THE POETIC NATURE OF NEHRU

 

V. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN

 

In a critique of Tennyson and Browning as poets, T.S. Eliot has said that they do not ‘feel’ their thought as im­mediately as the odour of a rose, Primarily a thinker, Nehru, unlike the two Victorian poets, did feel his thoughts, and as a man of action, acted on those thoughts. For him to think was to feel and to feel was to act. It poetry is a compound of blood, imagination and intellect, as Yeats would have it, then most of Nehru’s writings and speeches have the unmi­stakable touch of the poet.

 

Nehru was far too absorbed in the fight for freedom­ - political, economic and social - to give ‘to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’. But with that rosy streak in him, as Sarojini Naidu with her gift of prophecy said, he could trans­mute his pre-destined gifts of sorrow, suffering, sacrifice, anguish and strife, into the very substance of ecstacy. He was so obviously a poet in spite of his wanderings in other fields.

 

Nehru tells us that he developed a liking for poetry very early in life, a liking that endured and survived the many changes to which he was subject over the years. His study of poetry, Western and Eastern, was a wide as his apprecia­tion of it was keen. In moments of depression, he could despair with Matthew Arnold.

 

For the world which seems

To lie before us, like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new

Hath really neither joy, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here, as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle, and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

The despair would only be momentary and the student of history would brace himself up with the thought that life was rich and varied and that, though it had many swamps and marshes and muddy places, it had also the great sea, and the mountains, and snow, and glaciers, and wonderful starlit-nights, and the love of family and friends, and the comradeship of workers in a common cause, and music and books and the empire of ideas. He would, therefore, sing with the poet.

 

Lord, though I lived on earth, the child of earth,

Yet was I fathered by the starry sky.

If the mixture of good and evil that is the world

reminded him of William Blake’s lines,

When the stars threw dawn their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears,

Did He smile his work to see?

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

he could also view it with and without passion

along with the Chinese poet;

Oftentimes, one strips oneself of passion

In order to see that secret of life;

Oftentimes, one regards life with passion,

In order to see its manifold results.

 

The poet, wrote Wordsworth, thinks and fells in the spirit of human passions. One such passion, especially among leaders of men, is to change the sorry scheme of things entire and remould it nearer to the heart’s desire. The French Re­volution was the result of a passion of that kind. Impressed by its spontaneity and sobered by the course it took, Nehru wrote in poetic accents: “Straight; like an arrow, the men who make the revolution go forward to the goal, seeing neither to the right nor to the left, and the straighter and keener their vision the further goes the revolution. But this occurs only during the high period of the revolution, when its leaders are on the mountain peaks and the masses are marching up the mountain side. But, alas, there comes a time when they have to come down from the mountain into the dark valleys below, and faith grows dim and energy grows less” Here is figurative language at its best which brings out the process of revolutions and the people affected by them. This is poetry with out a metrical pattern which, indeed, it can ‘do’ without.

 

Poetry in a lighter vein ‘also’ appealed to Nehru and he summoned to his aid the satirical poets when he wanted to cook a snook at the Hamlets of politics, ‘sicklied o’ver with the pale cast of thought’ and cursing themselves for being born when ‘the time is out of joint’. He would charge at the Moderates with the lance of Ray Campbell’s lines.

 

They praise the firm restraint with which you write,

I am with you there, of course,

You use the snaffle and the curb all right

But where’s the bloody horse?

 

His word picture of Buddha, as the ‘symbol of the whole spirit of Indian thought’, has a rare beauty which would do credit to any poet lisping in numbers. “The ages roll by and Buddha seems not so far away after all; his voice whispers in our ears and tells us not to run away from the struggle but, calm-eyed, to face it, and to see in life ever greater opportunities for growth and advancement.” Nehru the poet, here looks ‘before and after’.

 

Poetry was ever an abiding source of inspiration and strength to Nehru. With advancing age and ill-health but with Himalayan problems on hand to tackle, he gained confidence from Robert Frost:

 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

 

The aesthetic sensibility of Nehru came to the surface when, as a prisoner in the jails at Naini, Bareilly and Almora, he looked:

 

Upon the little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky,

And every drifting cloud that went with sails of silver by.

 

From the Naini prison, he wrote to his daughter, Priyadarshini, ‘dear to the sight but dearer still when sight is denied’, on 14th January, 1931:

 

“I have developed strange habits in prison. One of these is the habit of getting up early - earlier even than the dawn. I have watched the contest between the moonlight and the dawn in which the dawn always wins. In the strange half-light, it is difficult to say for some time whether it is the moonlight or the light of the coming day. And then almost suddenly there is no doubt of it and it is day, and the pale moon retires, beaten, from the contest.”

 

Which pale moon was he referring to? Was he not hinting at the dawn of freedom and the retreat of the pale moon of British power from India, beaten in the contest? And when freedom came in 1947, he spoke of the Tryst with Destiny’ in poetic accents that would echo down the corridors of time. He said:

 

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

 

Nehru always bemoaned the loss of joy that Nature gave with the advance of industrialism. Regretting that the urbanites were unable to commune with Nature, only content with occa­sional weekend jaunts to the country-side, he said that they were like persons who, finding it difficult to admire some classic poet or writer, returned to their favourite novel or detective story where no effort of mind was necessary. As for himself, he loved to dwell amidst the loveliness of Nature and allow an enchantment to steal over his senses. His heart leapt up with joy as he looked at the top of a palm tree from the loneliness of his prison cell at Dehra Dun. He derived great comfort from the sight of mountains whose ‘solidity and imperturbability’ looked upon him with the ‘wisdom of a million years’ and mocked at his varying humours and soothed his fevered mind.

 

In the murmur of waters of the Ganga, Nehru heard the voices of ages long gone by. To the noble Ganga he was attached by hoops of steel. “The Ganga”, he said, “is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are inter­twined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age long culture and civilization, ever-chang­ing, ever-flowing and yet ever the same Ganga.” The imagery of an ever-flowing river recurs again and again in Nehru’s writings, every time striking us with a wealth of suggestion.

 

Nehru loved not only Nature in all her variety but every form of beauty, be it sculpture or architecture, music or painting. In Buddha’s image, he saw much more than that meets the ordinary eye. The image symbolised, for him the whole spirit of Indian thought or at least one vital aspect of it - the spirit of daring against odds. The cathedrals of Europe of the 11th and 12th centuries struck him with their ‘wondrous beauty’, and seemed to him ‘almost like a prayer going up to the heavens’. In Florence, he saw the shadows of the great painters, Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo and Raphael, of Dante the poet, followed by his beloved, Beatrice, trailing behind her a faint perfume.

 

Some of the best word-pictures of Nehru are those of Gandhiji, the little man with a magic in his look, a fire in his touch and understanding and love in his voice. When Gandhiji came on the Indian scene, fresh from his victories of the spirit in South Africa, he came like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths; like a beam of light that pierced the darkness and removed the scales from our eyes; like a whirlwind that upset many things but most of all the working of people’s minds’. Nehru differed from Gandhiji in many respects and suffered agonies, but at the end he bowed his head to the master. And when the good and great man fell to the bullets of an assassin, Nehru found himself enveloped in darkness ‘the light having gone out of our lives’. He sobbed aloud: ‘A glory has departed and the sun that warmed and brightened our hearts has set and we shiver in the cold and dark.’

 

Nehru’s love of children, of animals, birds and insects, of folk music and dance are all of a piece with his artistic nature. Allied to that nature was his majestic character which, as Tagore said, lifted him far above others and made him greater than his deeds and truer than his surroundings.

 

Until the future dare forget the past

His name and flame will be

An echo and a light unto eternity.

 

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