aura. It has not the God-grip and the God-sweep of Savitri's accent. To get that accent, however, is no facile task. A poet who has not himself reached the overhead planes can be occasionally a vehicle for their messages, but only if he lets nothing of his ordinary mind interfere. And in his case the ordinary mind must be understood to comprise not merely what has to be kept in abeyance in the writing of all genuine poetry; to get overhead inspiration we must regard as the ordinary mind the whole poetic urge too of the planes that are usually tapped. One who aspires after the speech of Savitri must be on guard against the very best he can achieve from another psychological level, unless of course that level
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has to be brought in for a special purpose like giving the reader an easy hold on an idea before lifting him into the spiritual reality to which the idea is a pointer. Where no such aim is present the natural tendency to create poetry from a more accessible plane must be closely watched. Look at the line:
Concealed because too brilliant for our eyes.
It occurs in an earlier draft of Savitri and is quite effective for expressing the excess of light which shuts out scrutiny. Stand it against the line Sri Aurobindo put in its place:
Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can bear.[p. 57]
Instead of the striking and clever point the first vision makes, we have a straight presentation of some high reality, the actual fact is before us without any explaining of its peculiar attribute, the attribute is concretely offered and an atmosphere of the spiritual brought up. The rhythm comes with a more inward thrill, a more intrinsically wide movement as if without the effort mental speech has to put forth for suggesting the ample and the majestic. Indeed it is the changed rhythm which, even more than the changed form of vision, produces the necessary directness - as can be proved by choosing a line in which the imagery can be kept intact and even the language unaltered in every word but only a small modification introduced in the rhythm and by that modification the living thrill transferred from spiritual to mental. This verse, for example, from Savitri -
The old adamantine vetoes stood no more -[p. 82]
loses the overhead wideness of sound and with it the overhead experience that is caught by the words, if we write:
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No more the old adamantine vetoes stood.
Apart from the undue emphasis "stood" gets by closing the line and occupying that final position divorced from "no more", the inner suggestion stops dead short with a staccato rhythm: the huge escape from ancient barriers lacks the profound spiritual thrill. Losing that thrill, the line drops in the directness which is born of the vision being coupled with the word-rhythm natural to the plane where the vision originates.
The coupling of the overhead vision with the overhead word-rhythm is the achievement par excellence of Sri Aurobindo. The former is rare enough, but at times it does occur in other mystical poets. There are a few snatches in Yeats, many in A.E., for Yeats, for all his attraction towards the unseen world, had no strong eye for the supremely spiritual. A.E. had a far closer acquaintance with it, yet he too did not go beyond the heart's lyrical God-drunkenness, the glamour of the Celtic mid-worlds and the mind's first few entranced steps above philosophy into direct touch on the Spirit. Though the Upanishads cast their light on him, the overhead accent visited him at scattered moments only and then also, as a rule, in a weakened form. The line –
And by their silence men adore the lovely silence
where He dwells–
has something of it, tuned with extreme liquid beauty to a more delicate, more loosened note than is proper to the overhead. A greater intensity is in
White for Thy whiteness all desires burn,
yet the rhythm and the vision do not hail from much above the eye and ear of spiritualised thought. Some tone of the overhead at its intuitive pitch is:
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Like winds and waters were her ways.
They heed not immemorial cries;
They move to their high destinies
Beyond the little voice that prays.
What A.E. lacks on the whole in dealing with the ultra-mental afflatus is fullness of rhythm - his genuine seizures of it are often thin in sound-stuff and hence unable to drive home its varied cosmicity, so to speak. This is not to deny his poetic merit on planes where he can seize word and vision at once, nor his value as a mystical messenger. That he is not a frequent assured dweller on the Aurobindonian levels detracts nothing from his status as the most spiritual of English singers, the first among them to be a Yogi in the oriental sense.
Even in an oriental poet like Tagore the overhead language-stir is mostly absent. Tagore is the ideal psalmist of the emotions - emotions not feverishly uncontrolled and rendered a confusing flame as in so many devotee-poets of the West but harmoniously psychicised and tinged by the superb serenity which enters into all Indian mysticism - the calm shadow of the overhead. The overhead, however, is an undifferentiated influence in him, far and faint, never intimately known. It may be argued that after all his Gitanjali is prose-poetry and is thus prevented from the absolute overhead ring. But, though not so clearly as in poetry proper, that ring can still make prose its medium. Two of the most c1 early overhead strains from the Upanishads retain something of their characteristic rhythm in Sri Aurobindo's translations in prose. Listen to this suggestion of the transcendental supra-cosmic Divine: "There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind. There these lightnings 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." Now hear what Yeats offers in his collaboration with Purohit Swami: "Neither sun, moon, star, neither fire nor lightning lights
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Him. When He shines, everything begins to shine. Everything in the world reflects His light." Evidently the attempt is to imitate the pithiness of the Upanishadic utterance, but where is the sonority accompanying the pithiness in Sanskrit, the sound subtly conveying the colossal Presence underlying the apparent concentrated points like the huge hidden bulk of an iceberg below the crystalline taperings that show above the sea's surface? Besides, Sanskrit is more naturally polysyllabic than English and the pithy statement in it does not appear bare and clipped. To make the English version equally polysyllabic would be to risk bombast; the same holds in translations from Greek and Latin. To compensate for the missing majesty a certain sweep of word and volume of sound have to be achieved by a special skill in phrase-formation and sentence-construction. Yeats is devoid of the true Upanishadic resonance as well as intonation in his rendering also of the stanza about the cosmic Divine: "Spirit is everywhere, upon the right, upon the left, above, below, behind, in front. What is the world but Spirit?" How poor in comparison to the Aurobindonian vividness and vibrancy: "The Eternal is before us and the Eternal is behind us and to the south and to the north of us and above and below and extended everywhere. All this magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal." As prose-poetry it rises head and shoulders over the Yeats-Purohit team-work; but its most choice quality is the overhead breath - a quality which we might expect from an Indian like Tagore in the mystical prose-poetry of Gitanjali. Tagore, however, gets the overhead afflatus to a recognisable degree no more than once - in a semi-reminiscence of the Upanishad's verse about the Transcendental. As he originally wrote them, the words run: "There, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." Yeats, in the Oxford Book of English Poetry edited by him, touched up the Tagorean sentences: "Where thine infinite
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sky spreadeth for the soul to take her flight, a stainless white radiance reigneth; wherein is neither day nor night, nor form nor colour, nor ever any word." Perhaps the Yeatsian tightening and connectivity add to the overhead intonation; the Irish poet's greater intimacy with the poetic potentialities of English seems to help out better the accent which the Indian has acquired.
The poetry written by Harindranath Chattopadhyaya before he turned Marxist and started versifying proletarian slogans is haunted by the Unknown as puissantly as anything composed by Tagore. His lyrics are a colourful subtlety that lays keen fingers on truths of the inner life, yet instead of plucking the word native to those truths the fingers bring back a creative impress for handling spiritually the speech of ideas and feelings in our normal mind and heart. Except in rare pieces there is very little of the Upanishadic inspiration. The Shelleyan "white radiance" of which Tagore gave an Indian avatar in the passage quoted from Gitanjali becomes in Chattopadhyaya:
...the naked everlastingness
That nor by pleasure nor by pain is stirred,
Being a hush that bears no human word
Nor deed nor dream nor passion as a burden.
Deeply inspired are these lines, a true echo by the poetic mind to the overhead harmonies. As poetry they are faultless; as word-rhythm capturing mystical vision, they come close to the overhead stuff Chattopadhyaya is handling but do not arise from it - as does, for instance, Sri Aurobindo's description of the Yogic self-release of Savitri's father, Aswapathy, into the spiritual ether by breaking "the intellect's hard and lustrous lid":
The toiling thinker widened and grew still,
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:
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His soul could sail beyond thought's luminous bar;
Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last shimer 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, [pp. 33-34]
Speech and sound are sovereignly adequate to the concrete vision of the mystical altitudes. Not echoes but actual voices are reproduced. The emotional seeker and the philosophical seer are both transfigured, raised towards a mighty moving God-realisation and the profound actuality of the experience conveyed in an accent leaping from its core. In the last three lines the Mantra is heard - and a remarkable technique of labials, sibilants, liquids, nasals and long vowels create, at once hauntingly and lullingly, wideningly and envelopingly, the impression of a single-mooded unthinkable infinitude of silence. But this technique succeeds because of a special inner rhythm, and it succeeds in a manner which is different from that of any similar outer technique normally possible to Chattopadhyaya. He too can surely bring about fitting effects of vowel and consonant and fill them with inspiration. What is typical here is that the inspiration carrying such effects is received by Sri Aurobindo by breaking completely the "lustrous lid" which divides the overhead from the ranges whence poetry usually springs.
The breaking of the "lustrous lid" is a very real spiritual experience. The Upanishads speak of the face of Truth having a golden cover which has to be removed. This cover is composed of the concepts and percepts through which we ordinarily turn our sight towards the Divine. Our concepts and percepts are indeed means of knowledge, rays of Truth, but indirect ones: they acquaint us with the appearance of the Divine, not with the reality of Him; they constitute a brilliant formation like a shield or a lid which falls over the Divine's
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reality. The formation is not easy to break through: it is "hard" as well as "lustrous" and obstructs a new poise as if there were a mental skull corresponding to the physical. Influences of the Truth-Sun can percolate into the mind and produce now and then a perfect result if the poet trains himself to be sensitive to them. But a sustained stream of light can arrive only if the poet practises that self-training in a deliberate integral way. Yoga is the desideratum - and an important part of Yoga for the poet of the Spirit is a tuning-up to the overhead speech by constantly revolving within his consciousness the Mantra and its approximations. Even for the non-poet the Mantra and its approximations are a potent means for evolving man into superman: they are the Infinite and the Eternal in one of the most veilless forms of manifestation possible. Therefore, a gift to the world precious in the last degree is Savitri. It is also a gift appropriate in the extreme to the position of the giver himself. Philosophical statement lending logical plausibility to facts of the Spirit is necessary in a time like ours when the intellect is acutely in the forefront and Sri Aurobindo has answered the need by writing that expository masterpiece, The Life Divine. There too it is not the bare intellect chopping logic: a greater faculty executes deft and many-aspected designs of argumentation and through them appeals to some intuitive intelligence behind the seat of analytic and synthetic judgment. But since the method of logic is accepted, the language of abstract speculation is used as a framework; this, though serving to hold the attention of the intellectuality of our day, lessens the impact of the living Reality that is far removed from abstract speculation, be it ever so magnificent and cogent. To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the furthest bounds of speech - such a task is incumbent on one who stands as the maker of a new spiritual epoch. Without it he would not establish on earth in a fully effective shape the influence brought by him. All evolutionary influences, in order to become dynamic in toto, must assume
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poetic shape as a correlate to the actual living out of them in personal consciousness and conduct. In that shape they can reach man's inner being persistently and ubiquitously over and above doing so with a luminous and vibrant suggestiveness unrivalled by any other mode of literature or art. But scattered and short pieces of poetry cannot build the sustained and organised Weltanschauung required for putting a permanent stamp upon the times. Nothing except an epic or a drama can, moving as they do across a wide field and coming charged with inventive vitality, with interplay of characters and events. Nor can an epic which teems with ultra-mental realisations be wholly adequate to its aim if it does not embody these realisations in ultra-mental word and rhythm. Hence Savitri is from every angle the right correlate to the practical drive towards earth-transformation by India's mightiest Master of spirituality in his Ashram at Pondicherry. Next to his own personal working as Guru on disciples offering themselves for a global remoulding of their lives, this poem that is at once legend and symbol will be the chief formateur of the Aurobindonian Age. Out of its projected fifty thousand lines, about twelve thousand only are said to be ready yet in final version, but even that number is enough to give it a central place, for the whole length of Paradise Lost is exceeded and in no other art-creation so continually and cumulatively has inspiration, the lightning-footed goddess, "a sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops", disclosed the Divine's truth and beauty:
Even were caught as through a cunning veil
The smile of love that sanctions the long game,
The calm indulgence and maternal breasts
Of Wisdom suckling the child-laughter of Chance,
Silence, the nurse of the Almighty's power,
The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word,
And of the Timeless the still brooding face,
And the creative eye of Eternity...
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In darkness' core she dug out wells of light,
On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,
Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts,
And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths
Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought
Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.[p. 41]
(The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, 1974, pp. 102-41)
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The first canto of the greatest epic since Paradise Lost has at last seen the light! Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol makes its entry on the world-stage in the first eleven pages of Sri Aurobindo Mandir Annual published from Calcutta on August 15. With the rare depth and magnificence of this poem of Sri Aurobindo's I have already dealt in a special essay in the Second Annual (recently reviewed in the All-India Weekly) of the Sri Aurobindo Circle of Bombay.1 Savitri marks a new age of mystical poetry, and all lovers of literature as well as mysticism will await with wonder-lit eyes further instalments of it.
The first canto is accompanied by a series of excerpts from letters written by Sri Aurobindo about certain characteristics of mystical verse in general and of the particular kind with which he himself is occupied. These excerpts are at once profound, suggestive and acute, and the concluding fourteen pages which explain the workings, especially on the poetic path, of a Consciousness far beyond the mind are a piece of "metaphysical psychology" and literary criticism which is supremely inspired. It would be foolhardy for me to discuss this part in a short causerie. But I may jot down some of my own opinions as regards a few of the other matters treated here.
One point concerns repetition of words in poetry. There are critics who are over-fastidious, who insist on a continual
1 [This refers to the article on the previous pages.]
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novelty and think it a deplorable defection of genius for a poet to bring in any word again which has already been used close-by. Thus, Coleridge looks at those phrases in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra–
Her gentle women, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes,
And made their bends adornings: at the helm
A seeming mermaid steers–
and noting the occurrence of "mermaids" and "mermaid" with no more than a line and a half between, remarks on "mermaids": "I strongly suspect Shakespeare wrote either 'sea-queens' or rather 'sea-brides' ". Alternatively he suggests "submarine graces". Well, I for one strongly suspect that Coleridge's judgment, when he wrote this, was a little misted by his unfortunate addiction to laudanum. The repetition aids the atmosphere, renders the picture of strangeness and luxury more keen, direct, insistent: to knock out "mermaids" would be to weaken the fabulous appeal.
One cannot make a cut-and-dried rule about word-repetition. Even if no aim is perceived, one need not always be strict. In my view, much depends on the character of a poem. If it is a leap at top speed from thought to thought, image to image, feeling to feeling in a series of loosely developing coruscations, one hardly notices the minute details of language. In Shelley repetitions of words happen in an easy natural quickly flowering manner which does not clash with the general ease and naturalness and swift efflorescence of his verse: on the contrary, it often adds to its peculiar charm. The same applies to Harindranath Chattopadhyaya at his best. It applies a good deal to Swinburne also, but at Swinburne's best the repetition is not always unconscious: he is frequently a deliberate artist in sound, a maestro in orchestration, and echoes are developed into almost an art within an art and we at once grasp the complex beautiful ends they serve. There
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are other styles too where word-recurrences do not glare out as faults. For one instance, the bare and simple, almost colloquial "artless" style of certain ballads and lyrics. For another, the rapid palpitating metaphor-gorged multiform Shakespearian splendour. Where, however, the poetry is the work of a more brooding inspiration, packed with cunningly drawn-out substance and moulded with passionate precision, bearing everywhere the trace of "the chaos-ending chisel-smite", then each phrase is a unit that draws attention, each word stands by itself even while forming an organic part in the whole harmony. In such work the grounds for repetition should always become clear and take a definite shape in the reader's mind with regard to the meaning, just as the whole poem cuts a more marked and significant shape than the other types. If those grounds are not perceived, we become conscious of a flaw, a sort of oversight by the poet: there is little room here for innocent recurrences or merely euphonious reiterations: they would be out of tune with the general temper and manner. Of course, deliberate significant effects by means of repetition are not confined to poems broodingly created. They can find a place in every sort of poetry; so also can those that form a leitmotif, a key helping the mind to keep open to the main theme, like the word Ritam (Truth) in many Vedic hymns. What I object to is the unpurposive recurrence in a text of carefully intense poetry - unpurposive in that it does not come with a luminous point, as it should, where everything is close-knit and all the parts seem to call out to be considered in detailed relation to one another. I object as well to a too near-by echo in verse that flows with easy celerity or flashes along with many-mooded energy, when this echo could have been avoided without much difficulty but is let be because of slipshodness. At the same time, I do not deny that on occasion it is preferable to repeat a word, no matter if with a small interval: a synonym may not be as alive with meaning. I make no fetish of simply avoiding any repetition: sensitive weighing of the particular occasion,
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sensitive perception of the general harmony, sensitive insight into the individual nature of a poet's creative afflatus must be our guides. I agree with Sri Aurobindo that we must not blindly kowtow to the rigid ban put up by "a certain kind of intellectual elegance" or "a refined and classical taste" born of the decorous intelligence and ministering to the "cultured entertainment and amusement of the highly civilised mind".
Coming to another matter, what Sri Aurobindo says about the usual criticism levelled at both philosophical and mystical poetry appears to be admirable. Sensation and emotion need not keep thought out of poetry, as some romanticists, surrealists and "pure-poetry"-mongers urge. Thought has its own rights, and for a certain completeness and comprehensiveness of expression it is most necessary, provided of course no abstractness makes it dry and heavy and its terms a technical jargon unsupported by any living truth of vision or experience. Also, the mystic is perfectly justified in treating of things which may seem abstract to the ordinary man but are most concrete to himself through his unusual range of vision and experience, provided again he takes care to carry over into his poetry their concreteness. There are places in Savitri where the common reader is likely to cry "Philosophical Abstraction" or "Metaphysical Unreality", but I would say "More palpable than matter, more tangible than flesh"; for a subtilising of the senses and an inner intuition can arrive at the concreteness and actuality of what is described. One line, however, in the first canto of Savitri I am not quite confident about: it speaks of a vague stirring in the primordial darkness from which our world has evolved: it says that some nameless buried discontent
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.[p. 2]
The words "teased" and "wake" are vivid, the terms "Inconscient" and "Ignorance" are not utterly devoid of self-explanation; they do hint a difference which can in general
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be felt to justify their being contraposed and there is no bad taste in speaking of the Inconscient being teased or Ignorance being wakened, since to spiritual experience they are concrete realities. Absolutely dry and abstract the line is not; and yet in its suggestive pregnancy I miss the full poetic turn that everywhere else carries Sri Aurobindo triumphantly through "strange seas of thought". Not that I want a bringing out of the entire philosophical content of the word "Inconscient" or the Vedantic idea of the Ignorance as the power behind the manifested world. All that I wish to say is that the line lacks somewhat the direct symbol drive or self-illuminative energy we meet in other verses from Savitri like Opponent of that glory of escape,
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail
Lashing a slumberous Infinite by its force
Into the deep obscurities of form[p. 79]
And the blind Void struggles to feel and see - [p. 22]
verses with a similar drift of the Inconscient teased into a waking of Ignorance. Perhaps just a line more, carrying a few deft touches by the mystic seer and artist, would give the playing of the two terms against each other the subtle exegesis or the occult animation by which the least soupcon would be removed of abstract and technical jargon?
A third matter finely expounded by Sri Aurobindo is the freedom we must have from what may be designated the Johnsonian critical method if we are properly to appreciate the essence of mystical and spiritual poetry. This method expects a precise logical order in thoughts and language, jibs at all that is not sober and restrained, anathematises all association of contraries, excess or abruptness or crowding of images, disregard of intellectual limitations, departures
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in technique from established canons. Sri Aurobindo shows how it would stumble over the Veda. Even with poetry not markedly mystical it hopelessly flounders. "What would the Johnsonian critic say," asks Sri Aurobindo, "to Shakespeare's famous lines:
Or take up arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them...?
He would say, 'What a mixture of metaphors and jumble of ideas! Only a lunatic could take up arms against a sea! A sea of troubles is a too fanciful metaphor and, in any case, one can't end the sea by opposing it, it is more likely to end you.' " Sri Aurobindo defends Shakespeare and argues that Shakespeare knowingly accepted the mixture because it brought home, with an inspired force which a neater language could not have had, the exact feeling and idea that he wanted to bring out. The case is put very well indeed for romantic poetry and the liberty with images which it legitimately takes - to the complete discomfiture of the Johnsonian critic. I may add, however, that romanticism is not the only cause of Shakespeare's way with images. In romantic poetry itself there are two ways of using imagery - that of poets like Spenser, Milton and Tennyson and that of poets like Shakespeare and Donne. Donne differs from Shakespeare in several respects and is a much inferior and less harmonised poet on the whole and often he falls between two stools -the afflatus of the élan vital and the inspiration of the pure mind - but both these poets have a certain affinity in their treatment of language and metre, their manner of thinking out a theme, their attitude towards images. Imagery is with them functional, it is a means of thinking and feeling, they think and feel in a sensuous fashion. Their imagery is not something added to the thought and the emotion: the adding can be most beautifully and harmoniously done, but it will still remain more a pictorial and artistic value than a direct
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and native mode of intellectual significance and emotional suggestion. Shakespeare's images often run into one another because he is trying not always to present a coherent pictorial description but rather to give flashes of the aspects of his thought, the turns of his emotion. His similes and metaphors are less to be realised in their sensory properties than in their meaning and mood. The sensory properties remain a little hazy - not in their individual picturisation but in collective effect: hence mixed, fused, changing images. A recent writer, noting some of these points in Shakespeare, quoted the phrase:
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dressed yourself?
Such a phrase would be impossible to find in Spenser or Tennyson, it would be very rare in Milton for all his compact force.
As for a quick play of varying images in mystical poetry, there is a striking passage in the first canto of Savitri, where a symbolic picture of dawn is built up by one suggestion piled upon another. "An errant marvel with no place to live" is felt to be soliciting in the midst of "the night's forlorn indifference"; then comes "a slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal"; then "the persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch" is on "the inert black quietude"; then "a wandering hand of pale enchanted light" takes "a gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge"; then we have "one lucent corner windowing hidden things"; then
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak
From the reclining body of a god;[p. 3]
then a pallid rift is mentioned and the rift widens into a luminous gap; then all changes into "a brief perpetual sign", followed by an "iridescence" of the Unknown; then comes a
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blaze and Dawn builds a magnificent aura. Quite a race of rapid transitions is here - free from a strict logical chain. But it is worth observing that all the images, however different, have yet an underlying consistency: they all have a certain community of mystical atmosphere. The image that seems most at variance with the rest is the falling cloak; and if it had stood by itself it might have been a bit of an intrusion in even a context of swiftly altering figures; but it is made a perfect success by "the reclining body of a god". Just the suggestive mystical touch is brought which, though not introducing some sort of even distant affinity in the image as such to what goes before and comes after, provides it with the common basis the various other images have and thus renders it an organic part of the many-sided and many-shaped phenomenon described.
No doubt, the Johnsonian critic would fall foul of the passage despite the subtle single thread on which the beads of dissimilar cuts are strung, just as the opposite kind of critic would fail to see poetry where any philosophising shows its head. We have to avoid the mistakes of both and bring a receptiveness which while not accepting the rhythmless vagaries of ultra-modernism is yet plastic enough to answer the diverse demands of true inspiration. All the more plastic has it to be for taking the living impress of mystical and spiritual poetry, in especial when that poetry comes Aurobindonianly to create a new age.
(The Thinking Corner - Causeries on Life and Literature,
1996, pp. 130-37)
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SRI AUROBINDO - LETTERS ON SAVITRI:
EDITOR'S NOTE TO THE 1951 EDITION
Sri Aurobindo intended to write a long Introduction to Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol. Together with one Book out of the twelve of his epic - significantly enough the Book of Death - the eagerly awaited Introduction never got written. Nothing that anybody may pen, however acute, can replace it as an expository and illuminative document on the unusual poetic afflatus - unusual both in message and music - that blows through the twenty-five thousand and odd lines of this Legend of the past that is a Symbol of the future. But luckily we have a substantial number of letters by Sri Aurobindo on what can be called, if any one achievement by so vastly and variously creative a genius can lay claim to the title, his literary life-work. Out of these letters an introductory ensemble - necessarily in certain places more informal, personal, unreserved, focussed on details, quick-shifting, repetitive than a specially composed piece for the public would be -has been made with the object of throwing, in the poet's own valuable words, some light on the poem's conception and development and on its qualities of inspiration, vision and technique.1
1 Some of the more general letters —whole or in part— have already appeared in "Letters of Sri Aurobindo" (Third Series). (Now 'Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art".) But as they are linked up with the kind of poetry that Savitri is and as they were actually written with direct or indirect reference to this poem, their most significant place is in the same setting as those treating
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It will perhaps be of interest to touch upon the origin of the series of notes that have been compiled and presented here. No sooner did I commence my contact with Sri Aurobindo in 1927 than I found the air of his Ashram humming with rich rumours of the masterpiece that had been in progress ever since his days in Baroda. Having always had a passion for poetry and having myself tried to catch a spark of the celestial fire, I was extremely thrilled and longed to set eyes on this most significant work of his which he was repeatedly recasting to make it accord with the ever higher ascension of his own consciousness in Yoga. But Sri Aurobindo was in no hurry to show it before it reached the intensest spiritual perfection. It was I, on the contrary, who kept showing him my own little efforts at expressing the few strange glimmers of beauty and truth that at times my discipleship under so gracious a spiritual and literary guru brought me. On one such occasion, to illustrate some point, he sent back with his helpful comments two lines describing "the Ray from the transcendent penetrating through the mind's passive neutral reflection of the supreme quietude of the silent Brahman." They ran:
Piercing the limitless unknowable,
Breaking the vacancy and voiceless peace.
of particular points. Among the latter, one or two short entries are included nor so much because they illustrate anything in rhe poem as because they have either a flavour of personality or some other psychological bearing. The letters have been divided into sections, each section determined mostly by similarity of theme in its contents or by their broad subsumableness under a common head. The order of the sections—and sometimes also that of their contents—is dictated by two considerations. One is semi-logical sequence; the other is textual reference—thar is, passages that allude to something in other passages have to come later and certain remarks must he on later pages because, without this being so, their exact sense may not emerge.
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I was struck by the profound word-reverberations that reinforced the mystical word-suggestions with a tremendous immediacy of spiritual fact, I asked where the lines came from. The reply was: "Savitri."
I never forgot this first brief impact of the closely guarded secret. Even before it, Sri Aurobindo had tried to make me conscious of a certain element in poetry that hailed from what he called the Overhead planes, the hidden ranges of consciousness above the intellect, with their inherent light of knowledge and their natural experience of the infinite. He distinguished four planes: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. The last-named has been, according to him, the top reach of the dynamic side of man's spirituality so far: a transcendental poise of immutable Brahman or featureless Nirvana is the Beyond to it usually realised when in isolated cases there is a leap to the ultimate status of that infinite silence of self-liberation which can be attained on any plane of the cosmos by an inner withdrawal. The master dynamism of the Divine, the integral earth-transformative power which Sri Aurobindo designated as Supermind or Gnosis or Truth-Consciousness and which was his own outstanding personal realisation, rendering his Yoga a unique hope for the world, has lain unmanifest and mostly unseized and, until certain radical conditions are completely fulfilled, cannot find direct expression in life or literature. Even the expression of the Overmind with its massive and comprehensive yet intensely immediate vision - especially in the entire authenticity of its undertones and overtones of rhythm - is rare, as is also to a less degree that of the Higher Mind's broad connective clarity, the Illumined Mind's many-sided opulence of colourful insight, the Intuition's swift and close and all-seizing focus. What the ancients termed the mantra - the stuff of Divinity itself appearing to become revelatory scriptural word as in some parts of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita - is the clearest voice
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of the Overmind in its few past visitations on earth. Less openly, the Overmind is the chief presence in the world's greatest poetic phrases of various types. More and more Sri Aurobindo sought - by patiently criticising, appraising, distinguishing - to help me not only respond, in my appreciation of poetry, to the rising scale of the Overhead note but also bring some strain of it into my own verses. The quest of that note grew for me a dominant occupation and most I prayed for a touch of the Overmind.
One day, emboldened by his innumerable favours of tutorship, I made a singular request. I wrote:
I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me
an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure
Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's
Those thoughts that wander through eternity
or Wordsworth's
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone,
which has a brief burst of it, but something sustained and plenary. I want to steep my consciousness in its rhythm and its, revelation. It will be a most cherished possession. Please don't disappoint me by saying that, as no English writer has a passage of this kind, you cannot do anything for me.
He wrote back in his characteristic vein:
Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the only possible answer - at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find more intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are
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things yet to come - the "future poetry" perhaps, but not the past.
With the familiarity - almost the impudence - he permitted us, I replied:
I think the favour I asked was expressed in perfectly clear language. If no English poet has produced the passage I want, then who has done so in English? God alone knows. But who is capable of doing it? All of us know. Well, then why not be kind enough to grant this favour? If difficult metres could be illustrated on, demand, is it impossible to illustrate in a satisfying measure something so naturally Aurobindonian as the Overmind? I am not asking for hundreds of lines - even eight will more than do - all pure gold to be treasured for ever. So please... Perhaps it is possible only on Sunday - the day dedicated to golden Surya and rich for you with leisure from correspondence: I can wait answerless for twenty-four hours with a sweet samata.
The answer came the very next morning:
I have to say Good Heavens again. Because difficult metres can be illustrated on demand, which is a matter of metrical skill, how does it follow that one can produce poetry from any blessed plane on demand? It would be easier to furnish you with hundreds of lines already written out of which you could select for yourself anything Overmindish if it exists (which I doubt) rather than produce 8 lines of warranted Overmind manufacture to order. All I can do is to give you from time to time some lines from Savitri, on condition you keep them to yourself for the present. It may be a poor substitute for the Overmental, but if you like the sample, the opening lines, I can give you more hereafter - and occasionally better.
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And then with an "e.g." there followed in his own fine and sensitive yet forceful hand sixteen lines of the very first Canto of Savitri as it stood then:1
The huge unslumbering spirit of Night, alone
In the unlit temple of immensity,
Lay stretched immobile upon silence' marge,
Mute with the unplumbed prevision of her change.
The impassive skies were neutral, waste and still.
Then a faint hesitating glimmer broke.
A slow miraculous gesture dimly came,
The insistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
That glowed along the moment's fading brink
Below the quotation were the words: "There! Promise fulfilled for a wonder."
After a whole day's absorption in the absolute nectar, I sent him a note:
Like the sample? Rather! It is useless for me to attempt thanking you. The beauty of what you have sent may move one to utterance but the wideness takes one's breath away. I read the lines over and over again. I am somewhat stunned by the magnitude and memorableness of this day: I think your description of the divine dawn can very well apply to its spiritually
1 At present this prelude - slightly altered in phrase and with its opening and its close considerably separated - stands in a passage of 93 lines: Savitri, Vol. I, pp. 3-5 (pp. 1-3 in the 1993 edition).
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poetic importance for me. Perhaps you will laugh, but I had two strange feelings before writing this letter. I was reading your verses, when I had a mute sense of big tears in the heart and a conviction that having seen what I had seen I could not possibly remain a mere mortal! What do you say to my madness?
The day of days was October 25,1936. From then onwards, for months, Sri Aurobindo kept sending passages which I typed out and he touched up again or expanded. About the next passage I remarked:
It goes reverberating in depth upon depth of one's being. What I admire is that the burden of infinite suggestion is carried with such a flexible ease. There is no attempt - as in the poetry of us lesser fry - to make things specially striking or strange or new, but a simple largeness of gesture which most naturally makes one surprising revelation after another of beauty and power.
His comment - intended, no doubt, for only my eyes, for in his public pronouncements he rarely spoke about his own work without reserve - was:
Well, it is the difference of receiving from above and living in the ambience of the Above - whatever comes receives the breath of largeness which belongs to that plane.
Our correspondence went on and it continued, though with several long breaks, up to almost the end. It was a correspondence with many features. All the critical appreciation and understanding I was capable of I brought to Savitri and all that I could write in my own manner by way of Introduction to the poem was put into the last chapter of my book The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, about which Sri Aurobindo was both generous and modest enough to say:
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"it seems to me very fine both in style and substance, but as it is in high eulogy of my own writing, you must not expect me to say more." But while I could not help eulogising most of Savitri with whatever analytic and imaginative apparatus was at my disposal, I did not abstain from questioning a few things here and there. Nor did Sri Aurobindo either expect or desire me to abstain. The precise character and motive of this questioning have been indicated in a footnote in the body of the selection of replies by Sri Aurobindo which I have made from my file. And the amount of fault-finding was too little for me to be ashamed of, but even so I feel that occasionally I encroached with the play of the surface intelligence overmuch on Sri Aurobindo's meagre and precious spare time. On the other hand, without that little amount and without my pressing upon his notice some unfavourable comments by an academic friend outside the Aurobindonian circle, the chance would have been missed for ever of seeing the finest critic I have known pass elucidatory judgment on the greatest poem I have read - a poem written by the most enlightened Master of Yoga and the most patient as well as considerate Superman one could hope to have the privilege to serve.
(Sri Aurobindo - Letters on Savitri, 2000)
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SAVITRI: SOME GLIMPSES AND
REFLECTIONS1
On August 15, 1954, the eighty-second birthday of Sri Aurobindo, a most splendid offering to the Master was the one-volume edition brought out by the Ashram of his greatest poetic achievement - Savitri, a Legend and a Symbol - over which he had worked for, we may say, almost his lifetime. It is on record that Virgil devoted approximately ten years to his Aeneid, Dante sixteen intermittently and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his Faust, with long intervals, over nearly fifty years of crowded life. Sri Aurobindo's occupation with his masterpiece is comparable in time-span to Goethe's - and his too was a life variously crowded, at the beginning with political events, afterwards with mystical realisations and inner discoveries and partly with the writing of a dozen books philosophical or literary on a large scale. But it was not merely lack of spare time or even a desire to put the maximum of available life-experience into the poem, that made it cover fifty years or so. Unlike any of the other epic poets Sri Aurobindo
1 Part of this essay is taken up into 'The Poet of Integralism', first published in The Integral Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, A Commemorative Symposium, edited by Haridas Chaudhuri and Frederic Spiegelberg (George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1960) and afterwards included with some enlargement in the author's The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo (Mother India, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1968). [Originally published in Mother India, August 1954, p. 36].
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made recast after recast, not merely addition on addition - and it was rarely because the early versions wanted in pure poetic merit that he did this: his aim was primarily to lift the work to the highest and most comprehensive expression possible of spiritual realities within the scheme set up by him of character, incident and plot.
This aim and the artistic method employed for achieving it were to be explained in a long Introduction which he intended to write to the complete Savitri. Mostly, Savitri was meant to create in massive proportions the kind of poetry that, in his published literary criticisms, he used to designate as hailing from "Overhead" planes - the ranges of consciousness broadly envisaged by ancient Indian scriptures as lying hidden above the human and possessing an inherent light of knowledge and a natural experience of the infinite. He distinguished in general a progression of four levels as having found rare voice in the world's literature and art: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. A fifth and highest plane, which he named Supermind and whose realisation above on its own peaks and ultimate descent below into the physical being are the aim of his own "Integral Yoga", was regarded by him as not having directly manifested yet.
The absence cannot help being regretted of what would have been a unique expository and elucidative document on the unusual poetic afflatus - unusual in both message and music - that blows through the nearly twenty-four thousand lines of this Legend of the past that he has presented as a Symbol of the future. Luckily, however, we have a substantial number of letters by him on his epic. Out of them an informal commentary has been compiled and put after the text with the object of throwing in the poet's own precious words some light on the poem's conception and development and on its qualities of inspiration, vision, style and technique. This commentary, which is now longer by a further sheaf of letters than when first published separately and follows a scheme of
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grouping differing in several respects from the one adopted then, serves also to add to the description of the Overhead planes given by Sri Aurobindo in Savitri itself as well as in his philosophical work The Life Divine and to clarify certain aspects of their role in poetic creation. It etches memorably on our minds what the author calls the metaphysical psychology of the new art inspired by the extraordinary experiences and significances that have gone to the making of his poem and, in seeking affinities for this art, it ranges over a wide terrain of world-poetry and gives us vivid illustration, penetrating analysis, suggestive evocation - aesthetic sensitiveness, intellectual grasp and spiritual insight moving harmoniously together.
Of course the letters, extending over eighteen years and often touching on various subjects at a time or dealing with the same subject at different times, could not always be arranged chronologically and in a regular series to make a continuous exposition. They have been sorted into sections, each section determined mostly by similarity of theme in its contents or by their broad subsumableness under a common head. One section has been specially devoted to comments on individual lines, phrases and words given as far as possible in the order of their occurrence in the poem. The order of the sections as well as of their contents has been dictated in the main by the consideration of either logical or textual sequence.
A short Note prefacing the wonderful letters gives us some valuable information on the way the poem was actually composed and finished. Not the least interesting and meaningful part of this Note is the quotation of some of the very last lines dictated by Sri Aurobindo - lines which strike one as being pregnant with a foreknowledge of the end at a time when there were no physical pointers to it and with a symbolic prefiguring of the spiritual situation that on his departure from his own body would face his comrade and co-worker in the Integral Yoga - the Mother.
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Both in quality and quantity Savitri must be counted as remarkable even among the world's major achievements. With its 23,813 lines,1 it is the longest poem in the English language, beating The Ring and the Book of Browning with its 21,116 to the place of runner-up: in fact it is the longest in any European language old or new, with the exception of Nicos Kazantzakis's recently published Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, written originally in present-day Greek and running into 33,333 lines. Among epics which can be compared with it in general poetic quality, only the Shah-Nameh, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata exceed it in length - three works which, like it, are products of the East. And indeed Savitri stands with the masterpieces of Valmiki and Vyasa in more than one respect. It has been conceived with something of the ancient Indian temperament which not only rejoiced in massive structures but took all human life and human thought into the spacious scope of its poetic creations and blended the workings of the hidden worlds of Gods and Titans and Demons with the activities of earth. A cosmic sweep is Savitri's and Sri Aurobindo wanted his poem to be a many-sided multi-coloured carving out, in word-music, of the gigantic secrets of his "supramental Yoga".
With the Mahabharata it has a direct link too. For, it is based on a story, in that epic, of a victorious fight by love against death. Such a fight is a theme that haunted Sri Aurobindo from his very youth, as is proved by his early narrative Love and Death which is somewhat similar in outward intention as well as based on an episode in the same ancient Indian epos. That other narrative of his twenties - Urvasie - is also a variant of the identical theme, since, though there is no death in it, it poetises a triumphant struggle against the fate which
1 Now adjudged to be a few less because some have been recognised as being alternative versions whose more natural place would be in footnotes than in the text. - K.D.S. (1970) [23,837 in the 1993 Revised Edition.]
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circumscribes mundane life and snatches away the beloved. As we know, Savitri itself was first drafted quite early in Sri Aurobindo's poetic career and, in it, the recurrent theme takes a form that clearly shows it to be bound up with Sri Aurobindo's own work in the world. The poem's heroine grew in detailed depth with each of the nearly twelve recasts he made in order to lift the meaning and music ever higher until they should press everywhere towards what the old Rishis had called the mantra and arrive again and again at this speech that Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as one in which the vision, the word, the rhythm are born with an intense wideness and un fathomable massiveness from the Overmind. Here Savitri of the Mahabharata fighting the God of Death who had taken away her consort Satyavan became more and more an Avatar of the eternal Beauty and Love plunging into the trials of terrestrial life and seeking to overcome them not only in herself but also in the world she had embraced as her own: she was sworn to put an end to earth's ignorant estrangement from God - estrangement whose most physical symbol is Death, the bodily opposite of the luminous inherent immortality of the Divine. Her story constitutes now a poetic structure in which Sri Aurobindo houses his special search and discovery, his uttermost exploration of hidden worlds, his ascent into the top ranges of the Spirit, his bringing down of their power to divinise man's total nature. And the figure of Savitri suggests in general his own companion in the field of Yoga, the Mother, who had carried on the great task set by the Master.
The technique of Savitri is attuned to the scriptural conception at work. The iambic five-foot line of blank verse is adopted as the most apt and plastic for harmonies like those of the Vedas and the Upanishads. The blank verse, however, is given certain special characteristics affining it still further to them. It moves in a series of blocks formed by a changing distribution of correctly proportioned sentence-lengths. Scarcely any block breaks off in the middle of a line and each
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thus forms, in spite of linkage with the others, a kind of self-sufficient structure like a stanza, but in general no two such "stanzas" are equally long. The units also of each block tell markedly in their own individual mass and force of word and rhythm, though a concordant continuity is maintained in the sense. Enjambment, which was used to impetuous effect in Urvasie and Love and Death, is not altogether avoided, yet end-stopping is the rule as serving better the graver more contained movement demanded by the scriptural mood.
Savitri begins with a picture of darkness passing into day. This transitionalhour has a particular appeal for Sri Aurobindo: several of his poems, short as well as long, are a-quiver with auroral suggestions. Among contemporary poets, we may point to Valéry as also responding very sensitively to the dawn-moment, but the glimmering obscurities of La Jeune Parque or the elusive lucidities of some other poems of his are "a sunrise upon ideas", as Thibaudet puts it, which, though penetrating, have little of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual evocativeness, least of all the largeness of it that is in Savitri.
In Savitri the passage of darkness into day is the last dawn in Satyavan's life, a dawn packed with the significance of the immortal light which Savitri has to win for earth by challenging the age-old decree of death. "The huge foreboding mind of Night" is first figured with a fathomless effectivity:
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite...[p. 1]
But
A long lone line of hesitating hue[p. 2]
troubles at last the depths of the darkness in which consciousness seems sepulchred and we have poetry of an intense visionary loveliness:
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Then the "pallid rift" widens and "the revelation and the flame" pour out - the poetry richly reflecting them:
Almost the epiphany appears to be disclosed, the goal of all our mortal gropings, and two lines at once simple and subtle in their sovereign spiritual suggestion afford us a glimpse of it:
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven.[p. 4]
Only a little the God-light can stay[p. 5]
and the intensity of the wonderful Presence fades into accustomed sunshine.
In the soul of Savitri, however, the sense of her mission never disappears. Hedged in though she is by mortality, her life's movement keeps the measure of the Gods. Painting her being and its human-divine beauty Sri Aurobindo achieves some of his supreme effects. Perhaps his grandest capture of the mantra are the nine verses which form the centre of a long
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passage, variously mantric, in which Savitri's avatarhood is characterised:
Or golden temple door to things beyond.[p. 15]
A hieratic poetry, demanding a keen sense of the occult and spiritual to compass both its subjective and objective values, is in this audacious and multi-dimensioned picture of a highly Yogic state of embodied being. Not all might respond to it and Sri Aurobindo knew that such moments in Savitri would have to wait long for general appreciation. But he could not be loyal to his mission without giving wide scope to the occult and spiritual and seeking to poetise them as much as possible with the vision and rhythm proper to the summits of reality. Of course, that vision and that rhythm are not restricted to the posture and contour of the summits, either the domains of divine dynamism or
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone [pp. 33-34]
or the mid-worlds, obscure or luminous, fearsome or marvellous, of which Savitri's father, King Aswapathy, carries out a long exploration which is one of the finest and most fascinating parts of the poem. They extend to the earth-drama too and set living amongst us the mysteries
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and travails of cosmic evolution, like that dreadful commerce of Savitri with one to whom Sri Aurobindo gives no name:
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.
Who chooses in this holocaust of the soul
Death, fall and sorrow as the spirit's goads,
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss, [p. -17]
Savitri would hardly be the unique poem that it is if it did not try to bring home to us the Unknown as it is in itself. However, it is a poem of many layers and no mean part of its excellence lies in its deploying its imponderables of sight and sound and remaining intensely spiritual even when its innumerable ranges and changes are not ostensibly concerned with spirituality. It is Legend as well as Symbol, a story with many scenes and levels of development at the same time that it is instinct with a mystical light. That light itself plays over many regions and does not fail to cover most aspects of world-thought. It is therefore not possible for it to confine itself straightforwardly to mystical substance. What it must do in order to be, despite its complex plan, a direct poetising of the Divine is to sustain everywhere the Overhead afflatus with the help principally of the sound-thrill shaking up hidden tracts of our being even while the outer attention is engaged with apparently non-mystical subjects. Thus a direct poetising of the Divine is achieved without a rejection of human interest or of the teeming motives and currents of man's mind.
A few quotations will indicate the variety of matter as well as of style, that is yet infused with the typical Aurobindonian quality. Glimpses of Nature's moods come again and again, exquisitely evocative as in
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The colonnade's dream grey in the quiet eve,
The slow moonrise gliding in front of night, [p. 466]
or with a powerful haunting suggestion as in that transference into English of a phrase of Vyasa's:
some lone tremendous wood
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry. [p. 385]
Glimpses of the human situation mix often with those of natural objects as in that simile cosmically sublime in its sweep:
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone. [p. 460]
The inner strength of the great is also brought vividly home in that gesture of Savitri when, confronting Death's subtle arguments and refusing to employ the frail artifices of Reason, which are vain because always open to doubt, she chooses to match all fate with the nude dynamism of her heart and soul in a terrific line which we may term, in a phraseology popular today, super-existentialist:
I am, I love, 1 see, I act, I will.[p. 594]
Here is an expression deriving its force and resolution from deeper layers of being than the famous close in Tennyson's poem about Ulysses and his comrades:
Made weak by fate and time, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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Those deeper layers render Sri Aurobindo's line more effective art also than Shelley's memorable words put into the mouth of Rousseau's ghost in his Triumph of Life:
Before thy memory,
I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died.
The insufficiency of the mere Reason as compared either to the inner soul's moved perception or to the puissant supra-intellectual sight is pictured with an inspired conceit the Elizabethans or the Metaphysicals would have welcomed with a whoop:
A million faces wears her knowledge here
And every face is turbaned with a doubt.[p. 251]
As unexpectedly striking and happy, though in a different key of inspiration, is the simile applied to the truth-direct ways of the higher harmonies of consciousness to which Savitri's father Aswapathy climbed:
There was no gulf between the thought and fact;
Ever they replied like bird to calling bird...[p. 327]
The felicity and the novelty that are prominent features of Sri Aurobindo's style in Savitri come at times in weirdly surprising figurations, as when Aswapathy passes through an occult infernal region:
A dragon power of reptile energies
And strange epiphanies of grovelling Force
And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire
Drew adoration to a gleam of slime.[p. 213]
Here the surprising has a complex character shot with imagery. It can have a complexity without being imaged, yet
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with the same living vibrancy. An example is the suggestion of a sacred secrecy within us:
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown, [p. 522] The surprising can be in Sri Aurobindo's hands the most simple also, with but a minimum of image-glimmer. Perfect in their noble finality as in the hands of a Dante are the instances:
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell... [p. 227]
His failure is not failure whom God leads...[p. 339]
Our life's repose is in the Infinite...[p. 197]
A certain type of effect, however, occurs often in Savitri, which escapes all comparison. One facet of it is that epigrammatic flash:
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven... [p. 52]
This line is not only the pure Overhead style: it is also a sheer depth of Yogic insight conveyed with concentrated richness and audacity - the unique Aurobindonian effect. Less densely shaped yet with a body as bold and brilliant is the vision developed by the Yogi's eye in the phrases:
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.[pp. 654-55]
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A single sentence can be made by Sri Aurobindo the Yogi to sum up the whole Angst of the idealist whose feeling of the supramundane is confronted not only by the world's enigmatic opposites lit up in the above lines but also by the impersonal indifference under which the Numinous appears to a certain philosophic mood:
An awful Silence watches tragic Time.[p. 444]
Or look at the Overhead verbal alchemisation for the state which in the language of the poetic intelligence Sri Aurobin.do at one place in Savitri puts thus:
My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer -[p. 408]
and which, with the same language lifted closer to that of rapturous seerhood, he phrases elsewhere in the epic:
Splendours of insight filled the blanks of thought, [p. 37]
In the Overhead style at a high pitch and in the unique Aurobindonian tone we have:
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient...[p. 48]
And, when the spiritual profundity has been realised, the entire knowledge-process is shown, in the same style, as altered:
Idea rotated symphonies of sight,
Sight was a flame-throw from identity...[p, 301]
And here, in a similar manner though with a more outward turn, is the dynamic reason of the change and of the possibilities of world-divinisation, the concrete movement
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of the Yogic seeker undaunted by the world's doubts or denials:
I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.[p. 614]
Something of this penetrating insight, at once mystical and clear-cut, comes into play at rare moments in Iqbal, flashing up his religious and philosophical passion, as in those vehement verses Englished by A.G. Arberry where the poet exemplifies the knowledge which Sufi love gives him of the world's kinship with his being:
I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky,
And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.
But this is more related to the adventurously imaginative style of Francis Thompson and we feel that for all its magnificence the knowledge is not directly Yogic. A similar impression we get vis-à-vis Tagore's lyrical soars, high and intense though they are, as in the lines of a somewhat Overhead breath he has translated thus into English prose-poetry: "There, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day or night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." An affinity with Shelley in his less aching moments is here, an instinctive sense of the Spirit's ether and a moved felicity of articulation. Sri Aurobindo comes also at times recognisably with turns that have been admirably practised by the Thompsons and Iqbals, the Shelleys and Tagores of man's aspiration; but every now and then come effects of the direct Yogi, tranquilly amazing, as in
There looked out from the shadow of the Unknown
The bodiless Namelessness that saw God born
And tries to gain from the mortal's mind and soul
A deathless body and a divine name -[p. 40]
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or amazing with a graphic boldness, as in the disclosure suffered by "the occult Force...guardian of the earth-scene's Beyond":
Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences
Flamed in transparencies of crowded light.[p. 88]
Yes, Savitri is full of diverse excellences woven together. And it does not reject any strand of life, it includes and absorbs every theme of import in man's evolution towards deity. Ancient motifs and motifs of our own day are equally caught up. Even modern totalitarianism is seized in its essence in the occult figure of it that from demoniac planes behind earth precipitates amongst us the Hitlerite power and propaganda:
A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue;
Its hard and shameless clamour filling space
And threatening all who dared to listen to truth
Claimed the monopoly of the battered ear;
A deafened acquiescence gave its vote,
And braggart dogmas shouted in the night
Kept for the fallen soul once deemed a god
The pride of its abysmal absolute.[p. 216]
Even the new physics that has replaced the classical concepts in which "all was precise, rigid, indubitable" enters the poetry:
Once more the world was made a wonder-web,
A magic's process in a magical space,
An unintelligible miracle's depths
Whose source is lost in the Ineffable....
A quantum dance remained, a sprawl of chance
In Energy's stupendous tripping whirl:...
The rare-point sparse substratum Universe
On which floats a solid world's phenomenal face.
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Alone a process of events was there
And Nature's plastic and protean change
And, strong by death to slay or to create,
The riven invisible atom's omnipotent force. [pp. 254-55]
But here too the accent is recognisably Aurobindonian. The Overhead breath flows everywhere and in the last line we have its art at top pitch. The craftsmanship of that line is superb, with its dense humming sound dextrously mixed with other expressive vibrations, and all moving in a metre packing fourteen syllables and a predominantly anapaestic run into a scheme of five strong stresses which are helped by massed consonants in several places to beat out clearly as well as to contain the overflowing music. The four "i"s and the four "o"s suggest at once penetration and expansion, the latter as if from an all-round fastness. The "v" in "riven", pronounced as it is with the upper teeth touching the lower lip, aids the sense of cutting that is in the word, while the "v" in "invisible" not only supports and increases the cutting suggestion but also hints by occurring in that particular word and in the midst of several syllables successively short in quantity the marvellous carrying of the power of fission into the mystery of the infinitesimal that constitutes the unseen atomic nucleus. Then there are the two "m"s with their movements of lip-closure corresponding to the closed secrecy that is being spoken of and they are preceded and followed by the labials "b" and "p" respectively which correspond to the initial motive of breaking open the closed secrecy and to the final accomplishment of that explosion. The hard strokes of the three "t"s mingle a further nuance of breaking. The "f" of "force" picks up again the fission-power of the "v"s and completes it with its own acute out-loosening sound accompanied by the somewhat rolled sibilance at the end. The sibilance itself, giving clear body to the softer sound of the pair of "s"s earlier in the line,
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achieves the idea of a full escape of the power that was so far not sweeping out of the charmed circle, as it were, of the atom's vibrant energy.
Indeed, the craftsmanship of the line is superb, but its success is different from what most poets might have attained, for it is due to the choice and collocation of particular words so as to create a particular rhythm embodying the vision-thrill of an Overhead consciousness. A Homer could be grandly resonant, a Milton make majestic thunder, a Shakespeare deploy a crowded colourful strength, and all be perfect poets thereby, but they could not charge their utterances, except in rare self-exceeding moments, with that vision-thrill, for the simple reason that the psychological levels on which they were accustomed to draw inspiration were specifically neither Overhead nor even orientated towards Yoga. And least of all without being a Yogi in a direct sense and having easy access to the planes above the mind would a poet, however great, be able to infuse into a verse about atomic energy or about some other apparently non-mystical subject the very enthousiasmos of the mantra.
However, it is in the frequently mantric expression of reality's occult dimensions rather than of familiar or terrestrial objects that the major virtue of Savitri resides. For mainly by that expression, endowing with concrete intimacy what is usually a remote Wonder, it seizes our minds with the ideal of the spiritual Superman that we have to become through inward growth into and outward manifestation of the unexplored intensities and magnitudes of our subliminal and supraliminal being. Only, we must remember that no narrowly esoteric aim animates this poetry. The intensities and magnitudes of the Unknown that are expressed are not meant to be mysteries to which a mere handful can have the key. Although they may not be immediately comprehended by the major bulk of readers, they are voiced with a luminous faithfulness, not with a recondite or recherché ambiguity, and are brought into
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commerce with the familiar, the terrestrial. Their poet is never unaware of his mission to help by his calm
the swaying wheels of life
And the long restlessness of transient things... [p. 427]
No less do his pulses throb with earth's in Savitri, where the utmost heavens are spanned by
The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face,[p. 677]
than in Urvasie and Love and Death and Baji Prabhou with their more directly human interest and - to adapt slightly a Savitri-phrase to characterise them - their
Words winged with the red splendour of the heart. [p. 615]
Indeed, just as they touch the skies with hands of clay, Savitri touches the poor dust with "the high Transcendent's sunlike hands". Man's earth-born heart is never forsaken by it. And perhaps the intensest throb of that heart is heard in those four long colloquies - first, the dialogue between King Aswapathy and the Divine Mother who grants him the boon he so passionately craves:
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....
Let thy infinity in one body live,
All-Knowledge wrap one mind in seas of light,
All-Love throb single in one human heart....
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Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God
Movements and moments of a mortal will,
Pack with the eternal might one human hour
And with one gesture change all future time - [p. 345]
then the sage Narad's talk with King Aswapathy and his Queen-wife about the fate chosen by their daughter Savitri and the pain involved by it:
Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men
To greatness: an inspired labour chisels
With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.
Implacable in the passion of their will,
Lifting the hammers of titanic toil
The demiurges of the universe work;
They shape with giant strokes their own; their sons
Are marked with their enormous stamp of fire - [p. 444]
then the debate of the God of Death and the incarnate Love that is Savitri, in which Savitri affirms:
Love must not cease to live upon the earth;
For Love is the bright link twixt earth and heaven,
Love is the far Transcendent's angel here;
Love is man's lien on the Absolute,[p. 633]
and defines against the lure of the Death-god towards escape beyond earth into pure peace the meaning of true freedom:
Freedom is this with ever seated soul,
Large in life's limits, strong in Matter's knots,
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.
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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.
This is my answer to thy lures, O Death -[p. 653]
and lastly the passage of ecstatic words between the Godhead of the supramental glories and Savitri the conqueror of Satyavan's mortality facing now the test and temptation of heaven's bountiful wonders and still holding out the claim of earth-life as the field of the divine Spirit:
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.[p. 687]
Savitri is granted her prayer by the Supreme and allowed to be the centre of His manifestation among the cosmic myriads:
O lasso of my rapture's widening noose,
Become my cord of universal love. [p. 702]
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Thus the earth-born heart of man is shown in the poem not only in its finiteness aching for the Infinite but also in an apocalyptic fulfilment. And this fulfilment, though dense with the mystical light, is again and again depicted in terms which go home to us and which set forth in a colossal clarity the Eternal in the movements of Time. For, Sri Aurobindo did not write his epic with the disposition of either a sworn Surrealist wedded to the obscurely entangled or a strict Symbolist cherishing a cult of the glimmeringly elusive. Behind the poet in him is the Master of Yoga whose work was to enlighten and not to puzzle and who, with all his roots in India's hoary past of spirituality, was yet a modern among moderns and the seer of a new mystical progression, a collective advance in consciousness from mind to Supermind, a whole world evolving Godwards and breaking the fetters not only of political or social tyranny but also of mortal ignorance. A democracy of the Divine liberating the human was his goal, as in those words he puts into the mouth of his Savitri:
A lonely freedom cannot satisfy
A heart that has grown one with every heart:
I am a deputy of the aspiring world,
My spirit's liberty I ask for all.[p. 649]
(Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, 1999, pp. 136-55)
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THE OPENING OF SAVITRI1
SOME QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON
BOOK ONE CANTO ONE
1
Would you kindly help me to understand the following points in Savitri (International University Centre Edition, with the Author's Letters on the Poem, 1954)?
P. 3. "A power of fallen boundless self..." Is it the same as "The huge foreboding mind of Night"?
Pp. 3, 4. The above-mentioned "power" longing "to reach its end in vacant Nought", "A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown", "Repeating for ever the unconscious act...", and the Earth wheeling "abandoned in the hollow gulfs" - are these movements successive or simultaneous? The doubt has come on my reading a certain published explanation.
P. 8. "The single Call, the uncompanioned Power..." Is the Power "uncompanioned" because the Goddess of Light was alone, without the aid of Power, and now the Power 'is alone without the aid of Light?
P. 6 " ...her luminous smile
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds."
Does the word "fire" imply that all leapt to life or that all rose in aspiration?
1 Published in Mother India, January and February 1969
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Perhaps your first two points will be best clarified against the background of what seems to me the meaning in general of the difficult opening passage.
One may easily suppose that the description in this passage is of the beginning of the cosmos, the universal evolution from the Inconscient. But I believe that the description is not directly of any such thing, though certainly connected with it. Just as we get a clue to the dawn in the line,
This was the day when Satyavan must die,[p. 10]
we get a clue to the night preceding the dawn in the line:
As in a dark beginning of all things...[p. 1]
Attend to that "As". The night depicted is comparable to the beginning of the cosmos: it is not itself the starting-point of the universal evolution. It is, as a letter of Sri Aurobindo's1 suggests, "a partial and temporary darkness". This darkness is made a "symbol", as that same letter indicates, of a state "of the soul and Nature". The symbolic character is referred to in the very passage by the line:
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse...[Ibid.]
One particular night, followed by one particular dawn which, like this symbolic night, is a "symbol dawn" (Canto-heading): such is the opening scene of Savitri's drama. The particularity is clear when from the immense nocturnal space-scape we focus down to the wheeling Earth
Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams... [Ibid.]
1 Savitri (1954), p.829.
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"Thrown back once more" - that is to say, forced to undergo a fresh fall like many a previous retrogression, like night after preceding night in the course of the long past.
And a similar turn in another letter by Sri Aurobindo1 directs us to the particularity as well as to the symbolisation. Saying that the description is not "simply of physical night and physical dawn" but that either of them is "what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised", Sri Aurobindo goes on to declare of the inner reality behind the night-symbol: "here it is a relapse into Inconscience..." The word "relapse", like the phrase "Thrown back once more", is an indisputable index of a new setback, involving here an unconscious state, as happens every night in the twenty-four-hour cycle through which we repeatedly pass.
In the poem itself our interpretation is supported when "a nameless movement, an unthought Idea" stirred the Inconscience and it was as though even in "dissolution's core" there lurked a surviving entity
Condemned to resume the effort and the pang,
Reviving in another frustrate world.[p. 2]
"Resume", "reviving", "another" - all these are signposts to a particular night about to end, a period of darkness with - before and an after of the same kind. A before and an after are implied also when, a little later, a "hesitating hue" on the eastern horizon, like a scout from the sun,
...conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.[p. 3]
1 Ibid., p. 907.
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A disillusioning day preceding the night, a forced renewal of hope in the succeeding dawn, as in a past sequence again and again, are suggested.
It may be argued: "Though a cycle of darkness and light is there, precluding a direct account of a straight once-for-all evolution from a cosmic Inconscience, the cycle is not diurnal but aeonic. The Indian cosmogonic theory speaks of a repeated emergence of the universe from the Unmanifest and a repeated disappearance into it: there comes a pralaya, a dissolution, after which once more a manifesting process starts. Sri Aurobindo shows us a new cosmic relapse into Inconscience and a new cosmic emergence: the effort and the pang of evolution are resumed, a revival in another frustrate world occurs, an old disillusioning cosmic history is forgotten and a compulsion is felt to renew consent to grow conscious. An aeonic vision, directly expressed, of destruction and creation on a cosmic scale is before us in Savitri's opening account."
We should reply: "The Indian cosmogonic theory of pralaya does not envisage a relapse into Inconscience. The universe is withdrawn into a Superconscience of the Unmanifest and then reprojected. In Savitri we have no such passage into Superconscience, no return of the cosmos into the First Cause, the Divine. An Inconscience, symbolised by Night, is all that is there. We may, of course, think of a recurrent relapse into a primeval Inconscience, from which a new cosmic history takes its start time and again. But we cannot bring such a relapse into tune with the Indian cosmogonic theory. What is more important, we do not even come across this kind of relapse in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. When Sri Aurobindo says that 'from a dark immense Inconscient this material world arises and out of it a soul that by evolution is struggling into consciousness',1 he conceives the process to be not repetitive at all but absolutely unique. For, considering the Why of it, 'the origin of this phenomenon', which 'stands as it were
1 The Riddle of This World (1933), p. 99.
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automatically justified in a supra-intellectual knowledge', he observes: 'To the human mind one might answer that while in itself the Infinite might be free from those perturbations [i.e., division, disharmony, pain, evil], yet once manifestation began infinite possibility also began and among the infinite possibilities which it is the function of the universal manifestation to work out, the negation, the apparent effective negation -with all its consequences - of the Power, Light, Peace, Bliss was very evidently one. If it is asked why even if possible it should have been accepted, the answer nearest to the Cosmic Truth which the human intelligence can make is that in the relations or in the transition of the Divine in the Oneness to the Divine in the Many, this ominous possible became at a certain point an inevitable.' Sri Aurobindo unequivocally affirms that to work out a Divine Emergence from the very opposite of the Divine was just 'one' possibility out of an infinite number. The remaining possibilities were all different from this. There can be no question of a cyclic evolution on a cosmic scale from a stark Inconscience in a struggling pain-fraught gradual manner through the ages. Savitri's opening account, if it directly expressed an aeonic vision of this sort of universal destruction and creation, would be absolutely non- Aurobindonian."
Yes, we have to stop with a cycle which is not aeonic but diurnal. However, in the new night that has come - the last in the married life of Satyavan and Savitri - the poet reads not only a state of the subjective being that is temporarily caught in the darkness which it feels as if that darkness were universal and eternal. The poet reads also in the new night a picture of what happened once-for-all at the commencement of cosmic history. The pointers to that history are scattered all over. I have already mentioned one: "As in a dark beginning of all things." Here is another immediately after it:
A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown... [p. 1]
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A third goes with an earlier line already cited:
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite...[Ibid.]
So the night-symbol may be considered a double one. It is suggestive or representative not only of a temporary relapse into Inconscience but also of a fundamental fall which constitutes the God-oblivious state on a cosmic scale. From this fall, as from a bodiless infinite abyss, a slow difficult return has to start of a God-memory ultimately leading to a God-realisation in terms of an embodied existence within the very cosmos where the emergence, the evolution, takes place. The depiction of that fundamental fall is the central theme of the poem's overture, even though the direct depiction is only of a particular period of darkness lasting a short time. For, the "symbol dawn" unfolds the panorama of a gradual rousing of consciousness on its way to the archetypal Superconscience and then the advent of this Superconscience itself in a passing spell of spiritual light - presage of Earth one day receiving and embodying the Divine in a supreme transfiguration of Mind and Life-force and Matter through the Soul's full awakening to the Supramental Reality that has to emerge and evolve here. The work that Savitri will do, bringing Satyavan back from the clutch of Death, of Yama who is the godhead of Inconscience, and making possible to earth the immortality of the superconscient Gods of Light, is prophesied by this dawn of the very day on which Satyavan must die. And the prophecy is touched alive through the picture of the original Inconscience and its evolutionary history.
However, the setting remains one particular night. And a skilful blending of the particular and the general - this night and the primal Night - is in the passage where the "semblance" of the original Inconscience is mentioned. We have there a switch-over from the continued past tense
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everywhere to a sudden present tense: the particular night which happened at one time, "cradled", as such nights had done repeatedly before,
...the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force
Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl. [Ibid.]
"Kindles" and "carries" are in the present tense, proving themselves to be generalities. They, as a letter1 puts it, "bring in a general...idea stressing the paradoxical nature of the creation and the contrasts which it contains, the drowsed somnambulist as the mother of the light of the suns and the activities of life." What is packed into the lines where the two verbs occur "is not intended as a present feature in the darkness of the Night." In other words, there is no transition from a void Inconscience to a creative movement in the Night with which the poem opens. The "suns" and "our "lives" are already there, and only the cradling goes on as ever of an ignorant Force's cosmic drowse. The creative slumber-movement belongs to the original Inconscience - it comes in here as but a truth for all time and not as a fact of the one special time whose tale Sri Aurobindo is recounting.
A truth for all time of another sort, blended with the fact of one special time, we get also in the very first line of the poem:
The contrast of the past tense "was" with the present tense "awake" strikes, at the poem's sheer opening, the note of one particular night to which applied a truth valid for night after night as the darkness draws to its close - namely, the commencement of the cosmic functions of light, the
___________
1 Savitri (1954), p. 847.
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constructive workings of the Nature-Gods. Doubtless, the past tense "awoke" also could go with one particular night, but the particularity" would not then be self-evident. The present tense leaves no alternative to the particularity. On the other hand, if the original Inconscience were meant by the Night, we should have exclusively the phrase: "before the Gods awoke." The past tense would show the once-for-all primal awakening, the once-for-all initial unfolding or evolving of consciousness-light. The present tense would be impossible, indicating as it does what would happen periodically at every dawning at the end of each night like the one which preceded the day of Satyavan's death.
Now we can come to your first two points. The various expressions employed - "The huge foreboding mind of Night", "A power of fallen boundless self", "A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown" - are all about the same thing. And the whole description shows different aspects of it. The aspects are shown successively but they do not constitute a series of successive happenings. Up to the line -
The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still [Ibid.]
we have a multitude of glimpses, on a particular occasion, of "the hour before the Gods awake", covering "the vain enormous trance of Space" and, within "the hollow gulfs" of Space, the small Earth spinning like a shadow in forgetful sleep. The entranced Space holds the once-kindled and still-burning suns: the Earth goes on carrying our lives, the innumerable generations from age to age.
As for
The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,[p. 5]
the sense of the adjectives emerges when we read a little analytically the rest of the passage as well as the line preceding that opening verse:
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The message ceased and waned the messenger.
The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,
Drew back into some far-off secret world
The hue and marvel of the supernal beam...[Ibid.]
What has come into the mortal's ken for a short while is not the whole of "some far-off secret world" but just a significant suggestion from it, a message embodied in a messenger who brings "the supernal beam" but not the entire mass of luminosity lying behind it - the Sun of Truth that has projected a herald of its light in the form of the Dawn-Goddess. It is because the full glory is held back unmanifested that the Call kindled in our space and time is "single" and the Power looking out on our mortality is "uncompanioned". This phenomenon is expressed or rather indicated also in the lines:
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane...
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,...
Once she half looked behind for her veiled sun... [p. 4]
The "splendour" is "lonely" because the "sun" is still "veiled". The plenary Perfection remaining hidden in its "far beatitudes" and sending forth a flame-part to work by itself in the phenomenal universe is pictured also in the passage:
A message from the unknown immortal Light... [pp. 3-4]
And later we read:
Here too the vision and prophetic gleam
Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes... [p. 5]
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The "prophetic gleam" rather than the fulfilled Sunhood is here: hence the solitariness of the Call and the Power. The solitariness has nothing to do with any distinction between the Power and the Goddess of Light and their being "uncompanioned" by each other.
The last quotation carries us naturally to your final question apropos of the phrase:
...her luminous smile
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.[p. 4]
The significance is not quite the same but there are keen affinities. In the latter phrase the terms contraposed are "fire" and "silence": in the former they are "miracles" and "common meaningless shapes". But the instrument at work is in both cases the divine light and, when we take into consideration the words preceding those cited by you and connect the "luminous smile" with its being "scattered on sealed depths", we find that what results in either instance is a revelation. In one the revelation is of divine forms in shapes without distinction and meaningful content - "miracles" that express in a lustrous language the soul-sense lying concealed in dense earthly things. In the other the revelation is again of what lay sealed in silence in the recesses of our manifold world - something beatifically bright that shows itself under the impact of the Dawn-Goddess's "luminous smile" in a response of self-expression which Sri Aurobindo sums up as "fire". You ask whether the meaning is: "all leapt to life" or "all rose in aspiration". Both the senses are legitimate, but the immediate direct sense is offered in the very next line:
All grew a consecration and a rite.[Ibid.]
Ordinary phenomena - air, wind, hills, boughs - became fierily activised, splendorously vitalised, into states and gestures of soul-elevating worship.
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Actually, your quotation and my quotation are parts of one whole, two concordant as well as complementary aspects of a single brief epiphany. Yours refers to the domain of Nature on its more ethereal side, so to speak; mine bears upon this domain on its more terrestrial side, the side which is "our half-lit ignorance", man's "ambiguous earth", "this anguished and precarious field of toil".1 The high "wideness"2 responds in yours; "our prostrate soil"3 answers in mine - the transfiguring touch on both is the same "awakening ray".4
2
There is a new point arising out of your explanatory note. You have taken the Dawn and the "Ambassadress twixt eternity and change" to be the same. I thought they were different. The Deity, that comes after the Dawn departs burying her aura's "seed of grandeur in the hours", is called the Goddess of eternal Light by Sri Aurobindo in a letter to you. The Dawn is always brief; it is followed by Light continuous. That is how I understood it. Would you again help?
No doubt, the Dawn is brief, but can it, for that reason, be debarred from being the Goddess of eternal Light? The function of the Spiritual Dawn, like the operation of the physical dawn, is to come as a herald and then disappear. But merely because Usha - to use the Rigvedic name and figure - appears for a short duration to do her work, is she herself a short-lived entity? She is surely an emanation or manifestation of eternal Light. Eternal Light briefly revealing itself does not cease to be eternal. In a general way not only Dawn but all experiences of spiritual luminosity last a short time under the conditions of the present natural and mortal
_________
1Ibid.
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
4Ibid.
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life in the cosmos. Does not Sri Aurobindo state this truth when he writes:
Only a little the God-light can stay...?[p. 5]
Can we affirm that by staying only a little the God-light is disqualified from being in itself eternal or, as you put it, continuous?
To come directly to your own terms of opposition: the Dawn and the Ambassadress. You say the Dawn departs after burying her aura's seed of grandeur in the hours. I believe you do so on the strength of the lines:
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood... [p. 4]
A slightly earlier support for you may be the verse in the same context:
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.[p. 3]
Your very word "brief" is here. But it is coupled with what seems its contradiction: "perpetual". Of course, we can say that the sign is perpetual in that it is recurrent, it is brief again and again: the recurring brevity is its sole perpetualness. Quite true, but let us see what the Vision did as it stood awhile, an instant's visitor:
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns...[p. 4]
With the old Vedic word "greatness" (mahimā) ringing in my ears, I suspect that in "perpetual" there is also a subtle shade of "eternal", a suggestion of something from the Everlasting:
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the brief sign is itself eternity packed in a moment. This is but natural when that Dawn is called
A message from the unknown immortal Light... [Ibid.]
And, after all, what is it that shone as an instant's visitor? The reply from the poem itself is: "the godhead." Are we to think that this godhead is not of eternal Light? In the line just quoted, "immortal Light" is declared to have sent the Dawn as its "message". The message may have lasted for a brief duration, yet it must have been made of the stuff of immortality if it came from the Light that is immortal.
Further, even supposing the Dawn to have been essentially non-continuous and to have departed, does the Ambassadress whom you identify as the Goddess of eternal Light fare really any better? First we may observe that, like the Dawn, she is also called a "vision" as well as a mere fore-glimpse:
Here too the vision and prophetic gleam...[p. 5]
Next we may realise that the general truth couched in the verse already quoted -
Only a little the God-light can stay -
is uttered in the context of none else than your Goddess of eternal Light. And it is about her we read:
Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew,
Unwanted, fading from the mortal's range.[Ibid.]
The Ambassadress's life is hardly Methuselahite: very soon it is "spent" and starts "fading". This sad truth is confirmed by other verses:
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That transitory glow of magic fire
So now dissolved in bright accustomed air.
The message ceased and waned the messenger....
Her body of glory was expunged from heaven:
The rarity and wonder lived no more.[Ibid.]
The light of the Ambassadress is termed "that transitory glow" and is said to dissolve, cease, wane and get expunged, yet all this does not prevent it from being not only "magic fire", "body of glory", "rarity and wonder" but also - as some previous lines imply - "spiritual beauty" which "squanders eternity on a beat of Time".
The Ambassadress and the Dawn are essentially in the same case: the "brief" is the "eternal" as well, and the "eternal" is the "brief" too. The pair are, as a colloquialism would put it, much of a muchness. A ground is thus initially created for identifying them. And this ground is seen to be veritable terra firma as soon as we ask: "What phase of time, after the Night, is represented by the Ambassadress?" If she is different from the Dawn, what is she? Sunrise is the only phenomenon succeeding the Dawn. Is .the Ambassadress the Day itself? That is impossible since precisely of her Sri Aurobindo writes:
She "writ to her immortal work" before the sun was unveiled: she thus cannot be any part of the Day. And, if she cannot, she has to be nothing save the Dawn.
The fact is: the Dawn, however brief, has several phases or "transitions". Commenting on a certain passage Sri Aurobindo1 indicates some of them coming on the heels of the darkness: "There is first a black quietude, then the persistent touch, then the first 'beauty and wonder' leading
__________
1 Savitri (1954), pp. 828-9.
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to the magical gate and the 'lucent corner'. Then comes the failing of the darkness, the simile used ['a falling cloak'] suggesting the rapidity of the change. Then as a result the change of what was once a rift into a wide luminous gap... Then all changes into a 'brief perpetual sign', the iridescence, then the blaze and the magnificent aura." The next phase is
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page [Ibid.]
and the statement is made:
Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed...
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.[Ibid.]
The epiphanic phase leads on to a greater nearness or brightness of the Dawn-Goddess. Her very tread is heard and her Face opens heaven and her Form brings beatitude close. She is now called "the omniscient Goddess" and she soon
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds[Ibid.]
and
Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes[p. 5]
and completed her symbolic job:
The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.[Ibid.]
But the divinity, the earth-transforming supernal Power, which she images forth through the process of time, is unwanted by the mortal's world and so she fades away into "the common light of earthly day".
A gloss of particular pertinence, that emerges from Sri Aurobindo's catalogue of phases, is: the line on the "brief
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perpetual sign" is not an all-covering one for the Dawn's nature, it is just a single phase among many - a phase succeeded by the "iridescence" and then the "blaze" and the "magnificent aura". What is intended by the line is, as it were, an announcement - very short in its duration though everlasting in its process and purpose - of the multicoloured glamour and the wide-burning message. Neither of the two epithets - "brief perpetual" - are directly meant to characterise the whole Dawn any more than the substantive "sign" is meant to do so. To make the whole Dawn brief, one would have to fall back only upon the words "instant" and "awhile" coming a little later.
However, you will notice that, although the Dawn is designated as "an instant's visitor" who is also a "Vision" that stood "awhile", she is nowhere explicitly said to fade or dissolve. On the contrary, she goes on doing things: bending over earth's forehead curve, interpreting hidden beauty and unfamiliar bliss, writing the lines of a myth, penning a brilliant code on the sky-page. Where do you find that the Dawn "departs"? To bury her aura's seed of grandeur in the hours is surely not tantamount to the Dawn herself getting buried! The Dawn merely impregnates with a spark of the Divine the world of time and space and she does this not by herself disappearing but by building her aura of magnificent hues. The disappearance of the light preceding the sunrise -the fading of the Dawn, that is to say - comes only when the
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change[p. 4]
has carried out certain revelatory functions. Hence the Ambassadress cannot be other than the Dawn herself in her most developed and final God-goldenness.
To "cap, crown and clinch" all that I have said I shall turn to Sri Aurobindo's letter, to which you have referred. He does mention "the Goddess of eternal Light" but there is no distinction made between her and the Dawn-Goddess.
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In fact, the clear implication is just the opposite. Here is the text:1 "that passage in my symbolic vision of Night and Dawn in which there is recorded the conscious adoration of Nature when it feels the passage of the omniscient Goddess of eternal Light." The Goddess in question is here said to figure in Sri Aurobindo's "symbolic vision of Night and Dawn". There is no going beyond the Dawn. Whatever follows the Night in the vision falls within the Dawn-category. Again, in the same letter, when he is discussing "the conscious adoration of Nature" which is connected with the Goddess of eternal Light, he2 remarks apropos of the line –
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky. :[Ibid.]
"This last line is an expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry not only in the dawn but at other times..." The phrase – "not only in the dawn" – means in the first place that the phenomenon of "all grew a consecration and a rite" as a result of the Goddess's "luminous smile" can happen in the dawn. It means in the second place that, although in the poem it happens in the dawn, it can happen also in other phases of our twenty-four-hour cycle. So, as far as the poem is concerned, there is no going beyond Usha to some "Deity" coming after her. At a later place in the same letter we get one more indication of what I have been trying to demonstrate. Sri Aurobindo3 writes in reply to a certain aspect of the criticism my friend Mendonça made: "His objection of longueur would be perfectly just if the description of the night and the dawn had been simply of physical night and physical dawn; but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the canto clearly suggests, a symbol,
____________
1Ibid., p. 901.
2Ibid., p. 904.
3Ibid., p. 907.
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although what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the 'day' of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out." Mark that Sri Aurobindo talks only of night and dawn and refers to the former as "a relapse into Inconscience" and to the latter in terms that combine adjectives and nouns such as the Canto uses at both the beginning and the end of the account of the growing spiritual luminousness magically preceding the common daylight. "Brief" and "splendid" remind us of your "Dawn": "prophetic outbreak of spiritual light" recalls your "Goddess of eternal Light". The whole inevitable impression left is that your two entities are one, in a varied progression of self-disclosure.
Of course, as we find from Sri Aurobindo's list of "transitions" or phases, the epithet "brief" occurring in the beginning of the account has a bearing different from the same epithet in the above sentence. The former applied merely to a particular step in the progression, the latter serves to give a characteristic of the whole movement. But my point is that what you define as "brief" - namely, the phenomenon prior to the Ambassadress's arrival - gets equated here, by the employment of the same defining term, with what includes this arrival no less than that phenomenon. Sri Aurobindo has put both parts of the account together as the story of a single divine manifestation through a series of Nature-moments, both that phenomenon and this arrival being called "outbreak of spiritual light".
The continuing identity of a single process, the developing disclosure of no more than one divine entity, Usha the spiritual Dawn, can be yet again established from another observation of Sri Aurobindo's in the very letter we are drawing upon. He is discoursing on my friend's objection to repetition of
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the cognates "sombre Vast", "unsounded Void", "opaque Inane", "vacant Vasts", especially as they fall into the same place at the end of the line. Sri Aurobindo1 writes: "What was important for me was to keep constantly before the view of the reader...the ever-present sense of the Inconscience in which everything is occurring. It is the frame as well as the background without which all the details would either fall apart or stand out only as separate incidents. That necessity lasts until there is the full outburst of the dawn and then it disappears; each phrase gives a feature of this Inconscience proper to its place and context. It is the entrance of the 'lonely splendour' into an otherwise inconscient obstructing and unreceptive world that has to be brought out and that cannot be done without the image of the 'opaque Inane' of the Inconscience which is the scene and cause of the resistance. There is the same necessity for reminding the reader that the 'tread' of the Divine Mother was an intrusion on the vacancy of the Inconscience and the herald of deliverance from it."
I have cited Sri Aurobindo's observation in full in order precisely to bring out the apparent opposition of the "lonely splendour" (which you attribute to the Dawn) and the "Divine Mother" (whom you would identify with a Deity coming after the Dawn and acting as the "Ambassadress") - yes, to bring out this "opposition" and then show the complete reconcilement. I want to prove that the Divine Mother is herself the Dawn and that the "opposition" is just the succession of different aspects of the Dawn who is the Divine Mother. Take the verse about the Divine Mother's advent:
Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts... [p. 4]
Now, "vacant Vasts" is set by Sri Aurobindo along with "sombre Vast", "unsounded Void" and "opaque Inane" as
1 Ibid., p. 908.
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one of the cognate expressions whose "necessity lasts until there is the full outburst of the dawn". It is the Dawn and nothing else but the Dawn that is continuing all through and the tread of the Divine Mother is a portion of the process before the Dawn's full outburst: it is a phase of the Dawn-Goddess's gradual unfoldment of her "eternal Light".
I am afraid I have over-laboured my thesis. I have done so because I felt you wanted the answer to your new point to be completely convincing to your understanding. An all-round treatment seemed desirable. And perhaps the final touch to the needed all-roundness will be given if in conclusion I hark back to the Rigveda for some descriptions of the Dawn as being no other than the Goddess of eternal Light and as doing what Sri Aurobindo's Ambassadress does - the Rigveda whose imagery so often gleams out in Savitri.
Usha is described in I. 113.19, mātā devānām adder anīkam, "Mother of the gods, form (or power) of Aditi." A Rik (80.1) of the fifth Mandala presents Usha as "a form from far beatitudes" coming near: it describes her as dytad-yāmānam brhatīm rtena rtāvarim svar āvahamtīm, "of a luminous movement, vast with the Truth, supreme in (or possessed of) the Truth, bringing with her Swar." The same role is played in VII. 81.3: yā vahasipuru sparham na dāsuse mayah, "thou who bearest to the giver the beatitude as a manifold and desirable ecstasy." Then we have an analogue of the "face of rapturous calm" parting "the eternal lids that open heaven" in VII. 75.1: vyusa āvo divijā rtena, āviskrnvānā mahimānam āgāt, "Dawn born in heaven opens out things by the Truth, she comes manifesting the greatness." Savitri's "omniscient Goddess" kindling the silent worlds to fire is the Rigveda's "young and ancient goddess of many thoughts, shining out on us immortal,... uttering the words of Truth", she who fronting "the worlds of the becoming stands aloft over them all as the vision of Immortality" (III. 61.3).
(Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, 1999, pp. 163-81)
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SOME NOTES ON SRI AUROBINDO'S
POEMS1
Apropos of the incarnation of the Divine and the advent of the Age of Gold on the heels of the Iron Age after "the last fierce spasms of the dying past" have shaken the nations, as suggested at the end of In the Moonlight, we may quote the magnificent passage from Book III, Canto 4 of Savitri:
A giant dance of Shiva tore the past,
There was a thunder as of worlds that fall;
Earth was o'errun with fire and the roar of Death
Clamouring to slay a world his hunger had made;
There was a clangour of Destruction's wings:
The Titan's battle-cry was in my ears,
Alarm and rumour shook the armoured Night.
I saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers
Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life
Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;
Forerunners of a divine multitude
Out of the paths of the morning star they came
Into the little room of mortal life.
I saw them cross the twilight of an age,
The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,
The great creators with wide brows of calm,
The massive barrier-breakers of the world
________________
1 Mostly published in Mother India, June-September 1957. [Here are included only the passages related to Savitri.]
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And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,
The labourers in the quarries of the gods,
The messengers of the Incommunicable,
The architects of immortality.
Into the fallen human sphere they came,
Faces that wore the Immortal's glory still,
Voices that communed still with the thoughts of God,
Bodies made beautiful by the Spirit's light,
Carrying the magic word, the mystic fire,
Carrying the Dionysian cup of joy,
Approaching eyes of a diviner man,
Lips chanting an unknown anthem of the soul,
Feet echoing in the corridors of Time.
High priests of wisdom, sweetness, might and bliss,
Discoverers of beauty's sunlit ways
And swimmers of Love's laughing fiery floods
And dancers within rapture's golden doors,
Their tread one day shall change the suffering earth
And justify the light on Nature's face.[pp. 343-44]
*
Among the poems of Sri Aurobindo's middle period, The Rishi represents, in a semi-dramatic form, the fullest philosophic statement of the all-round ancient Indian spirituality, at once life-transcending and life-embracing, which later ages broke up into many divergent strains and finally tended to narrow down to one predominant strain of other-worldly renunciation. The fourfold scheme of experience found in the Mandukya Upanishad is here: Virat, the gross outer, called Waking - Hiranyagarbha, the subtle inner, called Dream - Prajnā, the causal inmost, called Sleep - the sheer absolute Self, simply called Turiya or Fourth. We must remember that in the Upanishad's Dream there is no unreality, just as in its Sleep there is no emptiness: they merely designate depths of consciousness in which is an existence greater and truer than in the surface dimensions
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that are usually our life. In fact, Dream is the rich sustaining medium, the world-shaping Thought-power, through which the outer manifestation takes place, while Sleep is the ultimate cause and creator of things, the supreme omniscient and omnipotent Divinity hidden within all and holding in itself the archetypal seed-form of everything. The absolute Self is indeed utterly featureless, an indivisible unity of infinite Peace, but it is not cut off from the other three poises: those poises are its own and, though as the pure Ground of them it is free of them, their activity is its Peace loosened forth, their multiplicity its Oneness diversely deployed, and its freedom is not limited by non-manifestation even as it is not limited by manifestation.
A direct poetic version of the fourfold scheme is in a passage in Savitri, Book XI, Canto l.1
The Bird of Fire was originally attempted in quantitative metre but the poem did not progress. Then another form was tried and the result was successful - "a kind of compromise between the stress system and the foot measure." About the symbolism Sri Aurobindo wrote: "The Bird of Fire is the living vehicle of the gold fire of the Divine Light and the white fire of the Divine Tapas and the crimson fire of Divine Love - and everything else of the Divine Consciousness."
Here we may quote some lines from Savitri, Book I, Canto 2, together with Sri Aurobindo's remarks in reference to them:
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... [p. 16]
1 [pp. 680-82.]
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The question asked was: "In the mystical region, is the dragon bird any relation of your Bird of Fire with 'gold-wings' or your Hippogriff with 'face lustred, pale-blue lined'? And why do you write: 'What to say about him? One can only see'?" Sri Aurobindo replied: "All birds of that region are relatives. But this is the bird of eternal Ananda, while the Hippogriff is the divinised Thought and the Bird of Fire is the Agni-bird, psychic and tapas. All that however is to mentalise too much and mentalising always takes most of the life out of spiritual things. That is why I say it can be seen but nothing said about it."
To many lines in the Sonnets one can find parallels in Savitri though, of course, not always with the same nuance and intent. Perhaps the most easily paralleled are some lines in The Indwelling Universal which begins,
I contain the whole world in my soul's embrace:
In me Arcturus and Belphegor burn.
Book VII, Canto 6, of Savitri has:
His soul must be wider than the universe
And feel eternity as its very stuff,
Rejecting the moment's personality,
Know itself older than the birth of Time,
Creation an incident in its consciousness,
Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire
Circling in a corner of its boundless self...[p. 537]
Unlike the name "Arcturus", which is well-known for one of the brightest stars in the northern heavens and which has found its way not unoften into literature, "Belphegor" which Sri Aurobindo has brought in with powerful effect has practically no place in popular astronomy and has figured rarely in past literary usage.
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However, it has become famous, though not in an astronomical context, in contemporary France because of Julien Benda's book Belphégor where, turning its etymological significance (Baal-Peor, Semitic deity of licentiousness) to critical purposes, he has given a new adjective to the French language, Belphégorien, to designate certain strains of degeneracy and effeminacy in the intellectual and social life of his country.
About the composition of all his poetry (and even of all his prose) ever since the experience of the utterly silent mind in 1908, Sri Aurobindo has written in a letter: "I receive from above my head and receive changes and corrections from above without any initiation by myself or labour of the brain. Even if I change a hundred times, the mind does not work at that, it only receives. Formerly it used not to be so, the mind was always labouring at the stuff of an unshaped formation... The poems come as a stream beginning at the first line and ending at the last - only some remain with one or two changes, others have to be recast if the first inspiration was an inferior one." Savitri was recast eight or ten times "under the old insufficient inspiration": afterwards it was written and rewritten wholly "from above".
Concerning the blank-verse of Savitri we may touch on the "Miltonism" so often attributed to this epic. To be in general Miltonic is surely no defect, provided one is not merely an echo. But it does not help the ends of criticism to see Miltonism as soon as we have anywhere a high-pitched blank verse embodying at some length an epic or semi-epic theme. Of course, repeated end-stopping, as in Savitri, is bound to de-Miltonise the basic mould. But even the presence of enjambment is insufficient by itself to constitute the Miltonic movement. On the side of form, the latter consists not only of run-over lines but also of complicated sentences and grammatical suspenses building up a closely-knit verse-
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paragraph in an English markedly Latinised in its turn. On the side of style, the differentia is well touched off half-humourously by Sri Aurobindo himself in a remark drawn by the attachment of the Miltonic label to a couple of his lines: "Miltonic? 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."
On the side of substance, it is the strongly cut imaged idea in a religio-philosophical mood that is Miltonism - the substance which is proper, in one of its aspects, to what Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as the Poetic Intelligence from the really spiritual ranges that are "Overhead".
Not that thought-form is absent in Savitri: there is plenty of it and that is why the poem is a philosophy no less than a legend and a symbol. But the thinking is not from the mental level which is usually associated with thought. Thought-form can be taken by what arrives from Overhead through the Yogi's silent mind and the philosophy in Savitri is an idea-structure expressing a mystical vision, a spiritual contact or knowledge which have come by processes of consciousness other than the intellectual. The thought-element in Savitri therefore differs from that which is found usually in poets credited with a philosophical purpose -even a poet like Milton whose rhythmic roll seems to have a largeness reminiscent of overhead inspiration. For, though the rhythm catches something of the Overhead breath, Milton's substance, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out in a
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letter, "is, except at certain heights, mental - mentally grand and noble" and his "architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence." And it is because of the mixture of a semi-Overhead sweep of sound with a mostly intellectual-imaginative substance that Sri Aurobindo, for all his admiration for Milton, has said: "The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."
Some notion of the difference between the "mental Miltonic" and the Overhead Aurobindonian may be caught, together with other impressions of the latter's rare quality, if we compare a few phrases collected from several sections of Paradise Lost with a few from the opening of Savitri. Milton apostrophises the Divine Spirit:
Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dovelike satst brooding on the vast abyss
And madst it pregnant.1
He addresses too the original spiritual Light:
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!...
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God as with a mantle didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.2
About the advent of this illumination we may quote him further in the verses:
1Book I,19-22.
2Book III, 6,9-12.
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But now at last the sacred influence
Of light appears, and from the walls of Heaven
Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night
A glimmering dawn.1
He has also depicted an ethereal revelation, an entrance to God's grandeur, in the illumined distance:
The work as of a kingly palace-gate,
With frontispiece of diamond and gold
Embellished; thick with sparkling orient gems
The portal shone, inimitable on Earth
By model, or by shading pencil drawn.2
Now look at Savitri:
...The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite...
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.
Arrived from the other side of boundlessness
An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps...
Intervening in a mindless universe,
Its message crept through the reluctant hush
Calling the adventure of consciousness and joy
And, conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.
1Book II, 1034-37.
2Book III, 505-09.
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As if a soul long dead were moved to live...
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.[pp. 1-3]
In one of the sentences of the multi-imaged Dawn-description there is a grammatical inversion which I could recognise only after Sri Aurobindo had explained it. In the lines –
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal -[p. 3]
the word "solicited" is not a past participle passive but the past tense and the subject of this verb is "an errant marvel" delayed to the fourth line by the parenthesis "Orphaned", etc. The object of the inversion is to throw a strong emphasis and prominence upon the line,
An errant marvel with no place to live...
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The sense, after "as if", is not that somebody was being gracefully solicited but that somebody solicited with a timid grace.
Another inversion, not much later, taxes us a little in:
Thus trapped in the gin of earthly destinies,
Awaiting her ordeal's hour abode,
Outcast from her inborn felicity,
Accepting life's obscure terrestrial robe,
Hiding herself even from those she loved,
The godhead greater by a human fate.[p. 8]
The subject of the verb "abode" is the whole last line.
The adjective "emerald" seems to have been a favourite of Sri Aurobindo's during the period of Savitri. Its first occurrence in his poetry in general comes in Songs to Myrtilla:
Behold in emerald fire
The spotted lizard crawl
Upon the sun-kissed wall...
A few years later we meet it in Urvasie:
a mystic dewy
Half-invitation into emerald worlds–
and in Love and Death:
...wandering mid leaves
Through emerald ever-new discoveries...
We find it also in the opening passage of Ilion:
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There, like a hope through an emerald dream sole-pacing for ever,
Stealing to wideness beyond, crept Simois lame in his currents,
Guiding his argent thread mid the green of the reeds and the grasses.
In Savitri it is first found in:
A dense magnificent coloured self-wrapped life
Draped in the leaves' vivid emerald monotone... [p. 13]
This is on p. 17. The next comes after a gap of hundreds of pages - on p. 404:
Lost in the emerald glory of the woods...[p. 355]
Thereafter it is fairly frequent and always applied to forest-scenes. Once it is found twice on the same page: 442 [p. 466]. Altogether in Savitri it plays the part of a stock epithet 21 times. Its last appearance is on p. 806 [p. 718].
The lines –
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss - [p. 17]
where the intellectual style is clean overpassed may be juxtaposed with the well-known phrases of Francis Thompson's about the human heart's unrealised grandeurs:
The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink–
An awful Curtius make Him yawn unfilled.
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The comparison is interesting particularly because, while it is certain that Sri Aurobindo knew of the act of the fierce Roman patriot Sextus Curtius who jumped, horse-backed and full-armoured, into the deep trench which according to the augurs had to be packed with what Rome deemed most precious if she was to escape heavenly punishment, it is equally certain that he had not seen Thompson's lines where some of the very words used by Sri Aurobindo - "world", "chasm", "fill" - occur. We become aware how an afflatus with the same charge, as it were, of imaginative words comes in sheer intuitive visionariness and with an undiluted Overhead rhythm in the one instance and in the other with a no less poetic impact but with a more intellectually formulated substance and a vigorous movement which has a rather staccato effect in certain places and which, even when there is a wide sweep, seems to go from point to point in order to enlarge itself instead of presenting immediately a sense of the mysterious depths of being that are astir in the yawning chasm and the tremendous greatness of the Presence that alone can appease them.
Not only the intuitive directness blended with a keen gnomic turn is remarkable in the line:
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven... [p- 52]
The line is notable for its metrical structure also. We have two equal parts balanced on either side by the connecting verb "are" which implies their equivalence on two different planes - and the exact balance of essential significances constituted by the identical number of syllables is reinforced by the stress-scheme being precisely the same in either part: two consecutive stresses followed by a stress between two slacks -
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"Earth's winged chimeras", "Truth's steeds in Heaven". Metrical as well as rhythmical effects of expressive originality are abundant in Savitri. There is:
With the Truth-Light strike earth's massive roots of trance... [p. 72]
Here we have a sense of both striking power and massive rootedness through the five successive stresses after the first two words. Or take
Heaven's wa | ters trailed | and dribbled | through the | drowned land. [p. 350]
Here, together with the various suggestive alliterations, particularly of r in association with t, d, th and of "d" in association with "1" and "n", we have a scansion diversely pointing the many shades of the description.
We have again - towards the close of Book I, Canto 5- some fine metrical and rhythmical effects in the passage about the hierarchy of worlds. The lines,
have a strong startling impact of disclosure in the three consecutive stresses at almost the beginning, the last on a quantitatively long syllable reinforcing the sense of a penetration of depths. The second part of the opening line has two unstressed syllables at the end, giving a sense of the remote and unseized. The inverted foot, a trochee, starting with an accented intrinsic long the next line, counteracts this sense and creates a revelatory stroke, and the word
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"transparencies" which balances the word "transcendences" of the preceding line and has the same dying away slack-ending gives now an impression which is the very opposite of the remote and unseized, an impression of the unresisting and easily grasped. The final phrase "crowded light" is all the more accurately expressive because the stresses are not successive: the light, for all its crowdedness, has yet to be not dense but transparent and this is achieved metrically and rhythmically by a slack coming between the stresses, while the crowdedness is conveyed by the divided stresses falling on two quantitatively long syllables and thus counteracting whatever dispersiveness may be suggested by the division.
Another piece of metrical and rhythmical memorableness is the line,
A last high world was seen where all worlds met. [p. 89]
Here the coming together of stresses in exactly the same way in two places (the first two feet and the last two) and the close play of long quantities there and the stance of a single long quantity in the middle foot of the fine's five and the arrangement of the vowel sounds either differing from or agreeing with one another and, finally, the unbroken uniform run on and on of monosyllables - all these conjure up vividly the subtle reality expressed with simple and clear words.
On p. 214, in
Watched her charade of action for some hint,
Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes - [pp. 188-89]
"Nō" refers to a form of Japanese lyric drama, also known as "Noh". Naturally, it has nothing to do with negation such as in the lines:
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A limping Yes through the aeons journeys still
Accompanied by an eternal No.[p. 201]
The line in Savitri which seems to take the longest time to read is on p. 348:
The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought... [p. 307]
Every word is. a monosyllable and six out of the ten words - "great, schemed, worlds, they, planned, wrought" - are quantitatively long, being either supported on a vowel-sound of intrinsic length or else having the vowel-time drawn out by succeeding consonants.
The line in Savitri composed of the least number of words is on:
Architectonic and inevitable...[p. 273]
The passage about the abysm of Hell in Book II, Canto 7, one of the most intensely etched in Savitri, has a marked play of alliteration in several lines hammering home the ubiquitous hellishness:
Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power...
The implacable splendour of her nightmare pomps...
Trampled to tormented postures the torn sense....
A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue...
A travelling dot on downward roads of Dusk...
In a slow suffering Time and tortured Space... [pp. 211-18]
In the use and choice of words, too, Savitri comes often with highly original gestures. There is the uplifting of a non-
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poetic word beyond its common connotation into poetic effectiveness, as in
Then shall the business fail of Death and Night, [p. 633]
where the commercial note is fully exploited by "fail" being added to "business" and even a partnership indicated. There is an energy of unsqueamish violence which is yet memorable poetry, as in
Then perish vomiting the immortal soul
Out of Matter's belly into the sink of Nought. [p. 494]
There is a drawing upon other languages for exact effects, as in
Knowledge was rebuilt from cells of inference
Into a fixed body flasque and perishable,[p. 267]
where the French word "flasque" is more significant in sound and serves better the rhythmic end than would its English synonyms - "slack", "loose" or even "flaccid". Over and above all these gestures of original utterance Sri Aurobindo shows an inventive audacity by the employment of new words and new usages, either based on English or continental languages. We have
A single law simplessed the cosmic theme -[p. 273]
or a similar treatment of an English noun:
Ambitioned the seas for robe, for crown the stars... [p. 117]
We have even a clear neologism for "immensities" in
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And driven by a pointing hand of Light
Across his soul's unmapped immensitudes,[p. 80]
on the analogy of "infinitudes" for "infinities." It recurs:
A little gift comes from the Immensitudes,
But measureless to life its gain of joy...[p. 237]
The same neologism comes also in the singular number along with "infinity":
In their immensitude signing infinity
They were the extension of the self of God... [p. 524]
Savitri's father, who is "the traveller of the worlds" and whose Yogic explorations start with Canto One of Book II and come to an end with Canto Four of Book III, covering in all nineteen Cantos, is nowhere mentioned by name until the very last one.
There, on p. 386, for the first time and quite casually as if it were a familiar appellation by now, we come to know that he is "Aswapathy":
But Aswapathy's heart replied to her...[p. 341]
And the meaning of the name is indirectly conveyed to us at the conclusion of the same Canto:
The Lord of Life resumed his mighty rounds
In the scant field of the ambiguous globe.[p. 348]
"Aswapathy" literally stands for "The Lord of the Horse". But in the old Vedic symbolism the Horse represents the Life Force.
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The true Sanskrit form is without the h. Sri Aurobindo originally had the h both in the daughter's name and in her lover's, but later dropped it. For some reason he retained it in the father's. Ultimately it was dropped here also.
In Book VII, Canto 5, concerned with the finding of the Soul, the line
A being no bigger than the thumb of man,[p. 526]
is a translation from the Katha Upanishad where the inmost soul of man, divine in essence, governing his many lives and evolving through the ages into the Supreme Spirit's infinity, is spoken of in these terms.
In the long passage (pp. 598-99) beginning –
But now the half-opened lotus bud of her heart
Had bloomed and stood disclosed to the earthly ray;
In an image shone revealed her secret soul.
There was no wall severing the soul and mind,
No mystic fence guarding from the claims of life.
In its deep lotus home her being sat
As if on concentration's marble seat,
Calling the mighty Mother of the worlds
To make this earthly tenement her house.
As in a flash from a supernal light,
A living image of the original Power,
A face, a form came down into her heart
And made of it its temple and pure abode.
But when its feet had touched the quivering bloom,
A mighty movement rocked the inner space
As if a world were shaken and found its soul:
Out of the Inconscient's soulless mindless Night
A flaming serpent rose released from sleep–
[pp. 527-28]
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an experience is described, which is well-known to Indian Yoga. But here the process is a little different. The Power or Shakti of the Divine - Kundalini - sleeping coiled like a serpent in the chakra or lotuslike circle in the subtle body - sukshma sharira - at a place corresponding to the base of the spine in the gross physical body is here awakened not directly from below by Yogic concentration and special breath-exercise (prānāyāma) but by the descent of an Overhead Force into the lotuslike circle situated in the heart-region through which the evolving soul, the being no bigger than the thumb of man, gets most directly into contact with the rest of man's complex nature organised round it.
It is not easy to construe the passage :
A brute half-conscious body serves as means
A mind that must recover a knowledge lost
Held in stone grip by the world's inconscience,
And wearing still these countless knots of Law
A spirit bound stand up as Nature's king.[p. 108]
If we put a comma after "Law" and after "bound" and mentally read "must" before "stand", the sense is clarified. The last line would then link up with
A mind that must recover a knowledge lost...
The line -
Above the Masters of the Ideal throne -[p. 261]
has "Above" as an adverb, "Ideal" as a noun and "throne" as an intransitive verb equivalent to "as if throned" or more significantly "sit throned".
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A Latin construction not infrequent in Sri Aurobindo may be exemplified by a line on p. 811, the middle one of the passage:
And the swift parents hurrying to their child,–
Their cause of life now who had given him breath, –
Possessed him with their arms.[p. 722]
Here "Their" = "of them". The relative pronoun "who" goes with the understood "them". The meaning of the line is: "Satyavan who having been revived, was now the cause of the life of his parents who had given him life."
Some untangling is required for the last words (p. 813) spoken by Savitri:
"Awakened to the meaning of my heart,
That to feel love and oneness is to live
And this the magic of our golden change
Is all the truth I know or seek, O sage."[p. 724]
There should be a comma after "heart": otherwise the next line would seem an explanation of the word "meaning" in the first. But if we join up these two lines, no sense can be made of them, for a verb would be missing. "Is" of the last line cannot serve the purpose. Nor can it be the verb for the third line without leaving the first two verbless. The only way out, it seems, is to make "Awakened" go with "I", and then the prose-order of the passage would be "That to feel love and oneness is to live, and (that) this (is) the magic of our golden change, is all the truth which I, awakened to the meaning of my heart, know or seek, O sage," or one may put "And this the magic of our golden change" between two dashes as a parenthetical comment.
(Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, 1999, pp. 327-60)
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THE LONGEST SENTENCE IN ENGLISH
POETRY1
The longest sentence in English poetry - 143 words and, if a compound is counted as two, 144 - is in Savitri, Book IV, Canto 3, p. 426 [p. 375].
We must understand, of course, that true sentence-length does not really depend on putting a full-stop as late as possible and substituting commas and semi-colons and colons for it wherever we can. The true length is organic. The construction is such that the components, however independent-seeming, are grammatically inseparable. Many of them are really subordinate clauses or else contain words that internally link them together, as against mere external linkage by means of ands, which add mechanically rather than organically to the length of a sentence. In the instance from Savitri we have an ultra-Homeric simile, a long-drawn-out comparison whose sense, beginning with "As", is completed only when the full comparative picture has been painted and then the central situation which the simile illuminates is stated. If a sentence starts with an "As", it cannot be complete until there is a "so also" or its equivalent in some form at the other end to introduce the main theme.
Further, in a truly long sentence, not only is the syntax organic: the very organicity has what we may call a living limitativeness which practically ensures that the
1 [Here is included only an extract, related to Savitri.]
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sentence would assimilate within its vital system only the right amount of detail necessary to unfold the central meaning: a limit is intrinsically imposed upon the length, rendering this length, and no other, vitally significant. Such organicity is different from that of a passage where to enrich the theme one can go on drawing the length out with illustrative minutiae. In short, with organicity itself there can be a certain type of mechanical additiveness. Thus A Nocturnal Reverie by Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (1660?-1720), cast in heroic couplets, consists of one long sentence running into 50 lines and 367 words or, with each of its four compounds rating as two words, 371. The main clause does not appear until the forty-sixth line; most of the poem up to this point is a series of qualifying clauses. But the structure has no living limitativeness in the strict sense. The poem starts with
In such a night, when every louder wind
Is to its distant cavern safe confined –
and continues with particular on particular of imagery intended to create an atmosphere of peace, all the images introduced by the conjunction "when." The images do serve a single mood or impression, but they are not dictated by any palpable necessity which would exclude others - nor are they even in direct spatial relationship among themselves. There is no internal reason why, with more abundant observation, the poet should not have gone on adding many more than she had already done. In the sentence from Sri Aurobindo we have no open-endedness of this sort. The theme demands a special restricted development: nothing except a number of relevant details can be brought in within the organic form, giving it its length.
Sri Aurobindo's theme is: how, on hearing some words from her father Aswapathy, Savitri wakes up to the sense of her true mission:
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As when the mantra sinks in Yoga's ear,
Its message enters stirring the blind brain
And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;
The hearer understands a form of words
And, musing on the index thought it holds,
He strives to read it with the labouring mind,
But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:
Then, falling silent in himself to know
He meets the deeper listening of his soul:
The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:
Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self
Are seized unalterably and he endures
An ecstasy and an immortal change;
He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,
All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:
Transmuted by the white spiritual ray
He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,
Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech:
An equal greatness in her life was sown.[p. 375]
(Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, 1999, pp. 361-63)
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TWO CRITICS CRITICISED1
In the Illustrated Weekly of India (July 31, 1949) appeared a comment on Sri Aurobindo's poetry. It was by the periodical's editor, C. R. M., known to be an Irishman, in "Books and Comments" and was meant to review my study, The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo. After calling my book interesting, C. R. M. went on to say:
"For Mr. Sethna, Sri Aurobindo's Muse is a case of 'this side idolatry', and I am not so sure that genius is so rampant here as he claims. The merits seem to me to consist of a high level of spiritual utterance, abundant metrical skill, and a sound poetic sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters. Sometimes it is as if Sri Aurobindo had taken the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and stirred it to boiling point in the cauldron of his Muse. There are some first-rate passages of blank verse, e.g.:
Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his heart's ignorant whisper,
Whistle of wind in the tree-tops of Time and the rustle of Nature.
_______________
1 First published in Mother India, September 3, 1949, except for the change of a few quotations in order to avoid repeating some matter used elsewhere in my book.
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"Elsewhere there are many pleasant lines of a derivative nature and it is interesting to find traces of the influence of that Yellow Book character, the poet Stephen Phillips, who was at Cambridge with Sri Aurobindo. The Tennysonian influence is stronger:
And lightning 'twixt the eyes intolerable
Like heaven's vast eagle all that blackness swept
Down over the inferior snowless heights
And swallowed up the dawn.
"This, in spite of, or because of, that horrible word 'twixt (a crutch for amateur versifiers!) might be from the Idylls, and, by stressing the resemblance, one does not mean to decry Sri Aurobindo's talents, for Victoria's laureate was a master of rhythm and a true delineator of beauty."
Naturally, as the author of The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, I could not let C. R. M.'s comments pass. I wrote him a letter and requested its publication. The reply, though not ungenerous, scarcely served my purpose. It ran: "I find your letter on Sri Aurobindo's poetry very interesting and well-expressed (though it hasn't changed some of my opinions!) but I regret that my space is so confined that there is no room for it and we have no correspondence column in the Weekly." As C. R. M. is a gifted writer of considerable popularity and his readers may accept his estimate of Sri Aurobindo, it is necessary that I should voice in Mother India what was originally meant for the Weekly.
The Originality of a Master of Yoga
C. R. M.'s paragraphs, though appreciative in places and hitting off the truth here and there, seem to me on the whole to miss the mark because of his rather cursory acquaintance with Sri Aurobindo's poetry and a certain haste in making up his mind.
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When he pictures Sri Aurobindo as sometimes stirring and boiling the cream of Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson in his own Muse's cauldron, it is not easy to agree even if the critic's statement be applied to Sri Aurobindo's early work which is not that of a full-fledged Yogi; but when we come to his later work - especially his latest and longest, the epic Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, to which I have devoted many pages in my book - the statement loses all relevance. Milton's intellectual theology, Wordsworth's half-philosophical half-emotional pantheism and Tennyson's vague religious idealism can hardly be equated with the vision and experience of a Master of Yoga. As for the manner, it is equally individual in its turns and tones. Except that Sri Aurobindo, like Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson, does not bring in the typical modernist idiom a la Eliot of The Waste Land, nowhere are these poets discernible in either the substance or the style of lines like
Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes,
A figure in the ineffable Witness' shrine
Pacing the vast cathedral of his thoughts
Under its arches dim with infinity
And heavenward brooding of invisible wings, [p. 79]
or,
A greater force than the earthly held his limbs,
Huge workings bared his undiscovered sheaths,
Strange energies wrought and screened tremendous hands
Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed
The heavenly wideness of a godhead's gaze, [pp. 81-82]
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. [pp. 47-48]
These lines, with their direct mystical insight and their suggestive rhythm carrying the concrete life-throb of a Yogi's supra-intellectual consciousness, are not only different in a striking way from the typically Miltonic, Wordsworthian or Tennysonian poetry but also lead us to question C. R. M.'s phrase: "a sound sensitivity based on the classics and much akin to that of many of the more conservative masters". The term "conservative" is in itself debatable. What are called the "classics" are seldom conservative except in the sense that they are not flashy and flamboyant, addicted to involved conceit and confusing imagery, limping in metre and jaggedly irregular in form. If actually there are any conservative masters, the poet of Savitri is little akin to them in sensitivity. He has a warm suddenness of simile, a sweeping boldness of metaphor, a varicoloured intensity of vision, a breath-bereaving grandeur of intuition. Nor can the sensitivity shown in these things be said to have its basis in the classics, though the latter too are beautifully or powerfully vivid. Rather a vividness most revolutionary is at work in the Aurobindonian sensitivity - simile, metaphor, vision, intuition, all are of an unusual inner experience mostly beyond the classics. Sri Aurobindo's sensitivity is based on the classics in only one respect: it is neither morbid nor injudicious and has a certain poise and control even in the midst of extreme novelty and force. "Sound" it is, in the best connotation of the term, like the sensitivity of the classics, but its soundness, like that of theirs, is an attribute which makes for the genuinely great utterance as distinguished from the merely rushing, dazzling, distracting speech, and does not imply any imitativeness or want of "fine frenzy."
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(a)1
Mr. P. Lai has issued "A Testament for our Poets". He has some pointed and pertinent things to say, but he spoils their effect by falling foul rather violently of one about whom Francis Watson, in a recent broadcast on English Poetry from India, said that he was the one Indian poet whom Yeats had singled out as writing creatively in English. Yeats is well-known for his somewhat supercilious manner towards Indo-English poets: hence a comment like this from him has a rare value - particularly as he was himself one of the greatest contemporary poets in the English language. Mr. Lai seems to have been exceptionally unfortunate in his choice of Sri Aurobindo as a whipping-post.
His own personal preference is for "realistic poetry reflecting... the din and hubbub, the confusion and indecision, the flashes of goodness and beauty of our age". There is nothing intrinsically objectionable in this penchant, provided it does not deprive one of response to other kinds of poetry. But there must be no particular philosophical shade attached to the word "realistic" as if poetry that is not a product of so-called "realism" were a dressing up of unreality. Art is out of touch with reality only when its expression is abstract or imprecise instead of in concrete and vivid terms. Reality, for art, is simply that which is real to the artist and which he can best seize in perfect form with concreteness and vividness.
WRONG APPROACH
Such a position is not altogether repudiated by Mr. Lai - in broad theory. But he has grave limitations of perception and
_____________
1 This was published in Mother India, November 10,1951, except that a few quotations have been changed.
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sympathy, rendering his theory itself a little hazy, and he cannot help bringing into it his temperamental preferences. He reacts against romanticism on the one hand and "criticism of life" on the other. In condemning Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri and warning Indian poets to keep away from the Aurobindonian brand of verse if they wish to do anything worth-while, he also betrays a most serious lack of response to spiritual poetry.
He, of course, protests that he cannot be considered totally unsympathetic to poetry of a spiritual order. "I can read," he says, "the Divine Comedy with pleasure, St. John of the Cross is a marvellous poet, poems of Kabir and Chandidas are exquisite. T. S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday is an excellent poem of spiritual tension, confusion and resolution which I can read with great enjoyment and recall with surprising accuracy and detail." Well, the protest is far from convincing. Dante was a first-rate religious poet, not a spiritual or mystic one; he was well-versed in theology, perfectly conversant with the living symbols of the Catholic creed, his imagination was finely and powerfully touched by religious fervour, but there never was any invasion of his consciousness by the super-conscious and he had not the temperament or the experience of the Saints who figure in his Paradiso. By the way, apart from certain portions, the Divine Comedy is not even directly religious poetry: only its setting is in terms of religion. T. S. Eliot also is in part an effective poet of religious feeling and idea: the tension, confusion and resolution in Ash-Wednesday are not spiritual in the true sense and they are more misty than mystic. Not that a state of mind is not infused into them but they give us neither the concreteness nor the intensity of spiritual vision and mystic experience. Mr. Lai's ignorance of this fact proves that he has no clear idea of spiritual poetry.
St. John of the Cross is a real mystic and in his poems there is the immediacy of inner contact with the Eternal. But they are spiritual and mystic in a certain way - a highly
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personal devotion-coloured lyricism, deeply intense yet not charged with the powerful amplitude of vision and vibration such as we find in the verses of the Upanishads, verses which seem to be the Infinite's own large and luminous language. Kabir and Chandidas are somewhat in the same category, though with a difference of tone and temper. They are indeed, as Mr. Lai says, exquisite and they are authentically spiritual, but again more intense than immense and the masterful mantric expression is not theirs. If Mr. Lai responds to St. John of the Cross and to these two Indian singers he is not without any spiritual sympathy; still, he cannot be said to show true sensitiveness to the kind of inspiration that is Savitri. We are not surprised that he fails to appreciate it.
POETIC COMMUNICATION
Here we are likely to have a couple of paragraphs from his own article thrown at our heads by him. He has written: "The job of all poetry is to convey an experience which the reader has not himself experienced but to which he is made sympathetic by the rhythm, linguistic precision and incantation of the poem he is reading.... The good poem must be able to communicate an emotion to me even when I have only the faintest intellectual, and no emotional, idea of what that emotion is."
But surely there must be something in the reader to serve as a point d'appui for the poet's effort at communication? Else we shall be obliged to reject Lycidas as no poetry because Dr. Johnson found it crude and unmelodious, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads as sheer metricised prose because Jeffreys remarked, "This will never do", Shelley's work as valueless because Matthew Arnold shook his head about it, Swinburne's early lyrics as meretricious stuff because Morley castigated them ruthlessly. And, mind you, these were no small and narrow critics. If they could have
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a blind spot in their critical retina and prove unreliable on occasion, Mr. Lai who is obviously restricted in his general sympathies and semi-perceptive of the spiritual light in poetry can hardly hope to impress us by his statement: "When I read any passage from Sri Aurobindo's 'epics' a sick-as-stale-lemonade shiver gallops up and down my spine at a rate impossible to compute" - or by his description of Savitri-like verse as "greasy, weak-spined and purple-adjectived poetry", "a loose expression of a loose emotion" - or by his warning that unless poets like him band together and produce a Manifesto "there is every likelihood that the blurred, rubbery and airy sentiments of a Sri Aurobindo will slowly clog our own poetry".
SPIRITUAL VISION AND PHILOSOPHY
One point we may grant the preposterous Mr. Lai. If poets like him tried to write in Sri Aurobindo's vein without any of the Aurobindonian discipline of consciousness and mystical drive of the inner being, they might very well turn out in verse a painted anaemia of pseudo-spirituality. Spiritual poetry cannot be written on the cheap, but that does not mean that what Sri Aurobindo writes answers to Mr. Lai's designation of Savitri. Prima facie, a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism. If he is in addition an intellectual and a philosopher of giant proportions, all the less probable is it that his mystical expression should be greasy and weak-spined and purple-adjectived. At his worst he might be in danger of seeming elusive and esoteric or else remote and recondite. Mr. Lai's terms are absolutely irrelevant and incorrect.
One cannot tax with either gaudiness or prettification Sri Aurobindo's revelatory glimpses of Supernature:
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The ways that lead to endless happiness
Ran like dream-smiles through meditating vasts:
Disclosed stood up in a gold moment's blaze
White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite. [pp. 39-40]
Nor can we accuse of empty effusiveness his packed profound depiction of what man in his ignorance of the meaning of his life and of his high and splendid fate never sees in the dynamics of world-history:
Only the Immortals on their deathless heights...
Can see the Idea, the Might that change Time's course,
Come maned with light from undiscovered worlds,
Hear, while the world toils on with its deep blind heart,
The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event,
Bearing the superhuman rider, near
And, impassive to earth's din and startled cry,
Return to the silence of the hills of God;
As lightning leaps, as thunder sweeps, they pass
And leave their mark on the trampled breast of Life. [pp. 53-54]
Nor is there any pompous vacuity in Sri Aurobindo's suggestive conjuration of the strange fugitive experience to which the brain opens itself as it pauses at times between an unknown above and an unknown below and feels
Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge
Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores - [p. 347]
or in that phrase about the divinised consciousness's vivid play of self-disclosure within its universal oneness:
Sight was a flame-throw from identity...[p. 301]
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All this is pure spiritual vision which seems to have made little impression on Mr. Lai during his reading of Savitri. But Savitri is spiritual philosophy as well as spiritual vision, and Mr. Lai is equally at sea with poetry that fuses the philosophical concept with mystic symbolism and revelation. Else how could he miss the concreteness and vividness of a large-idea'd utterance like:
Original and supernal Immanence
Of which all Nature's process is the art,
The cosmic Worker set his secret hand
To turn this frail mud-engine to heaven-use.
A Presence wrought behind the ambiguous screen:
It beat his soil to bear a Titan's weight,
Refining half-hewn blocks of natural strength
It built his soul into a statued God.
The Craftsman of the magic stuff of self
Who labours at his high and difficult plan
In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,
Modelled in inward Time his rhythmic parts. [pp. 24-25]
Or take the following philosophically spiritual lines:
And the creative eye of Eternity.[p. 41]
Or consider a passage like this - an example of something that occurs very frequently in Savitri - about earth's aspirations and her future fulfilment:
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An inarticulate whisper drives her steps
Of which she feels the force but not the sense;
A few rare intimations come as guides,
Immense divining flashes cleave her brain...
A vision meets her of supernal Powers
That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost
Approaching with estranged great luminous gaze....
Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,
Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods
Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time
What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,
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.
For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:
Heaven's privilege she claims as her own right.
Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,
Clear in a greater light than reason owns:
Our intuitions are its title-deeds;
Our souls accept what our blind thoughts refuse.
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,
The impossible God's sign of things to be. [pp. 51-52]
It would really be a critical apocalypse if one could learn from Mr. Lai where in any of these magnificent excerpts is a stale-lemonade quality or a riot of blurred, airy and rubbery sentiments. One might as well look for an orgy of purple adjectives, or weak-spined greasiness, or loose emotion loosely expressed, in the profound-sighted and high-thoughted slokas of the Gita. Transposed to the plane of spiritual vision and spiritual philosophy, illumined and enlarged in the consciousness of a seer-sage, all that Mr. Lai demands of a true poem is here in abundance: "a choreographical pattern within a state of tension produced in a refined sensibility" - "language used precisely, nobly and with a sense of purpose."
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UNJUST CRITICISM
To be sure, the whole of Savitri is not uniformly inspired, but that is natural. In a long epic-narrative in which a story is unfolded or a sequence of experiences developed, inspiration has to build sober bridges, so to speak, between the glories of its dramatic moments. Even Dante who is more uniformly inspired in his Divine Comedy than most of the other great epic poets has his slightly relaxed periods. And as for Homer in the Iliad and Milton in Paradise Lost, they either nod or plod on occasion and still remain mighty names in the roll of poetry.
Even when the verse is not a sober bridge between the glories of dramatic moments, there is bound to be in a poem of considerable length and ample range of subject an inequality in the expression. What we have to appreciate in Savitri is the rareness of the inequality and the presence of some authentic minimum of inspiration in the passages where the afflatus tends to sink. According to Mr. Lai, there is no authentic inspiration of any kind in the following:
All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff:
A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground.
All here was known by a spiritual sense:
Thought was not there but a knowledge near and one
Seized on all things by a moved identity...
Life was not there, but an impassioned force
Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps,
Felt as a subtle and spiritual power,
A quivering out from soul to answering soul,
A mystic movement, a close influence,
A free and happy and intense approach
Of being to being with no screen or check,
Without which life and love could never have been.
Body was not there, for bodies were needed not,
The soul itself was its own deathless form
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And met at once the touch of other souls
Close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true. [pp. 291-92]
Well, can we say to Mr. Lai: "You are right for at least once"?
I am sorry that even this concession is out of the question. Read without prejudice, the passage for all its comparative inferiority has nothing to sicken us. There is a balanced systematic development of the theme of soul-stuff being all, and the lines –
Seized on all things by a moved identity –
cannot be bettered for accurate expression in a certain style. The phrase "near and one" is particularly pregnant for any alert intellect and the word "seized" is concrete and vivid as is also the word "moved": a suggestive picture of a knowing by means of a closeness of things to one another because of an intensely felt unity of being, which proves thought-knowledge a cold superficiality and an utter superfluity, comes before the inner sense. The lines that provoke Mr. Lai to the utmost sarcasm are -
Finer than fineness, deeper than the deeps...
The second line is an echo of a turn we find at times in some Upanishads, it is a sort of paradoxical pointing of extremes and is not devoid of attractiveness or effectiveness: here it is particularly apt because the soul, in Yogic realisation, is the inmost entity of the inner world and the subtlest of all subtle forces. The first line is deemed by Mr. Lai an attempt at Miltonese which succeeds in being mere wind. He is mistaken in both respects. Miltonese is more packed in turn, more grandiose in language, less direct in suggestion and
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inclines towards a deliberate balance of emphasised idea: it might convert the line into something like
Life absent, save impassioned force be life.
Sri Aurobindo here has a straightforward style and statement expressing the truth that on an occult "plane," where Soul is the determining principle, there is a pure essence of vitality in both its ardent and its dynamic aspects, rather than what we know as Life Force. Of course, these lines and all the rest of the passage would hardly make an impact on a reader who has allowed the glib use of the word "soul" by wishy-washy and vacuous sentimentalists or by pseudo-mystics to spoil his stomach for it. Still less would an impact occur if a reader had from the very beginning no feel of what the soul could be like and looks upon every mention of it as a gaseous falsehood. Mr. Lal labours under a serious deficiency of soul-sense. Most non-mystic readers are somewhat in the same case, but not all lack as completely a sympathetic instinct for something which to the mystic is more "close, blissful, concrete, wonderfully true" (a phrase, by the way, very felicitously worded and rhythmed) than even his bodily existence. Mr. Lai himself says vis-à-vis the passage: "I see nothing, there is nothing I can hang on to." This could just as well be because of his own clinging to the surface mentality as because of the supposed want of poetry in the lines.
Not that Sri Aurobindo is here at his best. But if we admit that Sri Aurobindo is here perhaps at his worst we still pay him a tremendous compliment. For the lines, by their harmonious significance and word and rhythm, remain poetry for all their falling below such bursts of inspiration as we quoted earlier - and even those examples cannot provide a really adequate notion of the sustained splendour Savitri has to offer nor of the huge variety of poetic merit in it, passages of a spiritualised "natural magic" and mysticised "human interest" as well as Yogicised philosophy and direct occult
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insight into the individual and the cosmos. Yes, the lines remain poetry and become more poetic when taken in their proper context as part of a fuller record in which is set alive before us an actual experience of the plane of the World-Soul. Terms like "soul-stuff" and "sky of soul" and "deep soul-ground" acquire a degree of concrete meaning that cannot arise when the passage is torn off from what goes before and comes after and when no indication is supplied of the totality of which it is an integral and almost inseparable portion.
Mr. Lai does injustice to the passage by the way he has presented it and the attitude he adopts towards it. But the worst crime he commits against the critic's office is to choose from Sri Aurobindo a passage that is not plenarily Aurobindonian, and declare it to be all that Sri Aurobindo is capable of throughout the nearly thirteen thousand lines published in Volume I of Savitri which has been available to Mr. Lai. That is an act of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, betraying a want of scruple added to limitation of aesthesis. No doubt, Savitri is not always easy to appreciate, it is mostly a new kind of poetry with a vision and language caught as if directly from hidden heights and depths and breadths of a more than human consciousness. Sri Aurobindo himself felt that it would take time to obtain wide recognition. But for an unprejudiced reader of quick, supple and penetrating imagination there is enough in it of recognisable excellence to win for its author the richest laurels - especially among his countrymen who may be expected to respond more readily to a sovereign spiritual utterance.
If, however, every Indian reader turns out to be like Mr. Lal I can only sigh and quote two lines - "a state of tension produced in a refined sensibility" and "language used precisely, nobly and with a sense of purpose", I suppose - from one of Mr. Lai's own recent and definitely non-Aurobindonian poems:
Here in dejection
I don't know what to do.
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(b)1
Fearing lest Mr. Lai should miss my criticism of him I took care to send him a copy of the issue of Mother India which had featured my attack. He was kind enough to acknowledge it and give consideration to that piece in a letter (November 22, 1951) from Calcutta:
Dear Mr. Sethna:
Thank you for sending me your rejoinder to my article on modern Indo-Anglian poets in the Sunday Standard. There was a time when Mother India used to be sold here regularly, but now I fail to find it on the news-stands; and if you hadn't forwarded me a copy I might very well have missed your interesting objections and counter-arguments.
I am flattered that you should think my remarks worth two lengthy pages of reply. To speak the truth, I brought in the poetry of Sri Aurobindo chiefly as a sidelight; my main purpose was to set a system of rules and methods which I hope would be helpful in encouraging the present efflorescence in our poetry and giving it a sense of direction and sureness.
I think I made it fairly clear from the very beginning that whatever I said was in no way an assertion of dogmatic belief; I divided poetry-appreciating people into two sorts, those who could derive what they thought was "poetic" satisfaction from the poetry of Sri Aurobindo and those who, for various reasons, the chief perhaps being an imperfect training in the enjoyment of spiritual poetry, could not. In spite of your many cogent arguments and very levelheaded attempt to puncture my thesis, I am still a member of the group which cannot find pleasure in Sri Aurobindo. If this were taken to mean that I condemn people who do, my ignorance would be shamefully evident. Nowhere in my article did I try to determine or standardize taste; I was
________
1 Based on a feature in Mother India, October, 1968.
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advocating a policy for our poets which might help them to crystallize their productions into a poetic school, which I thought was urgently needed if the Indo-Anglian revival was to remain a revival and not fizzle out in a diffuse display of eccentric sparks.
This kind of argument could carry on for ever, and justification is always a somewhat hateful process anyway. I hope nevertheless that you will permit me a few words, if not to justify my remarks (if they are worth anything, time will justify them; if they aren't, I wouldn't like to play hypocrite), at least to clear up a few points that have arisen in the course of your rejoinder.
It is quite possible that I may have "a blind spot on my critical retina" when I chastise Sri Aurobindo, but this should in no way invalidate my argument that the job of all good poetry is to communicate an emotion to the reader even when he has no emotional and only the faintest intellectual idea of what that emotion is. That was the way I was educated to many kinds and strata of emotion not available in our humdrum petit-bourgeois family; and my experience (and those of my friends) is where I start from. You protest that the reader must have some point of contact for the poet to touch. But of course. The reader is a passive radio set on which many wavelengths are contacted and received; but you do not understand Bangkok or Teheran. The wavelength's job is to be communicable; if I find I cannot make head or tail of Sri Aurobindo or Wallace Stevens, I think I am within my rights to push on to a greener pasture. Perhaps if I spent time on Sri Aurobindo, I might pick up something. But you cannot compel that from me.
I am afraid it is not quite right to say that "a master of spiritual experience, with a consummate knowledge of the English language (Sri Aurobindo was educated from his seventh to his twenty-first year in England), is not likely to pen feverishly feeble inanities and pass them off as mysticism". Spiritual experience means nothing (like all
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other experience) unless it can be precisely communicated to a person not acquainted with it. To imply that fourteen years in England are likely to give a person a mastery of the English language, would seem to ignore the fact that there are Englishmen who have spent lifetimes in England without being able to improve their grammar to the extent of writing a letter to the Editor of Picture Post. Consummate knowledge of a language may be a very dangerous thing sometimes, especially for a poet. If knowledge were all, every leader-writer would be a poet. The essential thing is to get to feel a language in a kind of disciplined debauch. Finally, you imply that I condemn Sri Aurobindo for deliberately palming off poetic hypocrisy. This is absurd. Though I have no gauge to judge the genuineness of Sri Aurobindo's mysticism, I think it is fair and reasonable to say that he was a sincere mystic, perhaps a profound mystic. But that does not ipso facto turn him into a correspondingly profound poet.
Thank you for your stimulating criticism. I hope our differences on poetic matters do not stand in the way of a cordial personal relationship.
You may publish this letter if you like.
Very sincerely, P. Lal
Here was evidently a call for a second rejoinder, which did make its way from Bombay to its target, though a trifle belatedly (December 20,1951):
Dear Mr. Lal,
I received your letter on the eve of my departure to Pondicherry. Once there, I did not feel like entering into any correspondence. Now I am back and, with part of the work on Mother India disposed of, I turn to your criticism of my rejoinder. I am sorry you have had to wait three weeks or more.
Your letter is, to my mind, a much more dignified and genuine document than your article, though even in my
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counter-attack I have not refused to grant that you had some pointed and pertinent things to say on poetry in general and Indo-Anglian poetry in particular. If what you say now had been all your thesis, I don't think I would have plunged into a defence of Sri Aurobindo. The one impression I carried away from your article was precisely that you were making an assertion of dogmatic belief. At the start you record just your own violent reaction against Savitri; but a little later you say something which is exactly the opposite of your present statement that people who do not derive poetic satisfaction from Sri Aurobindo's epic fail chiefly because of an imperfect training in the enjoyment of spiritual poetry. You actually try to prove that you are quite competent to pass judgment on spiritual poetry: you list your qualifications by commencing favourably on Dante, Eliot, St. John of the Cross, Kabir and Chandidas. The suggestion is unmistakable: Sri Aurobindo is a poetic failure and not merely a poet to whom you are allergic. It is this suggestion that drew my fire.
I do not for a moment deny what you write about poetic communication. It is indeed the job of the poet to convey his experience or vision with effective art. But just because you cannot kindle up to a certain kind of poetry you have no right to vilify it. You have only the right to set it aside (if you are not inclined to make an effort to be catholic). You may push on to what is for you a greener pasture, with a shrug of your shoulders signifying that the stuff you are leaving behind may be very good yet is barren land to you. You cannot talk of merely different tastes and in the same breath pontificate as if from an absolute standard.
Even with regard to "tastes" your division of readers into two classes is rather dogmatic. There are hundreds who can appreciate all that moves you and at the same time relish Sri Aurobindo. Take me, for instance. I can read with pleasure the type of poetry you favour, without losing one bit of my intense delight in Savitri. You represent a rather small
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class which has allowed some obscure prejudice to colour its judgment. There seems almost to be some perversity at work, eager to run down somebody who, some instinct tells one, is truly great. C. R. M. seldom lets an opportunity go by of having a fling at Sri Aurobindo's poetry, whether earlier or later, without ever having taken the trouble to read him sufficiently. If you look at my rejoinder to a comment made by him apropos of my book on Sri Aurobindo's blank verse, hexameters and recent mystical poems, you will be surprised to see how ignorant as well as wrong-headed he was at every turn. Some time back Tambimuttu, to illustrate bad English by Indians, pronounced that there was a sentence of Sri Aurobindo's which simply screamed out for correction. He just couldn't help picking on a writer whose English even Englishmen had highly praised. As Tambimuttu did not quote the sentence in question, I had no means of finding out whether he was making much of a printer's devil or of a slip such as is possible even to a great writer in a hurry or merely colliding with a usage beyond him. You, I am sure, have no more than perfunctory acquaintance with Savitri - and yet you don't hesitate to be cleverly nasty about it. But I must say that you were not very clever when, on the strength of the supposed "loose emotion loosely expressed" of one short passage wrenched out of its context, you tried to insinuate that the nearly thirteen thousand published lines of Savitri, Vol. I, were a sickening staleness!
You are a man of considerable talent. I have read several poems of yours and they are not all of the flat quality of the two lines I have quoted at the end of my article to hoist you with your own petard of non-Aurobindonian poetic technique. If you really can't stand Sri Aurobindo after reading enough of him, one can't help you - much less compel you to like him. But I do regret the "blind spot". You would add much to your critical sensitivity if you could feel even a little of the gigantic inspiration that has given us this epic which can rank in value with creations like the Ramayana and the
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Mahabharata on the one hand and on the other the Rigveda and the Upanishads.
What I regret more is that even in the present letter you do not quite rest with stating that Sri Aurobindo does not appeal to you. The tendency to summon arguments attempting to show that he is worthless is not absent. Just look at your line of thought about knowledge of English. Englishmen who spend lifetimes in their own country may still remain unable to improve their grammar to the extent of penning a letter to Picture Post. But Indians who spend in England fourteen of their most formative years in the direct study of English and pass through Cambridge with distinction and show an undeniably extraordinary capacity to master difficult languages like Greek and Latin are not liable to be in the same case. If you'll forgive my being blunt, your reasoning is patently twisted. Secondly, I never said that consummate knowledge of English is by itself enough to make one a poet. You are arguing with a dummy of your own invention. If you will look again at the sentence of mine which you have quoted, you will mark that I am pointing out the unlikelihood of a vacuous pseudo-mysticism being penned and palmed off as the genuine article by a Master of Yoga who brings to his self-expression an expert intimacy with the English language. This is something quite different and contains sound sense. I agree that the essential thing is, as you put it in a memorable phrase, to get to feel a language in a kind of disciplined debauch - but surely consummate knowledge of a tongue is not inapt to conduce to such a debauch. In fact, the knowledge cannot really be consummate without the feel you have in mind. I wonder how you can speak of ordinary leader-writers being consummate in knowledge: they are no more than efficient at their best.
I had no intention to charge you with considering Sri Aurobindo a bogus mystic - though I shouldn't be amazed if you did consider him such, for you appear to have no idea of the wonderful spiritual personality that he was or
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of the perfect blend of illumination and intellect that his philosophical or other expositions are. If you had an idea, would you so easily miss seeing how that sentence of mine could imply only that Sri Aurobindo with his qualifications, both spiritual and literary, would naturally be a sufficient critic to himself and would know if by any chance he wrote anything misty instead of mystic?
I appreciate the courtesy of your letter. I like the way you have taken my criticism and the broadness of thought that makes you hope our differences on poetic matters may not stand against a cordial personal relationship.
Sincerely yours,
K. D. Sethna
It would be ungracious on my part to omit the short note (December 24,1951) I received from Mr. Lal.
My dear Mr. Sethna,
Thank you for your letter of the 20th.
Arguments like ours can be prolonged interminably, and what we ultimately reach may be simply - and not very regrettably - an agreement to differ.
It is Christmas now and hatchets are best buried. May I extend to you my sincerest wishes for a Happy Christmas and New Year? I shall in 1952 read Savitri with greater care, in order to cultivate a more perfect sympathy for it.
Very sincerely,
P. Lal
(c)
It is very doubtful whether Mr. Lai carried out his pious resolve. For, his prejudices do not appear to have essentially diminished, though they are within a somewhat changed framework. He has recently brought out a big book, Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology and a Credo, partly
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to refute another critic, Buddhadeva Bose. In The Concise Encyclopaedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, edited by Stephen Spender and Donald Hall (1963), Bose levelled in effect the charge of rootlessness, incompetence and mediocrity against the sort of work Mr. Lal favours and practises. Bose's thesis was: "the best of Indian-English verse belongs to the nineteenth century, when Indians came nearest to 'speaking, thinking and dreaming in English'. In authenticity of diction and feeling Sri Aurobindo far outshines the others, but Toru Dutt's charming pastiche still holds some interest. As for present-day 'Indo-Anglians', they are earnest and not without talent, but it is difficult to see how they can develop as poets in a language which they have learnt from books and seldom hear spoken in the streets or even in their own houses, and whose two great sources lie beyond the seven seas."
Mr. Lal has several excellent things to say on the creative role of English in India at the present day no less than in the nineteenth century. Bose appears to have tilted the balance too roughly, too sweepingly. But Mr. Lai fails to cut an effective figure in any other respect. His reaction to Bose on Sri Aurobindo is: "I am struck dumb by this fatuous remark. If Mr. Bose thinks Sri Aurobindo 'far outshines the others' in 'authenticity of diction and feeling', he is entitled to his opinion - but should he put it down in an encyclopaedia for all the world to see?"
First, Mr. Lal is under the delusion that Bose's compliment to Sri Aurobindo in The Concise Encyclopaedia is a crazy one-man opinion or, at most, the view of a hopeless minority. Not that big battalions in themselves count, or that an encyclopaedia should be partisan in spirit. But such a book is surely the right place for a critical stance shared by many who can claim at least as much literary training and experience as Mr. Lal. Even within his own clique, G. S. Sharat Chandra ranks Sri Aurobindo among great writers, R. de L. Furtado finds his poetry impressive and S. R. Mokashi-Punekar manages both to contradict Bose and to outdo him in eulogy:
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"Why is Sri Aurobindo 19th-century please: I admire Sri Aurobindo. If I were more courageous and had the necessary genius, I would have tried to imitate him."
Secondly, Mr. Lal and his band of Post-Independence poets have not gauged the proper import of Bose's remark on Sri Aurobindo. Bose is referring to the nineteenth-century writers and it is in relation to them that he considers Sri Aurobindo as excelling everybody. Next to Sri Aurobindo he fancies Toru Dutt. He is not directly bearing on "present-day 'Indo-Anglians' ", whom he groups separately. Mr. Lai et al should really have no grudge against Bose within the universe of discourse where the comparative estimate was made. Do they contend that Sri Aurobindo is inferior in authenticity of diction and feeling to Toru Dutt and the rest of the nineteenth-century poets?
It is not directly but indirectly that Bose puts down Mr. Lai et al. Inasmuch as the latter are not even rated successful wielders of the English tongue in its poetic aspect they fall under Bose's censure. Here they are lumped as inferior to all the good nineteenth-century poets, not only to Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo, being the best of those poets in Bose's eyes, turns out to be the greatest exceller of these inferior writers. The terms of the condemnation are somewhat different in their posture from the over-touchy belief of the Lalians about them. However, apart from the lack of subtle perception in the matter, the Lalians are right in opining that Bose sets them lower than Sri Aurobindo. Actually, if Bose were comparing them with him, his compliment to Sri Aurobindo would not prove, in the world of his values, very laudatory in itself. For when he deems them so insignificant, Sri Aurobindo's greatness could very easily be no more than relative: he might well be a Triton among the minnows.
Not that Bose himself does anything less than hold him in high respect. And that really is the head and front of his offence to Mr. Lai. But Mr. Lal is not so brash today as he was in the past. In spite of the word "fatuous" to which he
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is provoked vis-à-vis Bose, he has come to a sort of specious compromise about Savitri. He writes:
"I realise that I may be charged, among the brighter and still wrathful younger groups of Tndo-Anglians' with critical flabbiness and senility. What K. Raghavendra Rao said of Buckenham's Paolo and Francesca (included in this volume1) in a letter to Kewlian Sio in 1950 - 'self-consciously literary and needlessly verbose; some good lines, yes, but the whole is verbose' - might be said of Sri Aurobindo also, but a fairer perspective is now called for.
"My private quarrel with Sri Aurobindo's technical abilities and philosophical system has nothing to do with the recognition of his importance as a guru. He is the only modern poet, in any Indian language, to have attempted the large philosophical poem.... I still find reason to complain of the nebulous images, and think the iambic pentameter fashioned by Sri Aurobindo to be weak-spined for most purposes. But there is a real attempt towards moulding a new verse form, and there is an admirable manner of philosophically transforming the Savitri story in the Mahabharata. The failure of a Titan is still cause for sorrow and awe, and in such failure, as distinct from petty losses, lie seeds of fruition later. Savitri is the work of a poet steeped in the Greek and Latin classics who realised, as he put it, that 'the nineteenth century in India was imitative, self-forgetful, artificial'. It aimed, he added, 'at a successful reproduction of Europe in India', forgetting that 'death in one's own dharma is better; it is a dangerous thing to follow the law of another's nature'. Such a death brings new birth, 'success in an alien path means only successful suicide'. Savitri is a great Pyrrhic victory."
It is not easy to make out Mr. Lai's meaning. One inclines to adapt K. Raghavendra Rao: "some good phrases, yes, but the whole is verbose." What is the sense of disapproving of "Sri Aurobindo's technical abilities" and of thinking "the iambic
1 [Sri Aurobindo - The Poet]
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pentameter fashioned by Sri Aurobindo to be weak-spined for most purposes" and then turning round to say: "there is a real attempt towards moulding a new verse form"? Again, how are we to manage in the same breath Mr. Lai's "private quarrel with Sri Aurobindo's...philosophical system" and his declaration not only that Sri Aurobindo alone among modern Indian poets has attempted the large philosophical poem but also that "there is an admirable manner of philosophically transforming the Savitri story in the Mahabharata? One seems to move through sludge trying to grasp all that roundabout talk on death in one's own dharma being better than life in another's and on Savitri's being such a death rather than the nineteenth-century's "imitative, self-forgetful, artificial" life, and on Sri Aurobindo's being a Titan whose failure and death in Savitri brings a new birth or, alternatively, whose great victory in this poem is achieved at a tremendous cost and so is a great defeat as well. Further, what is the point of the statement that the realisation of the nineteenth-century's imitativeness, self-forgetfulness and artificiality by Sri Aurobindo who was a poet steeped in the Greek and Latin classics lay at the back of the writing of Savitri? Does it suggest that in Savitri the Greek and Latin classics are at work along with a break-away from the nineteenth-century's defects? Or are those defects equivalent to one's being steeped in the classics of Greece and Rome as were the Europeans of the nineteenth-century whose dharma the Indians eagerly adopted? We fumble and stumble in all this crammed and mixed-up endeavour to give Sri Aurobindo something with one hand and take it away with the other. If any piece of writing which purports to come to a conclusion can be called a Pyrrhic victory, this is it.
Pyrrhic essentially because the reader does not quite know where he stands and especially because what remains over in the reader's mind are words like: "the large philosophical poem", "moulding a new verse form", "an admirable manner of philosophically transforming the Savitri story",
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"a Titan", "awe", "seeds of fruition". Evidently Mr. Lal feels somewhere in himself that an epic of nearly 24,000 lines cannot just be ignored or bypassed. And, reading on in Mr. Lai's Introduction, we come across some light on the positive side of that see-saw passage. He says: "Toru Dutt..., Sarojini Naidu, and Sri Aurobindo - whatever their weaknesses - have this great strength in common though in varying degrees: they have Indian responses to life and things." And also a little before those zigzag asseverations, against which their author anticipated a charge of "critical flabbiness and senility" from even his own followers, we have a ray of illumination: "very recently there has been a feeling that the work of Sri Aurobindo and others of the 'mystic school' needs perhaps to be revalued instead of dismissed cursorily."
It would seem to be in deference to a slowly growing national sense of Sri Aurobindo's greatness not only as a spiritual figure but also as the poet of a spirituality which is Indian without ceasing to be integral that Mr. Lai is moved to make some concessions. His own personal attitude appears to be basically the same as before, looking askance at what he terms in one place even now "the stilted mystic-incense style of Sri Aurobindo". And equally unchanged is the ineptitude of his fault-finding. Take the criticism that Sri Aurobindo's "real attempt towards moulding a new verse-form" has still resulted in an "iambic pentameter ...weak-spined for most purposes"? Has Mr. Lal ever sought to see this "verse-form" in the concrete, definite and restricted terms Sri Aurobindo has employed? In a letter to me in 1933 Sri Aurobindo wrote:
"Savitri...is blank verse without enjambment (except rarely) each line a thing by 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. You can't take that as a model - it is too difficult a rhythm-structure to
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be a model. I shall myself know whether it is a success or not, only when I have finished two or three books."
For such a model the technical requirements have been clearly put down by Sri Aurobindo in another letter:
"The things I lay most stress on...are whether each line in itself is the inevitable thing not only as a whole but in each word; whether there is the right distribution of sentence lengths (an immensely important thing in this kind of blank verse); whether the lines are in their right place, for all the lines may be perfect, but they may not combine perfectly together - bridges may be needed, alterations of position so as to create the right development and perspective etc., etc. Pauses hardly exist in this kind of blank verse; variations of rhythm as between the lines, of caesura, of the distribution of long and short, clipped and open syllables, manifold constructions of vowel and consonant sounds, alliteration, assonances, etc., distribution into one line, two line, three or four or five line, many line sentences, care to make each line tell by itself in its own mass and force and at the same time form a harmonious whole sentence - these are the important things.... I may add that the technique does not go by any set mental rule - for the object is not perfect technical elegance according to precept but sound-significance filling out the word-significance. If that can be done by breaking rules, well, so much the worse for the rule."
To dismiss this kind of special iambic pentameter as "weak-spined" - an expression which must have a technical sense or is worth nothing - and to imagine it to be meant for "most purposes" argues a critical mind content with blanket phraseology and not caring to attend to significant formal minutiae. So the mention of his "private quarrel with Sri Aurobindo's technical abilities" is meaningless.
As for the quarrel with Sri Aurobindo's "philosophical system", it can only connote - in distinction from the "admirable manner of philosophically transforming the Savitri story" -that Mr. Lal finds incongenial the type of mysticism or spirituality
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which Sri Aurobindo has systematically worked out as a philosophy. In the context of poetic problems the quarrel is irrelevant - neither here nor there.
What remains, then? Only "the stilted mystic-incense style" and the "nebulous images". Here, all that Mr. Lal has so far produced as justification for himself is that ancient citation of his of 17 lines out of Savitri's 23,800 and odd. Even at the time he picked them out he was not unaware of objections and he has tried to meet them: "The reader now may have misunderstood me altogether, and started to say: It's all very well for you to puncture a specific passage, especially a passage dealing with spiritual vision and realisation. Don't you see that states of ecstasy and beatitude are hardest to communicate to a person who has not passed through identical spiritual experiences?' " The answer he provides is no more than that a poem's "rhythm, linguistic precision and incantation" must be such as to communicate even the most uncommon states -and "Sri Aurobindo does not satisfy me on this basic level". Well, suppose the passage in question does lack in "rhythm, linguistic precision and incantation": still, how would Mr. Lai be justified in pushing away the gigantic whole of Savitri on the strength of a minuscule part of it? Nowhere does he come to grips with the reader's query on this head.
Mr. Lal's criticism on every count is patently inadequate, patently prejudiced - a personal allergy and nothing else. And when we come to the issue raised by his inclusion of two poems of Sri Aurobindo's in his own anthology, what do we realise? Mentioning Sri Aurobindo and five other poets in whose favour he has relaxed the chronological principle of including "only poems written after 1947", he tells us: "The poems selected from their works show 'modernism', and since four died after Independence and two are still with us, I felt that some idea should be given of the change in idiom and feeling that was beginning to make itself felt some time before the first major 'modern' spearhead launched itself in the years 1947-1950."
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In the first place, does the selection evince any guiding sense of revaluing the Aurobindonian "mystic school"? In the second, is it actuated by a recognition of "Indian responses to life and things"? Out of the two poems one most amusingly pillories modern materialism and its egregious theories about man's mind and soul and its rash playing about with nuclear energy. No directly mystical element is there and the sole Indianism is an allusion to the Bo-tree in the midst of four allusions from which three touch on European things: the epics of Homer, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Napoleon's career. The other poem is wittily quizzical about a cat. There just one phrase - "fur-footed Brahman" - brings India in. And that phrase too is not exactly a key-expression. On the score of the non-mysticism and the non-Indianism of the poems chosen, I suppose we are expected to believe that we are forced on to them because not only Savitri but also the vast corpus of the remainder of Sri Aurobindo's poems and plays can supply nothing at all of re-valuable mysticism and desirable Indianism suiting a "modern" mind. What we really come to see is simply that Mr. Lal is either unacquainted with Sri Aurobindo's voluminous output or totally biased and therefore unable to spot for his ends even "some good lines" which he has theoretically granted.
Now we may face the "modernism" said to be making itself felt some time before the Lalians brought it to a focus soon after Independence. Let us look at the poems in full:
A DREAM OF SURREAL SCIENCE
One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink
At the Mermaid, capture immortality;
A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink
Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.
1 Mr. Lal, for some reason, has a new name: One Dreamed and Saw.
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A thyroid, meditating almost nude
Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light
And, rising from its mighty solitude,
Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold path all right.
A brain by a disordered stomach driven
Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell,
From St. Helena went, perhaps to Heaven.
Thus wagged on the surreal world, until
A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout.
DESPAIR ON THE STAIRCASE
Mute stands she, lonely on the topmost stair,
An image of magnificent despair;
The grandeur of a sorrowful surmise
Wakes in the largeness of her glorious eyes.
In her beauty's dumb significant pose I find
The tragedy of her mysterious mind.
Yet is she stately, grandiose, full of grace.
A musing mask is her immobile face.
Her tail is up like an unconquered flag,
Its dignity knows not the right to wag.
An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,
Whether she is spirit, woman or a cat,
Is now the problem I am wondering at.
From the picture Mr. Lai has tried to conjure up of Sri Aurobindo one would never anticipate such poetry. If Sri Aurobindo is capable of writing in this vein, he certainly cannot be a hopeless addict to "nebulous images" and "weak-spined" pentameters. Here also are pentameters, though not blank verse, but they are full of vigour and variety. Here
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also images are at play, but they are handled by a master of precision and particularity. Nor is the author of either poem thinking and imagining in a way quite other than he was wont to do before the "modern" movement in India started faintly stirring in the pre-Independence days. In the early years of our century Sri Aurobindo had already written A Vision of Science, in which the poet dreams of three Angels striving within him for mastery. Towards the end of it the second Angel, Science, is asked by the departing Angel of Religion to try and know who she herself really is:
And Science confidently, "Nothing am I but earth,
Tissue and nerve and from the seed a birth,
A mould, a plasm, a gas, a little that is much.
In these grey cells that quiver to each touch
The secret lies of man; they are the thing called I.
Matter insists and matter makes reply.
Shakespeare was this; this force in Jesus yearned
And conquered by the cross; this only learned
The secret of the suns that blaze afar;
This was Napoleon's giant mind of war."
I heard and marvelled in myself to see
The infinite deny infinity.
Yet the weird paradox seemed justified;
Even mysticism shrank out-mystified.
By a strange coincidence, we have exactly fourteen lines again - and the same irony which is yet charged with a high seriousness is present, though with less exuberance and humour. Sri Aurobindo was "modern" two or three decades before the Lalians were born. The fact is: whatever else he was - and he was a great number of things, a rich manifold of culture - he was never less than modern. And his imagination was always powerful and concrete. And, if ever "nebulous", it was only so in the sense that in picturing a nebula in poetry you have to be very accurately nebulous.
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The other poem has no early counterpart but the realistic awareness of animal existence and of its beauty or mystery was never absent. It goes back to Sri Aurobindo's late teens when he saw
in emerald fire
Upon the sun-kissed wall.
In his late twenties he has a bird-simile with a striking Latinism - "extravagance" - which, in the root-language, would mean "wandering beyond (the limits)":
As a bright bird comes flying
From airy extravagance to his own home,
And breasts his mate, and feels her all his goal -
and there is an animal-vision too in a supernatural setting, the Death-God Yama's four-eyed dogs which, on either side of him,
rested prone,
Watchful, with huge heads on their paws advanced...
In 1942, Collected Poems and Plays (which, most comically, Mr. Lai's anthology always calls Collected Poems and Prayers) gives us in a free-verse composition when Sri Aurobindo was past seventy an unforgettable evocation of Death incarnate "in forests of the night":
Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless paws of grandeur and murder.
What poet in Mr. Lai's anthology has anything to match this sight and insight? We should have to go to the pregnant details of Blake's "fearful symmetry" "burning
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bright" or to Rilke's painting of the tiger with a few vital pen-strokes:
Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte.
(Velvety softness wedding to striding strength.)
As for the humour blended with imaginative empathy in Sri Aurobindo's approach to the common cat, it too stands unrivalled by the anthology's other entries. Mr. Lai himself comes nearest to it in one line on Blake's and Rilke's and Sri Aurobindo's beast of prey -
The tiger licking his five-haired snout -
but how far he is from the fun no less than the fineness of the couplet:
Indeed there is more vitality, more feel of reality along with subtlety of perception - more modernness - in this alleged practitioner of the "stilted mystic-incense style" than in all the moderns claiming "the right to wag" their tongues under the inspiration of Mr. Lai's imaginarily "unconquered flag".
And when we look back at Sri Aurobindo writing poetry nearly four decades before Independence and confronting not a feline problem as in Despair on the Staircase but one before which he still might wonder "whether she is spirit" or "woman" we find what we may term a magical realism which is the very opposite of nebulousness in a pejorative sense or any mystic-incense stiltedness:
Someone leaping from the rocks
Past me ran with wind-blown locks
Like a startled bright surmise
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Visible to mortal eyes, -
Just a cheek of frightened rose
That with sudden beauty glows,
Just a footstep like the wind
And a hurried glance behind,
And then nothing, - as a thought
Escapes the mind ere it is caught.
Someone of the heavenly rout
From behind the veil ran out.
Compare the exquisitely suggestive clarity of this poem with Mr. Lai's prominently put lyric which may be taken to set some kind of example of how to write in a non-Aurobindonian manner:
The Parrot's Death
When rains fall
Is all astir
My green soul,
My prisoner.
November.
Middle age
Struggles, needing
More than a cage.
Soul is to cage
As love to foe.
My loved one, my bird,
Take heart and go!
Where is any modernism, Indian or otherwise, here? No doubt, the opening stanza, in spite of the somewhat awkward inversion in lines 2 and 3, has some charm; but so also has Jean Ingelow's nineteenth-century heart-throb:
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When sparrows build, and the leaves break forth,
My old sorrow wakes and cries.
Ingelow, however, is at least free from "blurred sentiments" - Mr. Lai's bête noire in relation to that notorious quotation of his from Savitri. And, of course, most free is the locus classicus of rain-stirring: Chaucer's vision of the pilgrimage to Canterbury
When that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote.
But we can hardly assert the same of Mr. Lai's lyric. Nor are its "blurred sentiments" left by him to work themselves out in the normal way on the human-animal level. They are raised to a climax of cloudiness (natural, surely, "when rains fall") with the use, twice repeated, of that highly ambiguous word "soul". Better the "soul-stuff" and "soul-ground" of the peccant passage than the insipid parroting of the word without the smallest whiff of "an ampler ether, a diviner air" to give it even a little chance of acquiring a poetic body.
I am afraid criticism like Mr. Lai's will not induce the slightest wavering in anyone's literary allegiance to Sri Aurobindo. And I dare to prophesy that as Mr. Lai grows up he will find himself distant from his present uneasy compromise with regard to Sri Aurobindo's greatness as a poetic figure - more distant than he now is, in his manner though not essentially in his matter, from the essay of 1951 in The Sunday Standard in which he still notes "some interesting points" even while he quite frankly admits it to be "a callow, opinionated, over-zealous and slickly-written piece". There is a vein of honesty and good will in Mr. Lai, in addition to a velleity somewhere not to be too narrow in poetic appreciation, all of which is sadly wanting in some other members of his group. These qualities, vague though some of them are, give me the hope that with advancing years he will more and more see eye to
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eye with me about the work of one who was his own severest critic and who taught his disciples to test all poetic production by the highest standards but at the same time warned them against confining such standards to just one particular school: above all he asked them to keep their minds clear of the penchants of the moment, the exaggerations of personal or local tastes and wide open to every poetic possibility.
(Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, 1999, pp. 373-413)
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POETRY IN SRI AUROBINDO'S VISION1
LIGHTS FROM PASSAGES IN SAVITRI
We have said a good deal about Sri Aurobindo the Poet. And we have looked upon Savitri as the peak - or rather the many-peaked Himalaya - of Aurobindonian poetry. Also, in dealing with the supreme altitude as well as the inferior heights we have given glimpses of the Poet's view of the poetic phenomenon both in its essence and in its progression. It may not be amiss to dwell at a little more length on some of the fundamentals involved.
The easiest way to do so would be to string together or else paraphrase a number of passages from Sri Aurobindo's literary criticism. But I should think a mode more relevant in a series of discourses on the Poet Sri Aurobindo would be to pick out lines from his greatest poem - Savitri - and lay bare with their help his view on being a poet and, wherever necessary, use the literary criticism for confirmation. Academics may frov but the poetry-reader is likely to appreciate the novelty of the treatment.
We may launch on our venture with a verse from Book V, Canto 2, where Sri Aurobindo narrates the early life of Satyavan. Satyavan is called
1 Adapted from Nos. 2, 3 and 4 of Talks on Poetry delivered to students of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. [Published in Mother India and later in the book Sri Aurobindo -The Poet (1970).]
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A wanderer communing with depth and marge. [p. 393]
This semi-Wordsworthian turn is a suggestive summary of the poet's mood in its basic orientation. The poet moves among a diversity of things but everywhere he gets into living touch with what seems to overpass the limits of life, he is in his mood always at the edge of things, communing with their ultimate aspects and looking over the edge to commune with the beyond and to experience profundities in all with which he establishes a contact of consciousness. And we may include, in "communing", the poet's relationship with marge and depth in his reader's being by means of revealing words that draw a response from it. Communion would thus cover communication.
Yes, this line is a good hint of the poetic process. But it is not specifically what I wish to put forth. The verses I want to quote are two groups, each consisting of six lines - and, incidentally though far from superfluously, four passages relevant to one group. The sestet with which the passages are linked is a straight run, the other's components do not occur immediately in sequence but are made an ensemble by me. I shall take up first the second group and try to elicit from it a many-shaded picture of poetic psychology and metaphysics according to Sri Aurobindo.
The ensemble is from Book V, Canto 3. As in the line about the "wanderer", Sri Aurobindo is not exclusively describing here the poetic mood and process. I am adapting to my own purpose some phrases of ms that can be taken to describe them because they are portions of a context where the inward development of Satyavan is described in connection with his experience and exploration of Nature, a development on a broad scale that does issue also in art-activity on Satyavan's part. Here are the lines:
As if to a deeper country of the soul
Transposing the vivid imagery of earth,
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Through an inner seeing and sense a wakening came....
I caught for some eternal eye the sudden
Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool,...
And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity... [pp. 404-5]
In the first three lines we have the indication of a new awareness which is not on the surface but in the recesses of our being, the recesses that are called "soul". On a hasty reading, we may be inclined to think that the word "soul" is here employed in a general way for our self and that several countries are ascribed to it, some shallow and some deep, and that the reference is not so much to the soul in a special connotation as to "a deeper country". Such an interpretation would be a mistake. The soul is not here a generalisation, it is acutely contrasted to "earth": the two turns - "of the soul" and "of the earth" - are balanced against each other: there are only two countries implied, the country of earth and the country of the soul, the former a surface region, the latter a "deeper" domain. And by "earth" with its "vivid imagery" is meant the contents of our normal waking consciousness packed with thousands of observations, whereas the "soul" stands for a consciousness other than the life-force and mind operating in conjunction with a material body and brain. This consciousness is ordinarily like a dream-region, but the poet undergoes a novel "wakening" there by which he reinterprets in a different and deeper light the earth-experience. Nor is 'hat all. His reinterpretation involves the exp^-ience of new inings in the soul's depths, things which are as if earthly objects "transposed" into them but which in reality exist in their own right, native to those depths and constituting the originals whose copies or representatives are earthly objects. The specific quality of the experience of these originals is to be gauged from the use of the word "soul" and no other. Poetry is primarily not the exclamation of the mind and its concepts, not the cry of the life-force and its desires, not the appeal of the body and its instincts. All of them are audible
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in it, but in tune with a central note beyond them which -as Longinus recognised centuries ago - strangely transports us, a note charged with some ecstatic ideality, a magical intimacy, a mysterious presence, which we can specify only as the Divine.
When we say this we should not lay ourselves open to the objection: "All fine poets do not offer us spiritual matter. They talk of a multitude of earthly things and some of them are even disbelievers. The Roman Lucretius scoffed at religion and said that the gods were created by human fear: he was materialist and atheist by intellectual persuasion." It is true that a lot of excellent poetry is ostensibly unconcerned with any divine reality. But need that prove it non-spiritual whether in its origin or in its process? Its spirituality lies basically in the exercise in it of a rare power which goes beyond the human consciousness's well-established modes of functioning and which we may designate, for want of a proper term "intuition", an intensity of immediate response penetrating the "within" of all appearances by a lightning-like enraptured plumbing of one's own "within". Poetry is spiritual, in the first place, by the intuitive manner in which any theme is diversely treated by the imagination, the intuitive activity. The imagination's treatment is reflected in a word-gesture, the heart's thrill is echoed in a word-movement, that carry a certain absoluteness about them. There is an inevitable phrase-pattern, there is an unimpeachable rhythm-design - in she' a form of perfect beauty inwardly created, not built up by mere outward skill. Through such form, poetry, whatever its subject, comes with the face and gait of a godhead. How even materialism and atheism could come like this is well hit off by a paradoxical turn of Elizabeth Browning's about Lucretius: she writes in a poem that he "denied divinely the Divine".
It is the intrinsic divineness of the intuition-packed creative style of poetry that is the soul's note in it. And it is because the soul finds tongue through the poet that we have
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a light in poetry, a delight in poetry. Light and delight are the soul's very stuff, we might say, and by virtue of them the soul's "inner seeing and sense" is not just a fanciful entertainment but a kind of revelation. Of course, it is not directly a spiritual, a mystic gesture and movement: it is only indirectly so and even when its subject is spiritual or mystic the poet does not necessarily become a Yogi or a Rishi. In most instances he is no more than an "inspired" medium. But the soul-quality ensures, as Sri Aurobindo puts it in The Future Poetry,1 that the genuine poetic utterance is not merely a pastime, not even a godlike one: "it is a great formative and illuminative power."
The psychological instrument of this power is defined by the phrase: "inner seeing and sense." Here the stress is not only on the inwardness: it is also on sight. The poet is fundamentally occupied with the activity of the eye. When he turns to the phenomena of earth, what he busies himself with is their "vivid imagery". An image is something visual. A keen experience of shapes and colours is the poet's speciality and it is this that is connoted by the word: "seeing and sense." "Sense" is a term suggesting at once perception and feeling and understanding, a contact of consciousness with an object; but the main channel of the contact here is the sight. The perceiving, feeling, understanding consciousness of the poet comes to an active point, an effective focus, through the function of seeing: his the concentration and merging of all sense in vision. "Vision " says Sri Aurobindo in The Future Poetry,2 "is the characteristic power of the poet, as is discriminative thought the essential gift of the philosopher and analytic observation the natural genius of the scientist." A very acute and felicitous statement, this. Note first the noun "power" in connection with the poet. It recalls to us De Quincey's division of literature into the literature of
1The Future Poetry, SABCL Vol. 9, p. 10.
2Ibid., p. 29.
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knowledge and the literature of power. Philosophy and science are the literature of knowledge while all prose and poetry that are pieces of art fall under the category of literature of power because they affect the emotions and change attitudes and remould character. Note next the adjective "essential" in relation to the philosopher's gift. Philosophy is supposed to make clear the basic principle of reality, the essence of things. Then note the epithet "natural" apropos of the scientist's work. The scientist cuts into the physical universe and reaches down to its system of laws - his field is what commonly passes as Nature. A born master of words has made the statement, instinctively using the most expressive turns. But we are not at the moment concerned so much with the art of statement as with its isolation of the poet's function from the functions of the philosopher and the scientist: this function is primarily neither to think out reality nor to dissect phenomena but to experience the play of light and shadow, fixity and flux, individual form and multiple pattern: the poet may have a philosophic or a scientific bent (Lucretius had both), but he must exercise it in a glory of sight, set forth everything with intimate image, evocative symbol or at least general suggestive figurativeness.
To make a broad résumé in Sri Aurobindo's words:1 "...the native power of poetry is in its sight" and "the poetic vision of life is not a critical or intellectual or philosophic view of it, but a soul-view, a seizing by the inner sense", and the poetic climax is, in its substance and forrr; /'the rhythmic revelation or intuition arising out of the soul's sight..."
The ancient Indian word for poet is Kavi, which means one who sees and discloses. Of course the disclosing, the making manifest, the showing out is an integral part of the poet's function, and it is this part that is stressed in the Latin term poeta from the Greek poetes, which stands for "maker", "fashioner", "creator". But the whole labour of formation
1 Ibid., pp. 33-34.
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lies in rendering visible, in leading us to see, what has been seen by the one who forms. The vision is the first factor, the embodiment and communication of it is the second. The Indian name goes to the root of the matter in speaking of the seer who discloses instead of the discloser who has seen. Shakespeare bears out the Indian characterisation, though he does not neglect the Greek and Latin, by the famous passage which describes what the poet does. In picturing the poet's activity he speaks of "the poet's eye" –
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings
A local habitation and a name.
Yes, the poet is primarily a seer, but we may remember that he does not stop with mere sight of the surface of reality: his is not sight so much as in-sight: he sees through, behind, within: his fundamental glancing is, as Shakespeare puts it, "from heaven to earth" and, only after that, it is "from earth to heaven". The poet's "fine frenzy" transports his eye to some paradisal Yonder before bringing it into touch with the terrestrial Here. Even when the latter is touched, there is no resting there: the former is once again reached, the reader is carried finally where the writer started from. And the forms which the poet bodies forth are of things unknown, there is always something unfathomable about his vision - a distance beyond distance, a depth beyond depth: this constitutes the transcendence of the intellectual meaning by poetry.
Ultimately the transcendence derives from the Supreme Spirit, the Poet Creator whose words are worlds. The human poet's vision has a contact, remote or close, with "some eternal eye", as the phrase runs in the fourth line of our quotation
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from Savitri. Sri Aurobindo has written in The Future Poetry:1 "The intellectual, vital, sensible truths are subordinate things; the breath of poetry should give us along with them or it may even be apart from them, some more essential truth of the being of things, their very power which springs in the last resort from something eternal in their heart and secrecy, hrdaye guhāyām, expressive even in the moments and transiences of life." Mark the words: "something eternal." In another place2 we read that the poet may start from anything: " ... he may start from the colour of a rose, or the power or beauty of a character, or the splendour of an action, or go away from all these into his own secret soul and its most hidden movements. The one thing needful is that he should be able to go beyond the word or image he uses ... into the light of that which they have the power to reveal and flood them with it until they overflow with its suggestions or seem even to lose themselves and disappear into the revelation. At the highest he himself disappears into sight; the personality of the seer is lost in the eternity of the vision, and the Spirit of all seems alone to be there speaking out sovereignly its own secrets." Mark again the turn: "the eternity of the vision." The Eternal Eye is at the back of all poetic perfection, and what this Eye visions is the Divine Presence taking flawless shape in a super-cosmos. To that shape the poet, in one way or another, converts the objects or events he depicts.
The conversion is the act put before us in the fourth and fifth lines of our ensemble. Every word and turn in them is worth pondering. "I caught," Sri Aurobindo makes Satyavan say. There is implied no mere touching, no mere pulling, not even mere holding. Nothing tentative is here: we have an absolute seizure, a capturing that is precise and complete. The poet gathers and grips a thing unerringly and for good. Such a gathering and gripping suggests to us a shade in the
1Ibid., pp. 219-20.
2Ibid., p. 35.
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adjective "eternal", which is not directly mystical but still very pertinent to the artistic process. Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine talks of timeless eternity and time-eternity - an eternity which is outside or beyond the time-movement and an eternity which is constituted by time itself going on and on without end. This latter kind - indefinitely continuing world-existence - poetry achieves for whatever it catches. The perfection of phrase in which it embodies its vision makes that vision memorable for ever: it confers immortality on its themes by expressing them in such a way that the expression gets imprinted indelibly on the human mind: it eternises for all future a happening or an object of the present or the past. As Landor says:
Past ruin'd Ilion, Helen lives,
Alcestis rises from the shades;
Verse calls them forth: 'tis verse that gives
Immortal youth to mortal maids.
Shakespeare in several places in his sonnets declares that his powerful verse shall outlive marble and the gilded monuments of Princes. In one sonnet he asks: Who or what can save you, my lover, from being destroyed or forgotten? And he gives an answer paradoxically pointed:
O none unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
Now from the poet who is the vision-catcher and from the eternal eye for which he acts the visionary we may come to what is caught, the thing visualised. It is "the sudden kingfisher". Technically we cannot help being struck by the way the adjective stands - at the end of the line. In poetry lines are either end-stopped or enjambed. Enjambment (a French word) connoted originally the continuing of the sentence of one couplet into the next instead of stopping
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short. In general it connotes the running on of the phrase of one line into another instead of ending with the line's end or at least pausing there as a sort of self-sufficient unit. "Sudden" makes an enjambment and it makes it with what is termed a feminine ending, a close on a syllable unstressed and extra to the standard metrical length. What it thereby achieves are a host of effects. The first effect is to startle us by the occurrence of an adjective without is noun, an occurrence besides at so marked a place in the line as its very termination. Technically the meaning of the adjective is reinforced by its unexpected terminal place. But there are still other effects. One is 'in relation to the verb "caught". Suddenness suggests a quick movement which takes one by surprise and which may be thought to be uncatchable. So we have the phenomenon as of the uncatchable being caught, a tribute to the catcher, a hint of the mobile miracle that is the artist mind, a mind that can overtake anything and make an imaginative capture of it. How sudden the bird was is told in the next line where it is said to be "flashing". Even something as fast and fleeting and momentary as flashing and momentary as a flash can be seized by the poet's pursuing eye. And a further shade of the miracle comes out with the word "eternal". We took this word to mean both the unforgettable everlasting value poetry gives to a mortal thing and the value which a Divine Consciousness holds as the everlasting archetype of a thing that happens in the temporal world. The poet seizes flashlike objects for ever; once seized they are never submerged - if we may cite an unforgettable Shakespearean phrase–
In the dark backward and abysm of time.
Also, the contrast between the Divine Consciousness and the time-process is brought out by "sudden". The character of time is transitoriness, momentariness: nothing stands still, all life is a succession of infinitesimal rapidities, a series of suddennesses. This constant evanescence is vividly
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counterposed to Eternity by the concrete figure of the sudden kingfisher. The kingfisher in its incredibly swift flight is a symbol of all time. A slower-moving object would have failed to drive home both the perpetuation that the poet achieves and the archetypal divinity he serves, and his service of that eternity is struck out most clear for us by the marked closing position of "sudden".
We may add that if "sudden" had come in the next line, the poetic stroke would have been diminished. Suppose Sri Aurobindo had written:
I caught for some deep eye that is eternal
The sudden kingfisher's flash to a darkling pool.
Here we have eternity in one line and time in another. Do we not blur their contrast a little by this sheer division? Have we not heard of Kohler's experiments to ascertain the psychology of apes? One experiment puts a banana outside a chimpanzee's cage, exactly in front of the animal but beyond his arm's reach. To the right of the chimpanzee, outside the cage, a stick is put. The ape looks straight at the banana and then turns his head to look at the stick. The means of getting at the banana and pulling it into the cage is there but it needs another look than the one which takes in the banana. The animal is found unable to co-ordinate the two looks and arrive at a logical procedure for getting hold of the fruit, as it would if the stick were in a line with the banana. We feel rather like the chimpanzee if "eternal" is in line one and the expression suggesting the temporal is in line two. The needed contrast which would kindle the significance of the poetic vision gets a trifle weakened: there is a slight loss of immediacy, a slight failure in the meaningful fusion of the objects presented: the revelation by a bit of thought-effort: the technique is not fully co-operative with the vision.
We may draw attention to some other defects also. At first sight one may feel that whole phenomenon of the kingfisher
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is shown in its completeness in a single line, the second, and that this is a poetic gain. But consider the metrical rhythm of the line. Too many syllables - twelve in fact - are crowded together, creating a dancing wavering rhythm which serves ill the simple straight swift motion of the bird. Again, what stands in central focus now is the flash and not the kingfisher. Many different things may be said to give a flash: a sort of generality is grasped through the flashing, a less distinct less individualised and hence less concrete symbol is conjured up. The mention of the kingfisher seems hardly significant and inevitable: this particular bird with its special shape, colour, gesture appears somewhat wasted and correspondingly wasted is the pool which can have vital importance only if not the flash but the kingfisher with its habit of food-hunting in watery spots holds the chief place.
This point, as well as to some extent the point in regard to the metre, would be valid even if Sri Aurobindo wrote:
I caught for some eternal eye the flashing
Of the sudden kingfisher to a darkling pool.
The sole advantage over the other version would be that the contrast between eternity and time would be more forceful by the retention of a word charged with momentariness in the very line where "some eternal eye" figures. But then force would be lessened in the intended contrast between "flashing" and "darkling". Besides, to put the "flashing" before the "sudden kingfisher" is not so logical or so artistic as the other way round. The adjective for the kingfisher becomes unimpressive and almost superfluous after intensity of "flashing": also the act of flashing and the quality of suddenness grow two separate things instead of the former emerging from the latter and being the latter itself in an intense manifestation. The alliteration of the f-sounds and the sh-sounds in the two words "flashing" and "kingfisher" loses its expressive inevitability. In the phrase "kingfisher flashing"
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the alliteration in the second word brings out, as it were, a power already there in the bird so that the act of flashing is the natural and spontaneous flow of the kingfisher's being and is prepared, rendered unavoidable, made the true gesture of it. If "flashing" precedes "kingfisher" we have something blurted out before its time, and if the precedence is too far ahead the alliteration itself runs to waste.
Perhaps one may urge that the first rewriting supposed by us could have a slight change in its second line and put the kingfisher itself and not its flash in the chief place:
The sudden kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool.
But then the metre will grow still more dancing and wavering and the technique would break apart from the vision all the more.
No, Sri Aurobindo's arrangement of all the words remains the most felicitous and the sort of enjambment he achieves is also happier than any other; for no other can be so marked as an adjective divorced from its noun - "sudden" poised for the fraction of a second aloof from "kingfisher" - but carrying us on imperatively to what it qualifies. The enjambment suggests that, though momentariness is here, there is no cessation of the movement itself: we are hurried onward, pressed forward to the next line, so that we have a continuous movement of momentarinesses. Such a movement serves Sri Aurobindo's subject very appropriately, since the subject is not the kingfisher sitting out on a tree with its series of movements that follow one another, but the kingfisher in motion in the time-flux, the kingfisher flashing. The suggestion of "flashing" is anticipated and prepared by the enjambed technique working through "sudden". Further, the whole last foot in which the adjective stands is what is called an amphibrach: the foot consists of three syllables - "the sudden" - with only the central syllable stressed. Metrically it is like the last foot of the Shakespearean verse already quoted:
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The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling...
Sri Aurobindo1 has called Shakespeare's last foot "a spacious amphibrach like a long plunge of a wave" and remarked about the entire line's structure of four stressed intrinsically long vowels and one stressed vowel that is intrinsically short, all of them forming a run of two iambs, a pyrrhic, a spondee and an amphibrach: "no more expressive rhythm could have been contrived to convey potently the power, the excitement and the amplitude of the poet's vision." Our amphibrach is not spacious: its vowel is not quantitatively long like the o of "rolling": the vowel here is a short u and even the final syllable "en" is almost a half-syllable. The amphibrach is a rather compressed one, but there is enough of the unstressed third syllable to make with the stressed one preceding it a falling movement. Here too is a plunge, though not of a high-risen wave: it is a packed rather than a spacious plunge and as such it is quite in conformity with the small bird that the kingfisher is, and the falling movement is in perfect tune with the kingfisher's act of flying down from a tree to a pool. "Flashing" here implies not only a swift movement but also a downward one and, just as the enjambment anticipates and prepares the former, the feminine ending anticipates and prepares the latter. However, the swift downward movement of the small kingfisher would hardly be hinted so well by the amphibrach-enjambment if the last two syllables of the foot were not that significant word "sudden".
Now we reach the kingfisher itself. We shall not dwell on the metrical technique of the line given to its activity -except to make two remarks. The word "kingfisher" at the start of the line has its stress on the first syllable, initiating by the trochaic foot formed by its two opening syllables a falling movement in continuation of the same "cadence" at the end of the previous line, and the stressed syllable is an
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1 Collected Poems, SABCL Vol. 5, p. 351.
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i intrinsically short, though just a little lengthened by the consonantal sounds after it. So we have a suggestion not only of the darting from above but also of brevity-cum-force and insignificance-cum-insistence drawing itself out, as it were, by its darting - in sum, the diminutive diver and hunter with the little body and long beak and bright plumage and proud crest. At the close of the line we have the word "pool", a stressed word with an intrinsically long vowel-sound which especially evokes a sense of something significant deep down to which the kingfisher dives. So much for the purely metrical technique. Now for a few aspects of the verbal technique.
"Darkling" after "flashing" and before "pool" is an interesting effect in the picture of the kingfisher. It literally means being in the dark, being in a hidden state, but it cannot help bearing the sense of growing dark, of holding hiddennesses, and its function here is to tell us that the pool was a place of shadows, that it was a sort of secrecy. The very sound of the word, the combination of r and k and l, calls up the vision of a liquid glimmer-gloom and makes the word the most apt adjective for a thing like a pool which is a small mass of still water in which light goes diminishing as it is drawn deeper and deeper towards an invisible bottom. And then there is the play it makes with the preceding present participle "flashing". "Flashing" in itself blends the impression of lightning with the impression of a sweep and swish of wings through the air - again the aptest term for the rapid leap of colourful bird-life. But its connection with "darkling" presents our thought simultaneously with two facts that go beyond the mere account of a bird diving for its food. We see something intensely luminous dropping into something increasingly mysterious. It is a vision of keen beauty disappearing - but not to be swallowed up and lost. We get a sense as of a masterful plunge of brightness into a dark profundity. There is not exactly the exquisite casualty of Nashe's
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Brightness falls from the air
but a kind of dangerous adventure in which life laughingly dares darkness and plucks its prey from it. There is evanescence, no doubt, the time-touch, yet within the evanescence beats a triumph. The vision of life arises as though we were being shown what the phenomena of ordinary existence would look like when they are caught by the poet for some eternal eye and given their ultimate interpretation - or rather we have at once those phenomena and the deeper version of them that is truth in eternity.
Further, you may notice that the whole event described here is so much like the essential poetic experience itself. An airy colourfulness drops with a winged burst of revelatory light into a hidden depth in order to bring up from the depth some life-nourishing secret. We have the poetic intuition falling into the poet's inner being and capturing its contents for the poet's self-expression. And just remember that a darkling pool closely resembles an eye waiting with indrawn expectant stillness for a shining disclosure from above which will lay bare to that receptivity what lies within the dreamer's own vigilant soul, what hides there to feed with its mysterious life the light that fell from on high.
Indeed a many-aspected statement is present in Sri Aurobindo's picture, and its relevance to the poetic process is completed by the next line which I have joined on to these two:
And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity.
The poet is primarily a seer, but his instrument for seizing his vision and communicating it is the word: it is by the inspired sound that he creates a form for his intuitive sight. The inspired sound is implicit in the poetic act - and, just as the poet's vision must ultimately have behind it the working of some eternal eye, the poet's word must ultimately have
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behind it the working of some eternal ear. The ultimate home of the poetic process is the spiritual "Akash", the Self-space of the Spirit, the Divine Consciousness's infinity of self-extension. And this infinity has its creative vibrations that are at the basis of all cosmos. These vibrations are to be caught, however distantly or indirectly, by the sound of poetry. In terms of our own quotation, what the poet metricises when he captures in his verse the kingfisher's beat of pinions, is the rhythm-beats of the spacious ether of the Eternal Being who is the secret substance, one of whose vibrant materialisations is the kingfisher.
Some may, however, question the verb "metred". Modernists believe that metre is an artificial shackle on poetry from which they want to escape into what they call "free verse". But actually no verse can be free without ceasing to be verse: if there is no regulating principle of a distinguishable sort, however subtle be its regulation, we have the laxer movement of prose. If that laxer movement tries to pass off as poetry by some device like cutting itself up into long and short lines and sprinkling a few out-of-the-way locutions on a run of commonly turned words, then we do not have real verse but a pretentious and ineffectual falsity, about whose relation to prose we shall have to say, even at the risk of an atrocious and well-worn pun, that it is not prose but worse! Poetry must have not only intensity of vision and intensity of word; it must have also intensity of rhythm. That is the demand of the Aurobindonian poetics. And how is rhythm to be intense without having a central motif in the midst of variations, a base of harmonic recurrences over which modulations play, a base which is never overlaid with too much modulation but rings out its uniformity through the diversity? In the older literatures, metre tended to be of a set form. But to be of a set form is not the essence of metre. It was so because thus alone something in the older consciousness, the strong sense of order, of dharma, got represented in art. When the
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consciousness changes and becomes more individualised, more complex, as in modern times, the metre may follow suit. Every age can make its own metrical designs and our age may devise or discover less apparent regularities and complicate or subtilise its schemes of sound. There is no harm in that, though in an epoch of individuality we cannot insist that an individual who still finds something of the older metres a natural mould for his mood-movements should mechanically conform to the new nonconformity! All must have a right to be individual - and if people want to be boldly experimental in prosody they may do so, but the soul of metre must not be lost - or else poetry in the truest connotation will get lost with it. Even "free verse" is, when is still true poetry, a broad pattern of returning effects, a pattern rounded off and swaying under a dextrous disguise as a single whole - and it is true poetry precisely by being not really free but just differently bound than the older poetic creation.
My own penchant is for metre and I grant some point to an amusing exaggeration by George Gissing. Gissing expressed horror of "miserable men who do not know - who have never even heard of - the minute differences between Dochmiacs arid Antispasts". If you happen to be those miserable men I may tell you that a Dochmiac is a five-syllabled Greek foot composed of short-long-long-short-long and an Antispast is a four-syllabled Greek foot consisting of short-long-long-short. But I am afraid I cannot tell you more minute differences than that the former has one final long in excess of the latter, and if there is a yet minuter difference I myself shall have to live in the misery of ignorance. What, however, I do know I may concretely impart to you by illustrating a Dochmiac and an Antispast, in English prosodic terms, through a compliment to our horror-stricken ecstastic of metre:
An all-wise delight | is George Gissing's.
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Perhaps the compliment seems too high-pitched. But that there is an essence of truth in it will be conceded if we track metre to its origin in the Divine Ananda, the Delight of the All-wise. Sri Aurobindo has stated very strikingly the truth about metre. "All creation," he1 writes, "proceeds on a basis of oneness and sameness with a superstructure of diversity, and there is the highest creation where is the intensest power of basic unity and sameness and on that supporting basis the intensest power of appropriate and governed diversity.... Metre was in the thought of the Vedic poets the reproduction in speech of great creative world-rhythms; it is not a mere formal construction, though it may be made by the mind into even such a lifeless form: but even that lifeless form or convention, when genius and inspiration breathe the force of life into it, becomes again what it was meant to be, it becomes itself and serves its own true and great purpose. There is an intonation of poetry which is different from the flatter and looser intonation of prose, and with it a heightened or gathered intensity of language, a deepened vibrating intensity of rhythm, an intense inspiration in the thought substance. One leaps up with this rhythmic spring or flies upon these wings of rhythmic exaltation to a higher scale of consciousness which expresses things common with an uncommon power both of vision and of utterance and things uncommon with their own native and revealing accent; it expresses them, as no mere prose speech can do, with a certain kind of deep appealing intimacy of truth which poetic rhythm alone gives to expressive form and power of language: the greater this element, the greater is the poetry. The essence of this power can be there without metre, but metre is its spontaneous form, raises it to its acme. The tradition of metre is not a vain and foolish convention followed by the great poets of the past in a primitive ignorance unconscious of their own bondage; it is in spite
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1 Collected Poems, SABCL Vol. 5, pp. 368-69.
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of its appearance of human convention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest speech-nature."
The verb "metred", therefore, in the last line of our quotation may be held to be perfectly in order, especially in a context where infinity is implied to be harmoniously dynamic, eternity is said to be the visioner of the temporal and both together emerge as the creator of poetry through the human soul.
Our second group of six lines picturing Sri Aurobindo's poetic psychology and metaphysics are part of an account of Savitri's long quest for her soul's mate Satyavan. Savitri encounters various types of spiritual seekers retired from the noisy world into woods and hills. One band of them, pressing with a motionless mind beyond the confines of thought to sheer spiritual Light, comes back from there with the native word of the supreme Consciousness, the mantra such as we find in the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita:
Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech,
Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens,
Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,
They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers
In metres that reflect the moving worlds,
Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps. [p. 383]
This is a description of the poetic process at its highest spiritual pitch and it is itself a-thrill with the vibrations of what is spoken of and compasses in the closing verse the full breath of the mantra while concentrating in one brief expression the ultimate nature of the mantric utterance.
Yes, the whole subject is a special hieratic one, but the treatment of it sheds light on the nature of poetic inspiration in general. For, if the mantra is the ideal poetry, all poetry that is genuine must represent or shadow forth in its own way the mantric essence.
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In our first group of six lines we listed as the divine element in all poetry the inner intuitive cast of imaginative and emotional excitement taking shape in the outer rhythmic word-gesture and word-movement and thereby creating a perfect beauty. It is the creative intuition that is now pictured as it operates on the level of a most directly spiritual poetry. In such poetry the original power channelled by the poet comes into its own, getting its fullest scope; for has not Sri Aurobindo1 the defining phrase: "A direct spiritual perception and vision called by us intuition"?
We begin with the basic act of "intuitive knowledge" and its stirred seizures of truth get moulded into language: the leap upon the heart of reality's significances is at the same time a leap into words answering to them. The intuitive knowledge has two sides: the revelatory rhythm and the revelatory vision. The former is a subtlety of vibration in tune with the measureless mystery of the absolute Bliss and bringing into manifestation the unknown silences: it is in the form of a "voice" which gives the secret body of the heavenly existence a vesture woven of meaningful sound -sound that follows like a wonderfully responsive clothing the ever-indrawn identity of the Supreme. And this clothing of sound, with its rhythmic ripples, is a "splendour" at the same time that it is a "voice". The simile of a garment for sound is of high import: it shows that what is heard and what is seen are a single reality. Thus our passage's transition from revelatory rhythm to revelatory vision is natural and inevitable. A cloth of gold, as it were, is the theme - and the gold is the Light of lights, the creative fire that goes forth in a million modes and materialises and the suns with which our heavens are bespangled. An elemental incandescence projecting the contents of the Inscrutable in symbol-shapes is at work in the ecstatic heat of poetic production. The mantra holds it in a white state, so to speak, but something of it
1 The Future Poetry, SABCL Vol. 9, p. 220.
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persists everywhere, and each poet has in him the sense of a supra-intellectual illumination no less than a sense of some primal rapture which affines his heartbeat to what the old tradition designated the music of the spheres, the concord of the universal OM. With that illumination he becomes the seer of truth just as with that rapture he becomes the hearer of it - the truth concerned being the sight achieved of any aspect of reality by means of the faculty of intuition, with its thrilled flash into the depth of any part of the world through the depth of some part of one's self.
A gloss on the triple operation sketched by the lines – intuitive knowledge that is a voice, a voice that is a splendour - may be derived from four verses elsewhere in Savitri:
Even now great thoughts are here that walk alone:
Armed they have come with the infallible word
In an investiture of intuitive light
That is a sanction from the eyes of God...[p. 258]
Even the cloth-symbol is present and it directly serves to merge the elements of our three lines.
With these elements unified in his consciousness, the poet at his highest raises up an art-form of flawless loveliness, a Song in which Infinity's own self-disclosing articulation is at play: the godheads pronounce each his being's central note, his inherent name-image in which the power of his immortal creative bliss resides. The master-poet, by letting the Illimitable formulate its myriad magic of deific motion through his singing, echoes in the dominant rhythms of his poetry the primal measures of the Supreme's self-expression in the multitudinous cosmos: the metres of the starry revolutions, their set accords of majestic journey through endless space and time, are caught in his designs of long and short sounds, vowel-flows and consonant-curbs, overtones and undertones, stresses and slacks, line-units and verse-paragraphs - the macrocosmic regularities find their
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reflection in a microcosm of poetic cadences, the moving worlds make themselves felt in the harmonious words. As in our first group of verses, we have Infinity's rhythm-beats metricised.
Then we have the grand finale - the last line which seems to bear in itself both qualitatively and quantitatively all the rest in quintessence:
It is a really lengthy line because of eight step-by-step monosyllables and seven intrinsically long vowels and four consecutive stresses at the start and three at the end. The slow weighty stretched movement conveys the sense of a massive flood drawn towards earth from the distance of a divine existence - the profound secrecy of the Soul. Here again, as before, we have the Soul as the source of poetry and this source is not only deep within us but also itself a great depth, holding as it were a vast concealed ocean of experience-movements in which the Divine Consciousness is hidden and in which there is an occult oneness of our individuality with the whole world. Sensation, emotion, idea are here involved or contained in a thrilled awareness focused for poetic purposes in a luminous vision which is at the same time a subtle vibration taking the form of rhythmic words.
"Sight's sound-waves": a marvellous turn condensing an entire system of poetics. Seeing and hearing are shown as fused faculties - yet each is given its proper role. Poetry brings the soul's vastness into our common life by means of "sound-waves" - it is a super-version of Homer's "many-rumoured ocean". But the mighty billows drive home to us a burden of sight: the ocean is not only many-rumoured, it is also many-glimmered, many-figured. The poet's work is principally to set himself astir with the shine, the hue,
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the contour, the posture of things. Significances start within him as vivid pictures, imaginative conjurations, symbolic hints: through them he enjoys the subjective and the objective worlds and by them he traces the beauty and truth of things and attains to a comprehension of details, interrelations, totalities. However, the poet's seeings are of such an intensity and come projected from such an ecstasy-vibrant fount that they burst upon us with a verbal declaration of their intents. Each sight has its own manifesting sound which is not just "transmissive" but "incarnative", embodying with a living intimacy and piercing directness the gleaming stuff and stir of the Soul's revelatory contact with reality.
And this sound is best compared, as by Sri Aurobindo, to waves. For, it is a sustained march with a rise and fall, its rhythms variously modulating on a basic recurrent tone and breaking upon the receptive mind and heart and sensation not only with happy spontaneities like the changing dance of spume and spray but also with powerful profundities like the sweep of unremitting rollers and persisting undercurrents and now and then a mysterious ground-swell.
We may remark how the image of the sea springs up time and again in Sri Aurobindo's poetry about the poetic phenomenon. It is particularly there when he refers to that phenomenon's highest resolution in the mystic and spiritual key. But it has a vital role elsewhere too. In the course of recounting Savitri's girlhood and its inclusion of an experience of all the arts he tells us:
Poems in largeness cast like moving worlds
And metres surging with the ocean's voice
Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature's heart
But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech
The beauty and sublimity of her forms,
The passion of her moments and her moods
Lifting the human word nearer to the god's. [p. 361]
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The unsealing of grandeurs from subtle dimensions of Nature to cast an interpretative light on the world-pageant through a rich packed poetry could very well be true of ancient epics like Valmiki's Ramāyana and Vyasa's Mahabharata or mediaeval ones like Kalidasa's Kumārasambhava and Raghuvamsa. The last phrase about man's word being upraised to neighbour a divine utterance, rather than itself becoming such, is a pointer to the secular character of the poems concerned. This character is recognised all the more when we have a clear description of spiritual poetry, a use of the word in a different fashion and for a different goal:
Invested with a rhythm of higher spheres
The word was used as a hieratic means
For the release of the imprisoned spirit
Into communion with its comrade gods.
Or it helped to beat out new expressive forms
Of that which labours in the heart of life,
Some immemorial Soul in men and things,
Seeker of the Unknown and the Unborn
Carrying a light from the Ineffable
To rend the veil of the last mysteries.[p. 360]
Those other poems had their regard on Nature's forms, moments, moods and set free in the visible world deeper meanings, greater dynamisms that are like presences of hidden lords of Nature, living puissances that are secret cosmic agents. Now we are told of an attempt with the help of inspiration from "higher spheres" and not merely inner ones ("Nature's heart"), to liberate the soul of man, the "spirit" encased in the sensing, feeling, thinking body, and enable it to grow one with divine entities, share in the very being of secret cosmic agents, Nature's hidden lords, and even in that of transcendental powers, godheads beyond the universe and not only behind it. Further, side by side with the spirit's linkage with divinity through poetic rhythms brought
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straight from "above," hieratic or sacred poetry endeavours for a manifestation of divinity "below". It gets into touch with "the heart of life" where a World-Soul toils at evolution within man's physical mould and Nature's matter. Charged with the drive of this evolutionary Dreamer, it aims to infuse his idealistic dynamism into the stuff of outward existence, so that novel modes of thought and desire and perception may be realised, expressing openly through the activities of this stuff the fulfilment of the World-Soul's venture across the ages to revel here and now the arcade Eternal, the masked Absolute. Yes, the poems spoken of in our earlier quotation are like the masterpieces of Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa rather than like the Vedic hymns, the Upanishadic slokas or that super-Vyasan rarity - the Gita - in the midst of the Mahabharata. But these too, in Sri Aurobindo's imagination, have their own sound-waves of sight: through their metrical movement "the ocean's voice" is heard in them no less than in the mighty compositions that move from everlasting to everlasting in the worlds of the gods and whose imitations on earth are the Rishis' songs of "Infinity's names and deathless powers" - mighty compositions pictured by Sri Aurobindo in the eleventh Book of Savitri:
The odes that shape the universal thought,
The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face,
The rhythms that bring the sounds of wisdom's sea. [p. 677]
Large structured chants bearing the formative force of the Ideas on which the cosmic plan is founded, intensely lyrical phrases capturing with visionary power the secrets of the Supreme Beauty, patterns of sustained sonorities conveying fathomless suggestions and ultimate significances that escape all defining speech - this progression of poetic elements in the supernal modes concludes deliberately on the image of wide waters. That image makes the right climax. For most
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in the mantra, even as mainly in every species of poetry, it is the rhythmic vibration which holds the keenest sense of the life-throb, so to speak, of the Infinite and carries the greatest potentiality of re-creating the human existence in the mould of the divine. This vibration serves as the strongest instrument to stir the deepest recesses of our being and awake in them an answer of sympathetic vision to the sight of the Eternal which in one shape or another all poetry fundamentally strives to lay bare.
Keeping "sight" and its "sound-waves" in mind we may sum up in the words of Sri Aurobindo1 our whole exposition: "Sight is the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and word-images which become the expressive body of the vision; and the great poets are those who repeat in some measure this ideal creation, kavayah satyaśrutāh, seers and hearers of the poetic truth and poetic word."
(Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, 1999, pp. 182-207)
1 The Future Poetry, SABCL Vol. 9, p. 30.
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SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI, THE NATURE
OF EPIC AND THE EXPRESSION OF
MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH POETRY
A LETTER
The script of your friend's projected lecture, incorporating your touches, on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri makes interesting reading and is surely helpful in several respects. Most of these are analytic, classificatory; but the labelling is done skilfully and catchingly. I can understand his dissatisfaction with the passages he has quoted from Sisir Ghose, Srinivasa Iyengar and myself. But I don't know whether it is right to pull out a passage from me like that, as if I have written nothing to explicate what I mean by "a direct poetising of the Divine". All the detailed description of "overhead poetry" that I have given time and again seems overlooked. To explain overhead poetry may not be sufficient for the lecturer's purpose, namely, the bringing home to his students the structure or texture of Savitri in the ordinary senses of these terms; but that does not rule out the legitimacy of other approaches provided one does not indulge in empty vapourings. It never occurred to me that I was called upon to justify the word "epic" or to distinguish the "narrative voice" from any other. To discuss these points is quite pertinent, but I had other axes to grind and I believe they are just as valuable weapons for breaking into the poetic quality of the work.
Now that the question of "epic" or "narrative" has been raised, I may say a few things. Why should we stick to
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old norms? We may pick out the essence and reject or go beyond the appearance. To me "epic" is a certain frame of mind and a certain tone of voice. The subject proper is secondary and so too is the mode of treatment or development. As for the basic subject, I see little in common between the wrath of Achilles and Man's first disobedience to God along with the justification of God's ways to men. Again, the wanderings of Odysseus are dissimilar, in their innate orientation, to Dante's tour of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. The deeply religious epic, with metaphysical implications, cannot be equated with the heroic epic, even the literary heroic like the Aeneid. Savitri takes further the former genre and subjects it to the intuitions and experiences of a Master of Yoga. If Milton and Dante can be epic, I see no reason to doubt the epic character of Savitri. And why do we consider Paradise Lost and La Divina Commedia epic? Like Homer's and Virgil's works, they bring a frame of mind marked by a high seriousness, a cosmic outlook on life in general and a weaving together of many strains of knowledge. Then there is the tone of voice, which links together the utterances of various poets. Take
Zenos men pais ea Kronionos autar oixun
Eikhon apeiresien,
(I was the son of Zeus Cronion, yet have I suffered
Infinite pain,)
O passi graviora! dabit Deus his quoque finem,
(Fiercer griefs we have suffered; to these too God will
give ending,)
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Nessun maggiore
Dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria,
(The greatest
of all woes is to remember days of happiness
In misery,)
Fall'n Cherub! to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.
All these get linked up with Sri Aurobindo's
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss,
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives,[p. 453]
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss, [p. 17]
This tone of voice can come even into less momentous utterances: there is a breadth, there is a controlled power, there is an harmonious intensity, which distinguish it from poetic articulations such as we find in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso or Spenser's Faerie Queane. Ariosto and Spenser can be very poetic, but they are not epic in tone. Even when they bring a frame of mind akin to Homer's or Virgil's, Dante's or Milton's, something in the way of their speech lacks the epic touch. Compare Ariosto's
Cose non detta in prosa mai, ne in rima
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Things unattempted yet in prose or rime.
Somehow the two voices are worlds away from each other. The very technique differs. The extraordinary import of Ariosto's line does not find sufficient support in the expression: the expression has too easy a run and thereby creates somewhat the sense as of a melodious commonplace. Milton at once masters us with a double means in the word "unattempted". It is the one four-syllabled word in the midst of six monosyllables, coming at the right place with a suggestion of the rarity of what has remained to be done as well as of the lengthiness of the labour involved. Nor is this all. It also brings a considerable number of consonants which give weight to the sound and it joins three of them - mpt -together to effect a retardation of the voice: the long labour involved now seems markedly heavy and difficult. The high seriousness of epic verse comes through with an impressive technique reinforcing the tone.
On a still higher level of meaning and music we may note the difference of Shakespeare's
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven–
from Dante's
Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce tale,
Che la vostra misera non mi tange,
Ni fiamma d'este incendio non m'assale.
(I, by the grace of God, am fashioned such
I move untroubled by your suffering,
Nor me these cruel tongues of fire can touch.) –
and even more from Sri Aurobindo's
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A traveller of the million roads of life,
His steps familiar with the lights of heaven
Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell;
There he descends to edge eternal joy.[p. 592]
Whereas the tone of Ariosto is not intense enough, the tone of Shakespeare is intensity itself, but, as Sri Aurobindo would say, it is the intensity of a tremendous vital thrill which makes the poetry unrestrainedly romantic, though the absence of restraint is not explosive as in Chapman but finely organised in its outbreaks. Sri Aurobindo has said that there is some essential "austerity" in the epic temper which emerges in the tone of voice. But we must remember that this "austerity" does not preclude all richness or colour, nor does it prevent the exercise of energy. Dante, for instance, combines great richness with his sharp-cut concision and restraint: we may even say his is an ideal epic "austerity" - except that, according to Sri Aurobindo, he does not have enough of the "epic élan" such as Homer and Milton in their own individual styles possess.
Of course all these shades I have distinguished are not easy to appreciate and perhaps I am talking an esoteric language; but I feel that epicness has fundamentally to be perceived in the two qualities - cosmic outlook and tone-energy on the leash - which I have listed and only afterwards in the conventional categories set up by academic critics. Or, if we must pay respect to these categories, then we may declare Savitri an epic narrative or a narrative epic.
Perhaps even this combination is not acceptable from the paper's point of view. For the "narrative voice" is found on the whole to be submerged by the "apocalyptic voice" as well as the "prophetic voice". Thus Savitri appears to be quite a poser to the academician. I like the way the paper brings out the elements of the poser. The treatment is very competent on the whole, even if a little overdone in parts and in spite of small errors of textual interpretation. As you have asked me
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to point out any such possible slips, let me come first to them. It is said that in the passage -
And Savitri too awoke among these tribes
That hastened to join the brilliant Summoner's chant
And, lured by the beauty of the apparent ways,
Acclaimed their portion of ephemeral joy -[p. 6]
it is Savitri who "acclaimed". If this is so, it is again Savitri who is "lured". The second inference is absurd; the first conclusion is unwarranted. The "tribes" - "the thousand peoples of the soil and tree" - were both lured and doing the acclamation just as it is they who "hastened" to take part in the day's bright rhythm of common life. Besides, if Savitri "acclaimed", what is the relevance of "their"? Why should she acclaim the tribes' portion instead of her own? Again, in the passage -
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge -[p. 3]
the paper says that "opalescent" stands for the milky light coming from the interior. I know that a secondary sense of "opalescent" derives from a semi-translucent white glass in commercial contexts. But I am sure Sri Aurobindo never thought here in terms of human manufacture: he would both artificialise and superficialise his meaning if he did. It is the true opal he has in mind or, rather, what is known as the common opal, which is milky or bluish in colour with green, yellow and red reflections. Not translucence but iridescence is the suggestion here - a touch preparatory of the slightly later
Iridescent with the glory of the Unknown...[p. 3]
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However, we can say that the whole gate of dreams with its gold panel and opalescent hinge is a prevision of the mystery of the Light that is coming into the world's view. I should be disposed to interpret the adjectives "gold" and "opalescent" as suggesting ultimately the sun's golden light and the rainbow hues which are within it, the prismatic plenitude included in its aureate richness. The double quality goes appropriately with the dawn-scene with which Sri Aurobindo is here concerned, as well as with the multifarious content of the one creative Consciousness - the "Rose of God" which is "fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven".
Now for a few topics arising in the course of the paper. First: "the supreme moments of the poem are those in which all the three (voices) are fused". If this is a theoretical assertion, as if supreme poetry cannot come unless there is the fusion of the narrator, the apocalypt and the prophet, it is mere dogmatism. If it is an affirmation based on an examination of all the supreme moments, it shows aesthetic insensitiveness. Perhaps the sweeping character of the judgement is an oversight; for elsewhere occurs the phrase: "some of the supreme poetic moments" - and the passage where the mantra-image is elaborated is described as one in which the poet is employing his apocalyptic voice and the result fits into the narrative context.
Here only two voices are at play and yet we learn that the passage is "unmistakably great poetry by any critical standards". I am sure many passages have supreme excellence even though they embody only one voice or another of the three.
Further, we hear: "...the epic bard should never distract the listener's attention from the on-rushing flow of the narrative. Milton following the Homeric tradition also does the same thing." Well, does he? Milton is famous - or notorious -for his large digressions and even his personal asides like parts of the exordiums to Books Three and Seven, where we learn of his blindness and of the evil days on which he
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has fallen. Would you not consider his long-winding similes and parallels to be distractions of the reader's mind from the narrative? And, if he is most like Homer, it is just in this respect. So Homer himself, who initiated the Homeric simile, which the paper calls the image of impression - the simile where the "vehicle" is elaborated into a full-scale picture and the "tenor" is either ignored or omitted - so Homer too can hardly be said to rivet the reader to the narrative. As F.L. Lucas has observed somewhere, Homer does not care for cross-connections or "links of relevance". There is only one point of likeness, the rest is mostly a divine bounty. I do not know of a better image of impression than the one giving us a starlit scene. I am quoting Tennyson's version:
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart:
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed.
Mind you, we are presented with a battlefield as the occasion of the simile. The point of likeness is between many twinkling stars and many twinkling fires. Nothing else bears the least connection. Rather a strong contrast is there: the lurid darkness of the battlefield on the one hand and on the other the utterly peaceful night above the happy Wordsworthian shepherd on his moonlit moorland. I seem to remember another full-blown simile of Homer's, where we get a night-scene, this time with a sudden lightning bringing a surprise to the eye and striking one dumb: Homer likens this visual moment to the one when the Trojans all on a sudden heard the terrifying war-cry of Achilles. If my memory is correct, we get here a passing insight into the psychologico-poetic
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complexity of Homer's proverbially "simple" mind, the kind we attribute to the singer of a "primary epic". Even Homer in several respects cuts right across the exaggerated notion of what an epic bard must do or not do.
I would demur a little also to the contention that when Sri Aurobindo turns "the reader inward in order to make him debate within himself what the poetry is communicating" he is failing in the role of a narrator. The narration of a "legend" like Savitri, which is at the same time a "symbol", must involve such inner debating by the reader. Here is no straightforward narration, but why should narration be. limited to being straightforward? There are inner happenings no less than outer, and a suitable method of bringing them vividly before the mind of the reader has to be adopted and if Sri Aurobindo adopts the method the paper speaks of, he need not thereby cease to be either narrative or epic. In this connection we are told that Milton is epic because he focuses his reader's "attention on what is happening which is conveyed through poetry". But would you classify all the long speeches in the conference in hell as an aid to concentrating on the narrative's on-rushing flow? These speeches communicate inner debates of the devil's minds no less than phases of an outer powwow. The character of each devil is laid bare: the most memorable of the psychological disclosures is Belial's speech, with Milton's greatest moment in it and one of his greatest irrelevances:
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 or motion?
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that subtlety and variety of intellectual argument helpful to the sheer purpose of telling a story? I don't believe so, but who would lose, though full of pedantic pain, these vast side-tracking thoughts which, just like the elaborate similes and historical correspondences ("Fontarabbia" and the rest), slow down if not submerge the tale?
I find one or two little touches of pedantry elsewhere also. What is the pertinence of the point made by saying that "Aswapati", the name of Savitri's father, first occurs only on page 368 [p. 341]? Does a narrative or epic become simple merely by each character getting his proper name from the start? Does Milton name Jesus or Christ anywhere in Paradise Lost? At the start he refers to him as "one greater Man" and everywhere else he is called the "Son". Even in Book XII, when his human birth is spoken of in a long passage of historical prevision, he remains anonymous although other figures, like Abraham and Moses, get their known appellatives. Of course it may be that the person here is too well-known to need naming. But in Aswapati's case there may be a reason too: he is a certain type - "A thinker and toiler in the ideal's air" - whose being and doing are of importance rather than his human particularity. As soon as he figures in a clear human context he gets his identity-card. Before that, he is summed up at the end of Book Three as "The Lord of Life", preparatory to his human role as "Aswapati" in the next Book. Apropos of the line -
But Aswapati's heart replied to her -[p. 341]
the special comment is made: "Even here, we notice that it is not Aswapathy that is talking but his heart'. Is there any sense in such a distinction? Surely Aswapati's heart did not convey its message directly to Savitri's heart: words did the work of communication, words in which the heart-element found voice. Merely because Aswapati is not pictured as saying things with his lips, do we get a submergence of the
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narrative voice in any intelligible sense? What does Milton write about Satan beginning the debate in hell? He tells us that Satan
His proud imaginations thus displayed.
Like Aswapati's heart, we have the arch-fiend's "imaginations" talking - no, not even talking but just being "displayed". What an unnecessary subjectivism has barged in, spoiling the epic tone!
Here I am tempted to ask, perhaps not quite relevantly at this place but with some bearing on the general argument: "Milton's theme is the loss of Eden by man's disobedience. And yet the first three Books - the best of Paradise Lost -march majestically in utter indifference to the announced subject and we are whirled through events that form the backdrop, as it were, of the true plot. And even the whole Book connected with the war in Heaven has nothing directly to do with Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve, the ostensible hero and heroine of the poem, don't make their appearance until thousands of lines have been written. Is this the way an authentic epic must proceed?" Savitri, the heroine of Sri Aurobindo, at least makes her début in the very first Canto of Book 1 - even though she disappears soon after Canto Two for nearly ten thousand lines. But Milton cannot be exonerated from complicating his epic by all that endless thunder of the opening three Books. Actually, there are two stories in Paradise Lost, and what is meant to be the secondary story steals the show. And yet we are told that Milton is carrying on the genuine epic tradition.
So far I have dealt with more or less formal points - and I would not think it especially necessary to break a lance over them, except in the matter of the nature of epic. But I now come to a rather serious business, the general comment on "the long and difficult revelatory passage, 'the Symbol Dawn' ": "The English is compelled to communicate a
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testament of faith which the genius of the language resists to communicate. There is also perhaps something there foreign to the ordinary mentality. That is why it is full of terms with negative prefixes and suffixes, or abstract nouns used to convey a concrete meaning. This is not only true of the first canto, but of the entire poem. In the first fifty lines of the poem we come across the following words: unlit, impenetrable, eyeless, unbodied, zero, nothingness, insoluble, nought, featureless, unknown, unconscious, unseeing, formless, soulless, unthinking, inscrutable, nameless, unthought, unfilled, moonless, unremembering, unshaped, unsounded, endless. It is clear the poet is trying to articulate an idea which defies articulation."
The immediate inference, though perhaps not the definitive deduction, from this comment can be: Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is a poetic failure both because it is highly mystical and because it is written in an intrinsically unmystical language like English.
I should have thought that after Milton's ambition or aspiration in the words with which he hails the "Heavenly Muse" -
I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rime -
no one writing in English need be daunted by any theme, however recondite or "foreign to the ordinary mentality". Particularly a medium like poetry which traditionally brings into its articulation a breath of the Gods and plunges into the secret places of the human heart and soars into the distant spaces of the divine Spirit or, as the Negro preacher styled his work, tries to "fathom the fathomless and unscrew the unscrutable" - well, poetry should never be tagged with any
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innate inability to express "unknown modes of being". All the more ridiculous is it to charge a language like English with having a restricted genius able to communicate only a certain kind of testament of faith, a language which has not only a strong element of the Celtic fire and ether in it but has received fecundating streams of psychological power from so many European tongues and become multiform, complex, subtilised, armed with almost endless potentiality, ensouled with a flexible universality behind or below its Anglo-Saxon surface of mind and has in the last two centuries received a distinctly Vedantic influence - even if unlabelled as -such - through Wordsworth and Shelley and A.E. and carried touches of the occult through Blake and Coleridge and Yeats and, in a broad sense, grown plastic through Keats and Beddoes and others of their kind to ideas which normally would seem to defy articulation:
...solitary thinkings such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain.
The first canto of Savitri - as well as many a later part of the poem - is tough business. It is true that the frame of reference within which the opening passage is to be interpreted is not explicit. But all this creates only a difficulty, particularly for readers unprepared for the Aurobindonian revelation: there should be no conclusion to the effect that the substance falls outside the genius of English or even that all language must always fall short of the ideas concerned.
The proof the paper appears to see for such a conclusion strikes me as pretty artificial: namely, "terms with negative prefixes and suffixes, or abstract nouns used to convey a concrete meaning". The means and methods Sri Aurobindo adopts are suited to his theme, which is a huge spiritual Negation, the Inconscient, a fathomless zero, "the abysm of the unbodied Infinite". The negative prefixes and suffixes
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are just the right thing here, direct helps to communication. So also are the abstract nouns used to convey a concrete meaning. I may add that such prefixes and suffixes and such concretised abstractions have always been employed for particular poetic effects. Milton is not a truly mystical poet, but he knows that when his theme is either Chaos or the Empyrean he has to be negative-suggestioned and abstract-nouned in order to vivify it - as in:
who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark unbottomed infinite Abyss
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way...?
where "unbottomed", "infinite", "obscure", "uncouth" are all negatively prefixed and even "Abyss" comes from the Greek "abussos" meaning "bottomless". Or take:
Thee Father first they sung omnipotent,
Immutable, immortal, infinite,
Eternal King; thee Author of all being,
Fountain of Light, thyself invisible
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st
Throned inaccessible -
or else:
a globe far off
It seemed, now seems a boundless continent
Dark, waste and wide, under the frown of Night
Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms
Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky...
No doubt, Sri Aurobindo is more philosophical than Milton here, but Keats is sufficiently so in the lines I have quoted and Sri Aurobindo is not more abstract-nouned in
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the service of his philosophical turns than Keats there What makes those lines poetic is the concrete movement imparted to the abstractions. Sri Aurobindo, too, concretises all the terms. Even the most abstrusely metaphysical stir with life:
Something that wished but knew not how to be
And I can't imagine anything so vivid as what immediately follows:
A throe that came and left a quivering trace,
And only meets the corpse of his desire.[Ibid.]
You may complain that you can't properly tell what it is all about. I can sympathise there, but I would refuse you the right to say that it is not something alive (if not kicking). Here is no mere arrangement of dead matter, nor yet an efficiently operative machine: here is a palpitant organism "doing or suffering". You may not be able quite to make out what is being done or suffered, but there is an harmonious movement, an internal order, a directed process, the tracing of a significant figure, even though some of its details alone are understood by you and you cannot get the sense of the whole. From the way the vision functions, from the mode in which the rhythm is patterned, we can feel that expressive poetry has been born no matter if it passes somewhat over our heads.
The closing phrase of my sentence sends me to the pun I made in a recent talk of mine to our students about the type of poetry I had essayed to write with Sri Aurobindo's
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inspiring help and which he had called "overhead" because it seems to come from secret dimensions of consciousness felt high above the brain-mind. My pun was: "Overhead poetry is the poetry that passes over everybody's head." To get its full impact therefore, calls for some sort of aesthetic yoga, by which one receives impressions in a wide quiet consciousness thrown open, as it were, to a descent of vibrant word from a spiritual sky. The top range of this poetry is known as the Mantra. About the Mantra Sri Aurobindo has written:
"The mantra (not necessarily in the Upanishads alone) as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is what comes from the Overmind inspiration. Its characteristics are a language that says infinitely more than the mere sense of the words seems to indicate and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into Infinite, and the power to convey not merely some mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing it speaks of, but its value and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind them all. The passages you mention (from the Upanishad and the Gita) have certainly the Overmind accent. But ordinarily, as I have said, the Overmind inspiration does not come out pure in human poetry. It has to lift it by a seizure and surprise horn above into the Overmind largeness; but in doing so there is usually a mixture of the two elements, the uplifting influence and the lower stuff of mind. You must remember that the Overmind is a superhuman consciousness and to be able to write always or purely from an Overmind inspiration would mean the elevation of at least a part of the nature beyond the human level."
Of his own Savitri he has written in a private note:
"There have been made several successive revisions each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry. As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully
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through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them."
Sri Aurobindo has also pointed out that overhead poetry in small quantities had already been written in the past in various languages - and even the rare Overmind accent has come in. Particularly is this kind of verse possible in a language like English about which Sri Aurobindo writes in connection with translations from it into Bengali:1
"It is not that I find the translations here satisfactory in the full sense of the word, but they are better than I expected. There is none of them, not even the best, which I would pronounce to be quite the thing. But this 'quite the thing' is so rare a trouvaille, it is as illusive as the capture of Eternity in the hours. As for catching the subtleties, the difficulty lies in one supreme faculty of the English language which none other I know possesses, the ease with which it finds the packed allusive turn, the suggestive unexpressed, the door opening on things ineffable: Bengali, like French, is very clear and luminous and living and expressive, but to such clear languages the expression of the inexpressible is not so easy -one has to go out of one's way to find it. Witness Mallarme's wrestling with the French language to find the symbolic expression - the right turn for what is behind the veil. I think that even in these languages the power to find it with less effort must come; but meanwhile there is the difference."
"The expression of the inexpressible": this means bringing out in words the suggestion, the presence, of what is beyond the mind's habitual conception or imagination. It is not an attempt at the impossible, the inherently self-contradictory. And it can best be done in poetry - in poetry of the overhead Aurobindonian type - in overhead poetry created in English.
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If we approach Savitri with a proper understanding of the process, we shall feel and see and intuit its truth through the figure and gesture of its beauty, and all that the narrative, the apocalyptic and the prophetic voices in it, which the paper so well describes, have to convey will go home to us and keep winging for ever in those depths where the poet in each man hides and holds the inexpressible as his own eternal Self.
26.12.1970
(Inspiration and Effort: studies in literary attitude and expression, 1995,
pp. 232-48)
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A SUGGESTION ABOUT A WORD IN
AN AMERICAN DISCIPLE'S LETTER TO
MOTHER INDIA
February 13,1972
Dear Mr. Sethna,
A follower of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, I have been a reader of Mother India since 1953 and have gained much from it. T have been an admirer of your writings in particular. An engineer in the fields of computer design and communications, I have degrees in philosophy and physics.
With the introduction out of the way, I would like to call your attention to a seeming error in Savitri. It occurs in the original two volume edition, and in the 1954 University edition. Perhaps it has been corrected since. The line in which the fault lies occurs on the same page of the latter edition, page 290, as these famous lines:
Or we may find when all the rest has failed
Hid in ourselves the key of perfect change.[p. 256]
But the lines with which I am here concerned read:
Man then might rest content and live in peace,
Master of Nature who once her bondslave worked. [Ibid.]
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The above contains my correction of the passage. The book has "wants" for "once," which garbles the meaning. Although "wants" and "once" have only one letter in common, they are very close in pronunciation, suggesting that the error was made by a scribe taking dictation of the lines from Sri Aurobindo. Nirodbaran would seem to have committed a pun. Would you agree that my correction is fairly obvious wants seen, pardon me, once seen?
Sincerely yours, Robert Sharland
* * *
March 5,1972
Dear Mr. Sharland,
I was glad to get your letter, introducing yourself and suggesting "once" for "wants" in a line of Savitri. As the line occurs in that part of the poem which Sri Aurobindo had written and not dictated we were hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery by referring to his papers. On the face of it, it looked impossible that if the line were a written one anybody could have misread the word. So we suspected that Sri Aurobindo had expanded the passage in the days of dictation. And we were right. Nirodbaran found five new lines added and one of them was the bone of contention.
I agree with you that "once" makes very natural reading and that it should substitute the current word in all future editions. Thanks for being pundit enough to spot Nirodbaran's unconscious pun!
It's rather exhilarating to find that an engineer in the fields of computer design and communications or even that someone who has degrees in philosophy and physics is also such a sensitive reader of Sri Aurobindo's poetry on top of being a follower of him and the Mother. You have followed him very well indeed in this Savitri-passage!
Yours sincerely, K.D. Sethna
(Mother India, March 1972, pp. 92-93)
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SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI
AND DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA
TWO LETTERS
The thesis you have passed on to me cannot stand as it is. Although the research is excellent its foundation is rather unfortunate and needs some modification. If left without a shift in perspective, it will blur the truth of the matter.
The author conceives Sri Aurobindo as modelling Savitri upon Dante's Divine Comedy, following its theme and making extensions of it in the light of his own spiritual experience. It is even suggested that he is presenting Dante, filled out and expanded, to the modern world. And his own poetic performance is attributed to his extreme admiration for the Florentine's work and to its overwhelming influence on him.
It is true that Sri Aurobindo gave Dante a very high rank: Dante figured for him among the giants of poetry. But Sri Aurobindo certainly did not put him at the sheer top. Dante stood on a slightly lower level, along with Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton - just as all these stood above Goethe who too, according to Sri Aurobindo, was among the elite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa.
Four criteria Sri Aurobindo set up for the absolute first rank. They may be summed up: originality of imagination,
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power of expression, creative genius, range of subject matter. The last criterion implies also scale of work or what we may call quantity of quality. Dante just misses the utter Everest-point and sits crowned on a Kanchanjanga because his work does not have an equal genius with Vyasa's, Valmiki's, Shakespeare's and Homer's for creating a teeming world of living characters and real-seeming situations and "unknown modes of being". An energetic constructiveness on a grand scale rather than a formative force as of a demiurge distinguishes Dante, even as it marks out Kalidasa who, like him, would otherwise be in the company of those topmost four.
So Sri Aurobindo's admiration for Dante could never have been of the extreme order. Though, among the world's epics, he put the Divine Comedy alongside of the Odyssey as least sinking in poetic quality throughout its great length, he could not but be aware of their difference in elemental creativity. And it is also this difference that should be one of the factors deterring us from pressing too far the comparison between Savitri and the Divine Comedy. We may also remember that to have a sustained quality does not necessarily render a work superior to another which has ups and downs. Horace's dictum, "Even Homer sometimes nods", refers to the Iliad, but surely the epos of Achilles's wrath is greater than that of Odysseus's wanderings. There is a dazzling fire, there is a dizzying flight in the former that reveal more and reach farther than all the wondrous discoveries of the "many-counselled" sailor among the islands of the Aegean. In a dissimilar yet perhaps not quite unconnected universe of discourse we may note Sri Aurobindo's rating Shakespeare much higher than Racine in spite of the Frenchman's uniform perfection of art and the Englishman's repeated scoriae or, to put it more expressively, his sun-spots. Shakespeare has a height or a depth of vision, a magnificence or a mystery of word which Racine, for all his beautiful polish and finish, rarely, if at all, equals.
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Sri Aurobindo may be said to have been poetically influenced in a basic sense by Homer and Shakespeare from his earliest days and, later, by Vyasa, Valmiki and the mantras of the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita. If any poetry not exactly of the sheer top, though high enough, deeply permeated him, it was Kalidasa's more than Dante's.
This is not to say that Dante has nothing to do with Savitri. Interesting and even illuminating comparisons may be made, on the whole as well as in some details, between Savitri and the Divine Comedy. Many parallels drawn by the thesis can hold, but its point de depart has to be changed. And here the most important thing to be borne in mind is the real source of the Aurobindonian epic.
Dante differs fundamentally from Sri Aurobindo in not being, in the true sense, a mystic. Sri Aurobindo has designated Dante's poetry, as well as Milton's, religious, not mystical. And that means it is the imaginative projection of certain strong mental beliefs and vital attitudes touched by an intuition of God and of a supernatural Beyond. There is no direct occult experience, no immediate spiritual realisation at the back of it. Something from the occult domain and the spiritual plane was sure to come on the breath of the intense and authentic inspiration that was Dante's, but upon it and around it his poetic imagination has played. And, since he did not have, in the supreme degree, the creativity of which Sri Aurobindo speaks, the play of the poetic imagination could not always transmit that "something" in its utter essence.
A further point is the emphatically Christian character of Dante's "towering fantasy" (to use his own expression). The theology of Thomas Aquinas, with the metaphysics of Aristotle as its substructure, and the whole orthodox framework of the Mediaeval mind are an integral part of Dante's universe. The poet's individuality, his personal concerns, his sympathies with the old Classical world and the boldness of his opinions have blended with the traditional elements - and there is also a wide humanity tingeing everything and
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bringing what we may term a world-cry into so many of the poet's articulations. Still, Mediaeval Christianity, however universalised, is magisterial in the Divine Comedy - and with it there opens a gulf between Dante and Sri Aurobindo.
No doubt, Mediaeval Christianity, no less than Graeco-Roman Classicism and Modern Europe, are included in Sri Aurobindo's vast cultural consciousness. But all these strains are taken up by a profound identity with the oriental soul and particularly with the multi-dimensioned Indian spirit. Even more, there is at work in the Aurobindonian consciousness
the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
Sri Aurobindo does not merely sum up the whole past of human history: he also embodies the light of a new evolutionary future pressing for universal realisation. With the varied past of mankind and especially India's broad-based synthesis of Nature and Supernature as his launching-pad, his vision zooms into a Vita Nuova beyond Dante's conception, and from the height of this Unknown he looks at everything. A fresh astonishing light - the infrared of Nature's unfathomed secrets, the ultra-violet of Supernature's unreached arcana - is brought forth by him. What was a vague dream of the Ideal, an elusive hope of the Perfect, a struggling aspiration to the Plenary - all this is given substance and shape in Sri Aurobindo's experience and self-expression. All this comes to verbal life most clearly and comprehensively in the 23,8141 lines of Savitri. Knowledge of states of being and planes of consciousness such as even the greatest spiritual scriptures of India have never compassed shines out in intimate detail. These scriptures, with their warm touch on mystical reality, may be said to have prefigured that knowledge; but they are themselves shadowy in comparison
1 [23,837 in the 1993 edition.]
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to Sri Aurobindo's masterful disclosures. How much more so must be the Dantesque Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, for all the systematic accounts of their levels and all the insets of human drama they carry!
The system itself of other worlds unfolding in the Divine Comedy has little counterpart in Savitri. Where in it is the hierarchy of planes - subtle-physical, vital, mental, psychic, "overhead", and lastly "the radiant world of the Everlasting Truth"? Except for the common factor of exploring the ultra-terrestrial and for some correspondences here and there of setting and symbolism, we are in radically dissimilar dimensions. Nor can we say that Sri Aurobindo's hierarchy can be divided and distributed into three general sections covered by Dante's labels: "Inferno", "Purgatorio", "Paradiso". The subtle-physical and vital planes have their own hells and heavens: neither these hells nor these heavens can be lumped together to make a Dantesque picture. It is not possible also to ignore these heavens and restrict that label to the idealities of the mind-plane and the rapturous intensities of the psychic. Both below them and above we have paradisal expanses, and at the summit we have the supreme beatitudes -
White chambers of dalliance with Eternity
And the stupendous gates of the Alone.[p. 91]
A breath from such altitudes does get wafted in the closing canto of Dante's epic, which, barring a symphony of Beethoven's, is perhaps the most glorious voice Europe has heard of the Divine Ananda, but there too the scheme of Christian theology is at work. On occasion we have an anticipation of some Aurobindonian God-glimpse as in:
O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,
sola intendi, e da te intelletta
e intendente te ami e arridi!
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Laurence Binyon englishes the lines:
O Light Eternal, who in thyself alone
Dwell'st and thyself know'st and self-understood,
Self-understanding, smilest on thine own!
Barbara Reynolds's version reads:
Eternal Light, that in Thyself alone
Dwelling, alone dost know Thyself, and smile
On Thy self-love, so knowing and so known!
Both the translations are awkward in places and lack the clear natural conciseness and force of the original; but the original is perfect with the harmonious directness of the imaginative intellect's language intuitivised. It is not that Sri Aurobindo's utterance always differs toto coelo, but everywhere we have the sweep of a deeper vibrancy, and again and again we get mantric outbursts dealing with a theme not far removed from that of Dante's lines, either quietly spell-binding–
or thrillingly rapt:
Timeless domains of joy and absolute power
Stretched out surrounded by the eternal hush;
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Perhaps the spiritual difference will be best gauged if we put side by side with these passages an Aurobindonian moment itself which comes nearest the Dantesque:
There knowing herself by her own termless self,
Wisdom supernal, wordless, absolute,
Sat uncompanioned in the eternal Calm,
All-seeing, motionless, sovereign and alone.[p. 32]
Mention of mantric outbursts, involving a disparity between the sources of the two poetic perfections that are respectively Dante's and Sri Aurobindo's, brings us to a final point. In all those parts of Savitri where the old poem written in 1916, as far as we know, was enormously enlarged and completely transformed, Sri Aurobindo writes with an inspiration that comes straight from "overhead" levels through a mind entirely silent in a permanently established peace of the infinite and universal Self of selves - Atman that is Brahman. Sri Aurobindo's mind does not build up anything on its own: it does not say to itself, "Here is Dante's Divine Comedy describing an other-worldly journey through the pit of punishment and suffering, the mount of repentance and self-chastisement, the free spaces of ecstasy and epiphany. I will take up this theme and erect the lucent structure of a new epic. A tale from the Mahabharata of a fight between Love and Death is apt to my purpose. Basing myself on it I will write a new Divine Comedy. Everywhere I will take help of a Dantesque scaffolding and bring my own spiritual experience as well as my awareness of the modern world's needs to bear upon the general pattern of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise and on various particulars of the Mediaeval Italian poet's significant vision. I will be a magnified Dante." The whole mode of procedure natural to a master Yogi like Sri Aurobindo would be foreign to any such self-conscious mental project.
True, Sri Aurobindo's mind was a highly and diversely cultured one and the "overhead" afflatus would take up
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all that richness full of sounds and sights caught from numberless past creations of poetry. But it would not start from this richness. The start would be far beyond it. An ādesh, a divine command, would be upon his mind in poetic work as in any other. And the command would bring about an expression of his multifarious spiritual realisation, his immediate experience of all the inner and upper worlds beyond our earth and pour all his knowledge forth in inevitable words propelled sheer from the mystical truth of things and never from any artistic ambition, any emulation of past poetic achievements, even though the literary loves and cultural responses that were his would find a new avatar for themselves in several portions of the epic creation that is essentially independent of them. If we properly understand the Yogic manner in which Sri Aurobindo wrote Savitri, we would, while noting and underlining whatever Dantesque affinities have got woven into the fabric of vision and word, refrain from ascribing to him an all-influencing motive of writing Dante larger and more luminous.
I admire the spirit in which the writer of the thesis has taken my criticisms - and the spirit persists in spite of the "defence" put up at some points. This defence is welcome, for it clarifies a number of issues, without wanting us to refrain from modifying the language and turn of treatment in the thesis wherever necessary. The writer's modesty is worthy of a true researcher and comparative student.
I should like to make a few remarks apropos of some "defensive" observations. In one matter I fear the observer has gone rather astray. The impression seems to be there that "perfection of form" is missing among the criteria Sri Aurobindo has set up for the highest poetry. That is why the writer desires us not to concentrate only on what is called "elemental creative energy". But surely "perfection of form"
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is implied in the criterion "power of expression", which stands for the poetic gift of making flawless form by means of words. Actually this criterion involves both the things the writer puts apart. It is precisely "the channelising of that energy into a creative work of art". By "creative genius" (Sri Aurobindo's third criterion) is not meant merely a Niagara-rush à la Kazantzakis. There is a specific meaning attached to the term. It stands for the demiurgic capacity to create a world of one's own - living characters or else vibrant modes of being variously interrelated within a real-seeming milieu. It is because Dante, just like Kalidasa, has not enough of this capacity that he fails to rank with the sheer pinnacles of Parnassus: Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Vyasa. His having less of inequalities, fewer ups and downs, does not help him: those four have enough ups, and these ups have in a greater degree the creative genius which Sri Aurobindo speaks of. All great poets must have great elemental energy, but only when that energy is at its greatest in all the four attributes mentioned by Sri Aurobindo is the greatest poetry born. The isolation of this energy as one of the attributes out of the four and the identification of it with "creative genius" has made our correspondent labour an irrelevant point.
Not quite accurate also is our friend's placing on a par Sri Aurobindo's choice of the five-act Elizabethan model of the Drama and his choice of the Savitri-story for an epic like Dante's, dealing with other worlds. His Savitri in its gigantic "multifoliate" complexity has little in common with the Divina Commedia's structure to merit comparison with the close approximation of the structure of Rodogune and other plays to the model followed by the Elizabethan dramatists. Of course in general we have hells and heavens and perhaps even purgatories in Savitri, but they are of an entirely different kind and also they are differently organised. The correspondent appears to be somewhat in two minds here. At one place we read of "the occult experiences during the travels of Aswapati" and at another we get a reference
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to Savitri's own inner explorations "of the triple worlds of Night, Twilight and Day". It is only the latter that invite some comparison with Dante's scheme, but still in too broad a manner. The former hardly provide "vital connections" -though both may and do admit now and then the striking of a Dantesque chord in the Aurobindonian symphony.
And the chord would be all the more authentic because Sri Aurobindo, as the author of the thesis should know, was familiar with Italian sufficiently to read the Divina Commedia in the original. But nothing really links up Savitri with this mighty product of the Middle Ages of Europe in an organic and inevitable manner. I go to the length of asserting that even if Dante had never lived and his epic had never reared its "towering fantasy" the tale of Love and Death out of the Mahabharata would have been taken up by Sri Aurobindo and metamorphosed into almost the very same super-epic of the Spirit that is Savitri. I say "almost", for what would have been missing are lines here and there which have not only a Dantesque cast of utterance but also something of the substance of the Florentine's vision. That is all.
Provided we keep this foundational truth in mind we are free to make a comparative study and bring with it a fine literary as well as philosophico-spiritual insight. But I would rather dwell on several small pregnant anticipations by Dante than trace a host of amplifying correspondences in Sri Aurobindo.
pp. 262-71)
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SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI AND
TENNYSONIAN BLANK VERSE
I was much interested to read the views you have sent me of the two dons - one English, the other Irish - on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. The first of these Academics seems to me rather misguided in his evaluation of the epic's blank verse.
No doubt, he is right in saying that there was plenty of end-stopped blank verse in English before Savitri - but did you actually say that the only type had been the enjambed? Most probably, when you pointed out the "originality" of Sri Aurobindo's metrical form, you had more things in mind than merely its abstention from overflowing. It is a form deliberately adopted and deftly manipulated. Of course, whatever Sri Aurobindo wrote in his later life was not from the actively planning intelligence: it all came to him from "overhead" through the Yogi's silent mind - but the overhead inspiration does assume the modes of the mind and it can produce psychological phenomena which can be differentiated among themselves as those which look instinctively immediate and those which look consciously selective and formative. In his early days Sri Aurobindo had not gathered any body of technical knowledge and it was his keen art-feeling - engendered by his long self-steeping in the greatest and finest poetry of several countries - that was his guide. But later he acquired a mass of technical knowledge,
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and a critical sense constantly accompanied the dictates of the poetic enthousiasmos; he knew with wide-open eyes, as it were, how the inspiration worked and where it came from and whether it was anywhere distorted in the transmission. Even here, as he has written to me, he did not "think": he saw and felt; but whereas formerly he had just felt he now saw as well, and it is this seeing against a background of technical knowledge that constitutes what, in our ordinary language, we may call his deliberate adoption of a form and his deft manipulation of it.
This implies that his end-stopped blank verse was not merely opposed to the overflowing kind by being end-stopped: it had other and deeper motives, wider purposes, higher functions and was even end-stopping itself on account of these factors in a way all its own - all its own both with regard to the single verse-unit and in respect of the various ensembles the verse-units built up (blocks of one line, two lines, three or four or five lines). I question whether the early Elizabethans and the young Shakespeare had any crystallised art-idea when they "practised" a blank verse based on the unit of the single line. They followed a model that had somehow come into vogue and they had not yet realised the full possibilities of the enjambed variety.
Tennyson's revival of "this sort of blank verse" must have had more consciousness behind it, just as in a greater way Milton was conscious of the overflowing sort in his "organ music" and the mature Shakespeare in the large curves of his many-motioned violin, though I may doubt if the Shakespearian "consciousness" was much more than the Life Force of the Late Renaissance complexly kindling up to self-sight within this individual instrument of intense passion and curious imagination. But to compare Tennyson's revival with Sri Aurobindo's and, much more, to compare the practice of Marlowe, Kyd and the young Shakespeare with it is to overlook the very heart of the Aurobindonian art: "an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian
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movement, so far as that is a possibility in English", as Sri Aurobindo himself briefly and rather modestly puts it.
I may grant that certain Elizabethan and Tennysonian effects take on a fresh avatar in passages of Savitri, and a critic may legitimately juxtapose some Marlovian "mighty line" with any of Sri Aurobindo's, of which one may feel that here
The wide world-rhythms wove their stupendous chant, [p. 30]
or a commentator may justly measure the accent of a Tennysonian novelty against some song-thrill of new discovery in Sri Aurobindo,
A bow-twang's hum of young experiment. [Ibid.]
But surface-affinities discoverable here and there hardly justify the verdict of your professor friend: "Much of Aurobindo's blank verse seems to me Tennysonian..." It is a superficial verdict - and its character is little improved when the writer brings in what he must be considering a similarity of temper and adds that Sri Aurobindo was affected "also possibly by the Tennysonian blank verse of Sir Edwin Arnold, whose work he certainly knew well".
Mind you, I am not a hundred per cent denigrator of Tennyson the Poet. I set a fairly high value on his "young experiment", but his old performance, which constitutes the bulk of his work, is well hit off by Sri Aurobindo himself apropos of Indians writing blank verse: "Tennyson is a perilous model and can have a weakening and corrupting influence and the 'Princess' and 'Idylls of the King' which seem to have set the tone for Indo-English blank verse are perhaps the worst choice possible for such a role. There is plenty of clever craftsmanship but it is mostly false and superficial and without true strength or inspired movement or poetic
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force. As for language and substance his influence tends to bring a thin artificial decorative prettiness or picturesqueness varied by an elaborate false simplicity and an attempt at a kind of brilliant, sometimes lusciously brilliant sentimental or sententious commonplace." Even the nineteenth-century blank verse of Sri Aurobindo - Urvasie, Love and Death, The Hero and the Nymph (the last-named a translation of a drama of Kalidasa's) - are free from the typical Tennysonese, and it is free not merely by being impetuously enjambed as against Tennyson's mixture of end-stopping and overflow. Somewhere in- my writings I have put together a passage of Tennyson's and one of Sri Aurobindo's that have some similarity of general theme and pointed out the world of difference in vibrancy, sensitiveness, vision-vitality, art-intensity. Here is Tennyson in the middle of the Enid story:
O purblind race of miserable men,
How many among us at this very hour
Do forge a life-long 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...
Now take the following from Love and Death - part of a lover's lament visiting the underworld:
...O miserable race of men,
With violent and passionate souls you come
Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days
In fear and anguish, snatching 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
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Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,
The naked spirit here...
Sri Aurobindo appears to make a Tennysonian take-off but immediately he soars up into an intoxicating ozone and his touch-down is still with "trailing clouds of glory". Mark too the dissimilarity of the sheer form, the verse-body that goes soaring. Tennyson is loosely articulated, with a generic shape, so to speak, rather than a specific one: only one line (the sixth) has some originality of contour -
Groping, / how man/y, until / we pass / and reach -
but it is a newness languidly achieved. Sri Aurobindo disposes his beats with a constant vivacity of variation, and the very motion of mind and mood becomes a face and figure of beauty ("Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes", to remember a Byronic snatch). Particularly the last five lines and a half have that organic out-thrust and "a terrible beauty is born". They modulate themselves on a most creative instress. But the moulded energy is multi-toned, rhythmed "in inward time", in the earlier lines as well, though with less passion and more poignancy.
The usual tendency of commentators - at least in India - is to bracket Savitri's blank verse with that of Paradise Lost. So far as quality is concerned, this is not such an off-the-centre remark, yet it still bespeaks an obtuseness, a non-particularity of the aesthetic sensorium in the matter of turn, rhythm-curve, line-structure. The significant difference between the Miltonic and the Aurobindonian, in spite of a general common impression of elevated tone and massive dynamism, I have set forth in some detail in the course of a number of Notes published some years back. But I suppose that to an English scholar the opposition between the repeated enjambment of Paradise Lost and the predominant end-stopping of Savitri is too insistent to be ignored and hence is inhibitive of a glib
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comparison of Milton with Sri Aurobindo. That, however, is no reason why Tennyson's end-stopping in a good part of his verse should push one into the equal and perhaps worse glibness of Tennysonifying an afflatus so remote as is Sri Aurobindo's from that of The Princess and The Idylls.
To complete my contention that such compositions of the Victorian Poet-Laureate have really nothing to do with the "future poetry" in Sri Aurobindo's epic "Legend and Symbol", I may pick out a few lines to contrast the thought-quality of the two. Savitri became in its final version a Philosophy as well as a Legend and a Symbol, and there are, as the second Professor ably discerns, innumerable currents of philosophical thought in it. Now, one may urge that the passage I have culled from the Enid story does not totally lend itself to a juxtaposition with my excerpt from Love and Death. It has less of image-colour, less of emotional abandon, more of mental vision, a broad touch of poetic philosophising, with phrases like "taking true for false, or false for true" and "that other, where we see as we are seen". A movement is indicated from the twilight-illusions of this world to a world of verity, from the troubles of time to the equipoise of eternity. Well, let us extract whatever intellectually poetic pleasure we can from the thrill Tennyson conveys to us of his grey matter in the moulding hands of the Muse - and then let us look at a short spell of spiritual thinking in Savitri which transfers to a different plane the basic motif of the passage from Love and Death, with even a linking phrase ("Death helps us not") from it:
Our being must move eternally through Time;
Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;
A secret Will compels us to endure.
Our life's repose is in the Infinite;
It cannot end, its end is Life supreme...[p. 197]
The utter depths of the soul surge up here and move with a mighty measure in which the speech of the intellect is
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recognisably caught yet carried beyond itself by the Spirit's undertones and overtones. Not alone the waves of an unfathomable sound-significance but also the living hues of a genuine mind-vision playing in and out of their sweep towards luminous horizons are foreign to dear old Alfred for all his floating hair and prophet beard and mist-rapt eye trying to swim beyond our ken on a portwine-dark strange sea of thought. (I must apologise to Homer and Wordsworth for tainting the lovely "stock-description" of the one and the grand trouvaille of the other with a touch of the bibulous.)
Please do not think I am prejudiced in favour of the second don as against the first because the former has given Savitri high praise. It is the temper of the mind behind the pronouncements that I have considered. If the latter had offered authentic criticism after realising what sort of work, both in matter and manner, this epic is I would have respected his viewpoint even while attacking it - or perhaps I may have seen some area of agreement upon the ordinary level of literary criticism. Savitri is not a completely finished creation, it did not receive the absolute ultima lima from its author. So one may, if one wants, pick fault with a few parts of it from an overall outlook, if one does not have a sufficient inlook to take one away from such petty and superficial carping. And an impartial judge is bound to concede some room to competent reservations. But a facile summing-up cannot be let pass. Perhaps the Professor did not intend to make any censure. At least the mode of his expression is not censorious at all. But he appears to have given a very perfunctory response, as if to imply, "Oh, you make too much of it all - a fair amount is déjà vu."
From his letter to you I can see that he is a very kind and helpful person. And the suggestion he proffers to you to "say something about the remarkable parallel between the legend of Savitri and that of Alcestis" seems a fruitful one.
I had no idea the other Professor was such an old man. His mind has kept its full vigour and, what is more, its penetrating
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power. All his observations go to the heart of a thing - and he has many observations to make. I cannot conceive of a better tribute in a short space than his few lines by way of a general comment: "The poem has impressed me by its sublimity, richness of imagery, and lofty spiritual level, allied with great skill in interpreting unusual psychic experiences through appropriate imagery." And what genuine warmth of response is there in the other declaration: "I...greatly appreciated the privilege...of making the acquaintance of Savitri, a truly remarkable poem." Then there is the perspicacity of his note: "there are two points which struck me emphatically. (1)The frequent echoes - quite deliberate - of well-known lines in English poetry in Savitri. They are all over the place. (2)Sri Aurobindo says somewhere in the prose notes that he has discussed and examined in the poem every important philosophical theory... You have touched on the matter in various places in your thesis, but a detailed examination would call for a book all to itself. Some day perhaps you or a pupil of yours will write this book; but it would call of course for considerable philosophical equipment." Finally, there is the statement equally worth marking: "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."
I see too that in this Professor's last letter to you, he refers again to Savitri as "this great poem" and goes on to say: "I am interested in Sri Aurobindo and his work... Already there is a small collection of books in our world-famous library in Trinity College, Dublin, dealing with Sri Aurobindo and his work and writings. Your book will be a most valuable addition to the growing group of works in this important field."
You were indeed lucky to come into contact with such a fine consciousness. I write "consciousness" on purpose instead of "mind", for here there seems to have been an
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all-round sensitiveness and perceptiveness, a culture that permeated the whole being.
I am glad you have undertaken to carry out one of his wishes - that you should try a comparative study of Dante and Sri Aurobindo. Here I may note that in Savitri we have not only deliberate echoes of several great lines of English poetry, lines passed through the typical Aurobindonian spirituality, but also reverberations from the poetic literature of other countries. Dante too has contributed some strains. One may be mentioned at once. Do you remember the story he makes Ulysses tell, but none of the classics know, the story which has served as the basis of Tennyson's Ulysses, that memorable success of his in blank verse, along with Morte d'Arthur and Tithonus? I have Laurence Binyon's translation - poetic enough but naturally nowhere near Dante's unique blend of simplicity and exaltation, clear-cut flow and concentrated force. Dante's Ulysses tells his comrades:
"Brothers," I said, "who manfully, despite
Ten thousand perils, have attained the West,
In the brief vigil that remains of light
To feel in, stoop not to renounce the quest
Of what may in the sun's path be essayed,
The world that never man-kind hath possessed.
Think on the seed ye spring from! Ye were made
Not to live life of brute beasts in the field
But follow virtue and knowledge unafraid."
Now listen to what Savitri's father, King Aswapati, caught of
A word that leaped from some far sky of thought, [p. 369]
Sri Aurobindo's passage is much longer than Dante's. I'll cull a few parts of it:
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"O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,
O petty adventurers in an infinite world
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind
Around your little self and petty things?
But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,
Not for vain repetition were you built;
Out of the Immortal's substance you were made;
Your actions can be swift revealing steps,
Your life a changeful mould for growing gods....
A greater destiny waits you in your front:...
You shall awake into the spirit's air...
And look through Nature with sun-gazing lids...
Authors of earth's high change, to you it is given
To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul
And touch the mighty Mother stark awake
And meet the Omnipotent in this house of flesh
And make of life the million-bodied One.
The earth you tread is a border screened from heaven;
The life you lead conceals the light you are.
Immortal Powers sweep flaming past your doors;
Far-off upon your tops the god-chant sounds
While to exceed yourselves thought's trumpets call,
Heard by a few, but fewer dare aspire,
The nympholepts of the ecstasy and the blaze...." [pp. 370-71]
This is a fine example of the end-stopped technique, with just two lines effectively enjambed:
To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul...
And the whole passage has an affinity in a general manner to the grand finale of Tennyson's Dante-inspired little piece -perhaps the noblest blank verse the Victorian poet penned:
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I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rest unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From the eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
Tennysonian blank verse of this calibre - as adroit in end-stopping as in overflowing and charged everywhere with a winging afflatus, whether light and mobile,
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or massive and high-poised - may well stand beside the Aurobindonian as sheer poetry. But Ulysses is an exception and not the rule. Neither can it, for all its masterful semi-mystic romanticism, match the deeper tones that sweep through Savitri again and again. Perhaps the passage with the Dante-correspondence does not quite bring those tones home to the inner ear as markedly as others, such as:
Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart;
Through a faint glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone. [pp. 33-34]
If we may close in a technical strain, we may observe that in the last five lines here there is an intriguing mixture of the end-stopped and the enjambed, not in the sense that they alternate but in the sense that they appear to fuse. The first line is a regular overflow - while the next two form a partnership which is not easy to distinguish as the one kind or the other: the two kinds interplay, seeming at the same time a single whole and a pair of self-sufficient parts. Nor, when the third line is taken along with the two terminal ones, can this whole be really cut into three independent phrases, yet the links are so delicate and subtle that each has a telling life of its own and a monumental strength which still has a singing and a soaring, in which the great significance-packed words turn ethereally luminous and, on some haunting undertone of suggestion and some suffusing overtone of vision, achieve a
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poetic paradox which we can only characterise as the uttering of the Unutterable.
What exactly we mean may be indicated by a few critical hints. When we read at the very start of the passage -
The toiling thinker widened and grew still -
we can see and feel with a fair distinctness the movement of the human mind towards the Spirit beyond it. The weighty spondee of the initial line's first foot, the next trochee with its reversal of the basic iamb-flow of the metre and then the couple of regular beats leading to a sort of uninsistent trailing away of the poet's own voice into voicelessness - all these are effects we can discern. Similarly we can measure the drift of the succeeding line, with its first three regular feet conjuring up a large easy transition from the finite to the infinite, and then an accentless pyrrhic balanced at the end of the line by a spondee - "grew still" - conveying the fullness of the spiritual state, the culmination of the God-ward growth of the soul. The two lines together prepare the other duo with which the revelatory passage reaches its resolution. But in that duo we tend to lose our bearings. The phrases are not striking with a conscious poetry. The opening expression -"Where judgment ceases and the word is mute" - is most simple and direct, almost a prose locution: what animates it to a pitch far beyond me finest prose is a deep undercurrent, an intonation which nearly effaces the stresses and carries its meaning on a stream of silence, as it were. The next pentameter appears to have as abstract an air with its "Unconceived", an economical straightforwardness striving after no colourful imaginative effect, yet accomplishing an extreme of the vivid and visionary by the vocables "lies pathless". They evoke the sense of a super-personal Divinity in an eternal self-extension that defies all attempt of discriminative thought to pass across its mystery. And the epithet "alone" comes as a summing-up
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of the utter transcendence - or, if you like, a humming-up of the ultimate Silence, a tolling as of a huge golden bell, a very sky-dome ringing, to round off the multitudinous activity of the universe and announce the reign of the unfathomable Supracosmic, the boundless Godhead reposing in His secret self-luminosity, dissolving the universe into its indescribable divine potentiality. This is a poetry in which seeing and feeling draw intensely inward and disappear into an immense unmediated experience: seeing and feeling are then no longer needed: all the supernatural Wonder which words seek to communicate by seeing and feeling is now as if known by identity with it: there is here a spontaneous power of poetic Yoga holding by a transparency of language this Wonder in its own authentic plenitude of existence.
What Tennysonian blank verses can vibrate with the quality of such a Mantra?
pp. 249-61)
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POETRY OF THE THOUGHT-MIND AND
"OVERHEAD POETRY"
MILTON'S PARADISE LOST AND SRI AUROBINDO'S
Milton knew himself to be for "an audience fit, though few." It is impossible for many to address him in their minds as he makes Eve address Adam:
O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose,
My glory, my perfection!1
But in a poetic sense Milton can be likened to Adam and regarded as our glory and perfection if we interpret from the standpoint of poetic psychology the phrase:
O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose.
For, Milton is the first English poet to fashion the language of poetic thought: he is the Adam of the creative intelligence in English poetry, and poetic thinking really finds in him all repose - no strain, no gesticulation, an intellectual utterance achieved with sovereign ease on a gigantic scale: the thought-power in us can see its glory and perfection in him and solely in him who has used this power masterfully through 10,565 lines of pentametrical blank verse. Of
______________
1 Bk. V,28-9.
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course, we should not particularly look here for the inner mind, much less the domains still more occult. "Milton's architecture of thought and verse," writes Sri Aurobindo,1 "is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence, - for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he creates." Then Sri Aurobindo, referring to Vedic imagery, adds: "he does not stray into 'the mystic cavern of the heart', does not follow the inner fire entering like a thief with the Cow of Light into the secrecy of secrecies. Shakespeare does sometimes get in as if by a splendid psychic accident in spite of his preoccupation with the colours and shows of life."
Yes, Milton's mind, as we have already remarked, is not really mystical although it took Heaven and Hell to range over. His achievement, however, is not to be judged by what his mind could not do: the sweep of its positive virtues must be the determinant of our appraisal. Sri Aurobindo2 sums up his triumph: "he 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..."
Perhaps the claim that Milton is the innovator of English poetry of the thought-mind will be challenged on behalf of Donne. Has not Donne made poetic speech a vehicle of intense thinking? Does he not press all the rest of man's parts into the service of a quivering complicated thought? Well, the very form in which we are led to make the claim for him is an index to the half-way-house position he occupies. His
1Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Third Series), pp. 118-19.
2The Future Poetry, p. 117.
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mind is more recognisably free than Shakespeare's from the Life-urge, but it is yet caught in that urge and is constantly allured to function from within it rather than to work on its own and seize it for vitalising the authentic creations of another power than the nervous being and its dynamic and dramatic thought-quiverings. Donne is trying at the same time to be mental and vital. His is a restless personality and the double effort brings with it all that violence, disturbed rhythm, counter-pointed expression which are extremely effective on occasion but often strike us as no more than a clever torture of the language. The poetic intelligence has not found its proper voice in him. Although his mental ingenuities come alive frequently enough, the genuine orientation of the mind towards intellectual thought is baulked of consummation because a style suitable for the dominant play of the poised intelligence has not yet been launched. Donne was so different a personality from Milton that it is not easy to institute illuminating comparisons except in a very general manner; but we may catch the essential difference between their dealings with the creative intelligence and its native accent by juxtaposing the last stanza of Donne's "Prayer" from his Litany with the end of the exordium to Milton's Book I of Paradise Lost. Donne finely breathes into poetic diction a semi-colloquial tone and an argumentative urgency:
O Holy Ghost, whose temple I
Am, but of mud walls and condensed dust,
And being sacrilegiously
Half wasted with youth's fires, of pride and lust,
Must with new storms be weather-beat;
Double in my heart Thy flame,
Which let devout sad tears intend; and let
(Though this glass lanthorn, flesh, do suffer maim)
Fire, Sacrifice, Priest, Altar be the same.
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Milton, though not infused with the speaking voice's accent, articulates his poetic diction with a high naturalness of insistent thinking:
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That, to the highth of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.1
Here we have the thought-mind perfectly free in its own clear air and, from above, charging the creative vitality with its poetic burden, even as the Divine Spirit whose wide wings are seen by Milton alighting and brooding over the Abyss to impregnate it. The Elizabethan Life Force had already come under the stress of intellectuality before Milton and the speech of Classicism had been essayed: there was even a pressure towards something more than mind, a pressure which we feel best perhaps in Vaughan whose life (1622-95) overlapped with Donne's old age as well as much of Milton's career. But in Milton we have both the liberation and the consummation of the mind's native tongue; for, in Sri Aurobindo's words, Paradise Lost "is the one supreme fruit of the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance and measured perfection of form".2
1Bk. I,17-26.
2The Future Poetry, p.116.
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But when we speak of the mind's native tongue being Milton's, we do not yet hit off the whole quality of his mental poetry. For, such poetry has several kinds of movement. And in the age - the so-called English "Augustan" - which succeeded that of Milton we have a skilful language of the mind - the language of Dryden, Pope and others - yet without the natural nobility which moves in Milton. Rather there is a polished efficiency arranging glitters of thought. Even when a finer note is added, a tinge of truer feeling, there remains a lack of the authentically uplifting breath; and a well-turned idea, warmed by some sentiment, expresses itself in a meticulously but superficially finished style and proves attractive to the average reader by an artistic coating of the commonplace. We may take an instance from Gray which has some connection with Milton. In his extremely popular Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Gray has a stanza recalling our minds to a passage in the speech of Belial from which we have quoted in extenso. Gray tries to convey the pathos of a soul about to lose its earthly existence, standing on the verge of death but looking back before crossing over:
For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?1
How different is the accent of the Miltonic utterance - elegiac too in temper yet pitched in a nobler key:
... for who would lose,
1 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 85-8.
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In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion?1
No doubt, the line about "those thoughts" is extraordinary even in Milton and is incomparable; but the passage, to stand out against Gray's, could well do with a lesser Miltonic line. Suppose we pick up a phrase2 from elsewhere and read:
this intellectual being,
That to the highth of deity aspired...
The passage would still be worlds apart from the stanza by Gray. Even if we took the expression of a more "intellectual being" than Gray's we should feel Milton's distinctive quality. Here are some verses from a poem of Coleridge in an intellectual vein:
If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom
Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare
As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
But are their whole of being!...3
This is the genuine language of the thinking mind, with actually a Miltonic influence on some of the verbal turns. And yet what is often termed Milton's "organ-voice" is wanting -something in the manner and still more in the rhythm, that makes the miracle of the line about "those thoughts" not a sheer freak of revelatory music but an exceptional upsurge from a sort of constant base in the rhythm-roll of Paradise Lost. The reason for this is that, though mostly limited to the mental range of vision and not piercing beyond it to a
1Bk. II, 146-51.
2Bk.IX,167.
3Human Life: On the Denial of Immortality, 1-5.
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recognisable spiritual sight as distinguished from a high theological view, the thought-mind in Milton echoes the movement of a greater power of cognition: its breath of expressive sound seems caught from a level of consciousness which Sri Aurobindo's system of Yogic psychology considers the first "plane" in the hierarchy of "planes" above the mental level whose instrumental centre is in our brain.
Sri Aurobindo writes of "overhead poetry" - poetry coming from vastnesses of being and consciousness that are as yet unreached by mental man and whose manifestations in him have been rare and sporadic so far. At the top of the gradation which they form is what he calls Overmind, the world of the great Gods who are essentially One Existence and who, from the utterly divine and till now unmanifested Supermind, draw a delegated dynamism for their cosmic functions. The poetic word hailing from the Overmind is the Mantra. We have already spoken of its characteristics. Leading up to its source from the mental plane are the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuition. Unlike the Mind proper, the Higher Mind carries a natural awareness of the One Self everywhere and knows and sees through a lofty and comprehensive thought-force. It has "a strong tread often with bare unsandalled feet and moves in a clear-cut light: a divine power, measure, dignity is its most frequent character".1 The One Self everywhere is common to all the overhead planes, but the force at work varies: the Illumined Mind visions rather than thinks. "The outflow of the Illumined Mind comes in a flood brilliant with revealing words or a light of crowding images, sometimes surcharged with its burden of revelations, sometimes with a luminous sweep."2 The Intuition, which must be differentiated from the swift sudden leap of thought which occasionally takes place on the mental level, "is usually a lightning flash showing up a single
1Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Third Series), p. 116.
2ibid.
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spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire and miraculous completeness of vision to the surprised ecstasy of the inner eye; its rhythm has a decisive inevitable sound which leaves nothing essential unheard, but very commonly is embodied in a single stroke."1 Although none of these three planes has the overwhelming massiveness of the Overmind word and its vibration as from infinite to infinite, all of them have an intrinsic wideness which is not the same as the expansive tension of mental or any other poetry at its most cogent. And Milton has a spontaneous spaciousness of rhythm because, in spite of his thought and word generally lacking in the spiritual depth of the overhead, his rhythm echoes the Higher Mind.
Sri Aurobindo says: "When Milton starts his poem -
Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden Tree -
he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the substance or the style. But there is a largeness of rhythm and sweep of the language which has a certain kinship to the manner natural to what is above."2 In another place Sri Aurobindo calls Milton's "grand style" a derivate from or substitute for the manner of the "Higher Thought". And here he brings in a comparison with Shakespeare's poetry which too has an affinity with an overhead plane. This affinity seems to be more by the way the vision works than by the sound of its working. Sri Aurobindo3 begins by asking us to take Milton's grand style anywhere at its ordinary level or in its higher elevations: there is always or almost always, he tells us, an echo of the Higher Thought. After citing again
2Ibid., p. 65.
3Ibid., p. 117.
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the opening lines of Paradise Lost, Sri Aurobindo wants us to consider as an instance,
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues,
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
Then Sri Aurobindo goes on: "Shakespeare's poetry coruscates with a play of the hues of imagination which we may regard as a mental substitute for the inspiration of the Illumined Mind and sometimes by aiming at an exalted note he links on to the Illumined overhead inspiration itself as in the lines [to sleep] I have more than once quoted:
In cradle of the rude imperious surge?
The rest of that passage falls away in spite of its high-pitched language and resonant rhythm far below the overhead strain. So it is easy for the mind to mistake and take the higher for the lower inspiration or vice versa. Thus Milton's lines might at first sight be taken because of a certain depth of emotion in their large lingering rhythm as having the overhead complexion, but this rhythm loses something of its sovereign right because there are no depths of sense behind it. It conveys nothing but the noble and dignified pathos of the blindness and old age of a great personality fallen into evil days."1
Not that Sri Aurobindo altogether denies to Milton the substance and the expression making the large lingering
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rhythm exercise its sovereign right. He grants: "Naturally, something from the higher planes can come into a poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it."1 A direct uplifting into the Mantric Overmind cannot be expected more frequently than once or twice, but now and again the other overhead levels do mingle their voices with the mental Miltonic or else draw it into themselves: most often their influence, when it does enter in, plays upon a Higher-Mind transfiguration of the mental Miltonic. Perhaps the Higher Mind is directly vocal in:
Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss...2
The Illumined Mind seems to put its own stamp on a Higher-Mind expression when we hear:
Thou Sun, of this great world both eye and soul...3
The deeply suggestive touch of the Intuition appears to lie on a similar utterance that we have already culled:
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers...4
Possibly a breath of the Overmind itself passes faintly over the same basic speech with the phrase in God's mouth before the creation of the world out of Chaos:
Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill
Infinitude...5
1Ibid., pp. 117-18.
2Bk.V,297.
3Ibid.,171.
4Bk. 111,37-8.
5Bk. VII, 168-69.
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All these phrases, however, are rare wingings that must be carefully distinguished from the general level of Paradise Lost where repeatedly we meet with mental reflections of the overhead. Thus we might easily be tempted to cry "Higher Mind" on reading:
bring back
Through the world's wilderness long-wandered Man
Safe to eternal Paradise of rest.1
But, for all the solemn exquisiteness and expansive poignancy of the second line, a touch of the profundities is still somewhat absent, such as is found in the more simple-worded yet more subtle-thoughted sweep from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri:
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives. [p. 453]
Again, we may imagine the Illumined Mind flashing out of Milton's vivid account of how Satan
Springs upward like a pyramid of fire
Into the wild expanse2
or fusing with the Intuition in the phrase about the Eternal Eye that
forth from his holy mount,
And from within the golden lamps that burn
Nightly before him, saw without their light
Rebellion rising...3
1Bk. XII, 311-14.
2Bk. II, 1013-14.
3Bk.V, 712-15.
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But we should be able to distinguish these semblances from the Illumined Mind truly breaking through the Higher Thought when we get Sri Aurobindo's:
One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,
Questing for God as for a splendid prey,
He mounted burning like a cone of fire [p. 79-80]
and we rise sheer beyond all possible affinities with Milton's "pyramid of fire" or even his "Eternal Eye" when the Illumined Mind comes assimilated into the Intuition and even into the Overmind in the suddenly revelatory:
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient.[p. 48]
Nor should we be seduced into mixing up the Intuition proper with the suggestive intensity of Milton's
which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell: myself am Hell1 -
or the suggestive obscurity of his
yet from those flames
No light but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe...2
The Intuition proper disturbs our depths in Sri Aurobindo's verses on Hell's weird "epiphanies" -
Drew adoration to a gleam of slime,[p. 273]
1Bk. IV, 73-5.
2Bk. 1,62-4.
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or pierces to a sacred secrecy within us with
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown. [p. 522]
Finally, though the Miltonic poetry can be profoundly moving as well as mighty, we do not yet receive the accent of the Overmind from:
Long were to tell
What I have done, what suffered, with what pain
Voyaged the unreal, vast, unbounded Deep
Of horrible confusion...1
We get the clear Overmind accent in those forceful lines already cited from Sri Aurobindo about Savitri's sacrificial Avatarhood for the evolving world's perfection:
Here I may appropriately quote what Sri Aurobindo wrote to me when in a poem which he had considered "overhead" the line -
An ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy -
was found unsatisfactory by him and I asked him whether it was bad poetry or not "overhead" enough and therefore not in tune with its context. Sri Aurobindo replied: "The line is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually (in Paradise Lost) some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his
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substance is - except at certain heights - mental, mentally grand and noble. The interference of the mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."1 I changed the line to:
An ultimate crown of joy's infinity.
Sri Aurobindo considered this to be more acceptable as part of the poem concerned. It may be noticed that a small shift is made from the abstractly effective to the concretely effective, from poetic ideation to poetic suggestion, from the conceived spiritual to the perceived spiritual. "Inexhaustible joy" transmits a powerful thought about something beyond the thought-mind: "joy's infinity" conveys a direct vivid sense of the supra-intellectual reality. This reality is now before us with its intrinsic novelty, its natural transcendence of common or human fact: previously it needed to be imagined from a strong hint partly negating such fact and partly magnifying it. Joy is now identified with an infinity: an infinity already there in its own right, with its very being a divine Ananda, hangs upon our view, and when called "an ultimate crown" it immediately brings up the suggestion of a vast overhanging sky free from all trammels. Joy, described as "inexhaustible", had no clear skiey implication: when combined with an ultimate crown", it carried only a massive idea of something domelike above, unhampered by pain.
Sri Aurobindo's Savitri employs constantly and in the highest degree a style presenting spiritual vision and experience in all their concreteness. Even in the moments where a thought-form is prominent, spiritual vision and experience have moulded thought to their own luminous truths instead of thought essaying to capture them in a mental cast for intelligible communication. The style of Savitri thus is different
____________________
1 Life-Literature-Yoga, p. 38.
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from that of Paradise Lost in very temper and texture. We should commit a psychological mistake to term it Miltonic. Miltonic it is in so far as it organises a stupendous energy with a stupendous control and in so far as Milton has always a spaciousness of utterance. But to dub it Miltonic all round, as most reviews of Savitri have done, is to skim the mere surface of style-quality.
And it differs from the mental Miltonic not only in basic psychology: it differs also in expressive attitude and technical posture. The ends of criticism are hardly served by seeing Miltonism as soon as we have anywhere a high-pitched blank verse embodying at some length an epic theme. The technique of Miltonism is in the first place enjambment, the running over of lines, the sense drawn out inseparably from one verse to another, but with pauses set at varying places within the lines - as in the passage about Beelzebub when fear and desire were swaying his fellow-demons:
Which when Beelzebub perceived - than whom,
Satan except, none higher sat - with grave
Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed
A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat, and public care;
And princely counsel in his face yet shone,
Majestic though in ruin. Sage he stood,
With Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look
Drew audience and attention still as night
Or summer's noonday air...1
Savitri has quite a different technique. Take the lines on the heroine herself, conscious of her great transformative mission:
1 Bk. II, 299-309.
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A work she had to do, a word to speak;
Writing the unfinished story of her soul
In thoughts and actions graved in Nature's book
She accepted not to close the luminous page,
Cancel her commerce with eternity,
Or set a signature of weak assent
To the brute balance of the world's exchange. [p. 19]
Sri Aurobindo has made, in a letter, some general remarks on his technique in Savitri. "Savitri," he says, "is blank verse without enjambment (except rarely) - each line a thing by 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...1 Pauses hardly exist in this kind of blank verse; variations of rhythm as between the lines, of caesura, of the distribution of long and short, clipped and open syllables, manifold constructions of vowel and consonant sounds, alliteration, assonances, etc., distribution into one line, two line, three or four or five line, many line sentences, care to make each line tell by itself in its own mass and force and at the same time form a harmonious whole -these are the important things."2
Yes, Savitri is mostly end-stopped while Paradise Lost is mainly enjambed, but we must avoid the mistake of reading Milton as if there were to be no retardation of the voice at the close of a line. Although we may not halt as much as we would in an end-stopped structure, we must never forget that poetry is broken up into lines of a certain metrical pattern and the line-unit must be felt to however small a degree. John Diekhoff has even mustered some external evidence that Milton himself, in spite of thinking in run-over blocks and "verse-paragraphs", regarded the line as a more or less
1Savitri (1954), p. 821.
2Ibid., p. 825.
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isolated unit to be indicated as such by some sort of breath, pause, or lingering at the end.1
The general difference in expressive attitude Sri Aurobindo well touches off half-humourously in a remark drawn by my attachment of the label "Miltonic" to his lines:
Were the spectators of that mighty strife. [p. 13]
"Miltonic?" asks Sri Aurobindo and goes on to answer: "Surely not. The Miltonic has a statelier more spreading rhythm and a less direct more loftily arranged language. Miltonically I should have written
Watched the arbitrament of the high dispute."2
Sri Aurobindo's syntactical construction too is not markedly Latinised like Milton's in numerous places, nor have we in him the typical Miltonic flux and reflux of words except on a very rare occasion as when he says:
A greater darkness waited, a worse reign,
If worse can be where all is evil's extreme;
Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is naked worst, [p. 211]
(The Inspiration of "Paradise Lost", 1994, pp. 98-113)
1"Terminal Pause in Milton's Verse", Studies in Philology, XXXII (1935), pp. 235-9.
2Savitri, pp. 861-2.
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SOME COMMENTS ON SAVITRI1
(I)
The opening passage of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri - the block of the first 78 lines from
It was the hour before the Gods awake [p. 1]
to
All can be done if the God-touch is there [p. 3]
is often regarded as the most difficult, the most obscure in the whole epic. Its obscurity lies precisely in its description of an obscurity, a darkness, a night which covers the world. What is the nature of the tenebrous phenomenon pictured in lines 2-4 of the passage in relation to the 1st? -
The common impression is that the very beginning of the universal manifestation is spoken of. According to
1 [Originally published in Mother India, August and September 1975.]
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Sri Aurobindo's spiritual philosophy, the manifestation, of which earth's history is a part, begins with a stark Inconscience in which all that we understand by the Supreme Divine is submerged and concealed. From the total Involution cosmic Evolution starts: the submerged qualities of the Supreme Divine gradually emerge, the concealed powers of the Superconscience come out of the Inconscience, grade after grade. First, organised Matter takes shape - next, Life with its sensations and desires springs forth - then, Mind perceptive and conceptive appears - and, finally, there will be a disclosure of all that lies beyond mentality, the various phases of the Supreme Divine culminating in the quaternary: Supermind (Vijnana), Bliss (Ananda), Consciousness-Force (Chit-tapas), Existence (Sat).
Now, does the Night, which features in Savitri's opening passage, stand for this Inconscience at the commencement of things?
The initial clue to the right answer is in the very title of the Canto: "The Symbol Dawn." The title refers to the dawn of the day which is characterised in the line which occurs at the end of the first canto:
This was the day when Satyavan must die. [p. 10]
The dawn in question serves as a symbol. The symbolic content is stated in the verses picturing the occult power that has the natural daybreak as its suggestive front and communicative medium:
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A further pointer follows:
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns...
Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares...
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane. [p. 4]
In short, what is symbolised is the descent of the Supramental Godhead into the world's mental human consciousness for a total transformative purpose. A brief fore-glimpse is given of the invasion of Cosmic Ignorance by the Transcendent Knowledge. This Cosmic Ignorance, whose highest term is the mind groping towards Truth, is itself an evolute from the basic Inconscience. If the Transcendent Knowledge is the Reality of which the symbol is the dawn of the last day in Satyavan's life, this basic Inconscience would be the Reality of which the symbol is the night preceding that dawn. And actually the night and the dawn are connected by Sri Aurobindo when he first brings in the dawn motif:
Amid the Night's forlorn indifference. [p. 3]
These two lines come immediately after the opening passage of Savitri has closed with
All can be done if the God-touch is there. [Ibid.]
Thus "the huge foreboding mind of Night" is linked with the Symbol Dawn. And already before the opening passage ends we have the mention of this dawn:
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Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep. [p. 2]
What arrives in the wake of the hesitating hue is an illumining outbreak of the divine vision:
An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps; [Ibid.]
and the eye is called
A scout in a reconnaissance from the sun. [Ibid.]
Nowhere do we find any disjunction between the symbol dawn and the night preceding it. All that we find is different phases of this night. From a condition which Sri Aurobindo describes by saying,
A fathomless zero occupied the world [p. 1]
and later
we pass to another state about which he says:
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;
A nameless movement, an unthought Idea
Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.[pp. 1-2]
In other words, the symbolised Inconscience shades off into the less stark symbolised Ignorance - a state comparatively closer to the hesitating hue's "long lone line".
So much for the initial clue of the Canto's title. It has led us to several points in the whole passage driving home its
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suggestion. But in fact we do not need to go far afield to prove that the night is the particular period of darkness prior to the particular period of light during which Satyavan is going to die. We have only to consider turns of expression like the following, which occur on the heels of "the huge foreboding mind of Night":
As in a dark beginning of all things,
A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown...
Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force... [p. 1]
Here directly the word "symbol" is used about the night and we are told that what is happening is "as if" at the time when the original Inconscience started to disgorge an evolving universe from its depths. We have an explicit comparison in either instance. Again, there is the obvious word "semblance" telling us that this night is not the "Unknown" itself but only something like it in muteness and featurelessness. And the line,
matches the two later ones commencing with "Almost", which we have already quoted. Just as these declare the unmanifest Superconscience in the dawn-glamour, this one provides an inkling of the original Inconscience in the dark hour upon which that magic light breaks. It is this hour, and not anything else, that is spoken of in Savitri's opening line. And in the line itself a subtle sign that we are not at "the dark beginning of all things" is caught from the difference in the tenses:
It was the hour before the Gods awake. [Ibid.]
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Why does Sri Aurobindo not write "awoke"? The reason is that he is pointing not to an event which once happened but to one that constantly and repeatedly happens. It will hardly do to say that the Historic Present - a literary device to secure vividness - is being used. If such is the case, what is the idea of not employing the same narrative device in the first half of the line? Why are we not told: "It is the hour..."?
We get again a significant present tense slightly later when Sri Aurobindo tells us of the cosmic drowse of ignorant force
A situation covering a long span of ages, including the continuous cosmic phenomenon of stars shining and the continuous terrestrial phenomenon of human history, finds an allusion in "kindles" and "carries". The night described is not the primeval Inconscience but an image of it such as comes numberless times in that long span of the ages during which the kindling of suns and the carrying of lives are ever present. The coming, time and again, of the primeval Inconscience's image in the form of night preceding day is clinched for us by Sri Aurobindo writing:
Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,
Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs
Forgetful of her spirit and her fate. [Ibid.]
"Once more" is unmistakable in its implication. Nor is it an isolated locution. Its occurrence fairly early in the Night-passage links up with a reiteration of it at almost the conclusion of the passage and in the middle of the Dawn-passage following it:
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And old experience laboured out once more... [p. 3]
A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near. [p. 4]
Evidently what happened several times in the course of things is indicated - what is painfully recovered after each oblivious sleep which represents the primeval Inconscience, an obtruding on the night's vacancy by the advent of the Dawn-goddess who momentarily lets the transcendent Light through. We may add that just a little before the one passage's end we have a preparation of the next passage with the mention of the scout from the Sun. About the "message" of this "eye of deity" which "pierced through the dumb deeps" Sri Aurobindo continues:
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel. [pp. 2-3]
Mark the adjective "renewed". The "consent to see and feel" comes not just on one occasion but on a series of occasions as dawn follows night time after time.
What, in fact, Sri Aurobindo posits in
is a religio-mythic concept, that has been part of India's temple-life for millennia: the daily awaking of the Gods.
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The Gods are the Powers that carry on the harmonious functions by which the universe moves on its progressive path. According to an old belief, based on a subtle knowledge of the antagonism between the Lords of Falsehood and the Lords of Truth, the period of night interrupts the work of the Truth-Lords by its obscuration of sight and by its pulling down of the consciousness into sleep. Each day, with the onset of darkness the Gods are stopped in their functions by the Demons: the Gods pass into an oblivious slumber. Each day, with the advent of light they emerge into activity and continue their progress-creating career. Traditionally the moment of their awaking, termed "Brahma-muhurta", is 4 a.m. Every temple in India rings its bells and clangs its cymbals at 4 a.m. to stir the deities, no less than the devotees, into action. The "hour", therefore, which Savitri depicts at its start may be taken, if we are to be literal, as 3-4 a.m. The termination of this hour is "the divine Event" mentioned in the second line.
That this is so and that a particular religious custom which points to a local and temporal occurrence is in view are most aptly indicated by the 4th line, stating the place where Night's mind was alone:
In her unlit temple of eternity.[p.1]
Connecting the event of the Gods' awaking after the hour between 3 and 4 a.m. every day in Indian temples, there is the hit-in-the-eye word "temple" used by Sri Aurobindo.
Yes, the common impression that the very beginning of the universal manifestation is depicted is definitely off the mark. But we must not overlook the background of such an impression. The original primeval Inconscience from which all manifestation has sprung is certainly a looming enormity visible through the Night-passage. If it were not so the passage would not be as symbolic as the Dawn-passage. The exaggeration we must guard against is the forgetting of the
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symbolic act: we must refrain from mixing up the Symbol and the Reality.
Perhaps we may effect a species of reconciliation between the common impression and our explanation by another manner of presenting the symbolisation - a manner which, also can be justified from Sri Aurobindo. Here we have to say: "There is in each night a small temporary Inconscience, a passing snatch of the Great Darkness that is the divinely ordained womb of our cosmos. In this snatch we can glimpse the movement by which the Darkness grew less and less impenetrable and passed into what we may call Dimness awaiting illumination: the phenomenon which Sri Aurobindo tersely catches in the phrase about the Inconscient being teased to wake Ignorance. The symbolisation consists in each night being the primeval Night itself in a local transient miniature."
Before we close our discussion we may warn against the temptation to say: "Sri Aurobindo is sketching the old Indian conception of the Cosmos passing into laya, non-manifestation, again and again and emerging repeatedly out of that Darkness into phenomenal existence." First of all, laya is not Darkness: it is simply non-manifestation. Secondly the emergence of Ignorance from the Inconscient, the appearance of half-knowledge or finite consciousness, on the way to plenary knowledge or Super-conscience by means of a progressive evolution, is not considered by Sri Aurobindo a repetitive process. He conceives it to be one extreme possibility of self-revelation adopted by the Divine in the course of His varied "adventure of consciousness and joy" in terms of time and space. For, as Sri Aurobindo says in The Riddle of This World,1 "once manifestation began infinite possibility also began and among the infinite possibilities which it is the function of the universal manifestation to work out, the negation, the apparent effective negation - with all
1 The 1933 edition, Calcutta, p. 101.
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its consequences, - of the Power, Light, Peace, Bliss was very evidently one." Here is a unique dire experiment, a horrific wager with Himself that the Almighty makes because this too must appear at some point as a mode of phenomenal self-projection. Besides, an actual full repetition of "a dark beginning of all things" would never be called a "symbol", a "semblance" and introduced by "as if".
So far we have gone by internal evidences and general considerations. Now for a couple of quotations from Sri Aurobindo's letters on Savitri, providing an indirect elucidation of the problem. When we say "indirect", we do not mean that they leave any doubt lingering: we merely mean that they are not directly meant to solve the difficulty. The solution emerges in the course of answers to other questions.
The first excerpt1 runs:
"...do you seriously want me to give an accurate scientific description of the earth half in darkness and half in light so as to spoil my impressionist symbol or else to revert to the conception of the earth as a flat and immobile surface? I am not writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial and temporary darkness of the soul and Nature which seems to a temporary feeling of that which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal. One who is lost in that Night does not think of the other half of the earth as full of light; to him all is Night and the earth a forsaken wanderer in an enduring darkness. If I sacrifice this impressionism and abandon the image of the earth wheeling through dark space I might as well abandon the symbol altogether, for this is a necessary part of it. As a matter of fact in the passage itself earth in its wheeling does come into the dawn and pass from darkness
1 The 1972 edition of Savitri, pp. 733-34.
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into the light. You must take the idea as a whole and in all its transitions and not press one detail with too literal an insistence..."
Obviously the objection to which Sri Aurobindo replies is that the opening passage of Savitri suggests the whole earth to be plunged in darkness whereas the actuality disclosed by post-Copernican science is half-earth experiencing night and half-earth experiencing day. The very terms of the objection imply the view we have presented in our comments - namely, that Sri Aurobindo's immediate subject is one particular earthly night. If this view had been wrong, Sri Aurobindo would at once have criticised it. But his reply proceeds on the same view and thereby supports our presentation and, while thus proceeding, he has several expressions which leave no room for the notion that the original Inconscience prior to the earth was the explicit vision. The explicit vision is: "the image of the earth wheeling through dark space...." Through this image a number of profound insights are conveyed, but nowhere does it lose its central and frontal position. And we have to mark the adjectives in the phrase: "a symbol of a partial and temporary darkness of the soul and Nature" - as well as to observe the clear pointers everywhere that it is the earth's partial and temporary night that impressionistically serves for the symbolisation.
Our next excerpt dwells further on the symbolisation, in answer to a critic's feeling that the poet is drawing out his description to an inordinate lergth. Sri Aurobindo's defence1 goes:
"His objection of longueur would be perfectly just if the description of the night and the dawn had been simply of physical night and physical dawn; but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the canto clearly suggests, a symbol, although what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is
1 Ibid., pp. 792-93.
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to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind the 'day' of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. The whole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol and this opening canto is, it may be said, a key beginning and announcement. So understood there is nothing here otiose or unnecessary; all is needed to bring out by suggestion some aspect of the thing symbolised and .so start adequately the working out of the significance, of the whole poem."
The chief operative turn of speech for our purpose in the above is: "a relapse into Inconscience." The term "relapse" indicates indisputably a new setback, involving in the case before us a particular occasion for the unconscious condition such as happens each night in the course of the 24-hour cycle through which the earth passes repeatedly. We may also note that what makes the symbol of an inner reality and so takes us beyond the merely physical in import is, after all, the physical night and physical dawn constituting the earth's daily phases. The Inconscience that is there is primarily the one in which the soul and Nature sink during the recurrent nocturnal phase. Even though "the main purpose" of the description is to conjure up the "dark beginning of all things" as a presence, it is only through an instance of the earth's recurrent nocturnal phase that this presence is conjured up.
II
Savitri opens with a single self-sufficing line - a complete sentence in iambic pentameter consisting of eight words:
It was the hour before the Gods awake. [p.1]
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This line is the shortest start of any epic. The Iliad has a dactylic line starting the theme with a greater number of syllables proper to the quantitative hexameter - a number which Pope is obliged to match by a full heroic couplet:
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly Goddess sing!
Virgil's Aeneid has two hexameters and an extra foot for the initial grammatical unit. C. Day Lewis represents them by:
To tell of the war and the hero who first from Troy's frontier,
Displaced by destiny, came to the Lavinian shores,
To Italy....
Dante's Divina Commedia runs its start into a trio of lines setting the terza rima moving. In Dorothy Sayers's version we have:
Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
Milton's Paradise Lost beats all by his long-drawn-out overture:
Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one Greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse...
But Sri Aurobindo's opening, though the shortest, is not by any means the simplest. As we have seen, it preludes the most tough "knot" of the whole poem. It has cosmogonic
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overtones, metaphysico-religious implications, and refers to a religio-mythic concept: the moment of the Gods' awaking.
The next line -
Across the path of the divine Event - [p.l]
at once recalls with its two concluding words Tennyson's well-known
And one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves.
But there is no direct parity between the Aurobindonian "Event" and the Tennysonian. Sri Aurobindo points to a daily occurrence, while Tennyson presumably talks of the end of universal history. And yet, behind the daily working of divine forces to which Sri Aurobindo alludes, we may discern a final "divine Event", when the Gods, the Lords of Truth and Light, will awake forever and the Avivdya, the Ignorance, in which the world's consciousness lives at present, will be dispelled for good. As we have already observed, the habitual awaking of the Gods on the particular day with which Savitri begins its story is infused with a brief appearance of the ultimate glory: a touch of the "epiphany" is seen for a short while. The "one far-off divine event" is momentarily glimpsed. Yes, a Tennysonian suggestion glimmers in the background. But, of course, the consummation which Tennyson alludes to is not quite the same as the world-fulfilment Sri Aurobindo's yoga labours towards. Tennyson has a Christian outlook, and strains his eyes in the direction of a world-end leading to a Supreme Hereafter for all the elements of the Creation, which Christ, reappearing, will gather up into God. Sri Aurobindo has in view a crowning of the world's evolutionary effort by an establishment of the Supermind here in time and space with a divinised mind, vitality and body. Unlike the Christian
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visionary, he is spiritually this-worldly not only in "organic process" but also in ultimate achievement.
We may note in passing that Sri Aurobindo does not particularise his "Event" by qualifying it as "this" or "that": he employs only the general definite article "the". A sort of known generality is indicated: there is no pinning down of the Event to a specific occasion nor is any direct attention focused on it: it is named unobtrusively in spite of its magnitude - as if it were a matter of recurrent greatness, a common uncommonness - a splendour to be repeated interminably. The use of "the" rather than "this" or "that" turns us away again from some once-and-for-all Event and conforms to the pattern we have drawn of a night like any other in the long series of dark intervals, except that Satyavan is to die during the ensuing day.
In the line that follows -
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone - [Ibid.]
what is it that is foreboded? One may argue that it must be an unpleasant thing - a deeper and larger gloom - rather than a pleasant thing, namely, the light to come. One may imagine the deeper and larger darkness to be the original Inconscience, which was the beginning of the world; but how can that Inconscience be boded in advance? "Fore" implies a future, not a past. What is symbolised is not the same as what is anticipated. We should think only of the light to come. But then the atmosphere of gold that would go with this light would stand in the way: forebodings are gloomy, whereas the anticipation of light would be cheerful. However, we must remember two points. First, it is gloom that is in an anticipatory state: so the anticipation has itself to be gloomy, sharing as it does the nature of the anticipating entity, even though what is anticipated is bright. Secondly, what is anticipated would spell the end of gloom and surely gloom anticipating its own end cannot be cheerful about it!
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Psychologically it cannot help being gloomy about the event which would deal a death-blow to it.
"The event" - there we have named the very identity of the blow-dealer. What the mind of night forebodes is the preceding line's "divine Event" - the moment of the Gods' awaking. Actually the word "before" of the first line of Savitri should identify the object of night's foreboding activity.
Now we may dwell on the literary, as distinguished from the psychological quality of the participial adjective. From Sri Aurobindo's manuscripts we learn that the third line of Savitri originally ran:
The huge unslumbering spirit of Night, alone -
and was followed, two lines later, by:
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge,
Mute with the expectation of her change.
Later the final line became:
In the present version of the opening passage the substance of both forms of the line in question has been concentrated in "foreboding" in the immediate context and later assimilated into two lines:
An unshaped consciousness desired light
And a blank prescience yearned towards distant change. [p- 2]
We are pointing this out by the way; the literary problem we should like to raise is: how would an adjective like "expectant" or "previsioning" do as a substitute for "foreboding"?
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"Previsioning" would not be quite amiss, especially in view of the verse coming some 150 lines or so afterwards about the Dawn-Goddess:
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood. [p. 4]
But "previsioning" will introduce an anapaest in the line's third foot and spoil the steady, slow and even sombre movement: a kind of skip would come with the anapaestic intrusion. Besides, the quantitative values of the word - one semi-long and three intrinsic shorts - would be out of accord with the large-vowelled rhythm:
The huge foreboding mind of Night alone
There are six intrinsic longs and all the five stresses of the pentameter coincide with five out of these six voice-lengths. The line remarkably bears out by its sound the sense of the immense solitariness of the brooding Night-mind.
If one may be forgiven for recalling some verses of one's own I would quote:
One with night's incommunicable mind1
A loneliness of superhuman night.2
But, though here too by Sri Aurobindo's estimation is overhead poetry and at least in the last line a pure Mantra, still there is not such a succession of long vowels mostly driven home by strong stresses as in Sri Aurobindo's picture
1[Amal Kiran, The Secret Splendour, 'Dante on the Eve of the Divina Commedia', p. 34.]
2[Ibid., 'No Mortal Breath', p. 162.]
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-a picture supported grandly, after a one-line interval, by the vision of the verse which is concerned directly with the disposition of Night's mind:
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge
-again six quantitative longs and five stresses rendered more effective by the long quantities under them, particularly the stupendous opening spondee which seems to give a Presence extending right across the whole horizon that is "Silence' marge" at this occult hour with which Savitri breaks upon us. ("Stretched", I may remark, has a vowel which for all its intrinsic shortness is stretched out by the three consonantal sounds following it no less than preceding it.)
As for "expectant" instead of "previsioning", it is still worse. Even apart from the ridiculous suggestion of a woman expecting the birth of a baby, the poetry suffers an irremediable fall. There is a lack of suggestion in the adjective - it has a drab vacuous neutrality. It makes an abstract prose statement - no conjuring up of a presence, no calling forth of Night's characteristic mentality. And the whole sound rings flat and false, coming between "huge" and "mind". "Previsioning" had at least four syllables to suggest some kind of length making up for the brevity of the vowel-values. "Expectant" has nothing except three short vowels.
Finally, both these adjectives are wanting in the peculiar beauty and aptness of the two long o's that belong to "foreboding". Without their occurrence the long o of "alone" concluding the line would itself be alone and the word in which it figures would toll its bell as if in a void. Perhaps a more appropriate way of speaking would be: the void which the-line suggests would be a dead one instead of a living "fathomless zero" (to quote a Savitri-expression a little further on) if "alone", which rounds off the verse, were not prepared by what we may call - using a term from
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elsewhere in the poem - the "ciphered round" of each of the two o's earlier in the line. Echoing them, it fills out with a vibrant mystery.
What we may consider in contrast an insubstantial vacuity is caught in the line which intervenes between the two that are actively related to Night's mind, namely,
In her unlit temple of eternity.[p. 1]
The rhythmic antithesis to those two verses is complete: there is not a single quantitative long in the 11 syllables -short vowel follows short vowel to create the impression of a sheer lack of substantial reality. The semi-long of the first e in "eternity" hardly avails as a break. In addition to the short-vowelled character of the line, we should observe that there are only three real stresses as against the five in the other pair. Further, the line begins with an anapaest, as though a quick movement were easily possible in the utterly unresisting "atmosphere" of the temple. Lastly, we have no strong close as with "alone" and "marge" but a weak falling away into some endless unknown: "eternity" is without a true accent in its terminal syllable, a sort of half-pressure falls there merely because the line comes to an end: no actual end occurs and we get the sense of an indeterminable void with no life in it.
One more technical remark. In the earlier version of Savitri when there was "the huge unslumbering spirit of Night", our line stood:
In her unlit temple of immensity.
Now, with "eternity", Sri Aurobindo does not describe the temple's dimensions but the object to which the temple was dedicated: Night serves eternity in her temple. This change further takes away "substance" from what is described. "Immensity" is a positive term and indicates magnitude,
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the power of a spatial extension: "eternity" is non-indicative of any spatial as well as of any temporal continuity. We are carried off into the indefinite and imponderable.
The three lines about Night's mind lying lonely upon the marge of Silence in eternity's temple bring to my mind the three that come much later (in Canto 3 of Book One):
The lying immobile and silent and lonely recur, though the ultimate mood is different - the all-freeing tranquillity of an unnameable Nirvana instead of the ominous profundity of a hushed emptiness. What, from the standpoint of literary psycho-phonetics, links the two passages is the end-term "alone" in the second line of the one and in the closing line of the other. We encounter this effect elsewhere too in Savitri, but not so impressively as here, nor does it confront us with such a self-contained poetic generality - except once, as we shall soon see. No doubt, "foreboding" actually points to a particular object - the divine Event of the Gods' awaking - yet it can stand on its own as the expression of a psychological movement typical of and natural to the mind of Night, a movement fraught with a formless fear of the future. Again, in the other line the "And" at the start points to a special context and is necessary to the progressive revelation, yet metrically it is a superfluous conjunction, making the initial foot a glide-anapaest when the line could be a perfect pentameter without it and have the first foot an lamb.
Comparable self-contained small-scale masterpieces with the same termination to various descriptive, reflective or suggestive phrases may be cited. There is Housman's delightfully atmospheric snatch from Nature:
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The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells, alone.
There is the deeply poignant religious conviction of an early Sonneteer:
All love is lost except on God alone.
Wordsworth's greatest moment is that unfathomable phrase about Newton's bust at Cambridge with its silent face that is the marble index of
a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
John Chadwick, "Arjava" to the inmates of Sri Aurobindo's Ashram, matches the Upanishadic mystery and magnificence of Wordsworth by his lines:
This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude
Of Truth's abidingness, Self-blissful and alone.
A mixture of the descriptive, reflective and suggestive in four verses of terrific power, with a cosmic sweep of imagination, meets us in Canto 2 of Savitri's "Book of Fate":
These verses have a special interest and importance for us because they are some of the absolutely last that Sri Aurobindo dictated to Nirodbaran a little before December 5, the day when not Satyavan but Sri Aurobindo himself was to "die" and when, as a result of his passing into the inner planes, his
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co-worker and companion, the Mother, would undergo the fate of loneliness on the visible earth-stage - although
God-given her strength can battle against doom. [p. 462]
(The Sun and the Rainbow, 2008, pp. 143-62)
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OPENING SPEECH FOR THE
SRI AUROBINDO RESEARCH ACADEMY
24 APRIL 1978
In everything connected with Sri Aurobindo, as this Academy most evidently is, we have to think of the new Truth of the spiritual consciousness, which he has brought to the world - the all-creative and all-transforming Supermind.
The Supermind, by the very nature of its comprehensiveness, takes the whole of life into its scope. The new Truth which it represents must, therefore, mean a host of fresh insights waiting for us in all the fields of human activity -philosophy, sociology, history, science, art and even business. Everywhere by its influence we should be able to discover novel aspects which would change the views and interpretations hitherto prevalent.
Sri Aurobindo should lead us not only to look more energetically for the verities of life but also to look in a way not done so far, look again and again - with an ever more penetrating eye. What he should bring about is not merely a search for things: he should bring about a re-search, a new quest, a fresh exploration, a movement along unexpected lines. In this sense of the word the Sri Aurobindo Research Academy has to function.
However, for this sense to be fully operative we must go beyond mental means of questing and exploring. The quest and exploration have to be by the mind but not from the mind exclusively. We must aim to draw upon sources deep within,
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founts far above, and make the mind their instrument. Then alone will the Academy research basically in the Aurobindonian spirit.
In the hope of its fulfilling such an ideal I declare it open today. And in doing so I cannot do better than quote some lines from Savitri, that epic of supreme research, which might take for a subtitle the name of one of Balzac's novels: La Recherche de I'absolu. The mood at our opening ceremony, at which I was honoured with the job of cutting the ribbon at the Academy's door, should be inspired by what Aswapati, the father of the poem's heroine, experienced:
Awakened to new unearthly closenesses,
The touch replied to subtle infinities
And with a silver cry of opening gates
Sight's lightnings leaped into the invisible.[p. 31]
(Aspects of Sri Aurobindo, 2000, pp. 194-95)
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WHAT BASICALLY IS SAVITRI?
What basically is Savitri? It can be regarded, in its own language, as
So to approach it I would try to concentrate in the heart-centre and plunge into it until I felt it as not only intense but also immense - and in that secrecy of warm wideness I would become all eyes and ears bent upon feeling Savitri as the outflow of my own true self. Here would be an attempt to enter into Sri Aurobindo through my own profundities and, catching a sense of identity with him, achieve in the form of this poem's super-art what the Rigvedic Rishis termed "the seeing and hearing of the Truth". Whatever is spiritually visioned has an inherent vibration which renders itself into a voice, an audible rhythm of the inmost being's self-visualisation. To experience Savitri's spirit-disclosures in this intimate audiovisual manner within some psychic solitude of fathomless peace conjoined with power: there you have my ideal apropos of a phrase from Sri Aurobindo's epic.
But I may add that such an account as the above does not exhaust the reality of true readership. As Sri Aurobindo explains in The Future Poetry, the Mantra is seen-heard in the heart's abysm at the same time that it is sensed as descended from a height of heights. This sensing, if it is to be acute,
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reflects the experience we meet in those sapphics of Sri Aurobindo:
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 my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;
Ecstasy's chariots.
I should like to set my imagination a-thrill with the rapture-roll of these lines and with the picture they conjure up of a mighty descent from the Superconscient Ether into the human spirit and of a vast receptivity in that spirit's central organ. The central organ experiences at once an expansion and a subdual - its pulsation loses all common excitement and narrow sensation, it comes to know great prolonged gaps of silence between one throb and another. Within such a reflex and echo of the Rigveda's parame vyoman, the supreme Void where all the Gods are seated together and the Mantra goes eternally vibrating - within that superhumanised heart the revelatory utterance of a poem like Savitri can be realised in all the authenticity of its marvellous origin at the top of Nature, the Overmind-Supermind level.
And how does that utterance precipitate itself with its sight-sound? Sri Aurobindo uses an image from the Rigveda: the chariot. It is as a mobile well-framed carrier of a luminous load that the Mantra arrives and appears in the mortal's consciousness. What psychological fact is shadowed out by this arrival and appearance in the shape of a skilfully fashioned vehicle on two wheels which resemble - to quote an Upanishadic idea - a stable centre from which and into which run the diverse lines of our nature like circling spokes?
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According to the Rigveda, such arrival and appearance point to the domain of the mind in a state of in-drawnness which yet has a calm connection with all the parts of the being and which lends itself to the formative élan from the lofty home of Truth and from the deep answering heart. The indrawn illuminated mentality is the workshop here below of the hidden Gods. There, like an inspired cartwright, the seer gives a particularised mould to the messages that move from everlasting to everlasting. Rather, the mould which is already existent on Nature's summits gets its true replica for man in the shaping recesses of the mind. Ecstasy's chariots are projected into the cast of human language through the services of a mental seerhood. Hence Savitri's missioned voices from God's doorway call not only for a heart-consciousness of the right order but also for a mind-awareness properly tuned up.
To cut all this esoteric cackle of mine, I may sum up by saying that we should somehow so train ourselves in heart and mind that Savitri may be more than a superb communication to us: it should be a miraculous communion in which we shall feel as though we were its co-creators with Sri Aurobindo.
The Mother's presence is extremely intense today - as it should be to all who have pledged their future to her and to whom 21 February, along with 15 August, is the greatest occasion in history because something beyond history, a Grace of the Eternal, entered the historical stream to give it not only what it could never deserve but also what it could never dream of and desire. For, this stream belongs to the cosmic movement which has the transcendent behind it but never directly in it: its culmination would be the highest stratum of the world of the Gods, where the Many stand unified and harmonised in a Godhead synthesising in a single summum bonum the diverse goals of the various religions: the culmination would be the glory and passion of a World Religion such as would have been founded if the luminous
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creation of the Overmind plane had been precipitated in the wake of the Descent on 24 November 1926 and not been set aside by the Mother at the command of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo wanted not this natural crowning of the cosmic movement but the evocation of the Ineffable that was behind it, the secret Supermind transcendent of all religions, whose realisation would be rather the gift of a Super-Nature than Nature's own deserved and desired achievement in the course of history - in short, a Grace of the Eternal, which can only be received and never demanded as a right and which has been offered to terrestrial evolution by the birth of the Divine Mother amongst us, side by side with that of Sri Aurobindo the Supramental Avatar. From the viewpoint of Nature and history the dual embodiment of the Supermind is asking for the impossible. Have not all the prophets and saviours declared that, however irradiated the earth might be by the Spirit, the grand finale is always Yonder, never Here? Out of the mind, away from the life-force, far from the body we must ultimately go if the Supreme is to be our unchanging and everlasting home: this has been the master-message of every system of spirituality. Even Vaishnavism and Tantra, which attempted to lay reshaping hands on embodied existence, knew how short they fell of the power of true transformation: even they pointed in the end to an earth-exceeding Within or a world-forgetting Beyond. All spiritual insight in the past has said that it is chimerical to hope for a mind all-knowing, a life-force all-effecting, a physical being which is perpetually young, immune to disease, free from death. Alone the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have proclaimed:
The impossible God's sign of things to be. [p. 52]
And today - the 102nd anniversary of the Supernal Beloved's birth - the sign of the future to which our souls have been dedicated glowed bright in our consciousness, as though
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once again that Beloved were concretely in front of us and lavishing on us her unforgettable time-transfiguring smile.
21.2.1980
(Mother India, October 2003, pp. 834-36)
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When I was preparing Savitri for our International University Centre's one-volume edition in 19541 was very careful about the collection of Sri Aurobindo's letters to me, which was to accompany it at the end. I made several alterations in the arrangement - some actually at the page-proof stage. Not unexpectedly the Press felt bothered, but it did not put any hitch in my way. The Mother was kept in touch with all the goings-on.
Once I seemed to overstep the limit. After a letter of 1936 had been printed I made a new reading of two words from Sri Aurobindo's manuscript. The letter as it stood in print read: "Savitri is represented in the poem as an incarnation of the Divine Mother... The narrative is supposed to have taken place in far past times when the whole thing had to be opened, so as to 'hew the ways of Immortality'." Now, instead of "The narrative" I deciphered "This incarnation". Naturally I wanted a change to be introduced. Just as naturally the Press was upset. But it realised that the change was imperative. Either an erratum was to be put somewhere or the new words were to be printed on a small slip and pasted over the old ones. 1 opted for the slip to set right my own slip in decipherment a dozen years earlier. But the new words were longer by three letters and, even if we took advantage of the three dots after the full stop to the preceding sentence, the words could not be fitted into the text. I suggested the use of a slightly smaller type. The aesthetic sense of the Press was somewhat shocked. I agreed with its disgust, but to leave
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the wrong reading intact and resort to an erratum elsewhere was hardly a harmonious and felicitous solution either. I thought of submitting the whole matter to the Mother the next morning when I would be seeing her.
On finishing my pranam I told the Mother: "A special problem has come up in a certain letter of Sri Aurobindo's to me on Savitri." The Mother replied with a slight tinge of sternness: "I know all about it. The Press sent me the news last afternoon. I was informed that you had made a wrong reading in a letter and that a correction was now necessary. The printing is already done. So to correct is very inconvenient. I told Amiyo what I thought of you." "Mother, what did you say?" "You won't like it." "Well, whatever comes from you is welcome, even if it is not to one's liking. There's something to learn. Please tell me." "I said: 'Amal is too sure of himself.' "
I was extremely puzzled. Obviously the Mother had somehow not seized the situation in its total bearing. I answered: "You must be right - but from what you say it seems that somebody else than myself detected my blunder and offered the correction." "Yes, and isn't that so?" "Mother, it is I who found my own mistake and I wanted to rectify it with my new reading of the manuscript." "Oh, that's how it is? I did not get such an impression." "Mother, let me again be a little too sure of myself and say that not even in a hundred years would anybody else, on reading the printed version, suspect a mistake. I felt uneasy over the version and went back to the original in Sri Aurobindo's hand and then I thought I must correct myself at all costs. What would you say now?" "I say that you have the courage to declare your mistakes." "Thank you, Mother."
As for my proposal to get a slip in smaller type stuck over the old misreading on my part, the Mother remarked: "I too had the same idea. But the Press was not very happy." Ultimately the Press got over its initial recoil and did the sticking. No reader, to my knowledge, has drawn my notice to anything odd on the page concerned.
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Before leaving, I told the Mother: "Tomorrow I'll bring Sri Aurobindo's manuscript for you to see for yourself that my old reading was wrong." The next morning I presented the letter to the Mother. She took up a magnifying glass and scrutinised Sri Aurobindo's semi-hieroglyphics. Looking at me, she asked: "Are you sure it is not as you first read it?" This consoled me no end: after all, if even the Mother could be in doubt, mine had not been a Himalayan blunder. Finally she agreed to my new version, which makes better sense and is more consistent.
There must have been a bit of intellectual pride in my ambience, for on more than one occasion the Mother appeared to counteract the importance I seemed to attach to my own mind. To give one instance. The Press sent to the Mother the proof of the contents of the Savitri-volume. When I came as usual to meet her, she showed me the pages and said: "Nolini and I have gone through everything. It's all right. There is no need for you to look at the proof." "Still, Mother, will you give it to me?" "Oh, you think we are wrong? Here are the pages. You won't find anything to correct." I glanced at the proof. Indeed there was no misprint, and in that sense nothing to correct, but I immediately saw that a certain title differed from the form in which it stood in the body of the book. Inside it had run: "Sri Aurobindo's Letters on Savitri." In the proof the first two words were missing. Neither the Mother nor Nolini knew of the form inside; so they saw nothing. But it was necessary to make the titles match. Plucking up courage I faced the Mother's challenging eyes and said as quietly as I could: "I am afraid there is an error. One item does not correspond to the wording inside the volume. It has to be changed. The Contents should be accurate." The Mother kept silent for a few seconds and then nodded approval.
When the title was to be composed, there was discussion about the wording to be used in order to indicate the presence of Sri Aurobindo's letters at the end. The Mother cut short the debate and brought out the formula to be put between
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the mention of "Savitri" and the line giving the name "Sri Aurobindo". Her formula was "(Followed by the Author's Letters on the Poem)." On hearing such a long-drawn-out phrase, Udar grinned broadly and let out even a ghost of a chuckle. The Mother looked at him steadily and said in a serious tone: "It is a little long, I know, but nothing else will make things quite clear." After the book came out, I suggested to the Mother: "If Savitri is reprinted, don't you think a smaller formula can serve just as well? I propose simply: 'With Letters on the Poem.' As Sri Aurobindo's name comes in the next line it should be clear whose letters these are." The Mother readily accepted the shorter phrase as both elegant and sufficient. It now stands in all editions, along with a subtitle to "Savitri", which Sri Aurobindo himself intended: "A Legend and a Symbol."
In subsequent editions new matter has been added to the "Letters", but two letters in my collection have been overlooked by me. Perhaps it is not necessary to include them, but I give them here for future consideration of the parts in them that bring in Savitri. The earlier is in reference to the first number of Sri Aurobindo Circle Annual, which I was editing. It is also one of the last two handwritten letters of Sri Aurobindo. It goes:
"Don't wait for any poems for your Annual. I think the Pondicherry poets will have to march without a captain, unless you take the lead. I have been hunting among a number of poems which I perpetrated at intervals, mostly sonnets, but I am altogether dissatisfied with the inspiration which led me to perpetrate them, none of them is in my present opinion good enough to publish, at any rate in their present form, and I am too busy to recast, especially as poetically I am very much taken up with 'Savitri' which is attaining a giant stature, she has grown immensely since you last saw the baby. I am besides revising without end so as to let nothing pass which is not up to the mark. And I have much else to do" (March 18,1945).
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The second letter, which was sent to me in typescript, is the last to allude - after touching on other things - to the epic:
"I am afraid I am too much preoccupied with constant clashes with the world and the devil to write anything at length even about your new poems; a few lines must suffice. In fact, as I had to explain the other day to Dilip, my only other regular correspondent, my push to write letters or to new literary production has dwindled almost to zero - this apart from 'Savitri' and even 'Savitri' has very much slowed down and I am only making the last revisions of the First Part already completed, the other two parts are just now in cold storage" (July 20,1948).
The rather grim tone at the beginning of the note alludes to a state of affairs which called for an even grimmer accent with the same turn of phrase at the start of a typewritten letter to me in May 1949 about my discussion of the philosophical implications of modern physics: "I am afraid I have lost all interest in these speculations; things are getting too serious for me to waste time on these inconclusive intellectualities..." However, interest in the writing of Savitri revived and resulted in almost an unwonted hurry towards the end of 1950. Nirodbaran has recorded how anxious Sri Aurobindo was to complete whatever he thought most important in the epic, as if, because of the increasing seriousness of the Yogic situation, he knew of the sacrifice he would soon have to make of his body - as he did in the early hours of December 5.
After the one-volume Savitri had come out I expected the Mother to give me a copy with her own hands. But nothing was done. I felt perplexed and said to her somewhat dramatically though not insincerely: "I don't know why you haven't given me a copy. Savitri means so much to me. I would give my heart's blood for it." The Mother replied: "I am sorry. I haven't distributed the book at all. But certainly I'll give you a copy." She called for a copy, wrote "To Amal
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with blessings" and put her symbolic signature. It was a precious gift and one has only to look at my markings and my copious marginalia to realise how closely the book has been studied and cherished.
I have related elsewhere some other incidents connected with my editorial work on Savitri. I may here mention the grand finale, as it were. After the last pages had been printed, the Mother calmly announced to me: "The Press is very displeased with you." I answered: "I know it, Mother, and I am sorry I have troubled the Press. But are you displeased with my work?" She gave a faint smile and said: "No."
The Press's displeasure found a concrete expression in a long manifesto that came out on the heels of the Savitri-publication, asking all future customers to observe a set of rather Draconian-sounding rules. I was not mentioned anywhere but I knew that every shot fired had me as its main target. I accepted the charter without a word of protest. What it demanded was fair enough. However, the Press's bark is seldom followed by a bite. In fact, the people who work there have been exceedingly considerate and I cannot thank them enough for letting me break every rule of the charter now and again. I honestly do my best to behave, but inspiration of the moment sometimes gets the better of me and I cannot help some chopping and changing. My "copy" too is occasionally far from being a model. As much as possible the Press cooperates in a true Yogi's spirit full of understanding, tolerance, dedication to the Mother's Cause, fellow-feeling and even a dash of semi-Aurobindonian humour. Perhaps it even appreciates that, if not in anything else, at least in my dealings with the proofs I have walked rather faithfully in the footsteps of my Master who was an inveterate practitioner of creative proof-reading.
Perhaps the master-stroke of the Master occurred when Savitri was first appearing canto by canto in small fascicules. After all the pages of a certain canto were ready for printing, the Press sent up again to Sri Aurobindo the
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proof of one page, asking whether a particular comma was quite in place. Sri Aurobindo, instead of just replying "Yes" or "No", added a dozen or more new lines! The additional verses upset the arrangement of the fascicule and much had to be redone. I have not yet achieved anything so gloriously disturbing - but there is always hope of being more and more Aurobindonian.
Soon after the one-volume edition was out, the Mother said to our small group upstairs:
"Savitri is occult knowledge and spiritual experience. Some part of it can be understood mentally - but much of it needs the same knowledge and experience for understanding it. Nobody here except myself can explain Savitri. One day I hope to explain it in its true sense."
An appreciative treatment of Savitri in terms of its poetic quality - an elucidation of its thought-content, its imagery-inspiration, its word-craft and its rhythm-impact: this she did not consider as beyond another interpreter than herself. I can conclude thus because she fully approved Huta's proposal to her that I should go through the whole of the epic with Huta during the period when the Mother and she were doing the illustrations of the poem, the Mother making outline sketches or suggesting the general disposition of the required picture and Huta following her instructions, invoking Sri Aurobindo's spiritual help, keeping the Mother's presence constantly linked to both her heart and hand and producing the final finished painting.
It was a long-drawn-out pleasure - my study-sessions with the young artist who proved to be a most eager and receptive pupil, indeed so receptive that on a few occasions, with my expository enthusiasm serving as a spur, she would come out with ideas that taught a thing or two to the teacher.
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There was a period when the Mother was reciting passages from Savitri in front of a tape-recorder. Her longest recitation was from Book Eleven Canto One, the lines beginning a little before the important turning-point -
Around her some tremendous spirit lived - [p. 696]
and ending with:
Built is the golden tower, the flame-child born. [p. 702]
It was a most exalting performance. In connection with it the Mother disclosed to us that in the line
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God! [Ibid.]
the word she saw in place of "beautiful", although she did not read it, was "powerful". In the late hours of the evening, when she used to be inwardly absorbed in Sri Aurobindo's presence, she asked him why she had made that variant in the line. He answered: "What you have read is a truth - but a truth of the future. At present, 'beautiful' and not 'powerful' is the true word."
One day in the same period the Mother came down to the first floor from her room on the second after one more recitation and exclaimed: "Do you know what pains I take? I spent nearly two hours early this morning consulting an English Dictionary to get the correct pronunciation of several words. Now I hope my reading was good." We had the chance to hear the tape-record. It was really a good reading -though in two or three places there still lingered a slight shift of accent or a French way of speaking a word.
With what originality English can be pressed into suggestive service we can best gather from a study of Sri Aurobindo's
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extensive writings which always include the "luminous" in the "voluminous". I may illustrate it with a stroke of audacity which I came across in my plunge into his poetry in my early Ashram-days.
I wrote to him:
"I should like to know what exactly the meaning of the word 'absolve' is in the following lines from your Love and Death. I have been puzzled because the ordinary dictionary meanings don't seem to fit in.
But if with price, ah God! What easier! Tears
Dreadful, innumerable I will absolve
Or pay with anguish through the centuries...
There is another passage a few pages later where the same word is used differently:
For late
I saw her mid those pale inhabitants
Whom bodily anguish visits not, but thoughts
Sorrowful and dumb memories absolve,
And martyrdom of scourged hearts quivering."
Sri Aurobindo replied:
"In the second passage it is used in its ordinary sense. 'Absolution' means release from sins or from debts - the sorrowful thoughts and memories are the penalty or payment which procures the release from the debt which has been accumulated by the sins and errors of human life.
"In the first passage 'absolve' is used in its Latin and not in its English sense, - 'to pay off a debt', but here the sense is stretched a little. Instead of saying T will pay off with tears' Ruru says T will pay off tears' as the price of the absolution. This Latinisation and the inversion of syntactical connections are familiar licenses in English poetry, - of course, it is
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incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some others, likes, as Stephen Phillips used to say, to have liberties taken with it. But, of course, before one can take these liberties, one must be a master of the language, - and, in this case, of the Latin also" (1931).
By the way, "absolve", not a common word by any means, is a verb of which Sri Aurobindo seems rather fond. It appears six times in Savitri,1 mostly as a past participle passive in the sense of "having been released", a natural English usage, but twice the meaning is Latinised, amounting to variants of "pay off". Thus we read:
The conscious Force that acts in Nature's breast...
Absolves from hour to hour her secret charge. [p. 60]
Here the suggestion is of acquitting oneself of a task or duty assigned to one. In
This most she must absolve with endless pangs,
Her deep original sin, the will to be, [p. 599]
the "pay-off" connotation is more direct: "the will to be" is the culpable sin-debt incurred and "endless pangs" are the price for getting rid of it.
But the linguistic adventurousness of Savitri strikes us in a thousand ways. A few instances may be culled. We have a French noun boldly turned into a verb expressing the mind's mode of working by an over-reduction of aspects or terms:
1 Pp. 69,98,140,225,676,780 (The University Edition 1954) [In the current 1993 edition, this verb is found eleven times.]
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A single law simplessed the cosmic theme,
Compressing Nature into a formula. [p. 273]
Elsewhere a French adjective meaning "limp, slack, flaccid" faces us vividly:
Torn from its immediacy of errorless sight
Into a fixed body flasque and perishable .[p. 267]
An English noun is employed as a transitive verb telling us how the Life-Force
Ambitioned the seas for robe, for crown the stars. [p. 117]
Another Aurobindonian coinage, now a new noun framed on a valid analogy, comes three times - first in
Across his soul's unmapped immensitudes.1 [p. 80]
We get an unusual adjective-shaped noun about the doings of "a secret Nature":
As if her rash superb wagered to outvie
The veiled Creator's cosmic secrecies. [p. 84]
In a similar category is the phrase:
In man a dim disturbing somewhat lives;
It knows but turns away from divine Light
Preferring the dark ignorance of the fall. [p. 366]
1 The two other occurrences are on pp. 268 and 595 (1954 edition) [Pp. 237 and 524 (SABCL).]
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The sole difference is that an adverbial instead of an adjectival noun is at work. Again we meet an unfamiliar transformation with
A manifest of the Imperishable[p. 706]
a line which may well characterise the whole of Savitri from the viewpoint of spiritual revelatory literature.
This line could focus what the Mother meant when she called Sri Aurobindo's epic "that marvellous prophetic poem which will be humanity's guide towards the future realisation" (27-11-1963) and when she said to Norman Dowsett: "For the opening of the psychic, for the growth of consciousness and even for the improvement of English it is good to read one or two pages of Savitri each day."
(Our Light and Delight: Recollections of Life with the Mother,
1980, pp. 207-23)
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SRI AUROBINDO'S FIRST FAIR COPY OF
HIS EARLIEST VERSION OF SAVITRI
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
Towards the end of 1968 Nirodbaran put into my hands two old exercise-books he had found among Sri Aurobindo's papers. One had a cover greyish green and the other a brown cover. Both had been made in Madras and bore the trademark "Hanuman". A glance at their pages immediately gave the impression that they dated back to Sri Aurobindo's early days in Pondicherry, for his script showed his early practice of writing the English "e" like the Greek epsilon (e). And this script, in two or three kinds of ink and with some portions in more than one draft, set forth a version of Savitri older than any I had come across.
The very first version I had known was that which Sri Aurobindo used to send me privately in small consecutive instalments day after day in 1936 and from which the final one grew to its enormous length by 1950. This version was "A Legend and a Symbol". As I discovered with Nirodbaran's help in the period after Sri Aurobindo had left his body, its predecessor had been called Sâvithrî: A Tale and a Vision. Here not only the name of the heroine from the Mahabharata-story but also those of the two other leading characters (the heroine's father and her elected bridegroom) were spelled differently from their forms in 1936. Instead of Aswapati and Satyavan, they read Uswapathy and Suthyavân. The copy which I saw was in two sections. The first bore the general title Earth and
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was divided into four Books captioned respectively Quest, Love, Fate, Death. The second section was concerned with Beyond and consisted of parts entitled Night, Twilight, Day, Epilogue - the last relating the Return to Earth of Savithri with the revived Suthyâvan.
The poem opened:
The boundless spirit of Night, dreamless, alone
In the unlit temple of immensity
Waiting upon the marge of Silence sat
Mute with the expectation of her change,
An hour was near of the transfiguring gods.
Obviously, here, in a broad sense, is "the expectation" of the draft disclosed to me in 1936 and opening:
This later draft is itself a "prevision" of the final form which omits the last line and modifies lines 3 and 4 thus:
In her unlit temple of eternity... [p. 1]
The contents of that pair of exercise-books on which Nirodbaran had lighted was the starting point of several recensions to which Sri Aurobindo seems to allude collectively in a letter of 1931 to me: "There is a previous draft, the result of the many retouchings of which somebody told you; but in that form it would not have been a 'magnum opus' at all. Besides, it would have been a legend and not a symbol.
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I therefore started recasting the whole thing; only the best passages and lines of the old draft will remain, altered so as to fit into the new frame."
The very prelude of the poem in the "Hanuman" exercise-books strikes a note which goes clean out of the category of "Symbol":
In a huge forest where the listening Night
Heard lonely voices and in the large hush
Was conscious of the sigh and tread of things
That have no sound for the rich heart of day, -
For now her phantom tribes were not abroad,
The panther's eyes glared not, the tiger slept
Prone in his lair of jungle or deep grass, -
Startling the wide-browed dreamer Dawn arose.
A finely descriptive and subtly imaginative recounting of a famous traditional episode is promised, something like the poetic creations of Sri Aurobindo's middle and late twenties - Urvasie and Love and Death. But, as we perceive when we read further, we have more mental power of insight than in those narrative masterpieces of an impetuous romantic vitality. Like the semi-historical Baji Prabhou which came after those poems, it makes - though in a different and deeper style than that dynamic martial composition's - a transition between the afflatus of the early Sri Aurobindo and the inspiration of the later. One of the technical signs of the old afflatus is the frequent nineteenth-century convention of placing adjectives on either side of a noun: it persists here in phrases like "calm bright-eyed women pure", "deep glades divine". By the time I joined the Ashram (December 1927) and took Sri Aurobindo as my Master in poetry-writing no less than as the Guru of my Yoga, he had accepted many modern modes of expression. On the long labour between the old and the new inspirations in the spiritual domain Sri Aurobindo commented in 1936: "There
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have been made several successive revisions, each trying to lift the general level, higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry." In the same letter we read: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening."
Since the time of Nirodbaran's discovery other drafts of the same version have surfaced. One of them mostly precedes the matter in the exercise-books, occupies a large portion of a small notebook and bears at its beginning the date "August 8th 9th/1916" and towards its end "Nov. 9". The exercise-books carry a fair copy of the contents of the notebook. Work in them was begun even before work in the latter was completed. Dates in one of them range between 1 November and 16 November. The year is not given just as it is not given at the end of the notebook - and apparently for the same reason: namely, that it is the very year in which the notebook commenced.
This dating provides a definitive gloss on Sri Aurobindo's statement on October 31, 1936: "Savitri was originally written many years ago before the Mother came, as a narrative poem in two parts." His explanation, in the same letter, of the two parts evidently refers to "A Tale and a Vision" which has that very division as well as a scheme of Books with identical names. And as Savitri (or rather Sâvithrî) in this form is subsequent to that in the exercise-books, this form must fall in a period later than 1916. If so, its precedence of the Mother's coming to Pondicherry proves that Sri Aurobindo had in mind not her first arrival on 29 March 1914 which was followed nearly a year later by her departure for quite a while, but her final settlement for good from 24 April 1920 onward. But how can any draft of "A Tale and a Vision" be regarded as the original Savitri when we are positive about an earlier version? Obviously, Sri Aurobindo looked at it as essentially a variation played
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upon a single theme and at the two versions as phases of one continuing phenomenon in a certain psychological progression which he characterised in two stages in the letter about lifting more and more high the inspiration of his early versions.
In that case, for all the broad affinity of "A Tale and a Vision" to "A Legend and a Symbol", "the new frame", of whose imposition on the old draft he has written, should be taken to mean a very late version. Possibly not even that which after several experiments at the opening line like
It was an hour of the transfiguring Gods
An hour was near of the transfiguring Gods
It was the hush of a transfiguring hour, first struck upon
It was the hour before the Gods awake, [p. 1]
can qualify. In a wide sense the description would be apt only for the version on which the later Savitri is based - the one just preceding that from which instalments were communicated to me in 1936. In a specific connotation it could apply only to the last-named version in which for the first time there are passages briefly recording a climbing of subtle planes of existence by Uswapathy.
To get an idea of how far the poem has moved from its beginning to its final shape across nearly half of the poet's life like a grander Faust until it counted 23,8031 lines, we cannot but consider as a document of extreme literary interest what
1 [23,837 in the 1993 Revised Edition.]
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can be termed the first fair copy by Sri Aurobindo of the earliest draft now extant.
Here is no indication of a Part I called Earth and a Part II named Beyond. The work is simply entitled Sâvithrî and consists of two Books without any headings. The first book, divided into paragraphs, deals with quest, love, fate and death; the second brings in the themes of night, twilight and day, the day-section unfinished. Of the epilogue we have only one stray passage scribbled on the last page of the brown exercise-book. Almost everywhere we meet with small changes, radical alterations, even substantial additions - many of them after-thoughts that tend to link up more and more with those of a later period but which obviously came at a time when the latter had not yet taken shape.
Already there are passages forming perfect launching-pads for sustained memorable flights in the subsequent versions and even in the massive final one. An exquisite example is Sâvithrî's awakening on "the day when Suthyavan must die":
Sighing she laid her hand upon her bosom,
Nor knew why the close lingering ache was there,
So quiet, so old, so natural to its place,
Till memory came opening like a bud
Her strong sleep-shrouded soul....
For a sublime as well as audacious instance we have the end of Uswapathy's Yoga:
His soul drew back into the speed and noise
Of the vast business of created things
Out of its rapt abysm. He resumed
His burden and was strong for daily deeds,
Wise with the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge
Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.
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Take for subtlety the lines on Savithri's natural-supernatural girlhood:
She grew like a young tree in silent bliss
Self-gathered that receives the shocks of earth
With wordless passion. Bathed in another light,
Firm, quivering inwardly with mystic rain,
Proud of the ravishing storm's immense assault,
The tree in other calms and tempests lives.
The shadowy touches of these outward things
It only knows as shapes of powers within.
Or we see "natural magic" fringed with haunting mystery just before Sâvithrî catches sight of Suthyavan:
But now to a Nature more remote, self-hidden,
From all but its own vision deep and wild,
Attracted by the sombre forest's call
Her chariot hastened, skirting prouder glades
Where the green stragglers lingered in the light
Behind immenser seas of foliage, rear
Of a tremendous solitude of trees.
Here in a lifting of the vast secrecy
Where plunged a narrow cleft, a track ran hewn
To screened infinities from a farewell space
Of sunlight, she beheld a kingly youth...
Not only in such passages, where the turn of thought and image anticipates the future version, but also frequently elsewhere occur lines that have travelled intact to the ultimate recension - poetic surprises that could never be bettered. So in many ways there is a vivid continuity. At the same time we encounter a number of differences. Most of them are admirable in their particular roles. Some appear less happy: e.g., a poetic conventionalism of language on occasion, an overworking of romantic epithets like "sweet" and
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"rich". But these elements, we may be sure, Sri Aurobindo himself would have weeded out on a final critical whole-look instead of piecemeal surveys at various times. What might have stayed on is a feature on a more elusive level, something psychologically organic to the period: a play of penetrating revelatory idea reaching its fulfilment just short of that absolute profundity of suggestion which is so easy and natural to an increasing degree in the later recasts of the poem.
Perhaps the last point may be best illustrated in brief by comparing a certain small passage to its definitive version. Originally, Sâvithrî declared to Yama:
Advance, O Death,
Beyond the phantom beauty of this world,
Of its vague citizens I am not one,
Nor has my heart consented to be foiled.
I cherish there the fire and not the dream.
A variant of the concluding line ran:
I cherish, god, the fire and not the dream.
A very impressive affirmation, this, artistically all the better for being self-contained by omission of the "there", and it pierces to a fundamental posture of the soul militant and intransigent amidst a region of happy illusions. The state of the manuscript raises in one even the suspicion that Sri Aurobindo intended both the commas in the line to be omitted. The phrase would then take on a deeper colour according more directly with the speaker's own divinely inspired nature; but one is not quite sure of the poet's intention because of the small "g" left in of the word "god" which is always applied to Death. Whatever be the case, we are in the presence of the mot juste in the self-contained version. In that fine form the line would be a credit to any poet, and
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nobody would think of any falling short until he saw how Sri Aurobindo suddenly brought what we may term the mot inevitable in the ultimate recension of the passage:
Beyond the phantom beauty of this world;
For of its citizens I am not one.
I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream. [p. 614]
The full potentiality of the penetrating revelatory idea is released, the expression acquires the utmost intensity, the rhythmic movement an absolute concentration. And in the closing phrase, with its capitalised "G" and the term "God" ringing out twice, the speaker's soul at its profoundest is laid bare and startlingly suggests without the least veil that even in spirituality there can be a crucial choice between divine truths, on which may hinge the entire destiny of man the evolutionary aspirant.
However, in dealing with the affinities and the differences, we may record a curious fact. Except for the sheer transfiguration of the juste into the inévitable in the closing line, the ultimate recension of our passage is exactly the same as an alternative by Sri Aurobindo while producing the form with which we have contrasted that recension. The verse about Sâvithrî's heart was not there nor did the verse preceding it have the adjective "vague". A spare directness characterised the formulation. Only in the last line a slight rhetorical touch came in with the exclamation "O God" in place of the later more simple "god" which hovered on the verge of the final transfigurative suggestion. Thus, as regards most of this passage, the issue of affinity-difference is not so clear as it seems, though the last line spotlights it rather tellingly with its new directness of a dense rather than a spare kind.
Faithfully to trace all the differences and affinities, both on the obvious and on the elusive plane, is the editorial
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task in the presentation we have undertaken. But the odds against correct reading of the script in each detail are pretty formidable at times. Not only is there multiple rewriting over the lines: there is also revision done in the margins, line after line rewritten and then too not infrequently cancelled and revised. Further, at the top of the page and at the bottom we come across passages, either definitively or tentatively cast, demanding to be woven in. Occasionally stray words or phrases besprinkle the empty spaces and they have to be fitted into their right contexts. Again, some passages occur in several shapes at unsuspected parts of the exercise-books. One has to peep into every nook and corner lest any suggestion should get overlooked. With a broad yet detailed sweep, executed mostly with the help of a magnifying glass, one has to set about "the vast business of created things" in the first fair copy.
Even so, a few uncertainties are likely to remain. They would be due either to inadequate decipherment of what has been hurriedly scribbled or to difficulty in arranging the added lines properly or else to the gaps left by the author himself for future filling as well as to inability to decide whether a word or two scratched out were really meant to be omitted. The last-mentioned problem crops up when we see that something which is run through with ink or pencil is required by the metrical scheme: no substitute is offered and yet no sign is given that the deletion should be ignored.
Whether we have accomplished our task with reasonable success or not can be judged only by some future comber of the complicated MSS. If he brings a closer eye for the minutiae of the Aurobindonian inspiration he will produce a better transcript, especially with the help of the larger quantity of materials that have come to hand since I made mine towards the end of 1968. But, as it has not been possible for anyone yet to set forth the exact relation of the two earliest versions or between the first fair copy and the
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versions following it, the transcript I have made will have to serve at the moment, for good or ill, the critical reader, the literary historian and the studious disciple with its aim to place at their disposal as authentically and completely as possible what for all practical purposes may be designated the Ur-Savitri.
(from 'Sri Aurobindo's First Fair Copy of His Earliest Version of
Savitri', Mother India, August 1981, pp. 421-27)
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AGNI IN THE RIG-VEDA AND
ASWAPATHY IN SAVITRI
(SOME REFLECTIONS APROPOS OF A TERM
COMMENTED UPON BY NOLINI KANTA GUPTA)
In the Mother India of August 15, 1976 Nolini Kanta Gupta has given a very pointed and appealing interpretation of a term in Savitri which had puzzled Huta and me and led us to consult him. The term occurs in the course of a description of the Yogic development which Aswapathy, Savitri's father, undergoes. The context runs:
A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time.
For him mind's limiting firmament ceased above.
In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day
A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault;
The conscious ends of being went rolling back:
The landmarks of the little person fell,
The island ego joined its continent.
Overpassed was this world of rigid limiting forms:
Life's barriers opened into the Unknown. [p. 25]
Nolini, after reminding us that the Griffin is "Golden Hawk - Winged Lion", explained the symbol as standing for "The piercing eye of soaring aspiration + Upsurging energy of the pure vital" and asked us to remember "Vishnu's Garuda +
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Durga's Lion". Finally, he wrote: "With these twin powers you cross safely the borderland between the lower and the upper hemispheres - the twilight world (Night and Day) -Griffin is the guardian God of the passage - dvārapālaka."
All this strikes me as illuminatively correct in its central bearing. What I may venture to add are a number of ideas that have occurred to me while reading Sri Aurobindo's translations of the Rig-veda and his comments at a certain place. These ideas may call for a slight shift of perspective in the last part of Nolini's gloss but mostly they will serve to enrich that gloss with a few shades borrowed from an ancient symbology to mingle with Sri Aurobindo's own immediate esoteric vision. I wish to suggest that together with this vision Sri Aurobindo had in mind a group of Vedic associations. My thesis is that his "griffin" holds, fused in itself, some of the powers and functions and forms the Rig-veda ascribes to the Fire-god Agni.
To every reader of the Rig-veda the designation and image in the first line of our passage -
A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time - [p. 25]
is bound to recall several verses in the hymns to Agni translated by Sri Aurobindo in their spiritual sense:
"O thou who shinest out with thy lustres; O great luminousness, O Seer..." (X.140.1).1
"I voice the Shining One..., the guest in whom is nothing hostile..." (X.122.1).2
1Hymns to the Mystic Fire, Vol. 11 of the Birth Centenary Edition, p. 431.
2Ibid., p. 429.
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"...he is the seer and he lights up the sky..." (X.20.4).1
"Head of heaven and traveller of the earth a universal
Power was born to us in the Truth, a Guest of men, a
seer and absolute King..." (VI.7.1).2
The second line of our passage, with its sense of a breakthrough of the infinite - a sense linking up with all that follows the "griffin" line - has also affinities with what is said about Agni's work:
"Thou art he who breaks through, thou openest to us
the luminous impulsions; open to us the conquest of
the great Riches, O Fire" (VIII.23.29).3
"From thy place in the supreme region break through
to those who are below."... (VIII.75.15).4
That the true power of Agni should particularly manifest in Aswapathy is hinted pretty clearly in proximity to our passage, by the very designation given to him by Sri Aurobindo when, after recounting at some length the stages of man's spiritual ascent and liberation, he illustrates them in the case of that human aspirant:
This now was witnessed in that son of Force,
In him that high transition laid its base. [p. 24]
The Rig-veda brings us again and again the same expression for Agni as Sri Aurobindo uses here for Aswapathy. For example, III.14.1 has "Fire the son of force"; the 4th and 6th verses of this hymn have "son of Force"; while IV.2.2 reads "O Son of Force..."5 Agni in his
1Ibid., p. 397.
2Ibid., p. 259.
3Ibid., p. 334.
4Ibid., p. 368.
5Ibid., pp. 134,135,166.
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explicit aspect would thus naturally occur in the course of Aswapathy's progress.
But when we come to the line -
In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day - [p. 25]
can we still think of Agni acting a special role or do the words take us quite out of the Agni-universe of spiritual discourse? The last part of the phrase, commencing from "forefront", has a very strong echo of the Veda. We may begin with recollecting utterances like:
"Shine through the nights and the days... Thou art by
night and day inviolable" (VII.15.8 and 15).1
".. .thou art beloved of the great Dawns and thou shinest
in the dwelling places of the night" (VIII.19.31.).2
Then we may proceed to consider the opening hymn of the Fifth Mandala3 and one particular gloss by Sri Aurobindo on a passage there. As almost everywhere else, Agni in the hymn is called "the seer, manifold in his fixed knowledge" (verse 6) and "that illumined seer, who achieves perfection in the pilgrim-sacrifices" (7) as well as "our benignant guest" (8) and "wide of light...the beloved guest of human beings" (9). But most important for us is to note verses 4 and 5 and Sri Aurobindo's comments on them. The relevant portions of the verses are:
"...when two dawns of different forms give birth to
this Fire the white Horse is born in front of the days.
"He was born victorious in front of the days, established
in established things..."
1Ibid., pp. 312,313.
2Ibid., p. 328.
3Ibid., pp. 201-03.
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Sri Aurobindo's comments not only draw out the meaning of these statements within their own context but also exhibit through them the Veda's general sense as may be read from other passages of similar import. An instance of such analogues may be cited:
"Darkness and Dawn we desire, two mighty Mothers of
the Truth...increasers of our spacious being" (V.5.6.).1
Sri Aurobindo's comments go:
"Night and Dawn are the two unlike mothers who jointly give birth to Agni, Night, the avyakta, unmanifest state of knowledge and being, the power of Avidya, Dawn, the vyakta, manifest state of knowledge and being, the power of Vidya. They are the two Dawns, the two agencies which prepare the manifestation of God in us, Night fostering Agni in secret on the activities of Avidya, the activities of unillumined mind, life and body by which the god in us grows out of matter towards spirit, out of earth up to heaven, Dawn manifesting him again, more and more, until he is ready here for his continuous, pure and perfect activity. When this point of our journey towards perfection is reached he is born, śveta vāji ['white horse'] in the van of the days. We have here one of those great Vedic figures with a double sense in which the Rishis at once revealed and concealed their high knowledge, revealed it to the Aryan mind, concealed it from the un-Aryan. Agni is the white horse which appears galloping in front of the days, - the same image is used with a similar Vedantic sense in the opening verse of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad; but the horse here is not, as in the Upanishad, aśva, the horse of vital and material being in the state of life-force, but vāji, the horse of Being generally, Being manifested in substance whether of mind, life, body or idea or the three higher streams proper to our spiritual being. Agni therefore manifests as the fullness, the infinity, the brhat of all this
1 The Secret of the Veda, pp. 376-77.
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sevenfold substantial being that is the world we are, but white, the colour of illumined purity. He manifests therefore at this stage primarily as that mighty wideness, purity and illumination of our being which is the true basis of the complete and unassailable siddhi in the yoga, the only basis on which right knowledge, right thinking, right living, right enjoyment can be firmly, vastly and perpetually seated. He appears therefore in the van of the days, a great increasing state of illumined force and being, - for that is the image of ahan, - which are the eternal future of the mortal when he has attained immortality...
"This divine force is born victorious by its very purity and infinity over all the hostile forces that prevent, obstruct, limit or strive to destroy our accomplished freedoms, powers, illuminations and widenesses; by his victory he ushers in the wide days of the siddha, for which these nights and dawns of our human life are the preparatory movements."1
We have here the picture of a divine Presence that establishes itself in the human consciousness, turning that consciousness into a figure of divinity. We have pointers to the light of a Seer-Guest being "born victorious" in one who was so far a mental creature. As a result, "fullness", "infinity", the vastness (brhat) of the spiritual existence are realised. And by the help of this light the realised "freedoms, powers, illuminations and widenesses" are guarded. Also, the light comes from both Night and Day and moves "in front of the days" in the symbolic shape of a supernatural animal - a White Horse of illumined power - by whom or in whom our Night and Day are transcended and a greater lustre of knowledge revealed beyond them.
We may add that the Veda, on more than one occasion, has even a couple of successive verses which unite the idea of a gap or passage or portal as in Nolini's remarks on the "griffin"-line as well as on the line
1 Hymns to the Mystic Fire, pp. 498-99.
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A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault [p. 25]
and the idea of Agni's connection with and manifestation from both Night and Day. We have already quoted verse 6 of V.5. Now we may repeat it with the verse preceding it:
"Swing open, ye Doors divine, and give us easy passage
to our expanding...
"Darkness and Dawn we desire, two mighty
Mothers of the Truth,... increasers of our spacious
being" (V.5.5-6).1
A similar context has the very terms "Night and Day" employed in translation by Sri Aurobindo for the birth-givers of Agni:
"Widely expanding may they spring apart making
themselves beautiful for us as wives for their lords;
O divine doors, vast and all-pervading, be easy of
approach to the gods.
"Let night and day come gliding to us and, queens
of sacrifice, sit close together in their place of session..."
(X.110.5-6).2
In the lines from Savitri all these phenomena of spiritual progress appear to be projected and by the Vedic evidence on Agni, including the symbol of a supernatural animal, the "griffin forefront" should be the Seer-and-Guest's own position as part of a gap or passage or portal formed by Night and Day, those two "divine doors" seen by the occult eye of the inner sacrificer. What they lead to in the Vedic vision -"the wide days of the siddha", as Sri Aurobindo puts it - is reflected in some later Savitri-lines closing the account from which we have been quoting:
1The Secret of the Veda, pp. 76-77.
2Hymns to the Mystic Fire, p. 425.
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Freedom and empire called to him from on high;
Above mind's twilight and life's star-led night
There gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day. [p. 26]
But here we are faced with the intriguing question: Can Agni Vedically lend himself to the "griffin"-image?
Agni, as we have observed, is pictured in the Veda as a White Horse. Sometimes he is called a Bull, as in "the bull of the thousand horns" (V.1.8.)1 and "the luminous Bull" (VIII.75.6).2 It is seldom realised that the ancient scripture can actually tend Sri Aurobindo to see him as a griffin.
Nolini has spoken of a Hawk as a component of the griffin. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1964, p. 541, col. 2) describes the griffin as "Fabulous creature with eagle's head & wings & lion's body." This would suit Nolini quite well since he brings in "Vishnu's Garuda". Now, hawk and eagle and falcon are kin birds. If any one of them can be found Vedically associated with Agni, half of our case would be rendered credible. At the very start we may mention that, even when Agni is called the White Horse (named Dadhikravan), the horse's movement is linked to the sense of an eagle in flight. Sri Aurobindo translates IV.40.3 which continues the picture of Dadhikravan: "When he runs, when he speeds in his passage, as the wing of the Bird is a wind that blows about him in his greed of the gallop; as the wing that beats about the breast of the rushing Eagle, so about the breast of Dadhikravan when with the Force he carries us beyond."3 In X.11.4 Sri Aurobindo has the rendering about Agni: "Now the Bird, the missioned Hawk, has brought the draught of the great and seeing Wine to the pilgrim-sacrifice."4 In various hymns we have descriptions of Agni like: "Forth I
1Ibid., p. 202.
2Ibid., p. 366.
3Ibid., pp. 197-8.
4Ibid., p. 393.
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flew, with rapid speed a Falcon" (IV.27.1)1 - "The Falcon took and brought the Soma" (IV.26.7)2 - "Agni, Falcon of the sky" (VII.15.4).3 Either an Eagle or a Hawk or a Falcon is conjured up in general terms in X.91.14: "Fire the nectar-drinker who bears on his beak the Soma-wine.".4 There is no doubt that one-half of the griffin-image is perfectly amenable.
What about the other half - the lion? Sri Aurobindo's translation of X.79.6 about Agni reads: "In his play unplaying a tawny lion, eating only to devour..."5 Nor is this the only instance. III.9.4 compares Agni to a lion couched in his lair,6 while III.2.11 tells us that he is "born as a lion."7 Then there is 1.95.5 where also the lion-image for Agni occurs: Tvashtar's two worlds are said to "turn to him and reverence the lion".8
If Agni is both lion and eagle or hawk or falcon, Sri Aurobindo could justifiably join the two creatures and set Agni as a griffin acting like the more frequent horse in the forefront of both Night and Day. Night and Day, with Agni in their van, would not be exclusively or altogether the worlds of Divine Knowledge and human ignorance. Nor would they constitute simply a twilight mid-world, with a griffin-guarded portal, across which one passes from the lower hemisphere of existence to the higher. Besides being, in an ultimate sense, the material inconscience or ignorance on the one hand and the Supreme Light on the other, they would be the dark and the bright sides of mental consciousness itself, within both of
1The Hymns of the Rgveda, Translated with a Popular Commentary by Ralph T. H. Griffith (The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, Varanasi, 1974), Vol. I, p. 429.
2Ibid., p. 29
3Ibid., Vol. II. p. 14.
4Hymns to the Mystic Fire, p. 424.
5Ibid., p. 413.
6Griffith, Vol. I, p. 329.
7Ibid., p. 319.
8Ibid.,p. 124.
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which Agni, the ever-wakeful, functions and beyond both of which he goes as their leader towards the infinite and eternal. He serves, in the form of the griffin, as the new-born Seer in man, the shining Guest hailing from eternity into man's time-existence, through whom or in whom there comes about "a gap...rent in the all-concealing vault". The rending of this vault by means of Agni's established presence is pictured again a little later in the lines:
All the grey inhibitions were torn off
And broken the intellect's hard and lustrous lid. [p. 25]
The last phrase here indicates that the bright no less than the dark is a portion of the human intellectuality that has to be cloven with the help of the freshly arrived and established Fire-God who in the Rig-veda is simultaneously the mortal's visitor from heaven and his immortal in-dweller, purifier, guide, mediator, liberator.
As already suggested, Agni may himself be looked upon as the break, the gap, in the lid or vault formed by the human mind. In that aspect he is at once the portal and its guardian à la Nolini, poised between the two hemispheres. Further, since Vedically every god is also all the gods under this or that particular face and since Agni especially is the bringer or revealer or fashioner of all the gods in man - "in thee are all the gods" (V.3.1)1 - the identification of him with Vishnu's Garuda and with Durga's Lion is quite in order. Hence what Nolini has said stands substantially unchanged. Even his "twilight world" may be accepted in the sense that the bright and the dark of the human intellect, at play together in the same psychological domain, make a mixture of Day and Night. Has not Sri Aurobindo himself spoken of "mind's twilight" along with "life's star-led night"? If our vision is correct, only certain nuances of explanation undergo a change
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owing to the griffin, as well as the Seer and the Guest, being identified with Agni and recognised as in essence emergent from Vedic symbology.
It is even possible to discern Agni at work in the long passage preceding the one with which we are concerned. The Seer-Guest is born as the final expression of a number of moulding movements by a Divine Power upon and within Aswapathy. We may quote the lines between
In him that high transition laid its base
These lines run:
To turn this frail earth-engine to heaven-use.
It beat his soil to bear a Titan's weight.
It built his soul into a statued god.
Modelled in inward Time his rhythmic parts.
Then came the abrupt transcendent miracle:
The masked immaculate Grandeur could outline,
At travail in the occult womb of life,
His dreamed magnificence of things to be.
A crown of the architecture of the worlds,
A mystery of married Earth and Heaven
Annexed divinity to the mortal scheme. [pp. 24-25]
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As parallel to this picture of a masked cosmic Worker, Form-maker and Craftsman travailing with his mighty hands to prepare earthly mortality for perfection and joining it to heavenly divinity, we may cite a few verses about Agni from the Rig-veda:
"This is the universal godhead who by his
greatness labours in all the peoples" (I.59.7).1
"This is the one god who envelops with himself the
grandeurs of all the gods" (I.68.1).2
"...the satisfying fullness of thee becomes all-pervading
in its greatness along both the continents, Earth and
Heaven" (II.1.15).3
"The Flame is the head of heaven and the navel
of the earth and he is the power that moves at work in the
two worlds" (I.59.2).4
"He holds in his hands all mights: sitting in the secret
cave he upholds the gods in his strength" (I.6.72).5
"He forms within us the seer-wisdoms of the eternal
Creator holding in his hands many powers of the
godheads. May Fire become the treasure-master of the
riches, ever fashioning all immortal things" (I.72.1).6
"...come to be with us like a Form-Maker coming to the
forms he has to carve" (VIII.I02.8).7
"Thou art Twashtri and fashionest fullness of force for
thy worshipper" (II.1.5).8
_______
1Ibid., p. 51.
2Ibid., p. 55.
3Ibid., p. 84.
4Ibid., p. 50.
5Ibid., p. 54.
6Ibid., p. 61.
7Ibid., p. 371.
8Ibid., p. 82.
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"O Fire, thou art the craftsman Ribhu, near to us and to
be worshipped with obeisance of surrender" (II.1.10).1
"A skilled craftsman, a god knowing all the
manifestations of knowledge, he forms the beautiful
and desirable Name, the luminous seat of the being in
the movement of the peace..." (III.5.6).2
Summing up Agni's functions in the spiritual career of the aspirant, Sri Aurobindo writes:
"Agni manifests divine potentialities in a death-besieged body; Agni brings them to effective actuality and perfection. He creates in us the luminous forms of the Immortals.
"This he does as a cosmic worker labouring upon the rebellious human material... But it is in proportion as we learn to subjugate the ego and compel it to bow down in every act to the universal Being and to serve consciously in its least movements the supreme Will, that Agni himself takes form in us. The Divine Will becomes present and conscient in a human mind and enlightens it with the divine Knowledge."3
With these words we come back to the sense of Agni the Seer being born in Aswapathy as - to quote a phrase from Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God - "Guest of the marvellous Hour".4 And well indeed might Aswapathy be linked with Agni. He may be considered as Agni himself putting, forth a human vehicle out of his being for world-action. Not only is he called, like Agni, "Son of Force" but his very name "Aswapathy" means "Lord of the Horse", reminding us of Dadhikravan and of the Rig-vedic sloka:
1Ibid., p. 83.
2Ibid., p. 120.
3The Secret of the Veda, pp. 268-9.
4Collected Poems (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1972), p. 584.
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"Increase for us, O Fire, the acquisition and the growth of those who are men that are illuminates and...who...have achieved the power of the horse" (V.10.1-2).1
3
At this juncture the objection might be raised: "The natural construing of the lines -
For him the limiting firmament ceased above - [p. 25]
would make the pronoun 'him' refer to 'Seer' and 'Guest'. If that is so, the 'Griffin-forefront' cannot be related to the Seer-Guest, for the line immediately after the one mentioning the Hawk-Lion -
A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault -[Ibid.]
merely elaborates the phenomenon of the limiting firmament's cessation and therefore must be understood to differentiate the Seer-Guest who experiences the gap from the strange creature who is located in the forefront of the Night and Day. Moreover, the forefront-position is observed rather than taken by whoever is 'him', whoever experiences the gap. The two cannot be the same being under different aspects. If 'him' connects with the Seer-Guest the griffin-forefront cannot stand for the latter entity. Your whole interpretation here misfires - unless you can justify what amounts to an identification by you of 'him' with Aswapathy. A straightforward reading of the syntax rules out such an identification completely, even though your study of the Agni-symbology in the Veda as well as in the passage concerned may strongly suggest it by
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relating the griffin to the Seer-Guest. Can you ever render conceivable a syntactic reference to Aswapathy in that 'him'?"
I believe that an answer can quite convincingly be given. We may commence with the simple remark that there is a full-stop after the line on the Seer-Guest. After this closure by the punctuation, a reference to Aswapathy, directly continuing the lengthy narration of his development, which precedes this line, is perfectly conceivable. All the more is it so because, in the context from which our quotation derives, the Divine Power, variously named "Original and supernal Immanence", "the cosmic Worker", "the Craftsman of the magic stuff of self" and "the masked immaculate Grandeur" - is not the only referent of a cognate to the word "him": the possessive pronoun "his". Aswapathy too is often denoted by the same vocable.
Let us briefly note the sequence of the human aspirant's progress. "His soil" is prepared and "his soul" is built into the statue of a god. "His rhythmic parts" are modelled "in inward time" by the World-Craftsman. Then suddenly divinity enters the human formation. There is the birth of a Seer, Time receives a shining Guest. It is the being of Aswapathy that holds the Seer's birth and acts host to that luminous visitor from beyond time. The phrase "in him" is inevitably to be understood when the Seer-Guest is born. The line about this deep-visioned heaven-sent Splendour is a link in the story of the spiritual growth taking place within Aswapathy and sums up the culmination of the process which starts with the verse:
In him that high transition laid its base.[p. 24]
So the line -
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can very naturally be regarded as picking up the thread of the account about Aswapathy and as opening a report of the consequences - for this human aspirant - of what has been recorded immediately before as having happened in his being.
This eminent possibility gains further strength from the verb "ceased" in the next line. "Ceased" is highly suggestive of a condition previously continuing for whoever is "him" and afterwards coming to a stop. But how could a just-actualised Seer-Guest from the Timeless have such a history? Only Aswapathy could earlier experience "mind's limiting firmament" and then its cessation due to his harbouring a recent Seer-Guest in himself. Again, the later line -
The landmarks of the little person fell -[Ibid.]
can scarcely agree with a "him" implying the new-born Seer-Guest. This entity was never "the little person". Aswapathy knew that state once, and subsequently found its landmarks falling because he had by then realised in himself something very far from it.
Such a view is supported by the fact that after nine lines from the end of our passage - lines in which the narration of the experiences begun in our passage is prolonged and completed - we have the statement:
His march now soared into an eagle's flight.
Out of apprenticeship to ignorance
Wisdom upraised him to her master craft
And made him an arch-mason of the soul... [pp. 25-26]
It is certain that "his" and "him" here refer to the same agent who is "him" in our passage. So we have to ask: "Who is it whose march now soared eagle-like?" It cannot be the Seer and the shining Guest. It must be someone who marched in the past differently from "now": in the past his marching was
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not "an eagle's flight". Surely, Aswapathy's new experience in contrast to his old one is being spoken of. The Seer, the shining Guest, who has just appeared cannot be this being with a past of another kind than his present. Nor could he have known "apprenticeship to ignorance". In that case "the griffin forefront of the Night and Day" would not be other than a position of the new-born Seer-Guest. Besides, the "eagle's flight" may join up with one half of the griffin-image: it is a state which can align that image with the great Advent into Aswapathy's being.
Both the aptness of the phrase about the Seer-Guest to Agni and the aptness of the phrase about the "forefront" to the same god may be considered amply supported. As a result, "For him" should belong to the same universe of discourse as the initial "In him": that is, it should denote Aswapathy. Of course, the Seer-Guest too is part of Aswapathy, his own freshly found divine reality and therefore himself as a deep-visioned heavenly Splendour; but he has another part also, which he transcends by discovering this reality. Simultaneously he is divine and human. Not the divine side but that double individuality, which still retains the human side, is intended by the locution we are interpreting.
A complete confirmation of our reading emerges when we go a little backward and examine the statements on man's general ascent and liberation, with which Sri Aurobindo prefaces the sequence of Aswapathy's inward and upward movements. The terminal transfiguring step in that ascent and liberation corresponding to what we have been discussing for Aswapathy is presented. There is a futile-seeming "endless spiral"
Until at last is reached the giant point
Through which his Glory shines for whom we were made
And we break into the infinity of God.
Across our nature's border line we escape
Into supernature's arc of living light. [p. 24]
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Quite clearly, a distinction is suggested between the one whose "Glory shines" - "A Seer..., a shining Guest" -through a "giant point" of development - "a gap...rent in the all-concealing vault" - and us the human aspirants, like Aswapathy, who cross "over nature's border line" - "mind's limiting firmament" - and arise into "Supernature's arc of living light", a beyond which is figured in our context by the later lines:
Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room,
An empyrean vision saw and knew;
The bounded mind became a boundless light... [p. 25]
The inference to be drawn is that what stands in our passage for the "Glory" must be distinguished in some sense from what stands for the "we" who break into super-nature's light by escaping from nature's constricting border-line. That "Glory" is indeed the fulfilment of our own being since "we were made" for Him to whom it belongs, it is the Seer, the Shining Guest, born in our temporal existence as our own divine self-realisation, yet it is a celestial entrant into us and we are also the all-too-human self which is now being exceeded. In short, "For him" applies to our composite being, the Aswapathy that we are, and not to the luminous Visitor who is the higher half of us.
(Mother India, August 1982, pp. 524-35)
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THE OPENING SECTIONS OF THE 1936-37
VERSION OF SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI
The story of how Sri Aurobindo disclosed in private to one of his disciples the growing wonder of his Savitri has already been recounted in different ways in three books: Sri Aurobindo - the Poet, Light and Laughter, Our Light and Delight. But parts of it are especially relevant now that the actual text of the disclosed version is being published.1
Soon after I arrived in the Ashram on December 16, 1927 I started to hear snatches of information to the effect that a poetic masterpiece by Sri Aurobindo had been in progress for many years. But nobody could claim to have set eyes on the slowly developing epic. I was extremely eager to catch some scent of this creation which promised to become a veritable "thousand-petalled lotus" at the top of the human poetic endeavour. Once in 1931 and again in the two succeeding years I received in reply to my questions short general answers from the Master about his work on the poem and about the technique of its blank verse. But I remained in the dark as to its living reality.
Savitri first came to light for me - or rather to light me up - incognito. Having had from my school-days the urge to make verses I continued to jot down whatever seemed to
1 [Reproduced here under the title 'Sri Aurobindo - Letters on Savitri: Editor's Note to the 1951 Edition', see p. 49.]
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pour into me by intermittent inspiration. Sri Aurobindo was as expert a literary guru as a spiritual one. Judicious criticism, balanced encouragement, illuminative analysis met every effort I made towards better and better composition. On one such occasion, to illustrate some point, he sent me with his helpful comments two lines of poetry describing, as he put it, "the Ray from the transcendent penetrating through the mind's passive neutral reflection of the supreme quietude of the silent Brahman". They ran:
Piercing the limitless Unknowable,
I was struck by the profound word-reverberations that reinforced the mystical word-suggestions with a tremendous immediacy of spiritual fact. But there was no sign of the source of the lines: they were a "limitless Unknowable". I could not help asking where they had come from. The reply was: "Savitri."
I never forgot this initial brief impact of the closely guarded secret. Even before it, Sri Aurobindo had tried to make me aware of a certain element in poetry that hailed from what he called the Overhead planes, the hidden ranges of consciousness above the intellect, with their inherent light of knowledge and their natural experience of the infinite. He broadly distinguished four planes: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. The last-named has been, according to him, the highest reach of the dynamic side of man's spirituality so far. The master dynamism of the Divine, the integral earth-transformative power which Sri Aurobindo designated Supermind or Gnosis or Truth-Consciousness and which was his own outstanding personal realisation, rendering his Yoga a unique hope for the world, has lain unmanifest and mostly unseized. Until certain radical conditions are completely fulfilled, it cannot find direct expression in life or literature. More and more Sri Aurobindo
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sought to help me not only to respond, in my appreciation of poetry, to the rising scale of the already captured Overhead note but also to bring some strain of it into my own verses. The quest of that note grew for me a dominant passion and most of all I prayed for the Overmind's touch.
"I shall consider it a favour indeed if you will give me an instance in English of the inspiration of the pure Overmind. I don't mean just a line like Milton's
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone,
which has a brief burst of it, but something sustained and plenary. I want to steep my consciousness in its rhythm and its revelation. It will be a most cherished possession. Please don't disappoint me by saying that, as no English writer has a passage of this kind, you cannot do anything for me."
Sri Aurobindo wrote back in his characteristic vein:
"Good Heavens! how am I to avoid saying that, when it is the only possible answer - at least so far as I can remember? Perhaps if I went through English poetry again with my present consciousness I might find intimations like that line of Wordsworth, but a passage sustained and plenary? These surely are things to come - the 'future poetry' perhaps, but not the past."
"I think the favour I asked was expressed in perfectly clear language. If no English poet has produced the passage I want, then who has done so in English? God alone knows. But who is capable of doing it? All of us know. Well, then, why not
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be kind enough to grant this favour? If difficult metres could be illustrated on demand, is it impossible to illustrate in a satisfying measure something so natural as the Overmind? I am not asking for hundreds of lines - even eight will more than do - all pure gold to be treasured for ever. So please... Perhaps it is possible only on Sunday: I can wait answerless for twenty-four hours with a sweet samatā."
"I have to say Good Heavens again. Because difficult metres can be illustrated on demand, which is a matter of metrical skill, how does it follow that one can produce poetry from any blessed plane on demand? It would be easier to furnish you with hundreds of lines already written out of which you could select for yourself anything overmindish if it exists (which I doubt) rather than produce 8 lines of warranted overmind manufacture to order. All I can do is to give you from time to time some lines from Savitri on condition you keep them to yourself for the present. It may be a poor substitute for the Overmental, but if you like the sample, the opening lines, I can give you more hereafter -and occasionally better."
And then after an "E.G." there followed in his own fine and sensitive yet forceful hand sixteen lines of the very first section of Savitri as it stood then, dealing with the "Symbol Dawn." Below the quotation were the words: "There! Promise fulfilled for a wonder."
After a whole day's absorption in the absolute nectar, I sent Sri Aurobindo a note:
"Like the sample? Rather! It is useless for me to attempt thanking you. The beauty of what you have sent may move one to utterance but the wideness takes one's breath away. I read the lines over and over again. I am somewhat stunned by the magnitude and memorableness of this day: I think your description of the divine dawn can very well apply to its spiritually poetic importance for me. Perhaps you will laugh, but I had two strange feelings before writing this letter. I was
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reading your verses, when I had the mute sense of big tears in the heart and a conviction that having seen what I had seen I could not possibly die! What do you say to my madness?"
The day of days was October 25,1936. From then onwards for a time Sri Aurobindo kept sending passages which I typed and he touched up again or slightly expanded. About the next passage I remarked:
"It goes reverberating in depth upon depth of one's being. What I admire is that the burden of infinite suggestion is carried with such a flexible ease. There is no attempt - as in the poetry of us lesser fry - to make things specially striking or strange or new, but a simple largeness of gesture which most naturally makes one surprising revelation after another of beauty and power."
His comment was:
"Well, it is the difference of receiving from above and living in the ambience of the Above - whatever comes receives the breadth of largeness which belongs to that plane."
The precious gift of passages continued for months. Although there were long interruptions at a later stage, it was only at the close of February 1938 that the series stopped. A visit by me to Bombay got prolonged into a stay for many years. In the meanwhile Sri Aurobindo met with an accident: he broke his right leg on the eve of the darshan of November 24, 1938. During his convalescence he turned to revising several of his writings. The Life. Divine was taken up first and, some years later, Savitri got its chance. It underwent revision and expansion on a much grander scale than ever before. What he had already begun on the typescript much earlier is characterised in a couple of letters from him at the commencement of my Bombay-visit.
"I have been too occupied with other things to make much headway with the poem - except that I have spoilt your beautiful neat copy of the 'Worlds' under the oestrus of the restless urge for more and more perfection; but we are here for World-improvement, so I hope that it is excusable."
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"I have pulled up the third section to a higher consistency of level: the 'Worlds' have fallen into a state of manuscript chaos, corrections upon corrections, additions upon additions, rearrangements on rearrangements out of which perhaps some cosmic beauty will emerge!"
It would seem that the opening passages of the poem were not touched until long after the accident. I came to know of the radical change only in 1946 in connection with Nirodbaran's reading out to Sri Aurobindo the typescript of my treatment of Savitri in the final chapter of The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, based on the 1936 version.1 Sri Aurobindo sent me the following letter: "You will see when you get the full typescript [of the first three books] that Savitri has grown to an enormous length so that it is no longer quite the same thing as the poem you saw then... In the new form it will be a sort of poetic philosophy of the Spirit and of Life much profounder and vaster in its scope than was intended in the original poem..."
On receiving "the new form" I saw that the Symbol-Dawn prelude of 16 lines had not only been slightly altered in phrase but also stood in a passage of 93 lines with its opening and its close considerably separated. At first I felt a regret at the alteration. Sri Aurobindo answered that I had been so accustomed to the old prelude that I could not sufficiently outgrow the samskāras to respond easily to the new. Even now a faint nostalgia lingers for the dawn's direct breaking after the first few lines instead of its appearance being delayed by the lengthy evocation of the preceding night and the vision conjured up through it of the original Inconscience from which the material world evolved as well as of the unmanifest Unknown negatively reflected by that Inconscience. But I can appreciate well the awesome effect of lines like those four about the suggestion emanating from
1 [Included in the present collection of articles under the title 'Sri Aurobindo - A New Age of Mystical Poetry', p. 1.]
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"the huge foreboding mind of Night" which has replaced her earlier "huge unslumbering spirit":
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world. [p. 1]
The third line. here is indeed one of Sri Aurobindo's tremendous single-pentameter Mantras comparable to the mightily tranquil
or the deeply surprising
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient [p. 48]
or the revelation-packed
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven [p. 52]
or the inward-alluring
Unweave the stars and into silence pass. [p. 696]
Excepting the last of these brief miracles, which occurs towards the end of the present Savitri, all have their places in contexts which Sri Aurobindo sent me in 1936: they are products of the great subsequent enlargement. But there is enough in the old draft to render it an amazing feat. For instance, it contains the description of the poem's heroine, starting
Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven [p. 14]
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and ending
And moved in her as in his natural home -
a passage of 31 lines which was subsequently expanded to 51 but which even in its original form constitutes a rarity in all literature for its sustained spiritual height. I asked Sri Aurobindo: "Are not these lines which I regard as the ne plus ultra in world-poetry a snatch of the sheer Overmind?" He replied: "This passage is, I believe, what I might call the Overmind Intuition at work expressing itself in something like its own rhythm and language. It is difficult to say about one's own poetry, but I think I have succeeded here and in some passages later on in catching that difficult note; in separate or briefer passages (i.e. a few lines at a time) I think it comes in not unoften."
Considering Sri Aurobindo's remark in 1946 about his attitude ten years earlier - "At that time I hesitated 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" - and considering that several lines of other poets which he had hesitated about were later adjudged by him to be from the Overmind, it seems certain that this passage which he had ascribed to the Overmind Intuition, a plane he had defined as not Overmind itself but an intermediate level where intuition proper grows massive in substance and rhythm, would have been traced by him to the supreme source if he had been privately asked about it again.
Several lines of extreme originality are already in the 1936 version:
His wide eyes bodied viewless entities.
The Craftsman of the magic stuff of Self
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Moulded in inward Time his rhythmic parts....
Mid heavenward brooding of invisible wings....
He mounted burning like a cone of fire....
There is also that coinage - along the lines of "infinitude" and "vastitude" - in the vivid passage which, except for one additional phrase towards the end, is found fully in the old draft:
To a few is given that godlike rare release.
One among many thousands never touched,
Engrossed in the external world's design,
Is driven by a pointing hand of light
Across his soul's unmapped immensitudes.
We have, however, to mark significant enrichments in many places in the later revision. Thus earlier we read how "hidden altitudes" keep for us as "our rapturous heritage"
The calm immunity of spirit space,
The golden plateaus of immortal Fire,
The moon-flame oceans of unfallen Bliss,
To which the indwelling Daemon points our flight.
In the final form we come across:
Our souls can visit in great lonely hours
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Still regions of imperishable Light,
All-seeing eagle-peaks of silent Power,
And moon-flame oceans of swift fathomless Bliss
And calm immensities of spirit Space. [p. 47]
Here and there a fascinating mystic touch has entered the text. The earlier draft had some members of the occult fauna: "the gold hawk", "the enemy-Serpent" and "the white-fire dragon-bird of endless bliss." The new brought in many strange figures in place of psychological simple postures. Thus what once was a straightforward exceeding of-the mental consciousness -
For him the limiting firmament ceased above.
In a tense period of the sleepless urge
A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault -
had later not only the first line slightly modified but also the second turned completely into a flash of enigmatic symbolism with a half-lion half-eagle emerging from a Vedic vision:
In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day... [p. 25]
At times the felicities of a passage are moved apart to make entirely different revelations. Originally there were the lines:
Caught in a voiceless white epiphany
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart,
And with a silver cry of opening gates,
Breaking the intellect's hard and lustrous lid,
Across our mental sky he glimpsed above
The superconscious realms of motionless peace
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
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This combination of thrilled spirituality and occult vision directed towards a soul-fulfilling Beyond which is brought home on the breath of a Mantra whose music conveys most profoundly the sense of the supreme Ineffable - this many-faceted whole gets distributed into three equally inevitable moments at considerable intervals packed with extra matter of great spiritual and occult importance:
The touch replied to subtle infinities,
Sight's lightnings leaped into the invisible.... [p. 31]
His centre was no more in earthly mind,
A power of seeing silence filled his limbs:
Caught by a voiceless white epiphany
Into a vision that surpasses forms,
Into a living that surpasses life,
He neared the still consciousness sustaining all.... [p. 32]
The toiling Thinker widened and grew still,
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
At each step in the final version we have this kind of proliferation. Sri Aurobindo justified it in a letter to me answering some criticisms by a friend of mine who had a penchant for compositions like Milton's Lycidas or Comus and who reacted unfavourably to the gradual detailed
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unfoldment of the theme in the very first canto. Sri Aurobindo explained the reason for such an unfoldment as well as the general principle of the final version:
"Its length is an indispensable condition for carrying out its purpose and everywhere there is this length, critics may say an 'unconscionable length' -1 am quoting the description of the Times Literary Supplement's criticism of The Life Divine - in every part, in every passage, in almost every canto or section of a canto. It has been planned not on the scale of Lycidas or Comus or some brief narrative poem, but of the longer epical narrative, almost a minor, though a very minor Ramayana; it aims not at a minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation. One artistic method is to select a limited subject and even on that 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 to follow in Savitri. But X 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 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. His objection of longueur would be perfectly just if the description of the night and the dawn had been simply of physical night and physical dawn; but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of
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the canto clearly suggests, a symbol, although what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the 'day' of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out. The whole of Savitri is, according to the title of the poem, a legend that is a symbol and this opening canto is, it may be said, a key beginning and announcement. So understood there is nothing here otiose or unnecessary; all is needed to bring out by suggestion some aspect of the thing symbolised and so start adequately the working out of the significance of the whole poem. It will, of course, seem much too long to a reader who does not understand what is written or, understanding, takes no interest in the subject; but that is unavoidable."
The amount of elaboration done on the older draft can be gauged from two letters. One dated 1936 refers to the form existing in that year as compared to earlier attempts: "Savitri was originally written many years ago before the Mother came as a narrative poem in two parts, Part I Earth and Part II Beyond (these two parts are still extant in the scheme) each of four books - or rather Part II consisted of three books and an epilogue. Twelve books to an epic is a classical superstition, but the new Savitri may extend to ten books - if much is added in the final version it may be even twelve. The first book has been lengthening and lengthening out till it must be over 2000 lines, but I shall break up the original first four into five, I think in fact I have already started doing so. These first five will be, as I conceive them now, the Book of Birth, the Book of Quest, the Book of Love, the Book of Fate, the Book of Death. As for the second Part, I have not touched it yet."
The second letter is of 1948. We have quoted its first few lines already as well as some from its closing paragraph. Sri Aurobindo writes: "There are now three books in the
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first part. The first, the Book of Beginnings, comprises five cantos which cover the same ground as what you typed out but contains much more that is new. The small passage about Aswapathy and the other worlds has been replaced by a new book, the Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, in fourteen cantos with many thousand lines. There is also a third sufficiently long book, the Book of the Divine Mother. In the new plan of the poem there is a second part consisting of five books: two of these, the Book of Birth and Quest and the Book of Love, have been completed and another, the Book of Fate, is almost complete. Two others, the B6ok of Yoga and the Book of Death, have still to be written, though a part needs only a thorough recasting. Finally, there is the third part consisting of four books, the Book of Eternal Night, the Book of the Dual Twilight, the Book of Everlasting Day and the Return to Earth, which have to be entirely recast and the third of them largely rewritten. So it will be a long time before Savitri is complete... I am trying of course to keep it at a very high level of inspiration, but in so large a plan covering most subjects of philosophical thought and vision and many aspects of spiritual experience there is bound to be much variation of tone: but that is, I think, necessary for the richness and completeness of the treatment."
Yes, the new Savitri is not only a Legend and a Symbol but also a Philosophy and, as we have quoted its author as saying, "profounder and vaster in its scope", besides being poetically a more lavish luminousness. But the 1936 version, although less complex, is yet no mere narrative poem. It has epical proportions of its own and very markedly the same afflatus in essence as the later recension. Sri Aurobindo declared on November 3, 1936 about the work then in progress: "As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to the highest or the
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psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them." Again, like the final version it not only strikes the identical opening chord -
It was the hour before the Gods awake - [p.1]
a semi-Vedic cosmic suggestion found only in the last of the nearly dozen recastings that preceded that of 1936: the 1936 draft also depicts for the first time at some length the climbing of planes, which, as Sri Aurobindo says in a letter of November 1 of that year, "was only a brief interlude of a few lines formerly". Furthermore, it has had the unique luck of being the one version from which Sri Aurobindo read extracts to the Mother.
This observation rests on what Huta has recorded in the article entitled Spiritual and Occult Truths and published in Mother India, February 21,1978. The Mother disclosed to her in 1961 "how she had achieved in her tender age the highest occult truths, how she had realised all the visions set forth in Savitri". Here indeed is a marvellous flash of psychic autobiography. Huta continues the report based on the Mother's words: "Actually, she had experienced the poem's fundamental revelations before she arrived in Pondicherry and before Sri Aurobindo read out Savitri to her early in the morning day after day at a certain period of the Ashram. She also said to me that she had never told Sri Aurobindo all that she had seen beforehand." What could have been "a certain period"? The years when Savitri underwent ample revisions and extensions were after the accident to the poet's right leg at almost the end of 1938. Now the poet was surrounded by a small number of attendants, to one of whom - Nirodbaran -he accorded a privilege whose gloriousness I most envy, for after some time he commenced dictating his re-creation of the poem to him. From the end of 1938 to December 5, 1950 when Sri Aurobindo departed from his body there was no occasion in the midst of his constant attendants to read Savitri
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to the Mother. The period in question is almost certainly the years when he copied, chiselling as he went on, from his manuscript the passages he sent to me every morning in large envelopes. Before enclosing them, usually with the Mother's "Amal" inscribed on the covers, he must have read out the verse to her prior to breaking up their joint sessions of correspondence with the sadhakas late at night and through the small hours of the morning. The year and a half from nearly October's end in 1936 to the close of February 1938 must have contained that period of shining surprise not only to the Grace-inundated disciple to whom Savitri was sent but also on a far deeper plane to the Mother for the wonderful language in which the Master unveiled his high visions and to the Master himself because the Mother had anticipated them in mystic silence thirty years in advance.
From various viewpoints I feel encouraged to lay before the readers of Mother India whatever stream of Savitri came to me in private before it ceased in early 1938 like the fabled river Sarasvati of the Rigvedic symbolism.
Postscript
Several times I have said: "in private." But a small qualification is needed. The circumstances were such that to keep Savitri a total secret was very difficult. In those days Nolini was Sri Aurobindo's postman to the sadhakas or - shall we say? - the messenger Mercury from the Olympian Jupiter of Pondicherry. He used to distribute the Master's daily replies: we would wait eagerly for him around 7 a.m. Seeing the large envelopes, he guessed that some special correspondence was going on between Sri Aurobindo and me. Not out of curiosity but literary interest, occasionally when he handed me my "post" he slightly lifted his eyebrows and lingered for a few seconds. I looked very innocent, took the envelope and waited for him to depart before opening it. It happened like that four or five times. Then I felt a little nervous, so I wrote
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to Sri Aurobindo my impression that Nolini would soon get it into his head to inquire. "What should I do?" I asked. Sri Aurobindo very blandly replied: "Let us hope he will not get it into his head" (14.5.1937). But the silent inquisition of the lifted eyebrows for a moment or two did not cease. Then I wrote in desperation to Sri Aurobindo that I was sure the question would come and I must know whether to take Nolini into the secret or not. Sri Aurobindo answered: "Yes." So this secret was shared between Nolini and me for ten years - that is, until 1946, when I wrote a book on Sri Aurobindo's poetry. The third section of this book, like the other sections, came out first in the annual of the Sri Aurobindo Circle of Bombay. It was thus that excerpts from Savitri were divulged to the world - with Sri Aurobindo's approval. Afterwards the Ashram published whole cantos in various journals and in a number of fascicles and then the entire epic in two volumes.
(Mother India, November 1982, pp. 703-13)1
1 [The compiler was given a photocopy of the end of this article, with a few words added in Amal's handwriting. They have been inserted here. The book referred to is The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, of which the third part, dealing with Savitri, is reproduced here on pp. 1 ff.]
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DR. V. K. GOKAK AND
In the Indian Express, Saturday, September 11, 1982, p. 14, Dr. V. K. Gokak was interviewed on his latest literary work, an epic in Kannada due to be published in November of the same year. Asked why, being an English scholar who had taught the language for more than three decades, he wrote his epic in Kannada, Dr. Gokak was quoted as replying:
"...I was hesitant to write in a language which I have not mastered completely. Aurobindo who had mastered the language wrote his Savitri in English and, though it contained most beautiful passages, I felt the language was a bit awkward. If a scholar like Aurobindo can have problems in English, what about an ordinary man like me?"
Dr. Gokak's humility is to be appreciated. And, if we study the four pictures of him, three small and one big, reproduced on the page, we can at once observe that he has not only admiration but also devotion for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, for behind him there is an open photo-folder bearing the pictures of the Mother and the Master. So we cannot attribute to him any prejudiced and hostile attitude such as found in a number of poets and critics of a much smaller stature than he. A clique of so-called modern-minded writers never loses an opportunity to have a dig at Sri Aurobindo who, while fully conversant with all modern moods and techniques, refused to confine himself to them. He used the
______
1 [Originally published in Mother India, January 1983, pp. 31-34.]
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English language in varied ways to express high spiritual visions and experiences in the framework of a Legend that is a Symbol in the nearly 24,000 blank-verse lines of Savitri. It is therefore very surprising that one holding no truck with this coterie should label as "a bit awkward" the English of Sri Aurobindo's epic.
The surprise becomes sheer puzzlement when we notice that Dr. Gokak's phrase is in flagrant contradiction of his own accompanying remarks. First of all, if somebody admits that he has not mastered English completely and grants that another has done so, it is anomalous for the former to adjudge the latter linguistically unskilful to a small extent everywhere. Again, how can one who is declared to have mastered the English language be said to make it move with a slightly clumsy gait throughout? Lastly, is it not odd to refer to "most beautiful passages" as being couched in a speech that is a trifle ill-adapted for use in them? Dr. Gokak has cut the ground from under his own proposition that Sri Aurobindo had "problems in English".
Surely, he has himself been "a bit awkward" in the verdict he has given. What he should have said is that he, unlike Sri Aurobindo who had mastered the English language and shown his mastery in Savitri, could not venture on this language for his own epic but stick to his native Kannada over which he had a hold such as he could not claim over English. The propriety of a statement on these lines as regards Sri Aurobindo is driven home to us not only by the context of his present unfortunate inconsistency. It is driven home also by all that he has pronounced on other occasions apropos of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.
When we open his Introduction to that admirable compilation by him, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglican Poetry, published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in 1970, what do we read? " 'The Book of Love' (the fifth Book of Savitri) combines the freshness and lyric bloom of Romeo and Juliet with the idealism and platonism of Shelley and
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fuses them with a philosophical and mystical profundity all his own (p. xxxi)... His Savitri is an epic which sets forth with great precision and fidelity some of the highest states of mystical awareness (p. xxxiv)... Sri Aurobindo developed many kinds of style before 1950 and the best of them are all illustrated in Savitri. The style in this epic is flexible and varies according to its context and theme and Savitri is rich in its contexts and themes. It can be 'neoclassical' or 'romantic', symbolic or modernistic. There is his narrative or dramatic style employed when he has to present a character or situation, an encounter or a debate. His reflective style is of three kinds - the balanced and antithetical style employed when the matter is familiar to the reader, the paradoxical style where he writes at a more intense level or where the thought is subtly metaphysical, and the learned style where he is out to capture in precise words the contours of a theme which is likely to be difficult or unfamiliar to the reader. Then there is the expository or analytical style employed while presenting rare perceptions and levels, introducing the structuring and ordering of the intellect into the mystical consciousness. There is also the lyric style rising into a great height of intensity and passion. Lastly, there is the allusive style. As T. S. Eliot uses literary quotation to enrich his own meaning, Sri Aurobindo uses literary allusions to throw a bridge of understanding before the reader and to communicate to him effectively the thrill and the ecstasy which he himself has experienced at a higher level of consciousness" (pp. xxxvi-vii).
In all these detailed and penetrating encomiums Dr. Gokak is not merely referring to Sri Aurobindo's manifold subject-matter, his diverse "contexts and themes". He has in mind, too, Sri Aurobindo's manner of dealing with them in English, suiting his style flexibly to each. The very term "style", along with phrases like "freshness and lyric bloom", "precision and fidelity", "height of intensity and passion" and along with a mention of the means adopted "to communicate effectively" to the reader the writer's
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own spiritual "thrill and ecstasy" - the term "style" itself, repeated appreciatively, implies that vision, word and rhythm are fused together in successful self-expression in the tongue chosen by the poet. Not even the ghost of any awkwardness can be slipped in as a suggestion into Dr. Gokak's elaborately considered and expounded opinion of Savitri's achievement in English poetry.
If Dr. Gokak here is to be believed, gaucherie in the ordinary accepted sense should strike us as the last thing to be hinted at - no matter how moderately - for Sri Aurobindo's epic. Could he be having in view a special significance? It would seem impossible that a fellow-poet should complain in a generalising tone if Sri Aurobindo is in some places a little complicated in verbal turn or structure and may thus be regarded by those who make a fetish of the simple and the straightforward as in some degree unnatural, artificial, awkward. Milton, speaking of Satan's expulsion from Heaven and interposing nearly four and a half lines between a "him" and the "who" related to it can have those three adjectives shot at him - and yet the passage is one of the peaks of grandeur in English poetry:
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
To bottomless perdition there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.
Similarly, Keats's supremely exquisite evocation of a moment of breathless silence might be charged with awkward English because he has used a double-negatived indirectness to enforce the subdued key set by an opening negative:
No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
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Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
Especially in presenting occult or spiritual vision one may appear complex and out-of-the-way, not open to immediate understanding, but if one transmits the true afflatus from an inner or higher world the reader is bound to be carried along by a surge of felicitous audacity, as in that snatch of mysterious imagery from Sri Aurobindo's long description of his heroine:
Or golden temple-door to things beyond. [p. 15]
Such a breath of beauty and profundity sweeps through these lines that, whether we catch the exact drift or not at the first reading, a categorisation like "a bit awkward" for the English seems utterly irrelevant.
Sri Aurobindo, however, is not always so directly mystical in expression. He has numerous clear-cut pictures of unusual insight like that seizure of symbolism in what another poem of his calls "the dawn-moment's glamour". The picture in Savitri runs:
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A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge. [p. 3]
It is a matter of astonishment how Dr. Gokak could have fallen foul of Sri Aurobindo's masterpiece when he has acknowledged the outstanding merit of even the earlier poetry of Sri Aurobindo: e.g., the blank-verse narrative Love and Death written in 1899. Dr. Gokak's discriminative faculty is seen almost at its true function and as at least free from any quirk when he writes in that Introduction on which we have already drawn: "Some of Sri Aurobindo's lyrics in [the youthful] Songs to Myrtilla have the preciosity of 'Decadent' poetry in them. But his grand manner asserts itself in Love and Death..." (p. xxxi). If, as far back as the end of the last century, Sri Aurobindo could write grandly in an English unsullied anywhere even by "preciosity", how could he at the top of his development persistently stumble a little in his language? Mind you, the tendency to be "precious" - that is, over-refined in the choice of words - which Dr. Gokak notes in part of the production of Sri Aurobindo's Cambridge-days is not at all pointed at as "a bit awkward" in its English embodiment. The English of Songs to Myrtilla is nowhere found un-English in the least measure. All the more amazing, then, that a highly respected and responsible critic should commit such a gaffe about Savitri.
If he had shown us Sri Aurobindo facing "problems" in managing on a large scale the type of blank-verse he had selected - the end-stopped variety instead of the kind that flows over or is enjambed - he would have drawn our attention to a difficulty Sri Aurobindo himself envisaged at the start of his epic. Again, if he had touched on "problems" connected with rendering the English tongue more and more plastic to the stress of what Sri Aurobindo describes as the "overhead planes", levels of Yogic consciousness beyond the mental, he
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would have justly indicated the reason why Sri Aurobindo rewrote some portions of Savitri nearly a dozen times. But it is quite another matter to speak of Sri Aurobindo, who was educated in England from his seventh to his twenty-first year, as having "problems" in English as such in the whole course of his crowning poetic performance. The dictum is extremely gratuitious in itself no less than against the background of Dr. Gokak's other remarks in the present interview and all that he has carefully written as a scholar in the past.
(Aspects of Sri Aurobindo, 2000, pp. 125-30)
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(WITH ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO SRINVANTU,
AUGUST 1986)
(A few of us have been trying to read and study Savitri in a group. We requested Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna) to kindly give us a guide-line, so that our understanding as well as enjoyment of Savitri might be enhanced and enriched. We put some specific questions which would show him the trend of our mind. Given below are the first two of them along with his answers. - Ed. Srinvantu)
Q. One may approach Savitri (1) with a devotee's attitude as the spiritual autobiography of the Master, (2) as a book or storehouse of spiritual wisdom comparable to the Vedas, the Upanishads or the Gita, and (3) as great poetry. Can these approaches merge? What should be the basic approach for a full and just appreciation ?
A. To make the right approach we must understand what Sri Aurobindo intended Savitri to be. A few statements of his may be cited. "I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was particular - if part seemed to me to come from any lower levels I was not satisfied to leave it because it was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible of the same mint. In fact Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished,
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but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative."
We can gather several points here. First and foremost, Savitri is an adventure in poetry. But the aim is not merely to write good poetry. The poetry has to be good by an ascension in poetic quality to the highest spiritual plane possible: this plane has to be creative in terms of poetic values. Savitri should express poetically the ever-higher peak reached by Sri Aurobindo's progressive spiritual ascension. Therefore we cannot consider it either as sheer poetry or as sheer spirituality. It must help us at the same time to ascend to Sri Aurobindo's own peak and do so with the full awareness of the poetic way in which that peak has become communicative of its truth, its power, its delight. Savitri has to be taken as Sri Aurobindo's poetically spiritual autobiography which is meant to make us re-live his inner life of both poetic creativity and creative spirituality.
Further, we must attend to some details of these two creativities, keeping in view Sri Aurobindo's disclosure: "there have been made several successive revisions each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry. As [Savitri] now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them." Mention of Overmind aligns Savitri to the top reach of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita, and the enormous mass of it, nearly 24,000 verses, renders it a super-scripture, an unparalleled storehouse of spiritual wisdom. But we must remember that this wisdom comes at its best in the form of what the ancients called the Mantra, which Sri Aurobindo characterises in a line which is itself mantric as
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Here the final emergence of the Overmind's truth-light and truth-vibration is suggested, the surging up of the supreme Word from the secret heart of things which is one with our own inmost heart and which has received that Word for manifestation from the hidden heights. What is pertinent in this connection is that the Mantra is borne to us in "sound-waves", not simply the luminous sense but also the harmonious verbal embodiment of it is important. Thus the poetry that is Savitri is inseparable from the spirituality of this master-work of Sri Aurobindo and the latter cannot be appreciated and assimilated in a living manner unless we are responsive to the mode of vision, the cast of word, the mould of rhythm - the Spirit's varied poetic avatar. The heart of Savitri - the mystery from which the poem has sprung -yields its pulsation most intimately when we approach it with sensitiveness to the art of Savitri.
I may add that the wisdom we have to absorb from this poem has an intellectual element too. That is why Sri Aurobindo says that in its final form Savitri is "a sort of poetic philosophy of the Spirit and of Life". But we have to mark the qualifying noun "sort", for the "philosophy" is no more than the mental look the eyes of Yogic vision and experience put on, and we have to note the qualifying adjective "poetic" which brings in the artistry with which that look is worn.
Q. If somebody is fond of poetry and would prefer to come to sadhana via the road of poetry, will the study of Savitri as poetry help him much? Would you kindly explain to us how and where poetry becomes yoga and yoga poetry in Savitri?
A. I should think that all poetry, like all of the other arts, tends at its intensest to take us not only into magic but also into
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mystery. An impact of flawless form is felt: an impression of the ideal, the perfect, is received through the inevitable rhythmic expression. Even a descriptive line like
Sweet water hurrying from reluctant rocks
from Sri Aurobindo's early poetry enchants us with its apt surprises - the choice of the contrasting epithets "hurrying" and "reluctant", the easy run of the voice in the first half of the line and the retardation of it in the second half with its close consonantal conjuncts "ct", "nt", "cks", and yet the weaving together of the opposing senses by the alliterating "r" in the five words out of six, and finally through all these bespelling effects the disclosure of some hidden life in things which apparently are inanimate but occultly carry on a play of their own. Not only is a surface beauty of natural events delineated: a secret design of interacting and counteracting mobility and stability is also hinted at. We are given simultaneously a satisfying sight and a felicitous insight. This is the function of all inspired poetry. We get an inner experience through an outer stimulus: our perceptions get subtilised. Without even a directly spiritual communication attempted we undergo an exquisite refinement which can prepare us for it. As a critic has intuitively said, "Poetry may not save souls but it makes souls worth saving."
When we come to poetry like Savitri we have this power eminently exercised. Savitri can serve the poetry-lover as a road to sadhana. Here, over and above an account of spiritual states and by means of it a conceptual as well as imaginative sign-post to the mystical goal, we have a vibrant evocation of these states in a language that is born out of them and is no mere reflection of the profundities beyond the mind in mental terms. The process and the product of this special language are thrillingly pictured in the Savitri passage whose concluding line I have already quoted to illustrate the Mantra. Sri Aurobindo is describing the various orders of ascetics
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whom Savitri comes across in the course of her search for her destined mate. The Rishi-like occupation of one order is conveyed to us:
Seized, vibrant, kindling with the inspired word,
As Savitri exemplifies, by and large, this sort of spiritual composition, the reading of it is bound to induce movements of yoga. But the reader must approach it rightly. He should imagine the twofold birth of the Mantra: high above in an ether of Superconsciousness and deep within where the Rigvedic hrdaya samudra, the heart-ocean, the wondrous in-world into which opens the individual emotional-psychic experience, echoes and images the over-world. Then he should practise a dedicated silence in the mind in order to imitate something of the "hushed intense receptivity turned upwards" which Sri Aurobindo, in a letter to me, stressed as the state for the Rishi to draw the Mantra into his utterance. Such a state is necessary for two reasons. First: the full impression of the Mantric speech would be missed unless the mind were made a blank sheet on which the script of the Eternal could come out absolutely clear. Second: that speech is itself most typically, most fundamentally from a similar state. Sri Aurobindo, in Savitri, writes of
The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word - [p- 41]
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and in the same context he recounts how the Goddess of Inspiration
Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable. [Ibid.]
A final requisite for the reader to make Savitri his mode of sadhana is to read it not with the eye alone but also with the ear. The silence with which he approaches this poem which is born from "the omniscient hush" can be most effectively employed for "the immortal Word" to leave its mark upon it if we peruse the verse audibly. We have to hear and not just see the lines. In a slow subdued voice we have to communicate Savitri to our consciousness. All poetry has to be vocalised if its total magic and mystery are to go home to us. Much more is it necessary to vocalise Savitri. It has rhythmic properties more subtle than in any other poem, since it hails from realms of expression rarely tapped and unless we are so adept as to get inwardly the complete shape, as it were, of its "vibrant cry" we need to realise that shape by an audible transmission. Even to understand something, it is advisable to read it aloud - and Savitri too is best understood through the ear. But what I am asking for is meant to bear us beyond understanding. Poetry sets up a stirring within us answering to the life-throb of a vision or emotion or intuition, a life-throb which repeats itself in us and gives us a reality of the poet's substance exceeding the mere idea of it. Understanding poetry amounts to acquiring an idea of the vision, emotion, intuition concerned and reflecting upon the way they are conveyed. Such reflection is part of winning access to the art-element. It cannot be dispensed with, but even more important for the access is to catch the life-throb of those psychological faculties at work. Audible reading most fruitfully carries into us the life-throb and the basic shape of the poetry, transmitting both
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its aesthetic and its spiritual truth. Of course the value and efficacy of this double aspect of the poetic phenomenon - and particularly of a super-phenomenon like Savitri - will differ from reader to reader, depending on the inner sensitivity and on the intimacy with the English language. But all readers will receive the maximum they can by reciting Savitri instead of simply running the eye over the page.
As for the "how" and "where" of poetry becoming yoga and yoga poetry in Savitri I cannot make absolutely definite observations. I should say that the poetic and the yogic interplay throughout but there are several degrees which we may attempt to mark off in a rough way. Let me take a single theme and distinguish the modes of its recurrence. There is the straightforward statement, fusing the mental and the ultra-mental with a fine ease:
His mind transfigured to a rapturous seer... [p. 408]
This seems to be what Sri Aurobindo has termed the "adequate style" at an inevitable pitch. Then there is, in my opinion, his "effective style" keyed up to inevitability:
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight... [p. 276]
Next we may show an example of the inevitable "illumined style":
In the light flooding thought's blank vacancy... [p. 76]
The "illumined" merges in the "inspired" when we read:
Splendours of insight filled the blank of thought... [p. 37]
A mixture of all these styles - with perhaps the "adequate-effective" as an overall tone - may be found in:
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His seeking mind ceased in the Truth that knows... [p. 319]
A keener articulation of such a mixture meets us when Sri Aurobindo speaks of sages escaping from the confines of thought:
To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth... [p. 383]
This verse draws near to the style which, according to Sri Aurobindo, goes out of all classification, however inevitable a line may be within its own class - the style which is the "sheer inevitable" and whose undeniable example, in my eyes, is:
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient.... [p. 48]
Here poetry passes wholly into the mood of yoga and yoga becomes most intensely articulate in poetry.
An alternative scheme of distinction might take the first two instances as the "Creative Intelligence" in a couple of varying phases: quiet felicity in the one and vivida vis (lively force) in the other. Perhaps the second instance is half-way into the "Higher Mind". The next two seem to be the "Higher Mind" taken up into the "Illumined Mind" and verging on the "Intuition". The first of the pair of penultimate instances looks like the direct penetrative simplicity of the "Intuition" under the guise, as it were, of the "Creative Intelligences" 's clear-cut drive rather than of its colourful play. The second member has a greater sign in it of the "Intuition" 's thrilled power going straight to the heart of a subject, be it a scene, an event, a state or a person. Beyond this power lies the revelation of the "Overmind" which brings us the intensest inmost of the calmest immense, a sovereign seizure of spiritual truth in all its beauty of vision, voice and vibrancy.
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In the line I have quoted -
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient -
we have the vision of the thinker in us losing his loud self-assertive limits in a spontaneous super-knowledge which lights up everything. This vision finds voice in a compact pattern, the intransitive verb "hush" acquiring an extra impact, a depth of force, by standing in an inverted foot, a trochee in a virtually iambic verse, and that too as the second unit in the scansion, a surprise suddenly interrupting the expected metrical run. At the line's end comes another surprise, a noun made out of an adjective packed with tremendous significance. I believe that it is the first time in English literature that "Omniscient" is used as a noun with an indefinite article. Apart from that singularity is the question: "Why is 'omniscience' not used?" The habitual noun would indicate a state of all-knowledge and not a being who knows all. The personal identity of the yogi is preserved in some supreme form in a realm where the basic Universal wears numerous individual faces and the One Omniscient manifests in a multiplicity of Omniscients. There is also a sound-effect to be appreciated. The sh-sound in "hush" is caught up in "Omniscient" which is pronounced "Omnishyent", the suggestion of the echoed sound is that the hushing of the mind deepens and widens and heightens by a natural process the mind-possessing finite being that we are into an infinite supernal self who is by contrast a knower of everything' and yet mysteriously continuous with our present finitude. Finally, both for sense and for sound the epithet "bright" is the mot juste. "White" could have been put instead, connoting shadowless purity. But the special effect of the conjunct consonants "br" would have been absent. These consonants carry as if by the very modulation of the lips and tongue the hint of a spreading out as well as a glowing forth. The psychological impression is of a bursting into light. In addition we have to note that "bright" has a
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long "i" just as "minds" has. The sound-parity suggests the "minds" themselves turning "bright" through the hushing experience. Besides, "bright" is at the tail-end of a series of five monosyllables, a sort of climaxing of the process they represent. And this fivefold process thus climaxed terminates and culminates in a massive reality of transcendent transformation indicated by the single four-syllabled word "Omniscient".
To feel and recognise the spiritual afflatus of so superb a kind, borne magically home to us in a design of manifold artistry, is indeed a preparatory movement of sadhana. Again and again we get a chance to develop the sadhana-mood. The fundamental attitude necessary for advance in spirituality is hit off to perfection in the middle verse of the three powerful inward-drawing lines which yet turn one's soul outward to master the world's "crass casualty":
A poised serenity of tranquil strength,
A wide unshaken look on time's unrest
Faced all experience with unaltered peace. [p. 36]
The absolute of this peace, the self-existent infinitude of it meets us in a life-changing passage when Aswapati's aspiring consciousness breaks beyond the barrier of both individual and universal existence:
The superconscient realms of motionless Peace
Everywhere, in some places more directly and in others through a transparent veil, Savitri which is the self-expression of a master yogi can lead us towards yoga. But its most creative function is to kindle in us a flame burning at all times
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so that we may build up in ourselves the living presence of that master yogi and through the illumining art of this epic of the Spirit quicken at each moment with the invocation:
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride.... [p. 345]
(Aspects of Sri Aurobindo, 2000, pp. 131-40)
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THE BIGGEST PUZZLE IN THE TEXT OF
It is well known that a Critical Edition of Sri Aurobindo's epic is under preparation. The general guide-line is: "Follow the text" - the "text" signifying Sri Aurobindo's latest handwritten version or else his latest dictated matter. In regard to dictation some questions are natural because of possible mishearing. In regard to the manuscript there should theoretically be no question. On its authority a good number of what are termed "transmission errors" have been set right - that is, mistakes committed in copying out the occasionally difficult-to-read text and then repeated or sometimes even added to, inadvertently, in the typescript from which the press went to work. But there is one place in Savitri where the final MS itself has given rise to very grave doubt. It is in a passage on p. 347 of the Birth Centenary Edition and may be called the biggest puzzle in the text.
King Aswapaty (corrected form of the old spelling "Aswapathy") has returned from his exploration of the supra-terrestrial "planes", which had culminated in his vision of the Divine Mother and his securing a boon from her for the world. Though back on earth, he is still receptive to influences from beyond:
Once more he moved amid material scenes,
Lifted by intimations from the heights
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And twixt the pauses of the building brain
Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores. [p. 347]
Savitri has run through several editions but no reader has marked any anomaly here. The passage was read out to Sri Aurobindo himself before publication and he too did not notice anything amiss. No doubt, he has also passed many words which now stand convicted of being "transmission errors". Of course, in spite of their varying from the original text they were passed not because he considered the variations in Nirod's copy or in Nolini's typescript improvements again and again on his own writing but because he had forgotten what he had written and these variations managed in their own way to make sufficient sense. The trouble with the passage I have quoted is that it exactly transmits Sri Aurobindo's final manuscript so that the charge of his somehow accepting something alien is not valid - and yet a word here has seriously raised eyebrows during discussions for the Critical Edition.
The word is "twixt". At a recent count, in at least thirteen MSS before the very last, the third line is written with "in":
And in the pauses of the building brain...
Impressed by the fact that Sri Aurobindo's own hand has replaced the longstanding "in" by "twixt", meaning "between", a commentator on Savitri has publicly dwelt on the passage thus:
"Sri Aurobindo as an imager of thought-birds and as an artist of an exceptional merit making these heavenly visitors slip between the pauses of the building brain - when the brain is in its phase of intense activity symbolic of the duties of the ruler with a concern for his kingdom - is just superb. There is something remarkable here from the point of view of poetic expression achieving through its round-aboutness a very
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unusual result. Complex in structure but metrically so well-poised, the third line in the above passage depicts exactly the whole process by which Aswapati the Yogi is presently seen engrossed in affairs of public life, a typical Aurobindonian integration of the secular and the esoteric."1
In view of this emphatic printed pronouncement with no hint of the known diffidence about "twixt", which was aroused in some parties concerned with the Critical Edition, it is necessary to bring out in the open the precise bone of contention.
When Sri Aurobindo wrote "in", he evidently meant that during the times when Aswapaty's "building brain" had ceased from its activity and was in a state of calm, a condition of quietude, making an interval of "pause", he had received "thoughts" from far-off unearthly regions. In other words, these supra-mundane thoughts were received when the usual mental constructions were in abeyance. With this meaning, the line was a straightforward statement. It had no "round-aboutness", no "complexity in structure". Similarly straightforward would have been a line if Sri Aurobindo had wished to say that the opposite was true - namely, that the activity of the building brain and not the recurrent pause in it rendered Aswapaty a recipient of superhuman influences. We might have expected a verse like
And in the ventures of the building brain...
Now, with "twixt" instead of "in" to precede "pauses", one has to take Sri Aurobindo as resorting to "round-aboutness" and "complexity in structure" in order to suggest the same situation by saying that everything happened in the space of time between one pause and another and that nothing happened at the time a pause was there. Sri Aurobindo is
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made to imply not just that the presence of the "heavenly visitors" was felt during intensely busy cerebral processes but also that it was felt only during them and never if there was any calm, quietude, "pause".
On the very face of it, this strikes one as a contradiction of all that Sri Aurobindo has said on spiritual problems and Yogic practices. In fact, according to his writings, what now has been called "a typical Aurobindonian integration of the secular and the esoteric" occurs with the "secular" giving up its usual activity of the building brain and letting its striving thoughts be replaced by the assured luminous thinking of the "esoteric", the higher planes, or else allowing its own thought-stuff to be moulded by their light. To put it otherwise, it is not "between" but "in" the "pauses" that the integration takes shape. This sense is borne in on us by another passage in Savitri where too the precise verbal turn used in the numerous earlier versions of our passage meets us. On p. 421 we read:
Although in pauses of our human lives
Earth keeps for man some short and perfect hours
When the inconscient tread of Time can seem
The eternal moment which the deathless live,
Yet rare that touch upon the mortal's world. [p. 421]
The spiritual situation is similar. In addition to "pauses" reappearing, the past participle "touched" gets represented by the noun "touch", both of them relating the terrestrial to the finer and greater beyond.
The general drift intended in either passage is clearly caught in a third on p. 476:
Open God's door, enter into his trance.
Cast Thought from thee, that nimble ape of Light:
In his tremendous hush stilling thy brain
His vast Truth wake within and know and see. [p. 476]
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Such is Sri Aurobindo's message everywhere, in both prose and poetry. Even the commentator whom I have quoted lets this message come through in one of the lines he1 cites to show the varied poetic and spiritual qualities of Savitri. The line, taken from p. 383 of the Centenary Edition, runs as cited:
... Mind motionless sleeps, waiting Light's birth, [p. 383]
Savitri itself the commentator characterises in terms that go counter to the denigration implied earlier of "pauses". -He2 writes: "It is the Word that has taken birth in the Infinite's bosom of Silence, in the 'omniscienthush': Savitri's substratum is the divinely pervasive Shanta Rasa." The Supreme Truth and Beauty emerge from or through or in depths of peace.
That "twixt" makes really a twist in Sri Aurobindo's vision and is, in my opinion, the result of a strange oversight. But an attempt to rectify the situation appears to have been made. For, in Nirod's handwritten ledger where the text had been copied, a line was put under "twixt", and a tick in the margin, the usual sign of some uncertainty. When these marks were first noticed, it was thought that Nolini, struck by the incongruity of "twixt", had been responsible for them. Nirod said that he must have brought Nolini's questioning of the word to Sri Aurobindo's attention and that Sri Aurobindo must have affirmed "twixt". I believed that the underlining and the tick must have served simply as a push to Nirod to check the word with the original and that he must have done the checking and told Nolini of the word's occurrence in the MS. I could not think of Sri Aurobindo's giving no importance
1P. 103 of ibid.
2P. 105.
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to Nolini's pointed query. To my mind Sri Aurobindo did not come directly into the picture at all.
Now I have been proved wrong but in an unexpected sense - in favour of my distrust of "twixt". Wondering whether Nolini would really have been involved and rejected, I asked Richard Hartz, one of the editors of the Critical Edition, who has ready access to all the materials connected with Savitri, to examine whatever related to the question in hand. He has kindly supplied a report:
A study of the marks in the margin of Nirod's copy shows that Nolini put question-marks in pencil to indicate his doubts at the time of typing. Nolini questioned very obvious slips on Nirod's part, such as "who's" for "whose", "compliment" for "complement" and "slow-placed" for "slow-paced". He usually typed the correct form.
The mark next to the "twixt"-line is not a pencilled question-mark but a tick in ink - the same ink as used by Nirod for his copy. There are two possible explanations for this mark and similar ones. Nirod might have put the tick while copying to indicate his doubt about the reading of a word in the MS. But in the instance before us, there is no question of the word having been illegible or difficult to decipher: there is no alternative to reading "twixt". This explanation is inadequace in other cases also, for the underlined words in lines marked with ticks are not generally more difficult to read than most of the handwriting. Therefore, marks like the one here must have a different purpose connected with Sri Aurobindo's revision. Such ticks are found in the manuscript as well as the copy. Nirod has told us that, during dictated revision, Sri Aurobindo asked him to put these marks by lines he wished to come back to.
After returning to the line and either revising it or deciding to leave it as it was, the tick would normally
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be cancelled. Uncancelled ticks in the MS were transferred to the copy so that the matter could be attended to there. When the copy was revised, most of these ticks were cancelled - unless the correction itself, being obvious, made it unnecessary to cancel the tick. Some new ticks were also put during the revision of Nirod's copy. For example, the word "ineffable" was underlined and a tick put beside the line:
A Being intimate and ineffable.
Later, "ineffable" was crossed out and "unnamable" written after it.
The underlining of "twixt" and the tick in the margin would appear to indicate, then, that Sri Aurobindo entertained some doubt about this word when the copy of his manuscript was read to him. However, the fact that no action was taken and the tick was not cancelled may show that the intended return to it never came about. Once the canto was typed, there was no further reference to Nirod's copy. The attention which had been drawn to "twixt" would have been forgotten by the time the typescript was revised.
For a substantial amount of time must have elapsed between the revision of this canto in Nirod's ledger and the revision of the typed copy of it. We learn from Nirod himself that his copy of the first three Books of Savitri was first completed and revised, then given to Nolini for typing. The revision of the typescript then began from Book One. By the time the present passage was reached, almost at the end of Book Three, it seems unlikely that Sri Aurobindo would have had much recollection of details of the previous phase of revision.
It maybe noted in passing that Nirod, in copying the "twixt"-passage, had miscopied "shores" as "spheres"
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two lines below the line with "twixt". Sri Aurobindo did not notice this error when the passage was read out from Nirod's ledger, whereas he seems to have had some qualms about "twixt", as indicated by the underlining and the tick. However, when the typescript of the canto concerned was read to him, among the very few changes made in that canto was the correction of "spheres" to "shores", while "twixt" two lines earlier passed unnoticed - the exact opposite of what had happened at the ledger-stage. We have no way of knowing whether Sri Aurobindo, who had overlooked "spheres" in the ledger, suddenly remembered his own MS's much earlier detail. A fresh inspiration is also possible, accidentally coinciding with the original term. A number of transmission-errors were corrected in ways suggesting that Sri Aurobindo did not remember what he had previously written. Where the restoration of his original word would have provided the most natural and felicitous solution, we find him revising a line in accordance with the change in sense introduced by a mistake in copying or typing. To give a couple of examples out of several: this happened when his "iteration" was mistyped "vibration" and when his "freak" was wrongly typed "peak". In any case, the overlooking of "twixt" at the time "spheres" was corrected need not be accepted as a confirmation of "twixt" any more than the overlooking of "spheres" in the ledger need be so accepted for that word.
While no definite conclusion can be drawn from this ambivalent situation, the fact remains that Sri Aurobindo himself at one stage showed signs of being not quite at ease with his own "twixt". Thus we may be encouraged to discuss whether the perplexities created by this word are the result of a clear-sighted and final choice by Sri Aurobindo, in preference to the long-established and straightforward "in" of his earlier versions.
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Yes, everything inclines one to regard "twixt" as a strange oversight. Still, how are we to explain its original entry into the MS and how is it that Sri Aurobindo let it stand when Nirod read the canto to him before publication?
A highly intelligent friend, well conversant with both Sri Aurobindo's poetry and his Yogic teaching, accounts for the fact that none of us reacted against "twixt" for years and years, by remarking: "On a first reading (or even many more casual ones) we read the meaning and not quite the words, and so 'twixt' was just taken for 'in'. Now that it is pointed out one notices it." The background of Sri Aurobindo's uniform teaching would suffice to render us uncritical. The same explanation may hold for Sri Aurobindo's own attitude on hearing the passage read out, even if more than once. Actually, hearing instead of reading is bound to diminish critical attention further. As for the first half of the question, linked with the final draft, we may surmise a general state of inattention at the time Sri Aurobindo made this copy. Wanting to put a more weighty preposition than "in", he may have thought of "midst". But, even in the state we have surmised, he could not help noting "amid" just two lines earlier:
Once more he moved amid material scenes - [p. 347]
and immediately before this line there was
The mortal stir received him in its midst. [Ibid.]
Sri Aurobindo may have loosely opted for "twixt". One other instance in Savitri of "twixt" used not in a strict grammatical bearing is on p. 212:
Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts. [p. 212]
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The singular noun "magnificence" after a preposition connoting "between" is odd. But the plural "breasts" makes the sense clear and the line as it stands is far more poetically effective than the less concentrated but correct version possible:
Twixt her magnificent yet fatal breasts.
Unlike our line both the versions here carry the sense of "between", but we may observe that in the original line "Midst" could have been substituted so that "Twixt" might create the impression of being able to play the role of a broad synonym of that preposition. A close analytic view could show more clearly in our line the misleading which "twixt" instead of "midst" would cause. But a general state of inattention due to any hurry would be liable to exclude such a view. Now, have we any grounds to posit a state in which Sri Aurobindo was not focusing on all particulars though his eyes might have been moving up and down the page for some reason or other?
Highly relevant here is the earlier report on the page concerned, submitted by Richard Hartz to the group examining the data for the Critical Edition. It had been suggested that Sri Aurobindo must have inserted "twixt" with a cool deliberate eye to each item in the passage. Hartz wrote:
The final MS where "twixt" was substituted for "in" does not support the impression that Sri Aurobindo was attending carefully to every detail. Elsewhere on this page, for example, he neglected to put commas after "hush" and "trance" in these lines:
The harmony journeyed towards some distant hush
A music failing in the ear of trance
A cadence called by distant cadences,
A voice that trembled into strains withdrawn. [p. 346]
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Essential punctuation is also missing in three other places on this page of the final MS. But much more unusual are the slips which Sri Aurobindo made in writing the lines after "And twixt the pauses of the building brain." He first wrote "Lif" - obviously the 'beginning of "Lifted", which occurs two lines above. After cancelling this false start, he wrote:
Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.
"Fathomless shores", which Sri Aurobindo wrote at first, cannot possibly mean anything; evidently, "shores" was copied by mistake from the line below. Sri Aurobindo noticed this error immediately and changed "shores" to "surge", as in the penultimate version from which he was copying.
Although Sri Aurobindo corrected these mistakes, it would have been a more convincing sign of attentiveness if he had not made the mistakes at all. If there is any passage in the manuscripts of Savitri which gives the impression of some lack of attention on Sri Aurobindo's part, this is it. The reading "twixt the pauses" belongs only to this version, in contrast to "in the pauses", which has the opposite meaning and is supported by a long series of manuscripts. In view of the apparent meaninglessness of "twixt", I think we would be justified in this case in departing from our usual rule of adhering to the last version. A footnote would be sufficient recognition of "twixt".
Just the state is observed here which we have surmised -a looking up and down the page with mixed results while being somewhat inattentive as though one were in a hurry.
In such circumstances I cannot but agree with Richard about retaining "in". The footnote to it might be phrased thus:
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As in the numerous versions before the final which reads "twixt".
If, out of rigid piety, we go the other way around and keep "twixt" in the text, the footnote should be:
All the large number of versions before the last have "in".
But this footnote may prove unhelpful, for in the future a footnote is likely to be ignored by literary articles and currency given only to the text. We should beware of allowing currency to a text which, on a natural interpretation, is out of accord with Sri Aurobindo's known spiritual teaching no less than with his own poetic choice in an overwhelming majority of versions.
4
Lest anyone should think we are making a very special or unique case out of "twixt", I might point out that this is not exactly so. Even if it were so, our procedure would be fully justified by all the circumstances I have set forth. But remembering a past instance broadly analogous to it I turned once more to Hartz to bring it to a focus. He has submitted the following account:
There is one other place where, because of an apparent verbal slip in Sri Aurobindo's last handwritten manuscript, it has been proposed to follow an earlier version in the Critical Edition. This case, involving lines 6 and 7 on p. 218 of the Centenary Edition, has not aroused any controversy though it has some similarity to the problem with "twixt". In the penultimate manuscript, Sri Aurobindo had written:
A formless void oppressed his struggling brain,
A darkness grim and cold benumbed his flesh, [p. 218]
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The final manuscript reads:
A darkness grim and cold oppressed his flesh,
It appears very unlikely that the repetition of "oppressed" was an intentional change. The original "benumbed", found in all earlier versions that I have seen, can hardly be improved upon in sound or sense. The second "oppressed" looks like an inadvertent slip made in the somewhat mechanical process of copying out lines which did not require alteration. That Sri Aurobindo was not deliberately trying to make the word "oppressed" more oppressive by repeating it, is shown by his revision of the typescript. The ledger gives no sign of revision in this particular instance. In the typescript Sri Aurobindo changed the first "oppressed" to "suppressed" to avoid the repetition. Thus we have the printed text:
A formless void suppressed his struggling brain,
Strictly according to the "rules" of textual editing, this revised version should stand as our text - just as "twixt" would be our choice in the line in Book Three according to a literal-minded interpretation of the same principles. Yet all of us have accepted to print "oppressed" and "benumbed" as in the penultimate manuscript, treating the repetition of "oppressed" in the final MS as a sort of "transmission error" although it is in Sri Aurobindo's own hand. The subsequent alteration of the first "oppressed" to "suppressed" is then regarded as a consequence of the mistake. As such, it does not have quite the same value as the original version, though it must surely be mentioned
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as a variant since it represents Sri Aurobindo's own revision.
The case of "oppressed" and "benumbed" is not identical to that of "twixt" and " in", but there ai e enough similarities to make it useful to discuss them together. Among the similarities is the fact that Sri Aurobindo's final manuscript of the concluding passage of Book Two, Canto Seven, shows some signs of a certain inattentiveness even apart from the replacement of "benumbed" by a repetition of "oppressed". Two sentences later comes the line:
There crawled through every tense and aching nerve
After copying this, Sri Aurobindo wrote:
A nameless and unutterable
then cancelled these words, noticing that he had skipped a line. He then wrote, as in the manuscript from which he was copying:
Leaving behind a poignant quaking trail
A nameless and unutterable fear.
(The "a" before "poignant" was later changed to "its".)
With this detailed account we may close our survey of the biggest puzzle in the text of Savitri and draw a general balanced conclusion.
The editors of Savitri must certainly not succumb to the temptation to choose readings from earlier versions merely out of personal preference. But neither can a purely mechanical approach to editing be the ideal for a poem which covered many years and took shape in such a complex manner. Among the diverse possibilities of corruptions creeping
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into the text, slips and oversights by Sri Aurobindo himself form an extremely small category consisting primarily of omitted punctuation. But rare verbal slips are a possibility the editors must accept when there is very clear evidence for it, particularly from the standpoint of Sri Aurobindo's consistent yogic teaching.
(Mother India, November 1990, pp. 745-54)
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(In anticipation of August 15, 1991, the 113th anniversary of Sri Aurobindo's birth, All India Radio Pondicherry brought together at 8 p.m. on August 12 five voices from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram to broadcast enlightening words on the Master's manifold achievement. Here is the speech of Amal Kiran.)
Sri Aurobindo was a poet on a grand scale, the scale natural to all the sides of his versatile personality. He has given us poetry of various kinds - several narratives, numerous lyrics and sonnets, half a dozen dramas, a substantial body of experiments in new metres and, to top everything, an epic of nearly 24,000 lines of blank verse, the longest poetic creation in English: Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol.
This poem takes up the famous traditional story of a woman's love which manages to reclaim from the God of Death the life of her prematurely dead husband. Sri Aurobindo turns that Indian legend to his own spiritual purposes without depriving it of human interest. He transforms it into a symbol of conquering all the ills that attend on man's mortality. But the vision unfolded goes beyond a mere individual's perfection. A democracy of the Divine, liberating the' human collectivity, is the goal as in that utterance by the story's main character:
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My spirit's liberty I ask for all. [p. 649]
What is specially notable about Sri Aurobindo's epic is that it attempts to open up a new dimension of poetic expression. In English literature we have the Shakespearian accent of the thrilled rapid life-force, the Miltonic tone of the majestically thinking mind, the deep or colourful cry of the idealistic imagination as in Wordsworth and Shelley and, recently, Yeats and A.E. Savitri, while taking into itself the whole past of English poetry, adds not only the Indian spirit: it adds also in ample measure the typical intonation, at once intense and immense in its rhythmic significance, which the Rigveda, the Upanishads and the Gita bring. Sri Aurobindo calls it "overhead poetry". It is not what the common man may suppose: poetry that passes clean over his head! It is inspired verse with an illuminating power, hailing from secret regions of a more-than-human consciousness which lie above the mental level reached so far by earth's evolution. This poetry may be generally characterised, in Sri Aurobindo's own words from Savitri, as Consisting of
The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face. [p. 677]
If you want to relish variously such lines which the Rishis of old called the Mantra, the supreme vibrant Word, I may offer a few samples. In the exquisite vein you have:
The note of sheer sublimity is struck by
Our life's repose is in the Infinite. [p. 197]
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A music goes home to our human concerns with the whisper of an ultimate assurance when Sri Aurobindo says:
(Mother India, January 1992, pp. 9-10)
Page 368
The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo, K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran), 1947, 2nd rev. ed. 1974, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry
The Thinking Corner - Causeries on Life and Literature, Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), 1996,
The Integral Life Foundation, Waterford CT, 06385, U.S.A.
Sri Aurobindo - Letters on Savitri, Edited by K.D. Sethna, 1951, 2000, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry
Sri Aurobindo-The Poet, K.D. Sethna, 1970,1999, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry
Inspiration and Effort: studies in literary attitude and expression, Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), 1995,
The Inspiration of "Paradise Lost", Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), 1994, The Integral Life Foundation, Waterford CT, 06385, U.S.A.
The Sun and the Rainbow: Approaches to Life through Sri Aurobindo's Light (Essays, Letters, Poems, Short Stories),
K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran), 1981, Institute of Human Study, Hyderabad
Aspects of Sri Aurobindo, Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), 1995,2000,
Our Light and Delight: Recollections of Life with the Mother, Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), 1980, 2003, Clear Ray Trust, Pondicherry
Mother India, Monthly Review of Culture, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry
Page 369
A being no bigger than the thumb of man115
A brute half-conscious body serves as means116
A bull-throat bellowed with its brazen tongue71
A deathless body and a divine name70
A dragon power of reptile energies67
A formless void oppressed his struggling brain363
A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault304
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge367
A greater darkness waited, a worse reign245
A greater force than the earthly held his limbs123
A hope stole in that hardly dared to be248
A last high world was seen where all worlds met111
A lonely freedom cannot satisfy 77, 366
A long lone line of hesitating hue62
A manifest of the Imperishable286
A million faces wears her knowledge here67
A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown..82
A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time 299,311
A single law simplessed the cosmic theme 113, 285
A traveller of the million roads of life189
A wanderer communing with depth and marge159
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light190
A work she had to do, a word to speak244
Above the Masters of the Ideal throne116
Accompanied by an eternal No112
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed349
Across the path of the divine Event8
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven17
All can be done if the God-touch is there 68, 322
All grew a consecration and a rite87
All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff132
All things hang here between God's yes and no68
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable62
Almost they saw who lived within her light100
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change93
Ambitioned the seas for robe, for crown the stars 113,285
An awful Silence watches tragic Time69
An errant marvel with no place to live16
An inarticulate whisper drives her steps131
Page 370
An instant's visitor the godhead shone89
And broken the intellect's hard and lustrous lid307
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss22,65
And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl84
And driven by a pointing hand of Light114,285
And in the pauses of the building brain352
And Savitri too awoke among these tribes190
And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire240
And the blind Void struggles to feel and see45
And the long restlessness of transient things74
And the swift parents hurrying to their child117
And we break into the infinity of God314
Architectonic and inevitable112
Around her some tremendous spirit lived282
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven66
As if her rash superb wagered to outvie285
As if solicited in an alien world106
As if to a deeper country of the soul159
As in a mystic and dynamic dance64,337
As when the mantra sinks in Yoga's ear120
At first life grieved not in her burdened breast18
At the sombre centre of the dire debate20
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives187,239
Built is the golden tower, the flame-child born282
But Aswapati's heart replied to her194
But now the half-opened lotus bud of her heart115
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel80
Condemned to resume the effort and the pang80
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven 68,109,322
Even were caught as through a cunning veil39,130
Faced all experience with unaltered peace349
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge12
Flamed in transparencies of crowded light71
For ever love, O beautiful slave of God282
For him the limiting firmament ceased above312
Freedom is this with ever seated soul75
God-given her strength can battle against doom267
Heaven's waters trailed and dribbled through the drowned land.110
Her gulfs stood nude, her far transcendences110
Here too the vision and prophetic gleam90
His failure is not failure whom God leads68
His march now soared into an eagle's flight313
His mind transfigured to a rapturous seer346
His seeking mind ceased in the Truth that knows347
His soul must be wider than the universe101
I am, I love, I see, I act, I will66
I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream70,295
Idea rotated symphonies of sight129
Impassive he lived immune from earthly hopes123
In her unlit temple of eternity253, 288
In him that high transition laid its base308,312
In man a dim disturbing somewhat lives285
Page 371
In moments when the inner lamps are lit 123
In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day 301,325
In the light flooding thought's blank vacancy 346
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse 79
Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss 89
Into a far-off nook of heaven there came 106
Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech 344
It was the hour before the Gods awake 84,246,291,330
It wrote the lines of a significant myth 248
Knowledge was rebuilt from cells of inference 113
Lifting the human word nearer to the god's 181
Love must not cease to live upon the earth 75
Master of Nature who once her bondslave worked 203
My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer 69
Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven 24,322
Neighbouring proud palaces of perverted Power 112
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell 68
O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race 224
O lasso of my rapture's widening noose 76
O life, the life beneath the wheeling stars 76
O radiant fountain of the world's delight 74
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe 350
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood 89
Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts 96
Once more he moved amid material scenes 359
Once more the world was made a wonder-web 71
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great 20
One-pointed to the immaculate Delight 240
Only a little the God-light can stay 63,90
Only the Immortals on their deathless heights 129
Open God's door, enter into his trance 354
Original and supernal Immanence 130
Our being must move eternally through Time 220
Our life's repose is in the Infinite 68,367
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient 69,240,322,347
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight 346
Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men 75
Piercing the limitless Unknowable 317
Read the No-gestures of her silhouettes 111
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry 66
Sight was a flame-throw from identity 69
Sight's lightnings leaped into the invisible 269
Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps 342
Silence, the nurse of the Almighty's power 344
Something that wished but knew not how to be 15,199
Splendours of insight filled the blank of thought 346
Splendours of insight filled the blanks of thought. 69
Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance 44
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite 17, 322
The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail 45
The bounded mind became a boundless light 315
The colonnade's dream grey in the quiet eve 66
Page 372
The conscious Force that acts in Nature's breast284
The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak47
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain 108,187, 241
The Gods above and Nature sole below245
The great are strongest when they stand alone266
The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought112
The harmony journeyed towards some distant hush360
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone 105,260
The impossible God's sign of things to be273
The island ego joined its continent298
The landmarks of the little person fell313
The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face 74,367
The Lord of Life resumed his mighty rounds114
The old adamantine vetoes stood no more32
The single Call, the uncompanioned Power85
The superconscient realms of motionless peace 64, 210,265
The toiling thinker widened and grew still36
The ways that lead to endless happiness129
The wide world-rhythms wove their stupendous chant217
Then perish vomiting the immortal soul113
Then shall the business fail of Death and Night113
There gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day305
There knowing herself by her own termless self211
There was no gulf between the thought and fact67
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown 68,241
This most she must absolve with endless pangs284
This now was witnessed in that son of Force300
This was the day when Satyavan must die 79,247
Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness226
Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams79
To raise its head and look for absent light16
To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light s birth347
Torn from its immediacy of errorless sight285
Touched by the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge129
Twixt the magnificence of her fatal breasts359
Unweave the stars and into silence pass322
Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can bear32
White chambers of dalliance with Eternity209
With the Truth-Light strike earth's massive roots of trance110
Words winged with the red splendour of the heart74
Yet rare that touch upon the mortal's world354
Page 373
A
absolute Self 99
adesh 212
A.E., AE 33,197,367
Aeschylus 205
Agni 298
ahan 303
Akash 174
Amal Kiran
first article about Savitri 1
first contact with Savitri 50,316
lines of poetry 262
Sri Aurobindo - the Poet 316
The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo 1,55,321
Ananda 176,209,247
Anne, Countess of Winchelsea 119
Aquinas, Thomas 207
Arberry,A.G. 70
Ariosto 187
Aristotle 207
Arnold/Edwin 217
aśva 302
Aurobindonian
Age 39,48
art 216
blank verse 219
consciousness 208
effect 68
God-glimpse 209
integration of secular and esoteric 353
message 8
poetry 158,174,201,223,226
sensitivity 124
spirit 269
Yogi 6
Avatar's work 63,273
Avidya 259,302
avyakta 302
B
Beddoes 197
Benson, Robert Hugh 23
Binyon, Laurence 210,223
Blake 153,197
blank-verse 102,215
Brahma-muhurta 253
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 302
brhat 302
Browning, Elizabeth 60,161
C
Celtic fire and ether 197
ChadwickJohnA. 266
Chandidas 126
Chapman 189
Chattopadhyaya, Harindranath 36,42
Chit-Tapas 247
Coleridge 42,197,234
consciousness
depths of 99
developing through Savitri 286
Divine 167,174
Divine Presence and 303
higher 67,176
human's 95
in-drawn 28
Mantra in 271
mental 306,325
outer 160
Overhead 73
Overmind 200
poet s 160,162
quiet 200
ranges of 51,58
transformation of 77,248
word of supreme 177
creative intelligence 347
C.R.M. 122,140
Page 374
Dadhikravan (the white horse) 305,310
Dante 22,57,126,188,223,258 186, 205
Dawn-Goddess. See Savitri (2)
De Quincey's division of literature 162
death 5 desire 29,160
dharma 145,174
Diekhoff,John 244
Divine Presence 303
divinisation 6
Donne 46,230
Durga'sLion 307
Dutt,Toru 144
dvārapālaka 299
E
ego 298,310,313
Eliot, T.S. 126,335
emotional being 29
English poetry
creative intelligence in 229
epic and mysticism in 185
Latinisation and inversion 283
Life-Force and Mind-Force 216,367
lines of 223,282,322
longest sentence 118
peaks of grandeur in 336
Savitri and 367
epic 39,60,182,185,258
evolution 65, 247
G
Gita 207
Gnosis 51
Goddess of Inspiration 345
God, Europe vs. Asia 30
God of Love 24
God-realisation 5,315 Gods 253
Goethe 1,22,57,205
Gokak, Dr. V.K. 333
golden lid 307
Gray 234
H
Hartz, Richard 356,360,362
higher and lower hemispheres 306
Hiranyagarbha 99
Homer 132,186,205,213,258
horse 310
hostile forces 303
Housman,A.E. 26,265
hrdaye guhāyām 165
Huta 281,298,330
hymns to Agni 299
I
Ignorance 248
immortality 61,83,90,303
Inconscience 80,95,247,260,321,328
Inconscient 252
Indian spirituality 99
Ingelow,Jean 155
inner being 173
inspiration
Illumined Mind 237
Overhead 37,211
source of 200,215
Integral Yoga. See yoga
intellect
bright and dark 307
intelligence 82,215
intuition 235
Overmind 323,347
Iqbal 70
K
Kabir 126
Kalidasa 182,205,216,218
Katha Upanishad 115
kavayah satyaśhrutah 184
Kavi 163
Kazantzakis, Nicos 60,213
Keats 18,197,336 knowledge
Agni and 306
lustrous lid and 36,37,311
Savitri full of 208
Transcendent 248
Kundalirti 116
Kyd 216
L
Lal, P. 125
Landor 166
laya 254
Lewis, C. Day 258
life force. See also vital
all-effecting 273
horses 114,302
in Savitri 285
Page 375
inspiration of 2
Shakespearian 367
soul and 134,160
transformation 83
Longinus 161
Lucas, F.L. 192
"lustrous lid" 36,37,307
M
Mahabharata 60,61,141,182,183, 211,214
mahimā89
Mallarmé 201
Mandukya Upanishad 99
Mantra 51,177,270,341
Sri Aurobindo's letter on 200
Marlowe 216
Milton52,102,132,186,205,219,229, 258,326,336
mind
and overhead poetry 229
Higher 235
Illumined 235
in-drawn illuminated 272
insufficiency of 67
Knowledge in 310
labouring or receiving 102
lid formed by 307
luminous thinking 354
poetry and 160
research and 268
silence of 103,344
Sri Aurobindo's 211
super-knowledge and 346
thinking 234
transformation of 69
Mother
birthday 272
experiences, described in Savitri 330
recording Savitri 282
N
Naidu, Sarojini 147
Napoleon 150,152
Nature
achievement of 273
and Supernature 12,208,315
divine manifestation 95
doings of secret 285
domain of 88
field of scientists 163
Goddess of Light 94
Gods 85
in bliss 3
laws of 177
Light submerged in 5
moods of 65
multiplicities of 6
Satyavan and 159
soul and 79,116,255,257
subtle dimensions of 182
Night and Dawn 94,302
Nirodbaran 204,266,279,287,321, 330,352,357
Nirvana 51,265
Nolini 277,298,331,351,352
O
Oneness 3
One Self 235
overhead
planes 51,58,317,338
rhythm in mystical poets 33
writing 103,215
Overmind 51
inspiration 200
Intuition 323
P
pain 75,82
parame vyoman 271
Phillips, Stephen 284
poet
Creator 164
poetic intelligence 69,103,201,231, 330,341
poetry. See also inspiration
creative genius 213
criteria for highest 205
function of inspired 343
giants of 205
imagery 46
overhead 201,235,367
overmind rhythm 109
philosophy versus 163
power of expression 213
psychology and metaphysics of 159
repetition of words 41
Soul as the source of 180
Vedantic influence in 197
vision and 162
yoga and 342,347
Prajna 99
pralaya 81
Page 376
prānāyāma 116
prayer 76
progress 312
psychic being 28
opening through Savitri 286
R
Racine 206
Ramayana 60,140,182, 327
Reynolds, Barbara 210
Rig-veda 97,141,207,298
Rilke 154
Rishis 1,4,344
Ritam 43
Roman Lucretius 161 S
S
samadhi 29
samskāras 321
Sat 247
Savitri
inRigveda 4-5
who is Savitri 6
Savitri (1) General
appreciation of 64
approach to 270
editions 57,275,351
evolution and 71
full of knowledge 208
function of 349
growth of consciousness 286
how to read 286
human element 18
last dictated lines 266
length of 60
Mahabharata story 4
Mother on 281,286
Mother's experiences in 330
new dimension of poetic
expression 367
original form 287, 328
parallels with poems 98
philosophy and 220,321,342
revision of 320
spiritual philosophy and vision 130
spiritual revelatory literature 286
Sri Aurobindo on 58,147,200, 255,
283,288,289,320,323,327
style of 242
support in sadhana 342,345 technique of 61
understanding of 281
Vedas, Upanishads, Gita and 51,
61,177,340,367
what is Savitri 60,270
Savitri (2) descriptions in
abysm of Hell 112
advent of the Age of Gold 98
Agni at work 308
Aswapati's boon granted 74
awakening of Kundalini 115
Bird of Fire 100
dawn 247
Dawn 88
Dawn-Goddess 86,88,252,262
democracy of the Divine 77,366
descent of Supramental Godhead 248
different phases of night 249
divine and human simultaneously 314
Divine Mother 96
Divine Power 312
divine vision 249
divinised consciousness 129
earth-born heart of man 77
earth-life as the field of the Spirit 76
earth's aspiration 130
fate and pain 75
fourfold scheme of experience from
fullness of the spiritual state 227
glimpses of Supernature 128
hierarchy of planes 110,209
higher harmonies of consciousness 67
human aspirant's progress 312
in-drawn consciousness 28
inmost soul of man 115
inner strength 66
insufficiency of reason 67
inward and upward movements 314
Life-Force 285 Love 75
masked cosmic Worker 309
mind 346
mind's mode of working 284
modern physics 71
modem totalitarianism 71
Nature's moods 65
Night's mind 253,263
opening passage 8,47,79
opening passage (early version) 54,316
Page 377
poetic process 159
receptive to the beyond 351
Rishis 343
Savitri's avatarhood 64
Savitri's girlhood 181
Savitri, the heroine 322
Savitri wakes up to her mission 119
silence 344
silent Brahman 50,317
soul awareness 160
spiritual progress 304
superhuman state of consciousness 24
true freedom 75
Vision 89
world-history 129
Yogic development 298
Yogic self-release of Aswapari 36
Savitri (3) Words in
abode 107
absolve 283
ambitioned 113
Arcturus and Belphegor 101
awake 251
ceased 313
crowded light 111
dragon-bird 101
eternity 264
fire 78
flasque 113
foreboding 260
Glory 315
greatness 89
griffin 298,325
immensitude 285
immensitudes 113
immensity 264
ineffable 357
opalescent 190
prevision 263
relapse 80,257
simplessed 113
solicited 106
stretched 263
symbol 250
temple 253
twixt 351 Savitri (4) as Poetry
alliteration 110,112,169
blank-verse 215,338
enjambment 62, 166,215,219
grammatical inversion 106
imagery 47
Latin influence 103,145,153,283
Latinised construction 245
linguistic adventurousness of 284
metrical and rhythmical effects 53,
109,169,215
monosyllables 111,188,349
technique of 6,244
Shāh-Nāmāh 60
Shakespeare, William 42,164,166,
188,205,230,237
Shelley 23,42,67,70,197,334,367
siddha 303,304
silence 87,228,265
of mind 344
Sophocles 205
soul
description 115
evolving 81
in ancient scriptures 3,5
liberating 182
life force and 134
poetry and 165
progress and 312
Spenser 46,187
spiritual
growth 312
Light 177
Vita Nuova 208
Sri Aurobindo
cultural consciousness of 208
Descent on 24 Nov 1926 273
letters on Savitri 13,50,58,275
message of 355
mind of 211
on Agni 310
on Mantra 200
personal realisation 51
poetically influenced by 207
Sri Aurobindo's writings
composition of 102
BajiPrabhou 74,289
Hymns to the Mystic Fire 299
Ilion 8
In the Moonlight 98
Love and Death 2,60,74,218,220,
283,289,338
Rose of God 191,310
Songs to Myrtilla 338
Sonnets 101
The Future Poetry 162,200
The Hero and the Nymph 218
The Life Divine 38,59,166,320
Page 378
The Riddle of This World 254
TheRishi 99
The Secret of the Veda 302
Urvasie 2,60,74,218,289
St. John of the Cross 126
subtle-physical
body 116
plane 209
Sufi 70
sukshma sharira 116
Sun of Truth 38,86
Supermind 51,58
Supernature 12,128,208,273,315
Swinburne 42,127
T
Tagore, Rabindranath 34, 70
Tantra 273
Tennyson 66,216,259
Thibaudet 62
Thompson, Francis 20,22,27,108
transformation
power of true 273
translation 210
true soul 28,160
Truth-Consciousness 51
Turiya 99
U
Upanishads 3,37,61,141,200,207
Usha 88
V
Vaishnavism 273
vāji 302
Valery 62
Valmiki 60,182,205,213
Vaughan 232
Veda 3,61
Vedantic influence in poetry 197
Vidya 302
Vijnana 247
Virat 99
Virgil 57,186,205,258
Vishnu's Garuda 307
Vision, power of poet 162
vital 189
vyakta 302
Vyasa 60,66,182,205,213
W
Wordsworth 52,197,266,367
World Religion 272
Y
Yeats, W.B. 30,33,34,125,197,367
yoga
aesthetic 200
aim of 6
Integral 6,58
Kundalini 115
poetry and 77,342,347
Savitri holds the secrets of 60
siddhi in 303
through Savitri 349
Page 379
AMAL KIRAN'S BOOKS
AVAILABLE WITH THE CLEAR RAY TRUST
1.A Follower of Christ & a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo: Correspondence between Bede Griffiths and KD. Sethna (Amal Kiran)
2."A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal": An Interpretation from India
3.Adventures in Criticism
4.Amal Kiran - Poet and Critic
5.Aspects of Sri Aurobindo
6.Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation
7.Classical and Romantic : An Approach through Sri Aurobindo
8.. Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and KD. Sethna
9.Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression
10.Is Velikovsky's Revised Chronology Tenable? A Scrutiny of Four Fundamental Themes
11.K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran): A Centenary Tribute
12.Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. I
13.Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. II
14.Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. III
15.Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran - and Nirodbaran
16.Mandukya Upanishad: English Version, Notes and Commentary
17.On Sri Aurobindo's Savitri
18.Our Light and Delight: Recollections of Life with the Mother
19.Problems of Early Christianity
20.Science, Materialism, Mysticism
21.Sri Aurobindo and Greece
22.Teilhard De Chardin and our Time
23.The Beginning of History for Israel
24.The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to it
25.The Inspiration of Paradise Lost
26.The Mother: Past, Present, Future
Page 380
27.The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry
28.The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo
29.The Problems of Early Christianity
30.The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems
31.The Sun and the Rainbow : Approaches to Life through Sri Aurobindo's Light
32.The Thinking Corner: Causeries on Life and Literature
33.The Virgin Birth and the Earliest Christian Tradition
34.The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo
35.The Wonder That is K. D.Sethna alias Amal Kiran
AVAILABLE WITH OTHER PUBLISHERS
1.Altar and Flame (Poems)
2.Ancient India in a New Light
3.Evolving India : Essays on Cultural Issues
4.India and the World Scene
5.Karpasa in Prehistoric India : A Chronological and Cultural Clue
6.Life-Literature-Yoga: Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo
7.'Overhead Poetr': Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments
8.Parnassians
9.Poems by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran with Sri Aurobindo's Comments
10.Problems of Ancient India
11.Some Talks at Pondicherry : Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran
12.Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare
13.Sri Aurobindo : The Poet
14.Talks on Poetry
15.The Adventure of the Apocalypse (Poems)
16.The Indian Spirit and the World's Future
17.The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence
18.The Problem of Aryan Origins: From an Indian Point of View
19.The Spirituality of the Future: A Search apropos of R.C Zaehner's Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin
20."Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets
Page 381
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