Overhead Poetry

Agni Jatavedas

(In the Rigveda, Agni, called "Jatavedas" or "Knower of births", is the divine Fire visioned in various occult forms as the secret urge of our evolution towards the perfect splendour that is the Spirit.)

O smile of heaven locked in a seed of light—

O music burning through the heart's dumb rock—

O beast of beauty with the golden beard—

O lust-consumer in the virgin's bed—

Come with thy myriad eyes that face all truth,

Thy myriad arms equal to each desire!

Shatter or save, but fill this gap of gloom:

Rise from below and call thy far wealth down—

A straining supplicant of naked silver,

A jar of dream, a crystal emptiness

Draining through a mighty mouth above the mind

Some ageless alchemy of liquid sun.

Or bind us like a python-sleep of snow

Whose glory grips the flesh and leaves it numb

For soul to gather its forgotten fire,

A purple power no eagle's wing-waft knew,

A soar that makes time-towers a lonely fret

And all a futile victory the stars!

Work thy strange will, but load our gaze no more

With unexplorable freedoms of black air,

An infinite rapture veiled by infinite pain....

Lightning of Truth, God's lava passion—come!

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Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"Very fine poetry throughout, not exactly 'surrealistic', at least not in the current sense, but occult in its vision and sequences. I have marked the most powerful lines."

Originally the last line stood:

Lightning of Truth, God's lava—come, O come!

Sri Aurobindo criticised its ending as too romantic in turn for the kind of mystic inspiration expressed. Then the present form of the line, with its second part strengthened in significance and the conclusion made terse in its emotion, was found.

(Into what category of blank verse does this poem fall ? Has it any epic quality ? If not, how do you differentiate between the epic and the other kinds of poetic power ? What would you say of the styles of Victor Hugo, Marlowe, Dante ? I should think epic poetry has a more natural

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turn of imagination than the non-epic: it is powerfully wide or deep or high without being outstandingly bold, it also displays less colour.)

" 'Agni Jatavedas' is a sort of violent sublime—ultra-Aeschylean perhaps. There are sometimes epic or almost epic lines, but the whole or most of it has not the epic ring. There is one epic line—

An infinite rapture veiled by infinite pain.

Perhaps the first three lines are near the epic—there may be one or two others I don't know how I differentiate. Victor Hugo in the 'Legende des Siècles' tries to be epic and often succeeds, perhaps even on the whole: Marlowe is sometimes great or sublime, but I would not call him epic. There is a greatness or sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line—

In cradle of the rude imperious surge—

is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it,

Bēde kat' oulumpoio karēnōn chōömenos kēr

(He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart).¹

Or Virgil's

Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,

Fortunam ex aliis,²

or Milton's

Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable.

What is there in these lines that is not in Shakespeare's and makes them epic (Shakespeare's of course has something else as valuable)? For the moment at least, I can't tell you, but it is there. A tone of the inner spirit perhaps, expressing itself in the rhythm and the turn of the language. Dante has the epic spirit and tone, what he lacks is the epic élan and swiftness. The distinction you draw applies, no doubt, but I do not know whether it is the essence of the thing or only one result of a certain austerity in the epic Muse. I do not know whether one cannot be coloured provided one keeps that austerity which, be it understood, is not incompatible with a certain fineness and sweetness."

It may be of interest to have from the disciple-correspondent's own work a short complete passage—a whole sonnet—declared by Sri Aurobindo, in a characteristically penetrative comment, to have what he has called in the above letter the epic spirit, tone and élan:

¹Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo has translated the line in an hexameter: Down from the peaks of Olympus he came wrath vexing his heart-strings.

²This may be hexametrically rendered:

Learn from me, youth, what is courage and what true labour, Fortune from others.(K.D.S.)

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