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Part Seven
Pondicherry Circa 1927 1947
Six Poems
Gold-white wings a throb in the vastness, the bird of flame went glimmering over a sunfire curve to the haze of the west, Skimming, a messenger sail, the sapphire-summer waste of a soundless wayless burning sea. Now in the eve of the waning world the colour and splendour returning drift through a blue-flicker air back to my breast, Flame and shimmer staining the rapture-white foam-vest of the waters of Eternity.
Gold-white wings of the miraculous bird of fire, late and slow have you come from the Timeless. Angel, here unto me Bringst thou for travailing earth a spirit silent and free or His crimson passion of love divine, — White-ray-jar of the spuming rose-red wine drawn from the vats brimming with light-blaze, the vats of ecstasy, Pressed by the sudden and violent feet of the Dancer in Time from his sun-grape fruit of a deathless vine?
White-rose-altar the eternal Silence built, make now my nature wide, an intimate guest of His solitude, But golden above it the body of One in Her diamond sphere with Her halo of star-bloom and passion-ray! Rich and red is thy breast, O bird, like blood of a soul climbing the hard crag-teeth world, wounded and nude, A ruby of flame-petalled love in the silver-gold altar-vase of moon-edged night and rising day.
O Flame who art Time’s last boon of the sacrifice, offering-flower held by the finite’s gods to the Infinite, O marvel bird with the burning wings of light and the unbarred lids that look beyond all space, One strange leap of thy mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind and life, arrives at its luminous term thy flight; Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face.
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A naked and silver-pointed star Floating near the halo of the moon; A storm-rack, the pale sky’s fringe and bar, Over waters stilling into swoon.
My mind is awake in stirless trance, Hushed my heart, a burden of delight; Dispelled is the senses’ flicker-dance, Mute the body aureate with light.
O star of creation pure and free, Halo-moon of ecstasy unknown, Storm-breath of the soul-change yet to be, Ocean self enraptured and alone!
The Inconscient Creator
A face on the cold dire mountain peaks Grand and still; its lines white and austere Match with the unmeasured snowy streaks Cutting heaven, implacable and sheer.
Above it a mountain of matted hair Aeon-coiled on that deathless and lone head In its solitude huge of lifeless air Round, above illimitably spread.
A moon-ray on the forehead, blue and pale, Stretched afar its finger of chill light Illumining emptiness. Stern and male Mask of peace indifferent in might!
Page – 548 But out from some Infinite born now came Over giant snows and the still face A quiver and colour of crimson flame, Fire-point in immensities of space.
Light-spear-tips revealed the mighty shape, Tore the secret veil of the heart’s hold; In that diamond heart the fires undrape, Living core, a brazier of gold.
This was the closed mute and burning source Whence were formed the worlds and their star-dance; Life sprang, a self-rapt inconscient Force, Love, a blazing seed, from that flame-trance.
A life of intensities wide, immune Floats behind the earth and her life-fret, A magic of realms mastered by spell and rune, Grandiose, blissful, coloured, increate.
A music there wanders mortal ear Hears not, seizing, intimate, remote, Wide-winged in soul-spaces, fire-clear, Heaping note on enrapturing new note.
Forms deathless there triumph, hues divine Thrill with nets of glory the moved air; Each sense is an ecstasy, love the sign Of one outblaze of godhead that two share.
The peace of the senses, the senses’ stir On one harp are joined mysteries; pain Transmuted is ravishment’s minister, A high note and a fiery refrain.
Page – 549 All things are a harmony faultless, pure; Grief is not nor stain-wound of desire; The heart-beats are a cadence bright and sure Of Joy’s quick steps, too invincible to tire.
A Will there, a Force, a magician Mind Moves, and builds at once its delight-norms, The marvels it seeks for surprised, outlined, Hued, alive, a cosmos of fair forms,
Sounds, colours, joy-flamings. Life lies here Dreaming, bound to the heavens of its goal, In the clasp of a Power that enthrals to sheer Bliss and beauty body and rapt soul.
My spirit sank drowned in the wonder surge: Screened, withdrawn was the greatness it had sought; Lost was the storm-stress and the warrior urge, Lost the titan winging of the thought.
It lay at ease in a sweetness of heaven-sense Delivered from grief, with no need left to aspire, Free, self-dispersed in voluptuous innocence, Lulled and borne into roseate cloud-fire.
But suddenly there soared a dateless cry, Deep as Night, imperishable as Time; It seemed Death’s dire appeal to Eternity, Earth’s outcry to the limitless Sublime.
“O high seeker of immortality, Is there not, ineffable, a bliss Too vast for these finite harmonies, Too divine for the moment’s unsure kiss?
Page – 550 “Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight, Life that meets the Eternal with close breast, An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite, Force one with unimaginable rest?
“I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven; My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys, A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven; — My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.
“By me the last finite, yearning, strives To reach the last infinity’s unknown, The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone.”
Dissolving the kingdoms of happy ease Rocked and split and faded their dream-chime. All vanished; ungrasped eternities Sole survived and Timelessness seized Time.
Earth’s heart was felt beating below me still, Veiled, immense, unthinkable above My consciousness climbed like a topless hill, Crossed seas of Light to epiphanies of Love.
There is a silence greater than any known To earth’s dumb spirit, motionless in the soul That has become Eternity’s foothold, Touched by the infinitudes for ever.
A Splendour is here, refused to the earthward sight, That floods some deep flame-covered all-seeing eye; Revealed it wakens when God’s stillness Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature.
Page – 551 A Power descends no Fate can perturb or vanquish, Calmer than mountains, wider than marching waters, A single might of luminous quiet Tirelessly bearing the worlds and ages.
A Bliss surrounds with ecstasy everlasting, An absolute high-seated immortal rapture Possesses, sealing love to oneness In the grasp of the All-beautiful, All-beloved.
He who from Time’s dull motion escapes and thrills Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal’s breast, Unrolls the form and sign of being, Seated above in the omniscient Silence.
Although consenting here to a mortal body, He is the Undying; limit and bond he knows not; For him the aeons are a playground, Life and its deeds are his splendid shadow.
Only to bring God’s forces to waiting Nature, To help with wide-winged Peace her tormented labour And heal with joy her ancient sorrow, Casting down light on the inconscient darkness,
He acts and lives. Vain things are mind’s smaller motives To one whose soul enjoys for its high possession Infinity and the sempiternal All is his guide and beloved and refuge.
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A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea, A world of power hushed into symbols of hue, silent unendingly; Over its head like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play Follows its curve, — a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day.
Here or otherwhere, — poised on the unreachable abrupt, snow-solitary ascent Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and spent, Or on the glowing expanse, arid, fiery and austere, of the desert’s hungry soul, — A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity’s face, in a fragment the mystic Whole. Moment-mere, yet with all Eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense, Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die caught by the spirit in sense, In the greatness of a man, in music’s outspread wings, in a touch, in a smile, in a sound, Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a Nothing that was all and is found.
Page – 553 NOTES
(From Letters of the Author)
THE BIRD OF FIRE — TRANCE
These two poems are in the nature of metrical experiments. The first is a kind of compromise between the stress system and the foot measure. The stanza is of four lines, alternately of twelve and ten stresses. The second and fourth line in each stanza can be read as a ten-foot line of mixed iambs and anapaests, the first and third, though a similar system subject to replacement of afoot anywhere by a single-syllable half-foot could be applied, are still mainly readable by stresses. The other poem is an experiment in the use of quantitative foot measures not following any existing model, but freely invented. It is a four-line stanza reading alternately
˘ ¯ ˘ | ˘ ¯ ˘ | ¯ ˘ ¯
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It could indeed be read otherwise, in several ways, but read in the ordinary way of accentual feet it would lose all lyrical quality and the soul of its rhythm. The Bird of Fire is the living vehicle of the gold fire of the Divine Light and the white fire of the Divine Tapas and the crimson fire of Divine Love — and everything else of the Divine Consciousness.
SHIVA — The Inconscient Creator
The quantitative metre of Trance is suited only for a very brief lyrical poem. For longer poems I have sought to use it as a base but to liberate it by the introduction of an ample number of modulations which allow a fairly free variation of the rhythm without destroying the consistency of the underlying rhythmic measure. This is achieved in Shiva by allowing as the main modulations (1) a paeon anywhere in place of an amphibrach, (2) the
Page – 554 substitution of a long for a short syllable either in the first or the last syllable of an amphibrach, at will, thus substituting a bacchius or an antibacchius, (3) the substitution of a dactyl for an initial amphibrach, (4) the substitution of a long instead of short syllable in the middle of the final anapaest, both this and the ultimate syllable to be in that case stressed in reading, e.g.,
a bacchius replacing the anapaest. The suppression of the full value of long syllables to make them figure as metrical shorts has to be avoided in quantitative metre. Scan:
Ă fāce ŏn | thĕ cōld dīre | mōūntăin pēāks
Grānd
ănd stīll; | ĭts
līnes whīte
| ănd āūstēre Cūttĭng hēāvĕn, | ĭmplācă|blĕ ănd shēēr.
The Inconscient as the source and author of all material creation is one of the main discoveries of modern psychology, but it agrees with the idea of a famous Vedic hymn. In the Upanishads, Prajna, the Master of Sushupti, is the Ishwara and therefore the original Creator out of a superconscient sleep. The idea of the poem is that this creative Inconscient also is Shiva creating here life in matter out of an apparently inconscient material trance as from above he creates all the worlds (not the material only) from a superconscient trance. The reality is a supreme Consciousness — but that is veiled by the appearance on one side of the superconscient sleep, on the other of the material Inconscience. Here the emphasis is on the latter; the superconscient is only hinted at, not indicated, — it is the Infinity out of which comes the revealing Flame.
Page – 555 THE LIFE HEAVENS
Further modulations have been introduced in this poem — a greater use is made of tetra syllabic feet such as paeons, epitrites,di-iambs, double trochees, ionics and, once only, the antispast — and in a few places the foot of three long syllables (molossus) has been used, and in others a foot extending to five syllables (e.g., Delivered from grief). Scan:
Ă līfe ŏf | ĭntēnsĭtĭes | wīde, ĭmmūne
Flōāts
bĕhīnd | thĕ
ēārth ănd |
hĕr līfe-frēt,
Grāndĭōse,
blīss|fŭl, cōloŭred,
| ĭncrĕāte. There were two places in which at the time of writing there did not seem to me to be a satisfactory completeness and the addition of a stanza seemed to be called for — one at the end of the description of the Life Heavens, a stanza which would be a closing global description of the essence of the vital Heavens, the other (less imperatively called for) in the utterance of the Voice. There it is no doubt very condensed, but it cannot be otherwise. I thought, however, that one stanza might be added hinting rather than stating the connection between the two extremes. The connection is between the Divine suppressed in its opposites and the Divine eternal in its own unveiled and undescended nature. The idea is that the other worlds are not evolutionary but typal and each presents in a limited perfection some aspect of the Infinite, but each complete, perfectly satisfied in itself, not asking or aspiring for anything else, for self-exceeding of any kind. That aspiration, on the contrary, is self-imposed on the imperfection of Earth; the very fact of the Divine being there, but suppressed in its phenomenal opposites, compels an effort to arrive at the unveiled Divine — by ascent, but also by a descent of the Divine Perfection for evolutionary manifestation here. That is why the Earth declares itself a deeper Power than Heaven because it holds
Page – 556 in itself that possibility implied in the presence of the suppressed Divine here, — which does not exist in the perfection of the vital (or even the mental) Heavens.
JIVANMUKTA
Written in Alcaics. These Alcaics are not perhaps very orthodox. I have treated the close of the first two lines not as a dactyl but as a cretic and have taken the liberty in any stanza of turning this into a double trochee. In one closing line I have started the dactylic run with two short preliminary syllables and there is occasionally a dactyl or anapaest in unlawful places; the dactyls too are not all pure dactyls. The object is to bring in by modulations some variety and a more plastic form and easier run than strict orthodoxy could give. But in essence, I think, the alcaic movement remains in spite of these departures. The basic form of this Alcaic would run,
but with an opening to other modulations. The subject is the Vedantic ideal of the living liberated man — jīvanmukta — though perhaps I have given a pull towards my own ideal which the strict Vedantin would consider illegitimate.
IN HORIS AETERNUM
This poem on its technical side aims at finding a halfway house between free verse and regular metrical poetry. It is an attempt to avoid the chaotic amorphousness of free verse and keep to a regular form based on the fixed number of stresses in each line and part of a line while yet there shall be a great plasticity and variety in all the other elements of poetic rhythm, the number of syllables, the management of the feet, if any, the distribution of the stress-beats, the changing modulation of the rhythm. In 558
Page – 557 Horis Aeternum was meant as a first essay in this kind, a very simple and elementary model. The line here is cast into three parts, the first containing two stresses, the second and third each admitting three, four such lines rhymed constituting the stanza.
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