A commentary on Sri Aurobindo’s poem “Ahana”, recorded in three sessions in January 2016 by Narad and Alok Pandey.
…it has illustrated once more that poetry is not merely beauty but power, it is not merely sweet imagination but creative vision – it is even the Rik, the mantra that impels the gods to manifest upon earth, that fashions divinity in man.
(Nolini Kanta Gupta, Collected Works Vol. 2 The Approach to Mysticism. Ahana and Other Poems, pp 62-63)
“Science and philosophy, introspection and interrogation, fact and myth and symbolism, hope and aspiration and ecstasy, all course through Ahana’s universe of poesy to overwhelming effect. Now and then, and again and again, the resounding cataract crystallises into dazzling images and striking evocations: “Brooded out drama and epic, structured the climb of the sonnet”; “All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle”; “Time’s doors shudder / Swinging wide on their hinges into Eternity”; “Dupe of a figment of consciousness, doped with behaviour and feature”. Studded with iridescent lightnings, Ahana is one long reverberation of music, a feast alike for the physical and the inner ear.
(K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, “Sri Aurobindo – a biography and a history”, 2006, p 625)
