Sri Aurobindo

The Future Poetry

CWSA.- Volume 26

Poems in Quantitative Metres

{{0}}Ilion[[Hexameters. Some opening passages of a poem left unfinished have been recast and added here to illustrate to some extent the theory of the hexameter put forward in the preceding pages.]]

Dawn over Ilion

Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of mortals,

Dawn the beginner of things with the night for their rest or their ending,

Pallid and bright-lipped arrived from the mists and the chill of the Euxine.

Earth in the dawn-fire delivered from starry and shadowy vastness

Woke to the wonder of life and its passion and sorrow and beauty,

All on her bosom sustaining, the patient compassionate Mother.

Out of the formless vision of Night with its look on things hidden

Given to the gaze of the azure she lay in her garment of greenness,

Wearing light on her brow. In the dawn-ray lofty and voiceless

Ida climbed with her god-haunted peaks into diamond lustres,

Ida first of the hills with the ranges silent beyond her

Watching the dawn in their giant companies, as since the ages

First began they had watched her, upbearing Time on their summits.

Troas cold on her plain awaited the boon of the sunshine.

There, like a hope through an emerald dream sole-pacing for ever,

Stealing to wideness beyond, crept Simois lame in his currents,

Guiding his argent thread mid the green of the reeds and the grasses.

Headlong, impatient of Space and its boundaries, Time and its slowness,

Xanthus clamoured aloud as he ran to the far-surging waters,

Joining his call to the many-voiced roar of the mighty Aegean,

Answering Ocean’s limitless cry like a whelp to its parent.

Forests looked up through their rifts, the ravines grew aware of their shadows.

Closer now gliding glimmered the golden feet of the goddess.

Over the hills and the headlands spreading her garment of splendour,

Fateful she came with her eyes impartial looking on all things,

Bringer to man of the day of his fortune and day of his downfall.

Full of her luminous errand, careless of eve and its weeping,

Fateful she paused unconcerned above Ilion’s mysteried greatness,

Domes like shimmering tongues of the crystal flames of the morning,

Opalesque rhythm-line of tower-tops, notes of the lyre of the sungod.

High over all that a nation had built and its love and its laughter,

Lighting the last time highway and homestead, market and temple,

Looking on men who must die and women destined to sorrow,

Looking on beauty fire must lay low and the sickle of slaughter,

Fateful she lifted the doom-scroll red with the script of the Immortals,

Deep in the invisible air that folds in the race and its morrows

Fixed it, and passed on smiling the smile of the griefless and deathless,—

Dealers of death though death they know not, who in the morning

Scatter the seed of the event for the reaping ready at nightfall.

Over the brooding of plains and the agelong trance of the summits

Out of the sun and its spaces she came, pausing tranquil and fatal,

And, at a distance followed by the golden herds of the sungod,

Carried the burden of Light and its riddle and danger to Hellas.

The Coming of the Herald

Even as fleets on a chariot divine through the gold streets of ether,

Swiftly when Life fleets, invisibly changing the arc of the soul-drift,

And, with the choice that has chanced or the fate man has called and now suffers

Weighted, the moment travels driving the past towards the future,

Only its face and its feet are seen, not the burden it carries.

Weight of the event and its surface we bear, but the meaning is hidden.

Earth sees not; life’s clamour deafens the ear of the spirit:

Man knows not; least knows the messenger chosen for the summons.

Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his heart’s ignorant whisper,

Whistle of winds in the tree-tops of Time and the rustle of Nature.

Now too the messenger hastened driving the car of the errand:

Even while dawn was a gleam in the east, he had cried to his coursers.

Half yet awake in light’s turrets started the scouts of the morning

Hearing the jar of the wheels and the throb of the hooves’ exultation,

Hooves of the horses of Greece as they galloped to Phrygian Troya.

Proudly they trampled through Xanthus thwarting the foam of his anger,

Whinnying high as in scorn crossed Simois’ tangled currents,

Xanthus’ reed-girdled twin, the gentle and sluggard river.

One and unarmed in the car was the driver; grey was he, shrunken,

Worn with his decades. To Pergama cinctured with strength Cyclopean

Old and alone he arrived, insignificant, feeblest of mortals,

Carrying Fate in his helpless hands and the doom of an empire.

Ilion, couchant, saw him arrive from the sea and the darkness.

Heard mid the faint slow stirrings of life in the sleep of the city,

Rapid there neared a running of feet, and the cry of the summons

Beat round the doors that guarded the domes of the splendour of Priam.

“Wardens charged with the night, ye who stand in Laomedon’s gateway,

Waken the Ilian kings. Talthybius, herald of Argos,

Parleying stands at the portals of Troy in the grey of the dawning.”

High and insistent the call. In the dimness and hush of his chamber

Charioted far in his dreams amid visions of glory and terror,

Scenes of a vivider world,— though blurred and deformed in the brain-cells,

Vague and inconsequent, there full of colour and beauty and greatness,—

Suddenly drawn by the pull of the conscious thread of the earth-bond

And of the needs of Time and the travail assigned in the transience

Warned by his body, Deiphobus, reached in that splendid remoteness,

Touched through the nerve-ways of life that branch to the brain of the dreamer,

Heard the terrestrial call and slumber startled receded

Sliding like dew from the mane of a lion. Reluctant he travelled

Back from the light of the fields beyond death, from the wonderful kingdoms

Where he had wandered a soul among souls in the countries beyond us,

Free from the toil and incertitude, free from the struggle and danger:

Now, compelled, he returned from the respite given to the time-born,

Called to the strife and the wounds of the earth and the burden of daylight.

He from the carven couch upreared his giant stature.

Haste-spurred he laved his eyes and regained earth’s memories, haste-spurred

Donning apparel and armour strode through the town of his fathers,

Watched by her gods on his way to his fate, towards Pergama’s portals.

The Siege

Nine long years had passed and the tenth now was wearily ending,

Years of the wrath of the gods, and the leaguer still threatened the ramparts

Since through a tranquil morn the ships came past Tenedos sailing

And the first Argive fell slain as he leaped on the Phrygian beaches;

Still the assailants attacked, still fought back the stubborn defenders.

When the reward is withheld and endlessly lengthens the labour,

Weary of fruitless toil grows the transient heart of the mortal.

Weary of battle the invaders warring hearthless and homeless

Prayed to the gods for release and return to the land of their fathers:

Weary of battle the Phrygians beset in their beautiful city

Prayed to the gods for an end of the danger and mortal encounter.

Long had the high-beached ships forgotten their measureless ocean.

Greece seemed old and strange to her children camped on the beaches,

Old like a life long past one remembers hardly believing

But as a dream that has happened, but as the tale of another.

Time with his tardy touch and Nature changing our substance

Slowly had dimmed the faces loved and the scenes once cherished:

Yet was the dream still dear to them longing for wife and for children,

Longing for hearth and glebe in the far-off valleys of Hellas.

Always like waves that swallow the shingles, lapsing, returning,

Tide of the battle, race of the onset relentlessly thundered

Over the Phrygian corn-fields. Trojan wrestled with Argive,

Caria, Lycia, Thrace and the war-lord mighty Achaia

Joined in the clasp of the fight. Death, panic and wounds and disaster,

Glory of conquest and glory of fall, and the empty hearth-side,

Weeping and fortitude, terror and hope and the pang of remembrance,

Anguish of hearts, the lives of the warriors, the strength of the nations

Thrown were like weights into Destiny’s scales, but the balance wavered

Pressed by invisible hands. For not only the mortal fighters,

Heroes half divine whose names are like stars in remoteness,

Triumphed and failed and were winds or were weeds on the dance of the surges,

But from the peaks of Olympus and shimmering summits of Ida

Gleaming and clanging the gods of the antique ages descended.

Hidden from human knowledge the brilliant shapes of Immortals

Mingled unseen in the mellay, or sometimes, marvellous, maskless,

Forms of undying beauty and power that made tremble the heart-strings

Parting their deathless secrecy crossed through the borders of vision,

Plain as of old to the demigods out of their glory emerging,

Heard by mortal ears and seen by the eyeballs that perish.

Mighty they came from their spaces of freedom and sorrowless splendour.

Sea-vast, trailing the azure hem of his clamorous waters,

Blue-lidded, maned with the Night, Poseidon smote for the future,

Earth-shaker who with his trident releases the coils of the Dragon,

Freeing the forces unborn that are locked in the caverns of Nature.

Calm and unmoved, upholding the Word that is Fate and the order

Fixed in the sight of a Will foreknowing and silent and changeless,

Hera sent by Zeus and Athene lifting his aegis

Guarded the hidden decree. But for Ilion, loud as the surges,

Ares impetuous called to the fire in men’s hearts, and his passion

Woke in the shadowy depths the forms of the Titan and demon;

Dumb and coerced by the grip of the gods in the abyss of the being,

Formidable, veiled they sit in the grey subconscient darkness

Watching the sleep of the snake-haired Erinnys. Miracled, haloed,

Seer and magician and prophet who beholds what the thought cannot witness,

Lifting the godhead within us to more than a human endeavour,

Slayer and saviour, thinker and mystic, leaped from his sun-peaks

Guarding in Ilion the wall of his mysteries Delphic Apollo.

Heaven’s strengths divided swayed in the whirl of the Earth-force.

All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages;

Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure;

Goal seems there none for the ball that is chased throughout Time by the Fate-teams;

Evil once ended renews and no issue comes out of living:

Only an Eye unseen can distinguish the thread of its workings.

Such seemed the rule of the pastime of Fate on the plains of the Troad;

All went backwards and forwards tossed in the swing of the death-game.

Vain was the toil of the heroes, the blood of the mighty was squandered,

Spray as of surf on the cliffs when it moans unappeased, unrequited

Age after fruitless age. Day hunted the steps of the nightfall;

Joy succeeded to grief; defeat only greatened the vanquished,

Victory offered an empty delight without guerdon or profit.

End there was none of the effort and end there was none of the failure.

Triumph and agony changing hands in a desperate measure

Faced and turned as a man and a maiden trampling the grasses

Face and turn and they laugh in their joy of the dance and each other.

These were gods and they trampled lives. But though Time is immortal,

Mortal his works are and ways and the anguish ends like the rapture.

Artists of Nature content with their work in the plan of the transience,

Beautiful, deathless, august, the Olympians turned from the carnage,

Leaving the battle already decided, leaving the heroes

Slain in their minds, Troy burned, Greece left to her glory and downfall.

Into their heavens they rose up mighty like eagles ascending

Fanning the world with their wings. As the great to their luminous mansions

Turn from the cry and the strife, forgetting the wounded and fallen,

Calm they repose from their toil and incline to the joy of the banquet,

Watching the feet of the wine-bearers rosily placed on the marble,

Filling their hearts with ease, so they to their sorrowless ether

Passed from the wounded earth and its air that is ploughed with men’s anguish;

Calm they reposed and their hearts inclined to the joy and the silence.

Lifted was the burden laid on our wills by their starry presence:

Man was restored to his smallness, the world to its inconscient labour.

Life felt a respite from height, the winds breathed freer delivered;

Light was released from their blaze and the earth was released from their greatness.

But their immortal content from the struggle titanic departed.

Vacant the noise of the battle roared like the sea on the shingles;

Wearily hunted the spears their quarry; strength was disheartened;

Silence increased with the march of the months on the tents of the leaguer.

But not alone on the Achaians the steps of the moments fell heavy;

Slowly the shadow deepened on Ilion mighty and scornful:

Dragging her days went by; in the rear of the hearts of her people

Something that knew what they dared not know and the mind would not utter,

Something that smote at her soul of defiance and beauty and laughter,

Darkened the hours. For Doom in her sombre and giant uprising

Neared, assailing the skies: the sense of her lived in all pastimes;

Time was pursued by unease and a terror woke in the midnight:

Even the ramparts felt her, stones that the gods had erected.

Now no longer she dallied and played, but bounded and hastened,

Seeing before her the end and, imagining massacre calmly,

Laughed and admired the flames and rejoiced in the cry of the captives.

Under her, dead to the watching immortals, Deiphobus hastened

Clanging in arms through the streets of the beautiful insolent city,

Brilliant, a gleaming husk but empty and left by the daemon.

Even as a star long extinguished whose light still travels the spaces,

Seen in its form by men, but itself goes phantom-like fleeting

Void and null and dark through the uncaring infinite vastness,

So now he seemed to the sight that sees all things from the Real.

Timeless its vision of Time creates the hour by things coming.

Borne on a force from the past and no more by a power for the future

Mighty and bright was his body, but shadowy the shape of his spirit

Only an eidolon seemed of the being that had lived in him, fleeting

Vague like a phantom seen by the dim Acherontian waters.

The Herald

But to the guardian towers that watched over Pergama’s gateway

Out of the waking city Deiphobus swiftly arriving

Called, and swinging back the huge gates slowly, reluctant,

Flung Troy wide to the entering Argive. Ilion’s portals

Parted admitting her destiny, then with a sullen and iron

Cry they closed. Mute, staring, grey like a wolf descended

Old Talthybius, propping his steps on the staff of his errand;

Feeble his body, but fierce still his glance with the fire within him;

Speechless and brooding he gazed on the hated and coveted city.

Suddenly, seeking heaven with her buildings hewn as for Titans,

Marvellous, rhythmic, a child of the gods with marble for raiment,

Smiting the vision with harmony, splendid and mighty and golden,

Ilion stood up around him entrenched in her giant defences.

Strength was uplifted on strength and grandeur supported by grandeur;

Beauty lay in her lap. Remote, hieratic and changeless,

Filled with her deeds and her dreams her gods looked out on the Argive,

Helpless and dumb with his hate as he gazed on her, they too like mortals

Knowing their centuries past, not knowing the morrow before them.

Dire were his eyes upon Troya the beautiful, his face like a doom-mask:

All Greece gazed in them, hated, admired, grew afraid, grew relentless.

But to the Greek Deiphobus cried and he turned from his passion

Fixing his ominous eyes with the god in them straight on the Trojan:

“Messenger, voice of Achaia, wherefore confronting the daybreak

Comest thou driving thy car from the sleep of the tents that besiege us?

Fateful, I deem, was the thought that, conceived in the silence of midnight,

Raised up thy aged limbs from the couch of their rest in the stillness,—

Thoughts of a mortal but forged by the Will that uses our members

And of its promptings our speech and our acts are the tools and the image.

Oft from the veil and the shadow they leap out like stars in their brightness,

Lights that we think our own, yet they are but tokens and counters,

Signs of the Forces that flow through us serving a Power that is secret.

What in the dawning bringst thou to Troya the mighty and dateless

Now in the ending of Time when the gods are weary of struggle?

Sends Agamemnon challenge or courtesy, Greek, to the Trojans?”

High like the northwind answered the voice of the doom from Achaia:

“Trojan Deiphobus, daybreak, silence of night and the evening

Sink and arise and even the strong sun rests from his splendour.

Not for the servant is rest nor Time is his, only his death-pyre.

I have not come from the monarch of men or the armoured assembly

Held on the wind-swept marge of the thunder and laughter of ocean.

One in his singleness greater than kings and multitudes sends me.

I am a voice out of Phthia, I am the will of the Hellene.

Peace in my right I bring to you, death in my left hand. Trojan,

Proudly receive them, honour the gifts of the mighty Achilles.

Death accept, if Ate deceives you and Doom is your lover,

Peace if your fate can turn and the god in you chooses to hearken.

Full is my heart and my lips are impatient of speech undelivered.

It was not made for the streets or the market, nor to be uttered

Meanly to common ears, but where counsel and majesty harbour

Far from the crowd in the halls of the great and to wisdom and foresight

Secrecy whispers, there I will speak among Ilion’s princes.”

“Envoy,” answered the Laomedontian, “voice of Achilles,

Vain is the offer of peace that sets out with a threat for its prelude.

Yet will we hear thee. Arise who are fleetest of foot in the gateway,—

Thou, Thrasymachus, haste. Let the domes of the mansion of Ilus

Wake to the bruit of the Hellene challenge. Summon Aeneas.”

Even as the word sank back into stillness, doffing his mantle

Started to run at the bidding a swift-footed youth of the Trojans

First in the race and the battle, Thrasymachus son of Aretes.

He in the dawn disappeared into swiftness. Deiphobus slowly,

Measuring Fate with his thoughts in the troubled vasts of his spirit,

Back through the stir of the city returned to the house of his fathers,

Taming his mighty stride to the pace infirm of the Argive.

Aeneas

But with the god in his feet Thrasymachus rapidly running

Came to the halls in the youth of the wonderful city by Ilus

Built for the joy of the eye; for he rested from war and, triumphant,

Reigned adored by the prostrate nations. Now when all ended,

Last of its mortal possessors to walk in its flowering gardens,

Great Anchises lay in that luminous house of the ancients

Soothing his restful age, the far-warring victor Anchises,

High Bucoleon’s son and the father of Rome by a goddess;

Lonely and vagrant once in his boyhood divine upon Ida

White Aphrodite ensnared him and she loosed her ambrosial girdle

Seeking a mortal’s love. On the threshold Thrasymachus halted

Looking for servant or guard, but felt only a loneness of slumber

Drawing the soul’s sight within away from its life and things human;

Soundless, unheeding, the vacant corridors fled into darkness.

He to the shades of the house and the dreams of the echoing rafters

Trusted his high-voiced call, and from chambers still dim in their twilight

Strong Aeneas armoured and mantled, leonine striding,

Came, Anchises’ son; for the dawn had not found him reposing,

But in the night he had left his couch and the clasp of Creüsa,

Rising from sleep at the call of his spirit that turned to the waters

Prompted by Fate and his mother who guided him, white Aphrodite.

Still with the impulse of speed Thrasymachus greeted Aeneas:

“Hero Aeneas, swift be thy stride to the Ilian hill-top.

Dardanid, haste! for the gods are at work; they have risen with the morning,

Each from his starry couch, and they labour. Doom, we can see it,

Glows on their anvils of destiny, clang we can hear of their hammers.

Something they forge there sitting unknown in the silence eternal,

Whether of evil or good it is they who shall choose who are masters

Calm, unopposed; they are gods and they work out their iron caprices.

Troy is their stage and Argos their background; we are their puppets.

Always our voices are prompted to speech for an end that we know not,

Always we think that we drive, but are driven. Action and impulse,

Yearning and thought are their engines, our will is their shadow and helper.

Now too, deeming he comes with a purpose framed by a mortal,

Shaft of their will they have shot from the bow of the Grecian leaguer,

Lashing themselves at his steeds, Talthybius sent by Achilles.”

“Busy the gods are always, Thrasymachus son of Aretes,

Weaving Fate on their looms, and yesterday, now and tomorrow

Are but the stands they have made with Space and Time for their timber,

Frame but the dance of their shuttle. What eye unamazed by their workings

Ever can pierce where they dwell and uncover their far-stretching purpose?

Silent they toil, they are hid in the clouds, they are wrapped with the midnight.

Yet to Apollo I pray, the Archer friendly to mortals,

Yet to the rider on Fate I abase myself, wielder of thunder,

Evil and doom to avert from my fatherland. All night Morpheus,

He who with shadowy hands heaps error and truth upon mortals,

Stood at my pillow with images. Dreaming I erred like a phantom

Helpless in Ilion’s streets with the fire and the foeman around me.

Red was the smoke as it mounted triumphant the house-top of Priam,

Clang of the arms of the Greeks was in Troya, and thwarting the clangour

Voices were crying and calling me over the violent Ocean

Borne by the winds of the West from a land where Hesperus harbours.”

Brooding they ceased, for their thoughts grew heavy upon them and voiceless.

Then, in a farewell brief and unthought and unconscious of meaning,

Parting they turned to their tasks and their lives now close but soon severed:

Destined to perish even before his perishing nation,

Back to his watch at the gate sped Thrasymachus rapidly running;

Large of pace and swift, but with eyes absorbed and unseeing,

Driven like a car of the gods by the whip of his thoughts through the highways,

Turned to his mighty future the hero born of a goddess.

One was he chosen to ascend into greatness through fall and disaster,

Loser of his world by the will of a heaven that seemed ruthless and adverse,

Founder of a newer and greater world by daring adventure.

Now, from the citadel’s rise with the townships crowding below it

High towards a pondering of domes and the mystic Palladium climbing,

Fronted with the morning ray and joined by the winds of the ocean,

Fate-weighed up Troy’s slope strode musing strong Aeneas.

Under him silent the slumbering roofs of the city of Ilus

Dreamed in the light of the dawn; above watched the citadel, sleepless

Lonely and strong like a goddess white-limbed and bright on a hill-top,

Looking far out at the sea and the foe and the prowling of danger.

Over the brow he mounted and saw the palace of Priam,

Home of the gods of the earth, Laomedon’s marvellous vision

Held in the thought that accustomed his will to unearthly achievement

And in the blaze of his spirit compelling heaven with its greatness,

Dreamed by the harp of Apollo, a melody caught into marble.

Out of his mind it arose like an epic canto by canto;

Each of its halls was a strophe, its chambers lines of an epode,

Victor chant of Ilion’s destiny. Absent he entered,

Voiceless with thought, the brilliant megaron crowded with paintings,

Paved with a splendour of marble, and saw Deiphobus seated,

Son of the ancient house by the opulent hearth of his fathers,

And at his side like a shadow the grey and ominous Argive.

Happy of light like a lustrous star when it welcomes the morning,

Brilliant, beautiful, glamoured with gold and a fillet of gem-fire,

Paris, plucked from the song and the lyre by the Grecian challenge,

Came with the joy in his face and his eyes that Fate could not alter.

Ever a child of the dawn at play near a turn of the sun-roads,

Facing destiny’s look with the careless laugh of a comrade,

He with his vision of delight and beauty brightening the earth-field

Passed through its peril and grief on his way to the ambiguous Shadow.

Last from her chamber of sleep where she lay in the Ilian mansion

Far in the heart of the house with the deep-bosomed daughters of Priam,

Noble and tall and erect in a nimbus of youth and of glory,

Claiming the world and life as a fief of her strength and her courage,

Dawned through a doorway that opened to distant murmurs and laughter,

Capturing the eye like a smile or a sunbeam, Penthesilea.