The Song of Silence
Osho on Irish Poet William Yeats
Today is the birthday of William Butler Yeats, an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others.
His first significant poem was “The Island of Statues” a fantasy work. He had an extraordinary poetic sense. In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. He was aware of the symbolic value of an Irish winner so soon after Ireland had gained independence, His reply to many of the letters of congratulations sent to him contained the words: “I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.
A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER, AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN, LEDA AND THE SWAN, THE STOLEN CHILD, WHEN YOU ARE OLD, EASTER 1916, THE SECOND COMING these are some of his famous poetic works.
Some phrases from his poem “ LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE”
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
WHILE YOU, HEEDLESS OF ITS EXPANSION, BEWAIL THE WITHERING OF YOUR DAYS,
IT IS LIFE IN QUEST OF LIFE IN BODIES THAT FEAR THE GRAVE.
What is the seeker doing? It is life in quest of more life, it is dance that wants to become more perfect, it is silence that wants to become deeper. In the depth of silence there is a soundless song, the song celestial; there is a music without any instruments — a music that is just part of your being. It is not something added from the outside, it is something that grows from inside. Every being is pregnant with God. Just as the child grows in the mother’s womb, God grows within your being. Clean yourself of all rubbish that you have gathered so that your God can have enough space to grow. It needs all the space that is available in existence… less than that will not do.
THERE ARE NO GRAVES HERE.
Remember… don’t be afraid of death because there are no graves here.
THESE MOUNTAINS AND PLAINS ARE A CRADLE AND A STEPPING STONE.
WHENEVER YOU PASS BY THE FIELD WHERE YOU HAVE LAID YOUR ANCESTORS LOOK WELL THEREUPON, AND YOU SHALL SEE YOURSELVES AND YOUR CHILDREN DANCING HAND IN HAND.
If you enter into yourself, you will be surprised — entering into yourself you have entered into the immortality of life. You will find your ancestors, your forefathers, and you will also find your children’s children, hand in hand, dancing within you. Life is spread on both sides — the past and the future — and the present moment in you contains both. If you can be just here and now, without any thought, any disturbance, totally centered, in that very centering you will find that you are only a link between an eternal life. The chain goes backwards, containing all your forefathers from the very beginning, and it goes forwards, containing those children who have not yet been born — but their seeds are there. To know the present is to know the past and it is to know the future.
And then you will be able to say: THERE ARE NO GRAVES HERE…. There is only life eternal. Graves exist because of our ignorance, because we have never entered into our own life. We have remained always outside of our own life — that’s why the graves exist; otherwise there will be no graves. I started telling my people that when some sannyasin leaves the body there is no need to be sad and sorry, rather dance and celebrate. Celebrate even the death, because death is false; celebrate that one friend has passed into the future, into a new body. But nobody dies, nobody has ever died. That’s the meaning…
when Jesus was asked, “Will you say something about Abraham, the oldest, the most ancient father of humanity?” And Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I was.” He is not saying anything about Abraham; he is saying, “Even before Abraham” — and Abraham was almost two thousand years before Jesus — he says, “Even before Abraham was, I was.” The same can be said… even before my children’s children and their children will be, I will be. I am spread all over existence. Where can there be graves? There are no graves.
VERILY YOU OFTEN MAKE MERRY WITHOUT KNOWING….
WHENEVER YOU PASS BY THE FIELD WHERE YOU HAVE LAID YOUR ANCESTORS LOOK WELL THEREUPON, AND YOU SHALL SEE YOURSELVES AND YOUR CHILDREN DANCING HAND IN HAND.
VERILY YOU OFTEN MAKE MERRY WITHOUT KNOWING.
Because it is such a profound truth, the eternity of your life, whether you know it or not, once in a while it explodes — in your joy, in your dance, in your music. You don’t know what it is which takes a grip of you, of which you become possessed: it is the life eternal within you. The painter does not know — I am talking about the authentic painter, not the technician — the painter does not know who is painting through his hands, neither the poet knows who is writing through his hand.
When Coleridge died, he left near about forty thousand poems incomplete. His whole life his friends were saying, “These poems are so beautiful, why don’t you complete them? And it is not much work! Some poem is missing only one line or two lines or three lines, it is almost complete. Just compose one line more, and it will be part of the eternal literature of humanity.”
But Coleridge always said, “I have never written anything. Whenever I am possessed, something pours from me. Sometimes the poem is complete; sometimes, before the poem is complete the possession has disappeared. Coleridge is there. I have tried; I can deceive the whole world, but I cannot deceive myself. Just to compose one line more and make the poem complete… nobody is going to find out unless a man reads who has the same poetic experience as me; only he will find that all these lines have come from the beyond, but one line — the last line — is written by somebody else. And I don’t want to deceive myself, or the future humanity.”
It happened… when one of the greatest Indian poets of this century, Rabindranath Tagore, translated his poems into English — for which he was awarded the Nobel prize — he was a little hesitant, because everything else is easy to translate, but poetry is very difficult to translate. Every language has its own nuance, every language has its own different taste, its own different song — no other language can catch up with it. It may be possible to translate prose from one language to another language almost exactly, but poetry is a different matter; so he was a little shy, He was well educated in England, so it was not that English was a strange language to him — it was almost his second mother-tongue. But still the mother-tongue is mother-tongue; there is no way to substitute it.
He went to England; he had friends who were great poets. Before publishing those poems, he wanted first to read them to a small gathering of poets. Yeats, one of the great English poets, called a meeting of all the poets of London in his own home — he was already a Nobel prize winning poet — and Rabindranath read his poems. Everybody was surprised and was shocked too, that if these poems had not been translated, the world would have never known about them — and they have a totally different dimension, which no other English poet has ever touched. But Yeats was silent. He was the greatest poet in that meeting.
Rabindranath said, “You have not said anything about it.”
Yeats said, “The poems are great, but at four places… four words only are not yours. Somebody else has helped you.”
Rabindranath could not believe his ears, because it was true. Out of his hesitation he had shown to a great Christian missionary, C. F. Andrews — before he left for England — he had shown his poems, and asked, “Do you see any grammatical, linguistic mistakes in them?”
C. F. Andrews was a great scholar, but he was not a poet. He had looked through the poems, and only at four places he said, “These words are grammatically wrong. Everything is absolutely correct as far as grammar and language are concerned, but these four words have to be changed.”
He suggested four other words of the same meaning, and Rabindranath simply changed those four words. It became more grammatical, more correct as far as language is concerned — but he could not deceive Yeats and his poetic sensibility. He pointed to exactly those four words in the whole book of poems and he said, “These words are perfectly right as far as grammar is concerned, but whoever suggested them is not a poet.”
Rabindranath said, “You surprise me! These words were suggested to me by a great scholar, known worldwide, C. F. Andrews.”
Yeats said, “It does not matter who suggested them; he knows language, he knows grammar, but he does not know anything of poetry. You please just write your own words that you had put originally.”
He placed his own words, and Yeats said, “Now it is perfect — not grammatically, but poetry is not grammar. A prose composition has to be grammatical; poetry soars higher than grammar, higher than language. Now it is perfectly right. These are the words of a poet.”
It is without knowing… when you are dancing you may get possessed — not possessed by something from outside, but by something from inside which was asleep, and in your dance became awake. And you will be surprised, wondering from where is this dance coming, from where is this song coming? From where this silence and this joy…? Uncaused, it is simply overflowing in you. This overflow happens to everybody once in a while — but without your knowing; otherwise these rare moments can be of tremendous importance. They can become a transformation of your whole life. If you know from where the spring has suddenly exploded, from where this fragrance has come like a cloud surrounding you, if you go to its roots, its source, you will find not only your life but life as such. Remember, those who have found life have found life as such — not yours, not mine. They have found simply the pure life that moves from form to form, life to life, plane to plane.
Source:
Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link.
Discourse Series: The Messiah, Vol 2 Chapter #21
Chapter title: Become again an innocent child
8 February 1987 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
References:
Osho has spoken on distinguished poets like Byron, Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, Ghalib, Heinrich Heine, John Ruskin, Kahlil Gibran, Kalidas, Keats, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Milton, Oscar Wilde, Rabindranath Tagore, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Rumi, Rudyard Kipling, Shakespeare, Shelley, William Blake, Wordsworth and many more in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses:
- The Book of Wisdom
- The Sword and The Lotus
- Returning to the Source
- Light on the Path
- The Secret
- The Hidden Splendour
- The New Dawn
- Beyond Enlightenment
- Nansen: The Point of Departure
- From Misery to Enlightenment
- From the False to the Truth
- The Perfect Master, Vol 1
- I Am That
