Overhead Poetry

Love's Triumph

O face of scorn, you winter not my will:

This heart grew brighter when your breath's proud chill

Flung my diffuse life-blood more richly in!

Now mystic reveries halo mortal din:

No longer now the outward-burning stress,

The eternal Spirit's self-forgetfulness—

But through a superhuman quietude

The timeless secret of each rhythm is heard.

Love turns a living ether's infinite mood;

Your beauty's call, a brief and flickering word

Of clay, becomes in that divine expanse

Truth-whitenesses clasped by a hush of trance.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"The mental is no doubt prominent, but inspiration is present throughout and in the lines marked rises above the mental, for the overhead note is there. It is the mental lines that give the tone to the poem, these lines rise out of the mental like islands out of the sea. Moreover, except in the lines marked with a cross where the illumined Mind gets strongly in, the 'note' is not quite pure,—there is the higher Mind tone, even a little of the illumined Mind, but not enough to make it absolutely that. It is a fine poem with very fine lines in it."

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