Overhead Poetry

Agni

Not from the day but from the night he's born,

Night with her pang of dream—star on pale star

Winging strange rumour through a secret dawn.

For all the black uncanopied spaces mirror

The brooding distance of our plumbless mind.

O depth of gloom, reveal thy unknown light—

Awake our body to the alchemic touch

Of the great God who comes with minstrel hands!...

Lo, now my heart has grown his glimmering East:

Blown by his breath a cloud of colour runs:

The yearning curves of life are lit to a smile.

O mystic sun, arise upon our thought

And with thy gold omnipotence make each face

The centre of some blue infinitude!

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"The modifications now made are quite satisfactory and render the poem perfect. The last six lines still remain the finest part of the poem, they have a breath of revelation in them; especially the image 'my heart has grown his glimmering East' and the extreme felicity of 'the yearning curves of life are lit to a smile' have a very intense force of revealing intuitivity—and on a less minute, larger scale there is an equal revealing power and felicity in the boldness

Page 25

and strength of the image in the last three lines. These six lines may be classed as 'inevitable', not only separately but as a whole. The earlier part of the poem is also fine, though not in the same superlative degree—the last two lines have something of the same intuitive felicity, though with slighter less intense touches, as the first two of the (rhymeless) sestet—especially in the 'alchemic touch' of the 'minstrel hands'. Lines 2 to 5 have also some power of large illumination."

(How is it that people find my poetry difficult ? I almost suspect that only Nolini and Arjava¹ get the whole hang of it properly. Of course, many appreciate when I have explained it to them—but otherwise they admire the beauty of individual phrases without grasping the many-sided whole the phrases form. This morning Premanand, Vijayarai and Nirod read my Agni. None of them caught the precise relevances, the significant connections of the words and phrases of the opening five lines.

In the rest of the poem too they failed, now and again, to get the true point of felicity which constitutes poetic expression. My work is not surrealist: I put meaning into everything, not intellectualism but a coherent vision worked out suggestively in various detail. Why then the difficulty? Everybody feels at home in Harin Chattopadhyaya's poetry though I dare say that if I catechised them I might find the deepest felicities missed. All the same, there was something in his work which made his sense more accessible. Even Dilip says that my work passes a little over his head—Arjava's, of course, he finds still more difficult. Perhaps I tend to pack too much stuff into my words and to render my links a little less explicit than Harin did or Dilip himself does in Bengali. But would people have the same trouble with vernacular poetry, however like my own it might be ?)

"It is precisely because what you put in is not intellectualism or a product of mental imagination that your poetry is difficult to those who are accustomed to a predominantly mental strain in poetry. One

¹ J. A. Chadwick, who received from Sri Aurobindo the name "Arjavananda". (K.D.S.)

Page 26

can grasp fully if one has some clue to what you put in, either the clue of personal experience or the clue of a sympathetic insight. One who has had the concrete experience of the consciousness as a night with stars coming out and the sense of the secret dawn can at once feel the force of those two lines, as one who has had experience of the mind as a wide space or infinity or a thing of distances and expanses can fathom those that follow. Or even if he has had not these experiences but others of the same order, he can feel what you mean and enter into it by a kind of identification. Failing this experience, a sympathetic insight can bring the significance home; certainly, Nolini and Arjava who write poems of the inner vision and feeling must have that, moreover their minds are sufficiently subtle and plastic to enter into all kinds of poetic vision and expression. Premanand and Vijayarai have no such training; it is natural that they should find it difficult. Nirod ought to understand, but he would have to ponder and take some trouble before he got it; night with her labour of dream, the stars, the bird-winging, the bird-voices, the secret dawn are indeed familiar symbols in the poetry he is himself writing or with which he is familiar; but his mind seeks usually at first for precise allegories to fit the symbols and is less quick to see and feel by identification what is behind them—it is still intellectual and not concrete in its approach to these things, although his imagination has learned to make itself their transcribing medium. That is the difficulty, the crux of imaged spiritual poetry; it needs not only the fit writer but the fit audience—and that has yet to be made.

"Dilip wrote to me in recent times expressing great admiration for Arjava's poems and wanting to get something of the same quality into his own poetic style. But in any case Dilip has not the mystic mind and vision—Harin also. In quite different ways they receive and express their vision or experience through the poetic mind and imagination—even so, because it expressed something unusual, Dilip's poetry has had a difficulty in getting recognised except by people who were able to give the right response. Harin's poetry deals very skilfully with spiritual ideas or feelings through the language of the emotion and poetic imagination and intelligence—no difficulty there. As regards your poetry, it is indeed more compressed

Page 27

and carefully packed with substance and that creates a difficulty except to those who are alive to the language or have become alive to subtle shades, implications, depths in the words. Even those who understand a foreign language well in the ordinary way find it sometimes difficult to catch these in its poetry. Indications and suggestions easy to catch in one's own tongue are often missed there. So probably your last remark is founded."

(I hope people won't misunderstand what you have remarked about the mystic mind. One's not having the mystic mind and vision does not reflect upon one's poetic excellence, even as a singer of the Spirit. As regards Harin, you said long ago that he wrote from several planes. And surely his Dark Well poems come from a source beyond the poetic intelligence?)

"I used the word 'mystic' in the sense of a certain kind of inner seeing and feeling of things, a way which to the intellect would seem occult and visionary—for this is something different from imagination and its work with which the intellect is familiar. It was in this sense that I said Dilip had not the mystic mind and vision. One can go far in the spiritual way, have plenty of spiritual visions and dreams even without having this mystic mind and way of seeing things. So too one may write poetry from different planes or sources of inspiration and expressing spiritual feelings, knowledge, experience and yet use the poetic intelligence as the thought medium which gives them shape in speech; such poems are not of the mystic type. One may be mystic in this sense without being spiritual—one may also be spiritual without being mystic; or one may be both spiritual and mystic in one. Poems ditto.

"I had not in view the Dark Well poems when I wrote about Harin. I was thinking of his ordinary way of writing. If I remember right , the Dark Well poems came from the inner mind centre, some from the Higher Mind-other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what was given and turned it into something very vivid, coloured and beautiful, —but surely not mystic in the sense given above."

"It is when the thing seen is spiritually lived and has an independent vivid reality of its own which exceeds any conceptual significance it may have on the surface that it is mystic."—"In mystic poetry the symbol ought to be as much as possible the natural body of the inner truth or vision, itself an intimate part of the experience." —"Symbols may be of various kinds; there are those that are concealing images capable of intellectual interpretation but still different from either symbolic or allegorical figures—and there are those that have a more intimate life of their own and are not conceptual so much as occultly vital in their significance; there are still others that need a psychic or spiritual or at least an inner and intuitive sight to identify oneself fully with their meaning."

Page 28