పుట:Kankanamu020631mbp.pdf/4

experiences that tend to depress and elevate the spirit cherishing high hopes and great ideals and suffering keen disappointments, finally through peace and quietude, attains a status of permanent beauty and dignity. It requires, in the first instance, great imaginative power to see 'the permanent analogy of things', as Shelley puts it, to pursue the inherent comparison between these two apparently so dissimilar objects, a man and a drop of water. Secondly, it requires an equally powerful understanding to unravel, with the help of that analogy, some of the mysteries connected with human life. That is what Mr. Narayanamurti has done here. The poem is no doubt allegorical, but the allegory is not sustained and leaves ample scope for the intrepretative capacity of the reader to understand, in his own way, the inner significance of the minor experiences of the drop of water. The fundamentals are however indicated clearly enough. They are the mysterious origin of the drop of water and man, the sorrows and delights of the two on earth and in heaven, their reincarnations and finally their attainments of an immortal majesty through surrender to the forces of life, and conquest through surrender. The drop becomes a pearl and man a free soul enwrapped in a light not of this world. The conclusion arrived at by the poet seems to point, not to the Advaitic conception of the absorption of the individual in the universal, but to the view that man shedding all that is mortal in him. So far about the