Overhead Poetry

Yoga

"Torment not with intangible fulgences!

O master, to my hungry life impart

The nectarous truth of yon Sky-Spirit unheard

Whose sole revealing word

Is a touch of cold far flame upon my heart!

Of what avail mute mystic suns of snow?"

"Banish from your dream-night

The burning blindness of earth-hued desire,

That scorching shadow masked as living light!

Then only can your misery's

Heart-hunger know

The multi-splendoured sweetness of truth-glow,

The embracing fire

Of His inscrutable omnipotent peace!"

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"I fear it is only eloquence—a long way from the Mantra. From the point of view of a poetic eloquence there are some forceful lines and the rest is well done, but— There is too much play of the mind, not the hushed intense receptivity of the seer which is necessary for the Mantra."

(Does "poetic eloquence" belong only to the mental plane which you have called "the poetic intelligence" and more generally "the creative intelligence"? Can it be part also of "the Higher Mind" or "the Higher Thought" which is an "overhead" plane ?)

"It belongs to the poetic intelligence, but as in most of Milton it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and language."

"There are besides in mental poetry derivations or substitutes for all [overhead] styles. Milton's 'grand style' is such a substitute for the manner of the Higher Thought. Take it anywhere at its ordinary level or in its elevation, there is always or almost always that echo there:

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree,

or

On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues

or

Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides

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And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old....

Milton's lines might at first sight be taken because of a certain depth of emotion in their large lingering rhythm as having the overhead complexion, but this rhythm loses something of its sovereign right because there are no depths of sense behind... Milton's architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers; the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence,—for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he works."

"Naturally, something from the higher planes can come into the poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. That happens in such lines as [Milton's]

Those thoughts that wander through Eternity."

"The Mantra (not necessarily in the Upanishads alone)...is what comes as here from the Overmind inspiration."—"One has the sense here of a rhythm which does not begin or end with the line, but has for ever been sounding in the eternal planes and began even in Time ages ago and which returns into the infinite to go sounding on for ages after. In fact, the word-rhythm is only part of what we hear; it is a support for the rhythm we listen to behind in 'the Ear of the ear', śrotrasya śrotram. To a certain extent, that is what all great poetry at its highest tries to have, but it is only the Overmind rhythm to which it is altogether native and in which it is not only behind the word-rhythm but gets into the word-movement itself and finds a fully supporting body there."

(On the expression "lofty region" in a poem of mine, with variations like "vasty" and "myriad" suggested for the adjective, you passed the verdict: "pseudo-Miltonic." What exactly did you mean?)

"By pseudo-Miltonic I mean a certain kind of traditional poetic eloquence which finds its roots in Milton but even when well done lacks in originality and can easily be vapid and sometimes hollow....

An expression like lofty region, vasty region, myriad region even expresses nothing but a bare intellectual fact—with no more vision in it than would convey mere wideness without any significance in it."

*

(With one line picked out almost wholly from my poem Yoga, I have started another poem. The closing image is also somewhat similar to the one in the earlier work. Still far from the Upanishadic goal, I am afraid, but how does it strike you?)

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