The Rose and the Flame: Psychic and Spiritual Poetry
"The truth which poetry expresses," Sri Aurobindo says, "takes two forms, the truth of life and the truth of that which works in life, the truth of the inner spirit."1 In a general way, we can say that the poetry which expresses the second form of truth is mystic. But this poetry is not something uniform. The spirit is infinite, therefore the mystic's vision of the spirit too takes many forms. And the poetry that expresses the vision cannot easily be grasped within a clear definition. However, when we study mystic poetry we discern two main movements: the psychic and the spiritual. The psychic is an inward movement "to the inner being, the Self or Divinity within us," and the spiritual is an upward movement "to a supreme spiritual status or a higher existence. 2
When the poetic sight reaches the inmost soul what it discovers is the heart-ocean (hrt-samudra) of divine delight and the beauty of the Real which is also the truth of the Real. The emphasis here lies on delight, of which beauty is the visible sign. This inward movement goes deeper than the emotional heart which is but the rippling surface of the ocean. When the poetic sight ascends upwards and removes the mental lid that conceals what lies beyond, it discovers the spirit's knowledge which is the luminous expression of the truth of the Real. This truth is also the beauty and delight of the Real. However the emphasis here lies on knowledge.
1. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 195.
2. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 19, p. 910.
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We can then say that psychic poetry is the poetry of delight and spiritual poetry is the poetry of knowledge. Taking a suggestion from Sri Aurobindo we may say that the psychic poetry is the poetry of the kingdoms of the deathless Rose and the spiritual poetry is that of the kingdoms of the deathless Flame. He describes the first kingdoms in the following lines:
On one side glimmered hue on floating hue,
In a glory and surprise of the seized soul
And a tremulous rapture of the heart's insight
And the spontaneous bliss that beauty gives,
The lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose.
(Savitri, II. 12.)
Such is the world of psychic poetry seen by the seer-vision. In a letter, speaking of the psychic expression in poetry, he writes: "it has less of greatness, power, wideness, more of a smaller sweetness, delicate beauty; there is an intense beauty of emotion, fine subtlety of true perception, an intimate language. The expression 'sweetness and light' can very well be applied to the psychic as the kernel of its nature."3
The natural habitation of spiritual poetry is the world of the deathless Flame through which the ascending path rises to the absolute Being:
On the other side of the eternal stairs
The mighty kingdoms of the deathless Flame
Aspired to reach the Being's absolutes.
(Ibid.)
These kingdoms, of which the highest is the Gnostic or supramental world, manifest the truth of the Real:
They keep God's natural breath of mightiness,
His bare spontaneous swift intensities...
3. Sri Aurobindo, Letters, on Poetry, Literature and Art, SABCL,Vol. 9, p. 364.
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Spiritual poetry, as distinguished from psychic poetry, has "a wider utterance, a greater splendour of light, a stronger sweetness, a breath of powerful audacity, strength and space."4
Psychic poetry is fundamentally love-poetry, for, it is through love that delight and beauty, sweetness and loving light can best express themselves. But although the origin of love is the soul yet mostly it loses its pure psychic nature due to its contact with the mind, the life-force and the body. Poetry of love - even the love of the human soul for the divine Beloved - may get diminished because of this contact and become poetry of religious fervour or prayer that does not have the beauty and fragrance of the heart in which divine joy dwells. Take the following lines:
Father of all, to Thee
With loving hearts we pray,
Through Him in mercy given,
The Life, the Truth, the Way;
From Heav'n Thy Throne, in mercy shed
The blessings on each bended head.
(The Book of Common Prayers)
Love is, first of all, personal; it is the fragrance that rises from the heart-rose of the lover towards the loved one. And poetry of love is that fragrance transmuted into rhythmic words and music. Poetry does not say, "I love"; it suggests, through the vibration of the heart transported to words, the feeling deeper than what words alone can ever express. Suggestiveness, resonance (dhvani) and musicality are the vehicles of love-poetry. Poetry is not saying but evoking. In the above lines the poet "says": "With loving hearts we pray"; it is a statement of love, not love itself. The psychic vibration has not been able to take a suggestive form which would illuminate and gladden the heart of the reader.
4. Ibid., p. 365.
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Even behind human love there can be a psychic influence. When love is not merely a vital desire it has its roots in the psyche even if one is not always aware of it. In love-poems we often feel the subdued intimations coming from the far-off source but hardly ever the direct and unmistakable touch of the soul. The feeling is generally translated in mental words:
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and the ideal Grace.
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "How Do I Love Thee?")
These are beautiful lines but they are not the expression of the soul in the language of the soul. There, can be great love-poetry without the evident soul-touch. But when the soul-touch transmutes and sublimates human love, then words that embody that love vibrate deeper in the reader's soul. Take Shelley's lines:
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heaven's reject not, -The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
("To-")
Sri Aurobindo remarks that "it would not be easy to find a more perfect example of psychic inspiration in English literature" than these lines. And he adds that they possess "the true rhythm, expression and substance of poetry full of the psychic influence."5
5. Ibid.
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The starting point of Shelley's poem is human love but the love is interiorised and sublimated. The last traces of vital love are wiped away and what was desire becomes a worship and a yearning of the heart for the unattainable beauty. In the human love the heart tries to enclose in itself all that it desires, but the psychic love is the heart's self-offering, pure and disinterested. "The psychic love is pure and full of self-giving without egoistic demand."6 Because there is no vital desire the poet knows that the heart's worship will not be rejected by Heaven.
One way of getting some touch of the psychic influence is by the sublimation of human love. But there is another kind of psychic touch in poetry which is the manifestation of the soul's love and delight. However this manifestation has also to take place through language, and our language is normally a poor instrument for expressing anything that goes deeper and further than our physical, vital and mental experiences. The psychic love has to use the metaphor of the human love. "The Song of Solomon" can be taken as an example of psychic poetry which "seems to sing earthly beauty, but intends to suggest another beauty that abolishes the first."7 The same thing could be said about the Vaishnava poets. Chandidasa makes Radha speak about her night of love with Krishna thus:
ekatanu haiya mora rajani gonai/
sukhera sagare dubi abadhi napai//
rajani prabhata haile katara hiyay/
deha chaRi jena mora prana calx jay//
(My body one with his I passed the night,
I was drowned in the ocean of endless joy,
And when the day dawned it seemed to my sad heart
That my soul had gone away leaving my body behind.)
6. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 23, p. 764.
7. Albert Beguin, Poesie de la presence, Paris 1957, p. 70.
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This is the poetry of psychic love with an erotic undertone. This is the voice of the lover who rejoices in the union with the beloved and feels that without him she is but a soulless body.
"The direct psychic touch is not frequent in poetry. It breaks in sometimes - more often there is only a tinge here and there."8
Perhaps the art-form that can most adequately express the psychic influence is music, for, love, joy and beauty are more feeling than meaning. The bhakti-poets of India have always sung their poems in order to bring out more fully the psychic influence. They knew that the subtle inner melody of love could best be conveyed through music - both the pure music and the music of the poetic word. When we read poems that have a psychic touch, we are at first moved by the musicality of the words. It is the music, more than the meaning, that enters through the ears in the depth of the soul and makes the psychic influence felt.
John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz), the great Spanish mystic and poet, says that there is a voice that speaks from inside (que habla de dentro). Psychic poetry is that voice and poets who have ears to hear try to grasp it as perfectly as possible. As in the Vaishnava mysticism Radha, the woman in love, represents the human soul, so also for John of the Cross, the Bride (Esposa) is the human soul yearning for the love of the divine Lover (Esposo). In the dialogue between the soul and the Lover the Bride-soul says:
Addnde te escondiste,
Amado, y me dejaste con gemido?
Como el ciervo huiste
habiendome herido;
salt tras ti clamando, y eras ido.
("Canciones entre el Alma y el Esposo")
8. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 364
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(Where did you hide yourself,
Beloved, and left me moaning?
Like a stag you fled
having wounded me;
I went out after you wailing, but you were gone.)
The words, simple as they are, rise from the inmost heart. They have no veil; they have a transparency that is different from mental clarity - a transparency that, we may say, lets through the sweet glow of the soul. Even the wounded heart - the pain of separation - is a joyous yearning of the soul for the Divine. It is the vipralambha (love-in-separation) which the Vaishnava poets and mystics consider to be intenser and purer than sambhoga (love-in-union).
The same sweetness, simplicity and clarity mark K.D. Sethna's lyric "Appeal", that has an unmistakable psychic influence. Here is the first stanza:
My feet are sore, Beloved,
With agelong quest for Thee;
Wilt thou not choose for dwelling This lonesome heart of me?
Spiritual poetry is the poetry of knowledge, of vision and of stark luminosity. It is not so much the poetry of the depth as of the height. Its source is above our mental knowledge, in the region of vijnana, the suprarational. It is the poetry of the Flame that gradually burns, as it rises higher and higher, the veils hiding the face of Truth (satyasya mukham).
We are making a distinction here between psychic and spiritual poetry; however we should not forget that there is no clear-cut demarcation between the two. In fact, psychic inspiration opens the soul towards the higher visions of truth. The poetry that is created in the heart illumined by the above-mental knowledge can be called psycho-spiritual poetry. About a passage from Sethna's "This Errant Life" Sri Aurobindo writes to the poet that there is a spiritual ulumination, "but it is
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captured and dominated by the inner heart and by the psychic thrill, a certain utterance of the yearning and push of psychic love for the Divine incarnate."9
If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow
Its mortal longings, lean down from above,
Temper the unborn Light no thought can trace,
Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow;
For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:
Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,
And all Thy formless glory turn to love
And mould Thy love into a human face.
We hear, in these lines, the heart's aspiring cry, an intense supplication that rises from the sphere of our mortality. But there is something else too. Psychic poetry is the soliloquy of the poet's soul. The speaker, the subject, is the poet. But here the poet's personality is withdrawn. "I" is replaced by "Thou": "If Thou desirest." In the Vedantic experience of oneness "Thou" and "I" are one; yet before the experience, and even after it if the human soul does not definitely merge into the absolute Spirit, the love of "I" and "Thou" remains. "Thou" is the Spirit. The poet's heart does not only lift a worship or a devotion to something afar, but puts the Spirit, "Thou", in front, so that "the unborn Light" and the "formless glory", which are realities of the spiritual world, can become incarnate love. It is, we my say, the poet's prayer to the Flame to become the Rose.
A somewhat similar inspiration may be detected in the following lines of George Russell (AE):
And with what yearning inexpressible,
Rising from long forgetfulness I turn
To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still:
White for Thy whiteness all desires burn.
Ah, with what longing once again I turn!
("Desire")
9. Ibid., p. 366.
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The source of spiritual poetry is above the mind; it is the poetry of a Thought and a Knowledge that lie beyond our rational thinking. There is in man an evolutionary urge to rise beyond the mind. The Upanishadic seers had realised that there was a vast world above. Poets and mystics can rise to the higher ranges of that world or get, in some extraordinary moments, intimations and lightning flashes from there, and write things that have a greater clarity of thought than philosophers can ever dream of. Mallarme, the French Symbolist poet, has sometimes caught the higher Thought by polishing and repolishing language and eliminating from it all the dross of mental thinking. However the true spiritual breaks through only on rare occasions and mostly in flashes which may leave a sense of frustration. Mallarme's line about the swan caught in the glacier
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!
("Lecygne")
(Transparent glacier of flights that have not fled)
shows this frustration. "There can be," Sri Aurobindo writes, "no more powerful, moving and formidable expression of this spiritual frustration, this chilled and sterile greatness than the image of the frozen lake and the imprisoned swan as developed by Mallarme."10 The frustration itself is an indication that the poet knows there is a region overhead. And the line itself, even though it expresses the soul's inability to rise to those "high-peaked dominions" yet catches some light of the Spirit.
When the real spiritual sight is there vast boundless kingdoms open up; a clear light bursts forth; the rhythm becomes full and vigorous. The Spirit itself, the spiritual Reality itself, seizes thought and transmutes it into something which is beyond thought, which is the very essence of thought. Many verses of the Upanishads are supreme examples of spiritual poetry:
10. Ibid., p. 531.
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na tatra silryo bhati na candra-tarakam nemo.
vidyuto bhanti kuto 'yam agnih/
tarn eva bhdntam anubhati sarvam
tasya bhasa sarvam idam vibhati//
(Katha Upanishad, II.2.15.)
(The sun does not shine there, nor the moon; the stars do not shine; the lightnings do not flash there, let alone this earthly fire. All things reflect Him who is the shining One; everything shines by his shining.)
tad ejati tan naijati tad dure tad u antike/
tad antarasya sarvasya tad u sarvasydsya bahyatah //
(Isha Upanishad, 5)
(That moves and That does not move; That is far and That is also near; That is inside everything and That also is outside everything.)
These lines express the Real not through a lofty and vast Idea only but also through the rhythm which is the vibration of the Spirit itself. The idea may even seem absurd to the rational mind but if we are open to the things of the Spirit, we "see" in the simplicity of the expression and the soul-penetrating rhythm, the truth of That which is above the mind.
Sometimes reading a line of poetry we feel a sudden illumination, a ray of light, a going-beyond. It then seems to us that what was concealed stands revealed before us, clear, simple and concrete. A higher Intelligence than our own possesses us and we seem to see the Invisible, hear the Inaudible and know the Unknowable.
The "splendour of the spirit's realms" becomes visible in the following lines:
The million-pointing undivided grasp
Of its vision of one same stupendous All,
Its inexhaustible acts in a timeless Time,
A space that is its own infinity.
(Savitri, II. 15.)
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Here we have the same kind of clarity of vision as in the Upanishads and expressed in the same kind of diction and the same simple penetrating rhythm although these lines are written in a language very different from Sanskrit.
Spiritual poetry, Sri Aurobindo writes, has "the luminous and assured clarity of the fully expressed spiritual experience."11 Sri Aurobindo and the Upanishadic seers write from the direct spiritual experience, but even poets who have not risen to the regions above the mind grasp sometimes the flashes of those illumined heights. These flashes are not usually sustained and sometimes lose their native clarity, directness and intensity. Nevertheless we can hear in some lines, here and there, the rhythm of the heights and see the glow of the hidden glory:
The intolerable vastness still, to the uttermost star.
(George Russell, "Dark Rapture")
The infinite incantation of our selves
(Wallace Stevens, "The Poems of our Climate")
II ponente schiumd ne' suoi capegli
Immensa apparve, immensa nudita
(Gabriele d'Annunzio, "Stabat nuda aestas")
(In her [Summer's] hair foamed the setting sun. Immense, appeared to me her immense nakedness.)
His spirit moves like monumental win
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.
(Theodore Roethke, "The Far Fields")
Now I shall quote a few lines from poets who have consciously tried to go beyond the mind to the realms of higher spiritual knowledge.
The Dark has foundered and returns no more.
(Arjava, "Light's Victory")
11. Ibid., p. 354.
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and this line about "stars" by the same poet,
Gold-shining sentries of Truth's dwelling-place.
("Star Purified")
A gloom of God strewn with a million stars.
(K.D. Sethna, "Milk in Almighty Breasts")
and finally from the same poet,
A sun beyond this sun above the mind
Waits in a mystery beyond the blue:
A night more vast than the blind distances
Between our reveries and the flame they reach
Is spread between that flame and fathomless truth's
Gigantic star seen like one diamond speck
Lost in a time-transcending loneliness.
("Suns")
As the psychic poetry should not be confused with the poetry of religious devotion so the spiritual poetry should not be confused with the philosophical poetry. There is certainly a place for philosophy in poetry, but in the philosophical poetry the idea is of the mind and may reach the heights of pure intellect but it cannot reach beyond the mental barrier. The following couplet expresses clearly a high philosophical idea, but if we place it beside the Upanishadic verses we see the difference:
Anadi nidhanam brahma sabda tattvam yad aksaram
Vivartate artha-bhdvena prakriyajagato yatah
(Bhartrihari, Vakyapadiya, 1.1.)
(The beginningless and endless Brahman, which is the imperishable substance of the word, evolves as significant idea; and from that idea the world-process originates.)
The idea is clear but the rhythm that raises the idea to spiritual heights and makes verse aglow with immensity is missing here.
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But there is a spiritual philosophy that can use the language of the mind by infusing in it a clarity that is foreign to its ordinary nature:
All is abolished but the mute Alone.
(Sri Aurobindo, "Nirvana")
The bareness and simplicity, the unemphatic but superbly efficient rhythm give to the line an inevitability that lies beyond the powers of the mind. A similar line is Dante's:
E'n la sua volontate e nostra pace.
(In His will is our peace.)
Spiritual poetry can and often does free itself from the philosophical content and directly convey the significance of the spiritual matter in a spiritual manner and through a spiritual rhythm:
... the sole timeless Word
That carries eternity in its lonely sound,
The Idea self-luminous key to all ideas,
The integer of the Spirit's perfect sum
That equates the unequal All to the equal One,
The single sign interpreting every sign,
The absolute index of the Absolute.
(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, II.l.)
This passage is, at one and the same time, a description of spiritual poetry and its illustration. The Idea that spiritual poetry expresses is "self-luminous". In fact we can distinguish two elements in spiritual poetry: Thought and Vision. In spiritual poetry there is always a Thought that is beyond our present thinking, but as the poetic soul focuses its sight to ever higher summits this Thought becomes more and more luminous, it becomes a Vision. Beyond the regions of Truth-Thought, Sri Aurobindo writes, "we can distinguish a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and
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intensity and driving force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth-Sight with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity."12 Thus in the poetry of the higher spiritual regions we find an expression of the solar flame reaching towards something beyond all mental-spiritual influence -the plane of Truth-Consciousness.
In spiritual poetry, both the Thought and the Vision are present - the Vision growing more and more luminous and insistent as the poetic inspiration comes from higher and higher sources. How are we to distinguish between the poetry of spiritual thought and that of spiritual vision? When there is a vision the truth becomes visible and concrete. "The poetry of spiritual vision," Sri Aurobindo says, "as distinct from that of spiritual thought abounds in images, unavoidably because that is the straight way to avoid abstractness; but these images must be felt as very real and concrete things, otherwise they become like the images used by the philosophic poets, decorative to the thought rather than realities of the inner vision and experience."13
The poetry of spiritual thought is not an abstraction either. The Thought itself is "real and present"; it is incarnate and intimate to the being of the poet and it expresses truths that to the ordinary mind may seem abstract metaphysical speculations. Thus when Sri Aurobindo describes his experience of nirvana
Only the illimitable Permanent
Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still,
Replaces all...
("Nirvana")
the words "Permanent" and "Peace" are not abstract notions; they are more concrete to the seer-vision than material things. Likewise in the following line of Mallarme "Nothingness" is a concrete experience:
12. Sn Aurobindo, The Life Divine, SABCL, Vol. 18, p. 277.
13. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art, SABCL, Vol. 9, p. 352.
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Et trouver ce Neant que tu ne connais pas!
("Tristessed'ete")
(And find the Nothingness that you do not know!)
In these verses, concepts that are abstract to the intellect have become concrete. Thought thus transfigured is no longer a mental thought but is a Paraclete:
As some bright archangel in vision flies
Plunged in dream-caught spirit immensities,
Past the long green crests of the seas of life,
Past the orange skies of the mystic mind
Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God.
(Sri Aurobindo, "Thought the Paraclete")
This transformed thought, as Sri Aurobindo describes it, has become visible. And with luminous images and metaphors he gives to the Thought a living body. These lines, we can say, are of the spiritual vision. The following lines possess also the illumination that is beyond mental thought:
A force of gloom that makes each flicker-stress
Bare the whole body of its goldenness
And yield in that embrace of mystery
A flaming focus of infinity,
A fire-tongue nourished by God's whole expanse
Through darkness of superhuman trance.
(K.D. Sethna, "Night of Trance")
The Vedic poetry is essentially the poetry of spiritual vision. It is the mantra, the embodiment of revelatory thought and of revelatory light, "the Word discovering the Truth and clothing in image and symbol the mystic significance of life."14 The highest prayer of the seers was to the divine Sun, the vivifier, asking him to illumine, inspire and invigorate their thoughts. The famous verse, the most sacred to the aspirants of divine truth, bears testimony to this:
14. Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL, Vol. 14, p. 260.
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tat savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhTmahi/
dhiyo yo nah pracodayat//
(Rigveda, III. 62.10.)
(We meditate upon that excellent splendour
of the divine Sun:
May he impel our thoughts!)
In the poetry of the spiritual vision the thought itself becomes vision; apparently all mental traces vanish. What remains is pure symbol, pure rhythm and pure illumination. As an example we may take:
Gold-white wings a-throb in the vastness, the bird of flame went
glimmering over a sunfire curve to the haze of the west,
Skimming, a messenger sail, the sapphire-summer waste of a
soundless wayless burning sea.
Now in the eve of the waning world the colour and splendour
returning drift through a blue-flicker air back to my breast,
Flame and shimmer staining the rapture-white foam-vest of
the waters of Eternity.
(Sri Aurobindo, "The Bird of Fire")
Here all is vision. Our usual imagination sees something but cannot grasp the real thing. But when we go behind the images - wings, bird, sail, sea, flame - the Truth-Vision shines forth.
The poetry that endeavours to reveal the hidden mystery of the world and man may seem hermetic and obscure to the consciousness that sees only the surface of things and the phenomenal appearance and the reality that is fragmented and darkened by the intellect. The psychic and the spiritual poetry are the creation of the human genius to reinstate reality in its pristine glory, with the help of a language that is exiled by the analytical rational mind, a language that illumines all that is distant, all that is concealed:
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Syntaxe de I'eclair! bpur langage de I'exil!
Lointaine est I'autre rive oil le message s'illumine:...
(Saint-Jean Perse, "Exil")
(Syntax of lightning! O pure language of exile! Far-off is the other shore where language is illumined!)
Note
The quotations from Savitri are according to the Sri Aurobindo Brith Centenary Library (SABCL), Pondicherry: 1972.
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