SPIRITUAL VISION

        POEMS  AND  POETS

                       38. SPIRITUAL VISION

A  great poet makes us see ordinary things in extraordinary light. But the greatest is one who can make us see eternity in the passing, universe in a grain of sand. Poets of some periods seem to be seized by some dominant feeling or sense or vision, which they impart to the whole age and society. In India we speak of 'ashtadikgajas' or 'navaratnas' adorning the court of some fortunate king. In English poetry we have periods like Elizabethan, Romantic, Victorian when the poets were motivated by some one major idea or theme or force.

The Victorian age was marked by high intellectualism, represented by Tennyson and Browning. But the age preceding was one of  "unaccountable spiritual impulse, insistent but vague in some, strong but limited in one or two, splendid and supreme in its rare moments of vision and clarity" ( Sri Aurobindo). The poets then sought to pierce the veil of appearances and bring before us the spiritual truth behind. Their language attained strange heights, even when talking of common things. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake and Byron,  Keats and Shelley represent such a moment. Not all of them attained the same great height or kept it for long but the glimpse they got was sufficient to power them, and to provide us aesthetic pleasure and spiritual stimulation. Some like Wordsworth wrote too much and dissipated their energy, like Browning later; some like  Keats and Shelley died young, before they could ascend their full height, but what they left behind is remarkable.

Let us consider two poems of Shelley.

 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

LOVE'S PHILOSOPHY

The fountains mingle with the river,

     And the river with the ocean;

The winds of heaven mix for ever,

     With a sweet emotion;

Nothing in the world is single;

     All things by law divine

In one another's being mingle:-

     Why not I with thine?

See! the mountains kiss the heaven,

    And the waves clasp one another;

No sister flower would be forgiven

     If it disdained ts brother;

And the sunlight clasps the earth,

     And the moonbeams kiss the sea:-

What are these kissings worth,

    If thou kiss not me?

Apparently a love poem, but the images invoked make it sublime. And it brings to us the basic fact of the universe: all things are connected!

Shelley talks of the mountains kissing the heaven. Our own Majrooh Sultanpuri has another image of mountain- of mountain sleeping on the lap of clouds!

Sare haseen nazaare, sapnon mein kho gaye

Sar rakhke  aasman pe, parbat bhi so gaye!

All the beautiful scenes around me, have vanished in my dreams

And the mountain has also gone to sleep,

keeping its head on the sky!

THE CLOUD

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,

     From the seas and streams;

I bear light shade for the leaves when laid

     In their noonday dreams.

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken

     The sweets buds every one,

When rocked to rest on their mothers' breast,

     As she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the  lasting hail,

     And whiten the green plains under,

And then again I dissolve it in rain,

     And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,

     And their great pines grew aghast;

And all the night 'tis my pillow white

     While I sleep in the arms of the blast,

Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,

     Lightning my pilot sits;

In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,

    It struggles and howls at fits;

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,

    This pilot is guiding me

Lured by the love of the genii that move

     In the depths of the purple sea;

Over the rills,and the crags, and the hills,

     Over the lakes and the plains,

Wherever he dream, under mountain, or stream,

     The Spirit he loves remains;

And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,

     Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,

    And his burning plumes outspread,

Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,

     When the morning star shines dead;

As on the jag of a mountain crag,

     Which an earthquake rocks and swings,

An eagle alit one moment may sit

     In the light of its golden wings,

And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,

    Its ardours of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall

    From the depths of heaven above,

With wings folded I rest,on my aery nest,

     As still as a brooding dove.

That orbed maiden with white fire laden,

     Whom mortals call the Moon,

Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,

     By the midnight breezes strewn;

And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,

     Which only the angels hear,

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof

     The stars peep behind her and peer;

And i laugh to see them whirl and flee,

     Like a swarm of golden bees,

When I widen the rent in my mind-built tent,

     Till calm the rivers,lakes, and seas,

Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,

     Are each paved with moon and these.

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone,

     And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl;

The volcanoes are dim,and the stars reel and swim,

     When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.

From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,

     Over a torrent sea,

Sun-beam proof, I hang like a roof,

     The mountains its columns be.

The triumphal arch through which I march,

     With hurricane, fire, and snow,

When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,

     Is the million-coloured bow;

The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove,

     Whilst the moist Earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,

     And the nursling of the Sky;

I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

     I change, but I cannot die.

For after the rain when with never a strain,

     The pavilion of Heaven is bare,

And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams

     Build up the blue dome of air,

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

     And out of the caverns of rain,

Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

     I arise and unbuild it again.

This is a long poem but as we say, every expression in it is worth  a lakh of rupees- 'akshara laksham'.  Obviously it is about the cloud, but the cloud here stands for something more fundamental. The poem speaks of rain, moisture, hail snow, etc that the cloud causes. But it also shows how everything  in nature is connected, inter-linked and interdependent. But more than this, it shows how nature is an unending cycle, where the form keeps changing but the substance remains.  It is here that he comes close to our own philosophy. According to Hindus, while nature constantly changes, there is no destruction as such, in the sense of something going out of existence, as there is no 'creation' in the sense of something coming out of nothing. What is normally called creation is just'manifestation'- coming out of a hiding, so to say; at the end of the cycle, things again go out of manifestation: involution, preceding evolution. Srishti and pralaya are eternal cycles of manifestation- continuous evolution, change, transformation, involution and so on, again and again. This is what Shelley is conveying here: the continuous metamorphosis or transformation of nature. Our very words-jagat, srishti,  pralaya indicate this unending cycle.

It is also remarkable that Shelley does not regard the phenomena of nature as inanimate, but endows them with personalities. In this, he has recovered the soul of all the ancient religions of the world for whom forces of nature were endowed with divine attributes or personalities."I change, but I cannot die"- what supreme Wisdom is this! "I silently laugh at my own cenotaph- I arise and unbuild it again": how beautifully the self-renewing power or activity of nature is revealed here! Nobody can write "Finis" to Nature, though its forms will keep changing. This is the truth revealed ( or hidden?) by the dancing form of Nataraja!

The figure of cloud is very dear to us. At the conclusion of Sandhya upasana, everyone utters a prayer:

Aakaasaat patitam toyam, yatha gaccahti sagaram,

Sarva deva namaskaraha: Keshavam pratigachchati.

Just as the rain water caused by the cloud  falling anywhere will ultimately have to reach the sea, so do our prayers, to whichever deity  addressed, reach the Supreme. 

The cloud is formed by the sea waters evaporating, and it comes back to the earth and sea as rain, river and water!

This poem by Shelley is one of the truly metaphysical poems in the English language. Sri Aurobindo reserved his high praise for Shelley:

'The spiritual truth which had possession of Shelley's mind was higher than anything opened to the vision of any of his contemporaries, and its power and reality which was the essence of  his inspiration can only be grasped, when it is known and lived, by a changed and future humanity. Light, Love, Liberty are the three godheads in whose presence his pure and radiant spirit lived; but celestial light, a celestial love , a celestial liberty."

                                                       From: The Future Poetry, part I, chap XVIII
                                                        Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2000.