Overhead Poetry

I

Consummation

Immortal overhead the gold expanse—

An ultimate crown of joy's infinity.

But a king-power must grip all passion numb

And a gigantic loneliness draw down

The large gold throbbing on a silver hush.

Nought save an ice-pure peak of trance can bear

The benediction of that aureole.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"It is very fine—it is the Higher Mind vision and movement throughout, except that in the fifth line a flash of Illumination comes through. Intense light-play and colour in this kind of utterance is usually the Illumined Mind's intervention."

In the first version submitted, the second line had run:

An ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy.

Sri Aurobindo remarked about that line:

"It is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually—in 'Paradise Lost'—some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his substance is, except at certain heights, mental—mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."

"Milton's architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence, for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he works."

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"I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual consciousness where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness; but it is still very much on the mind level although highly spiritual in its essential substance; and its instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight — not illumined by any of the intenser upper lights but as if in a large strong and clear daylight. It acts as an intermediate state between the Truth-Light above and the human mind; communicating the higher knowledge in a form that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded or dazzled by a Truth beyond it. The poetic intelligence is not at all part of that clarified spiritual seeing and thinking — it is only a high activity of the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane,—this does not answer to that description. But the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic, though in a different cast of thinking, is nearer to the Higher Mind than the ordinary intellect and can more easily receive its influence. When Milton starts his poem

Of man's first disobedience and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree—

he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the style or the substance. But there is often a largeness of rhythm and sweep of language in Milton which has a certain distant kinship to the manner natural to a higher supra-intellectual vision, and something from the substance of the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it.

"Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence. But there are other influences which can suffuse and modify the pure poetic intelligence, making it perhaps less clear by limitations but more vivid, colourful, vivid with various lights and hues; it becomes less intellectual,

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more made of vision and a flame of insight. Very often this comes by an infiltration of the veiled inner Mind which is within us and has its own wider and deeper fields and subtler movements,—and can bring also the tinge of a higher afflatus to the poetic intelligence, sometimes a direct uplifting towards what is beyond it. It must be understood however that the greatness of poetry as poetry does not necessarily or always depend on the level from which it is written. Shelley has more access to the inner Mind and through it to greater things than Milton, but he is not the greater poet."

"When I say that the inner Mind can get the tinge or reflection of the higher experience I am not speaking here of the 'descent' in Yoga by which the higher realisation can come down into the inferior planes and enlighten or transform them. I mean that the Higher Mind is itself a spiritual plane and one who lives in it has naturally and normally the realisation of the Self, the unity and harmony everywhere, and a vision and activity of knowledge that proceeds from this consciousness but the inner Mind has not that naturally and in its own right, yet can open to its influence more easily than the outer intelligence. All the same, between the reflected realisation in the mind and the automatic and authentic realisation in the spiritual mental planes there is a wide difference."

Distinguishing the general mode and the typical turn of the Inner Mind's poetry from those of the Higher Mind's, Sri Aurobindo wrote of a poem: "Not from the Higher Mind—for there a high-uplifted thought is the characteristic—but probably from some realm of the inner Mind where thought and vision are involved in each other—that kind of fusion gives the easy felicity that is found here."

The distinction may be illustrated briefly by the last stanza of the poem in question which is entitled Two Birds after a parable from the Upanishads:

The watchful ravener below

Felt his time-tortured passion cease,

And flying upward knew himself

One with that bird of golden peace.

The whole stanza is considered to have come from the Inner Mind, except for "a touch of the Higher Mind perhaps" in line 2.

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