Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

6

Sheer Spiritual Light "Overhead Poetry "

Sonnets, Lyrics, Compositions in New Metres

Sri Aurobindo's latest work is the most unique he has done, but its deepest characteristic is not its new metre. This characteristic is equally patent in his recent poetry within the general bounds of traditional technique. To evaluate it effectively we have to speak in terms of planes of consciousness. And it will not suffice just to dub it mystical. No doubt, mystical poetry has a psychology distinct from that of poetry that is secular, but in literature mysticism itself functions on various planes. Whatever its sources, the expression it finds may very well be on the same planes as those of secular inspiration— the planes of imaginative passion and thought. When Donne acts the vehement devotee—

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you

As yet but knocke, breathe, shine and seek to mend,

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or Crashaw cries de profundis to St. Teresa, echoing her exaltation—

By the full kingdom of that final kiss

That seized thy parting soul and sealed thee His,

By all the heavens thou hast in Him

(Fair sister of the Seraphim!),

By all of Him we have in thee,

Leave nothing of myself in me,

or Gerard Manley Hopkins quiveringly flashlights the life within a religious discipline, "closed by a cassock and dedicate to God'

I did say yes

O at lightning and lashed rod;

Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess

Thy terror, O Christ, O God;

Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:

The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod

Hard down with a horror of height:

And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress,

or Eliot subtly symbolises the supreme religious consummation of love in which all intensities come together and are uplifted and opposites get reconciled

When the tongues of fire are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one,

spiritual realities are clothed in a language and rhythm whose turns and tones might serve equally well the realities of life's

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habitual experience. The mental eye is ranging over the Unknown and shaping it to significances and figures and values that are bathed in an element familiar to us. Indeed all poetry has to establish some sort of contact with familiar things, but a world of difference lies between the Unknown being gripped by our customary consciousness and our customary consciousness being gripped by the Unknown. In the latter phenomenon, not only the meaning but the very words and their combined vibrations seem to leap from entranced God-inhabited heights: the Divine and the Eternal find their own speech, large, luminous, fathomless—the meaning becomes visioned and felt as though man were no longer mental merely but poised on a level beyond mind. This type of poetry Sri Aurobindo calls "overhead", because it comes as if by a wide sweeping descent from an ether of superhuman being, high above our mind's centre in the brain.

It has not been absent from English literature: Vaughan, Wordsworth, Shelley, Francis Thompson and AE have it perhaps morefrequendy, but no English poet has proved continually a channel of its peculiar intensity. For that matter it is no more than sporadic in all languages except Sanskrit. And, even in Sanskrit, parts of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita stand alone as its embodiment en masse. To be holy scripture is not necessarily to be overhead with the revelatory rhythm with which the Indian Rishis often uttered their realisations. As a rule, the world's Bibles ring the note of Donne or Crashaw or Herbert, Hopkins or Eliot or other fine English poets turned mystics. Most of the existing religious and spiritual literature is wanting in the accent which leads up to what the Rishis considered the culminating speech of mysticism, the mantra— the accent we repeatedly find, for instance, in a poem like Sri Aurobindo's Descent where in seven Sapphic quatrains built on his own principles of quantity there is conveyed the Yogic

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process in which the Spirit's substance comes from remote altitudes into the human mould and of which a part is the overhead inspiration for those who are poetically receptive. Even lines which, taken separately, would not be overhead are caught up beyond themselves by the ensemble and the suffused overhead tone getting dense every now and then forms a climax of spiritual creativity in stanzas 4 and 5—

Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces

Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;

Thoughts that left the Ineffable's flaming mansions,

Blaze in my spirit.

Slow the heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;

Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway

Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,

Ecstasy's chariots.

These eight lines make a most magnificent composite picture, Vedic and Upanishadic in its symbols, and the sound-strokes of the words leave reverbrations that are mantric: the impulsion of the supreme Spirit is poetised in language and rhythm with an immediate direct play of superhuman immensities at their utmost instead of an indirect one through their adaptation to the mind's climate.

It is not always easy to distinguish the overhead style or to get perfectly the drift of its suggestion. There must be as much as possible a stilling of ourselves, an in-drawn hush ready to listen to the uncommon speech; and we must help the hush to absorb successfully that speech by repeatedly reading the verse aloud, since it is primarily through the rhythm that the psychological state with which an overhead poem is a-thrill echoes within us, stirring the eye to open wider and wider on spiritual

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mysteries and the brain to acquire a more and more true reflex of the transcendental that is the truth of things, waiting for manifestation.

The rhythm more than anything else is also what makes a gradation in overhead poetry. In Sri Aurobindo's work of this species it is difficult to demarcate the stages, for a general breath of the mantra seems to blow almost everywhere; but we may attempt a rough classification. According to him, above the mind-level four stages of mystical experience can be distinguished, which have found occasional embodiment, either distinct or interpenetrated, in human languages : a rare fifth, called by him Supermind and considered the ultimate goal of the Yoga taught by him, still awaits its hour of manifestation. Immediately higher than the reflective intelligence is a plane of thought, termed Higher Mind, which is not conceptive from outside its object but is projected from a Spirit-stuff which secretly pervades everything. Rising from that pervasion it comes charged with a broad and strong clarity of conception from the inside, resembling certain lofty outbrusts of the ideative mind proper but differing by a vibration-frequency, so to speak, no less than by a directness of spiritual sense. When Sri Aurobindo writes—

I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine,

or

My thoughts shall be hounds of light for Thy power to loose,

we may say he captures the accent of the first level. To appreciate the capture we may listen to a fine à peu près in Valéry's symbolisation of the pure intellect, contemplative, aloof, absolute to itself:

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Midi là-haut, Midi sans mouvement...

Tête complète et parfait diadème.

(Midday on high, Midday all motionless...

Head without flaw and perfect diadem.)

In the next grade, designated Illumined Mind, there is a keenness of lustre accompanying the amplitude, revealing not only the shape of the Spirit under all guises but also its colour and texture, its tense or tingling subdeties. A typical example in Sri Aurobindo of this level seems:

A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven,

or

Black fire and gold fire strove towards one bliss.

The typicality may be seen better by comparing the examples with a brilliant approximation to their level in Yeats's

O martyrs standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall.

The stage after this is named Intuition, a specific power which must not be confused with its own inferior forms in the swift graspings or discriminations possible to our intelligence at times. It brings a sharp and packed intimacy, a seeing as if with eyes closed in absorbed "empathy", a deep listening as if to the world's heart through one's own. Lustrousness is not the usual attribute of such utterance, a straightforward speech is sufficient though touches of fire may come here and there in the intense self-revealing breadths. As instances from Sri Aurobindo, take

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A Calm that cradles Fate upon its knees,

or

I am alone with my own self for space.

The full Intuition may strike out at us clearer if set beside an admirable near-hit in Rilke's

Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum:

Weltinnenraum.

(A single space spreads through all things that are, World's inner space).¹

Beyond spiritual speech of the intuitional order we have the word of Overmind, the plane which in Sri Aurobindo's system of Yogic philosophy is the immediate delegate of the hitherto unmanifested Supermind, that utter Divinity which holds the key to man's integral perfection, even the perfection of his physical being. The Overmind word is the mantra. Here any of the characteristics of the preceding levels may be transfigured by a rhythm that is sui generis or else new characteristics may emerge that defy analysis. The rhythm is as of the supreme Spirit realised by more than profound intimacy—realised by veritable identity. In the following quatrain, cast in quantitative trimeters and chanting forth the integral ideal which Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is bent upon in his Ashram at Pondicherry, we have in the first line an extremely moved soaring of overhead intuitive "empathy", in the second a most vivid uplifting of overhead sight, in the third a superb sublimation of overhead thought and in the

¹ Adapted from C. M. Bowra's translation.

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fourth a mingling of all the three overhead modes below Overmind and their being rapt beyond themselves to some indefinable nth degree

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.

The quatrain is mantra by an expansion of the meaning to a sovereign massiveness of immeasurable suggestion, an endlessness of undertone and overtone as though each line which appears to terminate went really sounding on from everlasting to everlasting because what it embodies is—with some sort of absoluteness proper to Supermind's immediate delegate—the Divine and the Deathless, the Light that has neither flaw nor bound.

These four lines are a good illustration too of the fact that the overhead speech is not concerned only with superhuman magnitudes but is capable of conveying an intense emotion: the throb of the human is never cast away by Sri Aurobindo, he gathers up again and again the cry of things that perish and breathes into it the truth of all our travail, which is the Divine's desire that He should be embodied in our earthly members and not merely that we should ascend to His summits. When Sri Aurobindo invokes, in Musa Spiritus, the "Word concealed in the upper fire", he calls on it to leap into "the gulfs of our nature":

In the uncertain glow of human mind,

Its waste of unharmonied thronging thoughts,

Carve thy epic mountain-lined

Crowded with deep prophetic grots.

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And in his most incantatory poem, Rose of God, an experiment in pure stress metre, where a symbol famous in mystical verse and steeped in exquisite associations by Yeats in our own day—

...Your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart...

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days...

Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,

Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose—

is suffused with the sight and sound of the overhead and even the mantric, every stanza connects by a half esoteric half intimate imagery Supernature's heights and Nature's depths. Lines 5-8 may serve as an illustration, playing a variation on the theme of our excerpt from Musa Spiritus:

Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being,

Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing!

Live in the mind of our earthhood: O golden Mystery, flower,

Sum on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour.

Yes, Sri Aurobindo never contemns earth, since he deems it the ordained scene of an evolution in which its own terms will not just be transcended but purified and fulfilled, discovering a solution rather than a dissolution for—in those piercing words of Bloc —

All this life's pitiable trembling,

All this uncomprehended fire.¹

¹ Translated by C.M. Bowra

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Within the imperfect parts of our terrestrial existence Sri Aurobindo sees a spark of the Divine—the psychic being, as he terms it—which is all perfection in embryo and which acts at present indirecdy through a general influence on mind, life-force and body but has to be brought forward into their midst and made to grow an open link between the Divine and the human and a focal starting-point for the latter's ultimate irradiation by the former. This secret psyche is a most poignant intensity and its pure emotion such as enters strongly into several lines of Rose of God infuses often into Sri Aurobindo's overhead grandeurs, either openly or from the background, its strange sweetness or its wistfulness that is yet never weak or escapist. When it comes to the fore, effects of a ravishing magic are produced, as in its mixing with the Illumined Mind in the second verse of that couplet from the rhymed quantitative hexameters of Ahana—

Open the barriers of Time, the world with thy beauty enamour.

Trailing behind thee the purple of thy soul and the dawn-moment's glamour...,

or with the Intuition in the first verse of another couplet from the same poem

Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us,

Luminous beckoning hands in the distance invite and implore us.

What is perhaps Sri Aurobindo's most moving mystical poem, A God's Labour, has throughout its thirty-one stanzas the stamp of the psyche all over its sublime overhead vision, cast into a directly personal mould, of the mission of one who would build a bridge "marrying the soil to the sky":

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He who would bring the heavens here

Must descend himself into clay

And the burden of earthly nature bear

And tread the dolorous way...

I have been digging deep and long

Mid a horror of filth and mire

A bed for the golden river's song,

A home for the deathless fire...

I saw that a falsehood was planted deep

At the very root of things

Where the grey Sphinx guards God's riddle sleep

On the Dragon's outspread wings...

I have delved through the dumb Earth's dreadful heart

And heard her black mass' bell.

I have seen the source whence her agonies part

And the inner reason of hell...

He who I am was with me still;

All veils are breaking now.

I have heard His voice and borne His will

On my vast untroubled brow...

A little more and the new life's doors

Shall be carved in silver light

With its aureate roof and mosaic floors

In a great world bare and bright...

Something of this tone also streams now and again into the sequence of more than fifty sonnets in which Sri Aurobindo has voiced a few of his spiritual realisations in a language either exquisitely simple or passionately rich but always with a

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straightforwardness in keeping with the autobiographical motif which here more than in most other self-revealing poems of his is felt by the reader. A feature often to be noted in these sonnets is the extremely close approximation the overhead speech makes to the language we have defined to be of the customary consciousness gripping the Unknown as differentiated from that of the Unknown gripping the customary consciousness. Now we have to recognise a third category which seems to be this consciousnesses speech not merely touched by the overhead, as happens at times in Sri Aurobindo's earlier philosophic or other verse, but unified with it and yet not so much assimilated into the specific tones of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition or Overmind as itself assimilating them. Its own mode remains, but within the possibilities of that mode the overhead is fully exploited instead of new possibilities being created by the overhead's transfiguration of it. It frequently passes over into sheer Spiritual Light, yet again and again a note is heard which can be distinguished both from the overhead which we have already illustrated and from the several shades of the customary— for instance, the forceful reflective in a mystical mood as in that close to a sonnet of 1899 on the poet's grandfather whose "strong and sentient spirit" he conceives as having been drawn back at death into the "omnipresent Thought" of which it was "a part and earthly hour":

... Into that splendour caught

Thou hast not lost thy special brightness. Power

Remains with thee and the old genial force

Unseen for blinding light, not darkly lurks:

As when a sacred river in its course

Dives into ocean, there its strength abides

Not less because with vastness wed and works

Unnoticed in the grandeur of the tides.

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A fine example of the note in question, at play amidst the pure overhead accent, is the sonnet The Godhead which faithfully records a very early experience when Sri Aurobindo was in danger of a carriage accident in Baroda in the first year of his stay there, a vision of the Godhead surging up from within him . and mastering and controlling with its gaze all events and surroundings:

I sat behind the dance of Danger's hooves

In the shouting street that seemed a futurist's whim,

And suddenly felt, exceeding Nature's grooves,

In me, enveloping me the body of Him.

Above my head a mighty head was seen,

A face with the calm of immortality

And an omnipotent gaze that held the scene

In the vast circle of its sovereignty.

His hair was mingled with the sun and breeze;

The world was in His heart and He was I;

I housed in me the Everlasting's peace,

The strength of One whose substance cannot die.

The moment passed and all was as before;

Only that deathless memory I bore.

Another striking example is The Pilgrim of the Night which links up in experience with A God's Labour. In passing to it, we may note two complementary aspects of Sri Aurobindo's God-realisation: one is in the line from the sonnet already cited,

The world was in His heart and He was I

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the other is in that cryptic startling phrase in A God's Labour,

He who I am was with me still.

Both the aspects are hinted in The Pilgrim of the Night where "He who I am" remains, though the transcendent and universal Divinity had to be left in the background when Sri Aurobindo addressed himself to the work of not merely attaining what he has called Supermind but also of diving into what he has termed the Inconscient, the nether pole to the Absolute's upper pole of total Light, the utter darkness of stonelike insensibility which marks the Divine's complete apparent self-loss for the sake of a novel laborious and dangerous self-discovery, the brute blindness in which everything lies "involved" and from which power after power is evolved under the pressure of and invasion by the higher planes where the same powers stand freely expressed:

I made an assignation with the Night;

In the abyss was fixed our rendezvous:

In my breast carrying God's deathless light

I came her dark and dangerous heart to woo.

I left the glory of the illumined Mind

And the calm rapture of the divinised soul

And travelled through a vastness dim and blind

To the grey shore where her ignorant waters roll.

I walk by the chill wave through the dull slime

And still that weary journeying knows no end;

Lost is the lustrous godhead beyond Time,

There comes no voice of the celestial Friend,

And yet I know my footprints' track shall be

A pathway towards Immortality.

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In many respects, these fifty sonnets or so are the best brief approach for us to Savitri, the gigantic epic which Sri Aurobindo subtitled "a Legend and a Symbol" and which may in addition be described as "a Philosophy" and in which all the varieties of spiritual speech we have tried to< discriminate attain their royal manifestation. For here we have not only the element of spiritual autobiography that, in a non-personal narrative shape, is found worked into that poem in detailed abundant vividness. We have also the element of spiritual philosophy found there in the form of general ideas set shining through the Yogi's silent mind by what arrives from overhead—a thought-structure expressing a mystical vision and contact and knowledge which have come by processes of consciousness other than intellectual. Again, the sustained pentameter anticipates the five-foot mould of Savitri and the sparse enjambment renders the anticipation even more a fore-glimpse. Of course, Savitri is blank verse, but when the Shakespearean rather than the Miltonic sonnet-scheme is here followed—and it is followed frequently—the last two lines of a quatrain seem to create with the first two of its successor an effect somewhat as of a snatch of concealed blank verse: for instance,

Failure is cradled on Thy deathless arm,

Victory is Thy passage mirrored in Fortune's glass.

In the rude combat with the fate of man

Thy smile within my heart is all my strength.

Also, there is a fair amount of significant modulation—spondaic, anapaestic, dactylic, trochaic or pyrrhic—on the iambic base to recall to a degree the blank-verse technique:

I walk | by the | chill wave | through the | dull slime...

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Victory | is Thy pas|sage mir|rored in Fortune

And bright | suddenness | of wings | in a gol|den air...

Man on | whom the | World-Unity | shall seize...¹

No doubt, the lyric tone is much in evidence in the Sonnets, but in Savitri too it is not absent. Besides, the architectural sequence and progression proper to the sonnet-form, with the finality as of a semi-logical demonstration at the end in a swift couplet or in a deliberate resolving movement of three lines, tend by themselves to introduce something of the graver, more strongly cut and more marshalled power of epic construction, even when the poised element of spiritual philosophy and the dynamic element of spiritual autobiography are not together directly in front to contribute an epic tone affined to that of Savitri.

¹ This line would scan differently if the first foot is truncated to a single stressed syllable.

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