Overhead Poetry

Mystic Mother

Seeing you walk our little ways, they wonder

That I who scorn the common loves of life

Should kneel to You in absolute surrender,

Deeming Your visible perfection wife

Unto my spirit's immortality.

They think I have changed one weakness for another,
Because they mark not the new birth of me-
This body which by You, the Mystic Mother,

Has now become a child of my vast soul!

Loving Your feet's earth-visitation, I

Find each heart-throb miraculously flower
Out of the unplumbable God-mystery
Behind dark clay; and, hour by dreamful hour,
Upbear that fragrance like an aureole.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"Exceedingly good. The octet here is adequateness raised to inevitability except the fourth and fifth lines in which the effective undergoes the same transformation. In the sestet on the other hand it is the illumined style that becomes inevitable."

The inspired style reaching inevitability may be exemplified by the two lines apropos of which Sri Aurobindo in his pronouncement on Dante, quoted above, referred to "the inspired style" in his writing:

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Si come quando Marsia traesti

Delia vagina delle membra sue.

These lines to Apollo may be tentatively rendered with a little freedom:

In that dire mode of yours as when you plucked

Marsyas out of the scabbard of his limbs.

An instance directly in English may be provided from the author himself of Mystic Mother. In the poem, Vita Nuova, quoted some pages back, the third and fourth lines of the stanza —

Beyond themselves her clay-born beauties call:

Breathing the rich air round her is to find

An ageless God-delight embracing all,

The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind—

were characterised by Sri Aurobindo: "These are 'inspired inevitable'."

Another instance noted by Sri Aurobindo is a line from a passage in his own early blank-verse narrative, Urvasie. He was induced to make a comment on this passage which tells us how the hero-king Pururavus, searching far and wide for his lost beloved Urvasie, did not linger on the inferior heights

But plunged o'er difficult gorge and prone ravine

And rivers thundering between dim walls,

Driven by immense desire, until he came

To dreadful silence of the peaks and trod

Regions as vast and lonely as his love.

Sri Aurobindo wrote: "This is...high-pitch effective except the last line which is in the inspired style—perhaps!"

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Two other judgments of Sri Aurobindo's in this field may be cited. They are again on excerpts from the poet of Mystic Mother. The first is from the poem Ne Plus Ultra, already quoted in the present collection at the end of Part 1:

Is the keen voice of tuneful ecstasy

To be denied its winged omnipotence,

Its ancient kinship to immensity

And the swift suns?

"This seems to me the effective style at a high pitch."

The second is from the close of a sonnet, Little Passions — the sestet following on the last four words of the octave:

For I have viewed,

Astir within my clay's engulfing sleep,

An alien astonishment of light!

Let me be merged with its unsoundable deep

And mirror in futile farness the full height

Of a heaven barred for ever to my distress,

Rather than hoard life's happy littleness!

"This is indeed an example of the effective style at its best, that is to say rising to something of illumination, especially in the second, fourth and sixth lines."

The third judgment is about a passage in Lacrimae Rerum, a poem on "A visionary flute-soul's plumbless woe". There occurs the moment:

Twilight hung mute and mauve: the bamboo's cry

Out of its pierced and hollow body came,

A God-dream yearning through mortality.

Sri Aurobindo, praising this moment, defined it as the illumined style passing into the inspired at the end.

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