Maharshi Aurobindo As A Poet Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Maharshi Aurobindo the yogi, the sadhaka as a poet,
The writer of Life Divine and other treatises in prose,
But well-known for Savitri,
An epic in verse,
Taking to Miltonic recourse in sentence pattern,
But the story no doubt Vedic, Upanishadic, Puranic,
Dealing with the story of love, life and death,
Dramamtized through Savitri and Satyavan.

The earlier poems of Aurobindo the rough exercises
In the verse of the eighteen nineties,
Nationalistc, patriotic,
But the latter showing a change in vision
And he after the realisation of God,
Choosing a different path for himself,
Finally, switching over to Pondicherry to be lost in his sadhna.

Though Urvasie, Love and Death, Ilion, Baji Prabhou,
The other works of his,
But instead of his affinity for Hellenic things,
Latinization and Miltonic style,
He tries to capture classical rapture and incantation,
Vedic rhyme and rhythm,
Fragrance and sonoriety.

Yoga, sadhna, realisation, approach and attitude to the Divine,
The things of Aurobindo,
Transcendental vision, is the thing of his deliberation,
But Western logic and reasoning
Cast an impact of their own on him
And he is more apt in prose than in poetry,
A poet rhetorical and prosodic.

The grammar of poesy is the text and textuality of Aurobindo,
Poetry as the grammar of poesy
And the poet a grammarian,
Poetry an exercise in rhetoric and prosody
And the poet a rhetorician and prosodist
Leaning to classicism,
Verbose and bombastic sentence-construction and word-structure.

Sometimes Milton's Paradise Lost influences him,
Sometimes Blake's The Tiger,
Sometimes under Homer,
Sometimes under Vyasa's Mahhabharata,
Aurobindo takes to his own recourse in poetry,
Finally arriving at Thomas Traherne and Henry Vaughan's
Experientation with the Light Divine and the Retreat,
The path of sadhna, the path of yoga to reach at.

Savitri is in reality a Life Divine in poetry,
The flower of his poetry,
Classical meditation and thinking,
Ashramite vision and dwelling,
Sanskritic reading and recycling,
And immortal work from the pen of the rishi,
The saint and the seer.