a ship with its countless
pilgrims,
Vanishing in the far-away blue of the sky,
Its sailors' song becoming fainter and fainter in
the air,
While I sink in the bosom of the endless night, fading
away from myself, dwindling into a point.

It is necessary to remark here that merely because something has been
written when feelings are brimming over, it is not therefore necessarily
good. Such is rather a time when the utterance is thick with emotion.
Just as it does not do to have the writer entirely removed from the
feeling to which he is giving expression, so also it does not conduce
to the truest poetry to have him too close to it. Memory is the brush
which can best lay on the true poetic colour. Nearness has too much of
the compelling about it and the imagination is not sufficiently free
unless it can get away from its influence. Not only in poetry, but in
all art, the mind of the artist must attain a certain degree of
aloofness--the _creator_ within man must be allowed the sole control. If
the subject matter gets the better of the creation, the result is a mere
replica of the event, not a reflection of it through the Artist's mind.

(37) _Nature's Revenge_

Here in Karwar I wrote the _Prakritir Pratishodha_, Nature's Revenge, a
dramatic poem. The hero was a Sanyasi (hermit) who had been striving to
gain a victory over Nature by cutting away the bonds of all desires and
affections and thus to arrive at a true and profound knowledge of self.
A little girl, however, brought him back from his communion with the
infinite to the world and into the bondage of human affection. On so
coming back the _Sanyasi_ realised that the great is to be found in the
small, the infinite within the bounds of form, and the eternal freedom
of the soul in love. It is only in the light of love that all limits
are merged in the limitless.

The sea beach of Karwar is certainly a fit place in which to realise
that the beauty of Nature is not a mirage of the imagination, but
reflects the joy of the Infinite and thus draws us to lose ourselves in
it. Where the universe is expressing itself in the magic of its laws it
may not be strange if we miss its infinitude; but where the heart gets
into immediate touch with immensity in the beauty of the meanest of
things, is any room left for argument?

Nature took the _Sanyasi_ to the presence of the Infinite, enthroned on
the finite, by the pathway of the