In it is life new-born to live and move in the Time of Eternity

Re: 04: Now her Life Shared the Cosmic Load by RY Deshpande on Sat 10 Feb 2007 06:32 AM PST Profile Permanent Link

The sonnet is a perfect piece of poetry; it easily ranks as one of the best Amal has written. I am sure, Sri Aurobindo himself would have remarked: “Very fine indeed. This time you have got the sonnet movement very well.” The images are Amalian and daring; the sequencing of poetic thought is impeccable; phrases like “blind force of mortal doom”, “Parthenon’s pillars” massive and beautiful in exquisite proportion lifting up a whole civilisation to the blue of the sky, “brute hands” of Time breaking the leaden chains of authority, “this one death” coming as a master-stroke, all these and many more are amply artistic to make the “paradox of a death that is a breakthrough into a new life for humanity” sufficiently convincing. The phrase “divine Aurobindo died” is heart-shattering no doubt, unacceptable, unbearable to the tradition-bound and the feeble with his small soul of bhakti or worshipful timid devotion; but it has the inspirational magic of transforming the Gita’s “transience and unhappiness” into the enduring and the blissful, proclaiming forcefully of the triumph through willed death. To quote a phrase from Amal’s another poem we have here a “fire of mystic mind” ready to leap into the great Flame. In it is life new-born to live and move in the Time of Eternity.

And yet the sonnet looks to be too perfect to be occult-spiritually acceptable with the connotations it should carry; for, I wonder, if the “divine Aurobindo died” does plunge at all deep enough into the mystery of the deathless embracing death. It sounds too loud, trumpeting a triumph which should have come from the womb of the omniscient hush—to use a Savitri-phrase. Its “overhead”-ness is patently mental, though perhaps of a very high order; the absoluteness of the spiritual demanded for such a theme is not there. Contrast this with “This was the day when Satyavan must die.” Its foundation is luminous peace and its birth is in the creative transcendent, simple and bare in its beauty. We could look into it in more detail, at least from one or two points of view. RYD