Overhead Poetry

Invocation to the Fourfold Divine

O Void where deathless power is merged in peace!

O myriad Passion lit to one self-fire!

O Breath like some vast rose that breaks through form!

O Hush of gold by whom all truth is heard!

Consume in me the blinded walls of mind:

Wing far above dull thought my speech with flame,

Make my desire an infinite sky's embrace,

A joy that feels through every colour's throb

One single heart kindling the universe—

And by strange sleep draw heaven closer still,

Blotting all distances of space and time!

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"That is perfect—it is all of one piece, an exceedingly fine poem expressing with revelatory images the consciousness of the cosmic Self into which one enters by breaking the walls of individual limitation. Higher Mind, touched with Illumined Mind, except lines 3,4, 8, 9 which are more of the Illumined Mind itself."

Asked what exactly was meant in line 3 by the phrase "that breaks through form", Sri Aurobindo replied:

"It means nothing exactly, but it gives the suggestion of a vast rose of illimitable life breaking out to manifest its splendour and colour through the limitations of form, as a rose breaks out of a bud."

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