Overhead Poetry

Gnosis

No clamorous wing-waft knew the deeps of gold.

An eagle lost in earth-forgetfulness,

Rising without one stir of dreamy feather,

Life gains the Unmeasured through a flame of sleep—

A love whose heart is white tranquillity

Upborne by vast surrender to this Sun.

Flickering no longer with the cry of clay,

The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind

Embraces there its own eternal Self—

Truth's burning core poised over the universe!

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"It has become by the omitted and added lines a finer poem than before. The first line had lost much of its power through being cut off from immediate connection with the eagle rising, now that it has been restored it gets its full beauty and by the change of the fourth line which is now on the same level as the preceding and following lines all these six become one piece with one power and level of inspiration: Higher Mind with some colour of Illumination and just touched by Overmind Intuition—a faultless movement of vision and colour, all welded together into a harmonious whole. The next two rise still more to an extraordinary lofty inspiration (Illumined Mind with the Overmind touch)—and present a most profoundly suggestive spiritual picture. The last two are very high up in the Higher Mind—just the right kind to form a powerful and luminous close. The ten lines make a consistently fine and admirably structured poem."

Nirodbaran's Query: Out of the two lines—7 and 8—which you say have an Overmind touch, I frankly think that the first one I could have written myself! Will you show me where exactly its super-excellence lies? I appreciated much more the lines that preceded it: why do you give it so much weight? Is its quality definable—and in what terms? Assonances, consonances, rhythm or what?

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Sri Aurobindo's Reply

"What super-excellence? As poetry? When I say that a line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the Overmind touch I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from lower planes—that Amal's lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light, etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there. You do not appreciate probably because you catch only the surface mental meaning. The line—'Flickering no longer with the cry of clay'— is very fine from the technical point of view, the distribution of consonantal and vowel sounds being perfect. That, however, is possible on any level of inspiration. These are technical elements, the Over-mind touch does not consist in that but in the undertones or overtones of the rhythmic cry and a language which carries in it a great depth or height or width of spiritual vision, feeling or experience. But all that has to be felt, it is not analysable. If I say that the second line is a magnificent expression of an inner reality most intimate and powerful and the first line, with its conception of the fire once 'flickering' with the 'cry' of clay but now no longer, is admirably revelatory—you would probably reply that it does not convey anything of the kind to you. That is why I do not usually speak of these things in themselves or in their relation to poetry—only with Amal who is trying to get his inspiration into touch with these planes. Either one must have the experience—e.g., here one must have lived in or glimpsed the mystic mind, felt its fire, been aware of the distances that haunt it, heard the cry of clay mixing with it and the consequent unsteady flickering of its flames and the release into the straight upward burning and so known that this is not mere romantic rhetoric, not mere images or metaphors expressing something imaginative but unreal (that is how many would take it perhaps) but facts and realities of the self, actual and concrete, or else there must be a conspiracy between the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus which makes one feel, if not know, the suggestion of these things through the words and rhythm.

"As for technique, there is a technique of this higher poetry but it

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is not analysable and teachable. If, for instance, Amal had written 'No longer flickering with the cry of clay' it would no longer have been the same thing though the exact mental meaning would be just as before—for the overtone, the rhythm would have been lost in the ordinary staccato clipped movement and with the overtone the rhythmic significance. It would not have given the suggestion of space and wideness full with the cry and the flicker, the intense impact of that cry and the agitation of the fire which is heard through the line as it is. But to realise that, one must have the inner sight and inner ear for these things; one must be able to hear the sound-meaning, feel the sound-spaces with their vibration. Again, if he had written 'Quivering no longer with the cry of clay', it would have been a good line, but meant much less and something quite different to the inner experience, though to the mind it would have been only the same thing expressed in a different image—not so to the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus. In this technique it must be the right word and no other, in the right place and in no other, the right sounds and no others, in a design of sound that cannot be changed even a little. You may say that it must be so in all poetry; but in ordinary poetry the mind can play about, chop and change, use one image or another, put this word here or that word there —if the sense is much the same and has a poetical value, the mind does not feel that all is lost unless it is very sensitive and much influenced by the solar plexus. In the overhead poetry these things are quite imperative, it is all or nothing—or at least all or a fall."

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