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Love and Death…contd.
Even sin may be a sumptuous sacrifice Acceptable for unholy fruits. But none Of these the inexorable shadow asks: Alone of gods Death loves not gifts: he visits The pure heart as the stained. Lo, the just man Bowed helpless over his dead, nor all his virtues Shall quicken that cold bosom: near him the wild Marred face and passionate and will not leave Kissing dead lips that shall not chide him more. Life the pale ghost requires: with half thy life Thou mayst protract the thread too early cut Of that delightful spirit — half sweet life. O Ruru, lo, thy frail precarious days, And yet how sweet they are! simply to breathe How warm and sweet! And ordinary things How exquisite, thou then shalt learn when lost, How luminous the daylight was, mere sleep How soft and friendly clasping tired limbs, And the deliciousness of common food. And things indifferent thou then shalt want, Regret rejected beauty, brightnesses Bestowed in vain. Wilt thou yield up, O lover, Half thy sweet portion of this light and gladness, Thy little insufficient share, and vainly Give to another? She is not thyself: Thou dost not feel the gladness in her bosom, Nor with the torture of thy body will she Throb and cry out: at most with tender looks And pitiful attempt to feel move near thee, And weep how far she is from what she loves. Men live like stars that see each other in heaven, But one knows not the pleasure and the grief The others feel: he lonely rapture has, Or bears his incommunicable pain. O Ruru, there are many beautiful faces, But one thyself. Think then how thou shalt mourn When thou hast shortened joy and feelst at last
Page – 127 The shadow that thou hadst for such sweet store." He ceased with a strange doubtful look. But swift Came back the lover’s voice, like passionate rain. "O idle words! For what is mere sunlight? Who would live on into extreme old age, Burden the impatient world, a weary old man, And look back on a selfish time ill-spent Exacting out of prodigal great life Small separate pleasures like an usurer, And no rich sacrifice and no large act Finding oneself in others, nor the sweet Expense of Nature in her passionate gusts Of love and giving, first of the soul’s needs? Who is so coldly wise, and does not feel How wasted were our grandiose human days In prudent personal unshared delights? Why dost thou mock me, friend of all the stars? How canst thou be love’s god and know not this, That love burns down the body’s barriers cold And laughs at difference — playing with it merely To make joy sweeter? O too deeply I know, The lover is not different from the loved, Nor is their silence dumb to each other. He Contains her heart and feels her body in his, He flushes with her heat, chills with her cold. And when she dies, oh! when she dies, oh me, The emptiness, the maim! the life no life, The sweet and passionate oneness lost! And if By shortening of great grief won back, O price Easy! O glad briefness, aeons may envy! For we shall live not fearing death, nor feel As others yearning over the loved at night When the lamp flickers, sudden chills of dread Terrible; nor at short absence agonise, Wrestling with mad imagination. Us Serenely when the darkening shadow comes, One common sob shall end and soul clasp soul,
Page – 128 Leaving the body in a long dim kiss. Then in the joys of heaven we shall consort, Amid the gladness often touching hands To make bliss sure; or in the ghastly stream If we must anguish, yet it shall not part Our passionate limbs inextricably locked By one strong agony, but we shall feel Hell’s pain half joy through sweet companionship. God Love, I weary of words. O wing me rather To her, my eloquent princess of the spring, In whatsoever wintry shores she roam." He ceased with eager forward eyes; once more A light of beauty immortal through the limbs Gleaming of the boy-god and soft sweet face, Glorifying him, flushed, and he replied: "Go then, O thou dear youth, and bear this flower In thy hand warily. For thou shalt come To that high meeting of the Ganges pure With vague and violent Ocean. There arise And loudly appeal my brother, the wild sea." He spoke and stretched out his immortal hand, And Ruru’s met it. All his young limbs yearned With dreadful rapture shuddering through them. He Felt in his fingers subtle uncertain bloom, A quivering magnificence, half fire, Whose petals changed like flame, and from them breathed Dangerous attraction and alarmed delight, As at a peril near. He raised his eyes, But the green place was empty of the God. Only the faery tree looked up at heaven Through branches, and with recent pleasure shook. Then over fading earth the night was lord.
But from Shatudru and Bipasha, streams Once holy, and loved Iravathi and swift Clear Chandrabhaga and Bitosta’s toil For man, went Ruru to bright sumptuous lands
Page – 129 By Aryan fathers not yet paced, but wild, But virgin to our fruitful human toil, Where Nature lay reclined in dumb delight Alone with woodlands and the voiceless hills. He with the widening yellow Ganges came, Amazed, to trackless countries where few tribes, Kirath and Poundrian, warred, worshipping trees And the great serpent. But robust wild earth, But forests with their splendid life of beasts Savage mastered those strong inhabitants. Thither came Ruru. In a thin soft eve Ganges spread far her multitudinous waves, A glimmering restlessness with voices large, And from the forests of that half-seen bank A boat came heaving over it, white-winged, With a sole silent helmsman marble-pale. Then Ruru by his side stepped in; they went Down the mysterious river and beheld The great banks widen out of sight. The world Was water and the skies to water plunged. All night with a dim motion gliding down He felt the dark against his eyelids; felt, As in a dream more real than daylight, The helmsman with his dumb and marble face Near him and moving wideness all around, And that continual gliding dimly on, As one who on a shoreless water sails For ever to a port he shall not win. But when the darkness paled, he heard a moan Of mightier waves and had the wide great sense Of ocean and the depths below our feet. But the boat stopped; the pilot lifted on him His marble gaze coeval with the stars. Then in the white-winged boat the boy arose And saw around him the vast sea all grey And heaving in the pallid dawning light. Loud Ruru cried across the murmur: "Hear me,
Page – 130 O inarticulate grey Ocean, hear. If any cadence in thy infinite Rumour was caught from lover’s moan, O Sea, Open thy abysses to my mortal tread. For I would travel to the despairing shades, The spheres of suffering where entangled dwell Souls unreleased and the untimely dead Who weep remembering. Thither, O, guide me, No despicable wayfarer, but Ruru, But son of a great Rishi, from all men On earth selected for peculiar pangs, Special disaster. Lo, this petalled fire, How freshly it blooms and lasts with my great pain!" He held the flower out subtly glimmering. And like a living thing the huge sea trembled, Then rose, calling, and filled the sight with waves, Converging all its giant crests; towards him Innumerable waters loomed and heaven Threatened. Horizon on horizon moved Dreadfully swift; then with a prone wide sound All Ocean hollowing drew him swiftly in, Curving with monstrous menace over him. He down the gulf where the loud waves collapsed Descending, saw with floating hair arise The daughters of the sea in pale green light, A million mystic breasts suddenly bare, And came beneath the flood and stunned beheld A mute stupendous march of waters race To reach some viewless pit beneath the world. Ganges he saw, as men predestined rush Upon a fearful doom foreseen, so run, Alarmed, with anguished speed, the river vast. Veiled to his eyes the triple goddess rose. She with a sound of waters cried to him, A thousand voices moaning with one pain: "Lover, who fearedst not sunlight to leave, With me thou mayst behold that helpless spirit
Page – 131 Lost in the gloom, if still thy burning bosom Have courage to endure great Nature’s night In the dire lands where I, a goddess, mourn Hurting my heart with my own cruelty." She darkened to the ominous descent, Unwilling, and her once so human waves Sent forth a cry not meant for living ears. And Ruru chilled; but terrible strong love Was like a fiery finger in his breast Pointing him on; so he through horror went Conducted by inexorable sound. For monstrous voices to his ear were close, And bodiless terrors with their dimness seized him In an obscurity phantasmal. Thus With agony of soul to the grey waste He came, glad of the pain of passage over, As men who through the storms of anguish strive Into abiding tranquil dreariness And draw sad breath assured; to the grey waste, Hopeless Patala, the immutable Country, where neither sun nor rain arrives, Nor happy labour of the human plough Fruitfully turns the soil, but in vague sands And indeterminable strange rocks and caverns That into silent blackness huge recede, Dwell the great serpent and his hosts, writhed forms, Sinuous, abhorred, through many horrible leagues Coiling in a half darkness. Shapes he saw, And heard the hiss and knew the lambent light Loathsome, but passed compelling his strong soul. At last through those six tired hopeless worlds, Too hopeless far for grief, pale he arrived Into a nether air by anguish moved, And heard before him cries that pierced the heart, Human, not to be borne, and issued shaken By the great river accursed. Maddened it ran, Anguished, importunate, and in its waves
Page – 132 The drifting ghosts their agony endured. There Ruru saw pale faces float of kings And grandiose victors and revered high priests And famous women. Now rose from the wave A golden shuddering arm and now a face. Torn piteous sides were seen and breasts that quailed. Over them moaned the penal waters on, And had no joy of their fierce cruelty. Then Ruru, his young cheeks with pity wan, Half moaned: "O miserable race of men, With violent and passionate souls you come Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days In fear and anguish, catching at stray beams Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers; Then from your spacious earth in a great horror Descend into this night, and here too soon Must expiate your few inadequate joys. O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace, The naked spirit here. O my sweet flower, Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood? Ah me! But I will haste and deeply plunge Into its hopeless pools and either bring Thy old warm beauty back beneath the stars, Or find thee out and clasp thy tortured bosom And kiss thy sweet wrung lips and hush thy cries. Love shall draw half thy pain into my limbs; Then we shall triumph glad of agony." He ceased and one replied close by his ear: "O thou who troublest with thy living eyes Established death, pass on. She whom thou seekest Rolls not in the accursed tide. For late I saw her mid those pale inhabitants Whom bodily anguish visits not, but thoughts Sorrowful and dumb memories absolve, And martyrdom of scourged hearts quivering." He turned and saw astride the dolorous flood
Page – 133 A mighty bridge paved with mosaic fire, All restless, and a woman clothed in flame, With hands calamitous that held a sword, Stood of the quaking passage sentinel. Magnificent and dire her burning face. "Pass on," she said once more, "O Bhrigu’s son; The flower protects thee from my hands." She stretched One arm towards him and with violence Majestic over the horrid arch compelled. Unhurt, though shaking from her touch, alone He stood upon an inner bank with strange Black dreary mosses covered and perceived A dim and level plain without one flower. Over it paced a multitude immense With gentle faces occupied by pain; Strong men were there and grieving mothers, girls With early beauty in their limbs and young Sad children of their childlike faces robbed. Naked they paced with falling hair and gaze Drooping upon their bosoms, weak as flowers That die for want of rain unmurmuring. Always a silence was upon the place. But Ruru came among them. Suddenly One felt him there and looked, and as a wind Moves over a still field of patient corn, And the ears stir and shudder and look up And bend innumerably flowing, so All those dumb spirits stirred and through them passed One shuddering motion of raised faces; then They streamed towards him without sound and caught With desperate hands his robe or touched his hair Or strove to feel upon them living breath. Pale girls and quiet children came and knelt And with large sorrowful eyes into his looked. Yet with their silent passion the cold hush Moved not; but Ruru’s human heart half burst With burden of so many sorrows; tears
Page – 134 Welled from him; he with anguish understood That terrible and wordless sympathy Of dead souls for the living. Then he turned His eyes and scanned their lovely faces strange For that one face and found it not. He paled, And spoke vain words into the listless air: "O spirits once joyous, miserable race, Happier if the old gladness were forgot! My soul yearns with your sorrow. Yet ah! reveal If dwell my love in your sad nation lost. Well may you know her, O wan beautiful spirits! But she most beautiful of all that died, By sweetness recognisable. Her name The sunshine knew." Speaking his tears made way: But they with dumb lips only looked at him, A vague and empty mourning in their eyes. He murmured low: "Ah, folly! were she here, Would she not first have felt me, first have raised Her lids and run to me, leaned back her face Of silent sorrow on my breast and looked With the old altered eyes into my own And striven to make my anguish understand? Oh joy, had she been here! for though her lips Of their old excellent music quite were robbed, Yet her dumb passion would have spoken to me; We should have understood each other and walked Silently hand in hand, almost content." He said and passed through those untimely dead. Speechless they followed him with clinging eyes. Then to a solemn building weird he came With grave colossal pillars round. One dome Roofed the whole brooding edifice, like cloud, And at the door strange shapes were pacing, armed. Then from their fear the sweet and mournful dead Drew back, returning to their wordless grief. But Ruru to the perilous doorway strode, And those disastrous shapes upon him raised
Page – 135 Their bows and aimed; but he held out Love’s flower, And with stern faces checked they let him pass. He entered and beheld a silent hall Dim and unbounded; moving then like one Who up a dismal stair seeks ever light, Attained a dais brilliant doubtfully With flaming pediment and round it coiled Python and Naga monstrous, Joruthcaru, Tuxuc and Vasuki himself, immense, Magic Carcotaca all flecked with fire; And many other prone destroying shapes Coiled. On the wondrous dais rose a throne, And he its pedestal whose lotus hood With ominous beauty crowns his horrible Sleek folds, great Mahapudma; high displayed He bears the throne of Death. There sat supreme With those compassionate and lethal eyes, Who many names, who many natures holds; Yama, the strong pure Hades sad and subtle, Dharma, who keeps the laws of old untouched, Critanta, who ends all things and at last Himself shall end. On either side of him The four-eyed dogs mysterious rested prone, Watchful, with huge heads on their paws advanced; And emanations of the godhead dim Moved near him, shadowy or serpentine, Vast Time and cold irreparable Death. Then Ruru came and bowed before the throne; And swaying all those figures stirred as shapes Upon a tapestry moved by the wind, And the sad voice was heard: "What breathing man Bows at the throne of Hades? By what force, Spiritual or communicated, troubles His living beauty the dead grace of Hell?" And one replied who seemed a neighbouring voice: "He has the blood of Gods and Titans old. An Apsara his mother liquid-orbed
Page – 136 Bore to the youthful Chyavan’s strong embrace This passionate face of earth with Eden touched. Chyavan was Bhrigu’s child, Puloma bore, The Titaness, — Bhrigu, great Brahma’s son. Love gave the flower that helps by anguish; therefore He chilled not with the breath of Hades, nor The cry of the infernal stream made stone." But at the name of Love all hell was moved. Death’s throne half faded into twilight; hissed The phantoms serpentine as if in pain, And the dogs raised their dreadful heads. Then spoke Yama: "And what needs Love in this pale realm, The warm great Love? All worlds his breath confounds, Mars solemn order and old steadfastness. But not in Hell his legates come and go; His vernal jurisdiction to bare Hell Extends not. This last world resists his power Youthful, anarchic. Here will he enlarge Tumult and wanton joys?" The voice replied: "Ménaca momentary on the earth, Heaven’s Apsara by the fleeting hours beguiled Played in the happy hidden glens; there bowed To yoke of swift terrestrial joys she bore, Immortal, to that fair Gundhurva king A mortal blossom of delight. That bloom Young Ruru found and plucked, but her too soon Thy fatal hooded snake on earth surprised, And he through gloom now travels armed by Love." But then all Hades swaying towards him cried: "O mortal, O misled! But sacrifice Is stronger, nor may law of Hell or Heaven Its fierce effectual action supersede. Thy dead I yield. Yet thou bethink thee, mortal, Not as a tedious evil nor to be Lightly rejected gave the gods old age, But tranquil, but august, but making easy The steep ascent to God. Therefore must Time
Page – 137 Still batter down the glory and form of youth And animal magnificent strong ease, To warn the earthward man that he is spirit Dallying with transience, nor by death he ends, Nor to the dumb warm mother’s arms is bound, But called unborn into the unborn skies. For body fades with the increasing soul And wideness of its limit grown intolerant Replaces life’s impetuous joys by peace. Youth, manhood, ripeness, age, four seasons Twixt its return and pale departing life Describes, O mortal, — youth that forward bends Midst hopes, delights and dreamings; manhood deepens To passions, toils and thoughts profound; but ripeness For large reflective gathering-up of these, As on a lonely slope whence men look back Down towards the cities and the human fields Where they too worked and laughed and loved; next age, Wonderful age with those approaching skies. That boon wilt thou renounce? Wherefore? To bring For a few years — how miserably few! — Her sunward who must after all return. Ah, son of Rishis, cease. Lo, I remit Hell’s grasp, not oft relinquished, and send back Thy beautiful life unborrowed to the stars. Or thou must render to the immutable Total all thy fruit-bearing years; then she Reblossoms." But the Shadow antagonist: "Let him be shown the glory he would renounce." And over the flaming pediment there moved, As on a frieze a march of sculptures, carved By Phidias for the Virgin strong and pure, Most perfect once of all things seen in earth Or Heaven, in Athens on the Acropolis, But now dismembered, now disrupt! or as In Buddhist cavern or Orissan temple, Large aspirations architectural,
Page – 138 Warrior and dancing-girl, adept and king, And conquering pomps and daily peaceful groups Dream delicately on, softening with beauty Great Bhuvanayshwar, the Almighty’s house, With sculptural suggestion so were limned Scenes future on a pediment of fire. There Ruru saw himself divine with age, A Rishi to whom infinity is close, Rejoicing in some green song-haunted glade Or boundless mountain-top where most we feel Wideness, not by small happy things disturbed. Around him, as around an ancient tree Its seedlings, forms august or flame-like rose; They grew beneath his hands and were his work; Great kings were there whom time remembers, fertile Deep minds and poets with their chanting lips Whose words were seed of vast philosophies — These worshipped; above this earth’s half-day he saw Amazed the dawn of that mysterious Face And all the universe in beauty merge. Mad the boy thrilled upwards, then spent ebbed back. Over his mind, as birds across the sky Sweep and are gone, the vision of those fields And drooping faces came; almost he heard The burdened river with human anguish wail. Then with a sudden fury gathering His soul he hurled out of it half its life, And fell, like lightning, prone. Triumphant rose The Shadow chill and deepened giant night. Only the dais flickered in the gloom, And those snake-eyes of cruel fire subdued. But suddenly a bloom, a fragrance. Hell Shuddered with bliss: resentful, overborne, The world-besetting Terror faded back Like one grown weak by desperate victory, And a voice cried in Ruru’s tired soul: "Arise! the strife is over, easy now
Page – 139 The horror that thou hast to face, the burden Now shared." And with a sudden burst like spring Life woke in the strong lover over-tried. He rose and left dim Death. Twelve times he crossed Boithorini, the river dolorous, Twelve times resisted Hell and, hurried down Into the ominous pit where plunges black The vast stream thundering, saw, led puissantly From night to unimaginable night, — As men oppressed in dreams, who cannot wake, But measure penal visions, — punishments Whose sight pollutes, unheard-of tortures, pangs Monstrous, intolerable mute agonies, Twisted unmoving attitudes of pain, Like thoughts inhuman in statuary. A fierce And iron voicelessness had grasped those worlds. No horror of cries expressed their endless woe, No saving struggle, no breathings of the soul. And in the last hell irremediable Where Ganges clots into that fatal pool, Appalled he saw her; pallid, listless, bare — O other than that earthly warmth and grace In which the happy roses deepened and dimmed With come-and-go of swift enamoured blood! Dumb drooped she; round her shapes of anger armed Stood dark like thunder-clouds. But Ruru sprang Upon them, burning with the admitted God. They from his touch like ineffectual fears Vanished; then sole with her, trembling he cried The old glad name and crying bent to her And touched, and at the touch the silent knots Of Hell were broken and its sombre dream Of dreadful stately pains at once dispersed. Then as from one whom a surpassing joy Has conquered, all the bright surrounding world Streams swiftly into distance, and he feels His daily senses slipping from his grasp,
Page – 140 So that unbearable enormous world Went rolling mighty shades, like the wet mist From men on mountain-tops; and sleep outstretched Rising its soft arms towards him and his thoughts, As on a bed, sank to ascending void.
But when he woke, he heard the koïl insist On sweetness and the voice of happy things Content with sunlight. The warm sense was round him Of old essential earth, known hues and custom Familiar tranquillising body and mind, As in its natural wave a lotus feels. He looked and saw all grass and dense green trees, And sunshine and a single grasshopper Near him repeated fierily its note. Thrilling he felt beneath his bosom her; Oh, warm and breathing were those rescued limbs Against the greenness, vivid, palpable, white, With great black hair and real and her cheek’s Old softness and her mouth a dewy rose. For many moments comforting his soul With all her jasmine body sun-ensnared He fed his longing eyes and, half in doubt, With touches satisfied himself of her. Hesitating he kissed her eyelids. Sighing With a slight sob she woke and earthly large Her eyes looked upward into his. She stretched Her arms up, yearning, and their souls embraced; Then twixt brief sobbing laughter and blissful tears, Clinging with all her limbs to him, "O love, The green green world! the warm sunlight!" and ceased, Finding no words; but the earth breathed round them, Glad of her children, and the koïl ‘s voice Persisted in the morning of the world.
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A NOTE ON LOVE AND DEATH
The story of Ruru and Pramadvura — I have substituted a name more manageable to the English tongue — her death in the forest by the snake and restoration at the price of half her husband’s life is told in the Mahabharata. It is a companion legend to the story of Savitri but not being told with any poetic skill or beauty has remained generally unknown. I have attempted in this poem to bring it out of its obscurity. For full success, however, it should have had a more faithfully Hindu colouring, but it was written a score of years ago when I had not penetrated to the heart of the Indian idea and its traditions, and the shadow of the Greek underworld and Tartarus with the sentiment of life and love and death which hangs about them has got into the legendary framework of the Indian Patala and hells. The central idea of the narrative alone is in the Mahabharata; the meeting with Kama and the descent into Hell were additions necessitated by the poverty of incident in the original story.
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