Publisher: La Mere Books, Kolkata ISBN: 978-93-341-6051-2
About Sri Aurobindo's Early Poetry
In this scholarly study of Sri Aurobindo’s early poetry the author finds threads of poetic tradition, modernism’s economy of style, and elements of the romantic, or the mystic in these poems. She sees the early poetry as a preface to the poetry as Mantra of the Real, Sri Aurobindo’s poetic theory as expounded in The Future Poetry. References to the influence of Emerson, Whitman, Arnold, and Phillips, the poetry of Mother-worship in both the early poetry and later in Alipore Jail when he wrote the mystical poem “The Mother of Dreams”, the poetic nature of his prose writing after 1909, and his translations of the Vaishnava poets are just a few of the themes addressed in the book. Detailed explications of many poems in Chapter Two, “The Sad and the Sublime”, and a flow of extracts from The Future Poetry and Sri Aurobindo’s letters on poetry go far to enhance our appreciation of his early poetry.
REVIEW
Professor of English Mondal has gifted us a short but sweet, thoroughly researched and well-argued rehabilitation of Sri Aurobindo’s early, sometimes more psychologically and emotionally themed poetry in the context of different phases of his life and in contrast to his later, increasingly spiritual and mantric poetry.
Considering Aurobindo Ghosh’s early literary works in the context of his later ones gives us insights into the evolution of consciousness in the poet himself, as he saw and used poetry as a means of transcribing his inner life. Of course, Sri Aurobindo’s later magnum opus Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol towers even over his other spiritual poetry, but long before he consciously encoded his yogic experiences into mantric language he had already recorded his thoughts and feelings in verse. As Sri Aurobindo is considered a kavi, a seer-poet, and avatar by many readers, and in this regard his most well-developed, later compositions often perceived as the most relevant and impactful today, it’s nice for a change to be reminded that he had a more humanly familiar side as a young man, as his early poetry attests to. At the same time, as Mondal makes clear, to relegate his first publications to a purely human, less or uninspired position within his works would be a disservice to the seeds of a mystical orientation, spiritual yearning and promise of future revelation, not to speak of his already evident technical talent and skill. Rather, Mondal gives us a fine example of how to conduct nuanced research on as delicate and complex a subject matter as Sri Aurobindo’s evolution as a poet through the themes on his mind, close to his heart and burning in his soul that seemed worthwhile of expression to him already early in his literary career. Mondal argues that they can give us not only insights into his development as a poet but also into his evolution as an individual, from the personal towards the transpersonal, from relatable humanity in isolation and loss to inspiring divinity “Beyond the last pinnacle seized by the thinker”. (CWSA 2: 202)
In the first chapter Mondal explores Sri Aurobindo’s early poetic influences and takes us through Sri Aurobindo’s transition, physically as well as in style and themes of his poetry, from the West to the East. She takes us through the relevance of writings such as “Light”, “Envoi”, “Songs to Myrtilla” and “The Harmony of Virtue”; in this last she perceives a foreshadowing of his “maturest period” in Pondicherry, reminding her of his translation of the Isha Upanishad. Mondal introduces Sri Aurobindo’s developing theory of poetry and his postulated necessary psychological faculties of “revealing power” and “inspiration, intuitive judgement and intuitive reason” for producing worthwhile poetry. The professor finds the closest match in Arthur Symons’ writings on the topic from 1899, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and differences as well as commonalities between Sri Aurobindo’s views on theoretical deliberations on metaphysical sources and potential effects of poetry and those of T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and W. B. Yeats. Some of them see poetry as “the natural subjective efflux of the soul” or the poet as a “seer”. Addressing the criticism that Sri Aurobindo “could not use the techniques of modernism”, she rather sees him as an integral poet able to draw on various styles and themes that usually might be considered incompatible. Finally, Prof. Mondal tracks the image of the divine feminine and its increasing prominence in Sri Aurobindo’s writing, reflecting his intensifying inner focus on Her until its first, in her eyes, entirely mystical and spiritual poetic expression in “The Mother of Dreams”, which she links to “Rose of God” and of course to Savitri.
In the second chapter, “The Sad and the Sublime”, Mondal’s scholarship highlights letters that reflect Sri Aurobindo’s own perspectives on his literary work, such as his acknowledgement of influences from Stephen Phillips, Meredith, Swinburne and Matthew Arnold, but “only on his expressive devices”, not “on his consciousness”. Further, the professor perceives the “most obvious echoes” of Keats, Wordsworth and Petrarch in Sri Aurobindo’s poetry but that “he was never imitating”. She argues with the help of T. S. Eliot that no poet can stand completely apart from what has come before and finds that Sri Aurobindo took “cues” from Emerson for his developing theory of poetry. Emerson’s phrase “poetry as efflux of the soul” is seen by Mondal to be reflected in Sri Aurobindo’s early use of the symbol of the rose. She examines the theme of different forms of love in Sri Aurobindo’s translations done in Baroda and Calcutta, which Mondal deems a “history of consciousness” through which he “was seeking to reveal the consciousness of the poets of that age”. She contrasts the style of the translations from what Sri Aurobindo termed the moral, intellectual and material phases with Sri Aurobindo’s own poetry of the time, which retained his refinement of the “creative vital” through his yoga, while the translations of other poets “followed their temperament as reflected in their words and images”.
Moving into the main part of the second chapter, we examine specific poems in more detail. Mondal reflects on themes of modernism, nature-mysticism, and the poetic expression of interiorised meditative states in contrast to those of a more mundane consciousness in respect to the three poems “The Sea at Night”, “Evening” and “A Tree”, while she interprets “Revelation” to be about a “spiritual vision of a cosmic lady”. She sees the progression from romantic to divine love as a major theme, which gets a strong biographical and psychologically interpretative component in poems she finds to be by and large about Sri Aurobindo’s relationship with his young wife who, Mondal argues, he perceived as a feminine aspect of the Divine. To explore this theme the professor takes us through seven early poems of Sri Aurobindo, from “Life and Death” and “O Face That I Have Loved” to “I Cannot Equal”, “O Letter Dull and Cold”, “My Life is Wasted”, “Because Thy Flame is Spent” and “Rose, I have Loved”.
Finally, in the third and last chapter, “Conclusion—The Turning Point (1909–12): Linking the Early with the Later Poetry”, Mondal speculates on the psychological and emotional states expressed in as well as the biographical context of Sri Aurobindo’s early poetry:
There is an undercurrent of sadness in Sri Aurobindo’s early lyric poetry, the source of which might have been in the lonely life of a student at Cambridge,…who suffered from financial problems as his father could not send him money regularly. Temperamentally too, Aurobindo did not interact much with his other classmates and also stayed away from cricket and other games. Apart from the note of sublimity, which was already there in his early poetry written between the mid-1880s and 1910, we come across sudden painful lines in Songs to Myrtilla written during his stay in England:
For there was none who loved me, no, not one. Alas, what was there that a man should love? For I was misery’s last and frailest son And even my mother bade me homeless rove.
Further, the professor identifies the relationship with his wife Mrinalini, their oftentimes physical but also inner distance due to his increasingly yogic orientation, and finally her sudden death as a source of pain that expressed itself in his writing of that time, as exemplified by a letter to his father-in-law in 1919:
God has seen good to lay upon me the one sorrow that could still touch me to the centre.… Where I have once loved, I do not cease from loving.
Of course these challenging times of youth and married life in the midst of revolution and intensifying sadhana were followed by even greater ones in terms of outer circumstances, be they solitary confinement in Alipore Jail or secret departure to French India, but even greater inwardly by taking on the entire terrestrial evolution of consciousness as his field of work. Mondal identifies the “Uttarpara Speech” and other prose of that time as “concealed poetry”, which marks the transition from more personal, psychological, still more human-seeming themes to that of what she calls “supreme realisation” (“Ahana”, “The Infinite Adventure” and “Omnipresence”). Even poems composed in prison without pen and paper seem to her expressions of “new-found ecstasy and enthusiasm” in spiritual (“Invitation”) and pantheistic (“Who”) experiences. Professor Mondal perceives this transition to naturally lead to the more purely mantric, rather than psychologically expressive later poetry, the linguistic framework for which Sri Aurobindo began outlining in The Future Poetry in 1917. His vision of a future poetry and “conjugal love conquering death” was to find its “supreme realisation” between 1930 and 1950 in Savitri – A Legend and a Symbol.
—Matthias Pommerening Matthias, a psychologist, is a frequent contributor of book reviews for Recent Publications.
