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Sri Aurobindo: “Ahana and Other Poems” WHAT is the world that Sri
Aurobindo sees and creates? Poetry is after all passion. By passion I do not
mean the fury of emotion nor the fume of sentimentalism, but what lies behind
at their source, what lends them the force they have – the sense of the
"grandly real," the vivid and pulsating truth. What then is the thing
that Sri Aurobindo has visualised, has endowed with a
throbbing life and made a poignant reality? Victor Hugo said: Attachez Dieu
au gibet, vous avez la croix – Tie God to the gibbet, you
have the cross. Even so, infuse passion into a thing most prosaic, you create
sublime poetry out of it. What is the dead matter that has found life and glows
and vibrates in Sri Aurobindo's passion? It is something which appears to many poetically intractable, not amenable to aesthetic
treatment, not usually, that is to say, nor in the supreme manner. Sri
Aurobindo has thrown such a material into his poetic fervour and created a
sheer beauty, a stupendous reality out of it. Herein lies
the greatness of his achievement. Philosophy, however divine, and in spite of ¹ James H. Cousins in his New Ways in English
Literature describes Sri Aurobindo as "the philosopher as poet."
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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
is a passionate visionary, and not his Paradiso (where he has put in
more thought-power) that marks the nee plus ultra of his poetic
achievement. And
yet what can be more poetic in essence than philosophy, if by philosophy we
mean, as it should mean, spiritual truth and spiritual realisation? What else
can give the full breath, the integral force to poetic inspiration if it is not
the problem of existence itself, of God, Soul and Immortality, things that
touch, that are at the very root of life and reality? What can most concern
man, what can strike the deepest fount in him, unless it is the mystery of his
own being, the why and the 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 that what we obtain in this way is humanity
in its lower degrees, its surface formulations, at its minimum magnitude. We
do not say that poets have never sung of God and Soul and things transcendent.
Poets have always done that. But what I say is this that presentation of
spiritual truths, as they are in their own home, in other words, treated philosophically
and yet in a supreme poetic manner, has always been a rarity. We have, indeed,
in
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– the spiritual significance remains esoteric, is suggested, is a matter of
deduction. Sri Aurobindo has dealt with spiritual experiences in a different
way. He has not clothed them in human symbols and allegories, in images and
figures of the mere earthly and secular life: he presents them in their
nakedness, just as they are seen and realised. He has not sought to tone down
the rigour of truth with contrivances that easily charm and captivate the
common human mind and heart. Nor has he indulged like so many poet philosophers
in vague generalisations and colourless or too colourful truisms that do not
embody a clear thought or rounded idea, a radiant judgment. Sri Aurobindo has
given us in his poetry thoughts that are clear-cut, ideas beautifully chiselled
– he is always luminously forceful. Take
these Vedantic lines that in their limpidity and harmonious flow beat anything
found in the fine French poet Lamartine: It is He in
the sun who is ageless and deathless, And into
the When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness, He was
seated within it immense and alone.¹ or
these that contain the metaphysics of a spiritual life: King, not in vain. I knew the tedious bars That I
had fled, To be His arms whom I have sought; I saw How earth
was made Out of his being; I perceived the Law, The
Truth, the Vast, From which we came and which we are; I heard The ages
past Whisper their history, and I knew the Word That
forth was cast Into the unformed potency of things To build the suns. Through endless Space and on Time's iron wings A rhythm runs
¹ Sri Aurobindo: "Who".
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pursue, and till the strain's complete That now so moans And falters, we upon this greenness meet, That
measure tread.¹ or
take again such daring lines as: One from of old possessed Himself above Who was
not anyone nor had a form, Nor
yet was formless. Neither hate nor love Could limit His perfection, peace nor storm. He is, we cannot say; for
Nothing too Is His conception of
Himself unguessed. He dawns
upon us and we would pursue, But who has found Him or what arms possessed ?² This is
sheer philosophy, told with an almost philosophical bluntness – may be, but is
it mere philosophy and mediocre poetry? Once more listen to the Upanishadic
lines: Deep in the luminous
secrecy, the mute Profound of things, Where
murmurs never sound of harp or lute And no voice sings, Light is
not, nor our darkness, nor these bright Thunderings, In the
deep steady voiceless core of white And luminous bliss, The
sweet vast centre and the cave divine Called He
dwells within us all who dwells not in Aught that is.³ It
is the bare truth, "truth in its own home", as I have said already
using a phrase of the ancient sages, that is formulated
here without the prop of any external symbolism. There is no veil, no mist, no
uncertainty or ambiguity. It is clarity itself, an almost scientific exactness
and precision. In ¹ Sri Aurobindo: "The Rishi". ² "Parabrahman" . ³ "The Rishi".
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this there is something of the straightness and fullness of vision that
characterised the Vedic Rishis, something of their supernal genius which could
mould speech into the very expression of what is beyond speech, which could
sublimate the small and the finite into forms of the Vast and the Infinite.
Mark how in these aphoristic lines embodying a deep spiritual experience, the
inexpressible has been expressed with a luminous felicity: Delight
that labours in its opposite, Faints in the rose and
on the rack is curled.¹ or He made an
eager death and called it life, He stung
Himself with bliss and called it pain.² To humanise the Divine, that is what we all wish to do; for the Divine is too lofty for us and we cannot look full into his face. We cry and supplicate to Rudra, "O dire Lord, show us that other form of thine that is benign and humane". All earthly imageries we lavish upon the Divine so that he may appear to us not as something far and distant and foreign, but, quite near, among us, as one of us. We take recourse to human symbolism often, because we wish to palliate or hide the rigours of a supreme experience, not because we have no adequate terms for it. The same human or earthly terms could be used differently if we had a different consciousness. Thus the Vedic Rishis sought not to humanise the Divine, their purpose was rather to divinise the human. And their allegorical language, although rich in terrestrial figures, does not carry the impress and atmosphere of mere humanity and earthliness. For in reality the symbol is not merely the symbol. It is mere symbol in regard to the truth so long as we take our stand on the lower plane when we have to look at the truth through the symbol; but if we view it from the higher plane, from truth itself, it is no longer mere symbol but the very truth bodied forth. Whatever there is of symbolism on earth and its beauties, in sense and its enjoyments, is then transfigured into the expression of the truth, of the divinity itself. We then no longer speak in human language but in the language of the gods. We have been speaking of
philosophy and the philosophic ¹"Parabrahman". ² Ibid.
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But what are the exact implications of the words, let us ask again. They mean
nothing more – and nothing less – than the force of thought and the mass of
thought content. After all, that seems to be almost the whole difference
between the past and the present human consciousness in so far at least as it
has found expression in poetry. That element, we wish to point out, is precisely what the old-world poets lacked or did not care
to possess or express or stress. A poet meant above all, if not all in all,
emotion, passion, sensuousness, sensibility, nervous enthusiasm and imagination
and fancy: remember the classic definition given by Shakespeare of the poet Of imagination all compact.. . . The poet's eye, in a fine
frenzy rolling.¹ The heart and its urges, the vital and its surges, the physical impulses – it is these of which the poets sang in their infinite variations. But the mind proper, that is to say, the higher reflective ideative mind, was not given the right of citizenship in the domain of poetry. I am not forgetting the so-called Metaphysicals. The element of metaphysics among the Metaphysicals has already been called into question. There is here, no doubt, some theology, a good dose of mental cleverness or conceit, but a modern intellectual or rather rational intelligence is something other, something more than that. Even the metaphysics that was commandeered here had more or less a decorative value, it could not be taken into the pith and substance of poetic truth and beauty. It was a decoration, but not unoften a drag. I referred to the Upanishads, but these strike quite a different, almost an opposite line in this connection. They are in a sense truly metaphysical: they bypass the mind and the mental powers, get hold of a higher mode of consciousness, make a direct contact with truth and beauty and reality. It was Buddha's credit to have forged this missing link in man's spiritual consciousness, to have brought into play the power of the rational intellect and used it in support of the spiritual experience. That is not to say that he was the very first person, the originator who initiated the movement; but at least this seems to be true that in him and his authentic ¹ A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Sc 1.
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the movement came to the forefront of human consciousness and attained the
proportions of a major member of man's psychological constitution. We may
remember here that Socrates, who started a similar movement of rationalisation in his own way in Poetry
as an expression of thought-power, poetry weighted with intelligence and rationalised knowledge – that seems to me to be the end and
drive, the secret sense of all the mystery of modern technique. The combination
is risky, but not impossible. In the spiritual domain the Gita achieved this
miracle to a considerable degree. Still, the power of intelligence and reason
shown by Vyasa is of a special order: it is a sublimated function of the
faculty, something aloof and other-worldly – "introvert", a modern
mind would term it – that is to say, something a priori, standing in its
own authenticity and selfsufficiency. A modern
intelligence would be more scientific, let us use the word, more
matter-of-fact and sense-based: the mental light should not be confined in its
ivory tower, however high that may be, but brought down and placed at the
service of our perception and appreciation and explanation of things human and
terrestrial; made immanent in the mundane and the ephemeral, as they are
commonly called. This is not an impossibility. Sri
Aurobindo seems to have done the thing. In him we find the three terms of human
consciousness arriving at an absolute fusion and his poetry is a wonderful
example of that fusion. The three terms are the spiritual, the intellectual or
philosophical and the physical or sensational. The intellectual, or more
generally, the mental, is the intermediary, the Paraclete,
as he himself will call it later on in a poem¹ magnificently exemplifying the
point we are trying to make out the agent who negotiates, bridges and harmonises the two other firmaments usually supposed to be
antagonistic and incompatible. Indeed it would be wrong to associate any cold ascetic nudity to the spiritual body of Sri Aurobindo. His poetry is philosophic, abstract, no doubt, but every philosophy has its practice, every abstract thing its concrete application, – even as the soul has its body; and the fusion, not mere union, of the ¹ "Thought the Paraclete".
Page – 58 two is very characteristic in him. The deepest and unseizable flights of thought he knows how to clothe with a Kalidasian richness of imagery, or a Keatsean gusto of sensuousness: . . . . .O flowers, O delight on the tree-tops burning! Grasses his
kine have grazed and crushed by his feet in the
dancing! Yamuna flowing with song, through the greenness always advancing! You unforgotten remind. For his flute with its sweetness ensnaring Sounds in our ears in the night and our souls of their teguments baring Hales them out naked and absolute, out to his wood lands eternal, Out to his moonlit dances, his dalliance sweet and supernal;¹ And
it would be wrong too to suppose that there is want of sympathy in Sri
Aurobindo for ordinary humanity, that he is not susceptible to sentiments, to
the weaknesses, that stir the natural man. Take for example this line so
instinct with a haunting melancholy strain: Cold are your rivers of peace
and their banks are leafless and lonely. or, Come to our tangled sunbeams, dawn on our twilights and
shadows or
again, Skies of monotonous calm
and his stillness slaying the ages? All the tragedy, the entire pathos of human life is concentrated
in this line so simple, yet so grand: Son of man, thou hast crowned the
life with the flowers that are scentless, ¹ From
"Ahana" in Sri Aurobindo's Ahana and Other Poems. There is a later version of
the poem in Collected Poems and Plays, Vol II.
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the whole aspiration of striving mortality finds its echo in: A song not master of its note, a cry That
persevered into eternity.¹ And
what an amount of tenderness he has poured into his little poem on childhood, a
perfect piece of chiselled crystal, pure and translucent and gleaming with the
clear lines of a summer sky: O thou
golden image, Miniature
of bliss, Speaking sweetly, speaking meetly! Every
word deserves a kiss.² And yet, I
should say, in all this it is not mere the human that is of supreme interest,
but something which even in being human yet transcends it. And here, let me point out, the capital difference between the European or rather the Hellenic spirit and the Indian spirit. It is the Indian spirit to take stand upon divinity and thence to embrace and mould what is earthly and human. The Greek spirit took its stand pre-eminently on earth and what belongs to earth. In Europe Dante's was a soul spiritualised more than perhaps any other and yet his is not a Hindu soul. The utmost that he could say after all the experience of the tragedy of mortality was:
Io no piangeva, si dentro impietrai –³ I grieve
not, into a stone I grew within. We have in Sri Aurobindo a
passage parallel in sentiment, if not of equal poetic value, which will bear
out the contrast: My mind within grew holy, calm and still Like the snow. ¹ "Reminiscence." ² "A Child's
Imagination." ³ Inferno, xxxiii. 39.
Page – 60 However
spiritual a soul, Dante is yet bound to the earth, he has dominated perhaps but
not conquered. The
Greek sings of the humanity of man, the Indian the divinity of man. It is the Hellenic spirit that has
very largely moulded our taste and we have forgotten that an equally poetic
world exists in the domain of spiritual life, even in its very severity, as in
that of earthly life and its sweetness. And as we are passionate about the
earthly life, even so Sri Aurobindo has made a passion of the spiritual life.
Poetry after all has a mission; the phrase "Art for Art's sake" may
be made to mean anything. Poetry is not merely what is pleasing, not even what
is merely touching and moving but what is at the same time, inspiring,
invigorating, elevating. Truth is indeed beauty but it is not always the beauty
that captivates the eye or the mere aesthetic sense. And
because our Vedic poets always looked beyond humanity, beyond earth, therefore
could they make divine poetry of humanity and what is of earth. Therefore it
was that they were pervadingly so grandiose and
sublime and puissant. The heroic, the epic was their natural element and they
could not but express themselves in the grand manner. Sri Aurobindo has
the same outlook and it is why we find in him the ring of the old-world manner. Mark
the stately march, the fullness of voice, the wealth of imagery, the vigour of
movement of these lines: What though
it's true that the through the Flows? But the diamond shines on the cliff-side, jacinth and beryl Gleam in the crannies, sapphire, smaragdus the roadway bejewel, Down in the jaws of the savage mountains granite and cruel. See, how the coursers divine champ spirited pawing the mountains! Look, how the wide-pacing river of life from its far-off fountains Flows down mighty and broad like a war-horse brought from its manger
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61 Arching its neck as it
paces grand to the gorges of
danger. Headlong, o'ercome, with a stridulent
horror the river
descending Shudders
below into sunless depths, along chasms unending,– And the majestic sweep and
the wide rolling cadence of These wanderings of the
suns, these stars at play In the due measure that
they chose of old.. . . The superb and the right
imperial tone instinct with a concentrated force of Who art thou, warrior
armed gloriously Like the sun? Thy gait is
an empire and thine eye Dominion. This
is poetry salutary indeed if there were any. We are so often and so much
enamoured of the feminine languidness of poetry; the clear, the sane, the
virile, that is a type of poetry that our nerves cannot always or for long
stand. But there is poetry that is agréable and there is poetry that is grand,
as Sainte Beuve said. There are the pleasures of poetry and there are the
"ardours of poetry". And the great poets are always grand rather
than agréable, full of the ardours of poetry rat her than the pleasures
of poetry. And
if there is something in the creative spirit of Sri Aurobindo which tends more
towards the strenuous than the genial, the arduous than the mellifluous, and
which has more of the austerity of Vyasa than the easy felicity of Valmiki, however
it might have affected the ultimate value of his creation, according to
certain standards,¹ it has illustrated once more that ¹". . .it cannot be said that Aurobindo shows any organic
adaptation to music and melody. His thought is profound; his technical devices
are commendable; but the music that enchants or disturbs is not there.
Aurobindo is not another Tagore or Iqbal, or even Sarojini Naidu." – The Times
Literary Supplement,
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is not merely beauty but power, it is not merely sweet imagination but creative
vision – it is even the Rik, the mantra that impels
the gods to manifest upon earth, that fashions divinity in man.
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