Ruru Ruaru : grandson of Maharshi Chyavana & son of Pramati, born of an Apsarā named Ghritasi. The story of Ruru & his wife Pramadvara is told in the Mahabharata.
... where failure was more probable than success. The story of Ruaru is told in the very latest accretion-layer of the Mahabharata, in a bald and puerile narrative without force, beauty or insight. Yet it is among the most significant and powerful in idea of our legends; for it is rather an idea than a tale. Bhrigou, the grandfather of Ruaru, is almost the most august and venerable name in Vedic literature... or Ilian dynasty whose princes after the great civil wars of the Mahabharata became Emperors of India. Chyavan's son Pramati, by an Apsara or nymph of paradise, begot a son named Ruaru, of whom this story is told. This Ruaru, later, Page 129 became a great Rishi like his fathers, but in his youth he was engrossed with his love for a beautiful girl whom he had made his wife, the daughter of... Priyumvada perished, like Eurydice, by the fangs of a snake. Ruaru inconsolable for her loss, wandered miserable among the forests that had been the shelter and witnesses of their loves, consuming the universe with his grief, until the Gods took pity on him and promised him his wife back, if he sacrificed for her half his life. To this Ruaru gladly assented and, the price paid, was reunited with his ...
... horrible leagues Coiling in a half darkness... 118 This is like the descent into Dante's Hell, and Ruru is aghast when he sees the shapes and hears the cries in Death's Kingdom. But Ruru's resolve is unshaken, and he makes the inexorable bargain with Death, and Ruru and Priyumvada are permitted to renew their interrupted life on earth. In both Urvasie and Love and... abandoned rolled. 115 In the companion poem, Love and Death, 116 there is described an Indian Orpheus (Ruru) regaining his lost Eurydice (Priyumvada); the roles of the Savitri story are here reversed, for it is the husband who by the power of his love regains his partner. Ruru, Sage Brigu's grandson, and Priyumvada, the Apsara Menaca's daughter, fall in love and marry. They lead the life... , but the joy Page 418 is short-lived. Priyumvada is bitten by a snake and dies. When the first shock is over, Ruru realises his grave loss and resolves to get back the living bride from Deaths grim claws. The God of Love, Kama, tells Ruru that it may be Death will relent, but he would also drive a heavy bargain: Alone of gods Death loves not gifts: he visits ...
... bloom To love, to Ruru; Ruru, a happy flood Of passion round a lotus dancing thrilled, Blinded with his soul's waves Priyumvada. To him the earth was a bed for this sole flower, To her all the world was filled with his embrace. 24 Next follow two or three pages of almost the apotheosis of sensuous poetry; the lovers are so very very happy that Ruru laughs towards the sun... infuriates Ruru who promptly casts a curse on it. Moving on and on, Ruru recalls memories and experiences that both hold promises to the ear and break them to the heart. He regrets the unreasoning anger he had directed against the well-meaning tree, whereas he had been impotent when the snake had stung Priyumvada! Who, who would take him now to the dim portal leading to Death himself? Ruru will confront... Wideness.... 34 Ruru even catches the vision splendid, sees "the dawn of that mysterious Face/And all the universe in beauty merge"; and yet - he will not accept the promised e Felicity; he would give back, in Ivan Karamazov's deadly expression, "the ticket". It is Priyumvada he wants, and he must have her back; the rest is nothing - less than nothing - to Ruru. Ruru is now once again in ...
... woodlands of the bright and early world, When love was to himself yet new and warm And stainless, played like morning with a flower Ruru with his young bride Priyumvada. Fresh-cheeked and dew-eyed white Priyumvada Opened her budded heart of crimson bloom To love, to Ruru; Ruru, a happy flood Of passion round a lotus dancing thrilled, Blinded with his soul's waves Priyumvada. To him the earth was a... sobbing like a little child Too early from her bounding pleasures called, The lovely discontented spirit stole From her warm body white. Over her leaned Ruru, and waited for dead lips to move. Still in the greenwood lay Priyumvada, And Ruru rose not from her, but with eyes Emptied of glory hung above his dead, Only, without a word, without a tear. Then the crowned wives of the great forest came... consented silently. In the same noon came Ruru; his mind had paused, Lured for a moment by soft wandering gleams Into forgetfulness of grief; for thoughts Gentle and near-eyed whispering memories So sweetly came, his blind heart dreamed she lived. Slow the uswuttha-tree bent down its leaves, And smote his cheek, and touched his heavy hair. And Ruru turned illumined. For a moment, One blissful ...
... Baroda (Circa 1898-1902) Baroda (Circa 1898-1902) Complete Narrative Poems Collected Poems A Note on Love and Death The story of Ruru and Pramadvura–I have substituted a name more manageable to the English tongue–her death in the forest by the snake and restoration at the price of half her husband's life is told in the Mahabharata. It is a companion ...
... answer—I have lived ten lives since then and don't remember. I don't think there was any falling of the seed of the idea or growth and maturing of it; it just came—from my reading about the story of Ruru in the Mahabharata ; I thought, Well, here's a subject, and the rest burst out of itself. Mood and atmosphere? I never depended on these things that I know of—something wrote in me or didn't write... general is there in Songs to Myrtilla. Arnold has influenced your blank verse in respect of particular constructions like two or three "buts" as in Page 220 No despicable wayfarer, but Ruru, But son of a great Rishi, or But tranquil, but august, but making easy ... Arnold is also observable in the way you build up and elaborate your similes both in Urvasie and in Love ...
... seasons dawn Our golden breasts between their hands or rush Our passionate presence on them like a wave— meets us in the long account—too long to be quoted at this point in full 1 —of Ruru's descent into the Underworld in search of the prematurely dead Priyumvada. This account may well be adjudged a ne plus ultra in the genre which we may call mythic rather than mystic but which in... in Sri Aurobindo's hands is still typically Indian in that the unearthly is as if felt and seen and not just conceived vividly by the curious thought. After sailing along the Ganges in a dim evening, Ruru launches on the ocean. There, with a whirling of the horizons, he is drawn in by the profundities: 1 All of it is given on pp. 17-19. Page 71 He down the gulf where the loud... minds and melting marble natures,____ Racked thirsting jealousy and kind hearts made stone:.. Cold lusts that linger and fierce fickleness..." In another place, after being told of Ruru's daily happiness with his young bride, we read: But Love has joys for spirits born divine More bleeding-lovely than his thornless rose. Working out this truth, Love and Death ...
... t flight heights which can only be called classical. This is high praise indeed, but is it after all inapt to ask if anything could be more Shakespearean than, for example, this little soliloquy of Ruru on returning to Priyumvada after having stolen from her side in the early morning to go "seeking comparisons for her bloom" among the best that he could pluck from woods of the earth's prime? ... no large act Finding oneself in others, nor the sweet Expense of nature in her passionate gusts Of love and giving, first of the soul's needs?" Or hear Yama the God of Death address Ruru when that impetuous boy offers half his life as a sacrifice to recover the snake-bitten, prematurely lost Priyumvada: "Not as a tedious evil nor to be Lightly rejected gave the gods old age... "Then in the joys of heaven we shall consort, Amid the gladness often touching hands To make bliss sure"— Page 13 to the same manner handled with tremendous severity when Ruru, in his search through Hades, chilled at "the cry not meant for living ears", pervading that region— but terrible strong love Was like a fiery finger in his breast Pointing him on— ...
... Aurobindo very early. We have seen that at the age of twenty-seven, while at Baroda Sri Aurobindo wrote Love and Death. It is a stirring poem in blank verse; this plot also is taken from the Mahabharata. Ruru descends into Hades to bring back to Earth and life his beloved Priyumvada —snatched untimely away by Death —in exchange for half his life span. "The poem itself was written in a white heat of inspiration ...
... Madan or Kama, as Indian mythology names him — when he manifests to help Ruru regain Priyumvada from the underworld? The young mourner doubts if the apparition is not just a dream of his "disastrous soul": But with the thrilled eternal smile that makes The spring, the lover of Rathi golden-limbed Replied to Ruru, "Mortal, I am he, I am that Madan who inform the stars With lustre... earth. In Urvasie as well as Love and Death there is that struggle against mortality and the fate which circumscribes mundane life. Pururavus scales an Over-world to clasp the vanished Urvasie; Ruru descends into an Underworld to bring back Priyumvada killed before she was Page 26 ripe. Earth's heart storming beyond earth to gain fulfilment, either by attaining the supra-terrestrial ...
... sacrifices her life so that her husband Admetus may be spared from the jaws of death; immortal Pollux 8 spends half his time in Hades in order that his twin Castor who was dead might return to life; Ruru 9 sacrifices half of the life-span allotted to him and his wife Pramadvura revives with this half. Mythical man has sometimes pondered that if the life upon earth is indeed brief and one ...
... debased Under inhuman pains? 9 Now, keeping both the passages in mind, with the turns of manner in which the thought and the emotion are expressed, let us appreciate the stylistic spirit of Ruru's exclamation in Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death at the piteous sight of the people in the Underworld where he has ventured in search of his prematurely lost Priyumvada: O miserable race of men... Milton matured the rare rich promise of his life's dawn within the spacious "intellectual being" of its evening - it is as if, recalling and addressing that promise, he worked with the resolution of Ruru, to bring Thy old warm beauty back beneath the stars. No doubt, the "intellectual being" is more active in Paradise Lost than in Love and Death: the latter is not charged directly ...
... like Love and Death. There is a passage in that blank-verse narrative, the speech of the Love-God Kama or Madan, to which I had somewhat failed to respond, preferring the long haunting passage on Ruru's descent into the Underworld through the rush of the Ganges into ocean-depths. Our friend Arjava (John Chadwick) had considered it one of the peaks in that poem. I asked Sri Aurobindo what his own ...
... lines from Sri Aurobindo's early blank-verse narrative Love and Death: after lamenting the frustrating transience of life for human beings who come into birth with "passionate and violent souls", Ruru views their entry into the Underworld and cries: ... Death helps us not. He leads Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace, The naked spirit here... Very vivid and forceful Phanopoeia ...
... reading about the story of Ruru in the Mahabharata; I thought, 'Well, here's a subject', and the rest burst out of itself..." An earlier note—recently found among Sri Aurobindo's Page 341 papers and dating itself to about 1919 by referring to Love and Death, a work of 1899, as having been "written a score of years ago"-runs: "The story of Ruru and Pramadvura—I have ... what easier! Tears Dreadful, innumerable I will absolve Or pay with anguish through the centuries... The usage here was contrasted to that in the lines in the passage dealing with Ruru's descent into the Underworld: For late I saw her mid those pale inhabitants Whom bodily anguish visits not, but thoughts Sorrowful and dumb memories absolve, And martyrdom of... powerful though it was, could be considered a peak of poetry. The passage runs: But with the thrilled eternal smile that makes The spring, the lover of Rathi golden-limbed Replied to Ruru, "Mortal, I am he; I am that Madan who inform the stars With lustre and on life's wide canvas fill Pictures of light and shade, of joy and tears, Make ordinary moments wonderful ...
... "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 Page 283 ...
... in Sri Aurobindo's poems and plays partake of the character of a symphony that is as contrapuntally rich as it is a beautiful whole. The agonised heart of an Andromeda or Aslaug or of a Pururavas or Ruru finds in blank verse a splendid medium for self-expression; the vaunts and demonic imaginings of Polydaon or Humber, the rages and curses of Cassiopea or Timocles, the sweet-sad virgin ecstasies of... glimmering restlessness with voices large, And from the forests of that half-seen bank A boat came heaving over it, white-winged, With a sole silent helmsman marble-pale. Then Ruru by his side stepped in; they went Down the mysterious river and beheld The great banks widen out of sight. 61 And, then, like other masters of the epic style, Sri Aurobindo too ...
... the former treats in essence the same theme as a play of Kalidasa's which Sri Aurobindo translated soon after. Out of many possible instances we may pick out just one in passing. In Love and Death, Ruru remembers all the enchanting ways in which he has called Priyumvada by "her liquid name". Among these ways there is at one extreme his murmuring in deep quiet moments That name like a religion ...
... any "super-bird". Actually Love and Death mentions Cuckoo and rainlark and love-speak-to-me and A peacock with his melancholy cry Complaining far away, and mentions how, when Ruru sat in stunned and still absorption after Priyumvada's death and old memories before her arrival into his life "kept with long pomps his mind / Excluding the dead girl" (not "maiden", as Yeats would... The birds flashed by him with their swift small wings, Fanning him.... The poem, whose tale is set in very early times, closes on a bird-note in the ears of the lovers reunited after Ruru has offered half his life to get Priyumvada back from the Underworld: ...the earth breathed round them. Glad of her children, and the koil's voice Persisted in the morning of the world... just the thing most noticeable in Sri Aurobindo's early work of 1899. Sometimes I despair at the failure of your ear. Let me make one more effort to open it with a short passage from Love and Death. Ruru has descended into the Underworld in search of his prematurely dead Priyumvada. A moan of profound pity escapes him when he sees anguished ghosts drifting on "the penal waters": "O miserable race ...
... "In 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 "I will pay off with tears" Ruru says 'I 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 incorrect, but ...
... dares everything, and sacrifices everything (except itself). Kshatriya or Brahmin, love is the great leveller. It is the sweet uncalculating madness, but of incalculable value Pururavas and Urvasie, Ruru and Priyumvada, come together, and they perceive that their union is, ...magically Inevitable as a perfect verse of Veda. 116 Page 52 Baji Prabhou ...
... bloom, the nameless fragrance that pervades Creation: but behind me, older than me, He comes with night and cold tremendous shade. 15 True, the god of love gives the flower that enables Ruru to pass unharmed through the underworld. But only many years after creating this image could Sri Aurobindo, in Savitri, speak of love as not only an all-pervading and all-suffering, but an all-tr ...
... blank-verse narrative Love and Death, lines which too we have cited before. After lamenting the frustrating transience of life for human beings who come into birth with "passionate and violent souls", Ruru views their entry into the Underworld and cries: ...Death helps us not. He leads Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace, The naked spirit here... Very vivid and forceful ...
... what seems to be no better than the constant challenge of "life's scaffold"? The challenge taken for granted, how was manly man to meet it, master it and exceed it? Love like Pururavas' for Urvasie or Ruru's for Priyumvada was a marvellous and glorious experience, but even such love by itself was not enough! The individual might find his felicity, but only at the cost of the greater good of the community ...
... 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 ...
... highest height. In Urvasie Pururavas struck by the shaft of immortal love, denied fulfilment by the power of the gods, at last gains his immortal love on the heights of Heaven. In Love and Death Ruru recovers Priyamvada from the dark nether regions of Death by the power of the charm of the supreme Mother and that of the God of Love. In both of these poems the immortality and eternity of Love are ...
... and be united with her there, abandoning his kingdom on earth. In Love and Death, when Priyumvada dies stung by a snake, 1 The Harmony of Virtue, SABCL, Vol. 3, pp. 154-55. Ruru seeks her out in Patala (Hades), makes a deal with the Lord of Death and returns with her to the earth. The theme is love, and separation, and the power of Love to achieve reunion. But in ...
... this kind in general is there in Songs to Myrtilla. Arnold had influenced your blank verse in respect of particular constructions like two or three "buts" as in No despicable wayfarer, but Ruru, But son of a great Rishi, or, But tranquil, but august, but making easy ... Arnold is also observable in the way you build up and elaborate your similes both in Urvasie ...
... In Urvasie, when the heroine returns to heaven, Pururavas has to follow and be united with her there, abandoning his kingdom on earth. In Love and Death, when Priyumvada dies stung by a snake, Ruru seeks her out in Patala (Hades), makes a deal with the Lord of Death's Other Kingdom, and returns with her to the earth. The theme is love, and separation, and the power of Love to achieve reunion ...
... funeral pyre, which follows you into heaven or draws you out of hell? Say not that this love does not exist and that all here is based on appetite, vanity, interest or selfish pleasure, that Rama & Sita, Ruru & Savitri are but dreams & imaginations. Human nature conscious of its divinity throws back the libel in scorn, and poetry blesses & history confirms its verdict. That Love is nothing but the Self ...
... How do they manage to come out from there? Except for very rare cases, the animals are not individualised and when they die they return to the spirit of the species. In "Love and Death" are Ruru and Priyumvada the first forms of Savitri and Satyavan? Sri Aurobindo told me nothing about that. 6 August 1966 Mother, X is one of my students. She works hard but cannot retain ...
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