Overhead Poetry

Storm-Light

The immortal music of her mind

Sweeps through the earth a lustrous wind—

"Renounce, O man, thy arduous oar

And, opening out faith's song-charmed helpless sail,

Reach on my breath of love the ecstatic shore!

My rush is truth self-beaconed, not thy pale

Stranger-surmise:

I am a cyclic gale

That blows from paradise to paradise!"

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"This is now quite perfect. Only, the lines 2-5 are now of the Illumined Mind, with a strong undertone of the effective,¹ the first and last four intuitive. This is not a defect.

"The poetry of the Illumined Mind is usually full of a play of lights and colours, brilliant and striking in phrase, for illumination makes the Truth vivid—it acts usually by a luminous rush. The poetry of the Intuition may have a play of colour and bright lights, but it does not depend on them—it may be quite bare; it tells by a sort of close intimacy with the Truth, an inward expression of it. The Illumined Mind sometimes gets rid of its trappings, but even then it always keeps a sort of lustrousness of robe which is its characteristic."

¹ The reference is evidently to one of the five kinds of style Sri Aurobindo has distinguished on pp. 35-40. In the present context he seems to take the style of the Illumined Mind to be ipso facto that which he has called "illumined" there. And the implication is that "the effective" is the style of the Higher Mind. But, if so, the "inspired" style would cover the lines described her e as "intuitive" .

(K.D.S.)

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