O wanderer soul, drunkard of distances,
Perfection’s pilgrim, touch with votive brow
The foot of the one transcendent Himalay!

Mystic Mountains, the title is quite clear, suggestive of the mountains, mystic and contemplative, meditational and religious, spiritual and divine, so deep and craggy, adventurous and daredevil calling for to ascend physically and if not physically, but spiritually. Herein lies it the beauty of the mystic mountains. We can understand why the Himalayas are so important? Why do the sadhakas like it most? How the caves of it? Where the sadhakas lost in their sadhna on Meru? Where those unknown ascenders of the past of Mount Everest? The sadhakas not, but the climbers, mountaineers and trekkers have always tried to take to adventuresome paths. Beauty is there in looking the mountain peaks; mystique is there in looking them. The myths of sadhna, how to tell it about spiritual ascension, transcendental meditation? How the caves?

The Alps of meditation, the Himalayas of, what to tell it about? How to ascend, how to scale the unscalable? The mind of the poet, the sadhaka, the ashramite, the three in one wander from the Alps of the Himalayas and vice versa and he trying to understand the mystery of the world and creation which is beyond the comprehension of human mind.

The poetic mind scales the Alps first, tries to rise to the whiter summit of it, marking the throb of life in the Alpine regions, the huts of the hermits to opine and wander in his way to reach the foot of the Himalayas to envision in his way.

The poem reminds us of W.B. Yeats’ Meru and William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. It is a poem of self-talk as the poetic self of Sethna is in discussion with the summits of the Alps and the foothills of the Himalayas to cave in and to sit in a sadhna. Where will he sit in for the Samadhi? But neither the Alps nor the Himalayas, but the Pondicherry Ashrama is the thing of his concern. It is man’s wisdom which seeks to know, often set out on a pilgrimage. It is the mystic mind which wants to delve deeper. The beauty of the silver summit is a great experience to undergo.

Men have always loved to converse with the mountains and their craggy peaks or heights sky-kissing and high. Wanders, hermits and adventurers have always cherished to see and so through yogic flashes he wants to have a mystic communion with the same.

Alps soar to lone pinnacles of light,
Intensities of isolated trance,
An upward rush of separate sanctities
The mind can cherish in its narrow sight
And worship with its flitting wonderment.
But O the thought-bewildering wall of white
Outrunning the extremes of human gaze,
Vanishing to the right, fading to the left
And lifting a universe of dreaming ice,
A vast virginity with no gap in God
To let the world’s familiar face yearn through —
All life plucked from its level loiterings
To one dense danger of divinity,
A sheer leap everywhere of soul made rock
Of rapture unperturbable by time —
The Himalaya’s immense epiphany!
 
No thin melodic themes drawn to high hush
Which yet weighs never the ineffable on earth’s ear
Nor wipes out the earth’s eye with infinite blank:
Here an all-instrumental harmony
Sweeps to a multitudinous peace beyond —
Both ear and eye numb with eternal snow,
Stunned by an adamant absolute of height,
Until new senses burst from the unknown —
A vision of the farthest truth above,
Around, below: a hearing of heaven’s heart
Behind each pulse-throb of mortality!
Too often have we adored the Alpine mood,
Submitted to the cleavage between crests,
Followed the peak of love or peak of power
Or wisdom rising to a silver summit.
The uttermost of each hangs still ungrasped:
Life is a breakless cry: without the whole
Self towering up in massive mystic sleep
How shall it wear the crown of the endless sky?. . .
O wanderer soul, drunkard of distances,
Perfection’s pilgrim, touch with votive brow
The foot of the one transcendent Himalay !
 

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