The Lake Isle of Innisfree: Yeats

 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Where is the lake isle of Innisfree? Why does he want to go there? Is that the scenery and the landscape which but tempts him just like Tintern Abbey of Wordsworth and flashes upon the mind’s plane for a recollection? Or, for some romantic mood and its pensive reflection and the escapist temperament he wants to escape to? What is the matter? Where will he go lastly? What will he after gliding into? But whatever be the poetic ruffle, the crux of it, The Lake Isle of Innisfree is at first instance a poem of tranquil calm, serenity, peace, quietude and solitude. As his days spent in County Sligo, in being attuned to Irish folktales, myths and legends and the occult, Yeats as a poet reposes in the Irish lore and Irishness for a soothing influence away from the humdrum of life, the monotony and drudgery of it.  One from the Anglo-Irish descent, he is a Protestant with a standing of own to contradict and refute to conform. His mind can go nowhere barring Ireland where he was born, where grew up to be man, was educated and reared, felt to feel it personally and privately to reflect upon. The poem is just like Martha of Walter de la Mare, Sea Fever by John Masefield, Look, Stranger by W.H.Auden and Ode On Solitude by Alexander Pope. Away from the circuit of civilization, he wants to move away just like Lawrence writes in Sea and Sardinia and other travelogues. The magic and charm of dream and imagery take him away from. None but a daydreamer or a night dreamer can write such a poem. The dreamy surface and the visionary glide of the poem are marvellous together with the tell-tale narrative and the make believe element inherent in it.

The poet will arise and will go for Innisfree where in the calm surrounding of the lake and the land mass he will build a small cabin made from clay and wattles and will settle to see and observe and nine beans he will plant. A hive for the bees too will be there and he will like to live alone with the bees   hovering around imaginatively and gliding along. The scene is one of pollen scattering and dreamy glides taken. Where does he want to go in search of peace, silence and content?

He will have peace, peace enthralling the heart, peace, all around peace dripping as the drops of dew or honey. The peace of mind, the peace of heart, the peace of soul, it is all that he seeks for and he will feel complacent. It takes time to settle and to be at peace and so is the atmosphere and environment of Innisfree, the landscape and scenery of it. The morning time and its silence, the mist uncovering and the light getting visible, the start of day with a freshness of its own, how to take to?

Wherever he goes to, he carries with him the imagery of the water dripping, spilling from the shore to the lake with a flow, murmur and babble of own. He may not be there, but the music still does for him. He has not forgotten the images and landscapes seen and enjoyed as they remain still captured in his heart, the images restored in. The album of Innisfree, the still photos taken and snapped, he cannot forget them poetically. He may be away from in his busy life of dull routines and schedules, but his heart still goes to Innisfree to draw the inspiration from. The midnight is but a glimmer and the noon a purple glow and the evening a linnet’s wings.

Sometimes man confides in nature to get the inner counsel and wisdom. Silence has also the notes of its own. This is what constitutes his soul which is lodged in the body. Nowhere can man find joy besides the beauties and bounties of nature which are but a permanent source of happiness and the   other thing is this that man is but an indivisible part of nature. The mind recomposes itself in silence and silence gives consent. The poem if to see it otherwise reminds us of The Brook by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The poetic pictures take us to the description of Lucy half-hidden from the world just like a daisy by the mossy rock in Lost Love. There is something of dream allegory as well as dream sequence in it.

The Irish setting and the Irish background give a befitting imagery to the poem as the natural scenery is pictorial and scenic no doubt in evoking scenes, pictures and images. There is music in the words which is so captivating and charming enough. Without knowing Innisfree one may not do justice to the poem and if one can explain it, everything will be clear to us.

 

Partition: WH Auden

 By: Bijay Kant Dubey

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
Having never set eyes on this land he was called to partition
Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.
'Time,' they had briefed him in London, 'is short. It's too late
For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
The only solution now lies in separation.
The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
That the less you are seen in his company the better,
So we've arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.'

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

I do not know who can write such a poem as he has, if there is a poem like this? Is there a historian who has in this way? How was India partitioned? Who divided it and for what? How could it be? Can land be divided or it is settled? Who is here to answer? All are but silent about with the lips held tight and answerless. All these lie inherent in unmindful of what the politicians, constitution-makers, historians, nationalists, freedom fighters and so on say it or put it otherwise. Had they at least the land department fellows they could have at least resolved the issues lying pending and unsettled? But the politicians cannot be believed, in no way at all. The selfish men and liars can never be. Who the guilty men of the Partition and how would India be in a haste? Whose vested interests were what? Who wanted what? The intentions are clear and if not, we may sense. How is this transition for power, the transfer of power? Can things be shipped so easily? It takes time. Can the things be partitioned as it was? With the Bench of the Five in which we can feel the echo of the Panch-parameshwara, wherein God is, can settle the things is our old perception, but can judgement be made in its negation, from the Indian perspective? Who really a fanatic, who really a patriot, who is who of, God knows, time will say it. Those whom we think of fanatics may not be and those whom we nationalists may not be. Who is what, it is very difficult to say it, it is very difficult to judge. Without consulting the peoples, the lands were partitioned at the behest of communal and divisive forces, politicians with vested political interests. Auden though he had not been during the Partition time catches the true spirit and frenzy, the fever and fret of the moments hanging so heavy upon with ill-will, brutality and irresponsible handling of the sensitive situation. Could the leaders not feel it then? Could the administrators not? Could the politicians not? How the chroniclers of history as Auden fails them through his sense of law and justice? Here he is no doubt John Galsworthian in his disposition of law and justice.

Had Sir Cyril Radcliffe been to India, he could have taken time, doing it not in haste, but he was called, reined in to demarcate the boundaries. The answer is not, he had not been before. If this could be the thing, how would he in a huff the vehemently opposed parties, the things of those peoples who are fanatically at odds with their different diets and incompatible gods?

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
Having never set eyes on this land he was called to partition

Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.

With the time briefed in London, schedules given, it was too late for a rational debate or conciliation and he thought of drawing the line as the contesting parties could not come to the table and the Partition appeared to be indispensable which but needed to be dealt with tougher iron hands, giving a deadly blow to the frenzied communal forces, given the vast mass of varying customs, sects, creeds, religions so differing from each other but aligning in the end    to a synthesis. The British too lacked that spirit and sense of dedication as they could not take it to be own failing to understand it properly and India too had been so ismic. The problem is none administered it well keeping the spirit of it and taking time to modernize.

The separation is the last solution. But the real story we do not know it. The problem lay it in illiteracy, black art, superstition, fatalism, inaction, backwardness, caste system, poverty, maladministration, mismanagement, backwardness, underdevelopment, ignorance, medievalism, conservatism, narrow nationalism, regionalism, parochial thinking, religious bigotry, fanaticism, ritualism and so on.

'Time,' they had briefed him in London, 'is short. It's too late
For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
The only solution now lies in separation.

But the Viceroy had the company and band of own. So keeping it in view he maintained distance from and avoiding him tried his utmost to dispense with which but needed rough works done before. As for to reach at, he was offered the Hindu and Muslim judges, but we wonder that the judges too could not be of any use in bailing out of the political crisis. He too was at wit’s end as for how to begin and where to end, how the lot of his to dispense with.

The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
That the less you are seen in his company the better,
So we've arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.'

Shut up in a lonely mansion with the police patrolling the house to drive the suspected assassins away, he got down to work, demarcate and oversee the Partition plan which was not at all timely and up-to-date as he had been just with the old maps:

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

A barrister he sailed for after his hectic activity and wrangling but so fraught with mistakes and miscomprehension, with so much misconception and misdemeanour. He went to and forgot just as a good lawyer does it for his profession sake as he misapprehended his presence could his life in trouble as for the trouble brewing and taking a drastic change with bloodshed, murder, loot, seize which K.A.Abbas’ The Refugee explains it best.

The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

But without knowing the history unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission, critical context one may not do justice with the poem. Who is the man whose arrival is awaited? One needs to know it. And Radcliff is the person here partitioning.  As for the judges, Hindu and Muslim, we are not sure of which Auden knows it best. Or, if we go through the minutes of the Partition, we shall know it by the way, but what pains us most is this that they divided it in a haste and with so much brutality doing justice to  a serious life matter in a childish way. The British too had not been serious in any way and their purpose too was to use and extract economically from rather than doing any good to. Can the lands be settled in such a way? Are the lands divided or settled? May I know it?

What the historians could not W.H.Auden has in his one small poem, has said it all what it happened, what they did and what our leaders and politicians. Could lands have been divided and settled in such a way? Is this the method of demarcation, drawing the line? Could Partition be done in such a way? Was it pre-planned, well-conceived, well thought-about? The answer is clearly, no. The reasonable men do not do as such, those who are logical at least. And I know it that they will not prescribe it into the courses of study as it open our eyes and the hidden truths will come out, if asked out of curiosity and logic is given to unravel the formulae of the Partition.

When we read the poem, Partition, we could not make a way, as for if Auden would take up Indian Partition and what interest will he get  from. But understood it through his indications that he was going to deal and grapple with a more sensitive and psychological matter which needed a sense of historicity and judgement which but a leftist like Auden and a socialist like George Bernard Shaw could have. Neither the Indians nor the so-called Pakistanis could think of the drastic consequences, the horror and terror of the Partition. It was not a partition of a nation, but of a sub-continent.

The Partition was a lapse on the part of judgement and the then time high court judges inducted in as the members too could opine in such a way is strange to think of toeing the religious lines as for the division of Mother India which is but a fallibility of human judgement as man is not above all those vested petty considerations, is the truth never to be put aside. What the people have got from is true from the prediction of Auden, better or worse the people of India and Pakistan can say it well. The times too had been awkward as such were the fellow people.  Nehru and Jinnah too could not feel about the   complications in their lust for sitting on chair. How can man be so cruel, we feel it on seeing the politicians, colonists and the colonized; the fundamentalists, fanatics and conservatives!

It was really a blunder to partition the sub-continent, a sin which Gods will never pardon it. Had there been no philanthropists and charitable people? Were there only the fundamentalists and communal forces involved in loot, plunder, murder, capture, violence and bloodshed? The fangs of the communal, divisive forces needed to be broken the moments it grew or appeared to be lethal and venomous. The census reports too were not up-to-date. The Governor-General too saw it tearlessly standing in the no-man’s land which could have been averted somehow, but in the absence of some wise judgement the mistake was committed in which the all as the parties were involved in practically more or less. Whose agendum was the Partition? How the resolutions taken? Was it done just to slaughter the innocent lives, to wipe out the common families mercilessly, to uproot them from their nativity? But something twitched him when he found the Partition taking a bad turn and people losing lives, getting displaced and dislocated and driven out of their homes and for that reason he refused to take the fee for his plan, burnt the papers and left in a huff. He really felt guilty of conscience, but what could he have if the times were so heavy upon and the situations so adverse? How strange is it that the judges too could not counsel him in the right way upholding judicature and jurisprudence, the Divine Justice, invoking the Goddess of Law from the human lapses, errors and trials of judgement?

Fire Hymn: Keki N. Daruwala

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

Fire-Hymn is one of the best hymns ever written by Daruwalla who is not only a poet, but a novelist, a short story writer, a travelogue-writer and an anthologist too besides being an IPS officer who has worked in various capacities. One from Lahore, he is a Parsi by faith and upbringing, but an Indian writing in English. After serving  the U.P., mainly the Terai regions and being posted in Delhi, he joined the RAW wing and worked as a Member of the National Minorities  Commission. His first book of poems appeared from Writers’ Workshop, Calcutta.  A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi award and the Padma award,  Daruwalla is a modern Indo-Anglian poet so robust,  bombastic, verbose, masculine and optimistic. Generally, disease, death and  tragedy, loss, suffering, violence, bloodshed, curfew and tragedy are the code words of his poetry. To read the hymn is to know the Parsi texts, beliefs and rituals. To understand him is to cut the ice of the Parsi psyche, is to delve deep into the things archetypal and  racial enough. To read him is to be reminded of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and the masculine toughness of Ted Hughes. As a poet, he is more inclined to tragedies,  Greek, Shakespearean and so on.

Fire-Hymn as a poem describes the scene of a ghat, a burning ghat near the river where the dead bodies are cremated, consigned to the flames. The poet visits the ghat and sees the bodies burnring or the the ashes with the embers within. He also sees the bodily parts and limbs while goign along the river-bank.

A  Parsi though he should not have but instead of as for compulsions, the Tower of Silence being away from, miles and miles away, he consigned to once, as he says about his first child. We know that the Parsis dispose off their dead on the Tower of Silence, an erected structure on which the dead bodies are placed and the birds of prey keep on perching, cleansing the flesh. Whatever be that, it is no doubt a fire-hymn, fire which had been so sacrosanct, is it still now and side by side which is also at the same time so dubious too in wreaking havoc. When we read the poem, the pictures and images of the Fire Temples flash upon the  mind’s plane, how were the fire-worshippers of  beyond India were in the past.

One day while strolling by the river-bank, the poet comes to mark the sudden blaze, flaring up of the fire, burning logs, sometimes quelled under the ashes or sometimes ignited by the  wind which but takes him by surprise. All those things take him over, draw the attention and they talk of the Fire, the Holy Fire and the jobs it does, the obsession with it and the aberration felt thereof. It is quite natural that the people like it not to see the burning ghats and even if, they try to avert their gaze or divert their attention. The burning pyres, smoking, fire catching upon and feeding, so playful and flirting, sometimes disgusting and annoying are the heart-rending scenes. Talking about the fire, his father hints towards the half-burnt bones lying on the ghat. How does sometimes fire leave it undone? How does it forget to cleanse it all?

The poet himself a Zoroastrian clinches the fist and feels the pain and swears to save the fire from the sin of forgetfulness which it occasionally forgets and as thus he gets hitched to some twenty years ago remembering it how he lost his first born baby which he consigned to the flames though he wanted it not personally as the Tower of Silence was some thousand of miles away and away from the place he was.  

The burning ghat erupted phosphorescence:
and wandering ghost lights frightened passers-by
as moonlight scuttled among the bones. 
Once strolling at dawn past river-bank and ghat 
we saw embers losing their cruel redness 
to the grey ash that swallows all. Half-cooked limbs
bore witness to the fire's debauchery.
My father said, "You see those half-burnt fingers
and bone-stubs? The fire at times forgets its dead! "
A Zoroastrian I, my child- fingers clenched 
into a little knot of pain,
I swore to save the fire
from the sin of forgetfulness. 

It never forgot, and twenty years since
as I consigned my first-born to the flames---
the nearest Tower of Silence was a thousand miles--- 
the fire-hymn said to me, "You stand forgiven."
Broken, yet rebellious, I swore this time
to save it from the sin of forgiving. 

The starting lines of the poem take us to Dawn at Puri written by Jayanta Mahapatra wherein he describes the funeral pyres on the sea beach adjacent to the Puri temple and the blaze taking the lookers on by surprise. On reading the poem, we think within if this the way of the world, of human life.

Fire-Hymn as a poem is Miltonic, Donnian as well as Shelleyian in the sense that Daruwalla invokes it like Milton writing Paradise Lost as well as sides with the rebellious questioning of Satan, is metaphysical like Donne and is Shelleyian for the revolt adding to the dimension of thought and idea. The duality of his soul is Hamletian, to be or not to be, whether he should have consigned or not. Why does fire take it on and finish it? Is it not ashamed of its deed? Is it not cruel and callous? How the Divine Scheme of things! The other point of deliberation may be his personality, psyche split in between the two, the Hindu way and the Parsi way, which way he should be with. This is but human nature because sometimes man thanks fire as for doing the holy job and sometimes rebukes for being so callous and hard, burning to ashes, wiping or erasing out of memory. Sometimes it takes time in dispensing with and it appears to be tedious to complete. There is something of the Book of Job and the Kathopanishada, Job mourning and questioning and Nachiketa and Vajashrava discussing and in the end Nachiketa and Yama left in the fray. There is something of prayer whispered, something confessed, something asked for condoning or pardon and he stands pardoned, a sinner I, sinful is the activity of mine, the sinful soul seeks the Almighty to pardon, to condone all the guilt committed out of ignorance, unmindfully. When he talks of cleansing of sin and purity and something as holy overtaking his guilt and consciousness, he seems to be reverting  to George Herbert and G.M.Hopkins. Fire-Hymn as a poem is purgatory and cathartic.

It is very dramatic and full of internal action though outwardly laden with weighty words. It is good to know the Parsi heart and soul, the Parsi spirit; the Parsi psyche and self. What Daruwalla has in this poem is similar to that one expressed in Bombay Prayers. Nissim Ezekiel's Philosophy and Hymns too are the same in spirit and tone. There are the images of three, father, son and the lost newborn. The poem is spooky and ghostly too as one shudders at generally in seeing the sights continuing around, going by near the crematorium seconded  with the coming and going of man. There is something of memoir and remembrance when he talks of the consigning of the first new-born to the flames.

The title is apt and suggestive because it is about the Holy Fire doing the job, sometimes doing in totality and sometimes keeping it half-done as the case is herein. The Zoroastrians are not fire-worshippers, but they take it for holy representing God and His Light and this light is but knowledge, the knowledge of the self.

Fire-Hymn is a poem of the fire flame, how it goes on leaping and licking, how the tongue and stride of it, but sometimes misses the target or say forgets it to do its duty.

The dialogue between father and son is very philosophical and observational:

My father said, "You see those half-burnt fingers
and bone-stubs? The fire at times forgets its dead! "
A Zoroastrian I, my child- fingers clenched 
into a little knot of pain,
I swore to save the fire
from the sin of forgetfulness 

The discussion is lively as well as down to relities. What does it last here? What does it happen to the body which appears to be own? The  reference to half-burnt fingers and bone stubs atatches to the pathetic   and tragic side of the body. But the son as a Zoroastrian feels the pain of cosigning to flames and wants it not to repeat it again.

Let us see how he relates to what it had happened to him some twenty years ago, as in the absence of the Tower of Silence, he consigned to flames:

It never forgot, and twenty years since
as I consigned my first-born to the flames---
the nearest Tower of Silence was a thousand miles--- 
the fire-hymn said to me, "You stand  forgiven."
Broken, yet rebellious, I swore this time
to save it from the sin of forgiving.

The Fire-Hymn in response to the dilemma going within, the spiritual malaise raking him murmured that he has been forgiven so keeping it in view the poet too seeks to save it from the sin of forgiving. The fire is burdened with the disposal of the dead. 

The burning ghat, erupted phosphorescence, wandering ghost lights,  frightened passers-by, moonlight scuttled among the bones, etc. add to the spooky element and to suspense. It arouses fear and terror.

Everything but finishes it here, nothing remains it for ever, the poet comes to feel it, as because when the pyres extinguish they, only the white ashes lie in, the fire embers too put out after losing their lustre:

Once strolling at dawn past river-bank and ghat 
we saw embers losing their cruel redness 
to the grey ash that swallows all. 

The embers, the cruel redness and the extinguishing fire with the remnants of white grey ash tell of the body turned to dust. Cruel redness tells of how fire reddening and feeding upon destroys it all.

Half-cooked limbs are but the fire’s debauchery as sometimes it forgets to do away with:

Half-cooked limbs
bore witness to the fire's debauchery. 

Whatever be the note of rebellion or the rebel taking up the cudgels against, the Fire, Holy Fire finally forgives the soul in askance or feeling the crisis within. Fire-Hymn is one step forward in the direction of the acquiring of good thoughts, good words and good deeds as for the spiritual crisis felt within and resolved. John Donne’s ‘Death, Be Not Proud’ too is a poem of this type wherein he talks of the rest of this body of flesh and bones and the soul’s delivery.

Aurobindo: Liberations (1 and 2)

By: Bijay Kant Dubey 

                     Liberation [1]

 

I have thrown from me the whirling dance of mind

And stand now in the spirit’s silence free;

Timeless and deathless beyond creature-kind,

The centre of my own eternity.

I have escaped and the small self is dead;

I am immortal, alone, ineffable;

I have gone out from the universe I made,

And have grown nameless and immeasurable.

My mind is hushed in a wide and endless light,

My heart a solitude of delight and peace,

My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight,

My body a point in white infinities.

I am the one Being’s sole immobile Bliss:

No one I am, I who am all that is.

Liberation [1] is one of those sonnets wherein he speaks of how the poet has thrown from him the whirling dance of mind and now standing in the spirit’s silence free from it all as something so timeless, deathless beyond the reach of the things of the creature-kind, the centre of his own eternity at last. The dance of the mind indicates the fluctuation and fickleness of the sensitive heart.

He has escaped from it all and the small self lies dead making him free from all that binds him and he stands it alone, namelessly immeasurable. He has gone out of the universe almost which he had made.

His mind lies hushed in a wide endless night; his heart the solitude of delight and peace and his sense detached from the touch and smell of the five senses. Now his body is a point of white infinities.

What has he to long and cherish for? What does it remain here to seek for? What to get, what not? If to get, but for what? What will he do with it?

Why to be after I? What is it in this I? If I gets into You, what to cherish? The things are carved out of matter and mass and the baser things return to their base finally.

Liberation as a poem is of course a poem of that type which takes us to dhyana, yoga and sadhna, opening the realms of thought and idea, delving deep in transcendental effects. What is dhyana, what is yoga and how to reach the edge? What is it sadhna? How the recourse of a sadhaka that he takes to? The bindu as the point of deliberation, the point of concentration, the cosmos assimilated and opined within the range, the meditation turning into supra-meditation, this forms the basis of discussion. When to see without the attributes, what will it remain here? What has a yogi to do it here? What can he be for? The bliss of sadhna is it all. Yoga is a reflection of the mind, the supra mind. Thought and thinking, where do they take to? Where to repose in? How to get nirvana, shantih, nirvana from the binding, shantih from tangles? What is substantial, what not? The Divine In-Form, the Divine Formless, how to gauze them? What is meditation? What is metaphysics? The stages and processes of dhyana, yoga, how to take to?

                          Liberation [2]

My mind, my soul grow larger than all Space;

Time founders in that vastness glad and nude:

The body fades, an outline, a dim trace,

A memory in the spirit’s solitude.

This universe is a vanishing circumstance

In the glory of a white infinilty,

Beautiful and bare for the Immortal’s dance,

House-room of my immense felicity.

In the thrilled happy giant void within

Thought lost in light and passion drowned in bliss,

Changing into a stillness hyaline,

Obey the edict of the Eternal’s peace.

Life’s now the Ineffable’s dominion;

Nature is ended and the spirit alone.

Liberation [2] is a poem in which the poet while recomposing in yoga and yogic practices scales the transcendental heights of meditation and silence, forgetting the self, merging with the Force, the mind and the soul rising above, getting lifted to, seemingly to be larger than all Space, time fluctuates it in that great vastness, the body fades it just like an outline seen, with the traces left over, a memory in the spirit’s solitude. This is how the Immortal takes one by surprise and astonishment. An Aurobindonian sonnet, Liberation [2] also echoes the antecedent in thought and idea.

A strange shunyata takes over. The universe appears to be a vanishing circumstance in the glory of a white infinity. Who can about the Creation of the Almighty? The Immortal’s dance, we cannot gauze it. The bare and the beautiful both are the creations of the Almighty.

While feeling the charm and warmth of meditation, the thrilled and happy giant void within, thought gets lost in light and passion drowned in bliss. The still hyaline, the edict of the Eternal’s peace, the giant void within happy and thrilled, what more is known to us barring these and what can we?

Life is but the Ineffable’s dominion. In such a state nature loses its landscape. Only the spirit pervades. Nothing remains here.

Yoga, metaphysics; logic, reasoning; intellect, thought, this is but the periphery of Aurobindo’s poetry and barring it he has nothing  to discuss. Yoga forms the basis of; the evolution of the human mind the core content of his poetry. Through yoga, what can one transcend? The power of sadhna, how to say it? Close the eyes and feel you.

It is really a pleasure to read the poems titled as Liberation, but at the same time we become curious to feel what it was that impelled him to write poems on two different occasions with the same title in hand. Whatever be that we shall like to have a comparative analysis of the two though the theme remains almost the same. In spite of it, the joys and spirits will definitely be slightly different no doubt. Let us see what it is in the poems just like the twins. The poems are the lotus of contemplation and meditation leading to nirvana and moksha, showing the ways as for how to be complacent, peaceful, meditative, contemplative and transcendental, and how to scale the heights of transcendence. From the void the world has been created and to the void lead we unto.

Aurobindo as a poet is George Bernard Shawian as both of them deal with evolutionary theories and charter the course of mankind through the development of thought and idea, propounding the thesis and antithesis. The evolution of thought, the growth of the mind of man, they discuss it in their writings and carry them forward as ideas, the texts and discourses of ideas merely.

Both the sonnets are alike in thought and content toeing the same line. Though the poems draw from yoga and meditation, instead there is something of shunyata, nihilism, existentialism, metaphysics, logic and reasoning. Dhyana-yoga forms the basis of his poetry, not aghora sadhna. What is nirvana? What is moksha? What is it liberation and where to go liberated from?

 

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

BY: Bijay Kant Dubey

I

This is about the green miraculous trees,

And old clocks on stone towers,

And playgrounds full of light

And dark blue uniforms.

At eight I'm a Boy Scout and make a tent

By stretching a bedsheet over parallel bars

And a fire by burning rose bushes,

I know half a dozen knots and drink

Tea from enamel mugs.

I wear khaki drill shorts, note down

The number-plates of cars,

Make a perfect about-turn for the first time.

In September I collect my cousins' books

And find out the dates of the six Mughals

To secretly write the history of India.

I see Napoleon crossing the Alps

On a white horse.

II

My first watch is a fat and silver Omega

Grandfather won in a race fifty-nine years ago;

It never works and I've to

Push its hands every few minutes

To get a clearer picture of time.

Somewhere I've kept my autograph book,

The tincture of iodine in homeopathy bottles,

Bright postcards he sent from

Bad Ems, Germany.

At seven-thirty we are sent home

From the Cosmopolitan Club,

My father says, ‘No-bid,'

My mother forgets her hand

In a deck of cards.

I sit reading on the railing till midnight,

Above a worn sign

That advertises a dentist.

III

I go to sleep after I hear him

Snore like the school bell:

I'm standing alone in a back alley

And a face I can never recollect is removing

The hubcaps from our dull brown Ford.

The first words I mumble are the names of roads,

Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton;

We live in a small cottage,

I grow up on a guava tree

Wondering where the servants vanish

After dinner, at the magic of the bearded tailor

Who can change the shape of my ancestors.

I bend down from the swaying bridge

And pick up the river

Which once tried to hide me:

The dance of torn skin

Is for much later.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is first and foremost a surrealist who has learnt his art of poesy from surrealism and has tried to lend a hand to it by dabbling in the verses which seem to be cramming with images, pictures, views and memories inter-crossing each other, so full of observation and personal reflection. While going to the bazaar or reading in the library or in the park, he comes across the different sections of people exchanging their thoughts and ideas, this or that and as thus he gets the materials for his poesy. To him, it does not matter what it is important or unimportant. He is a poet of gossips, chit-chats, tidbits; of time-spirit and is maniac and moody too. The unconscious mind, the litter and play of thought and the juxtaposition, this is the format on which he writes, sometimes rational, sometimes irrationally, which is what, we cannot say it. As a poet he is but a tagger tagging the loose things in his language the experiences of life as seen, come to feel and marked closely. A post-modernist, he is a poet of the disjoint self of man; of disintegration and dismemberment. Just as welder he keeps heating and welding the metal scraps of wayward, trite, common thing poetry. To go down the memory lines and to collect is the poetic habit of his as he can often be seen loitering on the balcony, terraces, the courtyard and into the garden stroking his white beards and talking with the green trees. His love of white beards is excellent. In the younger days he had blackly lovelier beards. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is but a poet of Lahore, Dehradun and Allahabad. The parallel lines running on the conscious and the unconscious levels he improvises them for his poetry.

What does he want to continue with here in this poem? But apart from giving a well-defined start, he starts it abruptly. This is about the green miraculous trees and old clocks on stone towers, the playgrounds full of light and blue uniforms. He remembers what has he as Scout Boy. He marks Napoleon crossing the Alps on a white horse. Here the lines are very striking as this one has to learn from history, from world history. Many fail to remember the dates and many go with learning by rote or some by hook or crook. To remember the names of the Mogul kings too is not easy as one often forgets them; the names are difficult to remember. Sometimes one does it when forgotten taking the tips from others. Such a thing it happens in the examination hall. What to say about the small children? Even the elderly fellows confuse them in taking the names of the Mogul kings chronologically. One who is parrot-like in imitation may be do it, we mean the learners by rote.

The second stanza is all about the wrist watches given, used and re-used, how we used to maneuvered to make it run, adjusting with, running abnormally, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. After that, he takes time in saying about the Omega Swiss watch running into trouble as for some mechanical and technical fault and he trying to adjust by hand. But what to do with the failed watches? The memories of the grandfather and his father hang over. Which home is he describing the Lahore home? The Dehradun home? Or the Allahabad home? Perhaps the second or the third is. But he is so much connected to Allahabad. There is something of family history, genealogy and his personal life in this poem. He sits on the railing till midnight above a worn sign telling of a dentist.

The third stanza tells of how he goes to sleep after his father has slept and started snoring. But before he sleeps he keeps standing in the dark alley and ruminating. There lies the dull brown Ford and the names of the roads come on the lips naturally,Thornhill, Hastings and Lytton as they live in a cottage. He grows on a guava tree as a line is suggestive of his plucking of the guavas frequently or may be it the tree is close to the building. But where do the servants vanish after the dinner is a thing of reckoning.

Mehrotra starts the poem with the green trees, old clocks on stone towers, playgrounds full of light and the blue uniforms doing the rounds:

This is about the green miraculous trees,

And old clocks on stone towers,

And playgrounds full of light

And dark blue uniforms.

His life as a scout boy finding craze in traffic control and others he takes a note of all that:

At eight I'm a Boy Scout and make a tent

By stretching a bedsheet over parallel bars

And a fire by burning rose bushes,

I know half a dozen knots and drink

Tea from enamel mugs.

People often mark it how the Scout boys and girls ask about to walk on the pathways and take to directions:

I wear khaki drill shorts, note down

The number-plates of cars,

Make a perfect about-turn for the first time.

But the routing changes it during the exam-time:

In September I collect my cousins' books

And find out the dates of the six Mughals

To secretly write the history of India.

I see Napoleon crossing the Alps

On a white horse.

At that time the watches used to mean so much for style and time-keeping and so is here the description about the Swiss watch here taking to the memory of his grandfather:

My first watch is a fat and silver Omega

Grandfather won in a race fifty-nine years ago;

It never works and I've to

Push its hands every few minutes

To get a clearer picture of time.

Again, he thinks of the autograph book and thinks of relocating it together with the homeopathy bottles. Bright postcards sent from Bad Ems, Germany engage the mindscape.

Somewhere I've kept my autograph book,

The tincture of iodine in homeopathy bottles,

Bright postcards he sent from

Bad Ems, Germany.

Again they return from the Cosmopolitan Club:

At seven-thirty we are sent home

From the Cosmopolitan Club,

My father says, ‘No-bid,'

My mother forgets her hand

In a deck of cards.

I sit reading on the railing till midnight,

Above a worn sign

That advertises a dentist.

The references to the dull brown Ford and the roads of Allahabad tell of his dormant passion and possession and the outing into those:

And a face I can never recollect is removing

The hubcaps from our dull brown Ford.

The first words I mumble are the names of roads,

Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton;

How the place where he lives, the cottage and the guava tree:

We live in a small cottage,

I grow up on a guava tree

Wondering where the servants vanish

After dinner, at the magic of the bearded tailor

Who can change the shape of my ancestors.

Here there is something difficult to explain so mythical, mystical and symbolical:

I bend down from the swaying bridge

And pick up the river

Which once tried to hide me:

The dance of torn skin

Is for much later.

With the flow of time and memory where does he want to go? The river consciousness it is there in him. The passage of time he seems to charter it, as seen, experienced and understood in life. This is as thus time passes off, memory slips down the lanes. This is as thus life continues it. One is connected with the other, one idea with another idea, one thought with another, one experience with another experience.

The Canonization

Link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/literariness.org/2020/07/06/analysis-of-john-donnes-the-canonization/amp/

By: Nasrullah Mambrol

Critics basically agree to divide John Donne’s writing into two groups related to his life stages, his romantic, or love, poetry in the stage dating prior to 1615, and the spiritual poetry emanating from the time of his ordination in 1615 to the year of his death, 1631. However, most scholars also agree that much of his romantic poetry reflects his grounding since childhood in the Catholic faith, seen often in the figurative language he adopts to write of love and its erotic aspects. This combination proved unseemly to many in cultures that followed Donne’s own, and for that reason his poetry did not gain popularity until the 20th century. That era proved more open to the exaggeration and surprising comparisons of metaphysical poets and poetry that had so scandalized earlier readers. Donne’s focus on the theme of union, both physical and spiritual, dominates his work. Supported by the logical precision in which Donne excelled, his writing emphasizes balance in relationships and between themes. In “The Canonization,” he uses the relationship between the spiritual and the erotic as framework to emphasize the close ties between spiritual and physical love.

By titling his poem The Canonization, (1633) Donne prepares his readers for a religious poem but delivers something entirely different. He often utilized that technique, as in A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning, among others. Canonization in the Catholic Church occurs when individuals have proved themselves practitioners of “heroic virtue.” A person labeled as heroic is believed to have acted in an exceptional manner that ranks him above the common man, while one who practices virtue possesses a soul already redeemed by Christ, enabling him to reject things material in favor of things spiritual. Canonization preceded the granting of sainthood, and those deemed saints could be called upon by humans for intervention with God in important matters. Donne’s choice of canonization as suggesting role models and intercessors proves vital to the meaning of his poem.

Gender Matters: The Women in Donne’s Poems

The speaker begins with a dramatic address suitable to the stage, crying to an unseen provoker, “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.” In a few words Donne sets a scene in which his audience understands that the “hero” of his poem has been attacked through words, probably gossip, due to the hero’s manner of loving. The speaker is concerned that because of the provoker’s judgment, he will not be allowed to continue his love. He next offers the antagonist substitute targets for his slander, including the obviously aged speaker’s physical attributes, such as his “palsy,” “gout,” and “five gray hairs.” Donne chooses the verb chide to make clear that the speaker’s nemesis seems a nag with so little to do, he must select an innocent person to rebuke. His next lines further allow his speaker to belittle the antagonist. Not only might the antagonist attack him simply for his age, which amounts to petty cruelty, but he might also criticize the speaker’s lack of material goods and social position, saying the attacker might his “ruined fortune flout.” Again Donne’s word choice proves imperative for its connotation. A person who suffers “ruin” is generally reduced by an outside attack of some kind, not by profligate actions of his own. The use of alliteration emphasizes that the attacker does not simply whisper about the speaker’s problems but flaunts them, suggesting he shows contempt for the debt, defying laws of decency. The speaker orders his assailant, “Take you a course, get you a place,” suggesting situations that at first glance seem to have high status, serving “his hounour, or his grace,” or a “King.” But Donne makes clear that these positions of “service” equate to simple toadyism, contemplating, for instance, the king’s “real, or his stamped face,” with “stamped face” probably meaning that which appeared on currency of the realm.

The speaker does not care what other occupations the antagonist chooses, as long as he will “let me love.” He concludes the first of his five nine-line stanzas having established himself as an innocent, set upon by undesirables who have no loves of their own.

The second stanza continues the speaker’s application of logic, as he questions how his love injures or harms others. He contrasts small actions, such as a lover’s sigh or tears shed, with grand events, such as the sinking of a “merchant’s ships” and the floods that caused that sinking. The results escalate to the level of the absurd, with the speaker questioning,

When did my colds a forward spring remove?   
When did the heats which my veins fill     
Add one more to the plaguy bill?

His love has not altered the seasons or killed anyone with infection; nor has it, he adds, affected soldiers or lawyers who will continue with their normal actions even “Though she and I do love.” Having reduced his attacker to the level of fool, the speaker moves into the next stanza inviting others to label him and his lover whatever they wish; labels do not alter the reality of their love:

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;     
Call her one, me another fly,   
We’re tapers too, and at our own cost die.

The taper metaphor invokes thoughts of burning candles, which eventually disappear, as he and his lover might eventually die, consumed by their passion.

Donne next compares the lovers to “the eagle and the dove,” alluding to the Renaissance idea of the Ptolemaic theory of the universe as concentric circles. Within those circles various creatures moved. While the eagle flew in the sublunar space, that of the sky above earth, doves ascended and descended to and from the upper heavens, according to biblical passages such as the one in which the Holy Spirit descends from heaven during the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist. Donne extends the metaphor of fire by using the phoenix, a mythological bird that recreated itself every 500 years, and suggesting its constant renewal as a riddle. The speaker proposes that the heat of passion may keep him young, despite his advancing age. The stanza concludes with an allusion to the Platonic notion that two lovers could join to form a perfect whole: “We die and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love.”

Donne carries the idea of love and death into the penultimate stanza, his first line reading, “We can die by it, if not live by love,” suggesting that once dead, the lovers will become the subject of legend and chronicle, their story preserved as an example to others. If their story is not told in history, it will certainly be presented through art:

We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms; 
As well a well wrought urn becomes 
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.

His suggestion of the small urn’s equality to the most lavish of tombs was made famous in the title of the 20th-century formalist critic Cleanth Brooks’s seminal book The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. But Donne saves his most dramatic comparison for the final two lines of this stanza, writing, “And by these hymns, all shall approve / Us Canonized for love.” Here he broaches the blasphemous suggestion that his physical love bears an importance equal to that of the canonized saints. Not only do they provide an example, their names may be called upon in order to intercede with requests that their own passion be increased.

This suggestion supports the final stanza, in which the brazen speaker claims that the very antagonists attacking him, and others of his ilk, will call upon the speaker’s love as a model for their own. Those for whom “love was peace that now is rage” once valued a quiet method for romance but now crave a far more passionate approach, signified by rage. Donne incorporates various words suggesting religion, including invoke and reverend, that would have scandalized Victorian readers. The speaker states that the You he addresses made the homes, or “hermitage,” of others their own through their intrusion or spying. Donne writes,

Who did the whole world’s soul extract, and drove,  
Into the glasses of your eyes,  
So made such mirrors, and such spies,     
That they did all to you epitomize,   
Countries, towns, courts; beg from above
A pattern of your love!

The speaker feels that those who spied upon others did so for vicarious needs and internalized what they observed. In the penultimate line, Donne adapts his frequent method for emphasis of an idea, expanding the individual concern or state to universal proportions.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Beatification and Canonization.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2.

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. “The Meaning of ‘Rage’ in ‘The Canonization.’ ” American Notes and Queries. 14, no. 2 (April 2001): 3.

Flynn, Denis. John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.