Poems
THEME/S
4
OUT OF THE UNKNOWN
Out of the unknown, like meteor-rain
Fell glimmering on my dark despair
The syllables of a prophetic tongue:
"O heart disconsolate, beauty-wrung,
Wanderer unsated, not in vain
A voice of unattainable melody
Winging in heavenly air,
Came Brindavan's immortal memory
And turned thy human happiness
Into dim longing pain.
Thy life's search is not meaningless
Though Jumuna's banks are void and bare;
Now too a spirit-flute
Conveys again so holy a calm abroad
That even on misery's lips fallen mute
In uncompanioned throes
Pale silence blossoms like a rose
Deep-rooted in the soul's eternity.
Rest not till thou find sanctuary
Where Brindavan has gore behind its God.
For there the veil shall draw aside,
Which hangs between thy in-turned gaze
And Him of the irradiant face:
His musical tranquillity
Shall once more in thy ear abide
And all the heart-beats of thy life's increase
Count but the starlike moments of His peace."
SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT
"Poetry, or at any rate a truly poetic poetry, comes always from some subtle plane through the creative vital and uses the outer mind and other external instruments for trans-
Page 121
mission only. There are three elements in the production of poetry; there is the original source of inspiration, there is the vital force of creative beauty which contributes its own substance and impetus and often determines the form, except when that also comes ready made from the original sources; there is finally the transmitting outer consciousness of the poet. The most genuine and perfect poetry is written when the original source is able to throw its inspiration pure and undiminished into the vital and there takes its true native form and power of speech exactly reproducing the inspiration, while the outer consciousness is entirely passive and transmits without alteration what it receives from the godheads of the inner or the superior spaces.1 When the vital mind and emotion are too active and give too much of their own initiation or a translation into more or less turbid vital stuff, the poetry remains powerful but is inferior in quality and less authentic. Finally, if the outer consciousness is too lethargic and blocks the transmission or too active and makes its own version, then you have the poetry that fails or is at best a creditable mental manufacture. It is the interference of these two parts either by obstruction or by too great an activity of their own or by both together that causes the difficulty and labour of writing. There would be no difficulty if the inspiration came through without obstruction or interference in a pure transcript—that is what happens in a poet's highest or freest moments when he writes not at all out of his own external human mind but by inspiration, as the mouthpiece of the Gods.
"The originating source may be anywhere; the poetry may arise or descend from the subtle physical plane, from the higher or lower vital itself, from the dynamic or creative
1 The expression—"the vital"—in this sentence is a special term of Sri Aurobindo's and must not be taken as one lacking by oversight a noun after it. Thus elsewhere he writes: "The vital has to be carefully distinguished from mind, even though it has a mind element transfused into it..." {Letters on Yoga, Birth Centenary, Vol. 22, p. 320). Of course, the term often occurs with a noun, as the very next sentence in the passage quoted testifies. (K.. D. S.)
Page 122
intelligence, from the plane 0f dynamic vision, from the psychic, from the illumined mind or Intuition,—even, though this is the rarest, from the Overmind widenesses. To get the Overmind inspiration is so rare that there are only a few lines or short passages in all poetic literature that give at least some appearance or reflection of it. When the source of inspiration is in the heart or the psychic there is more easily a good will in the vital channel, the flow is spontaneous; the inspiration takes at once its true form and speech and is transmitted without any interference or only a minimum of interference by the brain-mind, that great spoiler of the higher or deeper splendours. It is the character of the lyrical inspiration to flow in a jet out of the being —whether it comes from the vital or the psychic, it is usually spontaneous, for these are the two most powerfully impelling and compelling parts of the nature. When on the contrary the source of inspiration is in the creative poetic intelligence or even the higher mind or the illumined mind, the poetry which comes from this is quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect, our habitual thought-production engine. This intellect in an absurdly overactive part of the nature; it always thinks that nothing can be well done unless it puts its finger into the pie and therefore it instinctively interferes with the inspiration, blocks half or more than half of it and labours to substitute its own inferior and toilsome productions for the true speech and rhythm that ought to have come. The poet labours in anguish to get the one true word, the authentic rhythm, the real divine substance of what he has to say, while all the time it is waiting complete and ready behind; but it is denied free transmission by some part of the transmitting agency which prefers to translate and is not willing merely to receive and transcribe. When one gets something through from the illumined mind, then there is likely to come to birth work that is really fine and great. When there comes with labour or without it something reasonably like what the poetic intelligence wanted to say then there is something fine or ade-
Page 123
quate, though it may not be great unless there is an intervention from the higher levels. But when the outer brain is at work trying to fashion out of itself or to give its own version of what the higher sources are trying to pour down, then there results a manufacture or something quite inadequate or faulty or, at the best, 'good on the whole', but not the thing that ought to have come."
Touching on the direct personal question, Sri Aurobindo wrote apropos of this very early poem: "Your source is the creative (poetic) intelligence and, at your best, the illumined mind." His verdict on the first version of the poem was: "Good on the whole." The second version—the present one—had his approval. He marked off the last couplet and three other lines—
Deep-rooted in the soul's eternity...
Where Brindavan has gone behind its God—
as having come "through from the illumined mind". He added:
"The lines,
Came Brindavan's immotal memory,
though not on the same level as the best in the poem, are yet not far below them; they are a fine expression of a psychic and mystic reality."
"To get back from the surface vital into the psychic and psychic vital, to raise the level of your mental from the intellect to the Illumined Mind is your need both in poetry and in Yoga.... If you could always write direct from the Illumined Mind—finding there not only the substance, as
Page 124
you often do, but the rhythm and language—that indeed would be a poetry exquisite, original and unique. The intellect produces the idea, even the poetic idea, too much for the sake of the idea alone; coming from the Illumined Mind the idea in a form of light and music is itself but the shining body of the Light Divine."
(What is the difference between the plane of "dynamic or creative intelligence" and that of "dynamic vision"?)
'On one the creation is by thought, by the idea-force and images constructed by the idea mind-images; on the other one creates by sight, by direct vision either of the thing in itself or by some living significant symbol or expressive body of it. This dynamic sight is not the vision that comes by an intense reconstruction of physical seeing or through vital experience (e.g. Shakespeare's it is a kind of occult sight which sees the things behind the veil, the forms that are more intimate and expressive than any outward appearance, it is a very vivid sight and the expression that comes with it is also extremely vivid and living but with a sort of inner super-life To be able to write at will from this plane is sufficiently rare,—though a poet habitually writing from some other level may stumble into it from time to time."
The plane of dynamic vision is a part of the inner Mind and perhaps should be called a province rather than a plane. There arc many kinds of vision in the inner Mind and not dynamic vision only. So, to fix invariable characteristics for the poetry of the inner Mind is not easy or even possible. It is a thing to be felt rather than mentally definable."
(I don't know what to do with this mind of mine. As a poetic instrument it is extremely variable. Why can't it always get successfully inspired?)
"Perhaps one reason why your mind is so variable is because it has learned too much and has too many influences
Page 125
stamped upon it; it does not allow the real poet in you who is a little at the back to be himself—it wants to supply him with a form instead of allowing him to breathe into the instrument his own notes. It is, besides, too ingenious. What you have to learn is the art of allowing things to come through and recognising among them the one right thing—which is very much what you have to do in Yoga also. It is really this recognition that is the one important need—once you have that, things become much easier."
*
(I want to produce something Upanishadic. But I get no glimmering at all of the sovereignly transcendent. The poem below almost tells me what I should do to solve my difficulty; but the manner in which it tells seems to drive home the fact of my being so far from what I want—the sheer stupendous Mantra. "The way is long, the wind is cold", though luckily it is not true that "the minstrel is infirm and old".)
YOGA
"Torment not with intangible fulgenccs! O master, to my hungry life impart
The nectarous frith of yon Sky-Spirit unheard
Whose sole revealing word
Is a touch of cold far flame upon my heart!
Of what avail mate mystic suns of snow?"
"Banish from your dream-night
The burning blindness of earth-hued desire,
That scorching shadow masked as living light!
Then only can your misery's
Heart-hunger know
The multi-splendoured sweetness of truth-glow,
Page 126
The embracing fire
Of His inscrutable omnipotent peace!"
"1 fear it is only eloquence—a long way from the Mantra. From the point of view of a poetic eloquence there are some forceful lines and the rest is well done, but—There is too much play of the mind, not the hushed intense receptivity of the seer which is necessary for the Mantra."
(Does "poetic eloquence" belong only to the mental plane which you have called "the poetic intelligence" and more generally "the creative intelligence"? Can it be part also of "the Higher Mind" or "the Higher Thought" which is an "overhead" plane?)
"It belongs to the poetic intelligence, but as in most of Milton it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and language."
'There are besides in mental poetry derivations or substitutes for all [overhead] styles, Mi ton's 'grand style' is such a substitute for the manner of the Higher Thought. Take it anywhere at its ordinary level or in its elevation, there is always or almost always that echo there:
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree,
or
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old...
Milton's lines might at first sight be taken because of a certain depth of emotion in their large lingering rhythm as having the overhead complexion, but this rhythm loses
Page 127
something of its sovereign right because there are no depths of sense behind... Milton's architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers; the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence,—for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he works."
"Naturally, something from the higher planes can come into the poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. That happens in such lines as [Milton's]
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity."
"The Mantra (not necessarily in the Upanishads alone). . is what comes as here from the Overmind inspiration." —"One has the sense here of; rhythm which docs not begin or end with the line, but has for ever been sounding in the eternal planes and began even in Time ages ago and which returns into the infinite to go sounding on for ages after. In fact, the word-rhythm is only part of what we hear; it is a support for the rhythm we listen to behind in the Ear of the ear', srotrasya srotram. To a certain extent, that is what all great poetry at its highest tries to have, but it is only the Overmind rhythm to which it is altogether native and in which it is not only behind the word-rhythm but gets into the word-movement itself and finds a fully supporting body there."
(On the expression "lofty region" in a poem of mine, with variations like "vasty" and "myriad" suggested for the adjective, you passed the verdict: "pseudo-Miltonic." What exactly did you mean?) #
"By pseudo-Miltonic I mean a certain kind of traditional poetic eloquence which finds its roots in Milton but even when well done lacks in originality and can easily be vapid and sometimes hollow.... An expression like lofty region, vasty region, myriad region even expresses nothing but a
Page 128
bare intellectual fact—with no more vision in it than would convey mere wideness without any significance in it."
(With one line picked out a'most wholly from my poem Yoga, I have started another poem. The closing image is also somewhat similar to the one in the earlier work. Still far from the Upanishadic goal, I am afraid, but how does it strike you?)
MAYA
A scorching shadow masked as living light,
Earth's smile of painted passion withers now!
But is there hollow on black ravenous hollow
With never a gold core of love divine?
How pass then reveries of angelic wings
Or sudden stabs of paradise through clay
Revealing the blind heart of all desire?
Surely some haloed beauty hides within
The mournful spaces of unllustred limbs
To call with secret eyes a perfect Sun
Whose glory yearns across the drouth of hell!
Behind the false glow dreams the epiphany—
But like a face of night implacable
Save to the soul's virginity, the unknown
White fire whose arms enclasp infinitude...
SRI AUROBIDNO'S COMMENT
'Exceedingly fine. I have marked the best lines. It is a very powerful poetic expression of the idea. It is the poetic intelligence, of course, but the last lines 'the unknown White fire' etc. reach overhead."
Page 129
GLOAM-INFINITES
Gloam-infinites of trance!—but like a wound
Of vacancy unto my mortal heart
Came that aloof immeasurable peace.
The ear—a cavern lonely, echoless—
Waited in fear; then suddenly the spell
Of unknown firmaments broke to a close
Chirrup of some late passing bird, which drew
All the void dark and dreadful mystery
Into the music of one passionate kiss
Upon my blinded dream. I woke to feel
A human face yearnig out of the vast.
"It is very fine. The first three lines are the Higher Mind rising into the Illumined and are very powerful. The rest is of the Higher Mind, except it may be the two before the last which are somewhat mixed with the poetic intelligence."
PLEROMA
Nor first nor last, but in a timeless gyre
The globes of Beauty burn—a hush made fire:
Their colours self-secluded one by one,
Yet sisters in a joyful union—
Rhythms of quiet, thrill on gemlike thrill
Necklaced around a Threat invisible...
When wearily I string word after word,
I call your flame, O Ecstasies unheard.
To guide my frailty with some touch of you!
Grant me a worship-glow that reaches, through
My dreamful silence ere the musics throng,
A deathless silence at each close of song.
Page 130
"Very fine. It is a vision of things from the Illumined Mind with the atmosphere of light and colours that reigns there."
TWO BIRDS
A small bird crimson-hued
Among great realms of green
Fed on their multitudinous fruit—
But in his dark eye flamed more keen
A hunger as from joy to joy
He moved the poigrance of his beak,
And ever in his heart he wailed,
"Where hangs the marvellous fruit I seek?"
Then suddenly above his head
A searching gaze of grief he turned:
Lo, there upon the topmost bough
A pride of golden plumage burned!
Lost in a dream no hunger broke,
This calm bird—auteoled, immense—
Sat motionless: all fruit he found
Within his own magnificence.
The watchful ravener below
Felt his time-tortured passion cease,
And flying upward knew himself
One with that bird of golden peace.
"It is very felicitous in expression, and taking. The fourth stanza is from the Intuitive, the rest not from the Higher
Page 131
Mind—for there a high-uplifted thought is the characters tic—but more probably from some realm of the inner Mind where thought and vision are involved in each other—that kind of fusion gives the easy felicity that is found here. All the same there is a touch of the Higher Mind perhaps in the 2nd lines of the second and the last stanza."
EACH NIGHT
Dream not with gaze hung low
By love
That earthward calls—but know
The silver spaces move
Within your eyes when sleep
Brings gloom:
Then will your hush grow deep
As heaven's lofty room
And in this chamber strange
With blue
A Love unmarred by change
Shall ever tryst with you.
So, build Her each calm night
A swoon
That bears on outer sight
The padlock of the moon.
"The inspiration is, I think, from the same place. An easy and luminous simplicity that is at the same time very felicitous."
Page 132
GOD-SCULPTURE
"No man to immortal beauty woke
But by My music of stroke on stroke
Should I disdain to hurt your deep
Rigidities of clay-bound sleep,
How would you bear a thrilled impress
Of My unshadowed loveliness?
Pain like a chisel I've brought to trace
The death of pain upon your face:
Each curve and line new-wrought shall be
A tangible God-ecstasy.
If earth's hard gloom I never broke
With the keen fire of shaping stroke,
Creation would forfeit its aim—
To house the parad sal flame
In no vague momentary mood
But kindle with infinitude
Rapture as of eternal stone!
Must not My love be hammer-willed
Its crowning masterpiece to build
From the dense quarry of body and bone?"
SRI AUROBIUNDO'S COMMENT
"It is a very fine poem, perfect in rhythm and expression. The inspiration is from an inner centre."
EVANESCENCE
Where lie the past noon-lilies
And vesper-violets gone?
Into what strange invisible deep
Fall out of time the roses of each dawn?
Page 133
They draw for us a dream-way
To ecstasies unhoured, Where all earth's form-hues flicker and drop,
By some great wind of mystery overpowered.
"The simple revealing directness and beauty evoke without effort a pure sense of mystic truth. The opening stanza and continuation are exceedingly fine, full of magic suggestion. In the last two lines there is a mixture of the intuitive and the illumined, the rest is pure intuitive—but occult because it is from a province of the occult that the intuition of the substance comes. The last two lines have, I think, an equal poetic excellence with the rest, but it is not the same."
(How do you find this poem? Is it very surrealistic?)
AGNI JATAVEDAS
(In the Rigveda, Agni, called "Jatavedas" or "Knower of births", is the divine Fire visioned in various occult forms as the secret urge of our evolution towards the perfect splendour that is the Spirit.)
O smile of heaven locked in a seed of light—
O music burning through the heart's dumb rock—
O beast of beauty with the golden beard—
O lust-consumer in the virgin's bed—
Come with thy myriad eyes that face all truth,
Thy myriad arms equal to each desire!
Shatter or save, but fill this gap of gloom:
Rise from below and call thy far wealth down—
A straining supplicant of naked silver,
A jar of dream, a crystal emptiness
Page 134
Draining through a mighty mouth above the mind
Some ageless alchemy of liquid sun.
Or bind us like a python-sleep of snow
Whose glory grips the flesh and leaves it numb
For soul to gather its forgotten fire,
A purple power no eagle's wing-waft knew,
A soar that makes time-towers a lonely fret
And all a futile victory the stars!
Work thy strange will, but load our gaze no more
With unexplorable freedoms of black air,
An infinite rapture veiled by infinite pain....
Lightning of Truth, God's lava passion—come!
"Very fine poetry throughout, not exactly 'surrealistic', at least not in the current sense, but occult in its vision and sequences. 1 have marked the most powerful lines."
Originally the last line stood:
Lightning of Truth, God's lava—come, O come!
Sri Aurobindo criticised its ending as too romantic in turn for the kind of mystic inspiration expressed. Then the present form of the line, with its second part strengthened in significance and the conclusion made terse in its emotion, was found.
(Into what category of blank verse does this poem fall? Has it any epic quality? If not, how do you differentiate between the epic and the other kinds of poetic power? What would you say of the styles of Victor Hugo, Marlowe, Dante? I should think epic poetry has a more natural turn of imagination than the non-epic: it is powerfully wide or deep or high without being outstandingly bold, it also displays less colour.)
Page 135
"'Agni Jatavedas' is a sort of violent sublime—ultra-Aeschylean perhaps. There are sometimes epic or almost epic lines, but the whole or most of it has not the epic ring. There is one epic line—
An infinite rapture veiled by infinite pain.
Perhaps the first three lines are near the epic—there may be one or two others. I don't know how I differentiate. Victor Hugo in the 'Legende des Siecles' tries to be epic and often succeeds, perhaps even on the whole: Marlowe is sometimes great or sublime, but I would lot call him epic. There is a greatness or sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line—
In cradle of the rude imperious surge—
is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it,
Be de kat' oulumpolo karenon choomenos ker
(He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart).1
Or Virgil's
Disce, puer, virtutem ex ine verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis,2
or Milton's
Fall'n Cherub, to be weak, is miserable.
1 Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo has translated 'he line in an hexameter: Down from the peaks of Olympus he came wrath vexing his heart-strings.
2 This may be hexametricaily rendered:
Learn from me, youth, what is courage and what true labour.
Fortune from others. (K.D.S.)
Page 136
What is there in these lines that is not in Shakespeare's and makes them epic (Shakespeare's of course has something else as valuable)? For the moment at least, I can't tell you, but it is there. A tone of the inner spirit perhaps, expressing itself in the rhythm and the turn of the language. Dante has the epic spirit and tone, what be lacks is the epic elan and swiftness. The distinction you draw applies, no doubt, but I do not know whether it is the essence of the thing or only one result of a certain austerity in the epic Muse. I do not know whether one cannot be coloured provided one keeps that austerity which, be it understood, is not incompatible with a certain fineness and sweetness."
It may be of interest to have from the disciple-correspondent's own work a short complete passage—a whole sonnet—declared by Sri Aurobindo, in a characteristically penetrative comment, to have what he has called in the above letter the epic spirit, tone and elan:
THE DIVINE DENIER
Wanderer of hell's chimerIcal abyss,
Dreaming for ever of star-fragrance blown
From the efflorescent heart of the Unknown!
They knew thee not who scorned thy madnesses,
Nor plumbed the beauty of that terrible mood
Which hailed as a supreme apocalypse
The all-desiring and all-quenching lips
Of death's unfathomable solitude!
Thou wert Heaven's most God-haunted enemy.
The universe to thee was one vast tomb,
But of so tense, ineffable a gloom
That thou stoodst drunk with measureless mystery,
Ecstatic in the very shadow of doom
As though an infinite sun had blinded thee!
Page 137
SRI AUROBINOD'S COMMENT
"A really fine poem. I think 'hell' is better than 'sin' [in line 1]. As there is a phrase 'goody-goody' expressing a morbid sentimentality of virtue, so there could be a phrase 'baddy-baddy' which could express a morbid sentimentality of vice—and 'sin' here would be dangerously near to that. Still it can stand, if you prefer it—though it does not give the full epic note which is sustained throughout the rest of the poem."
The poet had roughly Baudelaire in mind as his subject: hence the word 'sin'. Sri Aurobindo wrote of Baudelaire, "He was a good poet with a perverted imagination", but considered him quite inadequate for the role depicted in the poem. According to Sri Aurobindo, the figure of Archangel Satan would best give the type.
In connection with epic and non-epic blank verse, we may note that a blank verse other than epic but also different from the non-epic of Agni Jatavedas has been distinguished by Sri Aurobindo in commenting on the poet's First Sight of Girnar in Part I: "No, it is no the epic kind—the rhythm is rather large, calm and reflective than epic."
Nirodbaran wrote to Sri Aurobindo: "You have stated to Nishikanta about his Bengali translation of Amal's Agni Jatavedas: 'It is a splendid translation rendering the full poetic force and colour and substance of the original which you have followed with a remarkable exactitude.' But Nishikanta, I understand, writes from the subtle vital plane. If a poem is from overhead, would not its spiritual value be lost in a translation from a different plane?"
Sri Aurobindo replied:
"If you mean the spiritual substance, I suppose it would be lost. I was looking at the poetic beauty of Nishikanto's
Page 138
rendering which is on a par with the original. As for the subtle vital sublimated it enters largely into Amal's poem, even if it is a sort of supervital."
(This poem seems to have an occult air about it on the whole. But perhaps it is more surrealistic? What would you say of its quality and value?)
GREEN TIGER
There is no going to the Gold
Save on four feet
Of the Green Tiger in whose heart's hold
Is the ineffable heat.
Raw with a burning body
Ruled by no thought—
Hero of the huge head roaring
Ever to be caught!
Backward and forward he struggles,
Till Sun and Moon tame
By cutting his neck asunder:
Then the heart's flame
Is free and the blind gap brings
A new life's beat—
Red Dragon with eagle-wings
Yet tiger-feet!
Time's blood is sap between
God's flower, God's root—
Infinity waits but to crown
This Super-brute.
Page 139
"Very powerful and original poem. There may be some doubt as to whether the images have coalesced into a perfect whole. But it may be that if they did, the startling originality of the combination might lose something of its vehement force, and in that case it may be allowed to stand as it is. At any rate it is an extremely original and powerful achievement."
A DIAMOND IS BURNING UPWARD
A diamond is burning upward
In the roofless chamber walled
By the ivory mind;
An orb entranced glows
Where earth-storm lever blows—
But the two wide eyes are blind
To its virgin soar behind
Their ruby and emerald.
The one pure bird finds rest
In the crescent moon of a nest
Which infinite boughs upbear....
Flung out on phantom air
In a colour-to-colour race
Yet never ending their quest,
The two birds dream they fly
Though fixed in the narrow sky Of a futile human face.
"It sounds very surrealistic. Images and poetry very beautiful, but significance and connections are cryptic. Very attractive, though."
Page 140
TALISMAN
(Suggested by a refrain from Morris)
The hallowing moon-white
Obscurity of night—
Aroma of a love-hush blown
From the inviolate unknown—
And then once more time's cleaving cry....
But in wide wonder beyond death
A trance of beauty grew life-breath
Behind a shield of memory,
Limned with one red rose strewn
Across a perfect moon.
Sri Aurobindo picked out in particular the first two and the last three lines and characterised them as having "a delicate, richly-subdued colour of mystic light".
TWO MOMENTS
Dark quietudes in a quiet gleam,
The branches woke with not a sough
The mere which made them water-souled,
Rapt from the rush of severing days.
One leaf forsook its hanging bough—
Fell through that agelessness of dream.
A wrinkle crept on the water's face,
And all light suddenly grew old.
'Very subtle and suggestive."
Page 141
WHITE HORSE
White horse, white horse,
Deathlessly wake.. .
Out of the cavern of our sleep
Like laughter break
Into the moon's pure flush
And the stars' pale sheen!
How can thy magic colour mate
With grey or green
The grey of drowsing soil
And the green of wood-gloom?
Thy feet have wings: for thee was built
Heaven's wide room.
Soar through the silver deeps
On a passion of prayer
Until the lost dawn echoes thy love
From its gold lair!
"Very good—a beautiful poem. Intuitive—intensely so."
ORISON
A godless temple is the dome of space:
Reveal the sun of thy love-splendoured face,
O lustrous flowering of invisible peace,
O glory breaking into curves of clay
From mute intangible dream-distances,
That like a wondrous ye familiar light
Eternity may mingle with our day!
Page 142
Leave thou no quiver of this time-born heart
A poor and visionless wanderer apart:
Make even my darkness a divine repose to
One with thy nameless root, O mystic rose— 11
The slumbering seasons of my mortal sight 12
A portion of the unknowable vast behind 13
Thy gold apocalypse of shadowless mind! 14
That is extraordinarily fine thioughout. But it is too fine for any need of remarks. Lines 3 4, 5, also 10,11, 12, 13, 14, Illumined Mind with Overmind Intuition touch—the rest Higher Mind suffused with Illumined Mind."
(The Muse is again away and I am feeling impatient. Can't you give me some clue about the direction of consciousness by which I may draw her back to me or reach out to her? But, of course, I want the highest and I want a thorough perfection. Perhaps I am too careful and self-critical? But that is my nature as an artist. Has it got something to do with the Muse's flight from me? In any case, the experience of uncreativeness, the loss of the freedom of flying on the wings of inspiration, the sense of the poetic part of me caught in the mere mind and rendered vague and ineffective—all this is most unpleasant. Sometimes I fear the present lack of fluency may become a permanent defect What method would you advise to counteract it? Quitting the mind? What do you do to get inspiration?)
'"Poetry seems to have intervals in its visits to you very often. I rather think the malady is fairly common. Dilip and Nishikanta who can write wherever they feel inclined are rare birds.I don't know about the direction of conscious-
Page 143
ness'. My own method is not to quiet the mind, for it is eternally quiet, but to turn upward and inward. You, I suppose, would have to quiet it first, which is not always easy. Have you tried it?
"It is precisely the people who are careful, self-critical, anxious for perfection who have interrupted visits from the Muse. Those who don't mind what they write, trusting to their genius, vigour, fluency to carry it off, are usually the abundant writers. There are exceptions, of course. 'The poetic part caught in the mere mind' is an admirable explanation of the phenomenon of interruption—it was the same with myself in the old days. Fluent poets are those who either do not mind if they do not always write their very best or whose minds are sufficiently poetic to make even their 'not best' verse pass muster well. Sometimes you write things that are good enough, but not your best—but both your insistence and mine—for I think it essential for you to write your best always, at least your 'level best'—may have curbed your fluency a good deal.
"The diminution of your prose was compensated by the much higher and maturcr quality to which it attained atfterwards. It would be so, I suppose, with the poetry and a new level of consciousness once attained there might well be a new fluency. So there is not much justification for the fear."
"What does your correspondent mean by #'philosophy' in a poem? Of course if one sets out to write a metaphysical argument in verse like the Greek Empedocles or the Roman Lucretius it is a risky business and is likely to land you into prosaic poetry which is a less pardonable mixture than poetic prose. Even when philosophising in a less perilous way, one has to be careful not to be flat or heavy. It is obviously easier to be poetic when singing about a skylark than when one tries to weave a robe of verse to clothe the
Page 144
attributes of the Brahman. But that does not mean that there is to be no thought or no spiritual thought or no expression of truth in poetry; there is no great poet who has not tried to philosophise. Shelley wrote about the skylark, but he also wrote about the Brahman.
Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity
is as good poetry as
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
There are flights of unsurpassable poetry in the Gita and the Upanishads. These rigid dicta are always excessive and there is no reason why a poet should allow the expression of his personality or the spirit within him or his whole poetic mind to be clipped, cabined or stifled by any theories of 'thou shalt not' of this character."
"The theory which discourages the poet from thinking or at least from thinking for the sake of the thought proceeds from an extreme romanticist temper; it reaches its acme on one side in the question of the surrealist, 'Why do you want poetry to mean anything'?' and on the other in Housman's exaltation of pure poetry which he describes paradoxically as a sort of sublime nonsense which does not appeal at all to the mental intelligence but knocks at the solar plexus and awakes a vital and physical rather than intellectual sensation and response. It is of course not that really but a vividness of imagination and feeling which disregards the mind's positive view of things and its logical sequences; the centre or centres it knocks at are not the brain-mind, not even the poetic intelligence but the subtle physical, the nervous, the vital or the psychic centre. The poem he quotes from Blake is certainly not nonsense, but it has no positive and exact meaning for the intellect or the surface mind; it expresses certain things that are true and real, not nonsense but a
Page 145
deeper sense which we feel powerfully with a great stirring of some inner emotion, but any attempt at exact intellectual statement of them sterilises their sense and spoils their appeal. This is not the method of the highest spiritual poetry. Its expression aims at a certain force, directness and spiritual clarity and reality. When it is not understood, it is because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the ordinary mind or belong to an untrodden domain or domains or enter into a field of occult experience; it is not because there is any attempt at a dark or vague profundity or at an escape from thought. The thinking is not intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a vision, a spiritual contact or a knowledge which has come by entering into the thing itself, by identity.
"It may be noted that the greater romantic poets did not shun thought; they thought abundantly, almost endlessly. They have their characteristic view of life, something that one might call their philosophy, their world-view, and they express it. Keats was the most romantic of poets, but he could write 'To philosophise I dare not yet1; he did not write 'I am too much of a poet to philosophise.' To philosophise he regarded evidently as mounting on the admiral's flag-ship and flying an almost royal manner. Spiritual philosophic poetry is different; it expresses or tries to express a total and many-sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other. Whatever language, whatever terms are necessary to convey this truth of vision and experience it uses without scruple, not admitting any mental rule of what is or is not poetic. It does not hesitate to employ terms which might be considered as technical when these can be turned to express something direct, vivid and powerful. That need not be an introduction of 'technical jargon', that is to say, I suppose, special and artificial language, expressing in this case only abstract ideas and generalities without any living truth or reality in them. Such jargon cannot make good literature, much less good poetry. But there is a 'poeticism' which establishes a sanitary cordon
Page 146
against words and ideas which it considers as prosaic but which properly used can strengthen poetry and extend its range. That limitation I do not admit as legitimate.
"I am justifying the poet's right to think as well as to see and feel, his right to 'dare to philosophise'. I agree with the modernists in their revolt against the romanticist's insistence on emotionalism and his objection to thinking and philosophical reflection in poetry. But the modernist went too far in his revolt. In trying to avoid what I may call poeticism he ceased to be poetic; wishing to escape from rhetorical writing, rhetorical pretension to greatness and beauty of style, he threw out true poetic greatness and beauty, turned from a deliberately poetic style to a colloquial tone and even to very flat writing; especially he turned away from poetic rhythm to a prose or half-prose rhythm or to no rhythm at all. Also he has weighed too much on thought and has lost the habit of intuitive sight; by turning emotion out of its intimate chamber in the house of Poetry, he has had to bring in to relieve the dryness of much of his thought, too much exaggeration of the lower vital and sensational reactions untransformed or else transformed only by exaggeration. Nevertheless he has perhaps restored to the poet the freedom to think as well as to adopt a certain straightforwardness and directness of style."
Page 147
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.