Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Indian Poetry in English

Manmohan Ghose [3]

I suppose you have read this poem of Manmohan’s:

Augustest! dearest! whom no thought can trace,

Name, murmuring out of birth’s infinity,

Mother! like heaven’s great face is thy sweet face,

Stupendous with the mystery of me.

Eyes, elder than the light; cheek, that no flower

Remembers; brow, at which my infant care

Gazed weeping up and saw the skies enshower

With tender rain of vast mysterious hair!

Thou at whose breast the sunbeams sucked, whose arms

Cradled the lisping ocean, art thou she,

Goddess, at whose dim heart the world’s deep charms,

Tears, terrors, sobbing things, were yet to be?

She, from whose tearing pangs in glory first

I and the infinite wide heavens burst?

Each line is wonderfully inspired; but is there in the total effect a sense of construction rather than creation, a splendid confusion instead of a supreme luminosity?

The poem has a considerable elevation of thought, diction and rhythm. It is certainly a fine production and, if all had been equal to the first three lines which are pure and perfect in inspiration, the sonnet might have stood among the finest things in the English language. But somehow it fails as a whole. The reason is that the intellectual mind took up the work of transcription and a Miltonic rhetorical note comes in, all begins to be thought rather than seen or felt; the poet seems to be writing what he thinks he ought to write on such a subject and doing it very well — one admires, the mind is moved and the vital stirred, but the deeper satisfying spiritual thrill which the first lines set out to give is no longer there. Already in the fourth line there is the touch of poetic rhetoric. The original afflatus continues to persist behind, but can no longer speak itself out in its native language, there is a mental translation. It tries indeed to get back —

Eyes, elder than the light; cheek, that no flower

Remembers —

then loses hold almost altogether — what follows is purely mental. Another effort brings the eighth line which is undoubtedly very fine and has sight behind it. Then there is a compromise; the spiritual seeing mind seems to say to the thinking poetic intellect, “All right, have it your own way — I will try at least to keep you up at your best”, and we have the three lines that follow those two others that are forcible and vivid poetic (very poetic) rhetoric — finally a close that goes back to the level of the stupendous mystery. No, it is not a “splendid confusion” — the poem is well-constructed from the point of view of arrangement of the thought, so there can be no confusion. It is the work of a poet who got into touch with some high level of spiritual sight, a living vision of some spirit Truth, but, that not being his native domain, could not keep its perfect voice throughout and mixed his inspiration — that seems to me the true estimate. A very fine poem, all the same.

5 November 1935