|
English >> Works of Other Authors >> Literature |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
Sri Aurobindo's Poetry: The Many and the Harmony— Madhumita Dutta
About Sri Aurobindo's Poetry: The Many and the HarmonyApproaching the poetry of Sri Aurobindo based largely on a thematic division, the author stresses throughout that while diverse in theme, form, style, and technique, his poems almost all relate to his integral philosophy and vision of the future. There are chapters devoted to the early romantic poems, to poems with a distinct political cast, to those where philosophical issues were taken up as themes, and to his later poems that are mostly transcriptions of the poet’s spiritual experiences. The final chapter, “The Legacy”, on the poets he nurtured and inspired, reveal through the comments and suggestions aspects of his own theory of poetics. The author has purposely omitted Savitri and Sri Aurobindo’s longer narrative poems from this analysis but includes an introduction that examines the spiritual poetics and foundations of the poetry of the future as laid out in The Future Poetry, Savitri, and his letters. REVIEWProfessor Dutta has written a wonderful book for those of us already happily in love with Sri Aurobindo’s poetry, as well as the ones who know there’s something deeper to explore in His writings, yet haven’t already found their keys to the kingdom of His visionary poetic corpus. Indeed, Ms Dutta provides an ideal introduction to the poetic expressions of the Master. In the Preface to the book she gives a thorough disposition about how she, for herself, approaches this unique Indo-Anglian poetry: “I see it, approach it, seek it as a seeker of the True and the Beautiful in life.” The author doesn’t consider herself a critic, rather a “participant” in the “infinite adventure” that the reading of Sri Aurobindo’s poems has been for her, a journey to which she would like to invite us. The chapters devoted to the poet’s romantic, political, philosophical and experimental works are steps along the path drawing us towards a unique appreciation of his poetry. In the Introduction Professor Dutta presents the central thesis of Sri Aurobindo’s Poetry: The Many and the Harmony, the integration and inclusivity of universal themes and their particular expressions in and as poetry throughout Sri Aurobindo’s works. She familiarises the reader with the Vedic theory of rasa, which intimates an essential delight behind any artistic experience, and relates it to the overarching concept of lila, the world as play. She frames Sri Aurobindo’s poetic works in different aspects of his integral philosophy and dimensions of his yoga as well as the sources of inspiration he postulates; from imagination and intuition up to the Overmind. Flowing from these, language turns to mantra and what Sri Aurobindo termed Overhead Poetry. Vedic, psychoanalytical and Aurobindonian per-spectives on impersonal and personal aspects of poetry are discussed, as well as their different assessments on the possibly cathartic effects of art. Setting the stage for her reflections on the varieties of themes and styles in Sri Aurobindo’s poetry in the book’s chapters, the author emphasises again the qualities of universality and integrality in the poet’s works. The topics of Sri Aurobindo as an Indian and “really an English writer” (Iyengar, Indian Writing in English) and the utility of the English language to express inner experiences from distinct inspirational roots within and above are discussed. The scholar relates Sri Aurobindo’s poetry to relevant literary traditions, especially the genre founded by himself, the Future Poetry. The Romantic Phase Beginning with what Professor Dutta terms Sri Aurobindo’s romantic phase, she is able to parse the term with nuance by situating it within the first literary flourishing of a teenage Aurobindo Ghose in England, as well as the English language literature and romantic genre of poetry that might have influenced him at the time. I was surprised to learn here that the first poem published by Aurobindo, when he was just ten, “Light”, was what she termed prophetic, and involved biblical themes such as the Garden of Eden, Noah’s ark and the birth of the messiah of the Christian faith. In “Songs to Myrtilla” she predominantly identifies “sensual poetry” in the “Romantic temper” that, according to her, “is felt throughout” this poem, but also first hints “of the nature-mystic to be” and lines that bear similarities to some of Shakespeare’s and Kalidasa’s. While in “Myrtilla” “Love’s feet were on the sea” and part of a movement “into the perfect day”, Sri Aurobindo’s poems “Night by the Sea” and “The Lover’s Complaint” cause the author to contemplate that the young poet’s “heart’s desire remains unfulfilled perhaps” and that “Sri Aurobindo has recruited the myth [of Virgil’s Eclogues] to reflect on his personal experience of love and loneliness.” These aforementioned poems, according to the author, share with “Love in Sorrow” an atmosphere of “gloom”, and, together with the “brilliant imagery” and “original lyric” of “The Sea at Night”, reflect “common themes of love, hope, fear, desire and discontent”. The Sonnets Additionally to the love poetry of Sri Aurobindo’s adolescence, his sonnets, com-posed after his return to India around 1900 while he was in his late twenties, represent another phase. The professor finds these later contributions to the genre to be more confident and playful, as “Since I have seen your face” exemplifies, and in other poems becomes even “Shakespearean” and reflects an “inward turn” towards the “love as something higher” and “something eternal and infinite”, as declared in the line “Immortal love, immovable by death” from the sonnet “Because thy flame is spent”. This latter trend is mirrored in the sonnet “I cannot equal”. Here the poet describes detachment, equanimity and acceptance in the face of unrequited or impossible love and the joy of love for the sake of love, independent of life’s denials of the inner experience. Professor Dutta: “We may read these lyrics of the heart as imaginative exercises on the passion and power called love, which is strong, immortal and divine.” “My life is wasted” again showcases a more conflicted and ambivalent experience of human love that reminds the author of the poet Petrarch and shares its symbolism of fire with “Because thy flame is spent”. “I have a hundred lives” continues the theme of an undying love orienting itself beyond the human world, towards the “Spirit ethereal”, and similarly in the sonnet “Rose, I have loved” and the later poem “Immortal Love”. She attributes these changes to Sri Aurobindo’s intensifying yogic sadhana and sees the poem “Appeal” as a subsequent encouragement of his readers to also “believe in the power of love”. The author sees this journey of the “love-poet” from human to divine to reach a culmination in “Surrender”. Sri Aurobindo’s farewell from England and its literary muses, and his wish to return home to a “greater work” Professor Dutta finds expressed in the Romantic poem “Envoi”. This change the author also finds reflected in the poet’s critical re-evaluation of his literary works produced in England (“To a Hero-Worshipper”) and a greater presence of Indic themes in his poetry (“O Coil, Coil”). Finally, returning to the main theme of her book The Many and the Harmony, she traces the integration of the poet’s development in the Romantic style in his later works, even in passages of Savitri, which reflect “attitudes of the poet to love, romance and Nature”.
Political Themes In the chapter titled “The Political Code” the author examines Sri Aurobindo’s poetry in relation to themes of the struggle for independence, war and other societal trends he observed at the time and, according to her, foresaw. Already in England, Sri Aurobindo had dedicated poems to an Irish independence fighter, namely “Charles Stewart Parnell”, “Lines on Ireland” and “Hic Jacet”. In these the professor identifies a still young Sri Aurobindo’s empathy for someone who had given his life for an aspirational vision of their country, one they were ready to sacrifice everything for. After his return to India, Sri Aurobindo contributed to the genre of Indian patriotic poetry during the struggle for his Motherland’s independence, most importantly with the narrative poem Baji Prabhou. In her analysis of these writings Professor Dutta emphasises the intention of the poet to heighten a rajasic drive to overcome tamasic tendencies in his fellow sons of Mother India in order to liberate their embodied collective deity. Especially in Baji Prabhou she finds the theme of divine inspiration and empowerment of someone fighting valiantly for a just cause to have been rendered viscerally. “A Dream of Surreal Science” is a satirical poem of prophetic warning that the author interprets as having foreseen the tendency of the scientific mind to reduce everything to its biological, chemical and atomic processes, thereby gaining immense knowledge and power on these levels of existence, yet not necessarily the wisdom to use them for the greater good of the whole: Thus wagged on the surreal world, until A scientist played with atoms and blew out The universe before God had time to shout. This poem written in the late 1930s naturally leads to Sri Aurobindo’s similarly satirical and cautionary poems, “The Dwarf Napoleon” (1939) and “The Children of Wotan” (1940), which thematise this knowledge and power over the material world being turned against its inhabitants, clearly relating to Nazi Germany, its Fuehrer and the Second World War raging at the time of writing. Poems Philosophical “Poems Philosophical” examines expressions of Sri Aurobindo’s vast knowledge of mental ideas he encountered in his studies of Western and Indian literary works and scriptures, but much more so, Professor Dutta insists, of his inner experiences and those above the mind formulated for the heart and intellect in verse. Maybe most famously, “Who” exemplifies this “philosophical-mystical” poetry contemplating the presence and nature of the Divine. Poems like “To the Sea” seem to be deeply intimate expressions of the poet’s yogic journey with its wider implications for spiritual life in general. This theme is even more explicitly explored in “The Vedantin’s Prayer” and continued in “Rebirth”, which “rests upon the philosophy of the Upanishads”. “In the Moonlight”, “Parabrahman”, “O Will of God” and “The Rishi” seem to explore most prominently Vedantic thoughts, concepts and experiences, in varying degrees of more veiled or direct language. A spiritual-philosophical perspective on the titular theme is given by the poet in “Life and Death”, a topic explored as well in “The Meditations of Mandavya”. The author praises the thematically related “reconciling of opposites” in the poetic experiment in quantitative metre “The Tiger and the Deer” as “wonderful craftsmanship”. Further, she reflects on “The Mother of Dreams” as a poetic expression of mystical vision, the originally paradoxical descriptions of Siva in “Epiphany” and the theme of oneness in “The Cosmic Man”. The professor concludes the chapter with her thoughts on the poem “Revelation” and how its title, style and content can be seen as somewhat representative of Sri Aurobindo’s works of this phase. Experimental Poems The longest chapter in The Many and the Harmony is dedicated to “Experiential Poetry”. Professor Dutta assesses this kind of lyricism to be the most developed expression of Sri Aurobindo both as a yogi and as a poet, and therefore the most challenging to interpret. So the interested reader is encouraged to read her reflections without an attempt at summary or even critique of her commendable approach to this difficult task here. In a way, her book builds towards this chapter, as she sees this latest phase of Sri Aurobindo’s writings between the 1930s and the 1950s as most informed by his highest experiences and their translation into Overhead Poetry that integrates his previous poetic growth. In this context, the author reflects on poems such as “Bird of Fire”, “The Inner Fields” and “Jivanmukta”, also in relation to relevant writings of Sri Aurobindo from The Life Divine and The Mother. Towards the end of the book the scholar sheds light on the influence of Sri Aurobindo on poetry more generally, the development of an “Aurobindonian school”, most prominently present in the writings of his disciples, some of whom he himself guided in their craft’s development. Among them were many who discovered and grew in their poetic capacity without any prior literary training or education and yet were able to aid and express their own inner growth by means of Sri Aurobindo’s inspiration and guidance. Maybe we can take this as encouragement for the development of our own creative expressions. The author closes the book with a differentiated positioning of Sri Aurobindo’s poetry, considering influences of tradition and genres as well as the poet’s unique aims in the context of yoga and spirituality. Again the book’s theme of integration comes into play, even as she defends the poet from critics whom she perceives misjudge him from too one-sided perspectives. Rather than judge poetry based on current cultural and literary sensibilities, we may find greater insights and joy in opening to the possibilities of a Future Poetry: “Poetry will help in the heightening and widening of consciousness, enlargement of vision, and reveal the truth of the universe.” Madhumita Dutta’s book, with its breadth of scope and perspectives as well as minuscule analysis, is an absolutely delightful read. It reminds us that “Poetry is the power of our inmost life.” —Matthias Pommerening Matthias, who lives and works in Auroville, has an academic background related to research into consciousness and is fascinated with Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s explorations in the field. Reviewed in August 2022 |
||||||||||||||||||||
