Reviews

HARINDRANATH CHATTOPADHYAYA – Poems and Plays

(The Hogarth Press, Madras)

Does this age mark a decadence in English poetry? Do we not have any productions of a pure and genuine character that equal, even if they do not excel, those of a Tennyson, a Browning, a Keats or a Shelley? It looks like it. The lover of English poetry thirsting for refreshing springs, finds stagnant cisterns or stinking pools. One is tempted to be skeptic about the future of this department of literature, that alone, in times of pulverising materialism, of drab science and dreary civilisation, is sought for soul-uplifting life and transcendental joy. Here a Yeats, there an "A. E", single swallows twittering ineffectually in the hot air of smoke and civilization, are not the symbols of a poetic May.

India, however, has made a rich and resplendant contribution. Rabindranath Tagore has received the homage of the English-speaking and English-loving nations of the world, and has been acclaimed as a poet who, in language regal and resonant, sung to prose-ridden peoples the song of a country steeped in spirit-poesy. England and English literature are deeply indebted to vassal India. Less known, but not less rich in promise, if not in production, is Toru Dutt, that bud which ere it broke faded into the dust. Sarojini Devi, that intrepid spirit, flying restlessly across a trouble-strewn country, has brought the fresh breath of Heaven and the breezes of the empyrean. All these have, in familiar parlance, interpreted the East to the West. All these have shown that the world has not yet degenerated to the level when it would exchange the Pegasus for a rocking horse. But there is one whose achievement has to be assigned its rightful place in the literature of our day.

Harindranath Chattopadhyaya lives in a world different from our own. He is not only away from his mortal fellows; he is above them. We rarely see him; we needs must gaze at him. He lives in ‘pale blue clouds’ in ‘rose-red dawns’. He dwells in the regions of the imagination where he builds temples of splendour reaching up to the heavens, and sets there for worship a glorious idol of multi-colored beauty. His world is co-extensive with the Kingdom of God. With him we do not feel the joy of the earth; we feel the transport of the Heavens. A paradisal delight infects us as, from poem to poem, we move and our feet seem to lose their primal hold on the soil beneath them. We develop invisible wings which flutter in the air and lift us until the smell of the dust is lost in the fragrance of the clouds. Harindranath is old beyond his years. The winds of Heaven have blown through the petals of a shut bud until it laughed into a flower.

His ‘Poems and Plays’ comes to the lovers of the Poet as a merited relief after a period of stray and spasmodic enjoyment in weary periodicals. A collected edition of the kind before us, although possessing a poor exterior, has a precious inside. After reading at dreary intervals from fitful publications of the Poet's productions, we longingly and lovingly press through the pages with renewed and freshened and invigorated delight. We have now a broader view of his intellectual beauty. We no longer witness the landscape through narrow apertures and with an obstructed vision.

Harindranath has an ineffable faith in the Great Beyond. He does not wail for the ungot gains or unfelt pleasures of the fleeting world. His eye is always on the distant, but to him delightful goal, so easily within his reach. He despises to wallow in the colored mire of the down below, but silently in some lone corner of the sin-convulsed earth, he sits and sings:

Through deepening dusk I sit and gaze
Into my spirit's glass
Wherein my visions one by one,
Like shadowy camels pass.

And then too before him pass "pale passioned specters" and "frozen shadows" and through "the blind voluptuous veil of painted glows" that cluster human life, his vision penetrates, and the "winds of heaven" calling out to him, he passes in spirit to a land beyond, and moves and mates and mingles with angels and archangels. To him death is as sweet as life, perhaps sweeter, as the only gate through which he might enter a world where he finds the perfection of the world we leave.

All things on earth, sweet winds and shining clouds,
Waters and Stars and the lone moods of men
Are cool green echoes of the voice that sings
Beyond the verge of time. . . .
For what is heaven but the earth grown full
And God but man unshadowed and afar.

Questions of immortality fly across his mind and an answering echo comes and silences his yearning soul's querulous tremor.

O! Does the soul survive or is it shed
Like the faint colour of a garden flower?

raises a tentative trouble in his sensitive soul and is stifled by the reverberation within:

We may become the branches of a tree
Winds or white lotuses upon a stream
Or the pure magic of some village man.

His infinite and illimitable love and faith galvanize his spirit and carry him aloft while the world is sinking beneath the feet of sinning humanity.

Who knows what mighty dreams He dreams
Between a glow-worm's two swift gleams.

To him God is love and forgiveness singing ever in the Kingdom where He presides and flooding the breathing world with the beatitude of His music.

The world goes on, I have no doubt
Because the soul in me cries out
Of all the fates, the fate
Of painted things is worst of all.

His philosophy of colors is amazing. He reads the world's beginning and its end in a peacock's countless colors. The gaudy dawn has a magic significance. The blue sky, the golden eve, the pale white clouds have a mystic meaning.

Richer I count a gorgeous death
Than life that has no hues in it.

There we find again the essence of his message. A dull, uneventful life marked or marred by nothing striking or stimulating, he discounts. Longevity has no charms for him, if it is a prolongation of lavish lassitude. A magnificent death has richer and more glittering mines hidden in its concealed caves than a monotonous life of wasteful and wistful protraction.

Sin has no recognisable place in his world. It has apparently no existence. It is a misnomer for something we have no words to describe. To him the "vilest thought in us is some far off god's" and takes the vulgar responsibility of sinning and being sinned against from off the slender shoulders of man and makes the "far off-god" enthroned in our hearts, the mover and the maker of our thoughts and desires and actions. He provides us the motive for deeds done or contemplated. It is that far-off God that breathes life into us that should also sustain it, beautify it and bless it and man, in Harindranath's view, is a moving and throbbing toy supplied with momentum and movement by the One Beyond.

For every thirsty bee that's born
Is born a honey-hiding rose.

And where is man's glory and all the self-consciousness that struts in human shape, all the sodden pride gorgeously glorified, magnificently colored? Every colour, every shade and tint of it is God's handiwork and man before Him dwindles into atomy nothingness.

To what extent do we control
The working of the flesh and soul
I often wonder if at all
We have the power to rise or fall
According as we will. . .
. . . . . . . we are
Companions with the traveling star
The silent tree, the fire, the glen
Controlled and charioted within
By some inviolate and old
Invisible law which aches to mould
Out of the pain of cloud and man
A gleam of paradisal gold
Dreamed long before the world began.

We find another shade of the poet's variegated mind, a real mine from which precious gold is got by delighted delvers. We find him unconcerned with the future, whatever it might hold for us, sorrows or joys, death or immortality.

Today is sweet, why dream the sorrow
Of the pale death of roses on the morrow

One is reminded of Omar Khayyam's Bohemianism.

Where all is one, there is no room for sorrow
Not for this gaudy myth of you and me.
What we call yesterday, today, tomorow
Dies in the rose-depths of eternity.

This confidence in things here and hereafter is supreme and superb. No thought of the morrow, no recollection of yesterday, mars or mutilates the joy of a heart, the bliss of a soul, so intent, so insistent on a divine Something, invisible and shapeless, yet looming in incomprehensible largeness before the windows of his being. He longs, yet despises to know what is beyond and suppresses the feeble whisper of an illegitimate suspicion.

Perhaps I will get to know the moment
I cease to want, to want to know,
All that you seek is born in you.

In his scheme of things, sorrow is eliminated. If it exists, it is only as a prelude to and a perfection of joy.

Who made the night made sorrow too
But at the end of both an inevitable burst of light.

His optimism, his confidence in the eternity of things, his deathless faith in the forgiveness of God are as boundless as unbounded heaven.

This stormy way which I now wend
Will meet me with a silent rose

breathes a mind capacious enough to sustain and survive the shocks that disfigure and distort human life. Of the ultimate end and fulfillment of living things, which are only particles of Heaven that move in scattered aloofness here below, only to merge in a loftier and larger being, his vision has an unfailing glow.

Each fulfils its individual fate
That He may in the end fulfill His own.

Harindranath's poems have not merely the breath of the Heavens. They have the fragrance of the rose that blows before our eyes. He not only conjures up before our vision glorious and golden dawns and colorless twilights and soft-tinted clouds, the green of the spring and ashen autumn, but plays upon the harp of life the music of the stormy blue, and floods our beings with universal symphonies. He finds melodies deep and deathless in flowers, and songs sweet and sinless in flitting shadows and shapeless winds. His poems have all the "liquid 1aughter break of rose." His verse runs like "rich music in the moonlight." We find there subtle shades of purple, superb tints of joyous crimson, a tingling music as though of silver anklets or golden bangles. He paints on a canvas large enough to comprehend earth and heaven. Bird, beast and man, the "bronze tamarind seed" the "red eared monkey", "the haggard sinner" and the "holy saint" have all a place big or small within his distended imagination. The death of a bird teaches him a lesson far transcending any that the reposited wisdom of ages can give.

God's ways are infinite. No power dare come
Between His perfect purpose and its goal
For He, the age-long lover of the soul,
Subjects all form to endless martyrdom.
Who knows why thou wert chosen for a fate
Of such deep sorrow? or is sorrow but
A figment that with inward vision shut
We in our blind unvisionment create?

An ocean still has its message for him. The songs of bees fade and fuse into the music of his soul. The rooted tree that for ages stood motionless, to him is not "caught in common clay", The changing world is controlled by "an unchanging law of change" and all things, with him, have universal unity and immutable mutability. With him we feel the breezes of Heaven nearer. With him we shake the dust of the earth off our feet and enter a spotless, a stainless world where the eternal cycle of sun and moon, day and night disappear in. and are supplanted by, the undimmed radiance of a million-colored gorgeousness.

Harindranath has carved out a distinct niche in the literature of the world. To the intellectual skepticism of a pride-fed Englishman, his achievement has a demolishing answer to give. If mastery of a foreign tongue by an Indian is to serve the purpose of interpreting the East to the West, Harindranath has done all that might be expected of such a gift. He has done more. He has proved to the world beyond a shadow of doubt that poetry is still the vehicle of spiritual expression, a beautiful outlet for a yearning and crying soul, a charming hand-maid of human thought.

M. V. RAMAN A RAO.

SILHOUETTES: By V. N. Bhushan. With a commendation by Principal A. B. Johnston of Masulipatam.

This small book of poems by an Andhra under-graduate reveals great promise. No one can find these "Silhouettes" dull or insipid. They carry with them the fine stamp of an individuality extremely sensitive to the good and the beautiful in life and nature. The author has a poet's heart and not merely a poet's technique, and reveals a happy gift of phrasing with the rare grace of intuition for the right word to combine effect with melody. There is a typical Indian atmosphere, and at times much suggestive local colouring about the poems, but here and there one finds a hint of fondness for outlandish expressions With the discipline of further striving, we have no doubt the author well find it possible to replace the syringa, the rosemary and the rhododendron with homelier flowers in his garden of fancy. The poem reproduced in this issue of Triveni is a sample of Mr. Bhushan's work at its best.

S. S.