There are several aspects of Aurobindo. He is nationalist, politician, poet, philosopher, critic, yogi, sociologist, teacher, scholar and a thinker. Even as a man of letters he is ‘many – splendoured’. He is a great writer of prose, as is evinced by the sheer bulk of his prose output—The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Secret of the Veda, The Ideal of Human Unity, The Human Cycle, The Future Poetry, The Foundations of Culture, Renaissance in India, Heraclitus, etc.
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| Sri Aurobindo As A Lyric Poet |
He is a playwright of considerable merit and has contributed five verse dramas of note - Purseus the Deliverer, Vasavadatta, Rodogune, The Viziers of Bassora, Eric, ranging over both Occidental and Oriental fable. He has translated widely from Indian literature into English notable among them being The Hero and the Nymph, his poetic rendering of Kalidasa's Vikramorvasiya, The Century of Life, a translation of Bhartihari's slokas, translations of devotional songs of Chandidas and Vidyapati, Vidula from the Mahabharata and Songs of the Sea, translations of the Bengali Sagar Sangit of C.R. Das. He has also written lyrics, epics and narrative poems. It is as an epic poet with Savitri (an epic of 24,000 lines and yet incomplete), Ahana and Ilion and many other long poems such as Urvasie and Love and Death that he has become the Homer of India. In the wake of this ‘marathon’ long works, says, Dr. Thakur Guru Prasad, “it is but natural usually to lose sight of his not inconsiderable contribution to lyrical poetry— the early Songs of Myrtilla reminiscent of the Naughty Nineties as well as his later appendices to weighty verse in Six Poems (1834), Poems (1841) and several posthumous ones in the Last Poems (1852), carrying out experiment in quantitative verse.”
Much of Sri Aurobindo's early poetry consists of lyrics and sonnets which were written between the age of eighteen to twenty when as a young man he was a student in England or in services in Baroda. This early work shows the influence of the English decadent or atheists in general and of Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Swinburne and Tennyson in particular. They sing of the beauty of spring, and flowers bloom in them everywhere and birds make sweet melody. They make a pleasant reading and have some sensuousness of Keats at every step or his enjoyment of the beauty of nature and of the beauty of the female body. They reflect his classical learning as they are full of references to classical mythology. But his later lyrics of the matured period “attain some things of the mantric quality of the poetry of the Vedas.” (Srinivas Iyengar). According to Jesse Roarkee, “It was only after he became settled in yoga that he found his full lyric vein and his singing voice in all its maturity and his best lyrics are all expressions of spiritual states, truths or experiences. They are in virtuoso in that line, if he were not so much more. He is a fine craftsman, but he is also an inspired poetical genius.”
As mentioned by Guruprasad, “Even as a lyric poet, Aurobindo's versatile Muse is characteristically meditational, spinning out difficult gems of mystical and philosophical poetry, To summit that this awesome Yugapurusha who realized Narayana Darshana and the inconceivable silences of his mind could ever patronize or ever entertain lighter moods is incredible indeed.”
It would be better to study in detail a few of his shooter compositions off the lighter vein. One such poem is “Despair on the Staircase” which is a fourteen - line poem made up of seven couplets, describing a young woman, probably a conquest:
Mute stands she, lonely on the topmost stair,
An image of magnificent despair;
The grandeur of a sorrowful surmise
Wakes in the largeness of her glorious eyes.
In her beauty's dumb significant pose I find
The tragedy of her mysterious mind.
Yet it is the 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.
This lyric is rich not only in images but also in humour and satire. Nobody could believe that a Mahayogi like Aurobindo could portray a young woman in such a humorous vein. Its structure is a remarkable experiment on the traditional form of the sonnet. Though it contains fourteen lines but is without the Petrarchan or Shakespearean classification into quartets, sestet and octave. The standard rhythm is decasyllabic, but beyond that there is little prosodic restriction, sufficiently free to reflect the liberty the poet takes with the dignified woman's image.
Similarly, another sonnet A Dream of Surreal Sciences is also a remarkable fusion of science, reverie and sardonic humour. The text runs as follows:
One dreamed and saw a gland white, Hamlet, drink
At the Mermaid, capture immortality;
A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink
Composed the Illiad and the Odyssey.
A thyroid, meditating almost nude
Under the Bo - tree, saw the eternal Light
And, rising from its mighty solitude,
Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all right.
A brain by a disordered stomach driven
Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell.
From St. Helena went, perhaps, to Heaven
Thus wagged on the Surreal world, until
A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout.
In this little but beautiful poem one can see Hamlet conceited in a dream , Homer's Illiad and Odyssey as the handiwork of a committee of hormones, Buddha's historic vision under the Bodhi tree , the rise and fall of Napoleon as the product of disordered stomach driving a brain. The mood is sarodic through and through. In this lyric also there is a flood of appropriate images and a union of the East and the West. Furthermore the poem is remarkable for the structural experimentation.
Then there is The Tiger and the Deer, a much bolder experiment on the fourteen- lines sonnet that either of the two earlier discussed, something of an epiphany following sharp perception of barbarous beauty in the wilds, capturing the way of the pitiless, mightily, glad. It illustrates his theory of quantitative verse. In it each line consists of groups of words. The group vary in length. The last two lines have only three such groups and all the rest have four. The effect in terms of rhythm is tremendous, and eminently suited to the substance of the poem. Just study the poem and find how brilliant, crouching and slouching it is!
Brilliant, crouching, slouching, what crept through
the green heart of the forest,
Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless
paws of grandeur and murder?
The wind slipped through the leaves as if afraid lest
its voice and the noise of the steps perturb the pitiless
Splendour.
Hardly daring to breathe. But the great beast crouched
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 mighty perish in their might;
The slain survive the slayer.
The Tiger and the Deer is a metaphysical lyric of great significance, and can be classed with Rishi, Who, Parabrahman, and Thought the Paraclete. It projects the bright and burning terror of the forest which is the tiger that brings unprovoked disaster to the deer, i.e. peace or innocence. The poem thus may be interpreted as a symbolic expression of the modern beastly power, the representative of which is the tiger crushing the innocent and beautiful deer representative of innocence and peace. The poem, however ends on an optimistic note, making a prophesy.
The mighty perish in their might;
The slain survive the slayer.
It is a lyric written in free quantitative verse, which is left to find out its own line by line rhythm and unity.