T. S. Eliot: “Four Quartets" IN these latest poems of his, Eliot has become outright a poet of the Dark Night of the Soul. The beginnings of the new avatar were already there certainly at the very beginning. The Waste Land is a good preparation and passage into the Night. Only, the negative element in it was stronger – the cynicism, the bleakness, the sereness of it all was almost overwhelming. The next stage was "The Hollow Men": it took us right up to the threshold, into the very entrance. It was gloomy and fore-boding enough, grim and serious – no glint or hint of the silver lining yet within reach. Now as we find ourselves into the very heart of the Night, things appear somew

Human Destiny ANTHROPOLOGISTS¹ speak of a very interesting, if not strange biological phenomenon. A baby monkey's face, it seems, is much nearer to the adult human face than to its own form when adult and grown-up. Also the characteristic accentuations that mark out the grown-up ape come in its case too soon, but the human being continues, generally and on the whole, the stamp of his early, i.e., immature animality through-out his life. The rough and gold blotches, the rude and crude structures that make up the adult simian face, meaning all the specialisation of its character are not inherited by man; man retains always something of the fragility and effeminacy of the child. Referen

Index A. E. (GEORGE RUSSELL), 64, 286 -"Desire",64n -"Endurance", 286n Adam, 116 Addison, 79n -"Hymn", 79n Adityas, 28-9 Aeschylus, 86 Aesop, 258 Afghanistan, 284 Agni, 16, 19-20,22-3,28, 33-5, 45, 157 61, 164, 166, 180,214 America, 198,284 Ananda, 133 Andamans, 103 Ansars, 267 Antigone, 187, 273 -Aphrodite, 182 Apollo, 180, 182 Aragon, 88 Aristotle, 89, 248 Arjuna, 254 Arnold, Matthew, 71, 189,234 -Essays in Criticism, 234n Arya, the, 131,227-8 Asia, 284 Asuras, 159 Aswins, 45 Atri, 162 Auden,88 Aurelius, 70 BACCHUS, 182 Bacon, 108 Banerji, Sanat Kumar, 230n Ba

A Stainless Steel Frame CORRUPTION is the order of the day. In all walks of life, wherever we have to live and move, we come across the monster; we cannot pass him by, we have to accost him (even in the Shakespearean sense, that is) welcome him, woo him. It is like one of the demons of the Greek legends that come out of the unknown, the sea or the sky, to prey upon a help - a less land and its people until a deliverer comes. Corruption appears today with a twofold face, Janus like: violence and falsehood. In private life, in the political field, in the business world, in social dealings, it is now an established practice, it has gained almost the force of a law of n

Mystic Poetry I WOULD like to make a distinction between mystic poetry and spiritual poetry. To equate mysticism and spirituality is not always happy or even correct. Thus, when Tagore sings: Who comes along singing and steering his boat? It seems a face familiar. He goes in full sail, turns nor right nor left; The waves break helplessly at the sides! His face looks familiar... ¹ it is mysticism, mysticism in excelsis. Even A.E.'s I turn To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still: White for Thy whiteness all desires burn. Ah, with what longing once again I turn!² is just on the borderland: it has succeeded in

A Vedic Conception of the Poet 'Kavi' is an invariable epithet of the gods. The Vedas mean by this attribute to bring out a most fundamental character, an inalienable dharma of the heavenly host. All the gods are poets; and a human being can become a poet only in so far as he attains to the nature and status of a god. Who is then a kavi? The Poet is he who by his poetic power raises forms of beauty in heaven – kavih kavitvÄ� divi rÅ«pam Ä�sajat.¹ Thus the essence of poetic power is to fashion divine Beauty, to reveal heavenly forms. What is this Heaven whose forms the Poet discovers and embodies? Heaven – Dyaus – has a very definite connotation in the Veda. It

Buddhism and Hinduism I BUDDHISM, or for that matter, Christianity or Mohammadenism or any credal and personal religion, is easy to understand. For they are each of them a single and simple entity, whereas Hinduism is a multiple and complex organism. The difference is that between a tree, a huge mighty tree, may be, and a vast and tangled forest. Buddhism, for example, "may be likened to the great Bo tree under which, one may say, it was born; but Hinduism is a veritable Dandakaranya. For Hinduism means all things to all men, while a personal religion is meant truly for a certain type of persons. Hinduism recognises differences and distinction even while admitting the fu

Of Beauty and Ananda TRUTH is Beauty's substance-it is Beauty self-governed. Beauty is Delight perfectly articulate. Love is Beauty enjoying itself. Knowledge is the light that Beauty emanates. Power is the fascination that Beauty exerts. *** All Art is the re-creation of Truth in Beauty. Rhythm is the gait of Truth dynamic with Delight. The Truth of a thing is its native substance, the being in its absolute self-law. Satyam is that which is of Sat. *** Beauty is delight organised. Poetry is the soul's delight seeking perfect expression in speech. Speech is self-expression. It is the organ of self-consciousness. The natur

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) "THE zeal for the Lord hath eaten me up." Such has indeed been the case with Pascal, almost literally. The fire that burned in him was too ardent and vehement for the vehicle, the material instrument, which was very soon used up and reduced to ashes. At twenty-four he was already a broken man, being struck with paralysis and neurasthenia; he died at the comparatively early age of 39, emulating, as it were, the life career of his Lord the Christ who died at 33. The Fire martyrised the body, but kindled and brought forth experiences and realisations that save and truths that abide. It was the Divine Fire whose vision and experience he had on the f

Nicholas Roerich Ex oriente lux. Out of the East the Light, and that light is of the nature and substance of beauty, of creative and dynamic beauty in the life the spirit. This, I suppose, is Roerich's message in a nutshell. The Light of the East is always the light of the “ample consciousness� that dwells on the heights of our being in God. The call that stirred a Western soul, made him a wanderer over the world in quest of the Holy Grail and finally lodged him in the Home of the Snows is symbolic of a more than individual destiny. It is representative of the secret history of a whole culture and civilisation that have been ruling humanity for some centuries, its inner want