Letters from a Young Poet (17 page)

Bolpur
Tuesday, 24 May 1892

I've told you before, in the afternoon I wander around the terrace by myself, sunk in my own thoughts; yesterday in the evening
I set off with my two friends on either side, with Aghor as our guide, thinking it was my duty to show them the natural beauty of this place. The sun had set by then, but it was not yet dark. At the extreme end of the horizon, rows of trees were to be seen in shades of blue and, just above it, a deeper blue line of very dark blue clouds had made the scene very beautiful—in the midst of it all, I became a little poetic and said: just like the blue line of kohl on the eyelid above blue eyes. My companions did not all hear me, some did not understand me and others said briefly, ‘Yes, looks great, doesn't it.' After that I did not venture into any poeticisms a second time round. After about a mile, there was a row of palm trees by a dam, and near the palm trees was a rustic waterfall in a field; we were standing and looking at that when suddenly we noticed that the blue clouds in the north had become extremely dense and swollen and were coming towards us with their lightning-teeth bared. We all decided unanimously that such natural beauty is best appreciated indoors—that it is the safest option. Just as we turned homeward, taking long steps over the vast field, an enormous storm fell upon our shoulders with an angry roar. While we were busy praising the kohl in her eyes we had not realized for a moment that nature's beauty would run up and attack us in this manner with a tremendous slap like an enraged housewife. It became so dark with dust that it was impossible to see beyond a distance of a few feet. The strength of the wind began to increase—the gravel, impelled by the wind, began to pierce us like shrapnel—it seemed as if the wind had caught hold of us by the nape of our necks and was propelling us forward—drops of rain too began to fall upon our faces and hurt us. Run, run! The field was uneven. In some places one needed to descend into the rifts [
khoẏāi
], where it's difficult to walk even
in ordinary circumstances, and even more so in the middle of a storm. On the way a dry branch with thorns managed to impale itself on my foot—while trying to peel that off, the wind tries to push you from the back and make you fall flat on your face. When we had reached the vicinity of the house we came across three or four servants who fell noisily upon us like a second storm! One holds your hand, another commiserates, someone else wants to show you the way, another thinks that the babu might fly away in the wind and embraces you from behind. Getting past the tyranny of these servants somehow or the other, I finally got home, panting, with dishevelled hair, grimy body and wet clothes. Anyway, that's a lesson well learnt—perhaps one day I might have sat down to describe the hero of a novel or poem encountering a terrible storm in a field as he goes blithely towards his beloved, thinking of her sweet face—but now I will not be able to write such lies. It's impossible to remember anybody's sweet face in the middle of a storm; one is too preoccupied with keeping the gravel out of one's eyes. And then on top of that I had my
eye glasses
on. They kept getting swept away by the wind; I found it impossible to keep a hold on them. With spectacles clutched in one hand and the ends of the dhuti in the other, I had to walk avoiding both thorny bushes and holes in the ground. Imagine if I had a beloved in a house by the Kopai River here, would I have been busy with thoughts of her, or with keeping my spectacles and dhuti in order! After getting home, I thought about it for a while—the Vaishnava poets have written a great deal of very good and sweet poetry on Radhika's unwearied assignations on a stormy night, but they have not thought for a moment about what she would have looked like in this storm when she arrived in front of Krishna. You can well imagine what would have happened to her hair. Think about the state of her clothes! Grimy with dust, caked with the mud of rainwater—what a wonderful image she would have presented in the forest groves! Of course you don't think about these things when you're reading the Vaishnava
poets—one just sees with the inner eye of one's imagination a beautiful woman on a dark night in the rainy season travelling, driven by love, through the flower-filled
k
ā
damba
forests by the banks of the Yamuna through storm and rain, impervious to her surroundings as if she is walking in her dreams; she has tied her anklets so that she may not be heard, she has worn
nīlāmbarī
clothes in a shade of deepest blue so she may not be seen, but she has not brought an umbrella in case she gets wet, nor a light in case she stumbles and falls. Alas, the necessities of life are so necessary when we need them, yet so neglected in poetry! Poetry pretends with untruths so that we may be free of the thousand bonds of slavery with which we are tied to necessity. Umbrellas, shoes, clothes—these will last forever. In fact, it seems that with the progress of civilization, poetry shall slowly die out, but new
patents
on umbrellas and shoes will continue to appear.

Bolpur
Saturday, 28 May 1892

The cup of tea I had last evening was somewhat on the stronger side—on top of that, the letter I wrote you last night was also on a subject that had become somewhat inflamed with the heat of my thoughts, so it kept ringing in my head for a long time—as a result, after I went to bed I spent more than half the night completely sleepless. There are no church bells that sound at night over here—and because there is no human habitation anywhere nearby, the moment the birds stop singing the whole place is enveloped in the most complete silence from the evening onward—there's not much difference between the first hours of the night and the middle of the night. In Calcutta, a sleepless night is like a large, dark river—it keeps flowing very slowly—you can lie flat on your bed and calculate its
motion by its sounds—here, the night is like a vast motionless lake that is dreadfully still—there is no movement anywhere. However much I might turn on this side or that, a vast, humid want of sleep hung over me which had no trace of any flow in it. This morning, getting out of bed a little late, I sat in the downstairs room leaning against a cushion with a slate on my chest and with my feet up, one on top of the other, and began to try and write a poem in the midst of the morning breeze and the call of the birds. It was all just beginning to gel—pleased expression, eyes slightly closed, head swaying frequently, and a rhythmic humming recitation growing progressively clearer—when suddenly a letter from you, a copy of
S
ā
dhan
ā, a proof of
S
ā
dhan
ā and a
Monist
paper presented themselves. I read your letter and proceeded to race my eyes across the pages of
S
ā
dhan
ā at a brisk gallop. Then, with a renewed nodding of the head and an indistinct humming, I resumed my poetic occupation. Other things could wait until it was done. I'm wondering why there is so much more joy to be obtained from the completion of a single poem than in the writing of a thousand pages of prose. In poetry, one's thoughts attain a completion, almost as if one can pick it up with one's hands. And prose is like a sack, full of separate things—if you hold it in one place, all of it doesn't come up so easily—an absolute specimen of a burden. If I could complete a poem every day then life would pass so pleasantly! But I've been pursuing it for such a long time now, and it still hasn't quite been tamed yet—it's not the sort of Pegasus that will allow you to put a harness on it every day. One of the chief joys of
art
is the joy of freedom—to take one's self quite far away, and then even after one returns to the prison house of the world, there's an echo in your ear, an elation in your mind, which stays with you for a long time. I'm unable to turn my hand to the play because these short poems keep coming up spontaneously. Otherwise, there were a few messengers from two or three future plays knocking at the door. I might not be able to attend to them before winter, possibly. With the exception of
Citrāṅgadā
, all my other plays are written in the winter. That is the
time when the passion of lyric poetry cools down a bit, and one can sit down calmly and quietly to write plays.

Bolpur
31 May 1892

It's not yet five o'clock—but it's already light, there's quite a breeze, and all the birds of the garden have woken up and started to sing. The cuckoo has outdone itself—nobody has yet been able to fathom why it calls so continuously—obviously it's not just for our pleasure, nor to make the beloved feel the pangs of separation even more—it must surely have a
personal
ambition of its own—but it's impossible to decide what that wretched ambition is! Nor does it let off—its
cooo-o
,
cooo-o
, goes on and on—and then, occasionally, as if its impatience had doubled, it coos more rapidly still. What does this mean? And again, a little further away, some other sort of bird is consistently repeating itself—
kuk-kuk
—in a very low tone, without the sting of the least bit of eagerness or enthusiasm—as if it were a man who was feeling quite despondent, all his hopes lost, but was still unable to give up the impulse to sit in the shade the entire day with its little bit of
kuk-kuk
,
kuk-kuk
. Really, these small, timid living things with wings, sitting in the shade of the trees with their intensely tender little necks and chests, running their individual households—we don't know anything of their actual story. We don't really understand why they need to call out in such a way. Some zoologists say it is to call out to their beloved. Their paramours too don't seem to be far behind humans, I see—making the gentleman quite maddened at this early hour—if the cuckoo lady wants to come to him, she might as well come at a call or two—why is she making the lovelorn admirer call so frantically in this way?

Shilaidaha
Sunday, 12 June 1892

What you wrote yesterday in your letter about the duties of life is absolutely true. Our chief duty is to make the place where we have somehow arrived happier, brighter and more peaceful to the best of our ability. All of you do exactly that with your happy, beautiful faces, your selfless service, love and affection—there is nothing further to be done. Not everybody is able to do this. We are cursed beings, we are born accompanied by such a tremendous unhappiness that we are unable to make the world a happy, calm place in a natural and easy way; we keep struggling and kicking in the same place and we muddy everything around us—we don't know how to make the world sweet—exactly the opposite. A hundred thousand curses on the race of men—there is no greater rubbish on the face of the earth.

Shilaidaha
Monday, 13 June 1892

I'm fed up with civilized behaviour—nowadays I often sit and recite—‘What if I were rather an Arab Bedouin!' What a healthy, strong, free barbarism! Instead of allowing one's judgement, behaviour, intelligence and thinking to make you decrepit in body and mind before time, caught up day and night in an ancient, worn-out set of rites, one could have enjoyed an intense, joyful life with a heart free of worries or hesitation. All one's hopes and desires, whether good or bad, could have been fearless, unhesitant and commendable—no continual conflict between one's brain and
one's customs, between the brain and desire, between desire and work. This closed life—if I could just let it run on in the most wild and lawless way, I would have created a storm and sent the waves crashing everywhere, riding one's frivolity like a strong, untamed horse running with the joy of one's passions!

But I'm not a Bedouin, I'm a Bengali. I will sit in a corner and nitpick, I will judge, argue, turn my mind over once this way and then the other way—in the way one fries fish—you let one side splutter and sizzle in the boiling oil, then you turn it over to let the other side sputter. Anyway! When it's impossible to be completely uncivilized, it's politic to try and be absolutely civilized. No point setting up a fight between civilization and barbarism….

As such by nature I'm uncivilized—I find the intimacy of people completely unbearable. Unless there's a lot of empty space all around, I cannot completely
unpack
my mind, spread out my hands and feet, and settle down. All my blessings are with the human race—I hope it prospers—but let them not come up too close against me…. I'm sure the general populace will get on completely fine without me and find themselves a lot of good friends. They will not lack consolation.

Shilaidaha
Wednesday, 15 June 1892

Yesterday, on the first day of Āshāṛh, the coronation of the rains was conducted with much pomp and ceremony. After a very hot day, dark clouds rolled in with a lot of fanfare towards evening…. Yesterday I thought: it's the first day of the rains, today it would be better to get drenched than spend the day inside a dark room—the year 1299 [Bengali Era] will not return a second time in my life—if you think about it, how many times will you experience the first
day of Āshāṛh in your entire life—if you collect them all together and you have about thirty days, then you must concede that that's a very long life. Ever since I wrote ‘
Meghdūt'
the first day of Āshāṛh has had a special significance—at least for me. I often think, these days of my life that keep coming one after the other—some brilliant with sunrise and sunset, some the calm blue of dense clouds, some shining like white flowers on a full-moon night—how lucky I am to have them! And how valuable they are! A thousand years ago, Kalidasa, sitting in the royal court of nature, had welcomed the first day of Āshāṛh by composing, in immortal rhyme, the song of man's pain of separation from his beloved; in my life too, the same first day of Āshāṛh rises every year with its entire sky of wealth—that same first day of Āshāṛh of the ancient poet of ancient Ujjaini with its men and women with their multitude of joys and sorrows, separations and reunions, of many many ages ago! That first great day of that very old Āshāṛh will be subtracted by a day every year from my life, until a time will come when there will not be a single day remaining in my life of this day of Kalidasa, this day of
Meghdūt
, this first day of the rains in India for all of time past. When you think about this deeply, you feel like looking once again at this world very carefully—you want to greet the sunrise every day in your life fully and consciously and say goodbye to every sunset like a familiar friend. If I were a renunciate by nature I might have thought that life is transient, so instead of spending my days uselessly I should engage in good works and in taking the name of god. But that is not my nature, that's why I sometimes think—such lovely days and nights are going from my life every day, and I'm unable to take them in fully! All these colours, this light and shade, this silent splendour spread across the sky, this peace and beauty that fills the entire space between earth and heaven—how much preparation all of this takes! Such a vast field of celebration! Such a huge and amazing affair happening every day outside, and we cannot find a proper response to it within us! We live at such a far remove from the universe! The light of a single star reaches us after travelling through the infinite darkness for
millions and millions of years, from millions and millions of miles away, and it cannot enter our hearts, as if our hearts were a further million miles away! The colourful mornings and evenings are falling from the torn necklace of the horizon's brides like so many gems into the ocean's water. Not one of them enters our thoughts! That time on the way to England the unearthly sunset I had seen upon the still waters of the ruby-red sea—where has it gone! But thank god I had seen it, thank god that that one evening of my life had not been rejected and wasted—in all our endless days and nights no other poet in the world had witnessed that one amazing sunset except me. Its colours remain in my life. Each day of that sort is like an individual legacy. The few days I spent in that garden of mine at Peneti,
^*
a few nights on the second-floor terrace, a few rainy days in the western and southern verandas, a few evenings by the Ganga at Chandannagar, one sunset and moonrise on the mountain peak at Sinchal in Darjeeling—it's as if I have
filed
away a few brilliant, beautiful fragments of moments of this sort. Beauty, for me, is a real drug! It really and truly drives me mad. When I used to lie on the terrace on moonlit nights as a child, it was as though the moonlight was the white foam of liquor overflowing and drowning me in it…. The world in which I find myself is full of very strange human beings—they are all occupied night and day with rules and building walls; they carefully put up curtains just in case their eyes actually see anything—really, the creatures of this world are very strange! It's a wonder they don't cover up every flowering bush, or erect canopies to keep out the moonlight. These wilfully blind people, traversing the world in closed palanquins, what do they see as they go? If there is an afterlife in which one's wishes and desires are taken into account, then I want to get out of this wrapped-up world and be born again in an open, free, beautiful and heavenly place. Those who are unable to truly immerse themselves in beauty are the ones who scorn beauty as merely the wealth of the senses, but
those who have tasted it know that it has within it an unutterable depth—beauty is far beyond even the most powerful of the senses; forget about the eyes and ears, even if you enter it with your entire heart you will not reach the limit of its melancholy. Why do I come and go on the city streets dressed up like a gentleman? Why waste my life in polite conversation with neatly dressed gentlemen? I'm truly uncivilized, impolite—is there no beautiful anarchy for me anywhere? No festival of joy with a handful of madmen? But what's all this poeticism I'm engaging in—this is the sort of thing that heroes of poems say—pronouncing their opinions on
conventionality
over the course of three or four pages, thinking they are bigger than the rest of human society. Really, it's quite embarrassing to say such things. The truth within these thoughts has always been suppressed by talk over the ages. Everybody in this world talks a lot—and I'm foremost among them—I've suddenly realized this now after all this time….

P.S. Let me finish telling you what I wanted to say to you at the start—don't worry, I won't take up another four pages—that is, it rained heavily in the evening on the first day of Āshāṛh. That's all.