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.

     

     

Words And Nature

              POEMS  AND  POETS

               33. Words And   Nature

Words are the common medium of poets, novelists,prose writers. But they do not use them in the same way- in sense or intensity. In prose and novels, words carry a precise meaning, which gives them power. But for a poet, words are a passport to a different world; they depend on their power to suggest something, beyond merely what is spoken about. It is mainly  this which constitutes the chief difference between prose and poetry.

Consider the opening scene from Macbeth.

Act I,Scene 1

Thunder and Lightning. Enter three witches.

First Witch

     When shall we three meet again?
     In thunder,lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch

     When the hurly-burly's done,
     When the battle's lost and won.

Third Witch
   
     That will be ere the set of sun.

First Witch

     Where the place?

Second Witch

     Upon the heath.

Third Witch

     There to meet with Macbeth.

Thunder, lightning, rain; hurly-burly, battle lost and won, sunset, heath- each of these has acquired a significance;quite ominous, because witches say it, meeting amid thunder and lightning. We know something is happening to Macbeth.

Great novelists achieve this poetic quality.
Consider this from Dickens's Bleak House: (1852)

" London. The Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill . Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes-gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke ( if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon the crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."

This is prose at its graphic best. Everything is brought before our eyes. Nothing is left to chance, or imagination.

Look at this from Thomas Hardy:  The Return of the Native:(1878)

A Saturday afternoon in November.... the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath...... The distant rims of the world  and of the firmament  seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to the evening. It could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden the noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.

 .....the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternisation....

         The  untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon was now, it always has been. Civilisation was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation, its soil has worn the same unique brown dress,....In its venerable one coat  lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes.

Graphic enough; but the prose does something more. Coming in the beginning of the novel, it is not a mere description of a physical landscape: it induces a psychological landscape. Unenclosed wild, division in time, saddening the noon, anticipate the frowning storms, shaking and dread,untameable thing,satire on human vanity- all these add up to a strange uneasiness, that the place is going to be an active participant in the unfolding story, and it is not going to be kind to every one, especially to those with an eye or mind on the city, for civilisation is its enemy.  Those who read a novel for its action will hardly notice this, like the modern tourists who 'do' the many places, may be clicking the pictures in their mobile, but hardly registering the thing in their mind! But if you pause and keep step upon conscious step as you walk the heath, it can hardly fail to stir you in some strange fashion. Here, the prose has the effect of poetry- taking you beyond the words, or the mere action. It makes you focus on the inner landscape of your mind and psyche. Reviewing our own lives, we can certainly recall moments when some places have exercised such an influence.

( Incidentally, a heath here, as in Macbeth!)

Both Dickens and Hardy are describing an objective scene. But Hardy vests in it a subjective vision, through the power of suggestion. Dickens deals with man's place in London of his times, the social conditions emerging consequent on the industrial revolution. But Hardy is using a remote country locale to place man in the universe, and question his place in it, and its meaning for his life! Dickens deals with problems and situations relevant to a particular point in time, which can be tackled by man- and so they have been tackled since; but Hardy's questions are more intractable. They are bound up with our being human; they show a side of human condition where our very attempt to improve things seems to worsen the situation, as if the gods do not want man to outwit them! It looks intensely tragic at times, but many poets have alluded to it. Byron wrote:

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away.

Perhaps this was at the back of his mind when our Kaifi Azmi wrote:

Ik haath se deti hai duniya,
Sau haathon se le leti hai,
Ye khel hai kab se jaari!

What the world gives with one hand,
It takes away with a hundred!
And this game has been going on since long!

Even Keats wrote in Endymion:

To sorrow
I bade good-morrow
And thought to leave her far away behind:
But cheerly,cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind.
I would deceive her,
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind!

All this is not said to depress us, but to induce a sense of detachment about the world. Be in the world, but not of it- easily said. All true religions teach us this in their own way. Keats himself said:

And then 'twas fit that from this mortal state
Thou shouldst, my love, by some unlooked for change
Be spiritualized.

         

     

A Bouquet of Great Poems - Introduction

Poems and Poets

Light and Delight

1.Poetry is the earliest form adopted by the human mind to express its experiences, thoughts, visions. All ancient civilisations are full of poetry of various types, even though by today's norms they would all be considered 'illiterate' or primitive. This poetry was not just recited but sung and danced,accompanied by music. Poetry was the medium through which culture and traditions of the society, so essential for its survival were transmitted to the next generations. On the contrary a society which lost touch with its own ancestral poetry lost itself and became the slave and imitator of others.

2.Poetry has been the greatest inspiration of the civilised kind through the ages.Poets did not deal in mere words. Kavi in the Indian tradition means one who knows-the Jnani. Such was the exalted position of the Jnani that when Vyasa set out to compose the Mahabharata, Lord Ganapati himself acted as his scribe.

3.Poets saw the higher truths obscured by the stream of daily life, its cares and concerns, its toil and tears. They tried to raise the human mind to higher realms.

"The rest may reason and welcome. It is we musicians know"

says Browning. We may easily read 'poets' for musicians!

The poets see something the ordinary person misses. As Blake says, the poets

".......And see the opening morn,  
Image of truth new-born
Doubt is fled & clouds of reason 
Dark disputes & artful teazing."

Again,

"Hear the voice of the Bard! Who present, past and future sees; Whose ears have heard The holy word."

4. Every generation has been nurtured and sustained by inspired poetry. It is only with the rise of the material,commercial culture that poetry has lost its importance and become - "my shame in crowds, my solitary pride"- as Oliver Goldsmith wrote in 1770. The present age "has mistaken comfort for civilisation" as Lewis Mumford told us, and made us all seekers of vulgar pleasure (where ere long "the toiling pleasure sickens into pain") and cheap entertainment, forgetting the age old quest for the Good, Beauty and Truth, where the ancient Greeks were our grand kinsmen.

5.In the whole history of mankind, there is no higher Truth than that recorded in the Veda and its allied literature, and no poetry more sublime than our Upanishads and the Gita. There is also a vast store of religious and secular poetry in all Indian languages. But such is the spirit of the times that our own people neglect them, especially after Independence. Less and less people of the younger generation get exposed to this great treasure. Very few choose to study them as a main subject, or even on their own.

6. Indians have been learning English  through the school system since 1836. An important part of studies was language and literature. Generations of young Indians got to learn English literature and know about their poets and study their poetry. Many of them acquired great taste and proficiency for English poetry and felt admiration for Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake and Keats, Tennyson and Pope,Browning and Shelley and their exalted train and even felt a deep bond with them. But in recent years, emphasis has shifted from "liberal education" to the hard sciences and social sciences. Language study has become incidental.The semester system ensures that the students do not have to remember anything beyond the next test or exam. The art of learning poems by heart has almost disappeared.

7. In my college days, I had to study something of Shakespeare and some English poets. My teachers , more than just teaching the prescribed portions, planted in me the love of poetry and desire to learn more. Excellent anthologies were available like Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Mentor Book of Major British Poets, An Anthology of Longer Poems by Moles and Moon, etc. But it was not easy to follow the poems and appreciate their full beauty, in the absence of detailed notes and explanations. Recent years have seen many more excellent anthologies and learned expositions by great scholars. The advent of the Net has also transformed  the scene. So many dedicated souls are providing so much information and guidance. And their tribe keeps increasing!

8.Here in this blog I desire to share with like-minded lovers of poetry some of the poems which I have read and enjoyed over the last 50 years. I am not a professional scholar or formal student of literature. My idea of literature is rather old fashioned- that it is a mirror on all aspects of life and also its mentor, and not the limited view that modern academics advocates- that it has  to do  merely with words and language, the  aesthetics of word usage, distinct from other disciplines.I consider a well written book on any subject to be good literature- be it Peter Drucker on Management, or The General Theory of Keynes,  or The Life Divine of Sri Aurobindo,no less than A.C.Bradley on Shakespeare or English Poetry and Dr.Johnson's writings on the English poets. Chesterton's 'Orthodoxy' and 'Heretics' will qualify in my view as literature, no less than his Father Brown stories. Benjamin Jowett's translation of Plato is literature, no less than translations of Rumi by Coleman Barks. Shakespeare is no insignificant  philosopher for being a poet and playwright.

9.The poems I select reflect my liking and taste. Why do I call them great? Because of their adherence to or advocacy of Good, Beauty, Truth (Others may of course have other criteria). These are universal and not limited to any time or clime. Fashions and fads come and go, but universal values remain. Great minds think alike and we will wonder how alike indeed they are when the English poets echo our own thoughts and sentiments. Great poetry is one which reminds us of our own humanity and potential for divinity.

10. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever",declared Keats.I hope these poems will spread joy and goodwill around. Great poetry constitutes "lifelong fountain of innocent and exalted pleasure" (Palgrave) Poetry where "words dance", "words sing"  (C.Day Lewis) makes our hearts sing too!I invite friends to share this beauty and spread this joy.

Sarve bhavantu sukhina:

Sarve santu niramaya:

Sarve bhadrani pasyantu

Ma kaschit dukha bagh bhaved.

May all beings be happy!

May all beings be free of illness!

May all beings be bestowed will all good!

May no being be touched by suffering!

May peace and plenty reign everywhere!