Sri Aurobindo: A Poet by Aju Mukhopadhyay
Sri Aurobindo was a poet from his childhood, writing poetry in school magazines in England to his last days in Pondicherry. Up to a few days before his breathing last, he dictated hundreds of lines of Savitri in full speed and Norodbaran, his scribe disciple, wrote them in paper. Those were the last of his revisions of the epic poem, as we read it in Nirodbaran’s account of his stay with Sri Aurobindo during the last 12 years of his life. His production of poetry was to the extent of some 50000 lines including a little more than 23800 lines in Savitri.
On 31 August 1934, Dilip Kumar Roy received a letter from Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan of Andhra University, requesting for a statement from Sri Aurobindo for a book on ‘Contemporary British Philosophy’, adding that he was anxiously waiting for the write up. Dilip Kumar sent the letter to his Guru with a note. And on the back of the letter he received Sri Aurobindo’s reply wishing to be excused, to be conveyed suitably by Dilip. Among other things, the poet wrote, “And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher- although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the yoga and came to Pondicherry- I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher!” 1
From their childhood days in Manchester Grammer School, both Manmohan and his younger brother Arvind Ackroyd Ghose, used to contribute poems to school magazines, Ulela and Fox Family magazine. While studying the usual curriculum Aurobindo always read books outside it and wrote poems. As a student he was always busy with different work andstudies at the same time; the Tripos, the I. C. S., for scholarship and for activities as member of secret Indian organization besides secretarial work of Indian Majlis. Even as a student his time was full or turmoil. He wrote poetry out of his sheer love for it, for his attraction towards the Greek Muse and great English poets like Shelley, Keats and Coleridge. Close to the Victorian poets, he was influenced by Mathew Arnold, Lord Tennyson, Swinburne and Stephen Phillips. He was encouraged and influenced by his poet brother Manmohan Ghose and his friend Lawrence Binyon.
He began writing poetry on nature- flowers, streams, birds, sky and stars, etc. and on human love; those were sweet romantic lyrics. In them we get sometimes the young boys and girls of his time and place, in England:
Many a girl’s lips ruby-red
With their vernal honey fed
Happy mouths and soft cheeks flushed
With Love’s rosy sunlight blushed.
But quickly remembering that everything is short lived here, he added, towards the end of the poem-
Haste- a million is to pay-
Lest too soon the allotted day
End and we oblivious keep
Darkness and eternal sleep
Night by the Sea-pp.16-18
Though a whole ten lined poem where a maiden sleeps in her garden, guarded by the tall birch tree could be shown, I quote four lines from ‘A Thing Seen’, to relish the beauty of the whole.
The wind walked softly; silent moved a cloud
Listening; of all the tree no leaf was loud,
But guarded a divine expectant hush
Thrilled by the silence of a hidden thrush.
A Thing Seen-p.19
His patriotic heart wrote about the failed patriots of Ireland in grave-
Where sits he? On what high foreshadowing throne
Guarded by grateful hearts? Beneath this stone
He lies; this guerdon only Ireland gave,
A broken heart and an unhonoured grave.
His Jacet-p.11
Or about Chares Stewart Parnell on his death:
O pale and guiding light, now star unshaped,
Deliverer lately hailed, since by our lords
Most feared, most hated, hated because feared-
Charles Stewart Parnell-1891 p.15
Songs to Myrtilla, written between1890 to 1892, and Envoi was the result of his love for the Greek poetry and the influence of Greek Muse on him. It is narrative, dialogue between Glaucus and AE THON. With sights and sounds of sweet nature, it is a lyric like many others of this period, full of songs of love in life. But he was not fully satisfied with them as they did not satisfy his newly refined Indian mind. He published Songs to Myrtilla and other poems for private circulation after coming to Bombay. It was the first volume of his poetry book printed.
Love’s feet were on the sea
Where he dawned on me.
His wings were purple and very slow;
His voice was very sweet and very low;
His rose-lit cheeks, his eyes’ pale-bloom
Were sorrow’s anteroom;
Songs to Myrtilla-p.4
But the time for such sweet lyrical rhymes was over. He would not be there for long. Neither he would be able to prosecute his studies further nor would he indulge any idea of settling there. With all her heritage and resources Mother India called him; in time the Gaekwad of Baroda offered him a job in his Princely state. To his Hellenic Muse he said-
For in Sicilian olive-groves no more
Or seldom must my footprints now be seen,
Nor tread Athenian lanes, nor yet explore
Parnassus or thy voiceful shores, O Hippocrene.
Me from her lotus heaven Saraswati
Has called to regions of eternal snow
And Ganges pacing to the southern sea,
Ganges upon whose shores the flowers of Eden blow.
Envoi- p.28
And to his English Muse he said-
Mine is not Byron’s lightning spear,
Nor Wordsworth’s lucid strain
Nor Shelley’s lyric pain,
Nor Keats’, the poet without pear.
I by the Indian waters vast
Did glimpse the magic of the past,
And on the Oaten-pipe I play
Warps echoes of an earlier day.
To a Hero Worshipper-p.8
About these poems K. R. S. Iyenger opined, “Juvenile’ these poems may be, yet are they the ‘Juvenile’ poems of a truly exceptional talent that had won through a mastery of the classics of Greece and Rome, the master-key that unlocked the seamless treasuries of Western culture . . . . Naturally enough, these early poems snap Sri Aurobindo in various emotional and intellectual attitudes and reveal also his tightening craftsmanship in verse, making a significant record of the education and ideas, imagination and feelings, engendered by a purely European culture.” 2
Back in India, a youth of 20 and half years, as he set foot on Indian soil at Apolo Bunder in Bombay, a vast-calm descended on him which did last long with him. AS he settled in Baroda state, the movement of his life greatly changed. Service was his mainstay but his works spread laterally and vertically. Eventually he became the professor of English and French. Joining secret societies he became active in the liberation of the country, secretly. His thirst for Indian literature, and language pushed him to read more voraciously. This time was specially marked for studies of Indian epics, scriptures and classics in original Sanskrit language besides regional languages. The direct result was the translation of various Indian classics in English. Here he learnt Sanskrit, Bangla, Marathi, Gujerati and Hindi. He wrote political serials also, anonymously. Here he entered the spiritual life through pranayama to begin with from 1904. And writing poetry became a special preoccupation during the period. Short poems written during the period were Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Madhusudan Dutt, Goethe, A Doubt, Song, The Spring Child and many others. Some remarkable long dramatic and narrative poems based mainly on stories borrowed from Mahabharata were also created. Of them Urvasie and Love and Death are presage to his great epic creation, Savitri. In each of the three poems, either the hero or the heroine, leaves the earth or dies prematurely and his or her lover, by the force of love, demands the life of the dead from heaven or the King of Death and succeeds.
Urvasie is a tale of love between Urvasie, the nymph of heaven, the heavenly Apsara and Pururavus, a mortal king. The agony of Pururavus begins when the Gods call back his beloved to heaven. After long search, travail and travel through difficult passages, heaven accedes to his request and she comes back to earth with him to enjoy earthly life of love and fate.
In Love and Death, Ruru’s beloved Priyumvada (Pramadvura in Mahabharata, changed here for “I have substituted a name, Priyumvada, more manageable to the English tongue”, said Sri Aurobindo.), daughter of Maneka, a heavenly Apsara, dies untimely due to snake bite.
The other long narrative poems are Khaled and the Sea, an Arabian romance; The Tale of Nala, the story of romantic love between Nala and Damayanti, taken from Mahabharata; The Vigil of Thaliard, about a witch snatching away Thaliard’s beloved; Chitrangada, a poem incomplete, taken from Mahabharata, about the encounter of Urjoon (Arjun), the third Pandava prince in exile with Chitrangada, the warrior princess of Manipur, one of the eastern hill regions of India and Uloupi, a complete poem.
Uloupi, the daughter of a snake, too was married to Urjoon as in the epic, Mahabharata. At the beginning of the poem we see Uloupi, a pale but majestic figure, swimming in the Bhagavathie river under the eastern hills, in Patala or the nether world. After this opening scene Chitrangada appears, in love with Urjoon. Both the poems tell the tale of love between Arjoon and Chitrangada. Uloupi supplements the Chitrangada. Even some lines of the two poems are similar, like the one of Chitrangada’s concluding speech to Urjoon:
To tarry soothing for her transient hour
Merely a woman’s heart, meanwhile perhaps
Lose some great moment of they life which once
Neglected never can return.
Chitrangada-p.317 and Ulupi-p.328
Most of the long poems are love poems except Baji Prabhu and The Rishi. Baji Prabhu is a long heroic poem in blank verse, depicting the story of the great patriot warrior Baji Prabhu Deshpande, who held the twelve thousands strong Mughal army with a few followers until his death, till Shivaji’s retreat. It may be said to be a great Maratha epic, a Hindu resistance against the marauding Mughal force. The poem represents Sri Aurobindo’s ideal of fight for freedom.
Rishi is a poem of conversation between Manu of the lore with a Rishi or sage who gives the true knowledge to the king who virtually possess all but misses the whole. When Manu says at last,
Manu
But Him I seek, the still and perfect One,-
The Sun not rays.
Rishi
For thou art He, O king. Only the night
Is on they soul
By thy own will. Remove it and recover
The serene whole
Thou art indeed, then raise up man the lover
To God the goal.
The Rishi-pp.311-12
In his earlier short lyrics and many long poems Sri Aurobindo has shown remarkable passion for human love- between man and woman- in different extraordinary shades and colours. He has been held to be a poet of love, from beginning to end, showing its courageous trait even in his last great poem, Savitri. Here is love in Urvasie when at last king Pururavus was reunited with Urvasie on earth and-
. . . . stood for space,
Like the entranced calm before great winds
And thunder . . . .
He moved, he came towards her. She, a leaf
Before a gust among the nearing trees,
Cowered. But, all a sea of mighty joy
Rushing and swallowing up the golden sand,
With a great cry and glad Pururavus
Seized her and caught her to his bosom thrilled,
Clinging and shuddering . . . . She o’erborne,
Panting, with inarticulate murmur lay,
Like a slim tree half seen through driving hail,
Her naked arm clasping his neck, her cheek
And golden throat averted, and wide trouble
In her large eyes bewildered with their bliss.
. . . .
With her sweet limbs all his, feeling her breasts
Tumultuous up against his beating heart,
He kissed the glorious mouth of heaven’s desire.
So clung they as two shipwrecked in a surge.
Then strong Pururavus, with godlike eyes
Mastering hers, cried tremulous: “O beloved,
O miser of thy rich and happy voice,
One word, one word to tell me that thou lovest.”
And Urvasie, all broken on his bosom,
Her godhead in his passion lost, moaned out
From her imprisoned breasts, “My lord, my love!”
Urvasie-pp. 206-07
Coming to Love and Death, an immortal dramatic narrative poem, depicting interaction between Ruru, the son of a Rishi and Priyumvada, the daughter of the Apsara, a heavenly being, in love. It is a story of love and death and regaining life; the death of the heroine and the journey of the hero through earth and hell crossing twelve time “Baithoroni, the river dolorous” and finally winning his lover back.
In a letter Sri Aurobindo wrote, “For full success, however, it should have had a more faithfully Hindu colouring, but it was written a score of years ago (1899) when I had not penetrated to the heart of the Indian idea and its traditions, and the shadow of the Greek underworld and Tartarus with the sentiment of life and love and death which hangs about them has got into the legendary framework of the Indian patala and hells.” 4
The central idea was taken from Mahabharata. He elaborated it with more characters and richer stories. Sri Aurobindo said that it is a companion legend to the story of Savitri but remained obscure. We shall presently see the lover’s journey through hell and reawakening of the heroine from the sleep of death to be reassured of her lover’s love; the scene of intimate love through whispering nature and their becoming the immortal lovers again. It may perhaps be said that because of the lingering effect of Greek world and English poetry on him with his newly acquired story and knowledge of the world of Mahabharata, the poem became richer and acquired strength.
And sweetness of the lingering of her lips
Was every time a nectar of surprise
To her lover; her smooth gleaming shoulder bared
In darkness of her hair showed jasmine bright,
while her kissed bossom by rich tumults stirred
was a moved sea that rocked beneath his heart . . . .
he knew not whether he loved most her smile,
her causeless tears or little anger swift
Love and Death-p.232
About the following lines poet and critic K. D. Sethna opined,
“Then observe these passages and lines which achieve by grace, balance, poignancy or strength of diction a many-sided aesthetic quality which puts us at a most pleasurable loss to decide whether they are more Virgilian or Dantesque. Begin with this glimpse of morning in a wood-
(He) felt slow beauty
And leafy secret change; for the damp leaves,
Grey-green at first, grew pallied with the light
And warmed with consciousness of sunshine near;
Then the whole daylight wandered in, and made
Hard tracts of splendour, and enriched all hues-
“Dwell a little on the exquisite pathos of the picture-
She for a moment stood
Beautiful with her love before she died;
And he laughed towards her.” 5
Ibid. p.233
The description continued on the same page-
With a pitiful cry
She paled; moaning, her stricken limbs collapsed . . . .
As he came,
He saw a brilliant flash of coils evade
The sunlight, and with hateful gorgeous hood
Darted into green safety, hissing, death.
Ibid. p.234
K. D. Sethna quoted the following lines too, to cover his opinion-
So still he was,
The birds flashed by him with their swift small wings,
Fanning him. Then he moved, then rigorous
Memories through all his body shuddering
Awoke and he looked up and knew the place,
And recognised greenness immutable,
And saw old trees and the same flowers still bloom.
He felt the bright indifference of earth
And all the lonely uselessness of pain-
Ibid. p.236
By all pain and lingering labour and trouble Ruru approached the throne of Death who did at last remit “Hell’s grasp” on her. Let us then linger a little more to see the end of the drama.
. . . then sole with her, trembling he cried
The old glad name and crying bent to her
And touched, and at the touch the silent knots
Of Hell were broken and its sombre dream
Of dreadful stately pains at once dispersed.
After a while,
He looked and saw all grass and dense green trees,
And sunshine and a single grasshopper
Near him repeated fierily its note.
Thrilling he felt beneath his bosom her . . . .
For many moments comforting his soul
With all her jasmine body sun-ensnared
He fed his longing eyes and, half in doubt,
With touches satisfied himself of her . . . .
Her eyes looked upward into his. She stretched
Her arms up, yearning, and their souls embraced.
Ibid. pp. 256-257
Sri Aurobindo continued to write poetry at every station of his life, even when he was actively associated with freedom struggle and secret revolutionary movements, living dangerously in Calcutta and elsewhere in India. Long poems like Illion, Ahana and some short poems were written during his intense political life. Even in jail he wrote a short poem in pencil on the back of a used postcard on his request, reminisced Nolini Kanta Gupta, a co-prisoner. But unfortunately that did not survive. And that famous poem, written during the period by an ever romantic, adventurous poet, reads-
I am the lord of tempest and mountain,
I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side.
Invitation-p.39
Another important poem written during the period is ‘Who’, carrying his faith and realization of the divine in the form of Krishna and Kali. They are everywhere in the creation, behind everything, as they are in other faiths through respective divine forms conceived. Krishna has different forms as in myths and legends, in Puranas; sometimes a boy with cowherds, sometimes the king, sometimes the charioteer and sometimes the lover. Kali is divine Mother but destroys the wrong doers; she is fierce then, she is naked and an embodiment of strength. So the poet writes,
We have love for a boy who is dark and resplendent,
A woman is lord of us, naked and fierce.
. . . .
It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is thrown;
When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone.
Who-p.40
Ilion, an epic in quantitative Hexametre, is based on the story of Troy after the death of Hector and the arrival of the Eastern Queen Panthesiela. It deals with the events on the last day of the siege of Troy. Variety of scenes and characters, inscrutable destiny and human action crowd the pages of Ilion. It has been hailed as one of the finest creations of Sri Aurobindo. K. D. Sethna, the critic writes, “If any work of Sri Aurobindo could be the spearhead of his poetic fame in the West, it should be Ilion . . . . Christopher Martin, once assistant editor of Encounter wrote, ‘I certainly am impressed by this masterly achievement in hexameters’ (Letter, December 9, 1959). Sir Herbert Read, eminent art-critic and thinker stated, ‘Sri Aurobindo’s Ilion is a remarkable achievement by any standard and I am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our English language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality’ (Letter, June 5, 1958)” 6
It may be added here that he lost quite a good number of his manuscripts during the period of hectic movement in the political field. He seldom stayed settled peacefully anywhere except finally at Pondicherry and there too not without occasional disturbances. But after his self-chosen settlement in Pondicherry he wrote his major volumes of literary works; poetry and prose of great quality and importance. In Pondicherry he published Ahana and other poems in 1915, written earlier.
In Pondicherry he wrote large number of sonnets written in different rhyming patterns, according to traditions. Some of the sonnets recorded his spiritual experiences in Baroda, direct and piercing, like ‘The Godhead’, ‘The Stone Goddess’, ‘Adwaita’ and ‘Nirvana’, some of them recorded his theories of evolution, some of them were of spiritual significance, mystic in essence and a few were satiric, like ‘The Dream of Surreal Science’, some carrying an innocent pleasure to paint a pet cat through the poetic words, like ‘Despair on The Staircase.’ This poem is not placed in the category of sonnets in his ‘Collected Poems’ but it too has 14 lines, regularly rhyming.
The Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator, was a great lover of animals, specially cats. She had many cats and many anecdotes about them to tell. Her cat-stories are quite interesting. With her Sri Aurobindo too became a cat lover. He really loved the cats and dogs. Of the poets, T. S. Eliot was a cat love. Presently V.S. Naipaul too is a cat lover. Let us here a few lines of Sri Aurobindo’s love for the cat-
In her beauty’s dumb significant pose I find
The tragedy of her mysterious mind.
Yet is she stately, grandiose, full of grace.
A musing mask is her immobile face.
Her tail is up like an unconquered flag.
Its dignity knows not the right to wag.
An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,
Whether she is spirit, woman or a cat,
Is now the problem I am wondering at.
Despair on the Staircase-p.113
And if we do not hear a few lines from the ‘Surrealist’, a short poem, our idea of how different types of poems could he write will never be complete.
I have heard a foghorn shouting at a sheep,
And oh the sweet sound made me laugh and weep
But alas, the sheep was on the hither shore
Of the little less and the ever-never more.
I sprang on its back; it jumped into the sea,
I was near to the edges of eternity.
Surrealist-p.113
‘A Dream of Surreal Science’, a sonnet, is also satirical-
A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout.
A Dream of Surreal Science-p.145
Not only satirical poems and poems with contemporary scenes, he was most modern in his time, using terms of science and technology in his poems. There are mathematical codes in his Savitri which are yet to be fully explored. Even he married the science and technology with the divine, as in ‘Electron’.
The electron on which forms and worlds are built,
Leaped into being, a particle of God.
A spark from the eternal Energy split,
It is the Infinite’s blind minute abode.
In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides.
Electron-p.130
In quite some of his sonnets and short poems we find man, growing while struggling.
Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay
He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day
Man, the Thinking animal-p.163
Man is a narrow bridge, a call that grows,
His soul the dim bud of God’s flaming rose.
The Dumb Inconscient-p.163
And Nature often gives him company in between the lines of his poems, from the beginning to the end in Savitri, though he was a thoroughly urban poet. ‘Evening’, a very short poem, shows the image of physical evening on earth, focusing at the same time on the evening of one’s life.
If now must pause the bullocks’ jingling tune,
Here let it be beneath the dreaming trees
Supine and huge that hang upon the breeze,
Here in the wide eye of the silent moon.
In the Moonlight-p.55
The grey sea creeps half-visible, half-hushed,
And grasps with its innumerable hands
These silent walls . . .
- long lines and dim
Of movement flecked with quivering spots of foam,
The quiet welter of a shifting world.
The Sea at Night-p.46
The beauty of the cruel tiger and the innocent deer are painted side by side but the poet’s heart sinks for the unfortunate fall of the innocent deer. He wishes that one day the cruelty will not be there in the absence of the mighty tiger and the beautiful deer will drink water unperturbed. The nature is nicely painted with words contrasting between mild harmless beauty and the strong cruel beauty. The poem carries innovative new metres.
The wind slipped through the leaves as if afraid lest its voice and the noise
of its steps perturb the pitiless Splendour,
Hardly daring to breathe. But the great beast crouched and crept, and crept
and crouched a last time, noiseless, fatal
Till suddenly death leaped on the beautiful wild deer as it drank
Unsuspecting from the great pool in the forest’s coolness and shadow,
And it fell and, torn, died remembering its mate left sole in the deep
woodland,-
Destroyed, the mild harmless beauty by the strong cruel beauty in Nature.
But a day may yet come when the tiger crouches and leaps no more in the
dangerous heart of the forest,
As the mammoth shakes no more the plains of Asia;
Still then shall the beautiful wild deer drink from the coolness of great pools
in the leaves’ shadow.
The Tiger and the Deer-p.569
But his Nature poems are sometimes elevated with god touch-
A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven-amorous.
This is the soul of man. Body and brain
Hungry for earth our heavenly flight detain.
A Tree-p.47
During the Second World War he saw the horrible Death March of Hitler from his yogic seat in Pondicherry and tried to remedy the situation in his yogic way. He wrote poems too, addressing him and his troop.
Where is the end of your armoured march, O children of Wotan?
Earth shudders with fear at your tread, the death-flames laughs in your eyes.
The Children of Wotan -1940-p.112
In his high villa on the fatal hill
Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice,
Dictator of his action’s sudden choice,
The tiger leap of a demoniac skill.
The Dwarf Napoleon Hitler, October 1939-p.110
Among all his poetic creations the greatest were his mystic, symbolic, even esoteric poems. Though Sri Aurobindo did not like to call them esoteric poems, he agreed that poems like ‘Trance’, ‘The Bird of Fire’ and ‘The Two Moons’ were esoteric in the true sense. K. D. Sethna expressed his opinion about his mystic poems in the following words,
“Sri Aurobindo is always a call to spiritual adventure. To read his recent poetry is like walking on the edge of a precipice. One gets intoxicated with heights, one feels dizzy with depths, and it is with an effort that one manages to breathe the keen air and keep a clear head . . . . Most critics will go astray because the self-expression of a Supreme Master of Yoga cannot be measured by the rules-of-thumb by which books of verse are reviewed, even religious or idealistic verse.” 7
Besides the esoteric poems, some of the other mystic poems are-‘The Dream Boat’, ‘Rose of God’, ‘Descent’, ‘Musa Spiritus’, ‘Symbol Moon’, ‘Krishna’, ‘Shiva’, ‘The Inconscient Creator’, ‘The Pilgrim of the Night’, ‘The Blue Bird’, ‘Bird of Fire’ and many others. Let us see portions of a few to ignite our sense for the eternal and the infinite, a sense of the deeper inside-
Bride of the Fire, clasp me now close,-
Bride of the Fire!
I have shed the bloom of the earthly rose,-
I have slain desire.
Bride of the Fire-p.103
By the side of the ‘Bride of the Fire’ we place two more mystic, symbolic and esoteric poem-
O marvel bird with the burning wings of light and the unbarred
Lids that look beyond all space,
One strange leap of they mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind
And life, arrives at its luminous term they flight;
Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire
Thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face.
The Bird of Fire-p.571
Who was it that came to me in a boat made of dream-fire,
With his flame brow and his sun-gold-body?
Melted was the silence into a sweet secret murmur,
“Do you come now? Is the heart’s fire ready?”
Hidden in the recess of the heart something shuddered,
It recalled all that the life’s joy cherished,
Imaged the felicity it must leave lost for ever,
And the boat passed and the gold god vanished.
Now within the hollowness of the world’s breast inhabits-
For the love died and the old joy ended-
Void of a felicity that has fled, gone for ever,
And the gold god and the dream boat come not.”
The Dream Boat-p.561
I have quoted the whole poem to bring home the poignant meaning of the whole. It is the ever burning psychic being within our heart which rarely comes in front but when it comes to lead us to a new life in some, it is our choice whether to avail of the divine felicity to rise up to a life ever aspired by many or to somehow avoid it for the pleasure of the time. In ‘The Hour of God’, a small but touching piece, Sri Aurobindo wrote,
“There are moments when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being . . . .
“Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to the call. But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force or misuse the moment; for them is irreparable loss or a great destruction.” 8
The dream boat came but went back. The poet has nothing to say but to give the image of a boat that came to our shore and went back unwelcome.
Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity’s face,
Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature’s abyss:
Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude’s kiss.
Rose of God-p.584
‘Who’ has already been cited, here is the fine ending-
It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is thrown;
When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone.
Who-p.41
‘A God’s Labour’ is a biography, a history of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual odyssey, not on the surface but in the occult depths of the spirit. Its straightforwardness and autobiographical motif is clear as in many of his spiritual poems. Though not very long, it is a poem of 31 stanzas.
He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way . . . .
I have been digging deep and long
Mid a horror of filth and mire
A bed for the golden river’s song
A home for the deathless fire . . . .
How they mock and sneer, both devils and men!
“Thy hope is chimera’s head
Painting the sky with its fiery stain;
Thou shalt fall and thy work lie dead . . . .
A voice cried, “Go where none have gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate.” . . . .
He who I am was with me still;
All veils are breaking now.
I have heard His voice and borne His will
On my vast untroubled brow . . . .
A little more and the new life’s doors
Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
In the great world bare and bright.
The poem ended with-
There shall move on the earth embodied and fair
The living truth of you.
A God’s labour-pp.99-102
‘A little more’, as we find above is very significant in Sri Aurobindo’s life and work. He laboured hard in the supramental world to bring its light and consciousness on earth to divinise it. And left giving his body for it, hoping that his ideas one day shall be fulfilled. He was always hoping for the fulfilment of his ardent aspiration which was a little ahead. He has a small poem,
‘One Day
The little More.’
One day, and all the half-dead is done,
One day, and all the unborn begun;
A little path and the great goal,
A touch that brings the divine whole.
Hill after hill was climbed and now,
Behold, the last tremendous brow
And the great rock that none has trod:
A step, and all is sky and God.
Full of imagery, full of hope, it is really a climbing to heaven. K. D. Sethna, in his ‘Sri Aurobindo-The Poet’ tells a story about this poem.
“One Day was among the lines of poetry the Mother read out on the last day of 1954, when she gave the Message for 1955 . . . .The Mother went on to say, ‘Now, as we have talked of difficulties, I wish to read two things, not two poems but some lines, one whole short poem and just one stanza of a poem, which are a very magnificent illustration of our message for the next year which will give you a little sketch of what the true consciousness is, that which is free from all difficulties, that which is above all conflicts.’
The four lines were from another poem titled, ‘Life’, and the whole poem that she read was ‘One Day’. K. D. Sethna wrote, “When the Mother was asked: ‘Will you explain the two passages?’ she replied: ‘Explain? There is no explanation. They speak for themselves very clearly. Poetry is not to be explained. It is to be felt and not reasoned about. The poetic inspiration is above reason. It must not be made to sink into the domain of the reason, because it will get spoiled . . . It is to be understood by an internal contact much more than by the words.’” 9
‘Little more’ seems to be the hint in some other poems too, like,
The day ends lost in a stretch of even,
A long road trod- and the little farther.
Now the waste-land, now the silence;
A blank dark wall, and behind it heaven.
Journey’s End-p.570
Like ‘A God’s Labour’ ‘The Pilgrim of the Night’, a sonnet, is autobiographical in the spiritual sphere. In almost the same way he says,
I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime
And still that weary journeying knows no end;
Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,
There comes no voice of the celestial Friend,
And yet I know my footprints’ track shall be
A pathway towards Immortality.
The Pilgrim of the Night- p.132
We end his Spiritual Pilgrimage with a sonnet, declaring the eternal glory of the day:
But now I listen to a greater Word
Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:
The voice that only Silence’ ear has heard
Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day.
All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace
To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release.
The Word of the Silence-p.141
True that most of Sri Aurobindo’s poems beyond the juvenile period are replete with his philosophy. The mystic and spiritual poems are full of autobiographical references of a yogi and true that there are repetitions galore. He was a master of rhyming and he loved to make experiments with different types of rhyming, bringing in styles and types from Greek, Latin and Sanskrit which also included his thought from the respective worlds. His poems speak of his life and work. If some of the critics and poetry lovers find it difficult to relish his poems, that surely is not the fault of his poems. His poetry speak of the poet as he was, combining many other personalities in him, and his poetry is a complex product of his being.
And in spite of some contradictions, it must be said that many of his later poems like ‘The Dream Boat’, ‘The Bird of Fire’, ‘Trance’, ‘Rose of God’, ‘Symbol Moon’, ‘Musa Spiritus’, ‘Krishna’, including many of his fine sonnets, some long romantic poems like ‘Love and Death’ and ‘Urvasie’ and another epic, ‘Ilion’ are extraordinary in their own places. And above all, his spiritual epic, Savitri is one of the unique creations in the world of poetry.
References:
1 Sri Aurobindo to Dilip. Pune and Mysore; H K M Trust and Mira Aditi. Volume-2 pp. 99-100
2 K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar. Sri Aurobindo a biography and a history. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education. Fourth Edition, 1985. p.38
3 Sri Aurobindo. Letter on Love and Death; Collected Poems. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo birth Centenary Library, Sri Aurobindo Ashram. V-5. p. 258.
4 ibid.
5 K. D. Sethna. Sri Aurobindo-A Poet. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. pp.12-13.
6 ibid. pp. 131-32
7 ibid. p.41
8 idem. Hour of God. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Sri Aurobindo Ashram. V-17. p.1
9 Sethna. op.cit. p.366
Note: all the poems quoted are from Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Collected Poems’. Sri Aurobindo. Op.cit.
(c)Aju Mukhopadhyay, 2010
8, Cheir Lodi Street,
Pondicherry-605001
Sri Aurobindo was a poet from his childhood, writing poetry in school magazines in England to his last days in Pondicherry. Up to a few days before his breathing last, he dictated hundreds of lines of Savitri in full speed and Norodbaran, his scribe disciple, wrote them in paper. Those were the last of his revisions of the epic poem, as we read it in Nirodbaran’s account of his stay with Sri Aurobindo during the last 12 years of his life. His production of poetry was to the extent of some 50000 lines including a little more than 23800 lines in Savitri.
On 31 August 1934, Dilip Kumar Roy received a letter from Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan of Andhra University, requesting for a statement from Sri Aurobindo for a book on ‘Contemporary British Philosophy’, adding that he was anxiously waiting for the write up. Dilip Kumar sent the letter to his Guru with a note. And on the back of the letter he received Sri Aurobindo’s reply wishing to be excused, to be conveyed suitably by Dilip. Among other things, the poet wrote, “And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher- although I have written philosophy which is another story altogether. I knew precious little about philosophy before I did the yoga and came to Pondicherry- I was a poet and a politician, not a philosopher!” 1
From their childhood days in Manchester Grammer School, both Manmohan and his younger brother Arvind Ackroyd Ghose, used to contribute poems to school magazines, Ulela and Fox Family magazine. While studying the usual curriculum Aurobindo always read books outside it and wrote poems. As a student he was always busy with different work andstudies at the same time; the Tripos, the I. C. S., for scholarship and for activities as member of secret Indian organization besides secretarial work of Indian Majlis. Even as a student his time was full or turmoil. He wrote poetry out of his sheer love for it, for his attraction towards the Greek Muse and great English poets like Shelley, Keats and Coleridge. Close to the Victorian poets, he was influenced by Mathew Arnold, Lord Tennyson, Swinburne and Stephen Phillips. He was encouraged and influenced by his poet brother Manmohan Ghose and his friend Lawrence Binyon.
He began writing poetry on nature- flowers, streams, birds, sky and stars, etc. and on human love; those were sweet romantic lyrics. In them we get sometimes the young boys and girls of his time and place, in England:
Many a girl’s lips ruby-red
With their vernal honey fed
Happy mouths and soft cheeks flushed
With Love’s rosy sunlight blushed.
But quickly remembering that everything is short lived here, he added, towards the end of the poem-
Haste- a million is to pay-
Lest too soon the allotted day
End and we oblivious keep
Darkness and eternal sleep
Night by the Sea-pp.16-18
Though a whole ten lined poem where a maiden sleeps in her garden, guarded by the tall birch tree could be shown, I quote four lines from ‘A Thing Seen’, to relish the beauty of the whole.
The wind walked softly; silent moved a cloud
Listening; of all the tree no leaf was loud,
But guarded a divine expectant hush
Thrilled by the silence of a hidden thrush.
A Thing Seen-p.19
His patriotic heart wrote about the failed patriots of Ireland in grave-
Where sits he? On what high foreshadowing throne
Guarded by grateful hearts? Beneath this stone
He lies; this guerdon only Ireland gave,
A broken heart and an unhonoured grave.
His Jacet-p.11
Or about Chares Stewart Parnell on his death:
O pale and guiding light, now star unshaped,
Deliverer lately hailed, since by our lords
Most feared, most hated, hated because feared-
Charles Stewart Parnell-1891 p.15
Songs to Myrtilla, written between1890 to 1892, and Envoi was the result of his love for the Greek poetry and the influence of Greek Muse on him. It is narrative, dialogue between Glaucus and AE THON. With sights and sounds of sweet nature, it is a lyric like many others of this period, full of songs of love in life. But he was not fully satisfied with them as they did not satisfy his newly refined Indian mind. He published Songs to Myrtilla and other poems for private circulation after coming to Bombay. It was the first volume of his poetry book printed.
Love’s feet were on the sea
Where he dawned on me.
His wings were purple and very slow;
His voice was very sweet and very low;
His rose-lit cheeks, his eyes’ pale-bloom
Were sorrow’s anteroom;
Songs to Myrtilla-p.4
But the time for such sweet lyrical rhymes was over. He would not be there for long. Neither he would be able to prosecute his studies further nor would he indulge any idea of settling there. With all her heritage and resources Mother India called him; in time the Gaekwad of Baroda offered him a job in his Princely state. To his Hellenic Muse he said-
For in Sicilian olive-groves no more
Or seldom must my footprints now be seen,
Nor tread Athenian lanes, nor yet explore
Parnassus or thy voiceful shores, O Hippocrene.
Me from her lotus heaven Saraswati
Has called to regions of eternal snow
And Ganges pacing to the southern sea,
Ganges upon whose shores the flowers of Eden blow.
Envoi- p.28
And to his English Muse he said-
Mine is not Byron’s lightning spear,
Nor Wordsworth’s lucid strain
Nor Shelley’s lyric pain,
Nor Keats’, the poet without pear.
I by the Indian waters vast
Did glimpse the magic of the past,
And on the Oaten-pipe I play
Warps echoes of an earlier day.
To a Hero Worshipper-p.8
About these poems K. R. S. Iyenger opined, “Juvenile’ these poems may be, yet are they the ‘Juvenile’ poems of a truly exceptional talent that had won through a mastery of the classics of Greece and Rome, the master-key that unlocked the seamless treasuries of Western culture . . . . Naturally enough, these early poems snap Sri Aurobindo in various emotional and intellectual attitudes and reveal also his tightening craftsmanship in verse, making a significant record of the education and ideas, imagination and feelings, engendered by a purely European culture.” 2
Back in India, a youth of 20 and half years, as he set foot on Indian soil at Apolo Bunder in Bombay, a vast-calm descended on him which did last long with him. AS he settled in Baroda state, the movement of his life greatly changed. Service was his mainstay but his works spread laterally and vertically. Eventually he became the professor of English and French. Joining secret societies he became active in the liberation of the country, secretly. His thirst for Indian literature, and language pushed him to read more voraciously. This time was specially marked for studies of Indian epics, scriptures and classics in original Sanskrit language besides regional languages. The direct result was the translation of various Indian classics in English. Here he learnt Sanskrit, Bangla, Marathi, Gujerati and Hindi. He wrote political serials also, anonymously. Here he entered the spiritual life through pranayama to begin with from 1904. And writing poetry became a special preoccupation during the period. Short poems written during the period were Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Madhusudan Dutt, Goethe, A Doubt, Song, The Spring Child and many others. Some remarkable long dramatic and narrative poems based mainly on stories borrowed from Mahabharata were also created. Of them Urvasie and Love and Death are presage to his great epic creation, Savitri. In each of the three poems, either the hero or the heroine, leaves the earth or dies prematurely and his or her lover, by the force of love, demands the life of the dead from heaven or the King of Death and succeeds.
Urvasie is a tale of love between Urvasie, the nymph of heaven, the heavenly Apsara and Pururavus, a mortal king. The agony of Pururavus begins when the Gods call back his beloved to heaven. After long search, travail and travel through difficult passages, heaven accedes to his request and she comes back to earth with him to enjoy earthly life of love and fate.
In Love and Death, Ruru’s beloved Priyumvada (Pramadvura in Mahabharata, changed here for “I have substituted a name, Priyumvada, more manageable to the English tongue”, said Sri Aurobindo.), daughter of Maneka, a heavenly Apsara, dies untimely due to snake bite.
The other long narrative poems are Khaled and the Sea, an Arabian romance; The Tale of Nala, the story of romantic love between Nala and Damayanti, taken from Mahabharata; The Vigil of Thaliard, about a witch snatching away Thaliard’s beloved; Chitrangada, a poem incomplete, taken from Mahabharata, about the encounter of Urjoon (Arjun), the third Pandava prince in exile with Chitrangada, the warrior princess of Manipur, one of the eastern hill regions of India and Uloupi, a complete poem.
Uloupi, the daughter of a snake, too was married to Urjoon as in the epic, Mahabharata. At the beginning of the poem we see Uloupi, a pale but majestic figure, swimming in the Bhagavathie river under the eastern hills, in Patala or the nether world. After this opening scene Chitrangada appears, in love with Urjoon. Both the poems tell the tale of love between Arjoon and Chitrangada. Uloupi supplements the Chitrangada. Even some lines of the two poems are similar, like the one of Chitrangada’s concluding speech to Urjoon:
To tarry soothing for her transient hour
Merely a woman’s heart, meanwhile perhaps
Lose some great moment of they life which once
Neglected never can return.
Chitrangada-p.317 and Ulupi-p.328
Most of the long poems are love poems except Baji Prabhu and The Rishi. Baji Prabhu is a long heroic poem in blank verse, depicting the story of the great patriot warrior Baji Prabhu Deshpande, who held the twelve thousands strong Mughal army with a few followers until his death, till Shivaji’s retreat. It may be said to be a great Maratha epic, a Hindu resistance against the marauding Mughal force. The poem represents Sri Aurobindo’s ideal of fight for freedom.
Rishi is a poem of conversation between Manu of the lore with a Rishi or sage who gives the true knowledge to the king who virtually possess all but misses the whole. When Manu says at last,
Manu
But Him I seek, the still and perfect One,-
The Sun not rays.
Rishi
For thou art He, O king. Only the night
Is on they soul
By thy own will. Remove it and recover
The serene whole
Thou art indeed, then raise up man the lover
To God the goal.
The Rishi-pp.311-12
In his earlier short lyrics and many long poems Sri Aurobindo has shown remarkable passion for human love- between man and woman- in different extraordinary shades and colours. He has been held to be a poet of love, from beginning to end, showing its courageous trait even in his last great poem, Savitri. Here is love in Urvasie when at last king Pururavus was reunited with Urvasie on earth and-
. . . . stood for space,
Like the entranced calm before great winds
And thunder . . . .
He moved, he came towards her. She, a leaf
Before a gust among the nearing trees,
Cowered. But, all a sea of mighty joy
Rushing and swallowing up the golden sand,
With a great cry and glad Pururavus
Seized her and caught her to his bosom thrilled,
Clinging and shuddering . . . . She o’erborne,
Panting, with inarticulate murmur lay,
Like a slim tree half seen through driving hail,
Her naked arm clasping his neck, her cheek
And golden throat averted, and wide trouble
In her large eyes bewildered with their bliss.
. . . .
With her sweet limbs all his, feeling her breasts
Tumultuous up against his beating heart,
He kissed the glorious mouth of heaven’s desire.
So clung they as two shipwrecked in a surge.
Then strong Pururavus, with godlike eyes
Mastering hers, cried tremulous: “O beloved,
O miser of thy rich and happy voice,
One word, one word to tell me that thou lovest.”
And Urvasie, all broken on his bosom,
Her godhead in his passion lost, moaned out
From her imprisoned breasts, “My lord, my love!”
Urvasie-pp. 206-07
Coming to Love and Death, an immortal dramatic narrative poem, depicting interaction between Ruru, the son of a Rishi and Priyumvada, the daughter of the Apsara, a heavenly being, in love. It is a story of love and death and regaining life; the death of the heroine and the journey of the hero through earth and hell crossing twelve time “Baithoroni, the river dolorous” and finally winning his lover back.
In a letter Sri Aurobindo wrote, “For full success, however, it should have had a more faithfully Hindu colouring, but it was written a score of years ago (1899) when I had not penetrated to the heart of the Indian idea and its traditions, and the shadow of the Greek underworld and Tartarus with the sentiment of life and love and death which hangs about them has got into the legendary framework of the Indian patala and hells.” 4
The central idea was taken from Mahabharata. He elaborated it with more characters and richer stories. Sri Aurobindo said that it is a companion legend to the story of Savitri but remained obscure. We shall presently see the lover’s journey through hell and reawakening of the heroine from the sleep of death to be reassured of her lover’s love; the scene of intimate love through whispering nature and their becoming the immortal lovers again. It may perhaps be said that because of the lingering effect of Greek world and English poetry on him with his newly acquired story and knowledge of the world of Mahabharata, the poem became richer and acquired strength.
And sweetness of the lingering of her lips
Was every time a nectar of surprise
To her lover; her smooth gleaming shoulder bared
In darkness of her hair showed jasmine bright,
while her kissed bossom by rich tumults stirred
was a moved sea that rocked beneath his heart . . . .
he knew not whether he loved most her smile,
her causeless tears or little anger swift
Love and Death-p.232
About the following lines poet and critic K. D. Sethna opined,
“Then observe these passages and lines which achieve by grace, balance, poignancy or strength of diction a many-sided aesthetic quality which puts us at a most pleasurable loss to decide whether they are more Virgilian or Dantesque. Begin with this glimpse of morning in a wood-
(He) felt slow beauty
And leafy secret change; for the damp leaves,
Grey-green at first, grew pallied with the light
And warmed with consciousness of sunshine near;
Then the whole daylight wandered in, and made
Hard tracts of splendour, and enriched all hues-
“Dwell a little on the exquisite pathos of the picture-
She for a moment stood
Beautiful with her love before she died;
And he laughed towards her.” 5
Ibid. p.233
The description continued on the same page-
With a pitiful cry
She paled; moaning, her stricken limbs collapsed . . . .
As he came,
He saw a brilliant flash of coils evade
The sunlight, and with hateful gorgeous hood
Darted into green safety, hissing, death.
Ibid. p.234
K. D. Sethna quoted the following lines too, to cover his opinion-
So still he was,
The birds flashed by him with their swift small wings,
Fanning him. Then he moved, then rigorous
Memories through all his body shuddering
Awoke and he looked up and knew the place,
And recognised greenness immutable,
And saw old trees and the same flowers still bloom.
He felt the bright indifference of earth
And all the lonely uselessness of pain-
Ibid. p.236
By all pain and lingering labour and trouble Ruru approached the throne of Death who did at last remit “Hell’s grasp” on her. Let us then linger a little more to see the end of the drama.
. . . then sole with her, trembling he cried
The old glad name and crying bent to her
And touched, and at the touch the silent knots
Of Hell were broken and its sombre dream
Of dreadful stately pains at once dispersed.
After a while,
He looked and saw all grass and dense green trees,
And sunshine and a single grasshopper
Near him repeated fierily its note.
Thrilling he felt beneath his bosom her . . . .
For many moments comforting his soul
With all her jasmine body sun-ensnared
He fed his longing eyes and, half in doubt,
With touches satisfied himself of her . . . .
Her eyes looked upward into his. She stretched
Her arms up, yearning, and their souls embraced.
Ibid. pp. 256-257
Sri Aurobindo continued to write poetry at every station of his life, even when he was actively associated with freedom struggle and secret revolutionary movements, living dangerously in Calcutta and elsewhere in India. Long poems like Illion, Ahana and some short poems were written during his intense political life. Even in jail he wrote a short poem in pencil on the back of a used postcard on his request, reminisced Nolini Kanta Gupta, a co-prisoner. But unfortunately that did not survive. And that famous poem, written during the period by an ever romantic, adventurous poet, reads-
I am the lord of tempest and mountain,
I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side.
Invitation-p.39
Another important poem written during the period is ‘Who’, carrying his faith and realization of the divine in the form of Krishna and Kali. They are everywhere in the creation, behind everything, as they are in other faiths through respective divine forms conceived. Krishna has different forms as in myths and legends, in Puranas; sometimes a boy with cowherds, sometimes the king, sometimes the charioteer and sometimes the lover. Kali is divine Mother but destroys the wrong doers; she is fierce then, she is naked and an embodiment of strength. So the poet writes,
We have love for a boy who is dark and resplendent,
A woman is lord of us, naked and fierce.
. . . .
It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is thrown;
When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone.
Who-p.40
Ilion, an epic in quantitative Hexametre, is based on the story of Troy after the death of Hector and the arrival of the Eastern Queen Panthesiela. It deals with the events on the last day of the siege of Troy. Variety of scenes and characters, inscrutable destiny and human action crowd the pages of Ilion. It has been hailed as one of the finest creations of Sri Aurobindo. K. D. Sethna, the critic writes, “If any work of Sri Aurobindo could be the spearhead of his poetic fame in the West, it should be Ilion . . . . Christopher Martin, once assistant editor of Encounter wrote, ‘I certainly am impressed by this masterly achievement in hexameters’ (Letter, December 9, 1959). Sir Herbert Read, eminent art-critic and thinker stated, ‘Sri Aurobindo’s Ilion is a remarkable achievement by any standard and I am full of amazement that someone not of English origin should have such a wonderful command not only of our English language as such, but of its skilful elaboration into poetic diction of such high quality’ (Letter, June 5, 1958)” 6
It may be added here that he lost quite a good number of his manuscripts during the period of hectic movement in the political field. He seldom stayed settled peacefully anywhere except finally at Pondicherry and there too not without occasional disturbances. But after his self-chosen settlement in Pondicherry he wrote his major volumes of literary works; poetry and prose of great quality and importance. In Pondicherry he published Ahana and other poems in 1915, written earlier.
In Pondicherry he wrote large number of sonnets written in different rhyming patterns, according to traditions. Some of the sonnets recorded his spiritual experiences in Baroda, direct and piercing, like ‘The Godhead’, ‘The Stone Goddess’, ‘Adwaita’ and ‘Nirvana’, some of them recorded his theories of evolution, some of them were of spiritual significance, mystic in essence and a few were satiric, like ‘The Dream of Surreal Science’, some carrying an innocent pleasure to paint a pet cat through the poetic words, like ‘Despair on The Staircase.’ This poem is not placed in the category of sonnets in his ‘Collected Poems’ but it too has 14 lines, regularly rhyming.
The Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator, was a great lover of animals, specially cats. She had many cats and many anecdotes about them to tell. Her cat-stories are quite interesting. With her Sri Aurobindo too became a cat lover. He really loved the cats and dogs. Of the poets, T. S. Eliot was a cat love. Presently V.S. Naipaul too is a cat lover. Let us here a few lines of Sri Aurobindo’s love for the cat-
In her beauty’s dumb significant pose I find
The tragedy of her mysterious mind.
Yet is she stately, grandiose, full of grace.
A musing mask is her immobile face.
Her tail is up like an unconquered flag.
Its dignity knows not the right to wag.
An animal creature wonderfully human,
A charm and miracle of fur-footed Brahman,
Whether she is spirit, woman or a cat,
Is now the problem I am wondering at.
Despair on the Staircase-p.113
And if we do not hear a few lines from the ‘Surrealist’, a short poem, our idea of how different types of poems could he write will never be complete.
I have heard a foghorn shouting at a sheep,
And oh the sweet sound made me laugh and weep
But alas, the sheep was on the hither shore
Of the little less and the ever-never more.
I sprang on its back; it jumped into the sea,
I was near to the edges of eternity.
Surrealist-p.113
‘A Dream of Surreal Science’, a sonnet, is also satirical-
A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout.
A Dream of Surreal Science-p.145
Not only satirical poems and poems with contemporary scenes, he was most modern in his time, using terms of science and technology in his poems. There are mathematical codes in his Savitri which are yet to be fully explored. Even he married the science and technology with the divine, as in ‘Electron’.
The electron on which forms and worlds are built,
Leaped into being, a particle of God.
A spark from the eternal Energy split,
It is the Infinite’s blind minute abode.
In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides.
Electron-p.130
In quite some of his sonnets and short poems we find man, growing while struggling.
Aspiring to godhead from insensible clay
He travels slow-footed towards the eternal day
Man, the Thinking animal-p.163
Man is a narrow bridge, a call that grows,
His soul the dim bud of God’s flaming rose.
The Dumb Inconscient-p.163
And Nature often gives him company in between the lines of his poems, from the beginning to the end in Savitri, though he was a thoroughly urban poet. ‘Evening’, a very short poem, shows the image of physical evening on earth, focusing at the same time on the evening of one’s life.
If now must pause the bullocks’ jingling tune,
Here let it be beneath the dreaming trees
Supine and huge that hang upon the breeze,
Here in the wide eye of the silent moon.
In the Moonlight-p.55
The grey sea creeps half-visible, half-hushed,
And grasps with its innumerable hands
These silent walls . . .
- long lines and dim
Of movement flecked with quivering spots of foam,
The quiet welter of a shifting world.
The Sea at Night-p.46
The beauty of the cruel tiger and the innocent deer are painted side by side but the poet’s heart sinks for the unfortunate fall of the innocent deer. He wishes that one day the cruelty will not be there in the absence of the mighty tiger and the beautiful deer will drink water unperturbed. The nature is nicely painted with words contrasting between mild harmless beauty and the strong cruel beauty. The poem carries innovative new metres.
The wind slipped through the leaves as if afraid lest its voice and the noise
of its steps perturb the pitiless Splendour,
Hardly daring to breathe. But the great beast crouched and crept, and crept
and crouched a last time, noiseless, fatal
Till suddenly death leaped on the beautiful wild deer as it drank
Unsuspecting from the great pool in the forest’s coolness and shadow,
And it fell and, torn, died remembering its mate left sole in the deep
woodland,-
Destroyed, the mild harmless beauty by the strong cruel beauty in Nature.
But a day may yet come when the tiger crouches and leaps no more in the
dangerous heart of the forest,
As the mammoth shakes no more the plains of Asia;
Still then shall the beautiful wild deer drink from the coolness of great pools
in the leaves’ shadow.
The Tiger and the Deer-p.569
But his Nature poems are sometimes elevated with god touch-
A tree beside the sandy river-beach
Holds up its topmost boughs
Like fingers towards the skies they cannot reach,
Earth-bound, heaven-amorous.
This is the soul of man. Body and brain
Hungry for earth our heavenly flight detain.
A Tree-p.47
During the Second World War he saw the horrible Death March of Hitler from his yogic seat in Pondicherry and tried to remedy the situation in his yogic way. He wrote poems too, addressing him and his troop.
Where is the end of your armoured march, O children of Wotan?
Earth shudders with fear at your tread, the death-flames laughs in your eyes.
The Children of Wotan -1940-p.112
In his high villa on the fatal hill
Alone he listens to that sovereign Voice,
Dictator of his action’s sudden choice,
The tiger leap of a demoniac skill.
The Dwarf Napoleon Hitler, October 1939-p.110
Among all his poetic creations the greatest were his mystic, symbolic, even esoteric poems. Though Sri Aurobindo did not like to call them esoteric poems, he agreed that poems like ‘Trance’, ‘The Bird of Fire’ and ‘The Two Moons’ were esoteric in the true sense. K. D. Sethna expressed his opinion about his mystic poems in the following words,
“Sri Aurobindo is always a call to spiritual adventure. To read his recent poetry is like walking on the edge of a precipice. One gets intoxicated with heights, one feels dizzy with depths, and it is with an effort that one manages to breathe the keen air and keep a clear head . . . . Most critics will go astray because the self-expression of a Supreme Master of Yoga cannot be measured by the rules-of-thumb by which books of verse are reviewed, even religious or idealistic verse.” 7
Besides the esoteric poems, some of the other mystic poems are-‘The Dream Boat’, ‘Rose of God’, ‘Descent’, ‘Musa Spiritus’, ‘Symbol Moon’, ‘Krishna’, ‘Shiva’, ‘The Inconscient Creator’, ‘The Pilgrim of the Night’, ‘The Blue Bird’, ‘Bird of Fire’ and many others. Let us see portions of a few to ignite our sense for the eternal and the infinite, a sense of the deeper inside-
Bride of the Fire, clasp me now close,-
Bride of the Fire!
I have shed the bloom of the earthly rose,-
I have slain desire.
Bride of the Fire-p.103
By the side of the ‘Bride of the Fire’ we place two more mystic, symbolic and esoteric poem-
O marvel bird with the burning wings of light and the unbarred
Lids that look beyond all space,
One strange leap of they mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind
And life, arrives at its luminous term they flight;
Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire
Thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face.
The Bird of Fire-p.571
Who was it that came to me in a boat made of dream-fire,
With his flame brow and his sun-gold-body?
Melted was the silence into a sweet secret murmur,
“Do you come now? Is the heart’s fire ready?”
Hidden in the recess of the heart something shuddered,
It recalled all that the life’s joy cherished,
Imaged the felicity it must leave lost for ever,
And the boat passed and the gold god vanished.
Now within the hollowness of the world’s breast inhabits-
For the love died and the old joy ended-
Void of a felicity that has fled, gone for ever,
And the gold god and the dream boat come not.”
The Dream Boat-p.561
I have quoted the whole poem to bring home the poignant meaning of the whole. It is the ever burning psychic being within our heart which rarely comes in front but when it comes to lead us to a new life in some, it is our choice whether to avail of the divine felicity to rise up to a life ever aspired by many or to somehow avoid it for the pleasure of the time. In ‘The Hour of God’, a small but touching piece, Sri Aurobindo wrote,
“There are moments when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being . . . .
“Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to the call. But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force or misuse the moment; for them is irreparable loss or a great destruction.” 8
The dream boat came but went back. The poet has nothing to say but to give the image of a boat that came to our shore and went back unwelcome.
Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity’s face,
Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature’s abyss:
Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude’s kiss.
Rose of God-p.584
‘Who’ has already been cited, here is the fine ending-
It is He in the sun who is ageless and deathless,
And into the midnight His shadow is thrown;
When darkness was blind and engulfed within darkness,
He was seated within it immense and alone.
Who-p.41
‘A God’s Labour’ is a biography, a history of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual odyssey, not on the surface but in the occult depths of the spirit. Its straightforwardness and autobiographical motif is clear as in many of his spiritual poems. Though not very long, it is a poem of 31 stanzas.
He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way . . . .
I have been digging deep and long
Mid a horror of filth and mire
A bed for the golden river’s song
A home for the deathless fire . . . .
How they mock and sneer, both devils and men!
“Thy hope is chimera’s head
Painting the sky with its fiery stain;
Thou shalt fall and thy work lie dead . . . .
A voice cried, “Go where none have gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate.” . . . .
He who I am was with me still;
All veils are breaking now.
I have heard His voice and borne His will
On my vast untroubled brow . . . .
A little more and the new life’s doors
Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
In the great world bare and bright.
The poem ended with-
There shall move on the earth embodied and fair
The living truth of you.
A God’s labour-pp.99-102
‘A little more’, as we find above is very significant in Sri Aurobindo’s life and work. He laboured hard in the supramental world to bring its light and consciousness on earth to divinise it. And left giving his body for it, hoping that his ideas one day shall be fulfilled. He was always hoping for the fulfilment of his ardent aspiration which was a little ahead. He has a small poem,
‘One Day
The little More.’
One day, and all the half-dead is done,
One day, and all the unborn begun;
A little path and the great goal,
A touch that brings the divine whole.
Hill after hill was climbed and now,
Behold, the last tremendous brow
And the great rock that none has trod:
A step, and all is sky and God.
Full of imagery, full of hope, it is really a climbing to heaven. K. D. Sethna, in his ‘Sri Aurobindo-The Poet’ tells a story about this poem.
“One Day was among the lines of poetry the Mother read out on the last day of 1954, when she gave the Message for 1955 . . . .The Mother went on to say, ‘Now, as we have talked of difficulties, I wish to read two things, not two poems but some lines, one whole short poem and just one stanza of a poem, which are a very magnificent illustration of our message for the next year which will give you a little sketch of what the true consciousness is, that which is free from all difficulties, that which is above all conflicts.’
The four lines were from another poem titled, ‘Life’, and the whole poem that she read was ‘One Day’. K. D. Sethna wrote, “When the Mother was asked: ‘Will you explain the two passages?’ she replied: ‘Explain? There is no explanation. They speak for themselves very clearly. Poetry is not to be explained. It is to be felt and not reasoned about. The poetic inspiration is above reason. It must not be made to sink into the domain of the reason, because it will get spoiled . . . It is to be understood by an internal contact much more than by the words.’” 9
‘Little more’ seems to be the hint in some other poems too, like,
The day ends lost in a stretch of even,
A long road trod- and the little farther.
Now the waste-land, now the silence;
A blank dark wall, and behind it heaven.
Journey’s End-p.570
Like ‘A God’s Labour’ ‘The Pilgrim of the Night’, a sonnet, is autobiographical in the spiritual sphere. In almost the same way he says,
I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime
And still that weary journeying knows no end;
Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,
There comes no voice of the celestial Friend,
And yet I know my footprints’ track shall be
A pathway towards Immortality.
The Pilgrim of the Night- p.132
We end his Spiritual Pilgrimage with a sonnet, declaring the eternal glory of the day:
But now I listen to a greater Word
Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:
The voice that only Silence’ ear has heard
Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day.
All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace
To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release.
The Word of the Silence-p.141
True that most of Sri Aurobindo’s poems beyond the juvenile period are replete with his philosophy. The mystic and spiritual poems are full of autobiographical references of a yogi and true that there are repetitions galore. He was a master of rhyming and he loved to make experiments with different types of rhyming, bringing in styles and types from Greek, Latin and Sanskrit which also included his thought from the respective worlds. His poems speak of his life and work. If some of the critics and poetry lovers find it difficult to relish his poems, that surely is not the fault of his poems. His poetry speak of the poet as he was, combining many other personalities in him, and his poetry is a complex product of his being.
And in spite of some contradictions, it must be said that many of his later poems like ‘The Dream Boat’, ‘The Bird of Fire’, ‘Trance’, ‘Rose of God’, ‘Symbol Moon’, ‘Musa Spiritus’, ‘Krishna’, including many of his fine sonnets, some long romantic poems like ‘Love and Death’ and ‘Urvasie’ and another epic, ‘Ilion’ are extraordinary in their own places. And above all, his spiritual epic, Savitri is one of the unique creations in the world of poetry.
References:
1 Sri Aurobindo to Dilip. Pune and Mysore; H K M Trust and Mira Aditi. Volume-2 pp. 99-100
2 K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar. Sri Aurobindo a biography and a history. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education. Fourth Edition, 1985. p.38
3 Sri Aurobindo. Letter on Love and Death; Collected Poems. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo birth Centenary Library, Sri Aurobindo Ashram. V-5. p. 258.
4 ibid.
5 K. D. Sethna. Sri Aurobindo-A Poet. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. pp.12-13.
6 ibid. pp. 131-32
7 ibid. p.41
8 idem. Hour of God. Pondicherry; Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Sri Aurobindo Ashram. V-17. p.1
9 Sethna. op.cit. p.366
Note: all the poems quoted are from Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Collected Poems’. Sri Aurobindo. Op.cit.
(c)Aju Mukhopadhyay, 2010
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