Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on the Work of Poets of the Ashram

Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna) [14]

Seated Above

Seated above in a measureless trance of truth —

A thunder wearing the lightning’s streak of smile,

A lonely monolith of frozen fire,

Sole pyramid piercing to the vast of the One —

Waits Shiva throned on an all-supporting void.

Wing after wing smites to the cosmic sky.

Gathering flame-speed out of their own wild heart —

That tunnel of dream through the body’s swoon of rock —

They find their home in this sweet silent Face

With the terrible brain that bursts to a hammer of heaven

And deluges hell with mercies without end.

The abysmal night opens its secret smile

And all the world cries out it is the dawn!

Seated Above is a striking poem but its violent connections and disconnections — I am not condemning them — have somehow awakened the Johnsonian critic in me and I give voice to his objections here without supporting them. His first objection is to “streak of smile” and he wants to know how thunder can wear a smile, because thunder is a sound, not a visible object. The next three lines are very fine, he admits though he wriggles a little at the frozen fire. He would like to know how a wing can have a heart and wants also to know whether it is the heart that is a tunnel of dream and whether it is the tunnel that finds a home and what can be meant by the home of a tunnel. He is startled by the deluge from Shiva’s brain and his own brain is ready to burst at the idea that Shiva’s brain is being knocked out of his head by the hammer of heaven. The last two lines elicit his first unquestioning approval; that, he says, is the right union of poetry and common-sense expression.

I don’t ask you to take these Johnsonianisms seriously; I have only been taking a little exercise in a field foreign to me; but I am not sure this is not how some critics will grumble and groan under this particular hammer of heaven.

12 November 1948