Overhead Poetry

Madonna Mia

I merge in her rhythm of haloed reverie

By spacious vigil-lonelinesses drawn

From star-birds winging through the vacancy

Of night's incomprehensible spirit-dawn.

My whole heart echoes the enchanted gloom

Where God-love shapes her visionary grace:

The sole truth my lips bear is the perfume

From the ecstatic flower of her face.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"I think it is one of your best. I could not very definitely say from where the inspiration comes. It seems to come from the Illumination through the Higher Mind—but there is an intuitive touch here and there, even some indirect touch of 'mental Overmind' vision hanging about the first stanza.

"There are two ranges of Overmind which might be called 'mental' and 'gnostic' Overmind respectively—the latter in direct touch with Supermind, the former more like a widened and massive intuition."

"...of course all overhead poetry is not from the Overmind, more often it comes from the higher thought, the illumined mind or the pure intuition. This last is different from the mental intuition which is frequent enough in poetry that does not transcend the mental level. The language and rhythm from other overhead levels can be very different from that which is proper to the Overmind; for the Overmind thinks in a mass; its thought, feeling, vision is high or deep or wide or all these things together: to use the Vedic expression about fire, the divine messenger, it goes vast on its way to bring the divine riches, and it has a corresponding language and rhythm. The higher thought has a strong tread often with bare unsandalled feet and moves in a clear-cut light: a divine power, measure, dignity

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is its most frequent character. The outflow of the illumined mind comes in a flood brilliant with revealing words or a light of crowding images, sometimes surcharged with its burden of revelations, sometimes with a luminous sweep. The intuition is usually a lightning flash showing up a single spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire and miraculous completeness of vision to the surprised ecstasy of the inner eye; its rhythm has a decisive inevitable sound which leaves nothing essential unheard, but very commonly it is embodied in a single stroke. These, however, are only general or dominant characters; any number of variations is possible. There are besides mingled inspirations, several levels meeting and combining or modifying each other's notes, and an ovcrmind transmission can contain or bring with it all the rest...."

(Here are some passages from the Mundaka Upanishad on the transcendent and universal Brahman¹ and some from the Gita's Vision of the Cosmic Spirit.² Have they the accent of what you have described in The Future Poetry as the Mantra? The target of all mystic and spiritual poetry should be, in my opinion, the Mantric utterance. At least the target of my own poetry certainly is. Will you shed some light on the Mantra's peculiar quality and original plane? And tell me, please, whether we can expect a poetry from the as-yet-unmanifest Supermind ?)

"The Mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater. The passages you mention from the Upanishad and the Gita have certainly the Overmind accent.

¹ II, 2. 11-12.

2 XI, 14-21

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But ordinarily the Overmind inspiration does not come out pure in human poetry—it has to come down to an inferior consciousness and touch it or else to lift it by a seizure and surprise from above into some infinite largeness. There is always a mixture of the two elements, not an absolute transformation though the higher may sometimes dominate. You must remember that the Overmind is a superhuman consciousness and to be able to write always or purely from an Overmind inspiration would mean the elevation of at least a part of the nature beyond the human level.

"But how do you expect a Supramental inspiration to come down here when the Overmind itself is so rarely within human reach? That is always the error of the impatient aspirant, to think he can get the Supermind without going through the intervening stages or to imagine that he has got it when in fact he has only got something from the illumined or intuitive or at the highest some kind of mixed Overmind consciousness."

"To get the Overmind inspiration through is so rare that there are only a few lines or short passages in all poetic literature that give at least some appearance or reflection of it."¹

"The Overmind is not strictly a transcendental consciousness— that epithet would more accurately apply to the Supramental and to the Sachchidananda consciousness—though it looks up to the transcendental and may receive something from it and though it does transcend the ordinary human mind and, in its full and native self-power when it does not lean down and become part of mind, is superconscient to us. It is more properly a cosmic consciousness, even the very base of the cosmic as we perceive, understand or feel it. It stands behind every particular in the cosmos and is the source of all our mental, vital or physical actualities and possibilities which are diminished and degraded derivations and variations from it and have not, except in certain formations and activities of genius and some intense self-exceeding, anything of the native overmind quality and power. Nevertheless, because it stands behind as if covered by a veil, something of it can break through or shine through or even only dimly glimmer through and that brings the overmind touch or note."

¹ In some qualification of this statement it may be mentioned that concerning the time when Madonna Mia and the subsequent poems had been commented upon, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1946: "At that time I hesitated to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English poetry or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this order." In 1946 several lines in the world's poetry which he had once hesitated about were adjudged by him to have been directly from the sheer Overmind. (K.D.S.)

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