~ the wonderful silhouette of night in Valmiki's Book of the Child~
निष्पन्दास्तरवः सर्वे निलीना मृगपक्षिणः ।
नैशेन तमसा व्याप्ता दिशश्च रघुनन्दन ॥
शनैर्विसृज्यते सन्ध्या नभो नेत्रैरिवावृतम् ।
नक्षत्रतारागहनं ज्योतिर्भिरवभासते ॥
उत्तिष्ठते च शीतांशुः शशी लोकतमोनुदः ।
ह्लादयन्प्राणिनां लोके मनांसि प्रभया स्वया ॥
नैशानि सर्वभूतानि विचरन्ति ततस्ततः ।
यक्षराक्षससङ्घाश्च रौद्राश्च पिशिताशनाः ॥10
"Motionless are all trees and shrouded the beasts and birds and the quarters filled, O joy of Raghu, with the glooms of night; slowly the sky parts with evening and grows full of eyes; dense with stars and constellations it glitters with points of light; and now yonder with cold beams rises up the moon and thrusts away the shadows from the world gladdening the hearts of living things on earth with its luminousness. All creatures of the night are walking to and fro and spirit-bands and troops of giants and the carrion-feeding jackals begin to roam."
Here every detail is carefully selected to produce a certain effect, the charm and weirdness of falling night in the forest; not a word is wasted; every epithet, every verb, every image is sought out and chosen so as to aid this effect, while the vowelisation is subtly managed and assonance and the composition of sounds skilfully yet unobtrusively woven so as to create a delicate, wary and listening movement, as of one walking in the forests by moonlight and afraid that the leaves may speak under his footing or his breath grow loud enough to be heard by himself or by beings whose presence he does not see but fears.
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~The longer speeches in the Ramayana, those even which have most the appearance of set, argumentative oration, proceed straight from the heart, the thoughts, words, reasonings come welling up from the dominant emotion or conflicting feeling of the speaker; they palpitate and are alive with the vital force from which they have sprung. Though belonging to a more thoughtful, gentle and cultured civilisation than Homer's, they have, like his, the large utterance which is not of primitive times, but of the primal emotions~
~Valmiki, when giving utterance to a mood or passion simple or complex, surcharges every line, every phrase, turn of words or movement of verse with it; there are no lightning flashes but a great depth of emotion swelling steadily, inexhaustibly and increasingly in a wonder of sustained feeling, like a continually rising wave with low crests of foam.~
~ The work of Valmiki has been an agent of almost incalculable power in the moulding of the cultural mind of India: it has presented to it to be loved and imitated in figures like Rama and Sita, made so divinely and with such a revelation of reality as to become objects of enduring cult and worship, or like Hanuman, Lakshmana, Bharata the living human image of its ethical ideals; it has fashioned much of what is best and sweetest in the national character, and it has evoked and fixed in it those finer and exquisite yet firm soul-tones and that more delicate humanity of temperament which are a more valuable thing than the formal outsides of virtue and conduct.''
*Source: Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo
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The First Night in Exile, from a dispersed series of illustrations for Ramayana ca. 1775–1780. Opaque watercolor on paper. Brooklyn Museum. (BMA-1126)
