Overhead Poetry

Ne Plus Ultra

A madrigal to enchant her—and no more?

With the brief beauty of her face—drunk, blind

To the inexhaustible vastnesses that lure

The song-impetuous mind?

Is the keen voice of tuneful ecstasy

To be denied its winged omnipotence,

Its ancient kinship to immensity

And the swift suns?

When mystic grandeurs urge him from behind,

When all creation is a rapturous wind

Driving him towards an ever-limitless goal,

Can such pale moments crown the poet's soul?

Shall he—born nomad of the infinite heart!

Time-tamer! star-struck debauchee of light!

Warrior who hurls his spirit like a dart

Across the terrible night Of death to conquer immortality!—

Content with little loves that seek to bind

His giant feet with perishing joys, shall he

Remain confined

To languors of a narrow paradise—

He in the mirroring depths of whose far eyes

The gods behold, o'erawed, the unnamable

One Beyond all gods, the Luminous, the Unknown?

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Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"This is magnificent. The three passages I have marked reach a high-water mark of poetic force, but the rest also is very fine. This poem can very well take its place by the other early poem [This Errant Life] which I sent you back the other day, though the tone is different-that other was more subtly perfect, this reaches another kind of summit through sustained height and grandeur."

On the plane of inspiration of the lines marked in the second stanza: "Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch."

This comment came when, considerably after the comment on the whole poem, the lines concerned were separately submitted for classification. We may suppose that the rest of the lines marked by Sri Aurobindo—those in the first stanza—as equal in poetic force have more or less the same overhead quality as these.

(Ne Plus Ultra was one of half a dozen poems—the others included This Errant Life-that Dilip sent to AE. Reading them all, AE wrote back of "genuine poetic quality" and "many fine lines" and added that they " show a feeling for rhythm which is remarkable since the poet is not writing in his native but a learned language". However, from Ne Plus Ultra he notes with pleasure only one phrase -and I think mostly apropos of this poem he utters a general warning against frequent use of words like " infinite", "eternal", "limitless". The difficulty about such words has struck me before-s-frequent use oj them gives a not-altogether-agreeable Hugoesque flavour to mystic Indian poetry; but I wonder whether I have cheapened or misused them. At least you have never taken me to task on that score.)

"I did not object to your frequent use of 'infinite', 'eternal', 'limitless', because these are adjectives that I myself freely pepper over my poetry. When one writes about the Infinite, the Eternal and the Limitless or when one feels them constantly, what is one to do? AE who has not this consciousness but only that of the temporal and finite (natural or occult) can avoid these words, but I can't. Besides,

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all poets have their favourite words and epithets which they constantly repeat. AE himself has been charged with a similar crime."

To Dilip Kumar Roy: "AE's remarks about 'immensity', etc., are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot apply to a new poetry dealing with spiritual things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. AE himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English language. His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent are mental realisations or intuitions occurring on the summits of the consciousness, rare 'high lights' over the low tones of the ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not to the average man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent the balance or harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere full of these high lights—in a consciousness in which the finite, not only the occult but even the earthly finite, is bathed in the sense of the eternal, the illimitable infinite, the immensities or intimacies of the timeless ? To follow AE's rule might well mean to falsify this atmosphere, to substitute a merely aesthetic fabrication for a true seeing and experience. Truth first—a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and, even if it did, the language will have to be made adequate. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however new; it must now be urged to a farther new progress. In fact, the power is there and has only to be brought out more fully to serve the full occult, mystic, spiritual purpose."

*

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(To help me distinguish the planes of inspiration, could you just indicate where the following phrases from various poems of mine have their sources?¹

1. What visionary urge

Has stolen from horizons watched alone

Into thy being with ethereal guile?

2. A huge sky-passion sprouting from the earth

In branched vastnesses of leafy rapture.

3. The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind.

4. A sea unheard where spume nor spray is blown.

5. Irradiant wing-waft through eternal space,

Pride of lone rapture and invincible sun-gaze.

6. And to the earth-self suddenly

Came, through remote entranced marvelling

Of adoration ever-widening,

A spacious sense of immortality.

7. Here life's lost heart of splendour beats immense.

8. The haunting rapture of the vast dream-wind

That blows, star-fragrant, from eternity.

9. An ocean-hearted ecstasy am I,

Where time flows inward to eternal shores.)

¹ Some of the phrases are part of poems quoted in the present collection.

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Sri Aurobindo's Comment

1."Second line Intuitive with Overmind touch. Third line imaginative Poetic Intelligence.

2."Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind.

3."Intuitive with Overmind touch.

4."Intuitive.

5."Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch.

6."Mixture of Higher and Illumined Mind—in the last line the mental Overmind touch.

7."Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch.

8."Ditto.

9."Intuitive, Illumined, Overmind touch all mixed together,

"I have analysed very imperfectly—because these influences are so mixed together that the descriptions are not exhaustive.

"Also remember that I speak of a touch, of the mental Overmind touch and that when there is the touch it is not always complete—it may be more apparent from something either in the language or substance or rhythm than in all three together.

"Even so, perhaps some of my descriptions are overhasty and denote the impression of the moment. Also the poetical value of the poetry exists independent of its source."

(I should like to know whether you intend any important distinction when you speak of "Overmind touch" and "mental Overmind touch".)

"Yes—the Overmind proper has some gnostic light in it which is absent in the mental Overmind."

*

(From what plane are the substance and rhythm of this phrase from Shakespeare ?—

...the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

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Are they really from what you have considered his usual plane—the vital ?)

"The origin of the inspiration may be from anywhere, but in Shakespeare it always comes through the vital and strongly coloured by it as in some others it comes from the poetic intelligence. What play or poem is this from? I don't remember it. It sounds almost overmental in origin."

(The phrase occurs in Sonnet CVII beginning:

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,

Can yet the lease of my true love control,

Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom.

What I am eager to know is whether the rhythm of the words I have picked out is a fusion of the overmental and the vital; or is it only the substance that is from the Overmind ?)

"There is something from the Above in the rhythm also, but it is rather covered up by the ordinary rhythm of the first half fine and the two lines that follow. It is curious that this fine and a half should have come in as if by an accident and have nothing really to do with the restricted subject of the rest."

(Is there something definite in the rhythm or language of a line of poetry which would prove it to be from a certain plane ? Take the quotations from Shakespeare I am sending you. The first, according to you, has an Overmind movement as well as substance coming strongly coloured by the vital. But where and in what lies the vital colour which makes it the highest Shakespearean and not, say, the highest Words-worthian—the line inspired by Newton ? How does one catch here and elsewhere the essential differentiae ?)

"It is a question of feeling, not of intellectual understanding. The second quotation from Shakespeare—

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Eternity was in our lips and eyes,

Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor

But was a race of heaven—

is plainly vital in its excited thrill. Only the vital can speak with that thrill of absolute passion—the rhythm too is vital.¹ I have given the instance (in The Future Poetry) of Shakespeare's

...it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

That is a 'thought', a judgment on life, so would naturally be assigned to the intellect, but as a matter of fact it is a throw-up from Macbeth's vital, an emotional or sensational, not an intellectual judgment and its whole turn and rhythm are vital. "About the first quotation, Shakespeare's

...the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,

there might be some doubt, but still it is quite different in tone from Wordsworth's line on Newton—

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone—

which is an above-head vision—and the difference comes because the vision of the 'dreaming soul' is felt through the vital mind and heart before it finds expression. It is this constant vitality, vital surge in Shakespeare's language, which makes it a sovereign expression not of mind or knowledge but of life."

*

"We make a distinction between truth and beauty; but there can

¹ Alongside the lines themselves Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Tremendously vital." (K.D.S)

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be an aesthetic response to truth also, a joy in its beauty, a love created by its charm, a rapture in the finding, a passion in the embrace, an aesthetic joy in its expression, a satisfaction of love in the giving of it to others. Truth is not merely a dry statement of facts or ideas to or by the intellect; it can be a splendid discovery, a rapturous revelation, a thing of beauty that is a joy for ever. The poet also can be a seeker and lover of truth as well as a seeker and lover of beauty.... On certain levels of the Overmind, where the mind element predominates over the element of gnosis, the distinction between truth and beauty is still valid. It is indeed one of the chief functions of the Overmind to separate the main powers of the consciousness and' give to each its full separate development and satisfaction, bring out its utmost potency and meaning, its own soul and significant body and take it on its own way as far as it can go....But also there is another action of the Overmind which sees and thinks and creates in masses, which reunites separated things, which reconciles opposites. On that level truth and beauty not only become constant companions but become one, involved in each other, inseparable: on that level the true is always beautiful and the beautiful is always true. Their highest fusion perhaps only takes place in the Supermind; but Overmind on its summits draws enough of the supramental light to see what the Supermind sees and do what the Supermind does though in a lower key and with a less absolute truth and power. On an inferior level Overmind may use the language of the intellect to convey as far as that language can do its own greater meaning and message but on its summits Overmind uses its own native language and gives to its truths their own supreme utterance, and no intellectual speech, no mentalised poetry can equal or even come near to that power and beauty. Here your intellectual dictum that poetry lives by its aesthetic quality alone and has no need of truth or that truth must depend upon aesthetics to become poetic at all, has no longer any meaning. For there truth itself is highest poetry and has only to appear to be utterly beautiful to the vision, the hearing, the sensibility of the soul. There dwells and from there springs the mystery of the inevitable word, the supreme immortal rhythm, the absolute significance and the absolute utterance."

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