The Passions, an Ode for Music : one of the odes of Collins.
... which leads all human passion to sorrow and surfeit, and all human living to degeneration and death. This posture of beauty, at once expressive and immobile, acquires a definition in terms of inwardness in the lines where Keats dwells on the musicians carved as playing their pipes. Theirs is a music that is silent because the playing is depicted in silent stone. Yet this music is felt to be far superior... asking ourselves a few questions about a passage from Keats's famous Ode on a Grecian Urn where both these topics are involved. The passage has posed a textual problem too and critics have debated the reading ever since the time of Keats. We shall deal with all the difficulties. Let me first outline to you the complex theme of the Ode. The poet takes the scenes and figures carved on a Grecian Urn and... is not of life lost but of life transcended. And the portrayal coldly done is such that it shall survive the generation to which Keats belongs. The expression is somewhat similar to the line in the Ode to a Nightingale: No hungry generations tread thee down... When old age will take Keats's contemporaries to death, the Urn will stay unchanged. Free from precarious and frustrating life, it ...
... essence" - "essence" here under the aspect of Beauty. Thus "all our Passions" are a species of imaginative energy - Page 142 and, conversely, the Imagination that seizes the Beautiful is a species of passionate energy. Does not Keats himself, in a communication to George and Georgiana Keats, write: "the yearning passion I have for the beautiful"? All in all, Keats's pursuit of the... Romantics had a nisus. Even Keats who is on the whole more aesthetic than mystic has wonderful moments of that nisus and his aesthe-ticism is never without a tinge of it, however subdued. In his Ode to a Nightingale, he recognises the bird's song to be revelatory of a timeless order of things through a phenomenon of Nature repeating as a single ravishment within diverse forms across the march... home, She stood in tears amid the alien com; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn. Similarly in the Ode on a Grecian Urn he took not beautiful sound but beautiful form, a visible silence, as a glimpse-giver of the timeless, the divine inner verity of things: Page 140 O Attic shape ...
... in the midst of some alloy full into his purest vein of gold. His earliest vision of his task was the right vision, and whatever may be the general truth of his philosophy of childhood in the great Ode, it seems to have been true of him. For as intellectuality grew on him, the vision failed; the first clear intimations dimmed and finally passed leaving behind an unillumined waste of mere thought and... unsurpassed poetic weight and gravity charged with imaginative insight, in which his thought and his ethical Page 136 sense and spiritual sight meet in a fine harmony, as in his one great Ode, in some of his sonnets, in Ruth , even in Laodamia , in lines and passages which uplift and redeem much of his less satisfying work, while when the inner light shines wholly out, it admits him to... possibility. Wordsworth, meditative, inward, concentrated in his thought, is more often able by force of brooding to bring out the voice of his greater self, but flags constantly, brings in a heavier music surrounding his few great clear tones, drowns his genius at last in a desolate sea of platitude. Neither arrives at that amplitude of achievement which might have been theirs in a more fortunate time ...
... but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era. His astonishing early performance leaves us wondering what might have been the masterpieces of his prime, of which even Hyperion and the Odes are only the unfulfilled promise. His death in the beginning of his powers is the greatest loss ever suffered by human achievement in this field. Alone of all the chief poets of his time he is in possession... of the time, was not Page 145 his own deeper self-expression; they are wonderful richly woven robes of sound and word and image curiously worked and brocaded, but they clothe nothing. The Odes, where fulfilment of imaginative beauty rises out of a higher sensuous seeking and satisfaction to an admirable sweetness, fullness, largeness and opulence and admits intimations of the ideal goddess... of his genius made him unintelligible to the rather gross and mundane intellectual mind of the nineteenth century; those who admired him most, were seized only by the externalities of his work, its music, delicacy, diffusely lavish imaginative opulence, enthusiasm, but missed its inner significance. Now that we are growing more into the shape of his ideas and the forms of his seeing, we can get nearer ...
... coming back to the surface, and in their place there is the movement of a more thoughtful and often complex sentiment and feeling, not freshets of song, but the larger wave of the chant and elegy and ode: the flowers Page 278 of the field and mountain self-sown on the banks or near the sources are replaced by the blossoms of a careful culture. Still however reined in or penetrated and rendered... and manners or expressive of the life-soul and its workings in event and character and passion, and the drama of the idea or, more vitally, Page 282 of the idea-power that is made to work itself out in the life movement, lay its hold on the soul's motions, create the type, use the character and the passion for its instruments and at its highest tension appear as an agent of the conflict of... in in detail in the modern fashion or simply and strongly outlined in the purer ancient method, will not be mistaken for the person, but accepted as only an inner life notation of the spirit: the passions, which have hitherto been prominently brought forward as the central stuff of the drama, will be reduced to their proper place as indicative colour and waves on the stream of spiritual self-revelation ...
... not something of which Shelley was incapable. Lines large in rhythm as well as intrepid are to be met with in the Ode to the West Wind ; and the Prometheus has here and there a fiery volume, so to speak, reminiscent of Thompson's hound-movement and his thunder in subsequent odes: a memorable comparison between rushing snow Page 79 and Prometheus's defiance of false godheads... Thompson, Shelley himself and to a lesser extent Blake. Donne and Patmore now remain: they are present — though more in the psychology than in the actual language of the style — in Thompson's later Odes; but with neither of them was he so much "a brother in song" as with Shelley — at least no great poetic outburst under their influence can be found to compare with his excellence at other times. The... gave the last and heaviest blow to his Shelleyan promise was that he not merely lacked the lyric cry which Shelley had sinuously melodised and Swinburne orchestrated: his fluency itself for all its odic power worked by fire-spurts soon consuming themselves and he had not a sustained gift of building with a large and symmetrical hand. The spacious energy which fashioned Prometheus Unbound and rendered ...
... taking Bayreuth and Wagner’s legacy under his special protection – as told by Brigitte Hamann in her Winifred Wagner, oder Hitlers Bayreuth. Wagner’s art helped spreading his anti-Semitism, which intensified over the years to the point where he declared: “I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it. It is certain that it is running us Germans to the ground... Wagner’s visionary music remains beyond dispute. (Léon Poliakov calls him “that medium of the nineteenth century”.) His character, on the contrary, was often egotistical in the extreme, violent, vindictive, and on occasion plain nasty. He succeeded single handed in giving life and colour to the German national myth by recreating the legend of the Nibelungs and evoking in soul-stirring music the world of... Wagnerian heroes and the Wagnerian music have animated the German armies from 1914 till 1918, still more in their hours of misfortune and sacrifice than in their hours of triumph.” 579 This is even more true of the German armies in the Second World War, for they fought under the command of a Wagnerian, Adolf Hitler, who had seen to it that they grew up with Wagner’s music in their ears at every important ...
... concerned with the identification which Coleridge, taking the poem to be an unhappy one, an epitaph, made between its "she" and Dorothy. Page 216 plative sonnets and the supreme Ode on Intimations of Immortality started on the way to becoming a dry stick. TRAITS OF CHARACTER He grew not only staid and respectable but also ridiculous in many things. For instance... fall upon us often when we look Into our minds, into the mind of man. "Does Mr. Wordsworth think he can surpass Jehovah?" Blake asked in horror. On the other hand, when the Immortality Ode was read out to him, he fell into almost hysterical rapture. In this connection we may mention Wordsworth's own attitude to Blake. When some of Blake's abnormalities were reported to him, he remarked:... depreciate this uniqueness, calling that poignancy and that amplitude pretence and woolliness. We may, of course, enjoy a witticism like James Stephens's apropos of the famous line in the Immortality Ode — Heaven lies about us in our infancy — "That is no reason why we should lie about Heaven in our old age." But it is impossible to take seriously any detraction of Wordsworth's far-reaching ...
... Shelley's Alastor, Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and of his fragment, The Triumph of Life; also in sections of Keats's Hyperion, here and there in the famous Odes and almost wholly in the fragment of an Ode ending with the line, Leaving great verse unto a little clan. But neither of these elements creates the typical new Romantic Age whose birth is from a Celticism of the... cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!' Page 154 We are in the presence of some perilous World-Witchery, some alluring Maya of the life of the senses and the passions, a reverse side to the obverse which feels the Divine in the heart's affections and in the imagination's truth-revealing embrace of the beautiful on earth. Shelley is tinged by the Mediaeval also:... creation of the time is interesting and suggestive in its way, but very little of it is intimately alive and true, and afterwards Germany failed to keep up a sustained poetic impulse; she turned aside to music on the one side and on the other to philosophy and science for her field. The French mind got away very soon from romanticism and, though greatly enriched by its outbreak into that phase, went on to ...
... be described, and even, if such a phrase can be used, the pictorial value of the thought to be seized. There is a similar happiness of device and effect in the verse; if there are no great lyrical, odic or epic outbursts to sweep us out of ourselves, there is the same well-governed craft of effective turn and invention as in the language, the same peculiar manner of easily carried elaborateness, a... are marred by excess, diffuseness, an inequality in the inspiration and the height and tone. But he has especially in his earlier poetry done work of a perfect and highly wrought beauty, a marvellous music. There is often a captivatingly rich and sensuous appeal in his language and not unoften it rises to a splendid magnificence. Atalanta in Calydon, Dolores, Hertha, The Garden of Proserpine and numerous... of Victorian domesticity and respectable social ethics. But the wearing of the white and scentless flower of a blameless life in a correct button-hole and a tepid sinning without the least tinge of passion or conviction by decorated puppets who are too evidently lay-figures of very modern ladies and gentlemen disguised as knights and dames, was hardly a sufficient justification for evoking the magic ...
... Keats's poetic movement has communicated its prayerfulness by means of the rhythmic word-pattern constituting the music of poetry. Thus, though poetry does not aspire primarily to the condition of music but to the condition of prayer, it achieves its prayerfulness through a condition of verbal music. Of course, since, for Bremond, silence no less than thought-absence is the stuff of the authentic mystical... echoed he calls "holy land" and by that phrase he blends Biblical associations with a Graeco-Roman context. The blending seems to have been facilitated by the influence of some lines from Keats's Ode to Psyche. Keats tells us that the story of Psyche was developed too late for her to be worshipped as a goddess and he promises to erect her a temple within him and be her priest: O brightest! though... where would it plunge us if not towards those august recesses where awaits us, where beckons us, a presence more than human? If one is to believe Walter Pater, 'all art aspires to the condition of music'. No, all the arts aspire, but each by the magic medium proper to it — words, notes, colours, lines — they all aspire to the condition of prayer.") Bremond regards the poet as one in whom something ...
... 1936 Heredia and Swinburne I don't think Heredia and Swinburne go very well together; one is a passionate and chaotic imperfection and the other is a passionless perfection, but it is a passion of the music of words only and a perfection of word and rhythm only; for they resemble each other only in one thing, an excess of the word over the substance. 19 August 1932 Michael Madhusudan Dutt... metres in Latin in their definitive form, with a style and rhythm in which strength and grace were singularly united, a writer also of satire 1 and familiar epistolary verse as well as a master of the ode and the lyric—that sums up his work. June or July 1933 Virgil I don't think Virgil would be classed by you as a psychic poet, and yet what is the source of that "majestic sadness" and that... (other than the psychic worlds) to which many poets give us some kind of access or sense of their existence behind much more than Virgil. But if when you say verse you mean his rhythm, his surge of word music, that does no doubt come from somewhere else, much more than the thoughts or the words that are carried on the surge. 31 March 1932 Page 373 Dante Somehow Dante's verse as well as ...
... words would not display much more license than "the extraordinary involution and confusion" of verbal arrangement which Patrick Maxwell has noted as leading yet to no obfuscation of sense in Horace's Odes, Book V, the first fifteen lines. To cut a long story short: Milton on the eve of Paradise Lost was quite ripe for the learnedly loaded, artistically complex and finished, Latinly cast poetry... was twenty-two we get an anticipation not only of the music (though rhymed) but also of the theme of Paradise Lost: the lines uttering the prayer that we may answer on Earth Heaven's "divine sounds" - Page 59 As once we did, till disproportioned Sin Jarred against Nature's chime and with harsh din Broke the fair music that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose... for the voluntary movement of his poetry. He would feed on such thoughts as would naturally bring forth poetic utterance. I suppose thoughts like these differ with poets: what would touch Milton to music might not touch his contemporary and friend, Andrew Marvell. Marvell spoke of: Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. A steeping of the mind in Nature's ...
... 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 last 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.6 Large structured chants bearing the... 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 ... 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 near to the god's.4 The unsealing of grandeurs from subtle dimensions of Nature to cast an interpretative light on the wor ...
... its cumulative power, an example where to be ungrammatical is better than being ineffective in sense or intolerable in rhythm with the more correct and literary "I". Shelley too knew this when in his Ode to the West Wind he said : "Be thou me...." Finally, we may cite as word-originality of another type the suggestive effect of consonantal sounds in the line mentioning one of the Snake-lords of the... individuality makes itself felt. Only in one special respect this diversity can be called invariably Miltonic. Milton, more impressively than any other eminent poet, carried the soul of past music mingled with a spirit that makes all things new. In fact, he had the avowed ambition to gather up in his Paradise Lost Aeschylus and Sophocles, Virgil, Lucretius and Dante into a mature mastery of... hers, cried tremulous: "O beloved, Omiser of thy rich and happy voice, One word, one word to tell me that thou lovest." And Urvasie, all broken on his bosom, Her godhead in his passion lost, moaned out From her imprisoned breasts, "My lord, my love!" Nor is Sri Aurobindo in his early twenties an expert only at giving us love's leaping and engulfing joy: he has an equally ...
... And now, alas! the poor sprite is Imprisoned for some fault of his In a body like a grave, or it strikes across a movement of strong and effective poetical thinking, as in Wordsworth's Ode to Duty , Me this unchartered freedom tires, or leaps up at once to set the tone of a poem, Page 293 She was a phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight, A lovely... emotion and a rarer than the surface truth and meaning of the object or experience. And very often the work is done not so much by the language as the subtle sense suggestion of the rhythm and word music, the sound doing the alchemic labour of transfiguration which the expression is not yet strong and adult enough to lead and compass. These are beginnings and beyond lies much that has to be done... cheerful dawn: Shelley's When hearts have once mingled, Love first leaves the well-built nest, The weak one is singled To endure what it once possessed; or Its passions will rock thee, As the storms rock the ravens on high; Bright reason will mock thee Like the sun from a wintry sky. In this manner English poetry is especially opulent and gets from it ...
... but by itself quite unfruitful because it attempts to interpret as a universe of logical discourse what is really a manifold strain of eternal music. The only way of escape is either to remain secure in the mid-regions of aesthetic thought and passion if the wings of inspiration are too Icarian to bear the luminous pressure of supernatural motives, or to make a bold dash towards the golden gates... of spiritual intoxication; We will tell the whole world of His ways and His cunning: He has rapture of torture and passion and pain; He delights in our sorrow and drives us to weeping, Then lures with His joy and His beauty again. All music is only the sound of His laughter, All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss; Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture... to which there is in certain respects no parallel. The famous close of Crashaw's Flaming Heart may have greater colour in its rocket-like leap into the heaven of heavens, Wordsworth's Immortality Ode may be richer and more varied in the roll of its harmony towards the vision splendid, The Hound of Page 34 Heaven may carry itself on a more passionate torrent of religious imagery ...
... found: He rules an infinite hush that hears each sound. But fragmentary quivers blossom there To voice on mingling voice of shadowless air, Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line Where passion's mortal music grows divine— For in that vasty region glimmers through Each form one single trance of breakless blue! Well, the first and third couplets are quite admirable. The rest not quite as... The Sources of Poetry Letters on Poetry and Art Examples of Overhead Poetry Examples from Various Poets Evaluations of 1932-1935 Does Wordsworth's ode on immortality contain any trace, however vague, of the Overmind inspiration? I don't remember, but I think not. And what about the rhythm and substance of solitary thinkings; such... produce philosophies more perfect in themselves than the systems of Shankara or Plato or Plotinus or Spinoza or Hegel, poetry superior to Homer's, Shakespeare's, Dante's or Valmiki's, music more superb than the music of Beethoven or Bach, sculpture greater than the statues of Phidias and Michael Angelo, architecture more utterly beautiful than the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon or Borobudur or St. Peter's ...
... made out of words that appeal to various senses; it is a picture in words with some sensuous appeal. Is this meaning enough for us? Yet the most sensuous of poets, Keats in an inspired moment of the Ode to a Greciaan Urn tells us that Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to... creation. Coleridge, however, slightly modifies these statements by saying that images "become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion, or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion." All the same poetry has begun to move towards 'Art for Art's sake' of the pre-Raphaelite movement. This brings into poetry the notion of imagery as "detachable ornaments... not, save upon Nature's summits, Ecstasy's chariots... 20 as cited by Purani. A kindred experience finds beautiful expression through rare intuitive speech in the following: A music spoke transcending mortal speech. As if from a golden phial of the All-Bliss, A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight, A rapture of the thrilled undying Word Poured into his heart ...
... There is, too, your preconception that beyond our world is nothing save Nirvana. Actually one finds also -as I say in a poem of my own - Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line Where passion's mortal music grows divine. (12.11.1987) Page 114 From Kathleen Raine It cannot be otherwise than that we differ about Sri Aurobindo as a poet, but let it at least be... lover of Wordsworth like you must know that at times a poet has to create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed. The very volumes in which such masterpieces as Tintern Abbey and the Immortality Ode appeared drew from Jeffries the crushing verdict: "This will never do!" Wordsworth has grown so much a part of your being that I am sure you will find nothing running against your grain in such a... all. It would not seem so to a Western mind at all, or necessarily cast doubt upon his metaphysical gifts. He was a brilliant, clear, and articulate thinker. Poetry is something else altogether, as music, dance, and sculpture are something else altogether. Or is that again the limitation of my Western mind? I have for some days now kept at my bedside Ili on; Dick Batstone sent me the whole ...
... existence – German music, philosophy, etc. How can anything develop where there is no freedom? I hope Mussolini has kept some sense of art. Disciple : He is very proud of Italians as a nation of artists! A friend of mine visited Italy, and found that the Italians still have a sense of beauty and art. Sri Aurobindo : Of music also; Art and music are their passion. The mother had... more subjective and the element of interpretation will have to be admitted. Disciple : There is an idea that the form of the epic may be a combination of epic and drama, or may be a series of odes in combination like the one written by Meredith. Sri Aurobindo : There has been an effort by Victor Hugo. His La Légende des siècle is epic in tone, in thought and movement. And yet it is... appears perhaps out of proportion. Then a time comes when people begin to see and discover Page 260 new proportions and a new harmony. Even in music the same thing happens. For instance, when Wagner gave his music it sounded very unusual and, to some discordant. But at last they found harmony and rhythm and everything else. Similarly poetry is not some arrangement of words ...
... one has to express the feelings raised by superb music and seem hardly to mean anything—not being able to convey what is beyond word and mere mental form—that is, at least, what I have felt and why I always find it a little difficult to write anything about music. March 25, 1933 Up till now we know nothing of what happened at the music party except what you have told us in your letter... have felt about music versus poetry. Probably I am wrong—yet there may be some core of truth in what I intuited. Apart from the style of the dialogue I draw your attention to the matter. I wonder if you could throw, say, half a dozen lines at me regarding this aspect? It will be so valuable for me to know how you feel about music. Harin was telling me the other day: "Dilip, music is greater than... doubts about our appreciation of your music. As for Harin, I don't know whether his abstention was due at all to his not having been encouraged by the Mother to sing himself before a large audience, but he put it on the ground of sadhana and it was on the ground of sadhana that Mother said he need not come. To ask to be left out of the music 2 is to ask for the music to be left out, for these things would ...
... 54. 'Dedication' to Selected Poems. 55. 'Romance' (Selected Poems), pp. 3-4. 5 6. Ode to a Nightingale. 57. Collected Poems, pp. 97-8. 58. That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire. 59. After a Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes. 60. Ode to the Confederate Dead. 61. Luke Havergal. 62. East Coker. 63. Sunday... 68. ibid., p. 754. 69. ibid.., p. 755. 70. ibid., p. 757. Cf. Keats: Charmed magic casements opening on the foam, Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn. (Ode to a Nightingale). 71. ibid.., p. 759. 72. ibid., p. 760. 73. ibid., p. 762. 74. ibid.., p. 765. 75. ibid.., p. 765. 76. Cf. A.B. Purani:... II . 12. Savitri, p. 65. 13. Collected Poems and Plays, Vol. II, p. 284. 14. Savitri, p.67. 15. Cf. W.B.Yeats: O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? (Among School Children) 16. Savitri.,p.72. 17. ibid. , p. 72. 18. ibid. , p. 74. 19 ...
... the Upanishads or the Rig Veda, have this inspiration. It is a poetry "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold" or welling up in a stream of passion, beauty and force. But sometimes there comes down a supreme voice, the Overmind voice and the Overmind music and it is to be observed that the lines and passages where that happens rank among the greatest and most admired in all poetic literature. ... mean more than "thy strong arm" or "thy glorious face" or than "the strength of thy arm" and "the glory of thy face". I come next to the critic's trenchant attack on that passage in * Ode to a Nightingale. 5 'Ibid., p. 309. Page 6 my symbolic vision of Night and Dawn in which there is recorded the conscious adoration of Nature when it feels the passage... mind and in its full and native self-power, when it does not lean down and become part of mind, is superconscient to us. It is more properly a cosmic consciousness, 3 Aeneid, I. 462. 6 Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, iii. 4 The Tempest, I. ii. 7 Doctor Faustus, V. i. 5 Paradise Lost, II. 148. Page 29 even the very base of the cosmic ...
... it is also an aspiration for a flawless magic of verbal form. Sappho and Catullus were not lovers grown vocal and nothing more: they were pre-eminently idealists of speech, their passion was for an irreproachable word-music and they perpetuated their loves in a language whose phrases and rhythms gave their personal desires a faultless mould wrought by a functioning of the senses, the feelings and the... Lost in the love-trance. If physical passion could have a mysticism of its own, it is well-nigh here, rendering in terms of sensuality the Aurobindonian Page 97 Light and still more light like an ocean billows Over me, round me. The "roaring waves" in Sappho's ear, which bring her the love-trance and afterwards the music whereon her experience floats through the ages... an Anactoria. The non-Sapphic element in Sri Aurobindo's poem is not just the religious temperament of Pindar but something of the grandiose uplift and triumphant crash of sound that is in Pindar's odes. Blended as it is with Sri Aurobindo's usual self-mastery this magnitude and momentum goes free of the intricate violence of word and image accompanying it in Pindar, balancing it fearfully on the verge ...
... Matter's signs: His fires of grandeur bum in the great sun, He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon; He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound; He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind; He is silence watching in the stars at night; He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough, Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree. Even in this labour and dolour... Finally, of what she calls God's creation of that nothing is left. This is the kind of spell Death tries to cast over Savitri, but she would not fall into the trap; she breaks that "dangerous music" and in the sweetness and harmony of her words brings a promise and a hope and a certitude. She is a little crescent in the sky of night cutting the gloom with the silver edge of her smile; she is a... and cling to the brief joys by which we little creatures spend our days hoping in the long travail of life for nothing else. After all, the love for which she is asking Satyavan back is but a queer passion, a fancy's fleeting fondness,—if not a figure of utter falsity. Later he even grants her two boons: for Satyavan's father Dyumatsena kingdom and power and friends and lost greatness and royal trappings ...
... beyond any recognisable English outlook: Unsleeping the sky whose sight embraces all? Let me end this series of brief citations with a reference once more to my favourite Wordsworth. His 'Ode on the Intimations of Immortality...' with its May morning in Cumberland comes with a mood essentially shot with non-English emotions and insights. The sense of the human Page 54 soul's... but in fact the picture is puzzling by its curious mixed imagery, and just the adjective 'sleeping' in the context of ]'winds' can scarcely throw light on the profoundly stirring obscurity in the Ode's phrase, A hint of the basic truth comes to us from the Mandukya Upanishad in which three grades of being - the outer human, the inner occult, the inmost spiritual - are termed Jagrat (Wakefulness)... Plato was a voice I had heard from almost the beginning and his call to see the temporal as the changing image of the eternal was never quite forgotten, but it couldn't help becoming just a background music for Page 12 several years while the assertive self-confident shout of the empirical and analytic scientist sprang from various directions at me and swayed me in spite of Plato from ...
... hazard's call and danger's charm, It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain, Perdition's peril, the wounded bare escape, The music of ruin and its glamour and crash, The savour of pity and the gamble of love And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate. Can it happen that the psychic being does not fall at the place where it wanted to take birth? ... depths of the being and listening to the inner inspiration. Unseen, a captive in a house of sound, The spirit lost in the splendour of a dream Listens to a thousand-voiced illusion's ode. A delicate weft of sorcery steals the heart Or a fiery magic tints her tones and hues, Yet they but wake a thrill of transient grace; A vagrant march struck by the wanderer Time... animal's desire, Then a sweet madness in the rapturous heart, An ardent comradeship in the happy mind, Becomes a wide spiritual yearning's space. A lonely soul passions for the Alone, The heart that loved man thrills to the love of God, Sweet Mother, Sri Aurobindo says that the voice of the ordinary conscience is not the voice ...
... 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 last 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. 1 1 P. 760. Page 225 Large... tual illumination no less than a sense of some primal rapture which 1 The Future Poetry, p. 309. Page 220 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... the ocean's voice Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature's heart But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech Page 223 The beauty and sublimity of her forms, The passion of her moments and her moods Lifting the human word near to the god's. 1 The unsealing of grandeurs from subtle dimensions of Nature to cast an interpretative light on the world-pageant ...
... 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... 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... 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] Page 181 The unsealing of grandeurs from subtle dimensions of Nature to cast an ...
... 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. 17 Large structured chants bearing the formative... 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... the ocean's voice Translated by grandeurs locked in Nature's heart But thrown now into a crowded glory of speech Page 218 The beauty and sublimity of her forms, The passion of her moments and her moods Lifting the human word near to the god's. 15 The unsealing of grandeurs from subtle dimensions of Nature to cast an interpretative light on the world-pageant ...
... that may come here and work themselves out in the unending Time's process. Death is truly an aspect of life, for it to become deathless life. That would remind us of Francis Thompson's lines from his Ode to the Setting Sun: The fairest things in life are Death and Birth, And of these two the fairer thing is Death. But this is not crucified Christ as a setting sun giving his Page... as these couplets are, in them we also at once see the difficulty of the translator to Page 114 render the majestic Anushtubha of the Sanskrit, with its quantitative basis of word-music and rhythm, into accented language which is so alien to the expression and spirit of the ancient seers and Rishis. Not only the substance and meaning, but also the measure and cadence of sound that... Soon this ill-fated prince will die! Not only are the reserves of sound absent, but even the contents robbed of their high genuineness, of their high purity and poise. The dhwani, the inner music of the language which gives to verses their poetry and which holds poetry together, is no more to be heard in it. We have to only listen to Vyasa and understand and appreciate what solid dense force ...
... may come here and work themselves out in the unending Time's process. Death is truly an aspect of life, for it to become deathless life. That would remind us of Francis Thompson's lines from his Ode to the Setting Sun: The fairest things in life are Death and Birth, And of these two the fairer thing is Death. But this is not crucified Christ as a setting sun giving his beauty... Creditable and impressive as these couplets are, in them we also at once see the difficulty of the translator to render the majestic Anushtubha of the Sanskrit, with its quantitative basis of word-music and rhythm, into accented language which is so alien to the expression and spirit of the ancient Seers and Rishis. Not only the substance and meaning, but also the measure and cadence of sound that... Soon this ill-fated prince will die! Not only are the reserves of sound absent, but even the contents robbed of their high genuineness, of their high purity and poise. The dhwani , the inner music of the language which gives to verses their poetry and which holds poetry together, is no more to be heard in it. We have to only listen to Vyasa and understand and appreciate what solid dense force ...
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