Foreword to the
Poems of Arjava

by Krishna Prem

It must be now twelve years since Chadwick and I sat together on the banks of the Ganges, talking far into the night of dreams that lay close to our hearts, dreams that had brought us together as they had brought us both to India. Of his past I knew little save that it included a fellowship at, I think, Trinity College, Cambridge and that a distinguished Cambridge philosopher entertained great hopes from his brilliant abilities in mathematical philosophy of the specifically ‘Cambridge’ sort. Somewhere between the chinks of his academic career I surmised an initiation into the Kabalistic tradition and there was that in his eyes which showed unmistakably that it was not for the sake of a professorship in a provincial university that he had left his friends at Cambridge and crossed the seven seas.
Once more we met in a university bungalow at Lucknow, a background that I think we both felt to be an utter irrelevance, and then we departed, I to the North and he to the South where he had found his Guru in Sri Aurobindo. There, in the Ashram at Pondicherry, he lived for the last ten years, shedding at the feet of his Guru the burden of all that the world counts valuable in order to find the hidden treasure for which most men have no eyes.
Of his life and sadhana there under the name of Arjava it is not for me to speak. That it brought about a profound psychic transformation in his nature is clear from the fact that he, whose language had hitherto been limited to the arid propositions of intellectual philosophy, became a poet, and, with the aid of poetry, entered the inner worlds of which, till then, he had but dreamed.
Traditionalist and those who take a narrow view of sadhana will perhaps wonder what poetry has to do with yoga. The truth is that the reintegration of the psyche that is brought about by sadhana has the effect of releasing unsuspected powers that were lying latent in the heart of the sadhaka, as, indeed, they are in the hearts of all. We read in books of yoga that “by meditating on Her who shines in the Root Lotus with the lustre of ten million Suns, a man becomes a Lord of Speech and…pure of heart, by his deep and musical words, serves the greatest of the Gods.”
The truth of such words, nowadays too often assumed to be mere empty praise, is witnessed to by these poems left behind by Arjava when, at what seems to us the early age of forty, the Sovereign Dweller of his heart decided to withdraw to inner worlds.
The mere literary critic will admire the delicate dream-like beauty of these poems, but, unless his insight is more than merely literary, he will go no deeper, for they deal with the mysteries of the inner life and only he who can read their symbols will be able to penetrate to their heart. For Arjava, as is shown in the poem entitled Correspondences, Nature was a shrine in which each form seen in the flickering firelight of the senses was a shadow of realities that lay within, shining in the magical light of the secret Moon which was the Master-Light of all his seeing, the central image of so many of his poems.
In the midst of our personal sadness at his early departure let us remember that this Path is one which leads through many worlds and that, as Sri Krishna said, nehabhikrama naso’ sti, for him who treads it there can be no loss of effort.

July 6, 1939