The friend who impressed me so deeply in the early
years of my Ashram life was KD Sethna who has since become famous both as a
poet and a priest of high—or shall I say, spiritual—journalism. I can clearly
recapture with my mind's eye his delicate sensitive face which first attracted
me with its fine crop of Clirist-like whiskers which he discarded subsequently,
to the universal regret of his friends and admirers. For we did admire
it without pressing die 'resemblance' any further. And let me add, with a sigh,
that those who have never seen him with his whiskers will never be able to
appreciate our sigh over its merciless eradication. And then his eyes: how they
radiated a keen though not unkind glint of intelligence! For he was nothing if
not sympathetic and enthusiastic. Fortunately, he knew where to draw the line
when expressing his sympathy in favour of this or that person.
Which brings me to his alert common sense. I have been
told that Sri Aurobindo once said, in joke, that the Divine wanted the
aspirants to surrender many things which they guarded jealously but one thing
they did surrender with alacrity which was not exacted: common sense. Sethna
was not one of these. For his common sense was never an absentee in his talks
and adjudications which seemed remarkable to me as he talked and passed verdicts
readily enough. I remember once (years later, when he had matured further) how
he debated with Krishnaprem in my living-room. How I envied his dialectical
intelligence! And Krishnaprem not only admired his mental robustness in a
frail physique but enjoyed to me full breaking a lance with him. But he had to
go all our to hold his own against Sethna, which is saying much. Yes, Sethna
was nothing if not perspicacious and wide-awake on top of being sensible. It
was refreshing to talk with him and stimulating to differ from him, since even
when one differed from his point of view one did feel that one was made
to look at things from a new angle as it were. In a word, his talks were always
suggestive. But to come now to something more important:
Those who are not born with an exceptional intelligence
are somewhat fortunate as they have no axe to grind in favour of the status
quo established and jealously guarded by the intellect. But those who have
once tasted of intellectual joys find it not a little hard to relinquish what
they have grown to love. That is why I admired Sethna more than I admired many
another who claimed being advanced sadhakas to the deep chagrin of Sri
Aurobindo. For when somebody once claimed that he was an advanced sadhaka
and men like Sethna were mere poets, he wrote: "Why X's claim to be an
advanced sadhaka and what is the sense of it ? It resolves itself into
an egoistic assertion of superiority over others which is not justified so long
as there is egoism and the need of assertion, accompanied as it always is by a
weakness and a turbid imperfection which belie the claim of having a superior
consciousness to the inadvanced sadhaka. It is time these crudities
disappeared from the Ashram atmosphere."
This is not irrelevant. For Sethna impressed me the
more because he not only never made such a claim to having reached "a
superior consciousness" but also he had die uncommon wisdom of common
sense to sec that one should accept what the Guru said even if is seemed—as it
often enough must, intellectual egoism being what it is—unacceptable to one's
mental preconceptions. That is why he often helped me by bowing to Sri
Aurobindo's verdicts even though he too, like me, wanted first to understand
with the mind as far as one could achieve it.
Luckily for him, he had an advantage over many another
who came to the Ashram with deep religious samskaras (formulations) and
could thus pour his heart's worship, unstintedly, at the altar of the Master.
This I say with full knowledge of its implications. For I myself dared not
compare Sri Aurobindo with some of his predecessors whom I need not name. But
Sethna could—and with an honest conviction. It was this honesty married to an
intelligence which drew me to him more and more for I have been sometimes
roused to oppose some sadhakas who talked with disrespect about past
prophets and seers. I myself did not feel any call to compare, because I could
not at the time feel quite the same degree of enthusiasm about Sri Aurobindo as
Sethna did. Here I have [0 admit that he scored over me in his gurubhakti. But
what I found personally rather charming of him was that he never flaunted the
initial advantage he had in coming to Sri Aurobindo with a clean heart-tablet
on which no other holy figure had been etched. This was assuredly one of the
reasons why he received so much from Gurudev, especially in insight into mystic
poetry. I do not know personally of any living critic who has read Sri
Aurobindo's poetry so thoroughly and acquired such a deep grasp of both its
poetical beauty and technical mastery, insomuch that he may easily be adjudged
a specialist in these two capacities. (I say 'living critic' because Chadwick
has, alas, departed this life—about whose outstanding poetical gift and sadhana
I will have a good deal to say presently.)
Naturally I liked Sethna also because he was, like
Chadwick and myself, a poet who continued all along to be a recipient of Sri Aurobindo's
letters on poetry. I was fond of his poems too but as my knowledge of English
verse was rather poor at the time, I could not sufficiently appreciate his
technique. Still I loved some of his poems even in those days—nearly twenty
years ago—and translated them, which knit us together into a closer bond. One
such poem which was singled out for special praise by Gurudev was entitled This
Errant Life which I must quote in full if only to bring out the side of
aspiration to his nature:
This errant life is dear although it dies;
And human lips are sweet though they but sing
Of stars estranged from us; and youth's emprise
Is wondrous yet, although an unsure thing.
Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness'
I fear to soar lest render bonds decrease.
If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow
Its mortal longings, lean down from above,
Temper the unborn tight no thought can trace,
Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.
For 'tis with mouth of day I supplicate:
Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,
And ail Thy formless glory turn to love
And mould Thy love into a human face!
When I sent Gurudev my Bengali translation he wrote,
commenting:
Amal's lines are not easily translatable, least of all
into Bengali. There is in them a union or rather fusion of high severity of
speech with exaltation and both with a pervading incense sweetness which it is
almost impossible to transfer bodily without loss into another language. There
is no word in excess, none that could have been added or changed without
spoiling the expression, every word just the right revelatory one—no colour, no
ornamentation, but a sort of suppressed burning glow, no similes, but images
which have been fused inseparably into the substance of the thought and feeling—the
thought perfectly developed, not idea added to idea at the will of the fancy,
but perfectly interrelated and linked together like the limbs of an organic
body. It is high poetic style in its mil perfection and nothing of all that is
transferable. You have taken his last line and put ill a lotus-face and made
divine love bloom in it,—a pretty image, but how tar from the glowing
impassioned severity .of phrase: “And mould thy love into a human face!”
I shall pass by me constant and ready help plus
encouragement which Sethna has given me all along in my poetic aspirations in
English as that will be going beyond me immediate and urgent aim of this humble
homage to one under whose aegis we in our little colony endeavoured to follow,
as best we could, the ideal that has drawn us together. I will refrain, for me
same reason, from enumerating his other rare qualities such as his sheer love
of poetry or innate generosity which prompted film to praise many a budding
Ashram poet. But I might as well write here of my fruitful contact with the
great poet AE for which Sethna was partly responsible. It happened like this.
Sethna, and later Chadwick, used to give me valuable
subsidiary advice about English prosody and verse-making which I was learning
under the direct guidance of Sri Aurobindo. I will have more to write in a
subsequent chapter on our Master's corrections and counsels and so will confine
myself here to Sethna who became the leader of our little cénacle
almost as naturally as a courageous man becomes the leader of a parry of
timid pilgrims. One day without telling him, I sent AE a few of his poems
along with some extracts from Sri Aurobindo's Future Poetry which
moved us to a deep admiration, extracts such as (I quote these from a then diary of mine):
"All art worth the name must go beyond the
visible, must reveal, must show us something that is hidden."
"So poetry arrives at the indication of infinite
meanings beyond the finite intellectual meaning the word carries."
"Poetical speech is the spiritual excitement of a
rhythmic voyage of self-discovery among the magic islands of form and name in
these inner and outer worlds."
"The aim of poetry, as of all true art, is neither
a photographic or otherwise realistic imitation of Nature, nor a romantic
furbishing and painting or idealistic improvement other image, but an
interpretation by the images she herself affords us not on one, but on many
planes of her creation, of that which she conceals from us, but is ready, when
rightly approached, to reveal."
And so on.
Also I asked AE's permission to publish my translations
of some of his lovely poems like Warning, Krishna etc.
I enclosed also a poem on silence written by a friend,
a poem which I could not sincerely sympathise with; I wrote that I held all
wordy eloquence about silence somewhat suspect.
He sent me his kind reply written in his own hand (that
is, not a typed letter) in which he signed himself AE (his pen-name) and not
George Russell.
The letter was from
Dear Dilip Roy,
Your letter has come at a time when I am too troubled
in mind to write, as I would like, about the poems you sent me. Yes, you have
my permission to translate the verses or any other poems you may desire.
I think the extracts from Sri Aurobindo very
fine, and the verses you sent of Mr Sethna have a genuine poetic' quality.
There are many fine lines like
'The song-impetuous mind.'
'The Eternal Glory is a wanderer
Hungry for lips of clay.'
Many such lines show a feeling for rhythm which is remarkable
since the poet is not writing in his native but a learned language. I
refer to this because the only advice one writer can give another rightly is
technical criticism. The craft of any art, painting, music, poetry, sculpture,
is continually growing and much can be taught in the schools. But the
inspiration cannot be passed on from one to another. So I confine myself to a
technical criticism.
You, like many Indians, are so familiar with your great
traditions that it is natural for you to deal with ideas verging on the
spiritual more than European writers do. The danger of this when writing poetry
is that there is a tendency to use or rather Overuse great words like
'immensity', 'omnipotence', 'inexhaustible', 'limitless3 etc. By the very
nature of the ideas which inspire you, you are led to use words of that nature
because of a kinship with the infinity of the spirit. But in the an of verse if
one uses these words overmuch they tend to lose their power just as painting in
which only the primary colours would weary the eye.
I would ask Mr Sethna to try to reserve the use of such
great words, as a painter keeps his high lights, for the sun and moon or
radiant water and the rest of his canvas is in low tones. So the light appears
radiant by contrast. English is a great language but it has very few words
relating to spiritual ideas. For example the word Karma in Sanskrit
embodies a philosophy. There is no word in English embodying die same idea.
There are many words in Sanskrit charged with meanings which have no
counterpart in English: Dhyani, Sushupti, Turiya etc., and I am sure the
languages which the Hindus speak today must be richer in words fitted for
spiritual expression than English, in which there are few luminous words that
can be used when there is a spiritual emotion to be expressed. I found this
difficulty myself of finding a vocabulary though English is the language I
heard from my cradle.
I hope Mr. Sethna will forgive my saying all this, I do
so because I find a talent in the verses you sent me and do not wish him to do
without such burnishing as a fellow-craftsman can help to give.
Will you tell your philosophic friend who praises
silence that with the poet the silence cannot he for ever? He sings and then
keeps silent until the cup is filled up again by sacrifice and mediation and
then he must give away what he gets, or nothing more will he poured into his
cup. The secret of this is that through the free giver the song flows freely
and whoever constrains life in himself, in him it is constrained. There is
indeed the Divine silence, but we do not come to that being by negation.
Sethna submitted his comments on this letter to Gurudev
who wrote back;
If you send your poems to five different poets, you are
likely s to get five absolutely disparate and discordant estimates of
them. A poet likes only the poetry that appeals to his own temperament or taste
the rest he condemns or ignores. (My own case is different because I have made
in criticism a practice of appreciating very thing that can be appreciated as a
catholic critic would.) Contemporary poetry, besides, seldom gets its right
Judgment from contemporary critics even.
Nothing can be more fu Ie than for a poet to write in
expectation of contemporary are or praise, however agreeable that may be, if it
comes; but it not of much value; for very poor poets have enjoyed a great
contemporary fame and very great poets have been neglected in their time. A
poet has to go on his way, trying to gather hints from what people say for or
against, when their criticisms are things he can profit by, but not otherwise
moved if he can manage it—seeking mainly to sharpen his own sense of
self-criticism by the help of others. Difference of estimate need not surprise
him at all.
Sethna asked him next a pointed question (which will be
readily inferred from his reply) to which die answer came again:
Your letter suggested a more critical attitude on AE's
part than his actual appreciation warrants. His appreciation is, on the
contrary, sufficiently warm: 'a genuine poetic quality' and 'many fine lines'—he
could not be expected to say more. The two quotations he makes certainly
deserve the praise he gives them and they are moreover of the kind, which AE
(and Yeats also) would naturally like. But your poem. This Errant Life
selected for special praise, has no striking expression, like these standing
out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would be no single feature
standing out in a special beauty (eyes, lips, head or hands) but the whole has
a harmoniously modelled grace of equal perfection everywhere as, let us say, in
the perfect charm of a .statue by Praxiteles. This—apart from the idea and
feeling which goes psychically and emotionally much deeper than the idea in the
lines quoted by AE which are poetically striking but have not the same subtle
spiritual appeal; they touch die mind and vital strongly but die other goes
home into the soul! …
His remarks about 'immensity' etc, are very interesting
to me; for these arc the very words, with others like them, that arc constantly
recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought,
but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well mat this recurrence would be
objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me
a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot apply to a new
poetry dealing with spiritual things. A new art of words written from a new
consciousness demands a new technique. AE himself admits that this rule makes a
great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English
language. His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they
represent arc mental ones or intuitions occurring on the summits of
consciousness, rare 'high lights' over the low tones of ordinary natural or
occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not the average man);
there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not
misrepresent die balance of harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives
in an atmosphere of these high lights - in a consciousness in which the finite,
not only the occult but even the earthly finite, is bathed in the sense of the
eternal, the illimitable infinite, the immensities or intimacies of the
Timeless ? To follow AE's rule might well mean to falsify this atmosphere, to
substitute a merely aesthetic fabrication for a true seeing and experience-
Truth first—a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to
be found, if it docs not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual
inadequacy of the English language; me inadequacy docs not exist and even if it
did, the language will have to be made adequate- It has been plastic enough in
the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however
new; it must now be urged to a farther new progress. In fact the power is there
and has only to be brought out more fully to serve the fail occult, mystic,
spiritual purpose.
And then he went on in another letter:
What you say may be correct (that our oriental luxury
in poetry makes it unappealing to Westerners), but on the other hand it is
possible that the mind of the future will be more international than it is now.
In that case the expression of various temperaments in English poetry will have
a chance.
If our aim is not success and personal fame but to
arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds of
poetry, the English tongue is die most wide-spread and is capable of profound
turns of mystic expression which makes it admirably fitted for the purpose; if
it could be used for the highest spiritual expression, that is worth trying.
And then in another letter:
The idea that Indians cannot succeed in English poetry is
very much in the air just now but it cannot be taken as absolutely valid.... At
present many are turning to
I have been at some pains here to labour this point
because I feel it necessary to combat the unhelpful attitude of those who
cannot create and yet presume to adjudicate on our highly laudable attempt to
express our deepest perceptions in English, as also because I reel sure, among
other things, that Sri Aurobindo will be recognised in future not only as a
poet but also as a poet-maker. It will take me too much space to bring out what
I mean when I say this. So I will confine myself at present to saying that
those of us who have seen not one, but many poets flower under his inspiration
(some of whom had never before written a single poem) cannot possibly accept
the verdicts of those who have no access to such data, for the simple reason
that no-experience is incompetent per se to adjudicate on the
validity or otherwise of experience.
But before I conclude my account of Sethna I must
stress something about his poetic perspicacity and insight, the more because
these native gifts, which matured rapidly under Gurudev's fostering, he
utilised religiously not only to understand our Master's special contribution
to poetry, but—what is more important for the public—to pave the way to a
more critical and deeper understanding of his genius by his luminous studies,
in different Journals, of Sri Aurobindo's form and message. I am myself
definitely persuaded—even from what little I have imbibed with my limited
receptivity of the supreme beauty of his epic Savitri—that he wilt be
regarded as by far the greatest poet of this age, a new epoch-maker in poetry,
or to quote from Sethna's on estimate:
On the brow of this giant we must place a crown of
triple triumph. For, Sri Aurobindo has done three exceedingly rare things.
First, lie has to his credit a bulk of excellent blank verse—a Statement
possible about poets we can count on our fingers. At least five thousand lines
in the Collected Poems and Plays... are a diversely modulated beauty and
power with no appreciable tall below a fine adequacy and with peak after peak
of superb frenzy. They put him cheek by jowl with Keats in both essence and
amount. The huge epic Savitri...
is a marvel which places him at once in the company of the absolute top-rankers
by a sustained abundance of first-rate quality. Add to living lengths of blank.
verse a large number of sublime or delicate shorter pieces, mostly in rhyme,
and we have a further testimony of Sri Aurobindo's creativeness. But what
is of extraordinary import
is that among them we have a body of successful work in a medium that has
eluded English poets: quantitative metre. Sri Aurobindo has solved once for all
the problem of quantity in English—a feat which gives the language 'a brave new
world' of consciousness. Quantitative metre is the second tier in Sri
Aurobindo's poetic crown. The third is not merely a revelation of strange
rhythm-moulds, but also the laying bare of a rhythmic life beyond the ranges of
inspired consciousness to which we have been so far accustomed. To bring the
epic surge or the lyric stream of the quantitative metres of
I do not fed called upon to apologise for giving
such a long quotation from Sethna's book, the- less because 1 cannot help a
deep regret that we, Indians, who have already flowered, at our loveliest, into
no mean creators in English poetry should have elected to cling to a cautious
if not timid silence about Sri Aurobindo's epic achievement in poetry (an
achievement which has been making history while we remain standing in a
non-committal hush) simply because we want to play safe and so dare not
give our verdicts lest our highbrow English tutors reverse it later on, I will
not go into the cause of the unresponsiveness on the part of the English, but I
feel I owe it to truth to speak out my deep conviction: that not to know Sri
Aurobindo as a poet will be, in the near future, to argue oneself unknown as a
critic and lover of poetry. Fortunately Krishnaprem (formerly Ronald Nixon) has
made some atonement at least for the silence of his compatriots, the English,
by writing in his tribute to Savitri:
Such poetry can only be written cither in the early
days before the rise to power of self-conscious mind or when that particular
cycle has run its course and life establishes itself once more in the
unity beyond, this time with all the added range and power that has been gained
during the reign of mind. It is an omen of the Utmost significance and hope
that in these years of darkness and despair such a poem as Savitri
should have appeared. Let us salute the Dawn.
And one must congratulate him - the more because he is
English —on his courage for having anticipated a hackneyed objection thus:
"The English language has been given to the world and its usages and
limits can now no longer be determined exclusively by the ears of the islanders
whose tongue it originally was. Those who would remain sole rulers of their
language must abjure empire." But to revert to Sethna.
I have felt this about him and a few others, isolated
appraisers of Sri Aurobindo's poetry, that when, in the not too-distant future,
Sri Aurobindo will have been acknowledged by the whole world as by far the
greatest of modern poets to whom the mantric word came as native as soaring to
the eagle, this first small band. of ardent admirers led by Sethna shall
receive the smile of the great Goddess of Poetry, Saraswati, not only
for having (in the words of Chesterton)
...watched when all men slept
And seen the stars which never see the sun.
but also for having readily acquitted themselves of
their sacred responsibility, the sense of which prompted them to "salute
the Dawn" they had seen and announce the high Herald of a new
consciousness in poetry, who sang vibrantly of Earth's deepest aspiration and
highest fulfilment:
An inarticulate whisper drives her steps
Of which she feels the force but not the sense;
A few rare intimations come as guides,
Immense divining flashes cleave her brain...
Outstretching arms to the unconscious Void,
Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods
Soliciting from dumb Fate and toiling Time
What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope,
A Mind unvisited by illusion's gleams,
A Will expressive of soul's deity,
A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed,
A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.
For these she yearns and feels them destined hers:
Heaven's privilege she claims as her own right.
Just is her claim the all-witnessing Gods approve,
Clear in a greater light than reason owns:
Our intuitions are its tide-deeds;
Our souls accept what our blind thoughts refuse.
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in Heaven,
The impossible God's sign of things to be.
(Savitri, pp. 51-52)
Source: Sri Aurobindo Came to me (pp. 85-103) by Dilip Kumar Roy