Book Review: The Rhyme of the Mystic Mariner

The Rhyme of the Mystic Mariner

Select Poems

Author: Yayati Madan Gandhi

Edited by: Ravi Dhar

Published by: The Poetry Society of India

Year of Publication: 2017

ISBN: 978-93-83888-76-4

Pp: 170

Price: Rs. 450.00

Review by Wani Nazir

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Roger Housden, in his book, Poems of the Mystics: Christian Tradition from Ancient to Modern writes:

                        Poetry is the language of choice for mystics in all traditions. If you want to speak of the ineffable and the essential, there is no better medium than poetry…Poetry is a language of choice for mystics…to communicate their insights and experiences for the benefit of those who will listen.

Since the essence of mysticism is rested on the belief that the things we see and know symbolise something greater, something essential, since poetry is a language consisting in looking for the resemblances, odysseying from the particular to the universal, since poet approaches philosophy obliquely, poetry becomes a medium to transmit the transcendental feelings the very being of a mystic is effervescent with.

Yayati Madan Gandhi’s book, The Rhyme of a Mystic Mariner, too has been written in poetry simply for the reason that the mystic illuminations the poet glimpses can never be expressed in any other medium than the language of poetry, the poet who writes in one of his poems titles as Poems as Actions:

Every time poets chisel words

They lend voice to feelings long pent up

And make portraits themselves

 To describe the indescribable, to say the unsayable is so onerous a task that when St Augustine tried to decipher the spiritual and supernal experience, she was left with no words and uttered just: “Don’t ask me I know, if you ask me I know not.”

Madan Gandhi has made poetry the wind on whose wings he wants to fly over the valleys of the Eternal Truth, his eyes are unflinchingly fixed on. The readers, not the ones like me, who have never experienced such epiphanic moments, too are transported along with the poet from the dry lands of scepticism to the ocean of spirituality. The poet dares to “Vie even with God/to create a new world/ordered or chaotic; grotesque or quixotic” (Poets and Painters). Such kind of daring needs a mystic soul, which Madan Gandhi, no doubt, is.

Madan Gandhi’s book delineates the mystical and transcendental concepts from various religious legacies, not from Brahmanism only. Apart from the concept of Awagaman (cycle of rebirth) as expressed by him in his poem, Time’s River, where he wants to break free from this cycle, he versifies:

                        Coming and going

                        is a cycle

                        which never stops,

he also expatiates on Buddhist concept of nirvana in his poem, Nirvana, and vindicates that nirvana is a release from all sufferings:

Nirvana is not a union

with God or a deity,

or individual self,

but a state of being.

Nirvana is not

void or nothingness

but a release

from all suffering.

He also poetises Sufism and talks about Dervish Dance when a Sufi is in ‘halat-e-sukur’ (Ecstasy) and identifies himself with the ‘music of spheres’. In his poem, The Dervishe’s Dance, the poet writes:

            All dance in harmony with nature; in a certain way

            yields the body to the earth’s movement

Shelley in one of his essays, A Defence of Poetry, attributes poetry with prophetic and mystical prowess and describes poetry as ‘a type of super-conscious intuition’, too awe-inspiring to be gauged by logicality of the intellect. One has to ‘tear the veil of thinking’ to reach the Truth, not to bank upon one’s human mind. This is what the poet of The Rhyme of the Mystic Mariner avers in his poem No Mind-State:

                       

                        Human mind

                        can’t hold

                        the whole.

Yayati Madan Gandhi, a mystic poet, like a mystic who is with the power of spirituality and divine illumination capable of tearing away the surface of autopic façades of things and peeps into the truth of things, is also blessed with this vision when he is bestowed with knowledge of essence of things and their secrets all. The poet, in his poem, Blessed, proves to be a soul blessed with divine illumination:

                       

                        I know the secrets

                        of the self and the cosmos

                        what glows

                        at the other end:

                        Whence life comes, whereto it goes

                        what makes the tide turn,

                        how moves the wheel.

Such is the state of his being tumultuous with the waves of Satya (the eternal truth) that he claims to be with Buddha and Jesus at the last post of divine realisation:

                        With Buddha and Jesus

I stand at the edge of realisation. (Flaming Cross)

                       

He too echoes the words of Socrates ‘know thy self’ and Mohammad (pbuh) ‘One who knows one’s self, knows everything’ because as The New Testament says, “Neither shall they say, Lo here! Or lo there! For, behold the kingdom of God is within you”, the divine is dwelling within – within one’s heart, which he calls a prince:

                        Everyone is but a prince

                        With a crown in heart (Living to Love)

                         

In his poem, Love: The Trusted Ferry, the poet too like all the mystics believes in love as a means to know one’s self and a way leading to the Ultimate Truth, the Divine Reality.

                        In love

                        you are one with all-soul

                        the inner and the outer self

                        lose all distinction

                        the selfless action becomes

                        meditation. 

Here he also seems to be in the shoes of Rumi who when over-brimmed with love admits:

Love has taken away my practices

And filled me with poetry.

The utter beauty of his poetic gems can be gauged by savouring just the lines where he teaches all the salik (those who embark on the path of spiritual odyssey) the message of how to live eternally transgressing space and time:

                       

                        To live eternally

                        you must know

                        the art of dying each moment

 All said and done, one has to but accept that Madan Gandhi, the author of The Rhyme of the Mystic Mariner, has tried to heave up his mystic encounters with his self and the Divine on the wings of poesy. The book is fraught with the ‘spots of time’, the blissful moments of self-realisation and divine illumination. The reader has to be fully equipped with all the paraphernalia he will definitely feel in need of while wading through the waters tiding with mystical and tumultuous waves the poetry of the book is inundated with. All I would say is that the book is not only worth reading but it is indeed worth owing.

Bibliography:

1. Housdon, Roger.  Poems of the Mystics:  Christian Tradition from Ancient to Modern, 2009.  RetrievedOctober,2016,fromwww.healyourlife.com/authorRogerhousden/2009/11/wisdom/inspiration/poems-of-the-mystics.
2. Gandhi Yayati Madan. The Rhyme of the Mystic Mariner, 2017, The Poetry Society of India

 Setu, July 2017