On Poetry
THEME/S
TALK EIGHTEEN
Sri Aurobindo — we closed last time with this name after talking of Yeats's two incantatory stanzas on the Rose in the deeps of his heart. Especially apt is this name in the Yeatsian context because Sri Aurobindo is not only the sovereign artist of incantation but has also given us a climax of the incantatory art in a poem on the Mystic Rose itself. The most famous of mystical symbols he has steeped in the keenest inner light and lifted it on a metrical base of pure stress into an atmosphere of rhythmic ecstasy. To receive the true impact of this poem we have to read it with a mind held quiet and the voice full-toned; but we must be very clear in our enuncia-tion, not allowing any emotional fuzz to come between the poet's significant sound and the intuitive depths of our intelligence. It is not a mere emotional thrill that he is communicating — the thrill is of some experience in which the Divine is feelingly visioned and visionarily comprehended and comprehendingly felt. Our reading has to convey accurately the quiver and colour of sight, the lumi-nous structure of idea, the meaningful enthusiasm of emotion. A controlled intonation in which every word, while accorded its full music of vowel and consonant, stands out distinct and keeps clear-ly patterned in syntax its intuitive relation with its companion words — thus have we to make the Aurobindonian Rose of God paint and perfume our speech.
There are five stanzas, each conjuring up an aspect of the Epiphany which Sri Aurobindo poetises:
Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven,
Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven!
Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame,
Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name.
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,
Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour.
Rose of God, damask force of Infinity, red icon of might,
Rose of Power, with thy diamond halo piercing the night!
Ablaze in the will of the mortal, design the wonder of thy plan,
Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in man.
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Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire,
Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colour's lyre!
Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical
rhyme;
Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the
children of Time.
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.
At first glance one may get a little bewildered and think that here are splashes of oriental hues and a revel of decorative effects for their own sake. But really there is no riot in the splendour: we have a many-sided system in it, exploring the secrets of the Divine Rose. A mystical metaphysics and psychology, as it were, unfold before us in the succession of vibrant images. Let us view this metaphysics and this psychology from close quarters. But let me warn you that since they are mystical we cannot be very sure about everything we say.
There are two sides of spiritual reality presented in each stanza. The first two lines everywhere are charged with the Glory that is on high, the Reality above the human consciousness, ever perfect and ever manifest. In the last two lines the same Reality is invoked to reveal itself by evolution in the human consciousness and to become progressively a part of earth or, rather, to make earth progressively a part of it. What is eternally in bloom in the Divine is asked to blossom anew in our time and space — a Brightness that, unlike in Nashe's line, never falls from the air. The nature of this Brightness can be gauged by a brief review of the figures under which the spiritual Reality is shown. The basic figure is, of course, that which gives the poem its title. But here Sri Aurobindo has a surprise for us. Not only have we to turn away from the Yeatsian Rose with its suggestion of an ultimate Beauty: we have also to move beyond the Rose-suggestion in a canto of Savitri. There he has written of Being's "effulgent stair" climbing from the human mentality to "the Eternal's house" and he has put on either side of the steps of the journey upward through the mystical conscious-ness "the heavens of the ideal Mind." On one side are
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The mighty kingdoms of the deathless Flame
and on the other
The lovely kingdoms of the deathless Rose.
Sri Aurobindo says further:
Above the spirit cased in mortal sense
Are superconscious realms of heavenly peace,
Below, the Inconscient's sullen dim abyss,
Between, behind our life, the deathless Rose...
World after coloured and ecstatic world
Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany.
Sri Aurobindo tells us that even in our mortal existence we can be visited by touches of those worlds, but the fullness of the Deathless Rose is beyond. This does not run counter to the suggestions in the poem we are studying. However, what we have in this poem is a certain sheer supremacy of the Rose: the "Rose of God" is the "far unseen epiphany" itself and not merely "the heavens of the ideal Mind". And we have also a fusion, as it were, of the death-less Rose with the deathless Flame whose kingdoms are said to be "mighty" as distinguished from those that are "lovely". Our poem, though presenting the Divine under the Rose-aspect, evi-dently exceeds the distinction drawn in the passages of Savitri: it takes us to a summit Reality which is the All — Eternity itself directly meeting us in the form of the Rose.
We should guess that metaphysically the Yeatsian Rose, whe-ther visioned in the deeps of the heart or elsewhere in a vaster pervasion —
Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!
in the poem "The Rose of Battle" and
Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose
in "The Secret Rose", cannot be the summit Reality. Beauty is not an Ultimate. Along with Love, it is an expression of Delight. Does
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not Sri Aurobindo say in The Synthesis of Yoga, "the general power of Delight is Love and the special mould which the joy of love takes is the vision of beauty."1 Divine Bliss is the fundamental which can give rise to Beauty as well as to Love in their highest modes. Ancient Indian spirituality recognised three Ultimates fused into a unity: Sat-Chit-Ananda — Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Everything else arises as expressions of these three-in-one. No doubt, any expression of them can be figured as primal and final for a particular purpose. Poets would be naturally inclined to look on Beauty as the supreme, the Bliss seen as coming to a focus of perfect form, an eternal Rose, in relation to the created world of forms. But Sri Aurobindo has evidently not followed such an inclination. Even Bliss, which is one of the three Ultimates, has not been exclusively chosen for the Rose-vision, for we have altogether five divine aspects presented equally under the figure of the God-Rose.
What exactly Sri Aurobindo had in view is made clear in a reply to a sadhak's question. Parichand asked: "Does the rose of all flowers most perfectly and aptly express the divine ecstasies or has it any symbolic allusion in the Veda or the Upanishad?" Sri Aurobindo answered: "There were no roses in those times in India — roses came with the Mahomedans from Persia. The rose is usually taken by us as the symbol of surrender, love etc. But here it is not used in that sense, but as the most intense of all flowers it is used as symbolic of the divine intensities — Bliss, Light, Love etc." (2.1.1935)
It is in the fitness of things that, though in this poem Bliss is put on a par with other intensities, it is set first among them, for in Indian mystical thought Ananda is the fount of all creation. Not from any need, any lack, does the Divine manifest the universe, but from His fullness of joy and that is why the universe is re-garded as his lila, the play of His own creative possibilities. This Ananda at play, constituting the God-Rose, is vivified for us by Sri Aurobindo against a background which he terms "the sapphires of heaven". Try to visualise an illimitable stretch of unbroken bright blue — the supreme Ineffable shining far and aloof like a cloudless sky, the Absolute lost in the heaven of Its own self. Then see the burst of the primal Form like a flower out of formlessness, a
1. On Yoga, Vol. 1 , p. 675.
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vermilion Rose standing out in an incandescence of Bliss from the sapphires of that self-absorbed heaven and holding a multiplicity of self-expression. Seven are said to be the ecstasies blended in that Bliss and each ecstasy contributes to the Rose a tinge of its own. The sevenfold self-expression has a full flower-aspect and a growing bud-aspect. The flower-flush is the Nameless Absolute in its passion of manifestation in the superhuman azure above. The bud-glow is the same Absolute manifesting as the mystical Name, the Divinity relating its miracle-flame to the human heart and leaping up there, a progressive perfection, in answer to that heart's cry for happiness.
A semi-parallel to the two opening lines and to a couple of phrases in the rest of the stanza is found in a passage in Savitri:
An all-revealing, all-creating Bliss
Seeking for forms to manifest truths divine,
Aligned to their significant mystery
The gleams of the symbols of the Ineffable
Blazoned like hues upon a colourless air
On the white purity of the Witness Soul.
These hues were the very prism of the Supreme,
His beauty, power, delight creation's cause.
The background here is white and not blue, but all the rest appears to have an affinity to the overture of our poem and when the Bliss-revealed and Bliss-created hues blazoning forth the Ineffable are said to be the Supreme's very prism — that is, something which breaks white light into its component rainbow-colours — we seem to have a manifestation "fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven". Still, there is a dissimilarity. We must not only ask why the ecstasies are said to be seven: we have also to inquire what exactly they are. To a part of the second question Sri Aurobindo has given an answer, again elicited by Parichand who had thought in terms of different kinds of ecstasies. Sri Aurobindo wrote back: "No, it is not seven kinds, but seven levels of Ananda that are meant by the ecstasies." The nature of the levels remains unspecified. We are left to speculate about it no less than about the number.
Even as far back as the Rigveda we find seven a sacred number. It answers to a truth of mystical experience, a truth recorded in many languages and not just in Sanskrit. But the Rigveda, though
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giving prominence to this number, does not confine its numerology to seven: what is most often spoken of as seven is also at times counted as five, eight, nine, ten and twelve. So, whether we take up seven or another number would depend somewhat on our line of approach and our frame of reference. But perhaps the mysti-cism proper to Bliss demands seven rather than any other number. It cannot be for a merely poetic reason that both here and in the Savitri-passage about the spiritual Bliss this particular number is involved. However, I believe that over and above mystical truth there must be in poetry an artistic justification for such a choice. The mysticism of Bliss must be rendered artistically inevitable. In the Savitri-lines the prism-image is an inevitable felicity after the Witness Soul's "white purity". In our poem, what is the corres-ponding aptness of association?
The blue background hardly calls for a sevenfold spectrum. Though we may argue that a rainbow always hangs against the sky's blue, surely there is no necessary connection between this azure and that iridescence? Besides, there is a difference between the colour-suggestion of the Savitri-lines and that of ours. The ecstasies in the latter, though seven like the prism-hues, cannot be thought of as running into all the shades of the rainbow: simply vermilion is set before us against the sapphires and the seven tinges have to be fiery shades of this one single hue. So the background need not be the white which is required for the rain-bow-spectrum: the blueness of the background is no anomaly, and we must look for another artistic justification than that arising from the background colour. I submit that the justification is to be found in what the seven ecstasies vermilionly dynamise and what the sapphires hold static. Artistically, the ecstasies are inevitably seven because "seven" rhymes most proportionately with "heaven". "Eleven" too is a rhyme, but it is not quite propor-tionate: the word has an extra syllable at the start. Sri Aurobindo's context, from the purely artistic point of view, demands no more than a suggestion of mystic multiplicity, and the word he has employed serves best that suggestion. For, whatever truth shines out here from ancient esoteric vision in general and from spiritual Bliss-experience in particular becomes inevitable in terms of art by the logic of exactly proportionate rhyme.
Can we say with some probability what "seven" levels Sri Aurobindo may have meant? In reference to the ancient Indian
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scriptures, he has explained this number by a scheme of planes diversely distinguished at different historical periods. In the most popular version the number denoted the three transcendental planes of Sat (Being), Chit (Consciousness), Ananda (Bliss), the three cosmic planes of Swar (Mind), Bhuvar (Life), Bhur (Matter) and the intermediate plane of Vijnana or Mahas (Truth-Con-sciousness, Supermind, Gnosis) which links the higher triplicity to the lower and formulates in its own transcendence the archetypal cosmos. On every plane there is a sevenfold existence with one term or another in the forefront and the rest subordinate. The phrase "ecstasies seven" is itself Vedic (sapta ratnani) and perhaps the ecstasies in the poem are kindled by the characteristics of the seven planes. Then the principle of Bliss may be taken as holding quintessentially the sustaining rapture-throbs of all the six other principles in a hierarchy based on its own fundamental ecstatic nature. But the poem does not specifically build its significance on a sevenfold chord, it has a fivefold harmony, and the constituents of the harmony are not distinct planes of existence. So here it may be better for us to remain with the mysticism of the poem's metaphysics than to probe the metaphysics of its mysticism.
As regards the fivefold harmony, it is interesting to note that, while the Rose of God is addressed as Bliss, Light, Power, Life and Love, it is invoked first to "leap up in our heart of human-hood", then to "live in the mind of our earthhood", next to be "ablaze in the will of the mortal", still next to "transform the body of the mortal" and, finally, again to accomplish a leaping up connected with the heart, though now the appeal is:
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss.
The heart is brought in twice: the poem opens with it and rounds off with it. One may object that the second heart is not the same as the first and that Sri Aurobindo means simply the very core of what the Rose of Love is asked to arise from. But is it possible to take this heart as a mere metaphor? Surely not. Love is too obviously a thing of the heart in a non-metaphorical sense. Be-sides, the first stanza and the last have too many resemblances for the second heart to be metaphorical. In the former we have "ecstasies", in the latter we have "rapture". Similarly, "fire-passion" corresponds to the earlier "fire-sweet" and "passion-
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flower". "Miracle" and "flame" are matched by "the home of the Wonderful" and "beatitude's kiss". The very word "beatitude" recalls the word "Bliss". And a general eye-catching sign of the essential affinity of the two and consequently of the two hearts is the opening line in either stanza: on the one hand the words about the Rose of Bliss —
... vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven —
and on the other the phrase about the Rose of Love —
... a blush of rapture on Eternity's face.
A blush can well be defined as a vermilion stain and when this stain is, as the next line shows, a tinge of ecstasy, it is nothing save a blush of rapture. Psychologically, Bliss and Love are connected with each other and both are connected with Beauty, as we have already seen from The Synthesis of Yoga. Sri Aurobindo also says: "Love is the power and passion of the divine self-delight and without love we may get the rapt peace of its infinity, the absorbed silence of the Ananda, but not its absolute depth of richness and fullness. Love leads us from the suffering of division into the bliss of perfect union, but without losing that joy of the act of union which is the soul's greatest discovery and for which the life of the cosmos is a long preparation. Therefore to approach God by love is to prepare oneself for the greatest possible spiritual fulfilment."1 If Bliss is the fount of creation and is the immediate substance of Beauty, it is by the passion of Love that it creates the object of Beauty and, by loving this object, knows itself most intensely and most profoundly with the utter richness and fullness which the poem calls "ruby depth of all being". And, when it is self-expressed as a cosmic multiplicity, the play of Love is funda-mentally the secret of the self-expression, the secret which in our evolutionary universe emerges slowly and by degrees. Sri Aurobindo has written: "A supreme divine Love is a creative Power and, even though it can exist in itself silent and unchangeable, yet rejoices in external form and expression and is not condemned to be a speech-less and bodiless godhead. It has even been said that creation itself
1. On Yoga, Vol. 1, p. 623.
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was an act of love or at least the building up of a field in which Divine Love could devise its symbols and fulfil itself in act of mutuality and self-giving and, if not the initial nature of creation, this may well be its ultimate object and motive."1 Bliss is the original movement of the Divine in which Love is implicit, Love is the Divine's final movement by which Bliss grows most explicit. They are essentially a single process with two actions: what is at work may be looked upon as the One whom Sri Aurobindo hails in Savitri:
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the worlds,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride,
binding the Supreme to earth, and whom he also names
The Mother of all godheads and all strengths
Who, mediatrix, binds earth to the Supreme.
Not that the "heart" of the last stanza is exactly the same as the "heart" of the first: there is a shade of difference, and we shall deal with it. But the second heart is far from being just a metaphor and the poem does come full circle by beginning with the Rose of Bliss and concluding with the Rose of Love. Before we deal with the shade of difference we must understand why the Roses of Light and Power and Life are put in between. Originally, Divine Bliss brings forth the cosmos by a certain conceptive and regulative principle which converts the free multiplicity-in-unity of that crea-tive Ananda into an ordered pattern of what we may term idea-realities seen and selected out of it: a process of Knowledge and a process of Will, a Truth-vision and a Truth-organisation come into play in order to project and establish in various related centres and steady cosmic rhythms the contents of the All-Delight. Anything deserving to be termed a universe, whether it be an archetypal universe for ever perfect or one like ours in which perfection is hidden, needs a guiding Wisdom-sight and an executive Wisdom-force to guard it from lapsing into a teeming amorphousness. Thus there must be a Rose of Light and a Rose of Power. Conversely, when the creative Bliss has to blossom fully in a human existence
1. Ibid.
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which develops from an apparent absence of it, the budding of this Ananda in the heart of humanhood must call into play the Rose of Light, the great Wisdom-bloom, the golden Mystery, to act in our mentality as the Seer held like a guest in marvellous Yogic hours and directing with sunlike Truth-knowledge the growth of the supreme Ecstasy. But Truth-knowledge is not enough: the diamond-radiant Truth-power must be there within our will to organise what is luminously visioned and to set forth masterfully its own plan and to work out an image of the immortal Light by destroying the circumambient darkness of-Ignorance.
What about the Rose of Life? If we may go by the suggestions in the poem, it is not something unrelated to the Roses of Power, Light and Bliss. It is characterised as divine Desire that has a smiting drive and comes incarnate: it is also a multiform move-ment of colourful collectivity and a creator of concordances in a Time-existence made deathless. The smiting drive towards death-less incarnation connects up directly with the infinite force and might and the piercing diamond halo spoken of in the preceding stanza, about the Rose of Power, as well as with the "image of immortality" there. It joins up indirectly with the sun that is the Rose of Light, the intensity of gold inseparable from the mystery of Divine Wisdom and justifying the appeal to that Wisdom to "live" in our mind. The multiform movement of colourful collec-tivity and concordance harks back to the seven-tinged fire-sweet-ness of the Rose of Bliss. But what the Rose of Life brings is outward action, concrete achievement. It translates the Truth-will into the Truth-deed, the Truth-vision into the Truth-contact, the Bliss-passion and the Bliss-multiplicity into enjoyment of substan-tial grasp and embodied growth. The concretisation of various centres and the dense touching activity among them so that a complex cosmos may be most objectively real — these necessities are served only by the Rose of Life.
From this Rose to the Rose of Love the transition is natural. Desire, while on one side it is akin to Will-power, is on the other side akin to Love. It is not only a drive of outward achievement: it is also a longing to seize and possess with pleasure. But it knows only how to expand and take: the movement towards concrete growth of one centre in relation to other centres of being is incomplete if the expansion is not also by self-giving, a concrete happy growth by lovingly passing into others and achieving a
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multiple unification. The Bliss-passion and the Bliss-multiplicity are thus fulfilled and the original Ananda leads back with the Roses of Light, Power and Life to itself through the Rose of Love.
So we return to the problem of the two hearts — our heart of humanhood and the heart that yearns and sobs from the abyss of Nature until the Rose of Love arises from it to
The former heart cannot be quite separated from the latter, since in us Nature herself has become human. The human heart is the top, as it were, of the heart whose bottom goes down to the darkest base of material existence. The abysmal heart must be some power of feeling that is not confined to man but resides as an upward-yearning ache in the very depths of Matter from which all living things have evolved — a power of feeling which is Nature's counterpart of Supernature's "ruby depth of all being" and which must be there in man's own depths and of which his heart of humanhood must be the frontal expression. The heart of human-hood, our emotional being, is in us the meeting-place between the mind-consciousness and the life-consciousness, it is the. centre of our normal nature: whatever individual self or soul we may have is likely to be seated hereabouts. Intellectuals may enthrone the mind as the individual self; but we may cheekily ask an intellec-tual: "Who says the soul is the mind?" He will answer, "I say so", and, while answering, he will thump the centre of his chest and never the middle of his forehead to indicate himself! Sri Aurobindo tells us that the true soul of us is hidden behind our emotional being whose physical counterpart is in the centre of our chest. He calls it the psyche or psychic being which is in its essence a spark of the Divine. This spark came originally from the highest world into the night of material Nature and from that abyss kept yearning towards God and rose through various organisations of matter to its present level where it has developed a human in-strument: it had during its lesser development in the past a sub-human instrument and shall have in its future greater development a superhuman one.
Its general character is "sweetness and light" and its natural turn is towards the Good, the True, the Beautiful; but, says Sri
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Aurobindo,1 "it is the divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine that is its spur, its goal..." Sri Aurobindo2 continues: "It lifts the being towards a transcendent Ecstasy and is ready to shed all the downward pull of the world from its wings in its uprising to reach the One Highest; but it calls down also this transcendent Love and Beatitude to deliver and transform this world of hatred and strife and division and darkness and jarring Ignorance. It opens to a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an intense and immense will for the good of all, for the embrace of the World-Mother enveloping or gathering to her her children, the divine Passion that has plunged into the night for the redemption of the world from the universal Ignorance." In the last phrase we have the rationale of the Love-Rose's arising from Nature's abyss: it is Divine Love, the "fire-passion of Grace", that has made a holocaust of itself by plunging into that abyss as the world-redeemer, and through the psychic being's yearning that has all the ache of this abyss within it the Rose of Love whose supreme existence is in Eternity shall manifest in earth and beatify no less than beautify our life.
Here two more quotations from Sri Aurobindo will be apt. "A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it. In that fire all the emotions are compelled to cast off their grosser elements and those that are undivine per-versions are burned away and the others discard their insuffi-ciencies, till a spirit of largest love and a stainless divine delight arises out of the flame and smoke and frankincense. It is the divine love which so emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man and all creatures in an active universal equality, will be more potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be. It is this poured out into acts that could alone create a harmony in the world and a true unity between all its creatures; all else strives in vain towards that end so long as Divine Love has not disclosed itself as the heart of the delivered manifestation in terres-trial Nature."3 What "all else" — mind, life-force, physical con-sciousness — would do without the psyche is well driven home by Sri Aurobindo: "Instead of a Divine Love creator of a new heaven
1.Ibid., Vol. I, p. 177.
2.Ibid., pp. 1 77-78.
3.Ibid., pp. 187-188.
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and a new earth of Truth and Light, they would hold it here prisoner as a tremendous sanction and glorifying force of sublima-tion to gild the mud of the old earth and colour with its rose and sapphire the old turbid unreal skies of sentimentalising vital ima-gination and mental idealised chimera."1
Mark that Sri Aurobindo begins by speaking of the Divine Name and ends with speaking of the rose and sapphire of Divine Love. With them we circle back to the Rose of Bliss and its "vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven" and its "passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name."
1. Ibid., p . 189.
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TALK NINETEEN
We have done our brief best with what I have called the mystical metaphysics and psychology of Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God. Let us now glance at the sheer poetic quality of its five incantatory stanzas.
In the first stanza the first outstanding effect is: "vermilion stain." The word "stain" is a happy violence showing the passion that bursts forth as if with God's own rich blood forced through the rapt distance of the Absolute. The suggestion of "blemish" in the word adds a sublime piquancy to the passion, as if Divine Perfec-tion were being divinely sullied in a spurt of-self-abandon and self-disclosure. The next effect to catch attention is: "fire-sweet." It is an unusual combination in which we have the passing of the seen through the touched into the tasted. And to get this combination needs not only a fusion of the senses but also their turning subtle to concretise the realities of inner experience. On the non-mystical level, that experience may be romantic fervour or idealistic enthu-siasm. Or it may be creative art-frenzy: have we not Hopkins writing of "Sweet fire, the sire of Muse..."? On the mystical level, it is the contact of the Divine, the communion with the Eternal, bringing an all-enkindling all-consuming joy in which the separa-tive ego is lost in an infinite radiance. Besides being remarkable in itself, "fire-sweet" is very much in place where it stands. It con-centrates at the same time the warm violence of the words "ver-milion stain" and the opulent ardency of the next phrase "seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven". It is a grip-point between the two and leads from the one to the other. This other phrase also is arresting. Here the operative term is "seven-tinged". If merely "tinged" were used, the "ecstasies seven" would surely indicate the variety of the tingeing, but the impression would miss the intense colour-impact as well as the intense multiplicity. Although only seven the ecstasies are said to be, we feel as if they were seven times seven and as many times flushed.
The entire last line,
Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name,
is splendid. As my remarks in the previous Talk must have made it clear, the designation "passion-flower" here has nothing to do
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with the genus of plants whose flower is taken in Europe to suggest the instruments of Christ's Passion — that is, Christ's suffering on the cross. I spoke of the flower-flush which is the Nameless Abso-lute in its passion of manifestation in the superhuman azures above and I contrasted it to the bud-glow which is the same Absolute manifesting as the mystical Name, the Divinity relating its miracle-flame to the human heart and leaping up there, a progressive perfection, in answer to that heart's cry for happiness. What endows the first half of the expression with a striking felicity is the linking of passion with the Nameless: we realise that the full flowering of the Absolute in the Rose of Bliss is only the bringing out of an intensity existing in some inconceivable manner in the very being of That which seems infinitely aloof. There is also a challenge to the imagination by the Nameless getting called a flower and the Name a bud. And in both halves of the line the use of "Nameless" and "Name" in connection with the floral image creates a rich yet elusive mysticism which is most haunting. The predominant lip-rhythm — p, m, b, m and again m — helps to suggest not only the opening of something closed but also the mouthlike objects that are the very theme — the vermilion flower and bud. In the second stanza, there are
Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing and
Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour —
two excellent lines in reference to the divine original whose imper-fect translation is our mental thought and which has to make this thought no longer a translation but a transparence of the "great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being" (another phrase which is excellent poetry conjuring up by its long ea and oo and e as well as by its heavy consonantal accumulations — gr, sd, mbl, ts, ng — the presence itself of the high-hung massive flower spoken of). The former line pictures very emphatically what Mind is in its origin. In its true form Mind is no mere thinker, no dealer in abstractions from outside the reality of things. The archetypal Mind is a self-existent Light, the clear and pure depth of a dynamic vision and, as
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shown by the succeeding phrase asking the Rose of Light to live in the mind of our earthhood, it is capable of palpitant activity. Both when it is called a Rose of Light and when designated a "golden mystery" and asked to flower in earth's mentality, we understand that it is a power of Truth that is also a power of Beauty. Coming as such, it enters the time-movement with the warmth and inti-macy of a beloved guest. The Divine Mind is Wisdom, an intuitive illumination measuring out and connecting rightly, happily, harmo-niously according to the essence of each detail and the essence of the ensemble without which the details have no final significance. That Wisdom is a great golden bloom of mystery — a sovereign and unerring insight is the mysterious gold of this great bloom, an intense loveliness and a creative artistry are the bloomed greatness of this gold that is a mystery. The Wisdom on the summits of being has all Plato and Hegel in it, every analytic acuteness, every synthetic sweep those master-philosophers possessed, but it has also a direct Seerhood far beyond their brains: it is free from the obscurities of the time-process, it is a head crowned with a Sun. The picture in the phrase about the head of the Timeless is start-ling in its splendour: the poetry of it brings almost a bodily feeling of a supraphysical yet not abstract or tenuous experience.
In the third stanza, the most gripping verbal turns in my opinion are "damask force of Infinity" and "thy diamond halo piercing the night". The adjective "damask" carries out a double function. Its obvious significance is "red" and it takes our thought to the variety of rose known as "Damask Rose" and thus proves itself apt for characterising the Rose of God. But it does not only mean "coloured like the Damask Rose". That variety of rose came originally from Damascus, a city especially celebrated for its steel sword-blade with a wavy surface-pattern in it, and the adjective also signifies a resemblance to such a blade. The extraordinariness of the Divine Force, its quality of being most beautiful and most cutting-keen, is caught in the adjective. The phrase about the diamond halo is extremely apt too. "Diamond" is suggestive both of sheer white luminosity and of intense pure strength that masters everything: the diamond is the most brilliant and the hardest substance we know of. Nothing can be a greater piercer of "night" than a diamond halo radiating from a Rose of Power. And we may fittingly visualise the piercing as made by rays like innumerable Damascus sword-blades shooting their sheen all around.
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The fourth stanza grips us first by "smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire". In the vivid violence of "smitten purple" we find the innate impetuosity of the divine Desire that is self-driven as by a torture of delight and we find the burning pressure and irresistible impact this Desire would bring in getting itself incarnated, becoming substanced and shaped into flesh. Purple, to occult sight, is the colour of the Life-Force, but the phrase under scrutiny has even a practical appositeness: if you smite any part of your body you will see a purple patch on the skin! The same stanza arrests us next with "colour's lyre", a turn of phrase suggestive of colour growing a sound-power, artistic vision growing a mantra, Divine Beauty capable of converting into a rhythmic whole whatever it touches and tinges with its passionate joy. The phrase prepares by a packed symbol the poetic ground for the appeal in the next line:
Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme.
Perhaps the word "rhyme" is meant to convey not only a rhythmic whole but also a harmony answering in the manifestation below to the epiphany above. And the position of the word at the line-end, where rhyming is done in poetry, endows it with a finely realistic gesture, so that the point is made with a recognisable concreteness and finality.
The last stanza gives three memorable locutions. First is "a blush of rapture on Eternity's face". The word "face" is the right expressive step forward after the poet has spoken in the fourth stanza of divine Desire becoming embodied, just as the word "incarnate" there is the right expressive step after the "icon" of the third stanza and just as "icon" is the right expressive step after the second stanza's "seeing" and just as "seeing" is the right expressive step after the "fire-sweet" self-experience with which in the first stanza ecstatic passion goes forth to create. A locution of great felicity also is "ruby depth of all being". The whole richness of mystical Love is in "ruby depth": the richness would not be mystical enough if "crimson" or "carmine" or "scarlet" or any other equivalent of "red" were used. There are three reasons why they would fall short. The first is phonetic and this itself has a threefold aspect. The initial vowel in "ruby" is a long oo-sound
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evoking a sense of inwardness in tune with the noun "depth" which is qualified by this adjective. The adjective has a labial consonant akin to the p of "depth" and identical with the b of "being": a unity is established by this triple consonance as if the depth of all being could be nothing so aptly as "ruby". Then there is the second syllable "by" with a short sound anticipating and preparing the long "be" of "being", thus relating the adjective to the very starting-point of the being whose depth it qualifies. All this is the phonetic felicity involved. The second reason is the concreteness given to the depth by an adjective made from the name of a precious stone: not merely redness is here but a tangible object saving the depth from striking us as an abstraction arti-ficially daubed over with a colour-epithet. Justice is done to the substantiality of spiritual experience. Thirdly, the ruby is a pre-cious stone found not on earth's surface but far underground: in addition to an inward-pointing sound harmonising with the rest of the phrase and in addition to a colourful concreteness true to spirituality, the adjective carries a direct association of depth.
Now we come to the final phrase that is outstanding in a poem of uninterrupted precision of imaginative language:
An exceedingly moving expression is here, charged with a pro-found sweetness of pathos. The r common to "Arise" and "heart" and "yearning" make, in combination with prominent long vowels, the first half of the expression one whole of clear liquidity melodiously surging up: a sense of welling tears is exquisitely conveyed. The s
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
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and the art of Virgil's
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt,
which C Day Lewis has englished:
Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience.
But Sri Aurobindo has a language of profounder implication. Apart from that implication which we have already dealt with when expounding the mystical metaphysics and psychology of the poem, there are one or two points about the effective interplay of the meaning of certain words. "Arise" becomes intense by con-trast to "abyss"; and what is asked to arise — the rapture-blushed Rose of Love — gets its intensity from "sobs": a sob too arises, it is a sound that comes up from the heart's yearning, and now instead of it the God-Rose is asked to bring up its rapture-blush.
Everywhere in Rose of God we have a language that is not only profound but also life-packed, as language should be when it attempts the revelation of spiritual reality. It can be simple but with a direct stroke and not with an easy-going fluency, or it can be rich but with a density of semi-occult semi-physical vision and not with a loose decorativeness of intellectual or emotional stuff coupled with pleasing images. The spiritual style simple is in: "outbreak of the Godhead in man". Just one word is enough to bring a beautiful energy from within, going straight to its goal without. It is also in: "beatitude's kiss." Here too one word gathers up all the piercing intimacy of beatitude: a word like "touch" or even "clasp" would not give that intimacy. And, fur-ther, "kiss" is very appropriate because sobbing has been men-tioned before it: the mouth is involved in both sobbing and kissing: life which is a sob of Nature becomes a kiss of Supernature. The spiritual style rich is in phrases like "vermilion stain" and "Sun on the head of the Timeless", which exert an audacious pictorial pressure on us.
I may close my survey by saying that each of the two sides in every stanza — the high above that is for ever and the down below that has to be — imposes its significances upon our spiritual sense not only by vivid words mystically visionary but also by an inner
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tone massively musical. And it is because of this tone that we have brought in the poem under the class of symphonic melopoeia.
However, it is a poem which could easily be classed as phano-poeia because of the abundance of its imagery. And, as such, it would belong to the highest revelatory order, the phanopoeic counterpart of the highest incantatory in melopoeia. And its double nature may be said to be indicated by the very character and potency ascribed to the Rose of God. That Rose is apostro-phised as "red icon of might" and "image of immortality" as well as invoked to
A comprehensive yet brief summing up of the simultaneously phanopoeic and melopoeic beauty of the piece is in the phrase already quoted: "colour's lyre."
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