Overhead Poetry

Orison

A godless temple is the dome of space:

Reveal the sun of thy love-splendoured face,

O lustrous flowering of invisible peace, 3

O glory breaking into curves of clay 4

From mute intangible dream-distances, 5

That like a wondrous yet familiar light

Eternity may mingle with our day!

Leave thou no quiver of this time-born heart

A poor and visionless wanderer apart:

Make even my darkness a divine repose 10

One with thy nameless root, O mystic rose— 11

The slumbering seasons of my mortal sight 12

A portion of the unknowable vast behind 13

Thy gold apocalypse of shadowless mind! 14

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"That is extraordinarily fine throughout. But it is too fine for any need of remarks. Lines 3,4,5, also 10,11,12,13,14, Illumined Mind with Overmind Intuition touch—the rest Higher Mind suffused with Illumined Mind."

*

(The Muse is again away and I am feeling impatient. Can't you give me some clue about the direction of consciousness by which I may draw her back to me or reach out to her ? But, of course, I want the highest and I want a thorough perfection. Perhaps I am too careful and self-

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critical ? But that is my nature as an artist. Has it got something to do with the Muse's flight from me ? In any case, the experience of un-creativeness, the loss of the freedom of flying on the wings of inspiration, the sense of the poetic part of me caught in the mere mind and rendered vague and ineffective—all this is most unpleasant. Sometimes I fear the present lack of fluency may become a permanent defect. What method would you advise to counteract it ? Quieting the mind ? What do you do to get inspiration ?)

"Poetry seems to have intervals in its visits to you very often. I rather think the malady is fairly common. Dilip and Nishikanta who can write whenever they feel inclined are rare birds. I don't know about 'the direction of consciousness'. My own method is not to quiet the mind, for it is eternally quiet, but to turn upward and inward. You, I suppose, would have to quiet it first, which is not always easy. Have you tried it?

"It is precisely the people who are careful, self-critical, anxious for perfection who have interrupted visits from the Muse. Those who don't mind what they write, trusting to their genius, vigour, fluency to carry it off, are usually the abundant writers. There are exceptions, of course. 'The poetic part caught in the mere mind' is an admirable explanation of the phenomenon of interruption—it was the same with myself in the old days. Fluent poets are those who either do not mind if they do not always write their very best or whose minds are sufficiently poetic to make even their 'not best' verse pass muster well. Sometimes you write things that are good enough, but not your best—but both your insistence and mine—for I think it essential for you to write your best always, at least your 'level best' —may have curbed your fluency a good deal.

"The diminution of your prose was compensated by the much higher and maturer quality to which it attained afterwards. It would be so, I suppose, with the poetry and a new level of consciousness once attained there might well be a new fluency. So there is not much justification for the fear."

*

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"What does your correspondent mean by 'philosophy' in a poem? Of course if one sets out to write a metaphysical argument in verse like the Greek Empedocles or the Roman Lucretius it is a risky business and is likely to land you into prosaic poetry which is a less pardonable mixture than poetic prose. Even when philosophising in a less perilous way, one has to be careful not to be flat or heavy. It is obviously easier to be poetic when singing about a skylark than when one tries to weave a robe of verse to clothe the attributes of the Brahman. But that does not mean that there is to be no thought or no spiritual thought or no expression of truth in poetry; there is no great poet who has not tried to philosophise. Shelley wrote about the skylark, but he also wrote about the Brahman.

Life like a dome of many-coloured glass

Stains the white radiance of Eternity

is as good poetry as

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

There are flights of unsurpassable poetry in the Gita and the Upanishads. These rigid dicta are always excessive and there is no reason why a poet should allow the expression of his personality or the spirit within him or his whole poetic mind to be clipped, cabinned or stifled by any theories or 'thou shalt not' of this character."

"The theory which discourages the poet from thinking or at least from thinking for the sake of the thought proceeds from an extreme romanticist temper; it reaches its acme on one side in the question of the surrealist, 'Why do you want poetry to mean anything?' and on the other in Housman's exaltation of pure poetry which he describes paradoxically as a sort of sublime nonsense which does not appeal at all to the mental intelligence but knocks at the solar plexus and awakes a vital and physical rather than intellectual sensation and response. It is of course not that really but a vividness of imagination and feeling which disregards the mind's positive view of things and its logical sequences; the centre or centres it knocks at are not

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the brain-mind, not even the poetic intelligence but the subtle physical, the nervous, the vital or the psychic centre. The poem he quotes from Blake is certainly not nonsense, but it has no positive and exact meaning for the intellect or the surface mind; it expresses certain things that are true and real, not nonsense but a deeper sense which we feel powerfully with a great stirring of some inner emotion, but any attempt at exact intellectual statement of them sterilises their sense and spoils their appeal. This is not the method of the highest spiritual poetry. Its expression aims at a certain force, directness and spiritual clarity and reality. When it is not understood, it is because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the ordinary mind or belong to an untrodden domain or domains or enter into a field of occult experience; it is not because there is any attempt at a dark or vague profundity or at an escape from thought. The thinking is not intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a vision, a spiritual contact or a knowledge which has come by entering into the thing itself, by identity.

"It may be noted that the greater romantic poets did not shun thought; they thought abundantly, almost endlessly. They have their characteristic view of life, something that one might call their philosophy, their world-view, and they express it. Keats was the most romantic of poets, but he could write 'To philosophise I dare not yet'; he did not write T am too much of a poet to philosophise.' To philosophise he regarded evidently as mounting on the admiral's flag-ship and flying an almost royal banner. Spiritual philosophic poetry is different; it expresses or tries to express a total and many-sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other. Whatever language, whatever terms are necessary to convey this truth of vision and experience it uses without scruple, not admitting any mental rule of what is or is not poetic. It does not hesitate to employ terms which might be considered as technical when these can be turned to express something direct, vivid and powerful. That need not be an introduction of 'technical jargon', that is to say, I suppose, special and artificial language, expressing in this case only abstract ideas and generalities without any living truth or reality in them. Such jargon cannot make good literature, much

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less good poetry. But there is a 'poeticism' which establishes a sanitary cordon against words and ideas which it considers as prosaic but which properly used can strengthen poetry and extend its range. That limitation I do not admit as legitimate.

"I am justifying the poet's right to think as well as to see and feel, his right to 'dare to philosophise'. I agree with the modernists in their revolt against the romanticist's insistence on emotionalism and his objection to thinking and philosophical reflection in poetry. But the modernist went too far in his revolt. In trying to avoid what I may call poeticism he ceased to be poetic; wishing to escape from rhetorical writing, rhetorical pretension to greatness and beauty of style, he threw out true poetic greatness and beauty, turned from a deliberately poetic style to a colloquial tone and even to very flat writing; especially he turned away from poetic rhythm to a prose or half-prose rhythm or to no rhythm at all. Also he has weighed too much on thought and has lost the habit of intuitive sight; by turning emotion out of its intimate chamber in the house of Poetry, he has had to bring in to relieve the dryness of much of his thought, too much exaggeration of the lower vital and sensational reactions un-transformed or else transformed only by exaggeration. Nevertheless he has perhaps restored to the poet the freedom to think as well as to adopt a certain straightforwardness and directness of style."

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