Episodes

During the past several years a large number of poems were written, these with varying moods and manners of expression, with different styles and idioms, and idea-thoughts. Yet there is a kind of underlying unity among them all. In the present anthology there are poems of a narrative-reflective kind, much like simple village household stories, bearing deeper significances of life and beliefs looking for their glowing secrets, a civilisation that had deeper roots in the psychology of ancient race, charged and suffused with a sort of spiritual ambiance that is there in its very blood, that which saved itself from crude invasive urbanity. Some of them were published in books, but as these are now out of print they have been included here, however, keeping the nature of only those whose thematic contents go along with the format of the chosen storyline adapted here. Poems in Part I are coming out for the first time though a few of them were published in some of the Ashram periodicals. These are verses which do not belong to the metrical rhymed genre which Sri Aurobindo calls as the "first fundamental indispensable element" for good poetry; nor are these just broken pieces of a musing prose composition more going by idea-rhythm than the sound. Yet, sure enough, there is the subtleness of sound in the very movement, as in some of the Upanishads in prose, and it is that which should really matter. This may not be a poetry coming from "above" but which attempts to climb to that "above" wherefrom comes the creative Word with the load of music and melody, with the charge of sight and sound and sense all together. This, writes Sri Aurobindo, "will not be as in the old times something hieratically remote, mystic, inward, shielded from the profane, but rather a sight which will endeavour to draw these godheads again to close and familiar intimacy with our earth." "The gods of life and still more the gods of mind are so incalculably self-creative that even when we can distinguish the main lines on which the working runs or has so far run, we are still unable to foresee with any certainty what turn they will yet take or of what new thing they are in labour."This form may not have, as is natural for the Overhead, that "greater power of revelation nearer to the direct vision and word of the Overmind from which all creative inspiration comes", though sometimes may yet slip in. But it is the happy soul of beauty and natural harmony that could receive the inspiration in the delight of creative wonder and discovery, the swift-footed goddess wearing the colourful garments of gladness and simplicity and charming rusticity, yet with its own dazzle. It is hoped that the current presentation will bring out the needed thrust and thrill of breathing life and power in the newest realm of flaming musical gold."A poetry of this kind need not be at all something high and remote or beautifully and delicately intangible, or not that alone, but will make too the highest things near, close and visible, will sing greatly and beautifully of all that has been sung, all that we are from outward body to very God and Self, of the finite and the infinite, the transient and the Eternal, but with a new reconciling and fusing vision that will make them other to us than they have been even when yet the same. If it wings to the heights, it will not leave earth unseen below it, but also will not confine itself to earth, but find too other realities and their powers on man and take all the planes of existence for its empire."