This errant life is dear although it dies;

And human lips are sweet though they but sing

Of stars estranged from us; and the youth’s emprise

Is wondrous yet, although an unsure thing.

 

Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!

I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above,

Temper the unborn light no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.

For ’tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to hear words intimate,

And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.

 

Sri Aurobindo’s Comments

“A very beautiful poem, one of the very best you have written. The last six lines, one may say even the last eight, are absolutely perfect. If you could always write like that, you would take your place among English poets and no low place either. I consider they can rank—these eight lines—with the very best in English poetry.” 

 

To Dilip Kumar Roy: “Amal’s lines are not easily translatable, least of all into Bengali. There is in them a union or rather fusion of high severity of speech with exaltation and both with a pervading intense sweetness which it is almost impossible to transfer bodily without loss into another language. There is no word in excess, none that could have been added or changed without spoiling the expression, every word just the right revelatory one—no colour, no ornamentation, but a sort of suppressed burning glow, no similes, but images which have been fused inseparably into the substance of the thought and feeling—the thought itself perfectly developed, not idea added to idea at the will of the fancy, but perfectly interrelated and linked together like the limbs of an organic body. It is high poetic style in its full perfection and nothing at all that is transferable.  You have taken his last line and put in a lotus-face and made divine love bloom in it,—a pretty image, but how far from the flowing impassioned severity of the phrase: ‘And mould Thy love into a human face’!” 

 

To the poet himself: “The quotations [AE] makes [from your poems]—

 

The song-impetuous mind…           

The Eternal Beauty is a wanderer

Hungry for lips of clay— 

 

certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are moreover of the kind AE and Yeats also, I think, would naturally like. But the poem [This Errant Life] I selected for special praise had no striking expressions like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would be no single feature standing out in a special beauty (eyes, lips, head or hands), but the whole has a harmoniously modeled grace of equal perfection everywhere as, let us say, in the perfect charm of a statue by Praxiteles. This apart from the idea and feeling, which goes psychically and emotionally much deeper than the ideas in the lines quoted by AE, which are poetically striking but have not the same subtle spiritual appeal; they touch the mind and vital strongly, but the other goes home into the soul.” 

 

“If you could always write direct from the Illumined Mind–finding there not only the substance, as you often do, but the rhythm and language, that indeed would be a poetry exquisite, original and unique. The intellect produces the idea, even the poetic idea, too much for the sake of the idea alone; coming from the Illumined Mind the idea in a form of light and music is itself but the shining body of the Light Divine.” 

 

I tried reading This Errant Life again and again … but could not understand much of it ... I am very much desirous to understand such a beautiful poem ... I kindly request you to guide me so I can understand and enjoy the poem.

Let me quote here first how Amal himself explained the poem. This appears in his Talks on Poetry, Talk 11. He says:

 

It is a poem written in a mood of half-dejection half-wistfulness. One morning the poet felt very much the pull of human things in the midst of his spiritual aspirations. All that attracts the heart of a mere man came up before his vision and he expressed the deep draw of it in spite of the transiency with which it is associated. But this spiritual yearning too remained. So he declared that the human cannot become the divine unless and until the divine becomes the human and answers as the Avatar the heavenward longing of earth.

The poem is simple enough not to call for much explanation… Sri Aurobindo has given it rather high praise and it has been translated into both Bengali and Gujarati. It has, I suppose, what one may term a poignantly profound sweetness. But by an irony of fate the way it was printed in its Gujarati translation knocked some of its high seriousness out of a printer’s slip. I hope this mistake does not accidentally happen to be a shrewd comment on the poet’s character; in the phrase

Its mortal longings…

the printed version misread “mortal” for “moral”!

I hope this helps you. Maybe we can see some other aspects later.

Although Amal might have written This Errant Life in a psychological state of glumness and pensive contemplation as if the entire future of his soul was going to be decided in it, although in it there might be a direct connection with his personal condition at the time, it stands quite independent of all these immediate associations. In fact the individual’s individuality had turned into such evocative poignancy that it at once acquired the character of spiritual universality. That is why it becomes accessible to us—even if we are not to know the causes of its appearance, what gave rise to its birth. Perhaps they are not important if there is the authentic inspiration behind the creation, the inspiration that can touch any kindred soul. The wonderful truth, the truth of a mystic or a sufi or a bhakta’s life is that “the human cannot become the divine unless and until the divine becomes the human”. In it there is also the power to render the psychic utterance into a deep philosophy of the spirit, on which a whole system of metaphysics can be erected. The fulfilment of the transient is in the eternal which also gets enriched by stepping into it.

Let us look at a couple of examples. Here is AE’s Star-Teachers:

 

These myriad eyes that look on me are mine.

Wandering beneath them I have found again

The ancient ample moment, the divine,

The God-root within men.

This is a true mystical experience in which the “ample moment” reveals, unexpectedly, that, after all, there is the God-foundation on which everything stands, that the stars are there to show us that even in the depth of darkness there is the divine.

And here are Rupert Brooke’s small pleasures and gladnesses and enjoyments, and small heeds and wants and concerns of we small little creatures—all these which can yet wash away “marvellously” our thousand sorrows and sufferings:

 

These hearts are woven of human joys and cares,

Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth,

The years had given them kindness, Dawn was theirs,

And sunset, and the colours of the earth.

Such is the power of The Dead to give us warm and living breath. There may not be the AEan mysticism in it, but the rush to the dawn and the sunset and the splendid-hued earth is definitely reassuring in its living and life-breathing lyricism.

Amal Kiran himself has his sublime “passionless” Kanchinjanga, being at whose feet is the great possibility of soaring above the “mortal woe”:

 

I have loved thee though thy beauty stands

Aloof from me,

And hoped that dwelling in thy sight

From dawn to dawn at last I might

Become like thee—

 

Become like thee and soar above

My mortal woe,

And to the heavens, passionless

And mute, from dawn to dawn address

Thoughts like snow.

There is in this another kind of echo which is akin, in another way, to the Errant Life’s outgrowing the mortal longing by the miracle of Kanchinjanga itself leaning over his soul. But we can’t say that the following, said by Sri Aurobindo regarding This Errant Life, can be applied to At the Foot of Kanchinjanga:

 

There is no word in excess, none that could have been added or changed without spoiling the expression, every word just the right revelatory one—no colour, no ornamentation, but a sort of suppressed burning glow, no similes, but images which have been fused inseparably into the substance of the thought and feeling—the thought itself perfectly developed, not idea added to idea at the will of the fancy, but perfectly interrelated and linked together like the limbs of an organic body.

This mixed mood of Amal combining dejection and wistfulness, a mood carrying in it an intimate soul-seeking despondency, that we witness with a degree of poignancy in the Errant Life was, from the point of view of poetic creation, most fruitful indeed. Perhaps it happens only in the case of a ready psyche, ready in several respects possessing the power of right expression also.

There are seven occurrences of the word “errant” in Savitri. Let us read their relevant contexts.

 

p. 3

All can be done if the god-touch is there.

A hope stole in that hardly dared to be

Amid the Night's forlorn indifference.

As if solicited in an alien world

With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,

Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,

An errant marvel with no place to live,

Into a far-off nook of heaven there came

A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.

The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch

Persuaded the inert black quietude

And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.

A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That glowed along a fading moment's brink,

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

One lucent corner windowing hidden things

Forced the world's blind immensity to sight.

The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak

From the reclining body of a god.

 

pp. 71-72

In the hidden strength of her omnipotent Will,

Driven by her breath across life's tossing deep,

Through the thunder's roar and through the windless hush,

Through fog and mist where nothing more is seen,

He carries her sealed orders in his breast.

Late will he know, opening the mystic script,

Whether to a blank port in the Unseen

He goes or, armed with her fiat, to discover

A new mind and body in the city of God

And enshrine the Immortal in his glory's house

And make the finite one with Infinity.

Across the salt waste of the endless years

Her ocean winds impel his errant boat,

The cosmic waters plashing as he goes,

A rumour around him and danger and a call.

Always he follows in her force's wake.

He sails through life and death and other life,

He travels on through waking and through sleep.

A power is on him from her occult force

That ties him to his own creation's fate,

And never can the mighty Traveller rest

And never can the mystic voyage cease

Till the nescient dusk is lifted from man's soul

And the morns of God have overtaken his night.

As long as Nature lasts, he too is there,

For this is sure that he and she are one;

Even when he sleeps, he keeps her on his breast:

Whoever leaves her, he will not depart

To repose without her in the Unknowable.

There is a truth to know, a work to do;

Her play is real; a Mystery he fulfils:

There is a plan in the Mother's deep world-whim,

A purpose in her vast and random game.

 

p. 152

A trepidant and motley multitude,

A strange pell-mell of magic artisans,

Was seen moulding the plastic clay of life,

An elfin brood, an elemental kind.

Astonished by the unaccustomed glow,

As if immanent in the shadows started up

Imps with wry limbs and carved beast visages,

Sprite-prompters goblin-wizened or faery-small,

And genii fairer but unsouled and poor

And fallen beings, their heavenly portion lost,

And errant divinities trapped in Time's dust.

Ignorant and dangerous wills but armed with power,

Half-animal, half-god their mood, their shape.

Out of the greyness of a dim background

Their whispers come, an inarticulate force,

Awake in mind an echoing thought or word,

To their sting of impulse the heart's sanction draw,

And in that little Nature do their work

And fill its powers and creatures with unease.

Its seed of joy they curse with sorrow's fruit,

Put out with error's breath its scanty lights

And turn its surface truths to falsehood's ends,

Its small emotions spur, its passions drive

To the abyss or through the bog and mire:

Or else with a goad of hard dry lusts they prick,

While jogs on devious ways that nowhere lead

Life's cart finding no issue from ignorance.

 

p. 176

This realm inspires us with our vaster hopes;

Its forces have made landings on our globe,

Its signs have traced their pattern in our lives:

It lends a sovereign movement to our fate,

Its errant waves motive our life's high surge.

All that we seek for is prefigured there

And all we have not known nor ever sought

Which yet one day must be born in human hearts

That the Timeless may fulfil itself in things.

Incarnate in the mystery of the days,

Eternal in an unclosed Infinite,

A mounting endless possibility

Climbs high upon a topless ladder of dream

For ever in the Being's conscious trance.

All on that ladder mounts to an unseen end.

An Energy of perpetual transience makes

The journey from which no return is sure,

The pilgrimage of Nature to the Unknown.

 

p. 194

A wanderer on forlorn despairing routes,

Along the roads of sound a frustrate voice

Forsaken cries to a forgotten bliss.

Astray in the echo caverns of Desire,

It guards the phantoms of a soul's dead hopes

And keeps alive the voice of perished things

Or lingers upon sweet and errant notes

Hunting for pleasure in the heart of pain.

A fateful hand has touched the cosmic chords

And the intrusion of a troubled strain

Covers the inner music's hidden key

That guides unheard the surface cadences.

Yet is it joy to live and to create

And joy to love and labour though all fails,

And joy to seek though all we find deceives

And all on which we lean betrays our trust;

Yet something in its depths was worth the pain,

A passionate memory haunts with ecstasy's fire.

 

p. 262

Our spirits break free from their environment;

The future brings its face of miracle near,

Its godhead looks at us with present eyes;

Acts deemed impossible grow natural;

We feel the hero's immortality;

The courage and the strength death cannot touch

Awake in limbs that are mortal, hearts that fail;

We move by the rapid impulse of a will

That scorns the tardy trudge of mortal time.

These promptings come not from an alien sphere:

Ourselves are citizens of that mother State,

Adventurers, we have colonised Matter's night.

But now our rights are barred, our passports void;

We live self-exiled from our heavenlier home.

An errant ray from the immortal Mind

Accepted the earth's blindness and became

Our human thought, servant of Ignorance.

An exile, labourer on this unsure globe

Captured and driven in Life's nescient grasp,

Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve,

It dreams of happier states and nobler powers,

The natural privilege of unfallen gods,

Recalling still its old lost sovereignty.

Amidst earth's mist and fog and mud and stone

It still remembers its exalted sphere

And the high city of its splendid birth.

 

pp. 331-32

Alien now seemed that dim far universe,

Self and eternity alone were true.

Then memory climbed to him from the striving planes

Bringing a cry from once-loved cherished things,

And to the cry as to its own lost call

A ray replied from the occult Supreme.

For even there the boundless Oneness dwells.

To its own sight unrecognisable,

It lived still sunk in its own tenebrous seas,

Upholding the world's inconscient unity

Hidden in Matter's insentient multitude.

This seed-self sown in the Indeterminate

Forfeits its glory of divinity,

Concealing the omnipotence of its Force,

Concealing the omniscience of its Soul;

An agent of its own transcendent Will,

It merges knowledge in the inconscient deep;

Accepting error, sorrow, death and pain,

It pays the ransom of the ignorant Night,

Redeeming by its substance Nature's fall.

Himself he knew and why his soul had gone

Into earth's passionate obscurity

To share the labour of an errant Power

Which by division hopes to find the One.

Two beings he was, one wide and free above,

One struggling, bound, intense, its portion here.

A tie between them still could bridge two worlds;

There was a dim response, a distant breath;

All had not ceased in the unbounded hush.

His heart lay somewhere conscious and alone

Far down below him like a lamp in night;

Abandoned it lay, alone, imperishable,

Immobile with excess of passionate will,

His living, sacrificed and offered heart

Absorbed in adoration mystical,

Turned to its far-off fount of light and love.

In the luminous stillness of its mute appeal

It looked up to the heights it could not see;

It yearned from the longing depths it could not leave.

 

Here is one from The Essays on the Gita, p. 20:

 

Such then is the divine Teacher of the Gita, the eternal Avatar, the Divine who has descended into the human consciousness, the Lord seated within the heart of all beings, He who guides from behind the veil all our thought and action and heart's seeking even as He directs from behind the veil of visible and sensible forms and forces and tendencies the great universal action of the world which He has manifested in His own being. All the strife of our upward endeavour and seeking finds its culmination and ceases in a satisfied fulfilment when we can rend the veil and get behind our apparent self to this real Self, can realise our whole being in this true Lord of our being, can give up our personality to and into this one real Person, merge our ever-dispersed and ever-converging mental activities into His plenary light, offer up our errant and struggling will and energies into His vast, luminous and undivided Will, at once renounce and satisfy all our dissipated outward-moving desires and emotions in the plenitude of His self-existent Bliss. This is the world-Teacher of whose eternal knowledge all other highest teaching is but the various reflection and partial word, this the Voice to which the hearing of our soul has to awaken.

Of course, the word “errant” does not occur in The Life Divine. Nor does the word “grace”.