Overhead Poetry

Vita Nuova

Haloed by some vast blue withheld from us,

Her pure face smiles through her cascading hair:

Like a strange dawn of rainfall nectarous

It comes to amaranth each desert prayer.

Beyond themselves her clay-born beauties call:

Breathing the rich air round her is to find

An ageless God-delight embracing all,

The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind.

Across both night and day her secrets run,

For even through our deepest slumberings

We hearken to an embassy of the sun

And stir invisible of rapturous wings.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"A very fine poem. The second stanza is the finest; in the two others the first line strikes very deep. The lines that reach the highest and widest are the third and fourth of the middle stanza. Lines i, 7, 8, 9, come from very high and express a vision the full significance of which can only be realised by spiritual experience. Line 1— Illumined Mind taken upwards by a wide intuitive inspiration. Lines 7,8—I am inclined to ascribe them at their source of vision to an intermediate plane which is not Overmind itself but may be called the Overmind Intuition. You are right about the second line—'The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind'; it is one of the finest you have written and is absolutely authentic and true.¹ Both lines have a strong revelatory power. Line 9—Intuition."

General remark apropos of the poem's manner: "A bold directness and a concrete audacity of image tells best in mystic poetry—it makes the thing live."

(You once distinguished two Overmind levels: mental and gnostic, the latter being the Overmind proper, the former like a massive and widened Intuition. Now you have spoken of Overmind Intuition as

¹ This line originally was part of another poem which was far from being overhead. Sri Aurobindo there called it "splendid" and in a later analysis of sources said of it: "Intuitive with Overmind touch." In regard to that analysis and the description now of it as coming from the Overmind Intuition, see the next question and answer. (K.D.S.)

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distinguished from the Overmind itself. In one letter you make four divisions: mental Overmind, intuitive Overmind, true Overmind and supramentalised Overmind. You have also used the expression: "Overmind Gnosis." This must correspond to "Overmind itself" and "true Overmind". But, if "intuitive Overmind" is different from "mental Overmind", "mental Overmind" must now mean something other than a massive and widened Intuition. Will you please give a hint as to the various significances and an idea as to what quality of rhythm, language and substance would constitute the differences in expression from the several levels. I should like particularly to know about the Overmind Gnosis.)

"As for the Overmind Gnosis, I cannot yet say anything—I am familiar with its workings, but they are not easily describable and, as for poetry, I have not yet observed sufficiently to say whether it enters in anywhere or not.... I should expect its intervention to be extremely rare even as a touch; but I refer at present all higher Overmind intervention to the Overmind Intuition in order to avoid any risk of overstatement. In the process of overmental transformation what I have observed is that the Overmind first takes up the illumined and higher mind and intellect (thinking, perceiving and reasoning intelligence) into itself and modifies itself to suit the operation—the result is what may be called a mental Overmind—then it lifts these lower movements and the intuitive mind together into a higher reach of itself, forming there the Overmind Intuition, and then all that into the Overmind Gnosis awaiting the supramental transformation. The Overmind 'touch' on the Higher Mind and Illumined Mind can thus raise towards the O.I. or to the O.G. or leave in the M.O.; but estimating at a glance as I have to do, it is not easy to be quite precise. I may have to revise my estimates later on a little, though perhaps not very appreciably, when I am able to look at things in a more leisurely way and fix the misty lines which often tend to fade away, being an indefinable border." (3.5.1937)

*

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