Overhead Poetry

Truth-Vision

How shall you see

Through a mist of tears

The laughing lips of beauty,

The golden heart of years?

Oh never say

That tears had birth

In the weeping soul of ages,

The gloomy brow of earth!

Your eyes alone

Carry the blame

For giving tearful answers

To questionings of flame.

What drew that film

Across your sight

Was only the great dazzle

Of everlasting Light!

Frailty begot

Your wounded gaze:

Eagle your mood, O spirit,

To see the Golden Face.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"It is exceedingly beautiful, one of the best things you have done. But don't ask me to analyse it. Things like that cannot be analysed, they can only be felt. It has throughout the perfection of simple inevitability about which no one can say, 'It is because of this that it is beautiful or because of that.' The more I read it, the more it gains upon me."

In terms of plane, we may conjecture "the perfection of simple inevitability" to be pointing—if we may go by Sri Aurobindo's own words elsewhere on mystic and spiritual poetry—to a manifold blending: the inner mind's "easy and luminous simplicity which is at the same time very felicitous", the psychic being's "fine subtiety of true perception" and "its intimate language" but touched with the "pure intuitive"'s "simple revealing directness and beauty".

Page 110