Overhead Poetry

Editor's Introduction

Here some poems are collected of a particular kind written by a disciple of Sri Aurobindo's, along with detailed appraisals of them by Sri Aurobindo himself. Following the appraisals are relevant excerpts from literary correspondence already published for the most part. This correspondence—barring a few instances—was with the same disciple and the excerpts have been either dovetailed to amplify the points of the immediate judgments or appended to present additional issues. They include, towards the end, a few remarks by Sri Aurobindo on some lines of his own. An epilogue consisting of a pertinently enlightening passage from Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri, concludes the book.

The disciple was aspiring to write systematically—with the help of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual influence, critical guidance and sometimes personal example—what the Master has called "Overhead Poetry" and distinguished as the most important element of what he has designated in general "The Future Poetry".

The Future Poetry would not be written from the usual sources of the world's literature—the levels of consciousness which, according to Sri Aurobindo, may be classified: subtle-physical mind (as in Homer and Chaucer, where the inner imaginative response is mostly to external gesture, movement and action); vital mind (as in Kalidasa and Shakespeare, where the vibrant play, delicate or vehement, of sensation, passion, emotion is directly expressed); intellectual mind (as in Vyasa, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante and Milton, where the poetic vision markedly brings out thought-values of whatever is caught up from subjective or objective existence).

The Future Poetry would be written from those rarer levels whose voices have occasionally joined the utterance from the usual sources to make the profoundest moments of past poetry. The rarest of those levels give birth to overhead poetry: they are "planes" whose afflatus comes as if from an infinitude of conscious being above our brain-clamped mentality. Sri Aurobindo labels them Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. Above even Overmind

is the sovereign divine dynamism which he names Supermind and whose ultimate manifestation is the goal of his Integral Yoga. But Supermind, in its essential and original form, has remained unexpressed up to now. It is only the other planes that can function more and more in poetry at present, either separately or in combination or by suffusing the usual poetic sources. And the overhead poet must drive increasingly towards a sustained inspiration from Over-mind, which is the home of what the ancient Indian seers called the "Mantra" and considered to be the Divine Word, the supreme revelatory speech of the Eternal.

The characteristics of these levels will become clear in the course of reading the book. In brief they may be summed up as follows. The Higher Mind displays a broad steady light of thought born of a spiritual and not intellectual consciousness: the reflective terms do not exist in their own right but as immediate formations of That which, in the language of the Upanishads, does not think by the mind but by which the mind is thought. The Illumined Mind has a greater intensity of spiritual light and comes forth with a direct vision of fundamental realities rather than with reflective terms. It discloses the very colours and contours, as it were, of Truth. The Intuition has keen flashes of an intimate sense of things: it deepens spiritual sight into spiritual insight, the luminosity goes straight and bare to its target with little need of image or interpretation. Truth's body is touched and explored. The Overmind not only brings the closest inner and outer grip but also moves massively with a radiant "globality". Interpretation, image and intimate sense are all raised here to their uttermost and transfigured by a vastness of sheer revelation, of knowledge by identity, as if a Cosmic Spirit were voicing its own secrets.

With regard to the quality of poems hailing from the overhead levels, two points have to be noted. As Sri Aurobindo once said in a letter, "the poetic (aesthetic) value or perfection of a line, passage or poem does not depend on the plane from which it comes, but on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense vision and inspiration from whatever source." At the same time, his pronouncement in another letter must be remembered.

There, while granting that even mysticism is not a monopoly of overhead verse, he ascribes to this verse a special virtue: "Mystic poetry can be written from any plane, provided the writer gets an inspiration from the inner consciousness whether mind, vital or subtle physical. Naturally, the lower planes cannot express the Spirit with its full and native voice as the higher planes do unless something comes down into them from the higher planes." To this we may add from a third letter: "The sense of the Infinite and the One which is pervasive in the overhead planes...can be expressed indeed by overhead poetry as no other can express it."

However, overhead poetry need not be explicitly mystic. Sri Aurobindo tells us that it can deal with quite other things than the Infinite and the One everywhere. Something behind mental or vital or physical consciousness has to be brought out in its own native tongue charged with its deeper values, rather than in a translation by that consciousness. But, of course, to be able to live constantly in that something behind we have to be practising mystics. And then mysticism and spirituality are bound to pervade, openly or by implication, our poetry—as in the overhead poems in the present collection. Also, perhaps the overhead will not function poetically on an extensive scale without importing the spiritual note.

This collection is divided into six parts. Each part is self-contained, demonstrating a gradation of inspired speech; and, although a slight overlapping occurs, the parts mostly offer different aspects of that gradation.

The first shows the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind and the Intuition in their pure characters at work in whole short pieces. It further shows a play of mixed inspiration, either raised to the pitch of the Overmind or plumbing the inmost self in us as distinguished from the upmost. This self Sri Aurobindo names the Psychic Being. It constitutes the plane of the "soul" proper, with its sweet poignancy and refining fire of aspiration, whose indirect presence on the more outer planes may be considered the secret power which transmits inspiration.

The next part and still more the third exhibit other blendings. The overhead poetry is accompanied by or fused with the intellectual

mind which, in its exalted operation, Sri Aurobindo often terms "the creative intelligence". Again, the same poetry draws into itself something of the Inner Mind, that many-dimensioned realm of a deeper look than the normal vision of the subtle-physical, vital or intellectual mentality. There are glimpses too of the "occult", snatches of a poetry communicating from the inner consciousness a pattern of delicately suggestive or dynamically piercing symbols with mysterious reverberations, and occasionally giving rise to a chequer of baffling beautiful surrealism.

Parts four, five and six are much longer and carry, together with a mixture of the overhead planes among themselves, a wider variety of interweavings and, for the sake of striking comparison, several examples of spiritual self-expression not only from the creative intelligence but also from the inner-mental, occult and psychic ranges. Thus diverse shades of "The Future Poetry" are openly illustrated, even while the main focus of attention is on the overhead afflatus with its extraordinarily profound sight and its tones at once of intensity and immensity mounting towards the "Mantra".

Parts four and five have each a few poems whose planes are not mentioned in the comments but may be inferred, from certain terms of characterisation, as the Inner Mind, either pure or charged with the overhead afflatus, for the one group and as the Psychic Being for the other.

In part six, some poems, not specified by Sri Aurobindo as overhead though highly appreciated, have also been included because they have obviously a close affinity in many respects if not in all to those specified as such.

The purpose of all the six series is not merely to preserve in compact significant arrangement an unusual body of verse and an expert analytic commentary on it. The purpose is, in addition, to be of service in two directions. First, poets of the spiritual life are to be helped to feel more strongly—through the systematic pursuit made by one of them—the power set working by Sri Aurobindo and to catch fire from it. Next, literary critics should be led to understand the expansion of possibility in vision and word and rhythm which it effects, and develop a detailed perception of both the "heart" and the

"art" of a poetry seeking to be vibrant—to quote a strikingly overhead verse itself from Sri Aurobindo—with

The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face.

And in the development of such perception a crowning aid may be sought in the long passage of poetry from Sri Aurobindo which constitutes our epilogue. It is an overhead description or rather evocation of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind in their specific qualities—and, as a grand finale, a general vision of Supermind in a revelatory language that may be considered to come as close as possible to the unknown power of inspiration whose glorious forerunner is all that we know as Overhead Poetry.

30.1.1972

K. D. SETHNA