Virgil : Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BC) Roman poet, author of Aeneid.
... propriety over the elan of assertive individuality. The chief names usually listed in Graeco-Roman Classicism are Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil and Lucretius. These six, all things considered, are indeed greater than the brilliant sextet: Pindar, Simonides, Sappho, Horace, Catullus, Ovid. There need... composure and melodious fullness. Euripides carries his effect by a pointed versatile ease, a piquancy wedded to deep grace and a brilliance of quick pathos. Virgil is most chiselled, most euphonious, a blend of elegance and majesty, exhibiting a charming strength, a dignified sensitivity. Lucretius comes in rushing force and grandeur... him is deep but firm and he commands a power of primitive symbols, a pictorial narrative ability, a rich religious fervour, a sustained artistic form as in Virgil though not so elaborate as in the author of the Aeneid whom he took for his literary master. Milton is distinguished by a complex grandeur matched with immense ...
... the quatrain which precedes it and which again is linked to the opening four lines. Considering his conscious artistry, his marvellous charm of rhythm, it would be fair to compare him with Virgil. Virgil is a poet unquestionably superior to Spenser in a total computation: he is more constructive and he is intense with a frequency of which the Elizabethan does not seem capable, but as an artist... but that Virgil carries an unresolved complex, the fighter in him bearing always an open wound which is too deep for his natural strength and can be endured only by a willed fortitude. Both, however, turned their moods into music of a rare order, though both had to face languages recalcitrant to rhythm. By means of the device of elision employed with the most appropriate finesse Virgil transmuted... legitimate foundation for all future poetry. Virgil marked almost a ne plus ultra of poetical Latinity; Spenser had a chord or two missing because no Lucretius and Catullus prepared his way and also on account of a certain dearth in himself of direct passion and that epic fibre which, for all his tendency towards the effeminate, Virgil never lacked — yet his spell of music was so creative ...
... it with what goes before, if we want Virgil to say in it only, "Oh yes, even in Carthage, so distant a place, these foreigners too can sympathise and weep over what has happened in Troy and get touched by human misfortune," then the line will lose all its value and we would only have to admire the strong turn and recherché suggestiveness of its expression. Virgil certainly did not mean it like that;... translation you quote repeats the "here too" of the previous line and so rivets his high close to its context, thus emphasising unduly the idea of a local interest and maiming the universality. 5 Virgil has put in no such close riveting, he keeps a bare connection from which he immediately slips away; his single incomparable line rises sheer and abrupt into the heights both in its thought and in its... universal, to the reaction of all humanity, to all that is human and mortal in a world of suffering. In your prose translation also there are superfluities which limit and lower the significance. 6 Virgil does not say "tears for earthly things", "earthly" is your addition; he says nothing about "mortal fortune" which makes the whole thing quite narrow. His single word rerum and his single word mortalia ...
... even after Dante. Chaucer, for instance, was versed not only in Dante and Petrarch but also in Virgil. Yet except on rare occasions he has not absorbed anything of the majesty of the Virgilian word. Thus, as a critic has pointed out, he attempts in The House of Fame a few lines of paraphrase from Virgil, the start of the Aeneid. This is how he puts it: Page 133 I wel now singen... essence of the poetic expression. Virgil, who had been in antiquity the supreme master of poetry as an art, obsessed the Italian mind of the Renaissance with the importance of literary discipline, the need to mould deliberately a fitting diction of choice word and resonant rhythm. The poet as "maker" bulked larger than the poet as "seer". In the Middle Ages the poems of Virgil constituted a book of inspired... who first from the coasts of Troya Came to Italy, reached the shores Lavinian, high fate Driving him... In the ears of Renaissance Italy the advent of the arms and the man of Virgil kept a continuous clangour of epic ambi-tion. All the arts and the general conduct of life strove to model themselves by a concept of "magnificence" derived from an idealisation of the Classical world ...
... greatness of the worker. And then what do you mean exactly by greatness in poetry? One can say that Virgil is greater than Catullus and that many of Virgil's lines are greater than anything Catullus ever achieved. But poetical perfection is not the same thing as poetical greatness. Virgil is perfect at his best, but Catullus too is perfect at his best: even each has a certain exquisiteness... anything can be that in a temporal world of relatives in which the Absolute reserves itself hidden behind the veil of human ignorance. It is no use for some to Page 24 contend that Virgil is a tame and elegant writer of a wearisome work in verse on agriculture and a tedious pseudo-epic written to imperial order and Lucretius the only really great poet in Latin literature or to depreciate... Virgil's kind is large and deep, that of Catullus sweet and intense. Virgil's art reached or had from its beginning a greater and more constant ripeness than that of Catullus. We can say then that Virgil was a greater poet and artist of word and rhythm but we cannot say that his poetry, at his best, was more perfect poetry and that of Catullus less perfect. That renders futile many of the attempts ...
... heard of me. I am Virgil from Mantua of Italy." "Oh, the great Virgil, the divine Virgil!" I exclaimed. "Yes," he answered, "the same." – Virgil who sang of the glory of Roman civilisation, of Roman greatness and also it was he, wonderful to say, mirabile dictu, who spoke of the advent of the new age and the birth of the Divine Child. It was just before the birth of Christ when Virgil made this prophecy... and there pass their days, their life in purifying themselves till the doomsday decide finally their destiny. Virgil now asked leave of Dante. Dante was very sad to part from his friend but then Virgil waved his hand and slowly retired. While Virgil was retiring, Dante noticed that Virgil did not cast a shadow and was surprised to see that he himself had a shadow. He now remembered that he had come... Page 52 charge of you, do not grieve. Beatrice herself will come." Dante was elated hearing the name of Beatrice but then to leave Virgil was a great grief. He exclaimed: "But why, why my sweet guide, why are you not allowed to enter?" Virgil answered: "That is my secret. But I keep nothing hidden from you. If you want to hear I will tell you. Intellectual knowledge I had enough, I had ...
... full greatness of the worker. And then what do you mean exactly by greatness in poetry? One can say that Virgil is greater than Catullus and that many of Virgil's lines are greater than anything Catullus ever achieved. But poetical perfection is not the same thing as poetical greatness. Virgil is perfect at his best, but Catullus too is perfect at his best: even, each has a certain exquisiteness of... large and deep, that of Catullus sweet and intense. Virgil's art reached or had from its beginning Page 39 a greater and more constant ripeness than that of Catullus. We can say then that Virgil was a greater poet and artist of word and rhythm but we cannot say that his poetry, at his best, was more perfect poetry and that of Catullus less perfect. That renders futile many of the attempts... language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Page 47 Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda, have this inspiration. It is a poetry "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold" or welling up ...
... remarked, several poets but mainly Virgil. Virgil has written about the ghosts of the Underworld: Quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo Lapsa cadunt folia... We may render the hexameters in English: Page 68 Even as in forests of autumn at the break of frost a myriad Leaves drift and fall... Marlowe has caught from both Virgil and the Greek poet Bacchylides... Paradise Lost translating several parts of Adamo Caduto. But these very passages are yet typically Milton's, full of what has been called his "grand style". Literary pilfering is an old profession. Virgil lifted chunks out of Homer, and Shakespeare took most of his plots from Bandello and versified Plutarch in many places. But Milton stands at the head of those who have made a pastiche or mosaic of ...
... well as learned and Latinised, posture of his verse might suggest to us. When we think of a supreme artist in verse on a colossal scale, we at once name Virgil and Milton together. Yet they are worlds apart in their methods. Virgil is indeed a magician of meaningful phrases in Latin, phrases of exquisite sense and sound, but he got his effects after long exertion. He made the rough draft... the Muse with a profound prayer that he might be perfected some day for the achievement of a master-work. No other poet was born with so intense a sense of mission to do for England what Homer and Virgil had done for Greece and Italy, no other poet worked throughout his life with so deeply felt a direction towards a God-given poetic fulfilment. Well might his life be crowned with that extraordinary... in trying to clinch his contention that Milton was really "a minor poet with a remarkable ear for music, before diabolic ambition impelled him to renounce the true Muse and bloat himself up, like Virgil (another minor poet with the same musical gift) into a towering, rugged major poet." To take away from Milton the credit for what Graves is compelled to admit when he says: "the majesty of certain ...
... hour about! Remember that Virgil used only to write 9 lines a day. At this rate you will end by being twice as inspired and fluent as Virgil. Saurin has hurt his thumb in the train and it seems to be in a bad condition. Go and see and give the necessary treatment. April 1, 1936 By the way, I hope you didn't intend to make me an April-fool mentioning Virgil and Nirod in the same pen-stroke... wrote yesterday, Sir. Absolutely unreadable! Not even by Nolini was it possible! I repeat then from memory. "What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other." 183 Tomorrow is 4th April! 184 We are commemorating it thus: 1) Nishikanta sends a big poem—splendid, exquisite. By Jove ...
... translations like Dryden's Virgil and Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam are equally poems by virtue of their finish and their essential fidelity to their originals.* Sri Aurobindo's letters contain other perceptive remarks too, as for example: There are two ways of rendering a poem from one language into another - * Cf. George Sampson: "Dryden's Virgil is literally Dryden's Virgil... Its readers were... were already familiar with Virgil's Virgil, and wanted to know how a great English poet would treat that familiar story." Page 69 one is to keep strictly to the manner and turn of the original, the other to take its spirit, sense and imagery and reproduce them freely so as to suit the new language.... The proper rule about literalness in translation... is that one should keep as ...
... despite their fine accents by a world of difference. Virgil has a magical brevity of suggestion in his first three words and the whole line has an unaffected strength and nobility: Wordsworth with his two adjectives seems to make a slight effort, Gibson is endeavouring to impress by his repetition of the word "heart", Page 96 while Virgil is profound without forcing his language in the... renderings I have come across. Virgil is relating how his hero Aeneas and the faithful friend Achates, after suffering shipwreck, arrive on the African shore and wander up to a temple and chance upon a frieze of engravings in which scenes of the tale of Troy are depicted. Aeneas is greatly moved by this discovery and raises a moan in which not a single English translator of Virgil from Dryden down to our... incidents or situations the cry carries in Virgil an all-pervading tone, and as if to render it universal he gives it to us in complete lines standing like detachable poetic embodiments of a philosophical vision. The line about "lachrymae rerum" is not only complete and detachable: it is also free from any obvious links of syntax with those that precede and follow. Virgil the master-craftsman who brooded and ...
... Of glory obscured, it is not impossible to mistake the description for prose of a highly patterned and euphonious order. But who with a trained ear can mistake for a snatch of prose-sound the Virgil-ian phrases about the priestess of Apollo? Page 28 Sed pectum anhelum Et rabie fera corda tument, majorque videri Nec mortale sonans, adflata est numine quando Jam propione... hexameter could be "Englishified" our poets would have two sovereign strings to their bow, each with its own special quality. So it is worth asking whence arises the marvellous metrical swing of Homer and Virgil. The classical hexameter is a run of five dactyls ending with a spondee, allowing a substitution anywhere of the first four dactyls by a spondee — the fifth being usually left untouched — and of the... quality is an inner one; the very spirit of the hexameter must be caught, the poet's blood must have the surge of the Iliad and the broad even stream of the Aeneid before he can play Homer and Virgil in English, Yet a proper sense of the outer form is also needed for the inner spirit to find natural and constant embodiment. A proper sense: that is the desideratum. Several poets have tried to ...
... then? Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Kalidasa? And what about Aeschylus, Virgil and Milton? I suppose all the names you mention except Goethe can be included; or if you like you can put them all including Goethe in three rows—e.g.: 1st row Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki 2nd row Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Virgil, Milton 3rd row Goethe and there you are! To speak less flippantly, the first... by the poetic seeing mind than by this kind of elemental demiurgic power—otherwise he would rank by their side; the same with Kalidasa. Aeschylus is a seer and creator but on a much smaller scale. Virgil and Milton have a less spontaneous breath of creative genius; one or two typal figures excepted, they live rather by what they have said than by what they have made. 31 March 1932 Is the omission ...
... great Mantuan's art. To the example I gave in my last letter I would particularly add his treatment of the line which Arnold Bennett considered the most rhythmical in all poetic literature - the phrase Virgil put in the mouth of Aeneas when that hero voiced his helplessness before Dido's request for the story of Troy: Infandum. regina, jubes renovare dolorem. Day Lewis converts this mournful magic... translator." Commenting on somebody's argument that a translator is not free to render a passage in a form not exploited in the original, -Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Pushed too far, it would mean that Homer and Virgil can be translated only in hexameters!" Sri Aurobindo also allowed the license of translating poetic prose into poetry, adding: "And what of the reverse cases - the many fine prose translations of poets... the original, yet there have been great translators who have, as it were, transposed some original into what is in its own right fine poetry - one has but to name Chapman's or Pope's Homer, Dryden's Virgil, Arthur Waley's Chinese poems, all of which have had a deep impact on the English language. Many excellent translations have done less than this but have brought something of the original - Leishman's ...
... IT is no hyperbole to say that Tagore is to Bengali literature what Shakespeare is to English, Goethe to German, Tolstoy to Russian, or Dante to Italian and, to go into the remoter past, what Virgil was to Latin and Homer to Greek or, in our country, what Kalidasa was to ancient Sanskrit. Each of these stars of the first magnitude is a king, a paramount ruler in his own language and literature... the universe. And, in a language and a literature that are not so immature but have already attained development and elegance, a creative vibhuti has brought about a second type of-transformation. Virgil, Shakespeare, Goethe and Kalidasa did a work of this category. It cannot be said that English was undeveloped or quite rustic before Shakespeare, although the image of the grandly real, something truly... Page 177 with them. But just as Shakespeare may be said to have led the English language across the border or as Tolstoy made the Russian language join hands with the wide world or as Virgil and Goethe imparted a fresh life and bloom, a fuller awakening of the soul of poetry, to Latin and to German, so too is Tagore the paramount and versatile poetic genius of Bengal who made the Bengali ...
... of extreme humility (though only a courteous assumption) in the comparison between the poeta and the patronus . Virgil, Shakespeare, Hugo I think what Belloc meant in crediting Virgil with the power to give us a sense of the Unknown Country [ see page 373 ] was that Virgil specialises in a kind of wistful vision of things across great distances in space or time, which renders them dream-like... faucille d'or is an ingenious fancy—there is nothing true behind it, not the least shadow of a mystical experience. The lines quoted from Virgil are exceedingly moving and poetic, but it is pathos Page 389 of the life planes, not anything more—Virgil would have stared if he had been told that his ripae ulterioris was revelatory of the native land of the soul. These sentimental modern... soul. Add to this that Virgil's rhythm is exquisitely euphonious, and it is no wonder Belloc should feel as if the very harps of heaven were echoed by the Mantuan. He couples Shakespeare with Virgil as a master of (to put it in a phrase of Arjava's) "earth-transforming gramarye". The quotations he gives from Shakespeare struck me as rather peculiar in the context: I don't exactly remember them ...
... 118. See A.B. Purani, Evening Talks, First Series p. 280; also Purani, Life of Sri Aurobindo, p. 26. 119. Collected Poems and Plays, Vol. II, p. 163. 120. The Aeneid of Virgil, translated by C. Day Lewis, p. 64. 121. Ilion,p. 125. 122. My account of Won above is largely based upon my own review-article in the Indian PE.N., December 1958, pp. 399-401... 960). SAVITRI: A COSMIC EPIC 1. 'The Hungry Eye: An Introduction to Comic Art, pp. 131-2. 2. Principles of Poetry, pp. xciv-xcv. 3. From Virgil to Milton, p. 5 4. The Idea of Great Poetry, pp. 72-3. 5. Heroic Poetry, Preface, p. v. 6. (Italics mine) Sri Aurobindo, Foundations of Indian Culture, pp. 330-1;... Series, p. 282. See also the chapter on 'Early Epic and Modern Poetry' in John Holloway's The Charted Mirror (1960). 10. The English Epic and its Background, pp. 5-12. 11. From Virgil to Milton, p. 15. 12. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance, p. 127. 13. Dante's Other World, p. 73. 14. Possibility, p. 27. 15. The Figure of Beatrice, ...
... that leave our outer mind incapable of entering with certitude into the mood musicalised. It is different with Virgil and, among past English poets, with Shelley. But Virgil and Shelley themselves differ. Both make their sweetest songs out of saddest thought; but the elusive element in Virgil leaps out of an earthly poignancy whereas in Shelley it plays within an ethereal one. A single instance may suffice:... The woodworm spins in shrillness on the bough... But surely Melopoeia cannot claim its true climax here. Page 243 Perhaps the greatest master of climactic Melopoeia is Virgil. According to Arnold Bennett, the most marvellously rhythmed line in all poetic literature is Aeneas's gesture of helplessness when Queen Dido of Carthage asks him for the story of Troy: Infandum... on long comparisons which are complete pictures in their own right—small dramatic scenes inset into the main visual reconstruction: the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's blank-verse narratives—particularly his Sohrab and Rustam ...
... (French sense, not English) only. You have again hit me with the number of years in Yoga plus Virgil, Keats and Milton in poetry. I am preparing a hit-back! There was no hit in that—I was only answering your question about writing only when the inspiration comes. I pointed out that these poets (Virgil, Milton) did not do that. They obliged the inspiration to come. Many not so great do the same... subject to qualification. What Lawrence states is true in principle but in practice most poets have to sustain the inspiration by industry. Milton in his later days used to write every day fifty lines; Virgil nine which he corrected and recorrected till it was within halfway of what he wanted. In other words he used to write under any other conditions and pull at his inspiration till it came. Perhaps... leisure. November 11, 1936 Guru, what else could it be if not a "hit" or at least shutting my mouth? Every time I complain of a great difficulty, no inspiration, you quote the names of Virgil, Milton, etc. Same in Yoga—you say 10 years, 12 years, pooh! I thought you were honestly asking for the truth about inspiration according to Lawrence and effort; and I answered to that. I didn't ...
... they are Christian in their main inspiration. In some respects, Camoens's epic is the most rewarding of the three. Like Dante, Camoens too—though with different results —acknowledges Virgil as his master. If Virgil sang of arms and the man, Aeneas, Camoens sang too of arms and the men—the men who carved out the Portuguese Empire and won the gorgeous East for Christ: The deeds I tell of... Bharati, Tagore and Sri Aurobindo have freely taken deep draughts from this veritable Ganga-Yamuna confluence of the great Indian epic tradition. The literary epics from the days of Virgil in Europe and since the days of Kalidasa in India have carved no mean territory for themselves in the 'realms of gold'. Not all hill-ranges can be of equal immensity, nor can all rivers match the... increasing need to imply more than to state, to send out waves of suggestion than raise walls of brick. Even with regard to an early epic like the Aeneid, Bowra says that because Virgil, "wished to write a poem about something much larger than the destinies of individual heroes, he created a type of epic in which the characters represent something outside themselves, and the events ...
... 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 word-magic and vision which make his verse, more than that of almost any other... others from almost anywhere. I do not mean to say there was no psychic touch at all anywhere in Virgil. And what is this unknown country? There are plenty of unknown countries (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 ...
... his eyes the first line has the ordinary ballad movement and diction and cannot rank, the second is fine poetry, vivid and impressive, with a beginning of grandeur—but the nobility of Homer, Virgil or Milton is not there. The line strikes at the mind with a great vehemence in order to impress it—nobility in poetry enters in and takes possession with an assured gait, by its own right. It would... gesticulates, wrestles, succeeds finally with a shout of triumph; that does not give a noble effect or a noble movement. See in contrast with what a self-possessed grandeur, dignity or godlike ease Milton, Virgil, Homer make their ascensions or keep their high levels. Then I come to Arnold's examples of which you question the nobility on the strength of my description of one essential of the poetically noble... and undertones which ballad rhythm has not at its native level. Then for the other example you have given—lines didactic in intention can be noble, as for instance, the example quoted by Arnold from Virgil, Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis Page 173 or the line quoted from Apollo's speech about the dead body of Hector and Achilles' long-nourished and ...
... Homer, but we have his very readable Virgil, with some excellent responses in places yet lacking the sense of the right body to make such responses organic to the inspiration. We may test him in one of Virgil's most memorable moments, which Sri Aurobindo too has translated in passing, while helping a disciple Page 309 in the art of the caesura. Virgil, in the midst of describing a storm... right hexametrical note, as in rendering Virgil's Prospexi Italiam summa sublimis ab unda by Caught sight of Italy, being lifted high on a wave crest. 2 1 The Aeneid of Virgil, translated from the Latin by C. Day Lewis (The New English Library Ltd., London, 1962), p. 6, line 199. 2 Ibid., p. 129. line 357. Page 310 There we have in the initial ... his | son and | roared with | laughter: two crows on | two black | branches | shook with | fright, and fled... The one writer who in the past has come nearest to the hexameter of Homer or Virgil in English is not Friar or Lewis or Lattimore: it is H.B. Cotterill In 1911 he published his translation of the Odyssey. 1 Rejecting academic attempts to 1 Homer's Odyssey, A Line-for-line ...
... for their name. To clinch our case for a wider location we may close with a reference to Virgil and Ovid, both of them writing in the 1st century A.D. as contemporaries of Diodorus. Ovid has the phrase: "terra Gangetis" ("the land of the Ganges"). It stands in general for India. Virgil, in his Georgics (111.26-27), writes: In foribus pugnam ex auro solidoque elephanto ... representing India or the people of India. What is to be fixed in mind on taking Ovid and Virgil together is the common concept of the Gangetic as one wide whole of country and people. On account of the growing importance of the Ganges-region in the three centuries before Ovid and Virgil, the Gangetic as an extensive unity has become a synonym for the Indian. The amplification of its ...
... You must have received by now the typed copy of the opening pages of Sri-Aurobindo's Ilion, the epic in hexameters moulded according to his insight into what this great medium of Homer and Virgil should be in a natural English form. Ilion is not ostensibly poetry of the sacred but it has still a depth of vision made dramatically vivid. Surely you Page 19 wouldn't call this... and a quality like those of this grand measure in Greek and Latin, has been a problem for centuries. There is no sustained hexametrical creation in English coming anywhere near the work of Homer and Virgil or even lesser Classical poets. Part of the lack is due, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, to the absence of a true conception of the form which a genuine English hexameter should have. All attempts have either... apeiresien, which I may approximate in English with: I was the child of Zeus Cronion, yet have I suffered Infinite pain. Or take that equally poignant yet more reassured cry from Virgil: O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem, rendered most sensitively by Sri Aurobindo: Fiercer griefs you have suffered; to these too God will give ending. Then there is the ...
... concentrate for the next line—so it went on... Let me remind you that Virgil would sit down and write nine lines, then spend the whole morning perfecting them. Now just compare yourself with Virgil; you have written 16 lines in 2 hours. That beats Virgil hollow. June 13, 1938 You flatter me by comparing me with Virgil, Sir. But you forget that my 16, 20 lines are nowhere beside his 9 lines ...
... happened to ask X whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius Caesar. Good Heavens, all... You have forgotten that Mrs. Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be prosecuted by her for misappropriation of personality. Alexander was too much of a torrent for me; I disclaim Milton and Virgil, am unconscious of Dante and Valmiki, diffident like X about the Bard (and moneylender?) of Avon. If, however, you can bring sufficiently cogent Page 55 evidence, I am ready to take upon ...
... but follow the scansion only): Page 133 (1) Quadrupe|dante pu|trem || cur|su quatit | ungula | campum. (Virgil) Horse-hooves | trampled the | crumbling | plain || with a | four-footed | gallop. (2) O pass|i gravi|ora, || dab|it deus | his quoque | finem. (Virgil) Fiercer | griefs you have | suffered; || to | these too | God will give | ending. (3) Nec fa|cundia | deseret ...
... subject to qualification. What Lawrence states is true in principle, but in practice most poets have to sustain the inspiration by industry. Milton in his later days used to write every day fifty lines; Virgil nine which he corrected and recorrected till it was within half way of what he wanted. In other words he used to write under any other conditions and pull at his inspiration till it came. To go... those which come in that way. Yes. Usually the best lines, passages etc. come like that. 10 November 1936 Every time I complain of great difficulty, no inspiration, you quote the names of Virgil, Milton, etc. Same in Yoga—you say 10 years, 12 years—pooh! I thought you were honestly asking for the truth about inspiration according to Lawrence and effort; and I answered to that. I did not ...
... same values. The greatness of Shakespeare, of Dante, of others of the same rank is unquestioned and unquestionable and the recognition of it has always been there in their own time and afterwards. Virgil and Horace stood out in their own day in the first rank among the poets and that verdict has never been reversed since. The area of a poet's fame may vary; it may have been seen first by a few, then... then by all. At first there may be adverse critics and assailants, but these negative voices die away. Questionings may rise from time to time—e.g. as to whether Lucretius was not a greater poet than Virgil—but these are usually from individuals and the general verdict abides always. Even lesser poets retain their rank in spite of fluctuations of their fame. You speak of the discrediting of some and the ...
... matter was further complicated by his killing Eurytus's son, for which he had to go into exile for a year, as a slave to the Lydian queen Omphale. ⁂ The Latin epigraph to Envoi is from Virgil and forms the conclusion of his Catalepton V which runs: Ite hinc, inanes, ite rhetorum ampullae, inflata rore non Achaico verba, et vos, Selique Tarquitique Varroque scholasticorum... mine, for truth to tell Sweet were ye once, but now begone; And yet, and yet, return anon, And when I write, at whiles be seen In visits shy and far between. The article on Virgil in the Encyclopaedia Britannica has the following pertinent passage: "After studying rhetoric he began the study of philosophy under Siron the Epicurean. One of the minor poems written about this ...
... which has the same subject as Virgil's Eighth Eclogue and treats of Damon's sad memories of Nysa who has been snatched away by the uncouth Mopsus, has in one stanza a most delightful originality. Where Virgil makes Damon say only that when he was a little lad of 10 and, along with his mother, plucking dewy apples from the lower boughs in a garden, he first saw Nysa and a fatal frenzy swept him off his feet... 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 style animated by his own genius and character. A consummate scholar in various literatures, deeply saturated with the great traditions of poetry, Sri ...
... esoteric occult hint and to my question: "What plane is spoken of by Virgil?" he replied' "I don't know, but purple is a light of the Vital. It may have been one of the vital heavens he was thinking of. The ancients saw the vital heavens as the highest and most of the religions also have done the same. I have used the suggestion of Virgil to insert a needed line." You - with your sun generously and ...
... came to be called the Son of God, worshipped as divine and considered mankind's Saviour as well as the inaugurator of a new era moving towards the Kingdom of God, Augustus was heralded by poets like Virgil as the creator of a Golden Age of peace and prosperity and accepted worship from the East as a divine being and saviour of humanity. Like the virginal conception the Gospels of Matthew and Luke picture... Caesar organised the life of the Roman empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe - he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly towards the success of his mission. After the interlude of the Middle Ages, this civilisation was reborn in a new mould in what is called the Renaissance, not in ...
... important being Carthage in North Africa. In the Aeneid, the Latin poet Virgil tells how Aeneas, guided by his mother, the great goddess Aphrodite, leaves Troy in flames, with his family and other Trojan refugees, and after many adventures, finds refuge in Carthage where he meets Dido, the great queen who founded it. Virgil (70 BC-19 BC) who has for centuries been acknowledged as the greatest Roman ...
... to ask Nolini whether you were Shakespeare. He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius Caesar. Sri Aurobindo: Good... You have forgotten that Mrs. Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be prosecuted by her for misappropriation of personality. Alexander was too much of a torrent for me; I disclaim Milton and Virgil, am unconscious of Dante and Valmiki, diffident like Nolini about the Bard (and money-lender?) of Avon. If, however, you can bring sufficiently cogent evidence, I am ready to take upon my back the ...
... evolved theory and practice of 'overhead' aesthesis. The role of Beatrice in the Commedia is played as purposefully and more dynamically by Savitri in Sri Aurobindo's poem; Virgil is distantly paralleled by Aswapati, and even as Virgil leads to Beatrice, Aswapati leads to Savitri. And Savitri herself is at once the heroine of the legend and the symbol-force of the Supreme Creatrix assuming or incarnating ...
... if not I will have some from the womb of future, for time has no end and the earth too is boundless." From this point of view Milton and Virgil may be looked upon as mere poets. Those who consider Shakespeare, Homer and Valmiki superior to Milton, Virgil and Kalidasa come to such a conclusion from a subtler consideration. One group of poets makes use of vaikhari vak, while the other of pasyanti ...
... touches of other worlds and their beings. Once outside the body, there is every danger for the individual to go astray and be hurt, unless he is guided and protected by a guardian angel, as Dante has had Virgil as his Maestro. We may note here that the passage of Dante from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven across their various levels is almost an exact image of what happens to a soul after death. The highest... compose their consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheshwari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron has something in his matter and manner that make us think of the stamp of Mahakali. Virgil or Petrarch, Shelley or our Tagore seem to be emanations of Beauty, Harmony, Love – Mahalakshmi. And the perfect artisanship Page 209 of Mahasaraswati has found its especial embodiment ...
... alexandrines. NIRODBARAN: Yes, yes. SRI AUROBINDO: That is different. Plenty of people have written alexandrines. But this is the dactylic six-foot line, the metre in which the epics of Homer and Virgil are written. It has a very fine movement which is most suitable for Epic. I wrote most of my hexametres—the poem Ilion—in Pondicherry. Amal and Arjava saw them and considered them a success. I may... poor. It is surprising that he could write an epic, for Bengalis haven't got an epic mind. The Bengali Ramayana and Mahabharata are not worth much. But I believe he got his inspiration from Homer and Virgil whom he read a lot. NIRODBARAN: What exactly do you mean by "an epic mind"? SRI AUROBINDO: The epic mind is something high, vast and powerful. The Bengali mind is more delicate and graceful. ...
... consciously artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the... frail materials, to get into contact with, to give some sense of the mystery of existence that passeth understanding. We are very far indeed from the "natural" poets, Homer or Shakespeare, Milton, or Virgil. And this is from a profane, a mundane poet, not an ostensibly religious or spiritual poet. The level of the poetic inspiration, at least of the poetic view and aspiration has evidently shifted to ...
... describes Sri Aurobindo as "the philosopher as poet." Page 52 like philosophy in their poetic creation. And in spite of some inclination to philosophy and philosophical ideas Virgil and Milton were not philosophers either. Dante sought perhaps consciously and deliberately to philosophise in his Paradiso. I Did he? The less Dante then is he. For it is his Inferno, where he... whither of it all? But mankind has been taught and trained to live merely or mostly on earth, and poetry has been treated as the expression of human joys and sorrows – the tears in mortal things of which Virgil spoke. The savour of earth, the thrill of the flesh has been too sweet for us and we have forgotten other sweetnesses. It is always the human element that we seek in poetry, but we fail to recognise ...
... Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is full of images? Then on April 1st he wrote something about Virgil and myself, so I asked him: Question: I hope you didn't intend to make me an April fool. Otherwise Virgil and Nirod to be mentioned in the same pen-stroke! But I couldn't read his answer to this, so I wrote: ... illegible, Sir. Even Nolinida couldn't read the words. Sri Aurobindo: I repeat then from memory: What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. Question: You referred to "circumstances being exceptional as regards my early success in English versification." ...
... place of the dative so that Virgil meant "There are tears for things" suggesting that there are occasions which naturally draw tears from us or, rather, tears are naturally drawn from us by certain occasions. The world-cry which Virgil has succinctly packed into his brief phrase is entirely lost in such a commonplace interpretation. C. Day Lewis has rightly taken Virgil to connote "Tears in the ...
... He was diffident. My own belief is that you have somehow amalgamated all that was precious in those forces that manifested as Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Dante, Virgil and Milton: if not all, at least the biggest of the lot. Kindly let us know the truth. Among your other and non-poetic incarnations, some surmise Alexander and Julius... have forgotten that Mrs. Besant claims Julius Caesar. I don't want to be prosecuted by her for misappropriation of personality. Alexander was too much of a torrent for me; I disclaim Milton and Virgil, am unconscious of Dante and Valmiki, diffident like Nolini about the Bard (and money-lender?) of Avon. If, however, you can bring sufficiently cogent evidence, I am ready to take upon my back... Caesar organised the life of the Roman Empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilization to Europe - he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly towards the success of his mission. After the interlude of the Middle Ages, this civilisation was reborn in a new mould in what is called the Renaissance, not ...
... is spoken of by Virgil in these lines: Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt. I don't know, but purple is a light of the vital. It may have been one of the vital heavens he was thinking of. The ancients saw the vital heavens as the highest and most of the religions also have done the same. I have used the suggestion of Virgil to insert a needed... There is a darkness in terrestrial things That will not suffer long too glad a note. [ pp. 16-17 ] Are these lines the poetic intelligence at its deepest, say, like a mixture of Sophocles and Virgil? They may be the pure or the intuitivised higher mind. I do not think it is the poetic intelligence any more than Virgil's Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt , which I think to be ...
... and rich phrases. The latter kind is not the only "poetic" poetry nor is necessarily the best. Homer is very direct and simple, Virgil less so but still restrained in his diction; Keats tends always to richness; but one cannot say that Keats is poetic and Homer and Virgil are not. The rich style has this danger that it may drown the narration so that its outlines are no longer clear. This is what has... a, Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya. In Bengali Meghnadbodh. In Italian Dante's Divine Comedy and Tasso's (I have forgotten the name for the moment) are in the epic cast. In Greek of course Homer, in Latin Virgil. There are other poems which attempt the epic style, but are not among the masterpieces. There are also primitive epics in German and Finnish (Nibelungenlied, Kalevala)— 4 May 1937 This afternoon ...
... scale of creation is much smaller: the same may be said of Sophocles. Virgil and Milton command a still less spontaneous breath of creative genius, though their expressive power is immense. Where in their works do we meet a teeming world like that of the Shakes-pearean plays? Milton has his fallen archangel Satan coming alive, and Virgil his heroic Aeneas and his tragic Dido — but most of the other characters... first class, but even these he distributes into three rows. In the top row he puts Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer and Shakespeare as equals. In the middle' row come Dante, Kalidasa; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil and Milton. In the third stands in solitary grandeui:Goethe.1 Those in the first- row have supreme imaginative originality and expressive power and creative genius, the widest scope and the largest ...
... passion snaps the leash in Euripides and strange as well as violent themes are found in much Greek drama. Touches of the Romantic occur in Latin literature too - in Ovid "with his love-lorn heroines", Virgil "with his Messianic broodings and his passionate Dido", Catullus "the Roman Burns'', Propertius ''the Roman Rossetti'' . 7 In giving examples of Romantic lines, Lucas 8 does not only mention... to the novels of Anne Radcliffe. Page 3 Sunt apud infernos tot milis formosarum - So many thousand beauties are among the Shades - (K.D,S.) and in those lines of Virgil: Hie tibi mortis erant metae, domus alta sub Ida, Lyrnesi domus alta, solo Laurente sepulchrum. Here was the bourn of death for thee - lofty thy house under Ida, Lyrnesus'... creation is always out of the poet's self and not out of what he externally sees: "that outward seeing only serves to excite the inner vision to its work." 22 The Classical poet - a Sophocles or a Virgil - no less than the Romantic has his mind environed by much more than the immediate physical reality, by even much more than the physical universe he imagines in his drama or epic: invisible powers ...
... Is Kalidasa a greater poet than Vyas or Valmiki because he is full of images? Then on April 1st he wrote something about Virgil and myself, so I asked him: QUESTION: I hope you didn't intend to make me an April fool. Otherwise Virgil and Nirod to be mentioned in the same pen-stroke! Page 120 But I couldn't read his answer to this., so I wrote: QUESTION:... illegible, Sir. Even Nolinida could not read the words. SRI AUROBINDO: I repeat then from memory: What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. QUESTION: You referred to "circumstances being exceptional" as regards my early success in English versification. But how ...
... tournament... ...Me, of these Not skilled nor studious, higher argument Remains... He has a theme better in its own way and for his particular purpose than the themes of Homer and Virgil, of Ariosto and Tasso. Milton's ostensible aim is to "assert Eternal Providence,/And justify the ways of God to men." It is almost a theological aim; and he would therefore try to effect a marriage... tly secular; he made it theological, and the change of approach meant a great change of temper and of atmosphere." 20 It would, perhaps, be truer to say that Milton tried to fuse Virgil and Dante, the epic manner of the former and the theological insights of the latter. This meant creating a new style, which is best summed up by the word 'sublime'. Analysing it, Gilbert Highet... least, to the poetic style, to the power of its unifying harmony. Highet's pointed emphasis on Milton's style in Paradise Lost is by no means misplaced. The hexameter of Homer and Virgil, the anustup of Vyasa and Valmiki, the terza rima of Dante, the symphonic blank verse of Milton, the crystalline iambic pentameter of Savitri, all play no mean part in charging these great epics ...
... follow the scansion only): (1) Quadrupe¦dante pu¦tream¦cur¦su quatit¦ungula¦campum. (Virgil) Horse-hooves¦trampled the¦cmmbling¦plain¦with a¦four-footed gallop Page 119 (2) O pass¦i gravi¦ora,¦¦dab¦it deusjhis quoque jfinem- (Virgil) Fiercerjgriefs you have¦suffered;¦¦to¦these too¦God will giveا ending. (3) Nec¦fa¦cun ...
... and give the same values. greatness of Shakespeare, of Dante, of others of the rank is unquestioned and unquestionable and the recogn1 of it has always been there in their own time and afterwards. Virgil and Horace stood out in their own day in the first rank Page 134 among the poets and that verdict has never been reversed since. The area of a poet's fame may vary; it may have been... then by all. At first there see he adverse critics and assailants, but these negative voice die away. Questionings may rise from time to time— e.g. as to whether Lucretius was not a greater poet than Virgil—but these are usually from individuals and the general verdict abides always. Even lesser poets retain their rank in its of fluctuations of their fame. You speak of the discrediting of some and the ...
... It takes me usually a day or two days to write and perfect one or three days even, or if very inspired, I get two short ones out, and have perhaps to revise the next day. Another poet will be like Virgil writing nine lines a day and spending all the rest of his time polishing and polishing. A fourth will be like Manmohan Page 211 as I knew him setting down half lines and fragments and taking... expecting me to divulge everything to them not in hints—but at length. Lord God in omnibus ! 29 March 1936 Every time I complain of difficulty in writing, you quote the names of Milton and Virgil, but you forget they had no Supramental Avatar or Guru to push them on. Considering that the Supramental Avatar himself is quite incapable of doing what Nishikanta or Jyoti do, i.e. producing a ...
... conceived that the best way to achieve their aim was to bring in the greatness of classical harmony and the nobility and beauty of Greek and Latin utterance by naturalising the quantitative metres of Virgil, Ovid, Horace. It was also natural that some of these innovators should conceive that this could be best done by imposing the classical laws of quantity wholesale on the English language. At the... an English hexameter; but this was only a half accomplishment. The rhythm that was so great, so beautiful or, at the lowest, so strong or so happy in the ancient tongues, the hexameter of Homer and Virgil, the hexameter of Theocritus, the hexameter of Horace and Juvenal becomes in their hands something poor, uncertain of itself and defective. There is here the waddle and squawk of a big water-fowl, ...
... least avoids eating and drinking things that may harm it. The Roman poet Virgil liked to live in the countryside. He admired the powerful bullock that draws the plough and cuts the furrow where the next harvest will spring up. Strong is his body, powerful his muscles and hard is his labour year in and year out. And Virgil adds: "Wine and too much feasting are unknown to him. He feeds on grass, quenches ...
... grasped from beyond the mind or raised up from the subliminal depths where they may lie reflected and echoed, are the priestess's province, and they cannot be disclosed by mere rational processes. In Virgil we have the vividest account of what happened to her in her 1 Ibid., p. 16. Page 323 oracular moods. Day Lewis 1 has translated this passage on the Sibyl of Cumae: ... are, But none so marvellous as Man. It also looks forward to Plato's "Knowledge" which is "Nous", the intuitive insight crowning the work of the intelligence. The 1 The Aeneid of Virgil, p. 120, line 46-51. 2 The Greeks (Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1951), P. 111. Page 324 most adequate reading would be wholly in terms of such insight: the Apollonian self-knowledge ...
... (Greek for example) and a certain metre. It is an imitation of poetry. Page 73 not the newly created expression of a present vision. It lacks what David Jones calls 'nowness'. Would Virgil have been impressed, or Ovid (not to speak of Homer) by some clever schoolboy or graduate's imitation of the Aeneid or the Iliad? There is an astonishing virtuosity (of course Aurobindo would have... whether being the Perfect Master may not exclude being a poet. But you immediately contradict yourself if you accept as I am certain you do that poetry comes from a world of the Gods to which Homer and Virgil and Dante and Milton appealed for their inspiration. The furor poeticus is also the enthousiasmos, the "God-entry", To reach the world of the Gods is to be more directly capable of great verse ...
... information about the poet is lacking. It is believed that his home was in Ionia in Asia. Among the front ranking poets of the world we could include Valmiki, Vyasa, Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Virgil, Kalidas, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and Goethe. From the point of view of essential force and beauty, Homer and Shakespeare stand above all the rest, although Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharta... Italy. Since then these two epics have been translated into various European languages and have become the most important poems of the classic European tradition, being valued even above the works of Virgil and Dante. Homer has come to be seen as a staple of Greek education, the repository of Greek myth, the source of a thousand dramas, the foundation of moral training and even the scripture of ...
... and rich phrases. The latter kind is not the only "poetic" poetry nor is necessarily the best. Homer is very direct and simple; Virgil less so but still is restrained in his diction; Keats tends always to richness; but one cannot say that Keats is poetic and Homer and Virgil are not. The rich style has this danger that it may drown the narration so that its outlines are no longer clear. This is what ...
... deuce am I to know? I wrote Page 53 what came as a metrical example and the roamer did not come in view. MYSELF: I hope you didn't intend to make me an April-fool. Otherwise Virgil and Nirod to be mentioned in the same pen-stroke ! Sri Aurobindo wrote in pencil: What a modest poet! Most think themselves the superior of Homer, Milton and Shakespeare all added together... couldn't read it) Absolutely unreadable, Sir, not even by Nolini! SRI AUROBINDO: I repeat then from memory. What a modest poet! Most think in their heart of hearts that they are superior to Homer, Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare all piled upon and fused into each other. MYSELF: Getting depressed, discouraged, thinking of giving up the blessed business of writing poetry. Binapani has no compassion ...
... consciously artistic, but loses something of the initial freshness and spontaneity: it gains in correctness, polish and elegance and has now a style in lieu of Nature's own naturalness. I am thinking of Virgil and Milton and Kalidasa. Dante's place is perhaps somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the... frail materials, to get into contact with, to give some sense of the mystery of existence that passeth understanding. We are very far indeed from the "natural" poets, Homer or Shakespeare, Milton or Virgil. And this is from a profane, a mundane poet, not an ostensibly religious or spiritual poet. The level of the poetic inspiration, at least of the poetic view and aspiration has evidently shifted to ...
... higher levels. To oppose the force of gravitation, to move ceaselessly towards purer and luminous heights of being and consciousness, that is Tapasya, Askesis, true asceticism. Page 106 Virgil, the great poet of a diviner order in human life, expressed the idea most beautifully and aptly in those well-known lines, one of the characteristic passages showing his genius at its best: .... that energy for the ascent and expansion of the consciousness. It is this inner athleticism that is the thing needful, not its vain physical simulacrum-not the one which is commonly worshipped. ¹ Virgil : Aeneid , VI. 128 Page 107 ...
... touches of other worlds and their beings. Once outside the body, there is every danger for the individual to go astray and be hurt, unless he is guided and protected by a guardian angel, as Dante has had Virgil as his Maestro. We may note here that the passage of Dante from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven across their various levels is almost an exact image of what happens to a soul after death. The highest... compose their consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheswari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron has something in his matter and manner that make us think of the stamp of Mahakali. Virgil or Petrarch, Shelley or our Tagore seem to be emanations of Beauty, Harmony, Love—Mahalakshmi. And the perfect artisanship of Mahasaraswati has found its especial embodiment in Horace and Racine and ...
... by side with it. The genius of the Latin is replete with intuition and that of the Celtic, the Slav, the Teuton with inspiration. If Shakespeare, Ibsen and Dostoevsky belong to the latter category, Virgil, Petrarch and Racine represent the former. Intuition and inspiration do not limit themselves, however, to particular countries or races, but the two appear in all ideological schools and even through... scattered all over Page 77 the ancient arts, and inspiration marks the modern. The Renaissance of Europe failed in its attempt, however sincere, at imitating the intuition of Homer and Virgil of the remote past and unwittingly managed to usher in the epoch of inspiration. Dante was the harbinger of the spirit of this new age, while Shakespeare of the English and Ronsard of the French developed ...
... (Macmillan Company, New York, 1934). Bowman, Archibald Allan. A Sacramental Universe, the Vanuxem Lectures edited by J.W. Scott (Princeton University Press, 1939). Bowra, CM. From Virgil to Milton (Macmillan, London, 1945). Heroic Poetry (Macmillan, London, 1952). Brockington, A. Allen. Mysticism and Poetry on a Basis Of Experience (Chapman & Hall, London, 1934). ... Leuba, James H. The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (Kegan Paul, London, 1925). Levy, G.R. The Sword from the Rock (Faber & Faber, London, 1953). Lewis, C. Day. The Aeneid of Virgil (The Hogarth Press, London, 1954). A Hope for Poetry (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1934). The Poet's Way to Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, London, 1957). Lodge ...
... Conqueror of the Scythians. That position is now much assailed, and some would place him in the third or fourth century; others see ground to follow popular tradition in making him a contemporary of Virgil, if not of Lucretius. The exact date matters little. It is enough that we find in Kalidasa's poetry the richest bloom and perfect expression of the long classical afternoon of Indian civilisation ...
... and straightforward vigour, a freshness and greatness and pulse of life, a simplicity of strength and beauty that makes of them quite another kind than the elaborately constructed literary epics of Virgil or Milton, Firdausi or Kalidasa. This peculiar blending of the natural breath of an early, heroic, swift and vigorous force of life with a strong development and activity of the ethical, the intellectual ...
... greatest world-poets and not always combined in them in so equable a harmony and with so adequate a combination of execution and substance. Kalidasa ranks among the supreme poetic artists with Milton and Virgil and he has a more subtle and delicate spirit and touch in his art than the English, a greater breath of native power informing and vivifying his execution than the Latin poet. There is no more perfect ...
... mould that it creates for its figures of experience in that one life. In another birth it will create for itself a different personality, different capacities, a different life and career. Supposing Virgil is born again, he may take up poetry in one or two other lives, but he will certainly not write an epic but rather perhaps slight but elegant and beautiful lyrics such as he wanted to write, but did ...
... and based on insufficient data. I liked Manmohan's poetry well enough, but I never thought it to be great. He was a conscientious artist of word and rhyme almost painfully careful about technique. Virgil wrote nine lines every day and spent the whole morning rewriting and rerewriting them out of all recognition. Manmohan did better. He would write five or six half lines and quarter lines and spend ...
... in principle in a majority of cases, but in the minority (which is the best part, for the less is often greater than the more) it need not stand at all. Pushed too far, it would mean that Homer and Virgil can be translated only in hexameters. Again, what of the reverse cases—the many fine prose translations of poets so much better and more akin to the spirit of the original than any poetic version of ...
... those last touches which sometimes make all the difference between perfection and the approach to it; and we feel too, not a failure of art,—for that is a defect which could never be alleged against Virgil,—but a relative thinning of the supporting power and inspiration. Still the consummate artistic intelligence of the poet has been so steadily at work, so complete from the very inception, it has so ...
... the absolute,—so far as anything can be that in a temporal world of relativities in which the Absolute reserves itself hidden behind the veil of human ignorance. It is no use for some to contend that Virgil is a tame and elegant writer of a wearisome work in verse on agriculture and a tedious pseudo-epic written to imperial order and Lucretius the only really great poet in Latin literature or to depreciate ...
... action); vital mind (as in Kalidasa and Shakespeare, where the vibrant play, delicate or vehement, of sensation, passion, emotion is directly expressed); intellectual mind (as in Vyasa, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante and Milton, where the poetic vision markedly brings out thought-values of whatever is caught up from subjective or objective existence). The Future Poetry would be written from those ...
... again on long compa-risons which are themselves complete pictures — small dramatic scenes inset into the main visual reconstruction: the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's blank-verse narratives — particularly his Sohrab and Rustam ...
... Intimate Immorality! Well, this Ode ends with a highly moral idea beautifully vivified and movingly deepened beyond either morality or immorality into an intimate perception of truths behind what Virgil has called "the tears of things" . Wordsworth writes: To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. The idea here is very great, the expression ...
... making pure poetry in its utmost essence. To those who have no familiarity with Latin, the acme of pure poetry depending solely on artistically arranged word-texture would be lines like the one from Virgil which Arnold Bennett considered the most marvellously rhythmed in all poetic literature: infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem... But can anyone rest satisfied with such music without knowing ...
... good breeding. These qualities are not intrinsically objectionable: in their true form they are some aspects of an authentic Classicism and make fine poetry indeed in the works of Horace who, next to Virgil, was the most famous figure in the circle of poets around the Roman Emperor Augustus. The bane of the pseudo-Augustans was an over-exter-nalisation of the cultured mind. Against this so-called naturalness ...
... Caesar organised the life of the Roman Empire and it was this that made the framework of the first transmission of the Graeco-Roman civilisation to Europe—he came for that work and the writings of Virgil and Horace and others helped greatly towards the success of his mission. After the interlude of the Middle Ages, this civilisation was reborn in a new mould in what is called the Renaissance, not in ...
... verse can be called traditional. But to be traditional is not to be debarred from originality and greatness. While being traditional, one can be, if one has the genius, as original and great as Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Marlowe, Milton, Keats. An infinite diversity is possible within traditionalism, and numberless heights and depths of vision and emotion can be reached through traditional technique. There ...
... The Secret Splendour (An adaptation and fusion of two famous speeches of Beatrice to Virgil in the Divina Commedia ) "O courteous soul of Mantuar poesy, Whose fame for ever on God's earth endures - A friend not of my fortune but of me Roves through a desert, driven from his course By obstacles so grave my I heart has fear Lest ...
... It is thought-provoking that Caesar Octavius, renamed Augustus, is an early manifestation of Sri Aurobindo of the vibhuti kind. No wonder the two greatest bards Augustus patronised were born again - Virgil as Nolini and Horace as Dilip - to be patronised by Sri Aurobindo. I, who as a poet was patronised by him even more than they, am still a question mark in connection with the time of the first Roman ...
... divine manifestation. After Nolini’s demise, in 1984, several persons have published their remembrances of him. There we read that he had himself told that he was a reincarnation of the Latin poet Virgil, of the French poet Pierre de Ronsard, and of André Le Nôtre who designed the gardens of Versailles. The Mother significantly wrote in one of his birthday cards: ‘Nolini en route towards the superman’ ...
... that of Solomon. A disciple of whom some incarnations are common knowledge was Nolini Kanta Gupta, a great yogi. He himself has said that he was Yuyutsu in the war on which the Mahabharata is based; Virgil, the Roman poet and friend of Caesar Augustus; Pierre de Ronsard, the French poet of the Pleiade and friend of Francois Clouet; Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s councillor and spy-master; André Le Nôtre ...
... activities, but when a French examining magistrate (juge d’instruction) on a domiciliary visit saw his Greek and Latin books, he annulled the prosecution on the spot. An Indian who read Homer and Virgil in the original language! No, this could not be the sinister conspirator depicted to him. Pondicherry was — and is — a small port on the Coromandel Coast, one hundred and sixty kilometers south ...
... Cambridge University. As a classical scholar, Aurobindo was participating in an educational system whose traditions went back to the Renaissance. To master Greek and Latin, to read Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, to absorb the culture of classical Greece and Rome — these were considered the proper training of an English gentleman. And what one learned in the classroom and lecture hall was only a ...
... by Peter Heehs: ‘As a classical scholar, Aurobindo was participating in an educational system whose traditions went back to the Renaissance. To master Greek and Latin, to read Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, to absorb the culture of classical Greece and Rome – these were considered the proper training of an English gentleman. And what one learned in the classroom and lecture hall was only part ...
... behind Jesus, Chaitanya and, most recently, Ramakrishna was said to be behind Pavitra now. St. Paul and Vivekananda were seen in the background of Anilbaran. In connection with Nolini we heard of Roman Virgil and the late-renaissance French poet Ronsard as well as the French-revolution poet Andre Chenier. As for Amrita himself, the forces in his past were Moses, Michelangelo and Victor Hugo, powerful p ...
... direct conscious expression of the Divine, but as a Vibhuti, a leader of the age in whom the Divine works from the background. No wonder the two greatest bards Augustus had patronised were born again -Virgil as Nolini and Horace as Dilip - to be patronised by Sri Aurobindo. I, who as a poet was patronised by him even more than they, am still a question-mark in connection with the Page 316 ...
... 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 ...
... 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. ...
... 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 plane 209 vyakta 302 Vyasa 60,66,182,205,213 W Wordsworth 52,197,266,367 World ...
... indirectly, that he was they in his past births. I used to pester Sri Aurobindo with all sorts of questions, dangling a long string of names: "Were you Homer, were you Shakespeare, were you Valmiki, Dante, Virgil, Milton?" And he stoutly said "No." I asked him also whether he had been Alexander and Julius Caesar. He replied that Alexander was too much of a torrent for him and, as for Caesar, he said: "You have ...
... of the death of Page 312 Death, and projects man's future in a changed and transformed Earth. Might we not, then, salute the author of Savitri — as the poets salute Virgil in Dante's poem — Onorate I' altissimo poeta: Honour the Poet of Highest Eminence, honour the Ultimate Poet! 79 K.R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR 79 Cf. the American poet D.R. Cameron's tribute ...
... metrical perfection; but he rejected rhyme because he found it unnecessary. Still, he did not follow Shakespeare's dramatic blank verse. Most probably, he had before him the verses of Homer and Virgil — these served as his models. But what is possible in Greek or Latin is impossible in English. The reasons are often repeated, so I refrain from stating them. Sri Aurobindo's blank verse is ...
... has not been static or conventional. On the contrary, it has been continually developing. This is clear in the remark of a critic who observes: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the purpose." Taking all epic poetry into consideration, one may divide it into two main classes: the authentic epic generally intended for recitation and ...
... behind Jesus, Chaitanya and, most recently, Ramakrishna was said to be behind Pavitra now. St. Paul and Vivekananda were seen in the background of Anilbaran. In connection with Nolini we heard of Roman Virgil and the late-renaissance French poet Ronsard as well as the French-revolution poet Andre Chenier. As for Amrita himself, the forces in his past were Moses, Michelangelo and Victor Hugo, powerful ...
... hearts touched by human transience. A somewhat freer version which, according to Sri Aurobindo, is "very fine" yet has a density of colour which is absent from the bare economy and direct force Virgil manages to combine with his subtle and unusual turn of phrase" is my own: Haunted by tears is the world and our hearts by the touch of things mortal. (K.D.S.) 2 Leopardi's ...
... struck the force That through and through I had felt my boy's heart shake I, like a child who seeks his mother and pours Into her ear his sudden dread or ache, Cried thus to Virgil as I pressed me nigher: "Not one small blood-drop mine that does not quake— I know the signals of the ancient fire!" Page 384 ...
... mould that it creates for its figures of experience in that one life. In another birth it will create for itself a different personality, different capacities, a different life and career. Supposing Virgil is born again, he may take up poetry in one or two other lives, but he will certainly not write an epic but rather perhaps slight but elegant and beautiful lyrics such as he wanted to but did not ...
... memory (not being allowed any writing material) and wrote down after being released. 2. Hexameters: A line of verse consisting of six metrical feet. The hexameter was very much used by Homer, Virgil and other Greek and Latin poets. 3. "To thunder through Asia plain to the Ganges": With this line Briseis takes us almost a thousand years after the Trojan war when Alexander the Great was ...
... not been found perhaps more than a dozen times since the world began. Because he possessed this harmonious combination, Kālidāsa ranks not with Anacreon and Horace and Shelley, but with Sophocles, Virgil and Milton. 7 There are references to Kālidāsa's greatness as a poet at different times, in our own country from scholars and poets of eminence, even of the stature of Bānabhatta, the famous ...
... of writing poetry: "I liked Manmohan's poetry well enough but I never thought it to be great. He was a conscientious artist of word and rhyme, almost painfully careful about technique. "Virgil wrote nine lines every day and spent the whole morning rewriting and rerewriting them out of all recognition. Manmohan did better. He would write five or six half lines and quarter lines and spend ...
... value were the reward extracted from his supramental quarry, though at the cost of being dubbed a "wooden head" and many other complimentary epithets. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Napoleon, Virgil, Shaw, Joyce, Hitler, Mussolini, Negus, Spanish Civil War, General Miaja, romping in, oh, the world-theatre seen at a glance exhibiting many-coloured movements for the eye's, the ear's and the soul's ...
... Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya. In Bengali Meghnadbodh. In Italian Dante's Divine Comedy and Tasso's (I have forgotten the name for the moment 138 ) are in the epic cast. In Greek of course Homer, in Latin Virgil. There are other poems which attempt the epic style, but are not among the masterpieces. There are also primitive epics in German and Finnish (Nibelungenlied, Kalevala)— Our vaccination list is ...
... enjoyment of pleasure in the grossest and the most materialistic way, pleasure for the sake of pleasure. The fount of tears pent up in the core of every transient object ("sunt lacrymae rerum"), so said Virgil, the great poet of Europe. The artistic mind of Europe derives its inspiration from there. The Indian consciousness even after accepting the material objects could not completely exhaust itself in ...
... resolution of all problems, the attainment of divine perfection. It is for you to enter and find for yourself the final consolation. Even so I am reminded of the great poet and seer Dante who was led by Virgil to the formidable door on which was inscribed in flaming letters the terrible heart-rending line: "Give up all hope, you who enter here." It is the door to eternal hell. But I bring ...
... the rhythm of higher levels. To oppose the force of gravitation, to move ceaselessly towards purer and luminous heights of being. and consciousness, that is Tapasya, Askesis, true asceticism. Virgil, the great poet of a diviner order in human life, expressed the idea most beautifully and aptly in those well-known lines, one of the characteristic passages showing his genius at its best: ...
... slowly be led into the mysteries of the highet Realisation of tears. The Roman poet spoke of the easy descent down the cliffs to the river : Facilis descensus Avernil. Easy is the descent to Avernus ( Virgil: Aeneid, II.126) The realisation aimed at demands a wholesale change, an integral transformation; it does not rest content with a partial success, an attainment on one level, in one portion ...
... when of its own accord It unveils itself: Page 161 Yamevai ṣ a v ṛṇ ute tena labhya ḥ (Katha: 2.23) The actual function or role of personal effort is that of a guide, like Virgil taking Dante through Hell and Purgatory and then arriving at the frontier of Paradise and there entrusting him into the hands of Beatrice. It is to give the preliminary experiences, initiate into the ...
... Vedas, the, 149, 190,272, 276 –Rigveda, 1O3n, 105, 129, 132, 139, 141, 143-6, 152 –Samaveda, 152 –Tajurveda, 152 Venus, 297 Vidyapati, 156-7 Virgil, 73n. –Aeneid, 73n. WORDSWORTH, 51 –Poems if the Imagination, "To a Skylark", 51n. World War II, 13 YAJNAVALKYA, RISHI, 49-56 ...
... one to do it? SRI AUROBINDO (with a surprised humorous frown) : How? I don't know how. One simply does it! CHAMPAKLAL (interrupting the talk) : My eyes always remain watery. SRI AUROBINDO: Virgil had eyes like that, while Horace used to breathe hard. Once Mycaenas, the great patron of literature in the reign of Augustus Caesar, was sitting between the two poets and said, "I am sitting between ...
... is the name of the man who releases the inmost potency of that literature, and who marks at the same time the height to which its creative genius has attained or perhaps can ever attain. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe and Camoens, Firdausi in Persian and Kalidasa in classical Sanskrit, are such names – numina, each being the presiding deity, the godhead born full-armed out of ...
... One is simply amazed at the enormous pains he has taken to raise Savitri to his ideal of perfection. I wonder if any other poet can be compared with him in this respect. He gave me the example of Virgil who, it seems, wrote six lines in the morning, and went on correcting them during the rest of the day. Even so, his Aeneid runs not even half the length of the first three Books of Savitri . Along ...
... also says: the highest is visible only when of its own accord It unveils itself: Yamevaisa_ vrnute tena labhyah ² The actual function or role of personal effort is that of a guide, like Virgil taking Dante through Hell and Purgatory and then arriving at the frontier of Paradise and there entrusting him into the hands of Beatrice. It is to give the preliminary ¹ The Gita: II, 59 ...
... Kena, 272 Urvasie, 390-1 VAISHNAVA, 183,265 Vaishnavism, 183 Varuna, 189,318-9, 369 Vedanta, 181, 197 Vedas, the, 188, 294, 330-1, 357, 369, 371 Villon, François, 338n Virgil, 284 Vishnu, 106, 183-4, 358 Vivekananda, 349 Vrindavan, 183, Vyom, 280, 331 WORDSWORTH, 257n – Ode on the Intimations Immortality", 257n Wu Wei, 144 YAMA, 400 ...
... eternity, which was vibrating beforehand and continues to vibrate long afterward, like the echo of another voyage behind this one: Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. This line by Virgil, which Sri Aurobindo has cited as foremost among inspirations of an overmental origin, owes its overmental quality not to the meaning of the words but to the rhythm that precedes the words and follows ...
... In a word, therefore, the hexameter has a chance of naturalisation in English only when a superlative poetic genius comes forward, takes in his firm grip the noble instrument fashioned by Homer and Virgil, adjusts the keys a little and the strings, and plays on the hoary instrument a rich modern note, holding in a charmed easy balance the twin pulls of law and impulse, achieving an yet unaccomplished ...
... Grace, demonstrates the possibility of the death of Death and projects mans future in a changed and transformed earth. Might we not, then, salute the author of Savitri - as the poets salute Virgil in Dante's poem Onorate l'altissimo peota : Honour of Highest Eminence, honour the Ultimate Poet!* * Cf. the American poet D.R. Cameron's tribute to Savitri: ...the mantra's bard ...
... ignorance of mind, life and matter, its Purgatorio in the ascent to the true knowledge of the so-called Supermind and its Paradiso in the ineffable mysteries of Satchidananda. His spiritual guides, his Virgil and Beatrice, are the Rig Veda and the Bhagavad Gita 62 An English critic, G. Wilson Knight, likewise writes: "In reading Sri Aurobindo's colossal work of mystical philosophy, ...
... epic poetry, the Indian epic poems were fashioned to serve a greater and completer national and cultural function... . 43 Sri Aurobindo finds in Kalidasa a poet who ranks with Milton and Virgil, but with Page 505 "a more subtle and delicate spirit and touch in his art than the English, a greater breath of native power informing and vivifying his execution than the Latin ...
... intemperate use is one of the great beauties of the Greek poetical style. When the Romans came into contact with Greek literature, their earlier poets tried to introduce this faculty into Latin and even Virgil describes the sea as velivolum , sail-flying, i.e. with sails flying over it like the wings of birds through the air, but the usage was too contrary to the Latin genius to succeed. Not only did the ...
... perhaps for lack of space. The title "Envoi" was given when a new edition of Songs to Myrtilla was brought out in 1923. The Latin epigraph is from the Appendix Vergiliana (poems once ascribed to Virgil, but more likely by a contemporary), Catalepton, Carmen 5, lines 8–11.The following translation of these lines is by Joseph J. Mooney ( The Minor Poems of Vergil [Birmingham, 1916]): ...
... At the Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo 561 August 15—Sri Aurobindo's Birthday 52 Avatar 453 Bard 411 Beatitude 476 Beatrice Missions Virgil to Guide Dante 502 Beau Geste 542 Beauty's Parting 246 Beggar-palms 714 Beginning of an Autobiography 519 Behind Man's Form 303 ...
... representative to the ceremony. Francesca and Paolo fell in love. Once the husband came suddenly and surprised them in bed. In his rage he severed the necks of both of them with his sword. Dante, guided by Virgil, meets their souls in the second circle of Hell, and Francesca tells him their story.) "My land of birth is seated on the shore Whither in quest of peace the Po descends And all ...
... "It is a very good poem—perhaps a little diffuse and wanting in grip, but the thought and expression have a certain beauty in them and the close is very fine." (1936) Beatrice Missions Virgil... "It gives the satisfaction of a certain quiet adequacy." Nirvana "It is very beautiful—quite inspired and perfect." (25.7.36) Paradox "It is fine ...
... And the azure hungers drown in a drunken orb; The Abysm is the belly of the prostitute. Grandeurs are dumb and misery has no muse; Homeric laughters crack through the hyena's teeth, Virgil drops tears of things through a crocodile And Dante climbs from the pit to pap and mouth! Only some glances parted by lids that quiver Catch the Soul pinking through the world-vast sleep ...
... action); vital mind (as in Kalidasa and Shakespeare, where the vibrant play, delicate or vehement, of sensation, passion, emotion is directly expressed); intellectual mind (as in Vyasa, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante and Milton, where the poetic vision markedly brings out thought-values of whatever is caught up from subjective or objective existence). The Future Poetry would be written from those rarer ...
... stretches to the stars are Lucretius and Sri Aurobindo. In Book I of De Rerum Natura Lucretius promises to reveal the ultimate realities of heaven and the gods. Applauding this attempt of his Virgil, in his Georgics, identifies him as the poet "who hath availed to know the causes of things and hath laid all fears and immitigable Fate and the roar of hungry Acheron under his feet." 2 Sri ...
... "Sunlit Mountain", which he aspires to scale but is barred by three beasts, — a leopard, a lion, a wolf (wicked habits). He is about to turn back in despair when a mysterious figure, the ghost of Virgil, sent by three heavenly Ladies — the Blessed Virgin St. Lucia and Beatric (the poet's own beloved)— accost him, promising that he could lead him there. Dante follows. The journey takes them through ...
... 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 ...
... has been continually developing, both with regard to the subject matter, manner and form. This can be seen from the remark of a critic who says: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the purpose." Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, it is clear that the epic has not been a stereotyped form of literary expression throughout history. ...
... is simply amazed at the enormous pains he has taken to raise Savitri to his ideal of perfection. I wonder if any other poet can be compared with him in this respect. He gave me the example of Virgil who, it seems, wrote six lines in the morning and went on correcting them during the rest of the day. Even so, his Aeneid runs not even half the length of the first three Books of Savitri. Along ...
... Poetry. It is too subtle, too refined, — it is not in the mind or through the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed. And men have the audacity to compare it with the work of Virgil or Homer and to find it inferior. They do not understand, they cannot Page 47 understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. ...
... by the glory of the Guru’s grace, by his lustrous majesty, krupeche vaibhava , that he has been able to accomplish this task, a task of such difficulty as was there to found the Roman race—to adapt Virgil. The Guru’s forbearance is that of the earth who ungrudgingly and tirelessly upholds the movable and immovable objects; from his ambrosia does the moon give soothing coolness to the world; his bright ...
... Heehs as follows: “As a classical scholar, Aravinda was participating in an educational system whose traditions went back to the Renaissance. To master Greek and Latin, to read Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, to absorb the culture of classical Greece and Rome – this was considered the proper training of an English gentleman. And what one learned in the classroom and lecture hall was only part ...
... people's rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from whoever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catullus, Horace? They did a good deal of inventing or of transferring—introducing Greek metres into Latin, for example. I can't spot a precedent in modern European literature ...
... medicine, but there it is. Incidentally, I am more convinced than ever that you lived and wrote and sighed ('I am between tears and sighs', said Maecenas as he sat between the weak and watery-eyed Virgil and the aesthetic Horace) under Augustus Caesar. You have kept the spirit and turn and most even of the manner. "Your 'epistolary frivolity' was all right. There is laughter in the Kingdom of Heaven ...
... them among the greatest creators." Among the latter, Sri Aurobindo makes three rows: First row - Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki, Vyasa. Second row - Dante, Kalidasa, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton. Third row - Goethe. In Sri Aurobindo's view, Dante and Kalidasa would rank beside those in the first row except that they do not have enough of "a kind of elemental demiurgic ...
... and reveal to us the secret benefit which always sits smiling in the core of every Page 278 misfortune - hidden with its sweetness and light behind what Sri Aurobindo interpreting Virgil calls "the touch of tears in mortal things". I am telling you these paradoxical matters not by a flight of ingenious theological theory. It is my very pulses that are beating out truths to you. I have ...
... ensure speech in the "inmost way", so the Divine, the Infinite, the Eternal, the essential One do not need to be indicated for the mode of word and rhythm to be the Spirit's own. The most famous line of Virgil - Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt - which is untranslatable with a truly effective literalness but to which a literal a peu pres is C. Day Lewis's Tears in the nature ...
... 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 e1ite. At the sheer top there was nobody except Homer, Shakespeare, Valmiki and Vyasa. ...
... itself a fuller language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the 1 In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has brought in Vyasa's line thus: some ...
... would not be the ghastly gap that it is. All our splendours are made of fragile stuff: they carry within them a seed of their own perishing: they are instinct with misfortune and mortality. Did not Virgil cry, sunt lacrimae rerum - 'there are tears of things'? Did not Nashe lament: Brightness falls from the air, Queens have died young and fair, Dust hath closed Helen's eye. Has not ...
... Aurobindonian grand style from the Miltonic. Yet a very sensitive perception can feel that there passes through the Aurobindonian a faint quiver of beauty, a secret breath of sweetness, a touch part Virgil part Shakespeare and part Spenser, which the Miltonic with its austerer accent has all but lost to power and greatness. Not that Milton's passage is the least bit inferior in poetic quality ...
... Lost: we have also the sense of their very presence in the temper and texture of the poem. It is as though the oceanic sweep of Homer pulsed through Milton's arteries, the broad even river-flow of Virgil ran in his veins, the concentrated titanism of Aeschylus made his bone and marrow, the grandiose passion of Lucretius tensed his tissues, the sweetly intense severity of Dante thrilled and toned his ...
... the silly theory that Homer is the name of half a dozen different hands that have pooled their works - silly because one Homer is already a mighty freak difficult enough in the economy of Nature. Virgil rarely intruded upon his story: once only he breaks out into a personal cry, a glorious passage all Latinists have by heart: "Fortunati ambo!..." 5 Dante is more felt in his work and that is ...
... attitude of a classical poet, but the vital substance of them is, I think, not misrepresented. It would be interesting to observe how far they recur in other epics. C. M. Bowra's study, From Virgil to Milton, might be helpful. The table of contents reproduced in my catalogue from his book prompts me to - but no! I won't say to what it prompts me. Enough of these leaps: I must draw myself back ...
... difference will become evident if we make a simple comparison with Homer and Dante or even with the structural power, much less inspired and vital than theirs, but always finely aesthetic and artistic, of Virgil. Poetry may be intellectual, but only in the sense of having a strong intellectual strain in it and of putting forward as its aim the play of imaginative thought in the service of the poetical int ...
... understood and therefore we find even poets of great power attempting Page 34 to set philosophic systems to music or even much more prosaic matter than a philosophic system, Hesiod and Virgil setting about even a manual of agriculture in verse! In Rome, always a little blunt of perception in the aesthetic mind, her two greatest poets fell a victim to this unhappy conception, with results ...
... altered—Why not? One can change out of recognition—Never—Yes, probably—Very little—No, I don't see anything—No—I don't say that, but I can trace nothing—Whose—He has, I understand, been identified with Virgil, & at any rate he has the Virgilean soul.. He is French, also, but a little of the Celtic Italian type—The Celtic type is dreaming artistic impulsive delicate intuitional a little formless; the Italian ...
... pen to paper but with these the inspiration is either not of a high order or quite unequal in its level. Again there are some who try to give it a habit of coming by always writing at the same time; Virgil with his nine Page 10 lines first written, then perfected every morning, Milton with his fifty epic lines a day, are said to have succeeded in regularising their inspiration. It is, I suppose ...
... people's rhythms and polishing them up to perfection, just as Shakespeare stole all his plots from wherever he could find any worth stealing. But all the same, if that applies to Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, what about Alcaeus, Sappho, Catallus, Horace? they did a good deal of inventing or of transferring—introducing Greek metres into Latin, for example. I can't spot a precedent in modern European literature ...
... hearts touched by human transience. A somewhat freer version which, according to Sri Aurobindo, is "very fine" yet "has a density of colour which is absent from the bare economy and direct force Virgil manages to combine with his subtle and unusual turn of phrase" is: Haunted by tears is the world and our hearts by the touch of things mortal. (K.D.S) 2 Leopardi's original has one different ...
... 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 intermittendy and six wholly to his Divina Commedia, Milton at least eight to Paradise Lost and Goethe spread the writing of his ...
... itself a fuller language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda have this inspiration. It is a poetry 'thick inlaid with patines of bright gold' or welling ...
... Vikramāditya of Ujjayinī, 481, 501-3,601,602 Vikramaputra, 502 Vincent, Father Hugues, v Vindhyasakti, 11, 12, 13,192,522 Vipāśa (Hyphasis, Beas), 175 Virasena, 594 Virgil: Georgics. 174 Vishnu, 142 Vishnu Purāna, 10, 11,91, 103, 105, 106, 107, 204,206.274,522 Vishnu-dhvaja, 398 Vishnugupta. 486,487,494 Vishnukada Chutukulānda Sātakarni ...
... is the one voiced by Francesca of Rimini to Dante: ...the greatest of all woes Is to remember days of happiness In misery - as well your sage guide knows. The guide, of course, is Virgil with his "sense of tears in earthly things" as Matthew Arnold puts it, Tennyson, in a lovely poem of nine-foot lines attempting to echo the Latin hexameter, hails him: Thou majestic in thy sadness ...
... unforced to grieve And help by calm the swaying wheels of life And the long restlessness of transient things And the trouble and passion of the unquiet world. 16 Homer and Virgil combine in an Aurobindonian tertium quid: Bear; thou shall find at last thy road to bliss. Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives. 17 The descent as of a beatific Beatrice ...
... epics, but how rare they are! Hundreds of long poems are attempted but most of them come to nothing. It is once in a thousand years that there arises a Homer. Once in another thousand years or so a Virgil comes on. Then after a millennium a Dante appears, and centuries pass before a Milton and a Sri Aurobindo work poetic miracles. The number of epic poets is such that we can count them on the fingers ...
... in antiquity and merit. 47 Palamedes a Greek warrior in the Trojan War, exposed a discreditable trick on the part of Odysseus, who by forged evidence got him executed for treason (Virgil, Aeneid ii. 811f). 48 Ajax expected to be awarded the arms of Achilles, which were supposed to pass, after their owner's death, to the next bravest of the Greeks; but the generals ...
... after Homer in antiquity and merit. Palamedes a Greek warrior in the Trojan war, exposed a discreditable trick on the part of Odysseus, who by forged evidence got him executed for treason (Virgil, Aeneid ii. 81 If). Ajax expected to be awarded the arms of Achilles, which were supposed to pass, after their owner's death, to the next bravest of the Greeks; but the generals Agamemnon ...
... SRI AUROBINDO: Range? What does he mean by range? If he means a certain largeness of vision, then Shelley does not have it. Homer, Shakespeare, the Ramayana and the Mahabhara have range. But neither Virgil nor Milton has range in the same measure. Their range is not so great. Dante's range too is partial. PURANI : Abercrombie says that although Goethe has range his hero Faust begins as a character ...
... He engaged several pundits and he had the inborn poetic faculty. PURANI: Besides, he was a linguist; he knew many European languages. SRI AUROBINDO: Oh yes! You can see the influence of Homer, Virgil and Tasso in his writings. DR. MANILAL: I asked Nirod if he was having experiences. He said, "No, my work is now in the physical." I asked, "What about mind and vital?" "Oh, all that is finished ...
... checking my mirth, "Champaklal burst into laughter." Sri Aurobindo: Oh, so it was Vishnu's Ananda that descended! Later on, Champaklal said, "My eyes always remain watery." Sri Aurobindo: Virgil had eyes like that, while Horace used to breathe hard. Once Mycaenas, the great patron of literature in the reign of Augustus Caesar, was sitting between the two poets and remarked, "I am sitting between ...
... Roman did not indulge in the loftier and subtler activities of the higher or intuitive mind; his was applied intelligence and its characteristic turn found expression in law and order and governance. Virgil was a representative poet of the race; finely sensitive and yet very self-conscious – earth-bound and mind-bound – as a creative artist: a clear and careful intelligence with an idealistic imagination ...
... 217-18, 221 2, 242, 247, 249, 272, 276, 281, 296 Vedic Age, 241 . Venizelos,239 Venus, 177 Versailles Treaty, 106 Vibhisana, 298 Vibhutis, 390 Virgil, 197,211,375 -Ae1Ulid, 375n Virochana, 288, 376 Vishnu, 133, 277 Vwekananda, 56, 59, 154, 161, 165,396 Voltaire, 16, 50, 212 . WAGNER, sa ...
... final limit, his love overcame 1 Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Ed. James Hastings), Vol. IV, p. 411. Page 5 him. He looked round and lost her for ever' (Virgil, Georg. iv). 1 In India we have similar accounts in the- mythical restoration of life to Satyavan through Savitri's intercession with Yama, the Lord of Death, and to Lakhindar as a result of ...
... subject, it depends on how you treat it. The epic tone can be used very well for it, but it must not be pitched too high, as if one were speaking of Gods and Rishis and great heroes as in Homer and Virgil or in Meghnadbodh or similar poems, so the river swelling in echo 161 of the lamentation of one who is an ordinary woman is out of place. The possibility of epic treatment lies in the subject, the ...
... It takes me usually a day or two days to write and perfect one or three days even, or if very inspired, I get two short ones out, and have perhaps to revise the next day. Another poet will be like Virgil writing nine lines a day and spending all the rest of his time polishing and polishing. A fourth will be like Monomohan, as I knew him, setting down half lines and fragments and taking 2 weeks or 2 ...
... too refined, — it is not in the mind or by the mind, it is in meditation that Savitri is revealed. And men have the audacity to compare it and find it inferior in inspiration to that of a Virgil or a Homer. They do not understand, they cannot understand. What do they know? Nothing at all. And it is useless to try to make them understand. It will be known what it is, but in a distant future ...
... Roman did not indulge in the loftier and subtler activities of the higher or intutive mind; his was applied intelligence and its characteristic turn found expression in law and order and governance. Virgil was a representative poet of the race, finely sensitive and yet very self-conscious —earth-bound and mind-bound—as a creative artist: a clear and careful intelligence with an idealistic imagination ...
... higher levels. To oppose the force of gravitation, to move ceaselessly towards purer and luminous heights of being and consciousness, that is Tapasya, Askesis, true asceticism. Page 191 Virgil, the great poet-of a diviner order in human life, expressed the idea most beautifully and aptly in those well- known lines, one of the characteristic passages showing his genius at its best: ...
... Gone", 8On Vayu, 166 Vedas, the, 9, 13-14, 21, 27-9, 37, 42, 104, 162, 166, 278, 281 -Rig Veda, 13n., 18n.,26, 30,36, 42-5n., 157, 160, 163-6n., 184n., 220 -"Ode to Darkness", 220 Virgil, 53, 85, 93 Vishnu, 30-1, 278 Vishwamitra,162 Visva Bharati, 228 Vivekananda, 103-5, 241, 253-4, 299 -From Colombo to Almora, 103 Voltaire, 85, 286 Vyasa, 39, 58, 62, ...
... -Swetaswatara, 68n. VAIKUNTHA,128 Valmiki,209 Varma, Ravi, 420 Varona, 207 Vedas, the, 133, 151, 239 -Rig Veda, 133, 160n Vedanta, 85 Victoria, Queen, 418 Virgil, 107,203,209 -Aeneid, 1O7n. 154, 178, 207, Vishnu, 58, 208 Vivekananda, 141,300 Voltaire, 99 WORDSWORTH, 119, 132, 195n. -Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, 119n. ...
... calvary of the Divine lay precisely here: it is due to this sense of separation, an individual exclusive self-existence prevailing in his children, issues of his own body. The ¹ Virgil: Aeneid, Book II, v. 126 FaciliS descensus Averni... Page 73 units in the cosmic body of the Divine in the Ignorance are indeed ignorant; ...
... It is not eternal and can be mastered and got over: it is of the category of the Sankhyan or Buddhistic dukhatrayabhighata – for that matter even the lacrimae rerum (tears inherent in things) of Virgil* are not eternal. But the new Anguish spoken of is a strange phenomenon: it is causeless and it is eternal. It has sprung unbidden with no ------------------------ * Sunt lacrimae rerum ...
... mortality, a god solely immortality, man a bridge between the two, partaking of both. What makes mortality exquisite and poignant – as sacred indeed as immortality – is that which touched the great poet Virgil who found for it a mantra, almost a mantra, fairly well-known: "lacrimae rerum" – tears of things. There is in mortality a spring that brings forth tear-drops. There is a pathos in the very constitution ...
... bring in the universal in the image itself, the Infinite has to be made living and visible – that is the exclusive art of Page 43 his genius. For example, take the famous line from Virgil Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem (Such huge labour was needed to found the Roman race.) Here we find the pride of a particular nation displayed – the dangers and difficulties ...
... strength and nobility have been brought out by Madhusudan. He has not the power and depth of thought, but there is in his style and manner something reminiscent of that "stepping of the goddess" in Virgil. One hears as if the rumbling of the clouds in the opening lines of Meghnadbadh: Page 94 We have of course moved a long way off from Madhusudan, and from Rabindranath as ...
... resolution of all problems, the attainment of divine perfection. It is for you to enter and find for yourselves the final consolation. Even so I am reminded of the great poet and seer Dante who was led by Virgil to the formidable door on which was inscribed in flaming letters the terrible heartrending line: Give up all hope, you who enter here. It is the door to eternal hell. But I bring you ...
... has been continually developing, both with regard to the subject matter, manner and form. This can be seen from the remark of a critic who says: "Homer fixes the type and way and artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; Milton perfects the pur- pose". Whether one agrees with this opinion or not, it is clear that the epic has not been a stereotyped form of literary expression throughout history. ...
... 458 Valmiki 243,340,341,384 Van Ruvsbroeck, Jan 326 Vasavadutla 47-49, 318 Vidula 12, 46, 458 Vidyapati 45 Vijayatunga J. 18 Virgil 33, 54, 309, 376, 380, 381, 383, 384, 395, 417 Vivekananda, Swami 4, 5,19 Viziers of Bassora, The 47, 49, 318 Vyasa 135,137,209,257,258,261,262, Wadia ...
... examples from world poetry of the overhead poignancy in thought, feeling, voice and rhythm: Sunt lacrimae rerum; 47 —Virgil Insano indegno mistero delle cose (The insane and ignoble mystery of things); 48 ...
... think you mean the Alexandrine. Disciple : Perhaps it is that. Sri Aurobindo : Plenty of people have written it. But this is dactylic hexameter, – the meter in which the epics of r and Virgil are written. It has a very fine movement and is very suitable for the epic. I have tried it and X and Y have seen and considered it a success. I remember just a few lines : – Old and alone he ...
... Books the centre of the action is the issue between Penthesilea and Achilles and the issue is not concluded in Book FX, which is itself extant only as a fragment. In the first Book of the Aeneid, Virgil makes Aeneas recall, among other episodes of the Trojan War: ...Penthesilea leading the crescent shields of The Amazons and storming through the melee like a fire, Her bare breast ...
... vanity and show," and ardently pleads for a higher quality - rather than a higher standard - of life. The prophet Muhammad, St. Francis, St. Banarasi Das who made a strong impression on Akbar, the poet Virgil, were living examples of simplicity and austerity. The advance of science and technology has in practice meant the galloping pace of consumerism, the proliferation of the expensive inessentials and ...
... Evelyn 61, 96 U.N.O. 446 Vasudha Shah 255, 265ff, 287, 674, 691, 699, 817 Vaun McPheeters 255, 296-7 Venkataraman, K.S. 258, 351, 377 Vijayatunga, J. 461, 535 Vincent de Paul, Saint 551-2 Virgil 485, 633 Visvamitra, Rishi 92 Vivekananda, Swami 15 Werner Haubrich (Saumitra) 674 ,. The Wherefore of the Worlds 110, 120, 127 Wilson, Margaret see Nishtha Wilson, President Woodrow 398 ...
... turned to Sri Aurobindo's culminating prose testament, The Supramental Manifestation. One way or another, the aim was to take the listeners to the inner countries of the Integral Yoga, rather like Virgil guiding Dante through the triple worlds in The Divine Comedy. It is seldom a sheerly sunlit path or the primrose path of easy success, for the invisible adverse forces are always around; but Grace ...
... new departure, and even breaks out into irregular blank verse in his ecstasy. "Then comes again the care-free heart of youth, the lines of trouble fade from the face, the empty pocket, like that of Virgil's traveller, becomes a cause for song, or like that of the schoolboy, a hoarding place for curious and assorted treasure." We are sorry to hear that the Englishman 's pocket is empty, but we think ...
... include the most different kinds of style—Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his 'fields of sleep', Shakespeare's 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's 'Sunt lacrimae rerum' and his 'O passi graviora'. "Homer's passage translated into English would be perfectly ordinary. He gets the best part of his effect from his rhythm. Translated it ...
... most different kinds of style—Keats' "magic casements", Wordsworth's [ lines on ] Newton and his "fields of sleep", Shakespeare's "Macbeth has murdered sleep", Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's "Sunt lachrimae rerum" and his "O passi graviora". 16 September 1934 You write, in regard to a poem of mine, "it is difficult to draw the line" between the illumined and inspired styles. Was ...
... seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it, Bēde kat' oulumpoio karēnōn chōömenos kēr (He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart). 1 Or Virgil's Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis, 2 or Milton's Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable. What is there in these lines that is not in ...
... Theme In a perceptive essay on 'The Odyssey and the Western World', George de E Lord has tried to delineate Odysseus as a middle term between the Achilles of the Iliad and the Aeneas of Virgil's poem. Between Hamlet, father, the old-world heroic hero who smote the sledded Polacks on the ice, and Horatio the self-poised humanist who is not passion's slave, Shakespeare places Hamlet, the ...
... smashing through the world into universes beyond while the last words give a most august and formidable impression of godhead. Would you consider this line of Dante's as miraculously inevitable as Virgil's "O passi graviora"? e venni dal martiro a questa pace That is rather the adequate inevitable. Page 188 And, is it possible to achieve a prose-inevitability—with rhythm and ...
... preface if I completed the translation, a preface where, he said, he would take up the question of the individual versus the State." Nolini never completed the translation. "I began my Latin with Virgil's Aeneid, and Italian with Dante." I do not know with what books he began his Spanish and German lessons! Nolini knew well those two languages also. And Sri Aurobindo taught him Sanskrit. He learnt ...
... Othello's Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate… (Othello, V. ii. 324) Or Hamlet's ... the rest is silence... (Hamlet, V. ii. 372) Or when Virgil's Orpheus says: Heu sed non tua palmas... These are the immense outpourings from the depth of the Page 140 human heart. But the moderns tend to give such feelings ...
... 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... 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 with Milton's almost exact translation ...
... 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... 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 with Milton's almost exact translation of the ...
... essentially by a feeling of its "Presence" as permeating whatever one refers to. From the few passages I have gone through I get a sense of "tears in the nature of things", as C. Day Lewis translates Virgil's "Sunt lacrimae rerum". These tears are inevitable as long as things yield only a glimmering evidence of the Great One. Merely to experience things as symbols is not enough. The reality symbolised ...
... bear And tread the dolorous way. I should like to know if any mystic has had more sense of "the terror and the tears at the heart of things", as Nair finely puts it with reminiscence of Virgil's "Sunt lacrimae rerum" ("Tears in the nature of things") and Wilfred Owen's "heartbreak at the heart of things", than he who talked of having undergone more difficulties than any spiritual seeker before ...
... power is rough rather than harmonious. His muscular vigour, his strong nervous rhythm, have not the serene lift by which Homer's elemental enthusiasm expressed itself, the godlike elegance in which Virgil's dignified pensiveness found voice, the soaring yet mountain-secure intensity to which Dante shaped his compulsive vision, the smiling certainty of vast wing-stroke which upbears Milton through all ...
... the translation, a preface where, he said, he would take up the question of the individual versus the State. Whether I did complete the translation I cannot now recollect. I began my Latin with Virgil's Aeneid, and Italian with Dante. I have already told you about my French, there I started with Moliere. I should tell you what one gains by this method, at least what has been my personal experience ...
... completed the translation, a preface where, he said, he would take up the question of the individual versus the state. Whether I did complete the translation I cannot now recollect. I began my Latin with Virgil's Aeneid, and Italian with Dante. I have already told you about my French, there I started with Molière. I should tell you what one gains by this method, at least what has been my personal experience ...
... 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, ...
... 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 ...
... oixun Eikhon apeiresien... This may be hexametricised in English: Son of Saturnine Zeus was I, yet have I suffered Infinite pain... Then there is the poignant phrase in Virgil's Aeneid: Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore. Again a hexametrical version would be: Forth did they stretch their hands with love of the shore beyond them. Perhaps ...
... of style —Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his Page 100 'fields of sleep', Shakespeare's 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's 'Sunt lacrimae rerum' and his 'O passi graviora'. "Homer's passage translated into English would be perfectly ordinary. He gets the best part of his effect from his rhythm. Translated it ...
... adapted to their age and mental development. That is why, when I took up Greek, I began straightaway with Euripides' Medea, and my second book was Sophocles' Antigone.... I began my Latin with Virgil's Aeneid, and Italian with Dante.... I should tell you what one gains by this method, at least what has been my personal experience. One feels as if one took a plunge into the inmost core of the language ...
... whole of clear liquidity melodiously surging up: a sense of welling tears is exquisitely conveyed. The s And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain Page 162 and the art of Virgil's Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt, which C Day Lewis has englished: Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience. But Sri Aurobindo has a language ...
... kind of plagiarism which is often practised by poets, even by very great ones, and most legitimately too so long as one either improves the matter adopted or clothes it in a novel hue and harmony. Virgil's quarrying from Homer is well-known, so also are Chaucer's beautiful imitation of the Italians and Milton's recutting the gems he discovered in the splendour of the Classics. Wordsworth's finely intonated ...
... seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it, Be de kat' oulumpolo karenon choomenos ker (He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart). 1 Or Virgil's Disce, puer, virtutem ex ine verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis, 2 or Milton's Fall'n Cherub, to be weak, is miserable. 1 Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo has ...
... double secret of this line in which a world-woe finds tongue, with an art equalling in its own way the art of Shakespeare's And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain and the art of Virgil's Page 286 Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt, which C. Day Lewis has Englished: Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience. ...
... Whose "glorious beauty stained with gold" the poet will behold no more? Who is Nisa, and who is Mopsus for whom she has forsaken the lover in The Lover's complaint (based in the main on Virgil's Eighth Eclogue): Page 41 O plaintive, murmuring reed, renew thy strain; O solace anguish yet again. I thought Love soft as velvet sleep, Sweeter than dews nocturnal breezes ...
... When he was preparing Love and Death for publication Page 570 in 1920, he dropped both the dedication and the introduction. The first of the two Latin quotations, from Virgil's Georgics (3.8 - 9), may be translated: "A path . . . by which I too may lift me from the dust, and float triumphant through the mouths of men". The second, from Horace's Satires (2.7.21, with ...
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