Overhead Poetry

THANK GOD...

Thank God for all this wretchedness of love—

The close apocalypt fires that only prove

The shutting of some golden gate in the face!

Not here beside us burning a brief space

Of life is ecstasy: immense, above,

The shining core of a divine abyss

Awaits the earth-unglamoured lonely gaze,

The tense heart broken into widenesses!

All quiver and cry of time is splendoured there

By an ageless alchemy smiling everywhere.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"Perfect in thought and expression. 'The tense heart broken into widenesses' is a very fine line. (I suppose 'alchemy' can smile— usually it doesn't.)"

Nirodbaran, who read the poem out to Sri Aurobindo, reports that Sri Aurobindo repeated several times to himself the phrase which he has called "a very fine line".

*

(Here is a poem about all the planes, briefly characterising them. It starts with the "inconscient" physical, then proceeds to the vital and the mental, with the psychic innermost recess between them—then sums up the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind and the Intuition and finally goes to the Overmind, the Supermind and the unmanifest Absolute. Do you think a special key is necessary to explain the poem or does it possess a sufficiently intelligible suggestiveness as a whole as well as in each part to give an intuitive sense of coherent meaning ?)

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