Overhead Poetry

First Sight of Girnar

Strange with half-hewn god-faces that upbear

A listening quietude of giant caves,

The prisoner eternities of earth

Have wakened in this purple loneliness.

Each granite block comes cloven to the eye

As if the blue voice of the Unknowable

Broke through its sleep: like memories left behind

Of some enormous sculpture-cry of soul

The rocks reveal their shattered silences.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"A very fine poem—Illumined Mind throughout very perfectly expressed."—"No, it is not the epic kind [of blank verse]—the rhythm is rather large, calm and reflective than epic."¹

"There is a substitute for the expression of the Higher Thought, the Illumination, the pure Intuition giving great or brilliant results, but these cannot be classed as the very body of the higher consciousness.... Shakespeare's poetry coruscates with a play of the hues of imagination which we may regard as a mental substitute for the inspiration of the Illumined Mind and sometimes by aiming at an exalted note he links on to the illumined overhead inspiration itself as in the lines I have more than once quoted:

¹ Further light from Sri Aurobindo on the epic tone will be found in the comments on the poem Agni Fatavedas in Part 4. (K.D.S.)

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Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge?

But the rest of that passage falls away in spite of its high-pitched language and resonant rhythm far below the overhead strain. So it is easy for the mind to mistake and take the higher for the lower inspiration or vice versa."

Comparing the poetry of the Inner Mind with that of the Illumined, Sri Aurobindo writes:

"There are many kinds of vision in the inner Mind.... A certain spontaneous intensity of vision is usually there, but that large or rich sweep or power which belongs to the Illumined Mind is not part of its character. Moreover, it is subtle and fine and has not the wideness which is the characteristic of the planes that rise towards the vast universality of the Overmind."

(What distinguishes in manner and quality a pure inspiration of the Illumined Mind from that which has the psychic plane for its origin?)

"Your question reads like a poser in an examination paper. Even if I could give a satisfactory definition Euclideanly rigid, I don't know that it would be of much use or would really help you to distinguish between the two kinds; these things have to be felt and perceived by experience. I would prefer to give examples. I suppose it would not be easy to find a more perfect example of psychic inspiration in English literature than Shelley's well-known lines,

I can give not what men call love,

But wilt thou accept not

The worship the heart lifts above

And the Heavens 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?

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—you will find there the true rhythm, expression and substance of poetry full of the psychic influence. For full examples of the poetry which comes from the Illumined Mind purely and simply and that in which the psychic and the spiritual illumination meet together, one has to go to poetry that tries to express a spiritual experience. You have yourself written things which can illustrate the difference. The lines

The longing of ecstatic tears

From infinite to infinite¹

will do very well as an instance of the pure illumination, for here what would otherwise be a description of a spiritual heart-experience, psychic therefore in its origin, is lifted up to a quite different spiritual level and expressed with the vision and language sufficiently characteristic of a spiritual-mental illumination. In another passage there is this illumination but it is captured and dominated by the inner heart and by the psychic love for the Divine incarnate.

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.²"

"There is...the psychic source of inspiration which can give a beautiful spiritual poetry. The psychic has two aspects—there is the soul principle itself which contains all soul possibilities and there is the psychic personality which represents whatever soul-power is developed from life to life or put forward for action in our present life-formation. The psychic being usually expresses itself through its instruments, mental, vital and physical; it tries to put as much of its own stamp on them as possible. But it can seldom put on them the full psychic stamp—unless it comes fully out from its rather secluded and overshadowed position and takes into its hands the direct government of the nature. It can then receive and express all spiritual realisations in its own way and manner. For the turn of the psychic is different from that of the overhead planes—it has less of greatness, power, wideness, more of a smaller sweetness, delicate beauty, there is an intense beauty of emotion; a 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. The spiritual plane, when it takes up these things, gives them a wider utterance, a greater splendour of light, a stronger sweetness, a breath of powerful audacity, strength and space."

¹ The last lines of the poem Young-hearted River, not quoted in this collection.

² From the poem quoted next.

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