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8: POETRY
Dilip Kumar Roy's first collection of English poems, Eyes of Light was published in 1948. Then, in Hark! His Flute! all the poems published in Eyes of Light along with his later poems were collected in 1972. Roy's ista devata was Krishna and he always sang in praise of this "Magic Flutist of Brindaban" in his poetry. As Krishna is the theme of many of his poems, the collection is entitled: Hark! His Flute! The poems chosen for the present study are from this latter publication.
Apart form being an ardent spiritual aspirant, Dilip Roy was an eminent musician of his day. As such, he was deeply influenced by the rich heritage of the devotional poetry of India. So, he wrote plenty of poems, both in Bengali as well as in English to express his intense worship of the Divine. Many of the poems in this volume are written to sing the glory of gods and goddesses like Krishna, Ganesha, Radha etc. But some of them could be called broadly biographical in Roy's sense of the term as they sketch briefly the Messengers of God, like Buddha, Sri Chaitanya, Sri Ramkrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramana Maharshi etc.; or great spiritual seekers like Saradamoni, Nivedita, Krishnaprem etc. All these lyrical poems reflect different aspects of his search for spiritual realization.
His determination to listen to the voice of Krishna, can be seen in the very first poem of the volume, 'The Everlasting Yes'. The first and the last quartrains are:
"When thy flute calls, how can I fail
To keep my tryst with thee? Though dark's the world how should I quail When thy light flowers in me? They make me smile, the wise, who swear By the everlasting No: For the everlasting Yes I hear
Thee hail incognito."
The age in which Dilip Roy wrote was torn in the conflict between the two forces, the quest for spirituality and scepticism about the possibility of its fulfilment. Science was supposed to be true light and the criterion of truth was materialistic. This was not only Roy's dilemma. The West, too, suffered from it. The expressions 'Everlasting Yea' and 'Everlasting Nay' come from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. He, too, was fighting the demon of materialism under the influence of German romanticism. He suffered from negation first and then realized a powerful affirmation of spiritual truth. The only difference between Roy and Carlyle is that the former's spirituality is the personal divinity of
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