Overhead Poetry

Through Vesper's Veil

A rose of fire like a secret smile

Won from the heart of lost eternity

Broke suddenly through vesper's virgin veil.

A smoulder of strange joy—then time grew dark,

And all my vigil's burning cry a swoon

As if the soul were drawn into its God

Across that dream-curve dimming out of space....

Then from the inmost deep a white trance-eye

Kindled a throbbing core of the Unknown,

Some mute mysterious memory lit beyond

The wideness with one star that is the dusk.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"Very fine poetry—quite original. Its originality consists as in other poems of yours of the same kind in the expression of a truth or plane of vision and experience not yet expressed and, secondly, in the power of expression which gives it an exact body—a revelatory not an intellectual exactitude. Lines 1,2,4,7,8,9,11 are overhead lines— Illumined Mind."

The double and single marks against the lines were put by Sri Aurobindo.

(From where does the "trance-eye" appear? From the soul drawn up into the transcendent timeless or from the mystic swoon in which the time-consciousness is left by the soul's escape ? I wonder, however, whether the expression warrants so definite a distinction.)

"It is not necessary to intellectualise,—but if one supposes the trance-eye to come from the swoon, it may still create a throbbing core of the unknown or a memory of it beyond the dark wideness. That is indeed what usually happens in the inner trance."

Page 24