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Aurobindo 92 Savitri Book 6

An appreciation on Savitri-
Book Six: The Book of Fate
Canto Two: The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain
Words within inverted commas are Aurobindo's

To Aswapati 'Narad answered covering truth with truth: '
'O Aswapati, random seem the ways
Along whose banks your footsteps stray or run'
'A greatness in thy daughter's soul resides
That can transform herself and all around
But must cross on stones of suffering to its goal.'
'She too must share the human need of grief
And all her cause of joy transmute to pain.'

'A Magician's formulas have made Matter's laws
And while they last, all things by them are bound;
But the spirit's consent is needed for each act
And Freedom walks in the same pace with Law.
All here can change if the Magician choose.

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poem by Indira Renganathan
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The Sky-Lab

Sky-lab, Sky-lab, the air did reverberate,
Rich or poor; young or old; literate or not:
All did discuss, the sky-lab's state,
And the dreadful destiny of mankind's lot.

The world was taut with tension,
Over NASA's debacle at exploration—
And was gripped with apprehension,
Of the faltering sky-lab's disintegration.

Under one great mantle of terror
Rocked the world with mute fear;
It chid America for the unpardonable error,
In the computation of the space-craft's steer.

Panic-stricken, some did flee,
In the fold of their kith and kin to be:
From place to place, from country to country,
People fled, to avoid the falling debris.

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poem by Chandra Thiagarajan
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Twilight Calm

Oh, pleasant eventide!
Clouds on the western side
Grow grey and greyer, hiding the warm sun:
The bees and birds, their happy labours done,
Seek their close nests and bide.

Screened in the leafy wood
The stock-doves sit and brood:
The very squirrel leaps from bough to bough
But lazily; pauses; and settles now
Where once he stored his food.

One by one the flowers close,
Lily and dewy rose
Shutting their tender petals from the moon:
The grasshoppers are still; but not so soon
Are still the noisy crows.

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poem by Christina Georgina Rossetti
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We Eternal

Prepare yourself my child for the time is rising
And it is we the young - we eternal - we unknown
Who are to weave in to the pages of the great wheel turning

The story itself is a wild beast yearning
Yearning for the bliss of wisdoms kiss and learning
Learning day by day to keep the world away.

Isolated - Desolate and dressed in forest shadows
Can you hear the music of mountain caverns?

They claim the clock to breath and that our mother has no pulse.

The sun has arisen and once more the southern soil beneath my feet begins to bake in the rising heat
The streets in the town beyond the horizons are tarmac snakes devouring
Hour by hour the restless - the faceless are lost

And here upon the boundary of the generations
I stand knowing that all that has passed has been for the good of all,

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poem by David Lacey
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Seven-Song of Death

Seven-Song of Death

So dawns the blue face of spring. Beneath the suckling trees
a darkness strays into evening and demise.
The blackbird’s feeble complaint is caught.
The stifled night appears, a wild bleeding,
dirge burrowing deeper into the hillside.

Flowering apple-branches sway in the damp air.
Tangles unhinge their silver,
death rattles over the night’s fluttering eyes, clatter of stars,
the whispered song from the cradle.

Down to the blackened woods the sleeper, arisen, descended,
and the blue spring, it wheezed its way through the valley,
that those bleached eyelids receded
wordlessly over his snow-covered face.

And the moon hunted the red beast
from its cave.

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poem by Georg Trakl
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Erewhile A Holocaust

The phoenix that erewhile has from a holocaust
arisen is reborn anew, molecularly
distinguished from its predecessors, having lost
all contact with its past, now living secularly
estranged from rules and customs and from texts that formed
its previous identity. It has a land
that it can call its own, but it does not conform
with aspirations ancestors could understand.

The ovens and the ashes from which it emerged
extinguished the traditions that once helped it fly,
but quite miraculously new ones have emerged
providing ashes with curricula vitae,
but like Samson it can blindly now bring down
the temples of its enemies, new Philistines
who do not want to let it fly, as Gaza town
confronts its new-old settlements in shrapnelled shrines.
Inspired by an article on Milton by Frank Kermode in the February 26,2009 edition of NYR (Heroic Milton: Happy Birthday”) in which Kermode review three new books on Milton, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, by Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot by Anna Beer and Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? by Nigel Smith:
The last of Milton's poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, are both profoundly concerned with heroic virtue (Job, Jesus, Samson) , with variations on a pattern he also applied to his own life. Christian heroic virtue shuns glory, shuns sensual satisfaction, shuns even pagan learning and poetry. It includes all other virtues. Milton seeks to achieve it in his own life and to represent it in his last poems. Commentators have often wondered at the change in character of the blank verse in Paradise Regained, but it is a bold move from the prosody of grandeur in Paradise Lost to one of calm assurance, a deliberate rejection of glory, like its hero's. The verse of Samson Agonistes is even more extraordinary, not Greek, not Hebrew, a celebration of the operation of unexampled heroic virtue under the direction of Providence, and so once again a reflection of the triumph of the blind master:
But he though blind of sight,

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Rex Captivus

Americans if ye be, who stand surrounding my prison,
Has the sight of me, caged and cowed, no hint of the past to say,
Of the days when ye chose me symbol of Freedom the New-arisen?
Free ye found me, and King ye crowned me,
And what is your King to-day?
Shackled for fools to laugh at, shorn of defence and defiance,
Tainted and reeking with filth in this barred, unspeakable slough,
Behold the sign of a creed divine, the bird of your faith’s reliance!
Polluted and shamed, the King ye acclaimed
Recalls your allegiance now !

Born to be Prince of the Air, and the great Sun’s peer and brother,
Who alone might meet his eye in the infinite heights of blue,
Butt of the vulgar and lewd, in the ruck of my pen I smother:
Yet King! Ye have said it! Is my discredit
Not greater disgrace for you?
Men—if ye still be men, not blind, unreasoning cattle—
See what the work of your hands hath made of the work of God!
These tabid things were once such wings as flash on your flags in battle,
And benisons put on every foot

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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1901)
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Enniskillen

Oh my heart beat high with joy elate,
When Danny rode in the Hunters’ Plate
On Enniskillen, the raking grey-
A mighty jumper, with power to stay!
Velvet muzzled, with eye of fire,
Clean-legged, slant –shouldered, and tough as wire,
Oh, the joy that can fill a colleen’s breast,
When her man and horse are dong their best!
The summer skies were without a cloud
O’er the heads of the frantic, cheering crowd,
As he led the field right into the straight,
And his eyes met mine, at the five-barred gate.
Then they thundered by, like a roaring flood,
And oh, good luck to the Irish blood!
The Irish blood that in horse or man
Has never ‘caved in’ since the world began.
He took the last leap, like a bird in the air,
Clearing the hurdle, straight and fair,
And Enniskillen won!

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poem by Alice Guerin Crist
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0126 A Longstanding Question

It’s rather a delicate personal matter…
I could of course say I’m just asking for a friend…
but I guess You’d see through that, from what I hear…

I wouldn’t trouble You, but
it’s not a question that concerned Adam
since he had no comparative physiology
any more than he had comparative theology…
so it didn’t matter a figleaf to him…

and Moses had the bigger picture in mind, and in his position
had to keep up with the Tablets
to use a medical term which
we might refer to later…

as for Jesus, well it didn’t affect him personally, of course,
even as Son of Man,
unless of course the Da Vinci Code is true
but I’d rather not pursue such maudlin thoughts
with You…

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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Ben Allah Achmet, or, the Fatal Tum

I once did know a Turkish man
Whom I upon a two-pair-back met,
His name it was EFFENDI KHAN
BACKSHEESH PASHA BEN ALLAH ACHMET.

A DOCTOR BROWN I also knew -
I've often eaten of his bounty;
The Turk and he they lived at Hooe,
In Sussex, that delightful county!

I knew a nice young lady there,
Her name was EMILY MACPHERSON,
And though she wore another's hair,
She was an interesting person.

The Turk adored the maid of Hooe
(Although his harem would have shocked her).
But BROWN adored that maiden too:
He was a most seductive doctor.

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poem by William Schwenck Gilbert
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