A Comparative Study of K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar's

“Microcosmographia Poetica”

PURASU BALAKRISHNAN

I

This poem of 684 lines, making a whole book, may at once be described as a high-aspiring testament of humanity. It is a poetic affirmation of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of integral Yoga, derived from the Rigveda and the earlier Upanishads, and set forth in the Bhagavad Gita.

It is, and is not, a reply to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It is a reply in the sense that the testimony it offers is the opposite of that of The Waste Land. While The Waste Land embodies the barreness and sterility of modern society, the drought and detritus modern civilization, Microcosmographia Poetica, drawing on the evidence of history and biological evolution and the philosophy and realization of Sri Aurobindo, intimates the mellow land from which mankind may stretch its arms to the promised land of Divine Life. It ministers the spiritual healing of Sri Aurobinda’s Yoga which will renew the waste land. It does this in no uncertain terms, for the words of the master have held forth the promise. The poem is not a reply to The Waste Land in the sense that, reflecting Sri Aurobiodo as it does, it draws its roots from India’s Rock of the Ages–the Veda and the Vedanta–and the Bhagavad Gita, and it is a natural production of an exponent of Sri Aurobindo that its author is, and accordingly it is not motivated to be a reply to T. S. Eliot, nor is it the outcome of a confrontation with the “stony rubbish” pictured in The Waste Land. We may permit ourselves further to remark that while it was perhaps that The Waste Land came from the West, from an American who elected for his home England with her established civilization and tradition which was getting devitalized, as described in his poem, it is perhaps also appropriate that the poem Microcosmographia Poetica has come from India. It is worthwhile noting in this connection that The Waste Land ends with the voice of thunder Da in Sanskrit, as described in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which (as narrated in that Upanishad) was variously interpreted–as Datta (meaning “give”) by men, as Dayadhvam (meaning “be self-merciful”) by demons, and as Damyata (meaning “be self-controlled”) by gods. The cryptic Da and the three explanatory words in full are given by Eliot in his poem. The advice of the thunder is not taken, and the poem ends with “a heap of broken images” brought out by fragmentary quotations. Strangely the poem, immediately following the three Da-words, ends with the Upanishadic benediction Shantih Shantih Shantih. If we may quote Eliot’s own words in The Hollow Men, altered in position and sense, the poem ends, not with a whimper, but with a bang. The Sanskrit words at the close and the vegetation myths envisage the possibility of regeneration of the waste land; and they seem almost to be an invitation to an Indian sequel. This has now been furnished by Prof. Srinivasa Iyengar in Microcosmographia Poetica in which this profound scholar and man of letters gives utterance to Sri Aurobindo’s vision of the Divine Life. This, says Sri Aurobindo, is to be established here and now on earth by a conscious evolutionary effort on the part of man with his conceptual mind to reach to the all-comprehending intuitive supermind. He describes the supermind as a state of dynamic self-awareness or spiritual consciousness which brings about, as it were, the descent into itself of Divine Grace or Shakti, making him no longer himself but a channel through which divine energy flows into the world–in short, he becomes a Jivanmukta, a liberated soul inhabiting the earth, according to the immemorial Hindu conception.

It will be illuminating to study the poem in the light of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot’s poem, consisting of 433 lines is not a single poem but a series of poems in which there is no logical order or coherence. Robert Graves observes that it is merely “a sequence of disparate short pieces, some poems, some not, like the songs in Blake’s Island on the Moon, and experimental only in the sense that Mr. Eliot asks his readers to make a mythically significant connection between them.” The jumbled architectural pattern of the poem is probably symbolic of the crumbles of European civilization which it portrays. On the other hand, Professor Iyengar’s poem follows a logical and progressive argument with the rigour of a philosophical exposition or thesis, in keeping with what it expounds, namely the path of integrated awareness to Divine Life. By the same token the poem, although it is replete with memorable and quotable expressions, lacks the music of The Waste Land in which Eliot’s mastery of image, metre and rhythm is apparent. In the case of Eliot’s poem, it is as well that this is so, for its unity, as has been observed by critics and hinted by Eliot himself, is not logical, metaphysical or narrative but musical, a unity born mysteriously of the poet’s auditory imagination.

II

Let us follow the argument of Microcosmographia Poetica.

The poem begins with the birth of the universe with astronomical sidelights like “the mighty bang” and “a universe expanding, contracting” in which is embedded philosophical insight. The questions posed in the opening stanzas of sections 1 and 2,

When was the beginning of beginnings

that saw the birth of this world?

and Yet wherefore that jump from hushed Aloneness

to manifold Becoming?

followed by a cavalcade of such questions strike the proper note for the whole poem with their high seriousness. Their tone and earnestness even remind one of the age-old question posed in the Hymn of Creation of the Rigveda:

What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter?

was water there, unfathomed depth of water?

Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it

was born and whence comes this creation?

The gods are later than this world’s production. Who

knows, then, whence it first came into being?

(Tr.: Max Mueller)

The astronomical “mighty bang” or “primordial explosion” is viewed thus:

Wasn’t the invader the lone Purusha

now opting for dispersion?

Then we have the birth of the earth and the first stirrings of life. Professor Iyengar hypothesizes:

Wasn’t Consciousness in sleep already,

and the first stirring was Life?

Sri Aurobindo calls the electrons and atoms of matter eternal somnambulists, and the Hindu view is that every material object contains a consciousness, an unfelt inner existence, the antaryamin of the Upanishads.

We are next called to see the unfolding biological evolution and the changes in the earth. The spectacle offered is sublime:

Aeons and aeons passed, while infinite

life-forms bubbled and broke up.

Continents collapsed, and Himavant heaved.

The philosophic enquiry arises:

But why that ageless journey into Time

and slow creep of consciousness?

We then witness the coming of man and the wonder of his ascent aided by his marvellous sense-perceptions until at last he perceives the first glimmerings of light:

How long did mammalian hominoids

grovel ere they saw some light?

This culminates in the emergence of the mind:

And on a fateful day something like Man

first felt the rumblings of Mind.

The question rises:

Was it a random throw again, a fluke,

a leap of lucky blind chance?

Cosmic consciousness affirms

What now surges up as new was buried

in deep slumber of seed-form,

born of the mystic sense

Doesn’t the Trace of Heaven grow upside down,

roots above and fruit below

which is a recall from the Bhagavad Gita:

with roots above, branches below, the Aswattha (the banyan) is said to be indestructible; the leaves are hymns; he who knoweth it is a Veda-knower. (Tr.: Annie Besant)

In the wake of the mind follows language which presages the birth of Thought. Language, starting with facts, goes beyond them. The poet considers next the nature of language and its culminating in the Sea of Collective Consciousness, from which

a shining pearl swims ashore.

Thus it culminates in the birth of poetic vision or the Grace of Poetry. Its advent is a major bright landmark in the progress of Man:

Like the earth, life and love came this splendour

of dream, hope and memory.

The nature of poetry is considered, recalling Matthew Arnold and other “practitioners.” Professor Iyengar calls it a “divine efflorescence” and “the mighty echo of the breath of a great soul,” recalling the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad which calls the Vedas “the breath of the Eternal.” He considers the function of poetry to be “untrammelled Ministry of Truth.” Poetic vision integrates the “heaps of seeming.” This phrase reminds us of “the heaps of broken images” in The Waste Land. The poet thus becomes the seer:

Kavi is thus doubled with the Risbi,

the poet-singer with the Seer,

and Poetry means looking at the face of Truth

behind the golden cover

these words recalling Isavasya Upanishad:

With a golden cover the face of Truth is closed

Uncover it, O Pushan, so that I, devoted to Truth,

may behold it (Tr.: Author)

The poet’s vision, says Professor Iyengar, sees

the noumena behind phenomena,

the soul encased in matter.

In short, Professor Iyengar gives to the poet a higher role than Shelley did, and equates the poet with the Seer in definition which etch the picture of a Sankara,

To throw bridgeheads across the abysses

Of Maya’s manifoldness

or a Ramana,

To make holocaust of the ego-self

for the true Phoenix to rise

or an Aurobindo,

An invasion of the ineffable,

a conveyor-belt of Grace.

Descending to a lower level, Professor Iyengar considers the method of the poet, and stresses the fulfilment of the poet in the receptive reader or rasika to the extent of making the rasika the alter-ego of the poet. In this context, strangely enough, he enters into a lengthy and vehement diatribe against warped critics and futile academicians, procrusteans and palatologists, vivisectionists and lemon-squeezers with their display of omniscience and narcissism. One receives a jolt from this unexpected digression as well as its vehemence. The digression continues, concerning itself with the vanity that dictates forms of literature and the futility that seeks to standardise aesthetic responses.

Returning to the fellowship of the poet and the rasika, Professor Iyengar considers the consummation of the poet-rasika inter-action which is the poetic vision. This vision is an integrated perception based on integral knowledge:

Only integral knowledge can vision

the oneness of Existence.

One should seek the secret splendour in which the material basis of art or painting or music is lost, so that

In the word’s disappearance in Silence

dawns the Tryst with the Divine.

From such moments of vision the fall to normalcy is “hell”, and this prompts:

A breakthrough beyond mortal man must be

Evolution’s next decree.

The finale of this urge or quest may be given in quotations from the poem:

...awaken preordained. Supermind,

the new Order’s ordainer!

The cry of aspiration from below

compels the Supreme’s descent.

It is emphasized that this must be done with a sense of urgency:

This canter–now–else the catastrophic

scuttling of the Ship of Man.

And what is the port?

A new earth, a new life, and the new Man –

the god-man of tomorrow,

And the word, crashing through space-time constraints,

will then reign as Power and Grace.

III

It will be seen that Professor Iyengar’s–or Sri Aurobindo’s–is an evolutionary vision of life. And what is new about this?

Darwin formulated this once and for all in his Origin of Species; and poetic utterance has been given to this by Tennyson and Browning. Interestingly enough, it is T. S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land we have been considering, who has this to say of Tennyson:

Much has been said of Tennyson’s interest in contemporary science and of the influence of Darwin. In Memoriam in any case antedates The Origin of Species by several years; and the belief in social progress by democracy antedates it by many more. I suspect that the faith of Tennyson’s age in human progress would have been quite as strong even had the discoveries of Darwin been postponed by fifty years. And after all, there is no logical connexion. The belief in progress current already, the discoveries of Darwin were harnessed to it:

No longer half akin to brute,

For all we thought, and loved and did

And hoped, and suffer’d, is but seed

Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod

This planet, was a noble type

Appearing ere the times were ripe,

That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event

To which the whole creation moves.

These lines show an interesting compromise between the religious attitude and, what is quite a different thing, the belief in human perfectability; but the contrast was not so obvious to Tennyson’s contemporaries. They may have been taken in by it; but I don’t think that Tennyson himself was, quite: his feelings were more honest than his mind.

While Tennyson points to the idealistic goal of evolution, as he would have it, Browning gives expression to the poetry of evolution itself in Paracelsus:

So glorious is our nature, so august

Man’s inborn uninstructed impulses

His naked spirit so majestical... ...God renews

His ancient rapture! Thus he dwells in all

From life’s minute beginnings, up at last

to Man–the consummation of this scheme

Of being–the completion of this sphere

Of life; whose attributes had here and there

Been scattered o’er the visible world before,

Asking to be combined–dim fragments meant

To be united in some wondrous whole–

Imperfect qualities throughout creation

Suggesting some one creature yet to make....

This takes us to the step from which Sri Aurobindo takes off.

Browning also descants upon the promise that the gospel of evolution offers. The second edition of Paracelsus carries the following lines which were later deleted by him (vide Maise Ward in Robert Browning and his world–the Private Face, published by Cassal, London, 1967):

Shall man refuse to be aught less than God?

Man’s weakness his glory is–for the strength

Which raises him to heaven and near God’s self

Came spite of it. God’s strength his glory is,

For thence came with our weakness sympathy

Which brought down to earth a man like us.

Browning here expresses the Hindu idea of avatar or descent of God, enunciated by Lord Krishna in Bhagavad Gita:

Whenever righteousness decays, whenever

unrighteousness uprises, O thou of Bharata’s race,

I come down embodied to the earth.

To protect the good, to destroy evil-doers,

and to establish righteousness I am born

from age to age.

(Tr.: Author)

Further Browning, in the first line of his, quoted above, comes to the threshold of Aurobindo’s Yogic flight, as he does also in the closing lines of the section “Pompilia” in The Ring and the Book where the dying Pompilia says of her deliverer Caponsacchi:

Through such souls alone

God stooping shows sufficient of His light

For us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise.

Sri Aurobindo goes farther than Tennyson and Browning in conceiving that while evolution, up to the human stage was a self-propulsive process (in which however the traditional Hindu view still sees a dynamic play of manifold manifestation of the Supreme Spirit – and this is different from, or more than, the static conception that God is present in all things), evolution after man is by man himself with his conscious effort, reaching to the supra-mental plane. The integral transformation of man is possible only by the supermind, says Sri Aurobindo, and not by man’s conceptual mind, however strong it may be. The supermind effects the reciprocal descent of the Divine, permeating, energizing and divinizing him. To quote D. S. Sarma, “The salvation of humanity lies not simply in transcending the world but in transfiguring it as well. It is not therefore merely a question of the soul’s ascent and escape but a question of integration and transformation as well. And for this purpose the mind of man, as it is, is not strong enough. The supermind should descend. The contrast between the working of the mind and the supermind is thus pointed out by Sri Aurobindo.” This ascent is formulated by Sri Aurobindo not from airy stilts of abstract philosophy, but by his actual realization by Yogic Sadhana or practice. This has also been realized by others like Sri Ramana Maharshi who, so to say, lived only yesterday.

Professor Iyengar gives expression to this philosophy:

The Spirit is still the Ground of Being

and Becoming’s Theatre.

But awaken preordained Supermind,

the new Order’s ordainer!

The cry of aspiration from below

compels the Supreme’s descent.

And the end?

The new man will betimes transform his world

and charge it with puissant light

That will be plenary Truth and Delight:

verily Raso vai sah!

The poem concludes with this quotation from Sanskrit, reminding us of the Sanskrit ending of The Waste Land.

The Waste Land, comprising only 433 lines, has had an impact altogether out of proportion to its length. It has been called a major minor poem of the age, it has been described as being equivalent in content to an epic. That Microcosmographia Poetica lends itself to consideration alongside The Waste Land is a measure of its content and significance. We would suggest that in the next edition, the poem–that is, the book–may be given the name The Mellow Land or The Ripe Land instead of its present forbidding Latin appellation.

Microcosmographia Poetica by K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar. Published by Writers Workshop, 162/92 Lake Gardens, Calcutta-5. Price: Rs 10.

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