Debashish Banerji
Across the expanse of modern poetry in Bengal falls the tall shadow of Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath indeed could be said to have created the modern Bengali language, bridging its stiffer Sanskritized literary precedents with popular parlance, fashioning a tongue noble, exalted yet supple, sweet and finely nuanced. Sri Aurobindo pays tribute to Rabindranath’s literary achievement in The Future Poetry, noting his ability to express spiritual truths poetically and suggestively, embodying a world of psychic aspirations in his word-music. He points to the force of rhythm, chhanda, as a powerful carrier of the mantric experience, and Rabindranath’s Bengali poetry certainly intones its subtle and exalted wings of flight to the inner hearing.
However, if it is a single primary difference one was asked to identify between the poetry of the late 19th /early 20th century and our present times, the attenuated contemporary concern with rhythm would most definitely be a pre-eminent candidate. Apart from overt elements, such as rhyme, sonic symmetry seems to have discarded even the semblance of metrical regularity, be it that of blank verse or of experimental moulds such as Sri Aurobindo’s proposed stress or quantitative or mixed meters. What accounts for this transition and what, if anything, substitutes the power of rhythm in modern verse, would make an important and interesting study. The comparative flatness of the modern ear is experienced painfully by all readers who awaken to the heartbeat-altering mantric rhythms of Sri Aurobindo’s own poems. Partly of course, I believe, this has to do with the high levels of noise pollution to which urban existence exposes us, rendering the hearing insensitive. But historical reasons related to changes in poetic practice in the 20th century are its more intentional origins.
Modernism in the Arts is Humanism’s correlate of that peculiar 20th century techno-economic phenomenon, Internationalism. It traces the human concerns relating to the appearance of a common urban culture across the world, drastic reductions in the subjective awareness of space and time, an enormously accelerated and all-engrossing world-wide material production system, a rupture from the ideals and continuities of gradually developing traditions. The early 20th century marks the transition to this change, spreading swiftly across the world from the West. Nor are the articulations of these common concerns accidentally homologous; the same vectors of accelerated transport and communication carrying globally the voices and thoughts of dissent and anguish in hearsay and print, and making it possible for distant cultures to recognize the commonalities of the modern phenomenon and echo one another. It is thus that French Symbolism, originating in the late 19th century, can be seen as the founding paradigm of Modernism in Poetry. Sri Aurobindo, commenting on Mallarme, refers to him as the father of modern poetry and indeed, this is true not merely in an European but an international context. The very precision of the French language, its classical lucidity, became an obstacle in the way of writers like Baudelaire and Mallarme, in their articulations of a modern subjectivity. The modern era is characterized by a pervasive technological concentration on the objective and material domain and, as Sri Aurobindo points out, it is inevitable that human consciousness will develop a corresponding deeper and more complex subjectivity in its interpretive and oppositional Humanist stance.
This subjective need, combined with the rational precision of French, drove Mallarme to develop his esoteric symbolism, resting on the power of images and their related associations. But it was Mallrame’s student, Paul Valery, who can be credited with turning this principle into the modern poetic methodology, with his emphasis on conciseness and imagistic density predicated on his observation of modern reading bias. At the turn of the century, Valery noted that the demands of modern civilization would make it less and less possible for individuals to read long and continuous tracts of literature, accurately anticipating contemporary advertisational and televisual culture. The intense accelarated compression of productive time necessitated the presentation of information as tightly packed immediacy-Gestalts, capsules of subjective complexity mentally ingested in short durations, capable of long-term assimilation. The visual orientation of this formulation is unmistakable and passing through the intellectual appropriations of English poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and circulating globally through their polemical writings in the world-hegemonic tongue, this orientation was to revolutionize modern poetic practice, heightening the imagary component of the word into the primary carrier of its subjective message, and spawning Imagism, Symbolism, Surrealism.
Another social factor playing into Modernism is the insignificance of the poet in the face of civilization’s inexorable material unifications. The poet’s self-image as prophet, as pioneer and leader of human consciousness, under the leveling action of a global and encompassing socio-industrial organization, gives way to a faceless anonymity, marked by a tragic consciousness of the loss of community and of human values that endure. The poet no more has the luxury of speaking from a pedestal. A discard in consumerism’s gigantic recyclings, his only strength is his word, to be exercised from an unprivileged position and his only concern the spiritual concern of humanity, the single destiny that unstoppably ties all individuals globally, without exception, to the wheels of the productivity machine. The exalted intonings of Rabindranath, Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, Swinburne and the early Yeats are now seen as Victorian excesses, precarious imaginings of a feudal elite, not visited yet by the pressures of quotidian survival. Pound and Yeats, once admirers of Rabindranath, who popularized him in England and nominated him for the Nobel award, both later retracted their support, deriding the lack of semantic density in his work. Eliot systematically demolished the basis of Swinburne’s enormous Continental popularity, by demonstrating that the richness of his word-music concealed a vapid insubstantiality of meaning. The case of Yeats is particularly interesting. Hailed by Sri Aurobindo in the Future Poetry as one of the promising voices of the future, a master of rhythm, suggestive music and mythological symbolism, he nevertheless, later disowned his past manner of writing
I have lived in dreams
A marble-headed Triton among the streams…
and accepted the rupture from tradition that modernity implied:
Though the great song return no more
There’s been delight in what we have
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.
From the faery seas of sound of his early poems, he moves to new seas in his later work:
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) was a Bengali poet who marks the transition to Bengali Modernist poetry. Necessitated into the career most common to modern poets, he was a teacher of English in Barisal (Bangladesh) and Calcutta and was well-read in Mallarme, Rimbaud, Valery, Pound, Eliot and the like, whom he often references in his prose writings. Jibanananda relies largely on imagistic and symbolical means to express in his poems a complexity which grapples with the subjective realities of modern urban life. He was unhappy with the conditions of modern living, was hopelessly impecunious and often expresses a deeply tragic sensibility. Yet, through the poignancy of passing beauty, the “touch of tears in mortal things” and the hopelessness and discord of material exploitation, overpopulation and poverty, the poet’s awareness of an eternal Beauty and Love struggles to penetrate the veil of appearances, questioning, probing, finding significance in unlikely circumstances. In a tragic and untimely ending, Jibanananda died in a tramcar accident in 1954.
Existential angst may be the consequence of an awakening to finitude and transience. Our social bus(i/y)ness conceals this reality from us but the loneliness of isolation brings it to the front. Such occasions for isolation become the norm in the modern world, where the breakdown of community makes one alone even in the company of others. And yet such moments may be moments of wisdom, for they bring us face to face with truth. The poet seeks out such moments, seeing behind the transience the backdrop of eternity. In the poem Road-Walking, for instance, he stirs out at night when all things sleep and walks the streets of Calcutta:
No one errs – brick home signboard door window terrace
Becoming silent know the need for sleep under a sky.
The simple perfection of the sphere of repose unveils itself to him at night. Behind the eternity of sleep, is the eternity of rebirth. The poet remembers distant times when he has walked thus the night in long-forgotten cities, experiencing the deja-vu of continuous recurrence. The powerful transient circulation of the city by day is thus counterbalanced in his consciousness by the equally powerful eternal repose which he lives recurrently. And yet a complex combination of wearniess and mystery surrounds the entire phenomenon
In Babylon alone thus I have walked the night
For some reason. What, today after a thousand thousand tired years I am yet to understand.
Several poems by Jibanananda Das are set at night and the deja-vu recurs repeatedly. Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Bidisha, Tyre, Shanghai – the era of world-history marshalls its dead civilizations before his eyes hazing the all too-real present with the ghosts of glorious pasts that will live no more. Night becomes the symbol of subjective contemplation when unharried by the rush of the world, one might juxtapose the past and the present, time and eternity. In another poem, Night, a more restless and humming cityscape emerges, but the “realm of the forefathers” can distance itself from both the ignoble present and the glorious past and, from its eternity, laugh at their transience:
Glare of the drunken light kisses my cheek.
Pong of kerosene, wood, lac, hessian, leather
Merging with drone of the dynamo
Keeps taut the bow-string.
Taut keeps the dead and living world
Taut keeps the string of life’s bow.
When, in distant times, Maitreyi has uttered spells,
Has conquered kingdoms immortal Atilla.
Ever in personal tune still from the window above
Half-awake the Jewish maiden sings.
Laughing, the realm of the forefathers thinks – what is song,
And what mines of gold, oil, paper ?
This cosmopolitan night provides the poet not merely the space for reflecting on time and eternity but also on the secret intimacies of human and animal lives:
Some Phiringi young men smartly pass.
Leaning against a column a lax Negro smiles
The briar pipe in his hand cleans
With confidence of an old gorilla.
Vast night of the city seems to him
The forest of Libya.
Still the animals are regulated – extremely proper –
In fact out of shyness they clothe themselves.
In another striking poem, Night of the Wind, the night sky brings powerful reminders of the perennial human aspiration for Immortality and Love
Those constellations that on the sky’s breast a thousand thousand years earlier had died,
They too have through the window a countless dead skies brought with them.
Those beauties whom I have in Assyria, Egypt, Bidisha seen dying
Last night they very far away in the limit of the sky in mist and mist tall spears in their hands holding have stood themselves in rows as if –
To oppress Death?
Deep victory of Life to express?
Fearsome profound column of Love to erect?
At such times, the poet feels within him the pressure of the continuous urge of consciousness and the empowerment of the past to confront the Falsehood of a mechanized Materialism. In rare and supreme instances, a Grace power acts and the veil is removed, revealing an inward glory. In the poem Blue, the sky becomes the living and conscious agent of this Grace. Here, the poet’s existential aloneness within the multitude becomes the occasion for the revelation:
O unblinking blue, of this prison-house of a hundred thousand rules
Your wizard-rod has broken the spell!
Solitary midst the multitude-rush I muse
In which distant magic kingdom’s enchantment wrapped
Into the blood-embankment of the mundane have you arrived, alone –
In crystal light outspread your robe of blue –
Voiceless dream-peacock wing!
An inner reality transforms his seeing and the earth reveals a new face:
Erased from my eye the hunter-pierced earth’s blood-calligraphy,
Awakens within the self-rapt sky’s golden flame!
…..
Earth’s worm-like withered moult breaks
At your lightning-touch, O sleepless distant wish-world!
Like the Night, a number of images repeat in Jibanananda’s poems, working their way into a symbolic system. The vulture is one such symbol, its ambiguous associations serving very well the poet’s complex reflections. Usually an element in several of his poems, in one, the vulture becomes the principal subject of contemplation, giving its name to the poem. In this poem, the repulsive scavenger bird becomes the messenger of the romantic spirit, closely related to death, looting the works of civilization with its pitiless eternal gaze. And yet its appearances bring the atmosphere and beauty of other worlds, upsetting established norms, fertilizing with the spirit of adventure. On crossing back to its alien kingdom, the bird leaves nostalgic longing in the poet’s heart, with a special tang in the knowledge that modern civilization may have finally succeeded in banishing this incursion of the irrational once and for all. In a final stanza, the poet equates the bird with the Huns, barbarian invaders whose appearance out of the wilderness broke the proud and invincible Roman empire and ushered a new age in history:
Passing round the sad corner of a minaret many vultures
Forgetting the birds of earth disappear to some kingdom beyond Death.
As if some Boitirini or desolated earthly lagoon of Separation
Is moved to weeping – Look to see when in deep blue have merged all those Huns!
In the face of all the changes of the modern world, the poet finds final solace in the knowledge that the world of primordial images cannot be banished. Some hypnotic power of primitive silence holds these images. In the poem Horse, such Stone-Age horses still haunt the “weird dynamo” of this world, pressing the depths of their atmosphere of Silence upon the present:
Odour of the stable floats in in a crowd of night breeze;
The shedding of sad hay sounds from the steel machine;
……
The paraffin lantern is snuffed in the circular stable
Blown by Time’s repose –
Having touched the moonlight of these horses’ Neolithic Silence.
The range of Jibanananda’s poems far exceeds the scope I have outlined in this essay, but my purpose here was only to touch on some important repeating themes and concerns in his work. I believe that in work of this kind, new directions towards the Future Poetry announced by Sri Aurobindo were taken, directions that have added to the store of approaches that might be utilized in the climb to a higher utterance, which yet recognize the range and complexity of consciousness in its engagement with modern existence.
