Overhead Poetry

Silver Grace

A love has sealed us one with paradise—

A kiss of crescent moon upon earth's soul

By virgin raptures dreaming in the blue

That even the pit of hell is a buried sky.

No warrior gold can pierce the veil of time;

For God's own glory here has sunk asleep,

And how shall that abyss of majesty

Brook from its summit-self a lash of light?

Therefore this love's seducing glimmer came,

This haloed serpent of the Infinite,

A white bliss curving through our blinded deeps

To give the darkness' mouth a shadowless smile.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"A very fine poem throughout. The 2nd and 3rd lines are from the Illumined Mind. The first from the Higher Mind—the fourth is in substance from the Illumined Mind but there is a mental rhythm— very good and expressive rhythm, no doubt. The rest is the Higher Mind with touch of Illumination and Intuition—the last three lines are the Illumined Mind with Overmind Intuition touch, extremely fine."

*

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"If I have given high praise to a passage, it does not follow that it is from the Overmind; the poetic (aesthetic) value or perfection of a line, passage or poem does not depend on the plane from which it comes, but on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical, but there are no greater poets in any literature. No doubt, if we can get a continuous inspiration from the Overmind, that would mean a greater, sustained height of perfection and spiritual quality in poetry than has yet been achieved; but we are discussing here short passages and lines."

"The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons; it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose. It can take up and uplift any or every style or at least put some stamp of itself upon it. More or less all that we have called Overhead poetry has something of this character whether it be from the Overmind or simply intuitive, illumined or strong with the strength of the higher revealing Thought; even when it is not

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intrinsically Overhead poetry, still some touch can come in. Even Overhead poetry itself does not always deal in what is new or striking or strange; it can take up the obvious, the common, the bare and even the bald, the old, even that which without it would seem stale and hackneyed and raise it to greatness. Take the lines:

I spoke as one who ne'er would speak again

And as a dying man to dying men.

The writer is not a poet, not even a conspicuously talented versifier. The statement of the thought is bare and direct and the rhetorical device used is of the simplest, but the overhead touch somehow got in through a passionate emotion and sincerity and is unmistakable."¹

"I do not know that it is possible for me to say why I regard one line or passage as having the overhead touch or the overhead note while another misses it. When I said that in the lines about the dying man the touch came in through some intense passion and sincerity in the writer, I was simply mentioning the psychological door through which the thing came. I did not mean to suggest that such passion and sincerity could of itself bring in the touch or that they constituted the overhead note in the lines. I am afraid I have to say what Arnold said about the grand style; it has to be felt and cannot be explained or accounted for. One has an intuitive feeling, a recognition of something familiar to one's experience or one's deeper perception in the substance and the rhythm or in one or the other which rings out and cannot be gainsaid. One might put forward a theory or a description of what the overhead character of the line consists in, but it is doubtful whether any such mentally constructed definition could be always applicable. You speak, for instance, of the

¹ Quoting from memory, Sri Aurobindo has modified Richard Baxter's first line which in the original was:

I preached as never sure to preach again!

A wider poignancy, an elemental cry, has come in to replace the somewhat restricted though still keen feeling in a narrower context that is found in Baxter.(K.D.S.)

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sense of the Infinite and the One which is pervasive in the Overhead planes; that need not be explicitly there in the overhead poetic expression or in the substance of any given line: it can be expressed indeed by overhead poetry as no other can express it; but this poetry can deal with quite other things. I would certainly say that Shakespeare's lines,

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

have the overhead touch in the substance, the rhythm and the feeling, but Shakespeare is not giving us here the sense of the One and the Infinite. He is, as in the other lines of his which have this note, dealing as he always does with life, with vital emotions and reactions or the thoughts that spring out in the life-mind under the pressure of life. It is not any strict adhesion to a transcendental view of things that constitutes this kind of poetry, but something behind not belonging to the mind or the vital and physical consciousness and with that a certain quality or power in the language and the rhythm which helps to bring out that deeper something. If I had to select the line in European poetry which most suggests an almost direct descent from the overmind consciousness there might come first Virgil's line about 'the touch of tears in mortal things':

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

Another might be Shakespeare's

In the dark backward and abysm of Time

or again Milton's

Those thoughts that wander through Eternity.

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We might also add Wordsworth's line,

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.

There are others less ideative and more emotional or simply descriptive which might be added, such as Marlowe's

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

If we could extract and describe the quality and the subtle something that mark the language and rhythm and feeling of these lines and underlie their substance we might attain hazardously to some mental understanding of the nature of overhead poetry....

"The essential character is perhaps that there is something behind of which I have already spoken and which comes not primarily from the mind or the vital emotion or the physical seeing but from the cosmic self and its consciousness standing behind them all and things then tend to be seen not as the mind or heart or body sees them but as this greater consciousness feels or sees or answers to them. In the direct overmind transmission this something behind is usually forced to the front by a combination of words which carries the suggestion of a deeper meaning or by the force of an image or, most of all, by an intonation and a rhythm which carry up the depths in their wide wash or long march or mounting surge. Sometimes it is left lurking behind and only suggested so that a subtle feeling of what is not actually expressed is needed if the reader is not to miss it. This is oftenest the case when there is just a touch or note pressed upon something that would be otherwise only of a mental, vital or physical poetic value and nothing of the body of the overhead power shows through the veil, but at most a tremor and vibration, a gleam or a glimpse. In the lines I have chosen there is always an unusual quality in the rhythm, as prominently in Virgil's line, often in the very building and constantly in the intonation and the asssociation of the sounds which meet in the line and find themselves linked together by a sort of inevitable felicity. There is also an inspired selection or an

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unusual bringing together of words which has the power to force a deeper sense on the mind as in Virgil's

Sunt lacrimae rerum.

One can note that this line if translated straight into English would sound awkward and clumsy as would many of the finest lines in Rig Veda; that is precisely because they are new and felicitous turns in the original language, discoveries of an unexpected and absolute phrase; they defy translation.¹ If you note the combination of words and sounds in Shakespeare's line,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

so arranged as to force on the mind and still more on the subtle nerves and sense the utter absoluteness of the difficulty and pain of living for the soul that has awakened to the misery of the world, you can see how this technique works. Here and elsewhere the very body and soul of the thing seen or felt come out into the open. The same dominant characteristic can be found in other lines which I have not cited, — in Leopardi's

L'insano indegno mistero delle cose

(The insane and ignoble mystery of things)²

¹Virgil's opening phrase, literally rendered, would be: "There are tears of things" or "Tears are of things".

C. Day Lewis translates the whole line: Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience. A somewhat freer version which, according to Sri Aurobindo, is "very fine" yet "has a density of colour which is absent from the bare economy and direct force Virgil manages to combine with his subtle and unusual turn of phrase" is:

Haunted by tears is the world and our hearts by the touch of things mortal. (K.D.S)

²Leopardi's original has one different word and is spread over parts of

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or in Wordsworth's

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Milton's line lives by its choice of the word "wander" to collocate with "through eternity"; if he had chosen any other word, it would no longer have been an overhead line even if the surface sense had been exactly the same."

____________

two lines:

l'acerbo, indegno

Mistero delle cose...

"Acerbo" may be rendered "harsh" or "bitter." As the Overmind quality depends on fine shades of both sound and significance, we may wonder whether the original quite comes up to Sri Aurobindo's slight misquotation.

(K.D.S.)

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