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Chapter III
AUROBINDO GHOSE, THE PHILOSOPHER AS POET
THE poetry of Aurobindo Ghose is a meeting-place of Asiatic universalism and European classicalism. It is inspired by the-philosophy of the Vedas ; but it is shaped and atmosphered like Greece, or the Greece that is dimly incarnate in English poetry. That is probably why—in view of the co-ordination that philosophy sets between outer and inner —Mr. Ghose, an Indian, writes in unimpeachable English, and is compelled by extraneous circumstances to write-and publish his poems in French India. The French connection is not quite clear. It may be the nearest territorial approximation to Greece : from the literary point of view, Ghose and French modern lyrical fervour are not synonymous,, though something of the large quietness of Hugo might be attributed to him. What strikes one most in the poems of Mr. Ghose is the difference between the focal point of his poetical vision and that of all but a very small minority of writers of verse in English. Nothing is celebrated by him in song for its own sake. The poet's eyes perpetually go behind the thing visible to the thing essential, so that symbol and significance are always in a state of interfusion, and only on the rarest occasion, as in "Evening," does the significance precipitate itself as an obvious tag.
A golden evening, when the thoughtful sun Rejects its usual pomp in going ; trees That bend down to their green companion And fruitful mother, vaguely whispering—these And a wide silent sea. Such hour is nearest God,— Like rich old age when the long ways have all been trod.
For a companion to Mr. Ghose's double-sightedness, the simultaneous glimpsing of norm and form, we have to pass beyond the confines of Europe, and listen to the spiritual songs of AE. The Irish poet has not the patience and expansiveness of his Aryan
brother, but in heart and vision they are kindred. Mr. Ghose sings thus :
All music is only the sound of His laughter, All beauty the smile of His passionate bliss ; Our lives are His heart-beats, our rapture the bridal Of Radha and Krishna, our love is their kiss. AE sings :
We liken love to this and that, our thought The echo of some deeper being seems. We kiss because God once for beauty sought Within a world of dreams.
Normally there is a high thinking quality in Mr. Ghose's poetry ; we feel that it is the work of a man who will find salvation, not through song like a poet-philosopher, but through realisation that may or may not use verse as a meana of expression. Mr. Ghose is apparently philosopher first ; but his poetry is saved from being mere philosophical argumentation in verse by his good taste in image and phrase. When he escapes into pure sight and speech, he gives us a wholly delightful thing like " Revelation," which stands self-existent in its own authenticity and beauty.
Someone leaping from the rocks Past me ran with wind-blown locks
Like a startled bright surmise Visible to mortal eyes,— Just a cheek of frightened rose That with sudden beauty glows, Just a footstep like the wind And a hurried glance behind, And then nothing,—as a thought Escapes the mind ere it is caught. Someone of the heavenly rout From behind the veil ran out.
I would venture to suggest that in letting slip such beings from the unsullied Eden of his genius, Mr. Ghose gives us something that will spoil our taste for more concrete and less living work. He cannot escape dignity and wisdom (though once he stumbles on tautology when he writes the line Expunged, annihilated, blotted out) ; but we could sometimes spare the dignity and wisdom when they come as an anti-climax, poor minted coin of the brain, like the long whipping of the European dead horse of materialism that somehow or other manages to come after the veritable alchemy of the imagination of the first four stanzas of " In the Moonlight." If now must pause the bullock's jingliug 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. How living a stillness reigns ! The night's hushed rule All things obey but three, the slow wind's sigh Among the leaves, the cricket's ceaseless cry, The frog's harsh discord in the ringing pool. Yet they but seem the silence to increase And dreadful wideness of the inhuman night. The whole hushed world immeasurable might Be watching round this single point of peace. So boundless is the darkness, and so rife With thoughts of infinite reach, that it creates A dangerous sense of space, and abrogates The wholesome littleness of human life.
That, despite a couple of well-worn rhymes, is superlative. We look towards its author for more and more of its kin. |
