Overhead Poetry

World-Poet

With song on radiant song I clasp the world,

+Weaving its wonder and wideness into my heart—

But ever the music misses some huge star

Or else some flower too small for the minstrel hand.

No skill can turn all life my harmony.

Perchance a tablet of magic mood will make

The truth of the whole universe write itself

But only when with mortal thoughts in-drawn

I learn the secret time-transcending art:

+Silence that, losing all, grows infinite Self ...

Sri Aurobindo's Reply

"The +marking indicates lines which are of the first poetic order. The ordinary mark indicates those which are excellent. The other lines not marked are all of them good but not of a special quality. Both the poems are very successful, especially the first."

7-11-1950

The classification here seems to hark back to the grades of poetic perfection Sri Aurobindo has distinguished by five kinds of styles. "The first poetic order" appears to fit principally what he has called

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the pure or sheer inevitable but also any one of the four lesser styles—adequate, effective, illumined, inspired—raised to an inevitability of its own. "Excellent" would point to the same styles at a high pitch. "Good" must be these styles well-achieved but falling short of their greater possibilities.

As for planes, if we may go by Sri Aurobindo's evaluations elsewhere, the cast of vision, word and rhythm in the lines marked by a cross suggests overhead poetry. The remaining lines belong to the mental plane.

*

(Once the consciousness is aware of a certain vibration and poetic quality, it is possible to reach out towards its source of inspiration. As poetry for us here must be a way of Yoga, I suppose this reaching out is a helpful attempt; but it would become easier if there were some constant vibration present in the consciousness, which we know to have descended from the higher ranges. Very often the creative spark comes to me from the poems I read. I shall be obliged if you will indicate the origin of the few examples below—only the first of which is from my own work.)

1.Plumbless inaudible waves of shining sleep.

2.The diamond dimness of the domed air.

(Harindranath Chattopadhyaya)

3.Withdrawn in a lost attitude of prayer. (Ibid.)

4.This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude

Of Truth's abidingness, Self-blissful and alone.

(Arjava [J. A. Chadwick])

5.Million d'oiseaux d'or, ô future Vigueur!¹ (Rimbaud)

6.Rapt above earth by power of one fair face.

7.I saw them walking in an air of glory. (Vaughan)

8. Solitary thinkings such as dodge

Conception to the very bourne of heaven,

Then leave the naked brain.(Keats)

9.But felt through all this fleshly dress

Bright shoots of everlastingness.(Vaughan)

¹ Millions of golden birds, O future Force! (K.D.S.)

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10. I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm as it was bright.(Ibid.)

1."Illumined Mind.

2."Illumined Mind.

3."Intuition.

4."Illumined Mind with an intuitive element and a strong Overmind touch.

5."Illumined Mind.

6."Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else—but something of illumination and intuition also.

7."It is a mixture. Something of the Illumined Mind, something of the Poetic Intelligence diluting the full sovereignty of the higher expression.

8."Higher Mind combined with Illumined.

9."Illumined Mind with something from Intuition.

10. "Illumined Mind with something from Overmind."

*

(Here is your passage describing Savitri in whom the God of Love found "his perfect shrine":

Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,

Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit

Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm

Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.

Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;

Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.

As in a mystic and dynamic dance

A priestess of immaculate ecstasies

Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault

Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,

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A heart of silence in the hands of joy

Inhabited with rich creative beats

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for veiled divinity

Or golden temple door to things beyond.

Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;

Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense

Even in earth-stuff and their intense delight

Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.

The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:

Vacant of the dwarf self's imprisoned air

Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath

Spiritual that can make all things divine.

For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.

At once she was the stillness and the word,

A continent of self-diffusing peace,

An ocean of untrembling virgin fire.

In her he met a vastness like his own,

His high warm subtle ether he refound

And moved in her as in his natural home.¹

Are not these lines, which I regard as the ne plus ultra in world-poetry, a snatch of the sheer Overmind?)

"This passage is, I believe, what I might call the Overmind Intuition at work expressing itself in something like its own rhythm and language. It is difficult to say about one's own poetry, but I think I have succeeded here and in some passages later on in catching that very difficult note; in separate lines or briefer passages (i.e. a few lines at a time) I think it comes in not unoften."²

(1936)

*

¹In the final form of Savitri the description has bee n expanded from its original 31 lines of the 1936 version to 5I. (K.D.S.)

² We may revert to the remark of Sri Aurobindo made in 1946 and already, quoted by us, in which he refer s to hi s attitude ten years earlier : "At that

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(You have made me believe in my poetic destiny. But I want as soon as possible to outgrow the remnants of the decorative and rhetorical level which, along with a finer intuitive and a larger overhead one, you have pointed out in my inspiration. I want to write more and more with a power near to the Overmind if not actually from it. What should I do ? It is difficult to keep the consciousness merely uplifted: I feel "high and dry". Can't you pour some cataract from above? Both in Yoga and in poetry I crave for the potent ease of the highest planes. I aspire to live, as well as to echo in quality of inspiration, those four lines of yours which I consider a plenary Mantra:

Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,

Force one with unimaginable rest.¹

Show me a way to realise my aspiration. I feel very impatient— though I must confess to my shame that the aspiration of the poet is more frequently in the forefront than that of the Yogi.)

"Impatience does not help; intensity of aspiration does. The use of keeping the consciousness uplifted is that it then remains ready for the flow from above when that comes. To get as early as possible to the highest range one must keep the consciousness steadily turned towards it and maintain the call. First one has to establish the permanent opening—or get it to establish itself, then the ascension and frequent, afterwards constant descent. It is only afterwards that one can have the ease."

(1937)

*

________

time I hesitated to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this order." Round about 1946 he gave up his hesitation about a number of lines. At that time, if he had been privately asked, it seems certain that he would have ascribed the Savitri-passage to Overmind itself rather than to a plane defined by him as intermediate

between Intuition and Overmind. (K.D.S.)

¹ From The Life Heavens .

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(I said to Nirod and Jyoti that it has been a habit with me to re-read and repeat and hum lines which I have felt to have come from very high sources. I mentioned your recent poems as my aid to drawing inspiration from the Overhead planes. Jyoti begged me to type for her all the lines of this character from these poems. I have chosen the following:

1.O marvel bird with the burning wings of light

and the unbarred lids that look beyond all space ...

(The Bird of Fire)

2.Lost the titan winging of the thought...

(The Life Heavens)

3.Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,

Force one with unimaginable rest. (Ibid.)

4.My consciousness climbed like a topless hill... (Ibid.)

5.He who from Time's dull motion escapes and thrills,

Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast,

Unrolls the form and sign of being,

Seated above in the omniscient Silence.

(Jivanmukta)

6.Calm faces of the gods on backgrounds vast

Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes ...

(The Other Earths)

7. A silent unnamed emptiness content

Either to fade in the Unknowable

Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.

(Nirvana)

8.Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,

Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned ...

(Thought the Paraclete)

9.I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine...

(Transformation)

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10.My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight...

(Ibid.)

11.Rose of God like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,

Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion

of Grace!

Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in

Nature's abyss:

Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life

Beatitude's kiss.

(Rose of God)

I shan't ask you to tell me in detail the sources of all these lines—but what do you think in general of my choice? Only for one quotation I must crave the favour of your closer attention. Please do try to tell me something about it, for I like it so much that I cannot remain without knowing all that can be known: it is, of course, No. 3 here. I consider these lines the most satisfying I have ever read: poetically as well as spiritually, you have written others as great—what I mean to say is that the whole essence of the truth of life is given by them and every cry in the being seems answered. So be kind enough to take a little trouble and give me an intimate knowledge of them. I'll be very happy to know their source and the sort of enthousiasmos you had when writing them, How exactly did they come into being ?)

"The choice is excellent. I am afraid I couldn't tell you in detail the sources, though I suppose they all belong to the Overhead inspiration. In all I simply remained silent and allowed the lines to come down shaped or shaping themselves on the way—I don't know that I know anything else about it. All depends on the stress of the enthousiasmos, the force of the creative thrill and largeness of the wave of its Ananda, but how is that describable or definable? What is prominent in No.3 is a certain calm, deep and intense spiritual emotion taken up by the spiritual vision that sees exactly the state or experience and gives it its exact revelatory words. It is an Overmind vision and experience and condition that is given a full power of expression by the word and the rhythm-there is a success in 'embodying'

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them or at least the sight and emotion of them which gives the lines their force."

*

(My lines—

Across the keen apocalypse of gold

and

A white word breaks the eternal quietude—

which you consider fine may be authentic poetry and true to spiritual reality but I find nothing strikingly new in them in their present context. Don't you believe that to repeat excellently is as much a fault in its own way as to do so half successfully ? I may be in a peculiar mood, but I am sick of these shining monotonies. I think some of my poetic colleagues need as much as myself to get rid of them.)

"Obviously, it is desirable not to repeat oneself or, if one has to, it is desirable to repeat in another language and in a new light. Still, even that cannot be overdone. The difficulty with most writers of spiritual poetry is that they have either a limited field of experience or are tacked on to a limited inspiration though an intense one. How to get out of it? The only recipe I know is to widen oneself (or one's receptivity) always. Or else perhaps wait in the eternal quietude for a new 'white word' to break it—if it does not come, telephone."

*

"... On the other hand to cease writing altogether might be a doubtful remedy. By your writing here you have got rid of most of your former defects, and reached a stage of preparation in which you may reasonably hope for a greater development hereafter. I myself have more than once abstained for some time from writing because I did not wish to produce anything except as an expression from a higher plane of consciousness, but to do that you must be sure of your poetic gift, that it will not rust by too long a disuse."

*

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"I have said that overhead poetry is not necessarily greater or more perfect than any other kind of poetry. But perhaps a subtle qualification may be made to this statement. It is true that each kind of poetical writing can reach a highest or perfect perfection in its own line and in its own quality and what can be more perfect than a perfect perfection and can we say that one kind of absolute perfection is greater than another kind? What can be more absolute than the absolute? But then what do we mean by the perfection of poetry? There is the perfection of the language and there is the perfection of the word-music and the rhythm, beauty of speech and beauty of sound, but there is the quality of the thing said which counts for something. If we consider only word and sound and what in themselves they evoke, we arrive at the application of the theory of art for art's sake to poetry. On that ground we might say that a lyric of Anacreon is as good poetry and as perfect poetry as anything in Aeschylus or Sophocles or Homer. The question of elevation or depth or of intrinsic beauty of the thing said cannot enter into our consideration of poetry; and yet it does enter, with most of us at any rate, and is part of the aesthetic reaction even in the most aesthetic of critics and readers. From this point of view the elevation from which the inspiration comes may after all matter, provided the one who receives it is a fit and powerful instrument; for a great poet will do more with a lower level of the origin of inspiration than a smaller poet can do even when helped from the highest sources. In a certain sense all genius comes from Overhead; for genius is the entry or inrush of a greater consciousness into the mind or the possession of the mind by a greater power. Every operation of genius has at its back or infused within it an intuition, a revelation, an inspiration, an illumination or at the least a hint or touch or influx from some greater power or level of conscious being than those which men ordinarily possess or use. But this power has two ways of acting: in one it touches the ordinary modes of the mind and deepens, heightens, intensifies or exquisitely refines their action but without changing its modes or transforming its normal character; in the other it brings down into these normal modes something of itself, something supernormal, something which one at once feels to be extraordinary and suggestive

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of a superhuman level. These two ways of action when working in poetry may produce things equally exquisite and beautiful, but the word 'greater' may perhaps be applied, with the necessary qualification, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation.

"The greater bulk of the highest poetry belongs to the first of these two orders. In the second order there are again two or perhaps three levels; sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual force of language or a deeper note of feeling brings in the overhead touch. More often it is the power of the rhythm that lifts up language that is simple and common or a feeling or idea that has often been expressed and awakes something which is not ordinarily there. If one listens with the mind only or from the vital centre only, one may have a wondering admiration for the skill and beauty of woven word and sound or be struck by the happy way or the power with which the feeling or idea is expressed. But there is something more in it than that; it is this that a deeper, more inward strand of the consciousness has seen and is speaking, and if we listen more profoundly we can get something more than the admiration and delight of the mind or Housman's thrill of the solar plexus. We can feel perhaps the Spirit of the universe lending its own depths to our mortal speech or listening from behind to some expression of itself, listening perhaps to its memories of

old, unhappy, far-off things

And battles long ago

or feeling and hearing, it may be said, the vast oceanic stillness and the cry of the cuckoo

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides

or it may enter again into Vyasa's

A void and dreadful forest ringing with the crickets' cry

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Vanam pratibhayam śūnyam jhillikdgananāditam¹

or remember its call to the soul of man

Anityam asukham lokam imam prāpya bhajasva mām

Thou who hast come into this transient and unhappy

world, love and worship Me.

There is a second level on which the poetry draws into itself a fuller language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda have this inspiration. It is a poetry 'thick inlaid with patines of bright gold' or welling up in a stream of passion, beauty and force. But sometimes there comes down a supreme voice, the overmind voice and the overmind music and it is to be observed that the lines and passages where that happens rank among the greatest and most admired in all poetic literature. It would be therefore too much to say that overhead inspiration cannot bring in a greatness into poetry which could surpass the other levels of inspiration, greater even from the purely aesthetic point of view and certainly greater in the power of its substance.

"A conscious attempt to write overhead poetry with a mind aware of the planes from which this inspiration comes and seeking always to ascend to those levels or bring down something from them, would probably result in a partial success; at its lowest it might attain to what I have called the first order, ordinarily it would achieve the two lower levels of the second order and inks supreme moments it might in lines and in sustained passages achieve the supreme level, something of the highest summit of its potency. But the greatest work will be to express adequately and constantly what is now only occasionally and inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above,

¹ In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has brought in Vyasa's line thus:

some lone tremendous wood

Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry. (K.D.S.)

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the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its external or superficial happenings and phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, the inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality. It would bring in the concreteness, the authentic image, the inmost soul of identity and the heart of meaning of these things, so that it could never lack in beauty. If this could be achieved by one possessed, if not of a supreme, still of a sufficiently high and wide poetic genius, something new could be added to the domains of poetry and there would be no danger of the power of poetry beginning to fade, to fall into decadence, to fail us. It might even enter into the domain of the infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of the Ineffable, show us revealing images which bring us near to the Reality that is secret in us and in all, of which the Upanishad speaks,

Anejad ekam manaso javīyo nainad devā āpnuvam pūrvam

arsat...

Tad ejati tan naijati tad dūre tad u antike.

The One unmoving is swifter than thought, the

Gods cannot overtake It, for It travels ever in

front; It moves and It moves not, It is far away

from us and It is very close.

"The gods of the Overhead planes can do much to bridge that distance and to bring out that closeness, even if they cannot altogether overtake the Reality that exceeds and transcends them."

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