On Poetry
THEME/S
III
1
Every poet is in essence a Platonist. No poet but feels he is serving a sacred mission beyond his own self, the mission of some perfect beauty waiting to be revealed. He may be as poignantly personal and fired with the body's hunger as Sappho and Catullus, yet the urge to his lyrical self-expression is not merely the joys and griefs of a personal libido: it is also an aspiration for a flawless magic of verbal form. Sappho and Catullus were not lovers grown vocal and nothing more: they were pre-eminently idealists of speech, their passion was for an irreproachable word-music and they perpetuated their loves in a language whose phrases and rhythms gave their personal desires a faultless mould wrought by a functioning of the senses, the feelings and the thoughts as though some concealed godhead were taking body through each poem. By answering that mysterious call of inspiration and not just the voice of Atthis or Lesbia, Sappho and Catullus wrote poetry. Whether they were intellectually conscious of serving a divinity in which they believed, is immaterial. All that was necessary for art was that they should be conscious of an overwhelming urge to fashion a piece of utter and unsurpassable beauty.
We have actually in Lucretius a poet who was an atheist and yet embodied the godlike presence which makes poetry the revelation that it is. Such a paradox is possible because inspiration is from beyond the machinery of logic and does not depend on the intellect's arguing for God and against God: if there is the right susceptibility in the depths of a man's nature, it rushes through, no matter how averse to religious belief may be his outward mind. The unreligious concepts of the mind it seizes as though with superhuman hands and builds out of them "topless towers" of loveliness. What is more, it envelops
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these concepts with a sort of cosmic grandeur that only differs from the infinitude haunting the religious spirit by being dark instead of luminous, an empire of everlasting night and death instead of an empire of everlasting day and life. Lucretius's summum bonum is the acceptance of that unconscious eternity to which our flesh returns after the brief interval of living, the immense inanimate within which our few feverish years seem to make a small noise and cease to be. A profound awe, a solemn sense of universal Nature blindly and inexorably at work in its gigantic reaches of space and time, pervade his philosophical epic like a religion manque, even as the presence of ari "unweeting" power, absolute and endless in "crass casualty", is perceived in the world of Thomas Hardy. The atheisms of Lucretius and Hardy are really special forms, heroic or morbid according to temperament, of the mystical belief all ages have had in an utter Unknown that rules above the desires and imaginings of men the totality of things: the Greeks called it Ananke, the Fate and the Necessity that is greater even than the Gods. Steeped in the conception of that dark Supreme, poets like Hardy and Lucretius create their masterpieces and disclose in spite of themselves the real origin of inspiration. It is also significant that even atheists like them break forth on occasion into chants about living forces more than human, one divine Spirit or many divine or at least supernatural presences. Thus Lucretius at his most inspired hails as all-fostering Venus, "delight of Gods and men," the procreative energy that is abroad in Nature; he invokes it as a Goddess to aid his exploration of "the secret ways of things". Hardy brings in a whole troop' of presiding powers, spirits of pity and irony pressing onward from above the Napoleonic drama depicted in The Dynasts. An instinct of the true source of the magnificence that is poetic expression appears to have compelled both the Roman poet and the English to conjure up an atmosphere of the Divine and the Superhuman around their highest moments, an instinct aligning itself with the inward impulsion that led Homer to appeal to his Thea and Milton to cry "Sing Heavenly Muse." A sense of the mysterious Divine is always leaping out in
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this manner through great poetry. In general, it is the unformulated background whose presence is felt primarily in the perfection of word and rhythm making a sheer absolute, an unsurpassable ultimate of beauty which can be perceived as much in what is intellectually understood to be an atheistic passage as in one that yields mystical meaning. Because of the touch of this absolute and ultimate we respond to poetry as to a statement of incontrovertible truth, an expression that compels belief as if by a God's dictate, even though what is stated and expressed may run quite counter to our own accepted notions about the universe. We may be scientifically-minded and see nothing beyond a swirl of electrons; still when A.E. sounds his crystal note of the Undying Ones that are not clay, we feel caught up into a realm of crowned souls, a world of wizardry uncharted by Planck and Schroedinger. And paradoxical though it may seem, our firmest faith in A.E.'s occult "Candle of Vision" will not drive back the shadow that falls upon us from Housman's exquisite agnosticism: like a final truth the omnipotence of the dust encompasses us through his lyrical inevitabilities of despair and denial. Every mood that finds faultless poetic Form lords it over us like a deity. What invests it with that gospel-glow is not merely our willingness to make-believe. The true aesthetic response is no playful assent to a pleasing verbal legerdemain; it is a seizure of the being by a magic and a mystery that has no scar of defect, it is a surrender by us, willy-nilly, to an assault from some realm of archetypes. In order to realise the assault, we do not need a Gabriel's trumpet like D. H. Lawrence's cry to the Mexican eagle:
You never look at the sun with your two eyes.
Only the inner eye of your scorched broad breast
Looks straight at the sun.
Poetry in a subdued style will serve equally. If we take those lines from W. H. Davies's poem to the moon —
Though there are birds that sing this night
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With thy white beams across their throats —
it is inadequate to say we have merely a sense of pleasure produced by significant sounds arranged in a cunning pattern. We may even call that pleasure, as I. A. Richards does, a rest, a balance, an integration of our impulses so that they are no more in conflict among themselves. We still leave unmeasured the effect of Davies's subtly beautiful picture of the moon inspiring the nightingales. Indeed there seems no point in speaking of beauty if the terms "pleasure, rest, balance, integration" are enough. Beauty in its full and final meaning implies a Form through which some absolute perfection impinges on us. Virginia Woolf, in her biography of Roger Fry, quotes from a letter by that famous art-critic to Robert Bridges: "One can only say that those who experience the aesthetic emotion feel it to have a peculiar quality of 'reality' which makes it a matter of infinite importance in their lives. Any attempt I might make to explain this would probably land me in the depths of mysticism." Modern art-critics fight shy of those depths, yet they cannot help hovering on their verge. Even Richards, with his equilibrium of impulses, is pointing to a quality in art which lifts us for the moment above the turmoil of want and desire, striving and seeking and frustration, and which gives the feeling of an ultimate wherein we can repose with a positive peace distinguished from inactive irresolution or unconsciousness: in short, a quality which is a kind of second cousin to that of mystical experience. Unless we describe poetry as a window opening through Form on the Divine, on a realm of archetypes, we shall never convey accurately the secret of its spell.
Yes, through Form and not Matter. But by Form we must not understand exclusively the turn of phrase and the movement of rhythm: the language-mould is all in all but it comes fused with a cast of consciousness — a form of vision and a form of emotion. Metrical speech without that vivid cast is the ghost of poetry. Neither does mere substance of consciousness, however weighty or profound, make on us the art-impact that is revelation: the consciousness has to take a particular pat-
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tern before it can become the poetic word. The philosophy of Epicurus is the substance, the matter, of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, but not till it has been stamped with the Lucretian sight and feeling, no less than shaped into the Lucretian word and rhythm, is the force of the archetypal received by us. Form in that fourfold sense has the archetypal touch which Matter by itself lacks just as much as do emptily resounding language and mechanically modulated metre. And it is because Form is the priest of the poetic revelation that all substance of consciousness, even the most profane, can be brought by the poet to stand before us like a godhead which will brook no "Nay" to its utterance. What is the source of poetry's convincing charm? Not the ideas expressible by the intellect and endlessly debatable by the logical faculty but a gleam and image, a hint and echo of some reality living hidden from us in its own self-world of absolute loveliness and holding there a manifold harmony of truth which our ideas cut up into a thousand conflicting aspects. As soon as flawless Form is achieved, that hidden reality shines out; it cares not if the Matter of a poem be spiritual or secular, God-affirming or God-denying, covered with holy incense or reckless rose-leaves. If somehow the path of inspiration keeps clear in a poet, the archetypes journey along it and the mysterious Divine trysts with the human.
Explaining Art as a journey and a tryst by the Highest, we are led — while we depreciate by no jot the perfection of poems that are concerned with things mortal — to prepare a special place for the lyra mystica. For, if the archetypal touch is everywhere through the Form of poetry, the mystic who invokes the Muse to convert his intuitions into song becomes her instrument in a double way: both Matter and Form are lit up by the archetypal. Openly, and not through themes that are no more than human, the Divine presses forward through the mystic's inspiration to lay hands on the world. Not the acme of the fictitious in the poet's mind, calling for a peak of make-believe in ours, but an immediate revealing of what is revealed remotely by other kinds of verse: this is mystical inspiration. When the Matter is remote from mysticism the poetic value gets no
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less: the Form determines that value. But provided the Form remains equally intense, a mystical immediacy in the Matter renders poetry a revelation in excelsis of the Real and the True. All great poetry has a body that is divine, but mostly the soul of it is divine with a human mask; the mystical poet's work is the unmasking of the divine spirit in that divine body.
The unmasking, however, is no simple and uniform act. Nor is it determined alone by a poet's individual style. Herbert has a religious simplicity, at once piquant and passionate; Crashaw a rich sensuousness kindling into spirituality; Donne a nervous intricate power troubling the Unknown; Vaughan a half-obscure half-bright straining beyond thought into mystical vision; Patmore a pointed polished ardour of the intellect for the veiled Wonder; Francis Thompson a restless and crowded and colourful heat of response to "the many-splen-doured Thing". All of them have flights of fine poetry, but their styles, standing out one from another, have yet a common element: the mask on the face of the Divine Spirit is diversely thinned and made translucent instead of being removed. Their unmasking is indirect. Only at rare movements something of the sheer reality shows itself. These poets have considerable vividness of mystical meaning: what they do not have enough is the language and rhythm of the mystical planes. The mystical planes are classified by Sri Aurobindo broadly as occult, psychic and spiritual. The occult language and rhythm have something of a Coleridgean, Blakean or Yeatsian stamp. They are not always instinct with the Divine, they have often a Celtic atmosphere, weird or fairylike. But when the mystical vision and emotion possess them, they transmit baffling buried heavens of Beauty like Yeats's
Throne above throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.
The psychic speech has a deeply delicate radiance moving the heart to some far sweetness or suffusing it with an exquisite
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ecstasy of God's love. Its yearning cry is heard in Blake's
Ah, sunflower! weary of Time
as well as in Geoffrey Faber's
0moon, that your light had lips and hands!
while the note of fulfilment steals into Robert Nichols's picture of "the Secret Garden" when the unseen gardener goes through it:
Humbled and hushed and happy falls each bird.
Vaughan hints the psychic plane in his image of the paradise felt by him in childhood:
That shady city of palm trees.
The spiritual inspiration, as distinguished from the occult and the psychic, has a wide-winging power: Sri Aurobindo calls it "overhead" because it arrives as if by a descent from spaces of light above the mind-level. Often it gets mixed with planes that are but mental: then its typical afflatus gets considerably subdued and comes out in no more than a few scattered breaths. Read carefully Vaughan's
Isee them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days.
My days which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmerings and decays.
The impression as a whole is of an excellent thinning and trans-lucence of the Divine's mask, but a steadier scrutiny unravels three strains of poetry. The third line is nothing save a thinking-out, an ideative statement just lifted from prose-level by a stir of sight and a musical breath. The first and last lines have
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a more felicitous, more intense articulation: still they are the imaginative mind tossing its ideas into the Unknown, theirs is not the true freedom, the large radiance, the direct throb of what is above imaginative mysticism. Only the second line of the quatrain — "Whose light doth trample on my days" — breaks somewhat loose from the tether of thought and touches a consciousness more than mental. Perhaps the really accurate description of it is not that it ceases to be thought but that its thinking is taken up into a spiritual clarity and amplitude. This is more than a thinning or translucence of the mask: it begins to remove it, though the removal is partial, just by one-fourth, we might say. Beyond this liberation from mental into spiritual thought a purer mystical intensity awaits the poet, but it is no more than once in a long while that English singers attain it. A magnificent unmasking by one-half is done by Vaughan himself:
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright.
The thing-in-itself is sensed, the spiritual mystery is mirrored in an eye from which all effort of thought has fallen away, the effort that is the mask between the human and the Divine. It may not yet be the most intimate expression of the mystical: the intimacy grows as the thought-effort falls further and further away, but here it has sunk sufficiently far to let the Spirit disclose in some super-conscious ether of keen illumination its own being-stuff through a significant symbol of the complete and the unending. We feel the power of the disclosure not only in the vision and the word but also in the rhythm. The rhythm has a vibrant wideness belonging to a consciousness that is not human though caught in language through a human medium.
Poetry packed with a mask-removing quality is holy scripture in a special way. Whatever wakes in us a feeling of the Divine is scriptural and yet there is a sense in which the ancient
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Vedas and Upanishads stand apart from the other bibles of the world. The latter have a good deal of moving God-intoxicated lyricism, also a mass of forceful God-haunted meditation, but the note of the Indian Rishis is infrequent in them as in the majority of mystical poetry written hitherto in English or for that matter any language save Sanskrit. No poet has proved a constant channel of its peculiar intensity. It is sporadic, almost accidental, in English literature. Where, however, it appears, it bears an.unmistakable halo. It may not mention even the name of God, it may speak of things that lie about us every day, and yet we recognise in it a spiritual creativity of the most puissant order. Put beside lines with a similar drift of meaning but drawn from less supernormal "planes" of consciousness, it is as if a prophet instead of his ministers, wonderfully gifted though they might be, stood before us and laid a transfiguring hand in benediction on our heads. A great minister is what we meet in Browning's
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of.
Fine poetry, this, and suggestive of the Unknown through a symbol of night; but it is the poetry of imaginative thought, it does not come sheer from a mystical plane. Harindranath Chattopadhyaya's
The silence of the midnight many-starred
has a more ample "atmospheric" touch; nevertheless, it is a touch of something splendid and secret rather than concretely mystical or spiritual. Wordsworth's much simpler line,
The silence that is in the starry sky
conveys the Unknown and the Ineffable with an intense intimacy, a state of high trance seems to be made actual, a lofty consciousness glimmering beyond mere imaginative thought makes its presence felt because both the expression and the
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rhythm come straight from a Vedic and Upanishadic source. A Rishi or a prophet is this line, the Divine in the act of unmasking.
Though not so impressive as the verse quoted from Vaughan it has a profounder vibration If Vaughan's unmasking took place in a high ether of keen illumination, Wordsworth's is part of a yet higher domain from the mystical standpoint: a more penetrating spirituality is here, not keenly illuminative so much as raptly intuitive, not shedding the Divine's radiance upon us but rather making us enter into it and dwell in its midst. What may haze for us its extraordinary revelation is precisely that entry and indwelling: the light that is above the mind is here like home, a natural and familiar thing: the line makes no "display" of the Spirit's marvellousness, it simply gives it to us with an utterly unassuming intimacy. I do not mean that the intuitive speech is always divorced from richness: it can have a rich body, particularly if it takes up an illumination and rarefies it as in another night-vision of Chattopadhyaya's:
The diamond dimness of the domed air.
It can, however, dispense with the impressive and complex, since its essence is independent of that quality. The same intuitively vibrant simplicity as in the line of Wordsworth already quoted is in the one with which he companions it:
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
Without any open declaration, it presents to us through a familiar symbol a peace of in-drawn power held by some lordly consciousness stretching wide across earth's being and into the Beyond or standing as a firm imperturbable intermediary between the terrestrial and the transcendental. Perhaps equally poetic are Lascelles Abercrombie's
Tall hills that stand in weather-blinded trances
As if they heard, drawn upward and held there.
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Some god's eternal tune,
but the direct spiritual rhythmic turn is absent. Apt and euphonious language carrying a mystically pointed thought and image is achieved by Abercrombie: what Wordsworth has done is to catch, in the very rhythm of the line, "some god's eternal tune" instead of speaking about it. The result is that the sleep he does speak of has the stuff of some god's experience while Abercrombie's weather-blinded trances are only a felicitous thought-reflection of the godlike.
It is the rhythm that most decisively distinguishes one plane of conscious being from another. For, rhythm is not just a play of ordered sound; it is the thrill of the consciousness translating itself into sound-vibration. That thrill gives us more than the mood: it gives too the psychological level on which the mood arises. And the poetic outbursts of the various levels differ not in degree but in kind. Difference in degree would imply poetic superiority and inferiority, whereas the fact is that each level can have its perfection of poetic outburst. Difference in kind enables us to see how the quotation from Wordsworth, without necessarily being superior qua poetry to that from Abercrombie, is more close to the hidden Divine by deriving its rhythm from a more spiritual plane. And it is also by a different kind of rhythm, more even than of vision and expression, that we perceive how that line of Wordsworth's is still not the intensest spirituality. The Divine is unmasked by it three-fourths and not whole. Beyond the intuitively intimate, there remains the complete identity. Poetry can descend into us from a level where the spiritual light does not merely carry us into the midst of the deific but makes us one with it. Then we have an expansion of the meaning to a supreme massiveness of immeasurable suggestion, an endlessness of overtone and undertone as though the line which seems to terminate went really sounding on from everlasting to everlasting because what it embodies is, without any mask at all, the Divine, the Deathless, the Infinite. When on a sudden a sonnet of Shakespeare's breaks into that extraordinary phrase:
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the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
our mind loses its customary bearings and flounders in a strange element we can scarcely plumb. The phrase is a grand intrusion in Shakespeare, the rhythm and rapture of another world than his tense quivering sonorities of sensation and passion. Not that those sonorities are absent or that a mystical idea deeper than any he was otherwise capable of has made its appearance. The phrase has a fathomlessness of word-suggestion and sound-suggestion other than the significant breadth and vivid plangency not only of his usual inspiration but also of lines like
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we may.
This is as penetrating in thought, the idea of it moves as puis-santly upon our pulses: what it lacks is the immense profundity and wide supernatural presence which the words about the prophetic world-soul possess. The poetry is equally perfect, yet its plane of inspiration is not quite the same as of the Dreamer of things to come. There is something in common — Shakespeare's habitual thinking with his senses and his nerves and his entrails — but, merging in it or absorbing it, an immediacy of some spiritual vastitude is there, whose vibration of consciousness is dissimilar to what is native to the thought-thrill and the passion-gusto that are Shakespeare's wont. The unmasking of the secret Divine is direct instead of indirect and the revelatory impulse is from a plane where the Spirit stands wholly bare. If we can hold the feel and rhythm of it intensely within us, we shall distinguish that utter "wholeness" from the high spirit-stuffed ideation of Frederic Myers's urge to
Leap from the universe and plunge in Thee
or Wordsworth's apostrophe to the unclouded soul of inno-
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cent clairvoyant childhood —
Thou over whom thy immortality
Broods like the Day,
as well as from that astonishing spirit-illumined line of Rimbaud's:
. Million d'oiseaux d'or, 6 future Vigueur! —
a line whose prophetic superhuman elan is perhaps just caught in the rendering:
Millions of golden birds, O vigour to come!
Shakespeare's accidental unmasking of the Divine by a Word one with some cosmic Truth-Consciousness exceeds as spiritual poetry even the large magnificence deepening into mystery that we meet in that Wordsworthian Being
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
Wordsworth seems here on the verge of the unmasking by identity; only a certain difference in the basic rhythm keeps the verse Spirit-intuitive instead of Spirit-identical. Possibly I am wrong, since it is very difficult to mark shades in a field so little explored, and Wordsworth here may be employing the accent which is at the top of the Vedic and Upanishadic grade and which the Rishis called the Mantra. There is, however, no doubt that the Mantra is uttered by a contemporary Indian poet writing in English in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram, Dilip Kumar Roy, when he coins that phrase about God's guardianship:
His sentinel love broods o'er the universe.
A modern English poet who died too young and whose work though published awaits the recognition it deserves utters it
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also through a vision of the grandiose triviality of the Cosmos in comparison to the unmanifest Divine:
This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude
Of Truth's abidingness, Self-Blissful and Alone.
It was John Chadwick, known to his friends in India as "Ar-java", who wrote those profoundly haunting lines, A disciple of Sri Aurobindo's, he drew at several places in his work from the planes which his Master is the first to embody en masse in a poetic language that stands on a par with the plenary apocalypse of the Vedas and Upanishads and surpasses it in an application of the luminous look not only to what is beyond the world and calls the soul thither but also to what the soul can call down from there to transform and fulfil earth-life.
2
Sri Aurobindo's mystical inspiration is a New Age of poetry. The New Age consists to some extent in a fuller emergence of the occult and the psychic, either pure or mingled with the mind's thought-stuff; to a greater extent in a blending of the occult, the psychic and the mysticised mental with the overhead afflatus; to the largest extent in the overhead afflatus sheer and undisguised, rising higher and higher towards the Mantra and frequently attaining it. Everywhere, Sri Aurobindo brings out living symbols from the mystical planes — a concrete contact with the Divine's presence. Even when realities that are not openly divine are viewed, the style is of a direct knowledge, direct feeling direct rhythm from an inner or upper poise: the mundane scene and the supra-mundane principalities and powers are given" their image and value and secret life-throb as realised from a consciousness aware directly of the supreme Spirit. That consciousness covers all phenomena with significances and suggestions which the mere mind cannot adequately gauge. It is necessary, therefore, for us readers to develop our
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aesthetic sense to a pitch subtler than in our normal response to poetry; else we shall often get no more than a run of disconnected flashes or, worse still, a jostle of grandiose abstractions; in either case we shall miss the concrete revelation, the living actuality. A twofold method of approach is desirable. There must be as much as possible a stilling of ourselves, an indrawn hush ready to listen to the supernormal speech; and we must help the hush to absorb successfully the new tone by reading the verse aloud. All poetry requires to be read aloud for the final force of its meaning to go home and the deepest implications to be evoked. But in Sri Aurobindo's work the ear's attention is all the more needed because we have not merely to get out of him the subtle secret of his meaning: we have also to get something which will convey to us a feel of reality without the meaning being adequately grasped by our mind. His poetry is drawn from regions so far behind or beyond the human level that the mind is frequently baffled and even when it sees the drift of the significance it fails to hold it enough to experience the concreteness of what is implied. To experience that substantiality the rhythm is of paramount help, for it makes the state of consciousness that is athrill in the poem live and vibrate within us, however difficult it may be for the intellect to pierce into that state. The substantiality, the harmony and consistency, the massed grandeur of the many-sided mystical vision and experience disclose themselves with a seizing directness when the poem is read aloud — a seizing directness which is likely on occasion to be absolutely absent if only the eye dwells on the words and notes their meaning without our letting in their haunting body of sound. The sound of mystical poetry, especially of the overhead order, is three-fourths of its efficacy: hence the old custom of audibly uttering the Mantra in order to liberate in one's being the godhead held within the words. This is not to say that spiritual poetry is glorious gibberish — it has a massive vision and an ample meaning, but the main gate of entry for these things into us is the rhythm, the sound-reflex of their hidden life-throb, their inner force of existence. Once the rhythm has transmitted to us that throb and
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that force, the eye will open wider and wider and our thought begin to shape itself according to the truth of the Spirit.
The ear's importance can be easily shown by reading a stanza like the following from Sri Aurobindo's quantitative Alcaics, Jivanamukta, first with the eye alone and then loudly:
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.
Something in the vitality of the style is felt to build for us more than a philosophical structure, yet the full lift and ecstasy get clipped, so to speak, unless we roll out the lines with a deliberate intoning. The slowly breaking suspense at the start, the sudden speeding up, the strange mixture of calm widening and intense penetrating the grave and ample revealing movement, the tremendous tranced poise — all these become a profound sensation to the soul when the words ring forth in the spaces of consciousness. A latent faculty deeper than thought and imagination is struck awake. The stresses, quantities, vowel-adjustments, consonant-combinations become instruments in the hands of an overhead inspiration to create in us a rhythm of being, an emotional vibration, a soul-stir that echo the self-experience of a divine plane. That self-experience lives most strongly in the second and fourth lines: a powerful pulsing away of mind and heart into the Divine's depth, a quiet plucking and largening out of them from human nature into the Divine's height. When these lines are made resonant by the voice, the concrete suggestions of words like "into" and "breast" and "seated" and "above" are perceived as no poetic devices but exact modes of rendering Yogic realisations.
Audible reading, repeated many times, would also tend to save us from falling foul of a poem like Thought the Paraclete, where Sri Aurobindo works into a novel quantitative scheme the experience of an upward movement of the mind as an intermediary between our consciousness and the Unknown. He
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depicts the mind as caught up into layer after layer of what is beyond, leaving behind in the consciousness here a superb calm unbounded by the brief and the finite, a sense of some ultimate Self without personal confines. The poetic expression is packed with symbols and visions straight from the spiritual planes:
The face
.Lustred, pale-blue-lined of the hippogriff,
Eremite, sole, daring the bourneless ways,
Over world-bare summits of timeless being
Gleamed; the deep twilights of the world-abyss
Failed below. Sun-realms of supernal seeing.
Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss
Drew its vague heart-yearning with voices sweet.
Hungering, large-souled, to surprise the unconned
Secrets white-fire-veiled of the last Beyond,
Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,
Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned,
Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete
Disappeared slow-singing a flame-word rune.
Self was left, lone, limitless, nude, immune.
The ordinary critic is likely to be puzzled. He cannot quite lump it with Surrealism as a chaotic transcription of the Subconscious, for there are evident a process and a denouement, but this control and guidance of the abnormal paints no picture that can be understood like Francis Thompson's gorgeous fantasy of unrest:
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
or his mightily imagined call from the Inscrutable:
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity.
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Sri Aurobindo is not mentally conceiving and visualising: he is recording realities that belong to some Supemature, without any effort to clothe his perceptions in emblems we can readily recognise from our contacts with the universe around. He is writing as a Yogi, letting spiritual facts seen in dimensions other than our universe take shape in poetry, and the poetry springs from those dimensions, throbbing with the strange tangibilities there and not throughout aided by an interpretative glow from our experience of material objects. Poetry must always be objective in order to convey a feel of actuality, but the outward world we know by our physical senses is not everything: Yoga reveals subtle senses that put us in touch with other worlds, other outwardnesses as real as those to which we are habituated and considerably divergent from them in spite of a certain correspondence between the two. The mind Lifted by Yoga towards the Eternal does not just shoot up ideas, does not just think of the Divine and imagine what the Divine must be like. It clearly separates from the body, rises as a distinct entity into a new consciousness and a series of supra-physical worlds. Passionate with God-hunger it is a living creature inwardly lit by a lust for the Eternal's empyrean, "pale-blue-lined" and wearing a symbolic form to its own inner eye according to what aspect of the consciousness has winged upward: the hippogriff — half horse and half eagle — is a form of this kind and no arbitrary futuristic figuration. And the worlds explored by that dynamic denizen of the inner being are real, concrete, objective. Sri Aurobindo transmits his experience of them to us in words charged with the very vision and vibration of the consciousness pervading those worlds. That is why the shapes and scenes are so incalculable, so bewildering — until we draw ourselves back from our habitual mind into a receptive hush and quicken that hush by reading aloud the strangely worded and strangely rhythmed lines. The rhythmical scheme is not any of the accepted metres — the stresses and the quantities are a pattern demanding all sorts of unusual word-combinations and sound-effects; the massed accents and lengths call for an abundant use of the compound, and the ne-
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cessity to hold together in short but accurate phrases the manifold grandeurs of Supenature amply justifies it. Seerhood and vitality are constant features of the style, and they possess us most forcefully through an audible reading. Whether we fully understand or no, the pictures and the sound-suggestions make an impact as of undeniable reality:
is a line of extreme subtle-sensuous energy, as is also
Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned, .
and they strike upon the aesthetic faculty in us with a splendour of poetry equal to the best of Francis Thompson and an immediacy of mystical perception more direct and concentrated than anything he could command.
A mystical immediacy akin to Thought the Paraclete' s in symbol-colour but directed towards a different end meets us in another quantitative experiment by Sri Aurobindo — Flame-Wind. Here too the mental imagination does not take the seat of honour. It comes to the fore, however, in important places as interpreter, so that the bulk of the poetry which is constituted by an excitement of the occult and a smoulder of the psychic, with widening puissances blown into them from the overhead spiritual, is not quite removed from the accent of Thompson:
A flame-wind ran from the gold of the east,
Leaped on my soul with the breath of a sevenfold noon.
Wings of the angel, gallop of the beast!
Mind and body on fire, but the heart in swoon. .
O flame, thou bringest the strength of the noon,
But where are the voices of mom and the stillness of
eve?
Where the pale-blue wine of the moon?
Mind and life are in flower, but the heart must grieve.
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Gold in the mind and the life-flame's red
Make of the heavens a splendour, the earth a blaze.
But the white and rose of the heart are dead.
Flame-wind, pass! I will wait for Love in the silent ways.
The style here joins hands in some respects with a Thompson-utterance like
I said to Dawn: Be sudden — to Eve: Be soon;
With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over
From this tremendous Lover,
and the one about Nature:
Let her, if she would owe me, Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky and show me The breasts o' her tenderness.
Where it differs is essentially in a certain directness of the symbols: Thompson, for all his power and poignance, gives the impression of trying to suggest the supernatural by similes and metaphors moulded from natural appearances, his images remain images, his "young skiey blossoms" and "blue bosom-veil of sky" are a figurative play of beautiful ideas whereas Sri Aurobindo's "pale-blue wine of the moon" and his "white and rose of the heart" come as statements of actualities, bearing directly the concreteness of some occult, psychic or spiritual truth. This difference does not lie only in the particular phrases, it is focussed in them by the light and atmosphere of the entire poem, by the plane on which it moves. With a more simple economical beauty and energy than Thompson's, the symbols of Sri Aurobindo take on a direct life, become themselves mystical states of being and consciousness instead of their hints and echoes. Thompson takes five lines to give us his Hound of Heaven:
Still with unhurrying chase,
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And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet,
And a Voice above their beat —
five lines poetically necessary for building the constant mighty accumulating pursuit, but none of them has the sheer direct supernatural impetus of Sri Aurobindo's
It may be said that Thompson's general meaning is more clear and in that sense his style is the more direct of the two. Yes, but the directness is not of the mystical species: it is nearer the intellect's explanatory method. Sri Aurobindo is not devoid of that method; no poem of his is pure Dada, in fact no poem worth the name can abolish connection between its parts and dispense with being felt as a whole by the understanding. The intellect by itself may not be able to get the full "hang", it must take the aid of the imagination, the visionary and the aesthetic powers; still, if the work has "form" it cannot be absolutely blank and chaotic in the impression made by its parts as well as by its totality on the intellect. The mind has many types of logic, it knows how to link section to section and embrace the linked sections as a single organic unit by means not always strictly argumentative a la Aristotle, it has also a Platonic dialectic, driven forward by pregnant analogies, suggestive similarities, picturesque parables in which the constructive artist with his harmonising eye and proportioning hand runs side by side with the abstract deducer. In poetry the Platonic dialectic keeps abstract deduction very much in the shade and develops the artistic sequence by devices not easily assimilable in prose: poetry often "argues" by alliteration and cadence, "clinches" by rhyme, at least by echo, and jumps from point to point by merging differences through metaphor and transferred epithet or even through transfigured punning. Its logic is more imaginative than intellectual, but logic it certainly has — a relation, a
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synthesis, a fusion, a unity. In mystical poetry of the Aurobindo-nian order this logic goes further away from the intellectual method than in the Thompsonian inspiration, and that extra distance is due to the planes from which Sri Aurobindo creates — planes of God-realisation held by his consciousness in their own substance and atmosphere instead of being reflected in normal human ignorance as happened with Thompson. Hence the mystical planes are more direct in his work than in that Catholic poet's and such a phenomenon makes for less kinship to intellectual directness since the contents of those planes are not quite like Nature and life as known to us, their behaviour is alien, their laws unexpected and the logic of their interconnection and harmony more difficult to grasp. However, it must be remembered that a greater mystical directness does not imply an inferiority in Sri Aurobindo's intellect to Thompson's: the intellect can be richer and mightier at the same time that one is more mystically direct but it will not deploy itself on its own level or cast its argumentative tendency on the poetic performance, it will surrender itself to the mystical consciousness and allow its resources and movements to be marshalled by that consciousness. Nor is the mystic's distance from intellectual directness to be confused with the complicated density or obscurity resulting from a many-strained, multi-motioned play of the intellect as in Donne, Browning and sometimes Thompson. That distance consists simply in the revelation of secret presences and experiences straight from the hidden planes which are charged with the Superhuman and the Divine — the revelation that is carried to its closest and its widest by Sri Aurobindo in the still unfinished epic growing daily under his hand — Savitri.
Flame-Wind is a sort of half-way house between the mystical poetry of the past and the unique Aurobindonian afflatus. It is not an extreme example of the naked light of the occult, the psychic, the spiritual, and its meaning is brought out with a considerable degree of reliance on the mind's ordinary method of speech. Its meaning of course, is that Sri Aurobindo is for an integral union with the Divine, a wholeness fulfilling every
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part of him: he will not rest with a sudden dynamic realisation of the Spirit-seized mind ruling the body and driving the life-impulse with a superhuman energy of thought and will, yet without those subtle delicate influences of the Divine that are received when the being is bent not only on God-knowing but also on God-loving, on growing the devotee and saint as well as the sage and prophet. This meaning, however, unfolds for all its reliance on the mind's ordinary method of speech less through a number of illustrative images concretising the ideas than through touches on our imagination from objects and beings belonging to other dimensions than the world from which a poet usually borrows his figures. The rhythm too has something of another space and time. All poetry imposes a new space and time on our world, mixing "unknown modes of being" with things that are familiar: that is why it is full of magic and mystery. Even a subtle fancy like Stephen Spender's
Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon's fluid line
suggests a strange entity living in an uncommon world interpenetrating and exceeding the outward physical and even the inward mental to which we are accustomed, but neither the meaning nor the rhythm takes us deep into the mystical spheres that are contacted in their concrete substance and form by Sri Aurobindo's poetry. That substance and form need not be always a definite symbol, a walking out into our midst by a hippogriff; it can just as well be a particular state of consciousness conveyed vividly by the impact of words plucked from the unknown and the deific, as in Sri Aurobindo's phrase:
My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight.
Before speaking of the complete and sustained outburst of this style, with its overhead uniqueness, in Savitri, it will perhaps not be out of place to look at a poem conveying the Yogic process of which a part is the coming down of the new inspiration
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from its spiritual altitudes. Descent is written in Sapphics, the only experiment in English comparable to those of Swinburne and John Addington Symonds. The classical Sapphic quatrain has in three lines a spondee and a dactyl between a single trochee at the beginning and two at the end, while the fourth line is a dactyl followed by either a spondee or a trochee. Swinburne uses often a trochaic instead of a spondaic foot and introduces a few other minor variations here and there; Symonds does likewise but he mostly keeps a spondaic close in the last line. Sri Aurobindo follows Swinburne rather than Symonds, adding however, the privilege of a more marked modulation anywhere of the dactyl in the first three lines by an anti-bacchius, cretic or molossus; at one place he substitutes their terminal trochee with a spondee and the dactyl of the last line with a cretic; at one or two points he employs elision to get his effect right. The values he ascribes to his syllables are, of course, quantitative according to the system illustrated at length in his hexameters. We have in Descent, therefore, not a strict imitation of the Greek pattern but a living response to it by English prosody without sacrificing the basic spirit and rhythm-movement of the original. Over and above technical departures there is also one in the lyrical quality which demands notice. Swinburne and Symonds retain, almost throughout, Sappho's poignant picturing tone, at once simple in expression and rich in sound-texture. Sri Aurobindo, though preserving the gorgeous-sounding yet clear-phrased power of Sappho, introduces in the poignancy and the picturisation another note which is due not alone to the theme and experience being different. Sappho was passionate in a piercingly human way of love; Sri Aurobindo the mystic and the Yogi has turned the cry of the heart towards the mystery of God, but this difference in the emotive trend need not diminish any essential warmth and indeed with an integral Yogi like Sri Aurobindo it does not; what is non-Sapphic in his verse is not the mysticising of the lyricism so much as on occasion a style that is Pindar rather than Sappho. A general Pindaresque atmosphere is not inconsistent with the Sapphic style: Pindar is intensely religious, a
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priest of the Gods, when he is not intensely secular, a celebrant of games and feasts, but that is a matter of temperament and it can express itself in a style of severe douceur, of grave delicacy, as in Simonides among the Greeks and Wordsworth among the English and as in Sappho herself at certain moments when she is more the artist conscious of self-consecration to the divine Muse than the lover shaken by the human beauty of an Anactoria. The non-Sapphic element in Sri Aurobindo's poem is not just the religious temperament of Pindar but something of the grandiose uplift and triumphant crash of sound that is in Pindar's odes. Blended as it is with Sri Aurobindo's usual self-mastery this magnitude and momentum goes free of the intricate violence of word and image accompanying it in Pindar, balancing it fearfully on the verge of the grotesque and the monstrous and even at times toppling it over. The best of Pindar's style and Sappho's is in Descent, coloured by a mystical experience of the "overhead" type:
All my cells thrill swept by a surge of splendour,
Soul and body stir with a mighty rapture,
Light and still more light like an ocean billows
Over me, round me.
Rigid, stone-like, fixed like a hill or statue,
Vast my body feels and upbears the world's weight;
Dire the large descent of the Godhead enters
Limbs that are mortal.
Voiceless, thronged. Infinity crowds upon me;
Presses down a glory of power eternal;
Mind and heart grow one with the cosmic wideness;
Stilled are earth's murmurs.
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.
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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.
All the world is changed to a single oneness;
Souls undying, infinite forces, meeting,
Join in God-dance weaving a seamless Nature,
Rhythm of the Deathless.
Mind and heart and body, one harp of being,
Cry that anthem, finding the notes eternal, —
Light and might and bliss and immortal wisdom
Clasping for ever.
Read aloud, the poem shows a pervading overhead tone which forms an overwhelming mass in stanzas four and five. Their purely poetic quality is on a par with the two stanzas in Symonds's translation, where Sappho's crystalline keenness finds an English equivalent: hearing Anactoria "silverly" laughing Sappho's heart quivers and her voice is hushed:
Yea, my tongue is broken and through me and through
me
'Neath the flesh palpable fire runs tingling;
Nothing see my eyes, and a noise of roaring
Waves in my ear sounds;
Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn
Caught by pains of menacing death I falter,
Lost in the love-trance.
If physical passion could have a mysticism of its own, it is well-nigh here, rendering in terms of sensuality the Aurobindonian
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Light and still more light like an ocean billows Over me, round me.
The "roaring waves" in Sappho's ear, which bring her the love-trance and afterwards the music whereon her experience floats through the ages, transfigure themselves on Sri Aurobindo's plane into "a torrent of rapid lightnings" by which knowledge of the deathless Divine leaps on the human consciousness and by whose thronged and glittering invasion the revelatory speech of the overhead spiritual is born:
These three lines make a most magnificent picture, Vedic and Upanishadic in its symbolism, and the sound-strokes of the words leave reverberations that are mantric: the impulsion of the supreme Spirit is poetised in language and rhythm which are themselves received from the immense Overworld known to the ancient Rishis. They are the aptest and most inwardly representative summing-up possible of the afflatus that creates Sri Aurobindo's Savitri and of the impression left by that afflatus on the sensitive reader.
3
When we speak of Savitri we speak of a unique adventure in poetic creation. From a certain standpoint the only parallel to its development is the second part of Goethe's Faust. Goethe kept it with him for several decades, adding to it, revising it, making it run along with the growth of his own mind, and the last touch was given just a few days before his death. Here the parallel ends. Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is not merely a work drawn out over a great number of years: it is a work re-written more than half a dozen times and each time re-written not sim-
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ply because of poetic defects. Each version might be poetically satisfying: the difference was of the plane of consciousness from which the writing took place. Nor was Sri Aurobindo growing and maturing only as Goethe did during the composition of the second part of Faust; he was moving from plane to plane of Yoga. Not alone the ideas and the emotions were undergoing a change and reaching to ripeness as with Goethe: the very stuff of consciousness was turning increasingly from human to superhuman. Savitri was originally composed with a good deal of the kind of inspiration which flows through Sri Aurobindo's early narratives Urvasie and Love and Death, the inspiration of the life-force with its surge of passion and emotion, the mind-energy with its lucid or recondite sweep of thought and here and there an outbreak of occult sight, a piercing by the bright poignancies of the psychic, a lifting into the large ideation of the Higher Mind. In Savitri the last three elements were more active than before, since the poet was now deep in Yoga. More frequent too were sudden visitations by the rhythm which passes through lines like the one from Love and Death:
Measuring vast pain in his immortal mind,
or by the vision as of that other from Urvasie:
Time like a snake coiling among the stars.
But Sri Aurobindo soon struck beyond the level from which he had written the original poem. He grew master — at all moments and not solely in the trance-state — of the plane the traditional Yogas posit above the mind-centre in the brain, the famous "thousand-petalled lotus" of spiritual light. A recast was made in the terms of this poise of consciousness. Another became necessary when he rose to an illumination yet more profound — and whenever definitely higher levels were his he infused the poem with fresh values of significance and sound. Sometimes, from one and the same level differing versions
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were set forth — on every occasion the scope extended and the writing laden with more matter. The last few, spread across thirty-five years or so, have been such ramifications and "pith-ings". The very final, which for want of leisure is still incomplete, is an endeavour to be comprehensive to the maximum with a continual command of the intense and immense spiritual directness of the Vedas and the Upanishads.
The ancient Indian scriptures are pervaded by an ever-present awareness of a living Infinity, an illimitable Oneness deploying itself in a myriad modes, remaining not only transcendental and static but throwing itself out in a cosmic dance, a dance that is divine on the higher planes but shot with shadows on the lower. On the lower there is a tremendous hide and seek, the soul has to pierce through masks and meet its own white truth. Once the piercing is done, the light is seen even here as ubiquitous and all Nature as secretly bathed in an ether of bliss. The Vedas and the Upanishads were chanted by those in whom the veil of division had fallen away. They spoke from the depths of the all-suffusing Spirit and from the heights of the Spirit's Truth-world whose dim reflex is in our space and time. These scriptures, therefore, brim with a concrete seeing and complex manifestation of forms which the mind cannot wholly explain but which seize at once the inner heart, or a mighty burst of harmonious intuitions in which the mind discovers the consummation, the absolute, of its own fumbling concepts. In either case, what is found is, as it were, three-dimensional — far from the merely abstract: there is a solid touch of revelation, a burning throb of realisation. Ail poetry deals in the tangible and the pulsing; but here what is supposed to be immeasurably remote comes intimately near, impinges on our members and affects our blood-stream. The whole body of us seems to thrill to the Eternal, feel itself as a play of the Eternal, in contact with the Eternal's luminous stuff, the Eternal's rhythm of vastitude. Yes, a new stuff of being, a new rhythm of experience press to incarnate themselves, so that our limited consciousness may not view the Beyond as from behind unbreakable glass but find windows and doors
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flung open in the crystal walls of the imagination for the breath of the shining Mystery to blow in and our mind and heart to rush out. That gigantic intercommunion and that boundless freedom are what the Vedic and Upanishadic poetry is composed of. It is these things that are also Savitri.
But Sri Aurobindo brings again and again the accent and vibration of the Mantra and a general mantric atmosphere playing round whatever other overhead planes find voice, to convey him to a goal further than any the Vedas and the Upanishads envisaged. His poetry traverses regions on which the steps of the ancients never fell. The afflatus of the planes from which the Rishis chanted serves him to reveal a knowledge unattained by the Rishis. Savitri is at the same time a harking back and a springing forward. Its very conception shows this double movement. In the Mahabharata the story of Savitri depicts a fight between love and death somewhat similar in outward intention to the episodes of Priyumvada and Ruru as well as Urvasie and Pururavus which Sri Aurobindo had already poetised. The Mahabharata relates that when Savitri chose Satyavan for her bridegroom she was told of the prophecy that his life would be short and that soon she would be widowed. She clung to her choice, resolved within herself to pit her love against the fatality by which she was being dogged. Knowing the heartbreak concealed for her behind the rapture of love she faced the future: hers was the hope of triumphing over the dread Adversary of man's existence. At the back of this tale of conjugal devotion armed with an extreme Will to life, Sri Aurobindo intuited a wealth of symbol; for the name "Savitri" the Rig Veda had given to the supreme creative consciousness emblemed forth as the Sun. It means the Truth-force of the divine Light, and by analogy "Satyavan" would mean that Light's Truth-being. So the carrying away of Satyavan by Yama the God of Death and the combat of Savi-tri's heart and mind with that inscrutable darkness were felt by Sri Aurobindo to be hinting vaguely the effort celebrated in the Vedic hymns to reclaim by means of Yoga what they call the lost Sun, the divine Light that has got submerged in a material
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Nature which seems to begin as a blind unconsciousness and out of which evolve various forms of Ignorance struggling to live and see. In Sri Aurobindo's poem the term Death regains its Vedic and Upanishadic connotation. Death, in the Vedas and the Upanishads, is the world's ignorance of its own divine Self: the falling asunder of the body and the blowing out of its little day are only the most external aspect of the Night that has hidden from us our own Godhead. But Sri Aurobindo does not rest with this connotation. He goes beyond the old Indian idea of what God-attainment is. The Rishis spoke of liberating the soul from its bondage and of the liberated soul bringing the light of the Infinite into its erstwhile prison. They, however, put a limit to that enlightenment. A certain mixture of shadow was accepted as inevitable. At rare moments a flashing doubt about this grey inevitability escapes their lips: Earth then appears to be a divine Mother waiting for some final apocalypse of herself. But the vision of that perfect life is never clearly held before the consciousness: fugitive symbols of its possibility float down from the high trances of the seers without yielding their inmost essence or becoming dynamic. Though sufficient support is given to regarding the cosmic scene as a field for manifesting the Spirit, complete spiritual fulfilment is said to come only after the gross body has been doffed and a status reached outside the cosmic round of rebirth. According to Sri Aurobindo, the Supreme must be possessing the basic and perfect reality, the flawless archetype, of everything set going in our space and time. To couple with a liberation into the Self of selves an attainment of this archetypal Truth and to evolve the divine counterpart of each side of our complex constitution is the full aim of Yoga: in such an aim, even the gross body with its energies cannot be neglected as untransmutable into a luminous and immortal vehicle. Consequently, Sri Aurobindo, while reading the Vedic and Upanishadic sense in the term Death, does not overlook its common physical sense which the Mahabharata kept in view. Unlike the old scriptures, he refuses to recognise the physical breaking-up as an unescapable destiny. The Aurobindonian Yogi does more than transmute his
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inward instruments: he conquers too the limitations imposed on the corporeal frame at present by age, disease or accident: he incarnates a divine body-archetype, his very stuff of matter flowers into a miraculous novel substance. So Savitri, fighting Satyavan's death, is in Sri Aurobindo's hands an Avatar of the immortal Beauty and Love plunging into the trials of terrestrial life and seeking to overcome them not only in herself but also in the world she has embraced as her own: she is sworn to put an utter end to earth's estrangement from God. Her story grows a poetic structure of incident and character, in which he houses his special search and discovery, his unique exploration of hidden worlds, his ascent into the deific ranges of the Spirit and his bringing down of their power to divinise man's total nature.
The technique of Savitri is attuned to the scriptural conception at work. It accepts the principle of metre and does not cut any modernistic zigzag of irregularity. Sri Aurobindo is not an enemy to free verse, but he does reject the free verse that has no underlying rhythm to unify its wanderings. A unifying norm, no matter how inexplicit, is the sine qua non of successful poetry, particularly in rendering overhead values. For, unity of measure is not just our mind's arbitrary demand: Nature operates on such a basis, all her multiplicities have fundamental types behind them — individuals grounded in species, species grounded in genera. A wide variation playing upon a persistent pattern is her creative mode everywhere. The overhead planes hold that basic oneness most intensely. Conscious being there does not forget as in our lower hemisphere the universal Self: every movement is fraught with awareness of the Infinite. The principle of metre translates most strikingly into speech Nature's law of manifestation, the Spirit's method of self-deployment: the Many modulating upon the basis of the One. Savitri adopts the iambic five-foot line of English blank verse as the most apt and plastic for harmonies like those of the Vedas and the Upanishads. Its blank verse, however, has certain special characteristics affining it still further to them. It moves in a series of blocks formed by a changing distribution
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of correctly proportioned sentence-lengths — lengths of one line, two lines, three or four or five lines, many lines. Scarcely any block breaks off in the middle of a line; the sentence seldom makes a full pause except when its last line is complete. Hence the blocks, connected as they are, have still an independence, a kind of self-sufficient structure like stanzas distinct without being equally long. And what applies to the sentence-unit applies in a general way to every part of it. Each line-unit seems itself a block on a small scale — telling in its own mass and force as if it could stand in vacuo and at the same time join in a concordant sentence-totality to develop the story and its spiritual perspective. Though enjambment is not avoided on any strict principle, it is less ingenious and precipitate than in Urvasie, Love and Death or Baji Prabhou. The scriptural mood demands a graver, more contained movement. To such a mood end-stopping comes with greater naturalness. But Sri Aurobindo does not make a fetish of end-stopping. What he does is a most careful moulding of the individual line so that it may not merely serve the broad scheme as in much present-day verse but be as well a power and perfection in its own right, without of course the least rhythmic monotony occurring in the passage and impairing the vitality of the broad scheme.
The power and perfection of each line of Savitri lies in utter faithfulness to the fact, the atmosphere, the life-throb found on the overhead planes. Not that the poetry refuses to descend anywhere: there are lines which the ordinary mind recognises as akin to its coinage, but these are deliberately introduced as helpful connecting-links between flight and flight on the supernormal levels. Even these have usually a vague breath of the Overworld about them. In any case they are so few that the generalisation about overhead power and perfection is practically unaffected. From the very start we have the full grip on profound realities, the expanse and richness of a revelation beyond the mental meaning. Savitri, like Ilion, that experiment by Sri Aurobindo of nearly four hundred lines in the quantitative hexameter, begins with a picture of darkness passing into day: here it is the last dawn in Satyavan's life, a phenomenon
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packed with significance of the immortal light which Savitri has to win for earth by challenging the decree of death so long accepted by man. The daybreak of Ilion combines the spirit of Greek myth and epic with the spirit of Indian Yoga. It is a vision charged with the illumination of the occult Orient but naturalising itself to the atmosphere of heroic Hellas. Savitri knows no such tempering: its mysticism is naked to the depths, the Orient shows its true inward colour, India's Yogic antiquity lives again to fill out with enormous rhythmic suggestions the Aurobindonian message. But the poem's prelude is too long to quote in uninterrupted sequence; only a number of "views", brief or extended, can be set together to limn the chief features of the symbolic dawn:
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge....
The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still.
Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;...
Something that wished but knew not how to be,...
Gave room for an old tired want unfilled,
At peace in its subconscient moonless cave
To raise its head and look for absent light,
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,
Like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire...:
As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek
Reminded of the endless need in things
The heedless Mother of the universe,
An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast.
Insensibly somewhere a breach began:
A long lone line of hesitating hue
Like a vague smile tempting a desert heart
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep....
A thought was sown in the unsounded Void,
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A sense was born within the darkness' depths,
A memory quivered in the heart of Time
As if a soul long dead were moved to live:
But the oblivion that succeeds the fall,
Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past,
And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt
And old experience laboured out once more.
All can be done if the God-touch is there.
A hope stole in that hardly dared to be
Amid the Night's forlorn indifference.
As if solicited in an alien world
With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,
Orphaned and driven out to seek a home.
An errant marvel with no place to live,
Into a far-off nook of heaven there came
A slow miraculous gesture's dim appeal.
The persistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink,
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
One lucent corner windowing hidden things
Forced the world's blind immensity to sight....
Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first
Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,
Outpoured the revelation and the flame.
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light
Ablaze upon creation's quivering edge,
Dawn built her aura of magnificent hues
And buried its seed of grandeur in the hours.
An instant's visitor the godhead shone:
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood
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And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve.
interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.
Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed
Of which our thoughts and hopes are signal flares;
A lonely splendour from the invisible goal
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.
Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts;
Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven;
A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,
The omniscient Goddess leaned across the breadths
That wrap the fated journeyings of the stars
And saw the spaces ready for her feet.
Once she half looked behind for her veiled sun,
Then, thoughtful, went to her immortal work.
Earth felt the Imperishable's passage close:
The waking ear of Nature heard her steps
And wideness turned to her its limitless eye,
And, scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.
All grew a consecration and a rite.
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;
The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind
Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky....
The impression is at first as of music afar and above — beautiful but not very distinguishable in its notes. There is, however, a pervading intensity which cannot be missed even at a distance: the notes may not be clear at once but they are no blur, they stand fully formed, diminished without being dissolved. A little concentrated hearing — and the music takes
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a grip on us, stirring strange secret places within to echo the rhythms that float down and to mirror the visions that fall across gigantic spaces. When our consciousness grows receptive enough, we observe that the spiritual and the material move here as one. Most of us who, when the night had run a long course but was still thick, have waited in the ambiguous atmosphere with our faces to the East, have had an inkling of a vigil by some cosmic Ignorance and have been faintly filled with the unplumbed prevision of a deific change because of both a tendency in the gloom and a beckoning from some masked splendour. Also, when watching daybreak, we have felt a deific revelation in the making, a beauty that was too great to be borne by earth-eyes and was soon lost in the familiar bright outlines of our world. Either of these two perceptions is caught by Sri Aurobindo with the utmost suggestive precision; we face occurrences we might see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands. It is the combined sense of the closely possessed and the supremely inimitable that is the mark of true overhead poetry. For, the Spiritual is never tenuous or empty: it is dense and rich, containing the essence of all that we regard as substantial: whatever has shape and colour can therefore interpret it, bring it to a focus for our minds, be its revelatory figure. But shape and colour so often tend to overlay the Spirit's secret values. Sri Aurobindo's art is free from that tendency: he nowhere loses in the terms of Nature the stuff of Super-Nature. A striking example of his success are the lines:
That glowed along a fading moment's brink
A keen atmosphere of Supernature bathes what we are accustomed to look upon as natural objects — hand, panel, hinge,gate. And they are thus bathed not merely by being used as metaphors. There has happened a merging of them in realities of planes beyond the earth, a spiritual concreteness fuses with
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their material concreteness and makes them affect our senses with forms instinct with an unearthly significance. Perhaps it will be easiest to appreciate this art of mystical fact by noting the lines immediately preceding the above:
It is possible to play the critic and ask: "Should there not be a restraint in the double adjective? On top of a general teeming of single 'qualifiers' two epithets are put before a noun in the same way twice in three lines here and two lines further one more pair of similarly yoked adjectives is seen in 'pale enchanted light': would it not be an improvement if some variety were introduced and a less obvious method followed?" Sri Aurobindo, in a private letter, makes a most enlightening statement on the point at issue: "If a slow rich wealth-burdened movement is the right thing as it certainly is here in my judgment, the necessary means have to be used to bring it about — and the double adjective is admirably suited for the purpose.... Do not forget that Savitri is...spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure. Done on this scale, it is really a new attempt and cannot be hampered by old ideas of technique except when they are assimilable. Least of all by standards proper to a mere intellectual and abstract poetry which makes 'reason and taste' the supreme arbiters, aims at a harmonised poetic-intellectual balanced expression of the sense, elegance in language, a sober and subtle use of imaginative decoration, a restrained emotive element etc. The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psycho-physical concreteness.... According to certain canons epithets should be used sparingly, free use of them is rhetorical, an 'obvious' device, a crowding of images is bad taste, there should be a subtlety of art not displayed but severely concealed
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— summa ars est celare artem. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton whenever he chooses Such lines as
In hideous ruin and combustion down
[To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire]
or
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge
(note two double adjectives in three lines in the last) — are not subtle or restrained, or careful to conceal their elements of powerful technique, they show rather a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing language to its utmost power of expression. That has to be done still more in this kind of mystic poetry. I cannot bring out the spiritual objectivity if I have to be miserly about epithets, images, or deny myself the use of all available resources of sound significance.
The double epithets are indispensable here and in the exact order in which they are arranged by me. You say the rich burdened movement can be secured by other means, but a rich burdened movement of any kind is not my primary object, it is desirable only because it is needed to express the spirit of the action here; and the double epithets are wanted because they are the best, not only one way of securing it. The 'gesture' must be 'slow miraculous' — if it is merely miraculous or merely slow, that does not create a picture of the thing as it is, but of something quite abstract and ordinary or concrete but ordinary — it is the combination that renders the exact nature of the mystic movement, with the 'dimly came' supporting it, so that 'gesture' is not here a metaphor, but a thing actually done. Equally a pale light or an enchanted light may be very
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pretty, but it is only the combination that renders the luminosity which is that of the hand acting tentatively in the darkness. That darkness itself is described as a quietude, which gives it a subjective spiritual character and brings out the thing symbolised, but the double epithet 'inert black' gives it the needed concreteness so that the quietude ceases to be something abstract and becomes something concrete, objective, but still spiritually subjective.... Every word must be the right word, with the right atmosphere, the right relation to all the other words, just as every sound in its place and the whole sound together must bring out the imponderable significance which is beyond verbal expression. One can't chop and change about on the principle that it is sufficient if the same mental sense or part of it is given with some poetical beauty or power. One can only change if the change brings out more perfectly the thing behind that is seeking for expression — brings out in full objectivity and also in the full mystic sense. If I can do that; well, other considerations have to take a back seat or seek their satisfaction elsewhere."
A free diversity of style is practised by Sri Aurobindo to attain his goal. He does not immure himself in any one formula — not even the formula of lavish technique which he has defended. Where the spiritual mood and situation demand it, he can be quite sparing in epithet and image and sound. And not only differences in the texture of style does he exploit: he has in addition different tempers of it. The texture consists in simplicity or complexity, austereness or lavishness, concision or diffusion: the temper lies in a particular receptive attitude and exploratory process of the visioning word. One sort of temper may run through many sorts of texture, for its quality resides behind the obvious characteristics of the word-body. Roughly, there are four kinds of temper that can be described to some extent, while a fifth eludes all analysis and is the inmost circle of style, the magic of inevitability at its diamond point. The other kinds also can be inevitable, but here is, as it were, the sheer quintessence of their inevitabilities and we can say about it when we meet it that there it is but what exactly it is we can-
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not say. In the field of the definable sty le-tempers we have first the visioning word doing no more than equate itself to a mood and a situation: it accepts the mood, acknowledges the situation and gives them a just expression with any style-texture the poet is moved to adopt. Thus Sri Aurobinodo writes:
Something that wished but knew not how to be,
An errant marvel with no place to live.
This stylistic temper is mixed with a second type in the lines about "an old tired want" being given room
Straining closed eyes of vanished memory
like one who searches for a bygone self
And only meets the corpse of his desire.
Now the visioning word is not merely just, not merely equated to its contents: it has pressed out of them a vigorous subtlety: it does not stop with a felicitous possession of their appearance, it goes under their skin, so to speak, and startles them into throwing up effective suggestions of their inner vitality. A third temper of style is shown us, infused into the second, when Sri Aurobindo comes with:
Troubled the far rim of life's obscure sleep.
The visioning word has begun to quicken with an inside glow-there is, besides the vividness and the subtlety from under the skin of mood and situation, a kindling in which many nuances from within arise and play and merge, the pulse of things becomes a gleaming varied flow of intense significances and not
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only a strong suggestive leap. This process arrives at its acme in a passage like:
Nor is the process, of which I have spoken, the sole element in the above passage. Joined with it is another which bears the visioning word in a spelled exaltation of deep discovery, a fourth temper of style instilling into the theme a rapt self-transparency of meaningful design and vital inwardness. It is not easy to disengage this temper: more than the rest it must be felt by an instinct, for it is nearest the absolute style which refuses to be analysed. That absolute style is in the exquisite lines already cited about the fixing of "a gate of dreams". There it comes into being with a kinship to the third temper, while it confronts us with a kinship to the fourth in the poignant wizardry of:
The wide winged hymn of a great priestly wind
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky,
or the august enchantment of:
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven.
It can also have a kinship to the first and second tempers. The first seems quietly alchemised into it by
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One of the lines from a group omitted in our quotation of Savitri's prelude illustrates a mighty mutation into it from the second:
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite.
Of course this indefinable super-inevitable style is poetically the ultima thule, just as the Mantra is spiritually so. But in an epic of great length it cannot be present everywhere "neat"; nor can the Mantra. And the very plan of Savitri, comprising as it does the entire expanse of evolution into deity and covering most subjects of philosophical search and every possible aspect of mystical living, demands for the richness and completeness of the treatment variation of style-temper no less than of style-texture and inspiring plane. The only condition which cannot be waived is the overhead afflatus: it must be there in one form and degree or another if a direct poetising of the Divine is to be accomplished.
A direct poetising of the Divine runs through Savitri from end to end. But that does not imply a rejection of human interest: what is implied is an "unmasked" pervasion and interpen-etration of it by the beyond-human. In fact the human element is unavoidable, since the figure from which the poem derives its name is the divine Consciousness descended into flesh. Her work is among terrestrial creatures: it is among their joys and travails that she awakes on that fateful morning. Trees and animals and humans hold her in their midst, an Immortal prisoned in mortality, the high potencies of her soul wedded to a living that is but a slow dying:
At first life grieved not in her burdened breast...
In a deep cleft dug by silence twixt two realms
She lay remote from grief, unsawn by care,
Nothing recalling of the sorrow here.
Then a slow faint remembrance shadowlike moved
And sighing she laid her hand upon her bosom
And recognised the close and lingering ache
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Deep, quiet, old, made natural to its place.
The origin of these lines is not the sheer overhead, they have not the masterful seeing through an amplitude of light. Still, they have a general overhead influence and their difference from fine poetry of the mental order can be marked if we put side by side with their last three verses a snatch from Keats which has a similar motive. In Hyperion an action almost identical with Savitri's is given to Thea, the companion of Saturn during his fallen days:
One hand she pressed upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain.
Sri Aurobindo has a more profound tone; the language is charged with suggestions that go below the thought-meaning; the tragedy of a luminous soul enduring the darkness of earth, taking upon itself the heartbreak that is mortal existence, finds voice in the very rhythm of that ancient heartbreak. The emotion in the excerpt from Keats does not draw upon this intense psychic sadness, it neighbours it in the phrase, "that aching spot where beats the human heart", but passes on to the imaginative idea of the Immortal's pain instead of plumbing the actual pathos of the entombed sweetness. Nor is there in it the sense of the height from which the celestial sweetness has fallen: the mere words, "though an Immortal", convey no more than the conception, while Sri Aurobindo infuses into his less explicit yet keener turns some breath of the overhead atmosphere. The poetic seeing is from some psychic centre, and therefore not sweepingly large, yet like a sharp flame the poetry rises to touch the air of the Overworld and burn a tittle with a colour beyond its own mood.
This phenomenon plays in and out of Savitri. At times an occult feature joins in and assumes prominence, as when Savitri is further described as remembering the wrestle, within her heart, of huge dim figures — earth and love and doom — and
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then the image of some cryptic greatness emerges, with a psychic effluence of sweetness and light falling across the dread and the secrecy and also with a hidden sense of the Spirit's overhead amplitude, but the main impression is of the puzzling occult:
At the sombre centre of the dire debate
A guardian of the unconsoled abyss
Inheriting the long agony of the globe,
A stone-still figure of high and godlike Pain,
Stared into space with fixed regardless eyes
That saw grief s timeless depths but not life's goal.
A similar composite inspiration of three-planed poetry is offered us a little later when another vision, picking up the abyss-element, is brought forward, a vision even more mysterious whom Sri Aurobindo gives no name:
One dealt with her who meets the burdened great.
Assigner of the ordeal and the path
Who uses in this holocaust of the soul
Death, fall and sorrow for the spirit's goads,
The dubious Godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.
But in these lines there is a crescendo of the overhead seizing the occult and the last three are tremendous both in sight and vibration. They conjure up from royal heights of the overhead the scene of the earth-drama in which Savitri is the chief protagonist. The rhythm courses with a huge intensity and makes us actually hear the workings of the divine mysteries which the language puts into the picture of Savitri as well as of the dark evolving universe she has come to help. Just as we compared Keats's lines with Sri Aurobindo's in order to feel the latter's differentia, so we can best note the peculiar overhead envelopment and absorption of the occult by comparing to the
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style and the sound here those of the famous finale of Francis Thompson's sonnet The Heart. Thompson recalls the act of that fierce Roman patriot Sextus Curtius who jumped, horse-backed and full-armoured, into the deep trench which according to the augurs had to be filled with what Rome deemed most precious if she was to escape heavenly punishment. Thompson creates an image magnificently profound about the human heart's unrealised grandeur:
The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink —
Yet shall that chasm, till He who these did build
An awful Curtius make Him, yawn unfilled.
As sheer poetry this is equal to the Aurobindonian lines and the spiritual word-significance is as admirable. Word-significance, however, is not the sole ingredient of poetry. There is what Sri Aurobindo calls the imponderable significance beyond verbal expression. The rhythm set up by the words brings it home and awakes in us the reality they strive to portray. Thompson's rhythm, like his expression, has grip and strength, it shakes up broad tracts of the mind but except a little at the end it does not break through the mind into the infinite overhead. A precisely moulded and forcefully imaged thought goes winging through us, stirring mystical suggestions with the aid of an historical incident. We are moved by the brilliant originality which enlarges that incident and strikes into it an inward spiritual truth, yet save for the effect produced by the sound and the meaning of the words "awful" and "yawn" we miss the cosmic unfathomable reverberations Sri Aurobindo induces in some concealed spaciousness of divine being. Technically we might say that the second line in Thompson fails to be overhead because of the crowdedly repetitive clipped sounds "till" and "did" and "build". The overhead rhythm needs a different art — and behind the art a different psychological disposition. Thompson's opening line has nothing markedly counter to the overhead art; somehow the right psychological disposition is still lacking. In the last line he is on the verge
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of both, yet comes short because there is not the overhead lift completing the semi-overhead wideness; so the imponderable significance beyond verbal expression is much less spiritual than in Sri Aurobindo's
Unmistakably mantric seems this note — and that too in full measure. The pinions of the Mantra beat often in Savitri, but everywhere they are not completely unclosed to occupy the entire line. They mingle with wafts of other overhead utterances — the Spirit ideative or illuminative or intuitive. The Spirit in nothing else than its identity is difficult to sustain for more than a few lines. Though in the Dawn-description it is a frequent presence, even there it is interspersed with a less direct substantiality of the Spirit. The passage, however, where the Avatarhood of Savitri is painted keeps the unalloyed Mantra ringing for dozens of lines! It is worth special attention both for this reason and for being poetically the longest and most comprehensive mystical portrait in all literature.
To lead from darkness into light, from ignorance of God to knowledge of Him is the work assigned by many poets to woman. There is the praise by Goethe of the Eternal Feminine calling us onward and upward. And there is Dante's music about the santo riso, the saintly smile, of Beatrice which guided him from the sins of the flesh to the soul's ecstasy of worship. Crashaw wrote a hymn in honour of St. Teresa, lauding her devotion to Christ and her transforming influence on men. Francis Thompson made a shrine for Alice Meynell: she was the religious calm-centre to the storm of his much-tossed and vagrant career. Wordsworth imagined how the "overseeing power" of Nature would build up the child Lucy into a woman aglow with a soulful beauty and character that would be in tune with pantheistic harmonies of wind and water. But none of these poets has left us a sustained mystical portrait. A few phrases pregnant with mysticism are all we have from them in the midst of a general diffused suggestion of good-
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ness or else of religious zeal. There is also the imaginative picture drawn by Shelley from brief glimpses of Emilia Viviani in a convent, no nun herself but kept as a charge of the nuns by a tyrannical parent. Who among us, in the days of youthful dreaming, has not been intoxicated by the romantic idealism shot with Platonic mysticism in the apostrophe? —
Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light and love and immortality!
Sweet benediction in the eternal Curse!
Veiled glory of the lampless Universe!
or in the description? —
...the brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless heaven of June,
Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon
Bums inextinguishably beautiful.
But such passages are rare in Epipsychidion: most of the poem is idealistically romantic rather than mystically Platonic. And even in the exceptional places the mysticism is not what I have designated as direct. The language is of the poetic intelligence visited by the rapture and radiance of an occult sphere of mentality behind it: both vision and rhythm are, for all that occult visitation, indirect in their mystical import and impact: they are the outward mind thrilling to the occult yet rendering it in terms not altogether native to it. Nor does the attraction of the overhead, which is marked in patches, get full response. Indirect also are the excellent lines by a poet of our own day, Robert Hugh Benson, depicting a contemplative of St. Teresa's Order:
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She moves in tumult; round her lies
The silence of the world of grace;
The twilight of our mysteries
Shines like high noonday on her face;
Our piteous guesses, dim with fears,
She touches, handles, sees and hears.
In her all longings mix and meet;
Dumb souls through her are eloquent;
She feels the world beneath her feet
Thrill in a passionate intent;
Through her our tides of feeling roll
And find their God within her soul.
It is again the poetic intelligence speaking — with a difference in two respects from Shelley's passages. First, the inner mind has contributed a certain intuitive intimacy of contact with mystical experience rather than a wash of bright and colourful vision. Second, the emotion does not so much rise upward to echo something of the wide overhead power as plunges inward to touch the profound delicacy of the psychic.
All that is indirect in Shelley and Benson grows a directness the most complete and at a stretch not found in either the Vedas and the Upanishads, when Sri Aurobindo builds up the portrait of Savitri as one in whom the Godhead of Love finds a perfect incarnation. Everything in her pointed to a nobler kind than the human:
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
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Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
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.
A wide self-giving was her native act;
A magnanimity as of sea or sky
Enveloped with its greatness all that came
And gave a sense as of a greatened world:
Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,
Her high passion a blue heaven's equipoise...
A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven:
Love in her was wider than the universe,
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.
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,
The strength, the silence of the gods were hers.
In her he found a vastness like his own,
His high warm subtle ether he refound
And moved in her as in his natural home.
In her he met his own eternity.
It is not necessary to understand the passage in detail in order to feel its magnificence. The phrases have an enormous
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weight of vision that strikes us to our knees, as it were, im-pressing us with a finality we dare not question. The rhythm has an overpowering fidelity to the inner thrill of the experience suggested and symbolised. Here-are the figures and values of a superhuman state of consciousness at the very top, breaking upon us in their own stuff and vibrancy through the medium of language. This is not the mind imagining the highest it can beyond itself. This is an Overmind actually holding all the magnitudes that are pictured; its vision is from within, composed of its own substance and lit up with its own vast vitality. As a result, the pictures are at once extra-immediate and extra-remote: they make, as A. E. Housman would have said, an impact upon our solar plexus as no mental reflection of mystical realities can, but while convincing us of their living concreteness they dodge our mental apprehension by refusing to yield their meanings easily and to affine themselves to what our thought can size up. To adopt Sri Aurobindo's own turn, the ways of thought are overflown, worlds of splendour and calm above the human level are crossed and unborn things reached. Not that everything is difficult to conceive: Savitri's "magnanimity", "kindly care" and "inward help" reach us through emblems that are not resistant to analysis, though we shall be deprived of a considerable amount of their stimulus unless we use the Eye behind the eye and the Ear behind the ear to sense that the elemental, cosmic or supramundane analogies and metaphors with their supporting breadth of phrase and sonance are no eloquent exaggerations but are accurately intrinsic to the special nature of Savitri's "self-giving". The "sea of white sincerity" too is within our imaginative grasp and so, again, in this era of the psycho-analysed subconscious are the gulfs which are "secrecies of light". No less steeped in the Overmind run the language and rhythm of the lines where they are mentioned and it would be poor justice to them if we did not thrill to the rapturous wideness drowning all thought in the one case and in the other the ecstatic opening of depth beyond depth unsounded by the Freudian intellect; but we are able to adapt ourselves without much strain to the general vi-
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sion. The two lines driving home Savitri's being at the same time the stillness and the word —
A continent of self-diffusing peace.
have an expressive force more hard to absorb. Savitri's word-aspect could have been served well enough by being called an ocean of virgin fire and her stillness-aspect a continent of peace without the two epithets "untrembling" and "self-diffusing". As soon as the fire is "untrembling" and the peace "self-diffusing", the intense movement is seen as superbly steady, the extreme rest as gigantically spreading its influence. So in the very fact of movement there is rest, in the very fact of rest movement: the two are a single miracle most aptly figured to suggest, by their playing into each other's hands, the omnipotent essence of the Divine. Our mind has usually little experience of opposites meeting much less coalescing even Thompson's poetic idea —
Passionless passion, wild tranquillities
falls slightly outside easy conception. Sri Aurobindo's direct mystical sight, packed with an inward sense of the superhuman, is still more enigmatic: it grips us by its intimacy with its object but we do not grip it enough by our ideative powers.
In the central picture of the passage — the nine lines, beginning with "As in a mystic and dynamic dance", which are perhaps Sri Aurobindo's grandest achievement in mantric poetry — there is no obstacle to our imaginatively realising how apt are the glorious figures — "a parable of dawn", "a niche for veiled divinity", "a golden temple door" — for Savitri's body with its finite-looking beauty admitting us into a Presence that has no limit. Nor is there any bar to our conjuring up "a priestess of immaculate ecstasies". But what is "Truth's revealing vault" inspiring and ruling her? Is the sky used here as a symbol of the light of Eternity? Evidently some infinitude
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of being that stretches above like a sky and is higher than our obscure and erring consciousness is meant. Yet immediately afterwards we have the "prophet cavern of the gods": it is in a cavern that the priestess is moving and a cavern by definition cannot have a sky, it must be a closed place. The word "vault" is admirably dual and suits the cavem-suggestion no less than the sky-suggestion, but how are we to mingle the two? We must think of the cavern as having a "revealing" roof, which means really a roof that, instead of shutting out light, is one dense mass of light. Truth's own stuff. Such a cavern with such a roof is neither closed in nor dark: it is somewhat like our universe as viewed from the earth at midday, an immense "inverted bowl" of brightness under which we seem cooped. What special point is made by bringing in that cavernous view? The answer is that no other will present the profound secrecy of the world Sri Aurobindo is speaking of — a spiritual state which is to be entered by drawing the consciousness further and further away from outward phenomena as into a cavern but which, when entered, is discovered to be a boundless space of being, full of a knowledge capable of prophecy, a time-transcending knowledge which is a radiance poured from above where Truth is like some huge sun. This strange world appears to be a fusion of two levels. It is not quite removed from what Sri Aurobindo elsewhere hints as "an aureate opening in Time". The "aureate opening" refers to the psyche, the gate of communication between our ignorant time-process and the splendour of the eternal Spirit: it is the authentic soul or divine spark as distinguished from the elan vital and the mind-force, behind and between which it is hidden and upon which it sheds its mystical influence. In Yoga the psyche is found at the back of that juncture of the elan vital and the mind-force — the emotional being whose physical effects we feel in the heart-region. It is the true heart of us, of which our emotional being with its physical counterpart is an outward diminished representation. It has its own experience of the Divine, exquisite and passionate, yet it has not in itself the amplitude and puissance as experienced in the overhead planes,
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the amplitude and puissance which attain their extreme in the consciousness whence the Mantra comes. This consciousness is implied in Sri Aurobindo's mention of Truth's inspiring and ruling vault as well as of the gods in whose cavern the priestess is dancing. The spiritual state he describes is, therefore, a domain where the psyche has opened up to the Overworld and got suffused with the highest light. Savitri has an embodied emotional being that is not merely merged in the psyche; it is merged also in a denizen of the Overworld's top-range descended into the psyche and making the inspiration of that Height one with it. The double character is suggested again when the "heart of silence" is said to be in the "hands of joy". Usually in Yoga a poise free from aching desire is taken hold of and enveloped by a vast bliss that is independent of finite objects and circumstances, but here more is meant than this mystical experience: the in-drawn dedicated stillness, caught by a masterful bliss as though with hands commanding and directing corresponds to the samadhi - rapt priestess rhythmically swaying to the luminous and beatific will invading her from Truth's empyrean.
All this, of course, is just an effort at an imaginative recreation of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual symbols. It can serve merely as a prop, it cannot deliver the full sense of them. Intuitive vision is the means to compass both their subjective and objective values, for they are plucked from Supemature with an absolute loyalty to its extreme altitudes. We must go very far indeed from the imaginative intellect's grasp in order to feel their coherence and their living force. Without submitting ourselves in intuitive sympathy to an invasion from worlds of a Consciousness that is divine and deathless, ours will be a surface appreciation, at most admiring certain similes and felicitous turns of language, scarcely stirring to the hidden immensity of the revelation and its concrete mystical drive and scope. And if we do not read the passage aloud like a spell of superb potency and let the rhythm break through secret sound-spaces within us we shall never awake wholly to the fact that the entire description of Savitri and especially the part
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I have been commenting upon is word and vibration charged with actual deific states — the highest spiritual plane with its own native accent.
Failure to tackle the Mantra, and. in general all overhead poetry, in the right receptive way will lay its contents, more than those of any other type of mystical verse, open to the accusation of being what Yeats called "Asiatic vague immensities". For in it Asia's difference from the European dealing with God is most prominent. Europe finds its natural element in definite philosophical ideas, it governs even the Infinite by the laws of logic and constructs a self-consistent picture by following a single track of thought. Asia is at home in multiple tracks: though philosophers have tried to be logically bound down to systems clear-cut out of one dominant trend, the instinct is to give way to multitudinous incompatibilities harmonising and uniting in a supra-logical vision. Overhead poetry, particularly at its apex, is supra-logical vision embodied without the intellect playing the interpreter. Whatever is seizable by the intellect is an adaptation by the overhead planes of themselves to its mode and not its shaping of them according to its own desire and proclivity. Much must escape the intellect almost altogether and call for a very extended development of the faculties in us which respond to poetic values through intuition and rhythm-feeling. Large ambiguities, therefore, arise in the mind, especially the European. But, on the other hand, from the standpoint of intrinsic character we may say that overhead poetry is the least exposed to the Yeatsian accusation, since in it the supra-logical seeing is mated with an expression springing from the very planes on which that seeing is inherent in consciousness. The expression is organic to the sight and consequently carries an authentic and convincing power. If the word and the rhythm are from elsewhere, there is for the reader either a medley that floats unconvincingly on the mind's surface or a spaciousness that can be reflected only by blurring its infinite contents. The many-sided nature of the Divine becomes "confused", the essential unity "thin": in short, both turn "vague". No matter how much we yield to the
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poetry through intuition and rhythm-feeling, the supra-logical will never quite achieve in non-overhead language the needed degree of directness, of substantial and detailed presence. We may get complete intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure — the meaning may stand out clear and the beauty may be vital and absolute; yet neither the meaning nor the beauty may do justice to what we cognise as pressing for poetic manifestation. The suggestive aura round the significant phrase and round the aesthetic form will not be dense and tense enough with the sheer Godhead.
Even the inspiration from the occult and the psychic is, in comparison to the overhead speech, attenuated in its suggestive aura. It has not the God-grip and the God-sweep of Savitri's accent. To get that accent, however, is no facile task. A poet who has not himself reached the overhead planes can be occasionally a vehicle for their messages, but only if he lets nothing of his ordinary mind interfere. And in his case the ordinary mind must be understood to comprise not merely what has to be kept in abeyance in the writing of all genuine poetry; to get overhead inspiration we must regard as the ordinary mind the whole poetic urge too of the planes that are usually tapped. One who aspires after the speech of Savitri must be on guard against the very best he can achieve from another psychological level, unless of course that level has to be brought in for a special purpose like giving the reader an easy hold on an idea before lifting him into the spiritual reality to which the idea is a pointer. Where no such aim is present the natural tendency to create poetry from a more accessible plane must be closely watched. Look at the line:
Concealed because too brilliant for our eyes.
It occurs in an earlier draft of Savitri and is quite effective for expressing the excess of light which shuts out scrutiny. Stand it against the line Sri Aurobindo put in its place:
Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can bear.
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Instead of the striking and clever point the first vision makes, we have a straight presentation of some high reality, the actual fact is before us without any explaining of its peculiar attribute, the attribute is concretely offered and an atmosphere of the spiritual brought up. The rhythm comes with a more inward thrill, a more intrinsically wide movement as if without the effort mental speech has to put forth for suggesting the ample and the majestic. Indeed it is the changed rhythm which, even more than the changed form of vision, produces the necessary directness — as can be proved by choosing a line in which the imagery can be kept intact and even the language unaltered in every word but only a small modification introduced in the rhythm and by that modification the living thrill transferred from spiritual to mental. This verse, for example, from Savitri —
The old adamantine vetoes stood no more —
loses the overhead wideness of sound and with it the overhead experience that is caught by the words, if we write:
No more the old adamantine vetoes stood.
Apart from the undue emphasis "stood" gets by closing the line and occupying that final position divorced from "no more", the inner suggestion stops dead short with a staccato rhythm: the huge escape from ancient barriers lacks the profound spiritual thrill. Losing that thrill, the line drops in the directness which is born of the vision being coupled with the word-rhvthm natural to the plane where the vision originates.
The coupling of the overhead vision with the overhead word-rhythm is the achievement par excellence of Sri Aurobindo. The former is rare enough, but at times it does occur in other mystical poets. There are a few snatches in Yeats, many in A.E., for Yeats, for all his attraction towards the unseen world, had no strong eye for the supremely spiritual. A.E. had a far closer acquaintance with it, yet he too did not go
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beyond the heart's lyrical God-drunkenness, the glamour of the Celtic mid-worlds and the mind's first few entranced steps above philosophy into direct touch on the Spirit. Though the Upanishads cast their light on him, the overhead accent visited him at scattered moments only and then also, as a rule, in a weakened form. The line —
And by their silence men adore the lovely silence where
He dwells —
has something of it, tuned with extreme liquid beauty to a more delicate, more loosened note than is proper to the overhead. A greater intensity is in
White for Thy whiteness all desires burn,
yet the rhythm and the vision do not hail from much above the eye and ear of spiritualised thought. Some tone of the overhead at its intuitive pitch is:
Like winds and waters were her ways.
They heed not immemorial cries;
They move to their high destinies
Beyond the little voice that prays.
What A.E. lacks on the whole in dealing with the ultra-mental afflatus is fullness of rhythm — his genuine seizures of it are often thin in sound-stuff and hence unable to drive home its varied cosmicity, so to speak. This is not to deny his poetic merit on planes where he can seize word and vision at once, nor his value as a mystical messenger. That he is not a frequent assured dweller on the Aurobindonian levels detracts nothing from his status as the most spiritual of English singers, the first among them to be a Yogi in the oriental sense.
Even in an oriental poet like Tagore the overhead language-stir is mostly absent. Tagore is the ideal psalmist of the emotions — emotions not feverishly uncontrolled and rendered a
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confusing flame as in so many devotee-poets of the West but harmoniously psychicised and tinged by the superb serenity which enters into all Indian mysticism — the calm shadow of the overhead. The overhead, however; is an undifferentiated influence in him, far and faint, never intimately known. It may be argued that after all his Gitanjali is prose-poetry and is thus prevented from the absolute overhead ring. But, though not so clearly as in poetry proper, that ring can still make prose its medium. Two of the most clearly overhead strains from the Upanishads retain something of their characteristic rhythm in Sri Aurobindo's translations in prose. Listen to this suggestion of the transcendental supra-cosmic Divine: "There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendour and the stars are blind. There these lightnings flash not nor any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shineth." Now hear what Yeats offers in his collaboration with Purohit Swami: "Neither sun, moon, star, neither fire nor lightning lights Him. When He shines, everything begins to shine. Everything in the world reflects His light." Evidently the attempt is to imitate the pithiness of the Upanishadic utterance, but where is the sonority accompanying the pithiness in Sanskrit, the sound subtly conveying the colossal Presence underlying the apparent concentrated points like the huge hidden bulk of an iceberg below the crystalline taperings that show above the sea's surface? Besides, Sanskrit is more naturally polysyllabic than English and the pithy statement in it does not appear bare and clipped. To make the English version equally polysyllabic would be to risk bombast; the same holds in translations from Greek and Latin. To compensate for the missing majesty a certain sweep of word and volume of sound have to be achieved by a special skill in phrase-formation and sentence-construction. Yeats is devoid of the true Upanishadic resonance as well as intonation in his rendering also of the stanza about the cosmic Divine; "Spirit is everywhere, upon the right, upon the left, above, below, behind, in front. What is the world but Spirit?" How poor in comparison to the Aurobindonian vividness and vibrancy: "The Eternal is before
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us and the Eternal is behind us and to the south and to the north of us and above and below and extended everywhere. All this magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal." As prose-poetry it rises head and shoulders over the Yeats-Puro-hit team-work; but its most choice quality is the overhead breath — a quality which we might expect from an Indian like Tagore in the mystical prose-poetry of Gitanjali. Tagore, however, gets the overhead afflatus to a recognisable degree no more than once — in a serm-rerniniscence of the Upanishad's verse about the Transcendental. As he originally wrote them, the words run: "There, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor colour, and never, never a word." Yeats, in the Oxford Book of English Poetry edited by him, touched up the Tagorean sentences: "Where thine infinite sky spreadeth for the soul to take her flight, a stainless white radiance reigneth; wherein is neither day nor night, nor form nor colour, nor ever any word," Perhaps the Yeatsian tightening and connectivity add to the overhead intonation; the Irish poet's greater intimacy with the poetic potentialities of English seems to help out better the accent which the Indian has acquired.
The poetry written by Harindranath Chattopadhyaya before he turned Marxist and started versifying proletarian slogans is haunted by the Unknown as puissantly as anything composed by Tagore. His lyrics are a colourful subtlety that lays keen fingers on truths of the inner life, yet instead of plucking the word native to those truths the fingers bring back a creative impress for handling spiritually the speech of ideas and feelings in our normal mind and heart. Except in rare pieces there is very little of the Upanishadic inspiration. The Shelleyan "white radiance" of which Tagore gave an Indian avatar in the passage quoted from Gitanjali becomes in Chattopadhyaya:
...the naked everlastingness
That nor by pleasure nor by pain is stirred,
Being a hush that bears no human word
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Nor deed nor dream nor passion as a burden.
Deeply inspired are these lines, a true echo by the poetic mind to the overhead harmonies. As poetry they are faultless; as word-rhythm capturing mystical vision, they come close to the overhead stuff Chattopadhyaya is handling but do not arise from it — as does, for instance, Sri Aurobindo's description of the Yogic self-release of Savitri's father, Aswapathy, into the spiritual ether by breaking "the intellect's hard and lustrous lid":
The toiling thinker widened and grew still,
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart:
His soul could sail beyond thought's luminous bar;
Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last shimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgement ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
Speech and sound are sovereignly adequate to the concrete vision of the mystical altitudes. Not echoes but actual voices are reproduced. The emotional seeker and the philosophical seer are both transfigured, raised towards a mighty moving God-realisation and the profound actuality of the experience conveyed in an accent leaping from its core. In the last three lines the Mantra is heard — and a remarkable technique of labials, sibilants, liquids, nasals and long vowels create, at once haunt-ingly and lullingly, wideningly and envelopingly, the impression of a single-mooded unthinkable irfinitude of silence. But this technique succeeds because of a special inner rhythm, and it succeeds in a manner which is different from that of any similar outer technique normally possible to Chattopadhyaya. He too can surely bring about fitting effects of vowel and consonant and fill them with inspiration. What is typical here is that the inspiration carrying such effects is received by Sri
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Aurobindo by breaking completely the "lustrous lid" which divides the overhead from the ranges whence poetry usually springs.
The breaking of the "lustrous lid" is a very real spiritual experience. The Upanishads speak of the face of Truth having a golden cover which has to be removed. This cover is composed of the concepts and percepts through which we ordinarily turn our sight towards the Divine. Our concepts and percepts are indeed means of knowledge, rays of Truth, but indirect ones: they acquaint us with the appearance of the Divine, not with the reality of Him; they constitute a brilliant formation like a shield or a lid which falls over the Divine's reality. The formation is not easy to break through: it is "hard" as well as "lustrous" and obstructs a new poise as if there were a mental skull corresponding to the physical. Influences of the Truth-Sun can percolate into the mind and produce now and then a perfect result if the poet trains himself to be sensitive to them. But a sustained stream of light can arrive only if the poet practises that self-training in a deliberate integral way. Yoga is the desideratum — and an important part of Yoga for the poet of the Spirit is a tuning-up to the overhead speech by constantly revolving within his consciousness the Mantra and its approximations. Even for the non-poet the Mantra and its approximations are a potent means for evolving man into superman: they are the Infinite and the Eternal in one of the most veilless forms of manifestation possible. Therefore, a gift to the world precious in the last degree is Savitri. It is also a gift appropriate in the extreme to the position of the giver himself. Philosophical statement lending logical plausibility to facts of the Spirit is necessary in a time like ours when the intellect is acutely in the forefront and Sri Aurobindo has answered the need by writing that expository masterpiece, The Life Divine. There too it is not the bare intellect chopping logic: a greater faculty executes deft and many-aspected designs of argumentation and through them appeals to some intuitive intelligence behind the seat of analytic and synthetic judgment. But since the method of logic is accepted, the language of abstract specu-
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latdon is used as a framework; this, though serving to hold the attention of the intellectuality of our day, lessens the impact of the living Reality that is far removed from abstract speculation, be it ever so magnificent and cogent. To create a poetic mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine for transmitting the living Reality to the furthest bounds of speech — such a task is incumbent on one who stands as the maker of a new spiritual epoch. Without it he would not establish on earth in a fully effective shape the influence brought by him. All evolutionary influences, in order to become dynamic in toto, must assume poetic shape as a correlate to the actual living out of them in personal consciousness and conduct. In that shape they can reach man's inner being persistently and ubiquitously over and above doing so with a luminous and vibrant sugges-tiveness unrivalled by any other mode of literature or art. But scattered and short pieces of poetry cannot build the sustained and organised Weltanschauung required for putting a permanent stamp upon the times. Nothing except an epic or a drama can, moving as they do across a wide field and coming charged with inventive vitality, with interplay of characters and events. Nor can an epic which teems with ultra-mental realisations be wholly adequate to its aim if it does not embody these realisations in ultra-mental word and rhythm. Hence Savitri is from every angle the right correlate to the practical drive towards earth-transformation by India's mightiest Master of spirituality in his Ashram at Pondicherry. Next to his own personal working as Guru on disciples offering themselves for a global remoulding of their lives, this poem that is at once legend and symbol will be the chief formateur of the Aurobindonian Age. Out of its projected fifty thousand lines, about twelve thousand only are said to be ready yet in final version, but even that number is enough to give it a central place, for the whole length of Paradise Lost is exceeded and in no other art-creation so continually and cumulatively has inspiration, the lightning-footed goddess, "a sudden messenger from the all-seeing tops", disclosed the Divine's truth and beauty:
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Even were caught as through a cunning veil
The smile of love that sanctions the long game,
The calm indulgence and maternal breasts
Of Wisdom suckling the child-laughter of Chance,
Silence the nurse of the Almighty's power,
The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word,
And of the Timeless the still brooding face.
And the creative eye of Eternity...
In darkness' core she dug out wells of light,
On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,
Lent a vibrant cry to the unurtered vasts,
And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths
Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought
Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR :
1.The Problem of Aryan Origins: From an Indian Point of View
2.Karpasa in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue
3.Problems of Ancient India
4.Ancient India in a New Light
5.The Beginning of History for Israel
6.Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. I
7.Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. II
8.Life-Poetry-Yoga, Personal Letters, Vol. III
9.Parnassians
10."Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" — The Enigmas of Shakespeare's Sonnets
11.The English Language and the Indian Spirit: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna
12.Indian Poets and English Poetry: Correspondence between Kathleen Raine and K.D. Sethna
13.The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry
14.Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation
15.The Inspiration of Paradise Lost
16.Inspiration and Effort: Studies in Literary Attitude and Expression
17."A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" — An Interpretation from India
18.The Thinking Comer: Causeries on Life and Literature
19.Adventures in Criticism
20.Classical and Romantic —An Approach through Sri Aurobindo
21.Mandukya Upanishad: English Version, Notes and Commentary
22.Science, Materialism, Mysticism
23.The Indian Spirit and the World's Future
24.A Follower of Christ & a Disciple of Sri Aurobindo:
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Correspondence between Bede Griffiths and K.D. Sethna (Amal Kiran)
25.Problems of Early Christianity
26.The Virgin Birth and the Earliest Christian Tradition
27.Is Velikovsky's Revised Chronology Tenable? A Scrutiny of Four Fundamental Themes
28.Teilhard De Chardin and our Time
29.Aspects of Sri Aurobindo 30., Sri Aurobindo and Greece
31.The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo
32.Sri Aurobindo - The Poet
33.The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to it
34.The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo
35.Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare
36.Our Light and Delight—Recollections of Life with the Mother
37.The Mother: Past-Present-Future
38.Life-Literature-Yoga: Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo
39.The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence
40.Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran
41.The Spirituality of the Future: A Search apropos of R.C. Zaehner's Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin
42.The Secret Splendour: Collected Poems
43.Evolving India: Essays on Cultural Issues
44.The Adventure of the Apocalypse (Poems)
45.Altar and Flame (Poems)
46.The Sun and the Rainbow — Approaches to Life through Sri Aurobindo's Light
47.Poems by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran with Sri Aurobindo's Comments
48."Overhead Poetry": Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments
49.Talks on Poetry
50.Some Talks at Pondicherry — Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran
51.India and the World Scene
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