Overhead Poetry

Mere of Dream

The Unknown above is a mute vacancy—

But in the mere of dream wide wings are spread.

An ageless bird poising a rumour of gold

Upon prophetic waters hung asleep.

The veils of vastitude are cloven white,

The burden of unreachable blue is lost:

A ring of hills around a silver hush,

The far mind haloed with mysterious dawn

Treasures in the deep eye of thought-suspense

An eagle-destiny beaconing through all time.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

On an earlier version not including lines 5 and 6:

"First line from the higher Mind, the next five from the illumined Mind—the last two I can't very well say: perhaps the inner Mind there has taken up the illumined inspiration and given it a turn belonging to an interpretative language of its own making. All the lines are of a fine quality, but the 2nd and 4th are the finest." On the present version:

"As a whole it gains by the two lines added; the line about the veils of vastitude being on the general level of the first four and even on the specially high level of 2 and 4. 6 is also a fine line (illumined higher Mind)."

"The poem does not fall below the average mark [you have set yourself], but there are degrees even in the above-average and this is fine, even very fine, but not as a whole quite as absolute as some that went before. The 2nd and 4th and 5th lines are the finest."

"What you are writing now is 'overhead' poetry—I mean poetry inspired from those planes—before you used to write poems very often from the intuitive mind—these had a beauty and perfection of their own. What I mean by absoluteness here is a full intensely inevitable expression of what comes from above. These lines are original, convincing, have vision, they are not to be rejected, but they

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are not the highest flight except in single lines. Such variations are to be expected and would be more prominent if you were writing longer poems, for then to keep always or even usually to that highest level would be an extraordinary feat—no poet has managed as yet to write always at his highest flight and here in that kind of poetry it would be still more difficult. The important point is not to fall below a certain level—when you do, I shall certainly tell you."

(How is it that after this training under you and getting inspiration from certain of the planes towards which I have kept straining my consciousness I relapse time and again into inferior poetry ? Either a relapse or I grow dumb—and even otherwise it is no easy job to receive the kind of inspiration I want. There are fine flowings at times, but often there are blockings in places and I have to wait and wait for their removal. I feel dejected and wonder when the intense joy that poetry brings me will be free from these most discouraging impediments. My relapse at the moment, as regards some lines, fills me with shame.)

"It is not a relapse, but an oscillation which one finds in almost every poet. Each has a general level, a highest level and a lower range in which some defects of his poetical faculty come out. You have three manners: (i) a sort of decorative romantic manner that survives from your early days—this at a lower pitch turns to too much dressing of an ornamental kind, at a higher to post-Victorian Edwardian or Georgian rhetoric with a frequent saving touch of Yeats; (2) a level at which all is fused into a fine intuitive authenticity and beauty, there is seldom anything to change; (3) a higher level of grander movement and language in which you pull down or reach the influences of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Over-mind Intuition. The last you have not yet fully mastered so as to write with an absolute certainty and faultlessness except by lines and stanzas or else as a whole in rare moments of total inspiration, but you are moving towards mastery in it. Sometimes these inspirations get mixed up together. It is this straining towards greater height that creates the difficulty, yet it is indispensable for the evolution of your genius. It is not surprising, therefore, that inspiration comes with difficulty often, or that there are dormant periods or returns of the decorative inspiration. All that is part of the day's work and dejection is quite out of place."

(20-4-1937)

(What exactly is the intuitive mind you have spoken of, and how does it differ from what you have called 'inner mind' and 'mystic mind' ?)

"The intuitive mind, strictly speaking, stretches from the Intuition proper down to the intuitivised inner mind—it is therefore at once an overhead power and a mental intelligence power. All depends on the amount, intensity, quality of the intuition and how far it is mixed with mind or pure. The inner mind is not necessarily intuitive, though it can easily become so. The mystic mind is turned towards the occult and spiritual, but the inner mind can act without direct reference to the occult and spiritual, it can act in the same field and in the same material as the ordinary mind, only with a larger and deeper power, range and light and in greater unison with the Universal Mind; it can open also more easily to what is within and what is above. Intuitive intelligence, mystic mind, inner mind intelligence are all part of the inner mind operation. In today's poem, for instance—

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