Poems
THEME/S
5
HARMONIES
Unfathomed harmonies roll, drowning our sight
In purple of their passionate abyss—
A superhuman solitude of night
Sprung from a deep where all the waves are bliss.
O waves divine, dark to our shuddering eyes,
You float a fire that glooms each common glow!
Sweep over foundering thought your rhythmic skies
Until we gain some marvellous earth below.
There still the pure Atlantis shall be found
Of rapture lost by souls unluminous:
There rings of silver memories surround
An empty throne of gold awaiting us.
SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT
"It is more mental than usual--but the vision and expression are there. The first stanza is the most powerful, a Higher Mind movement; lines 7, 8 belong to the same category— though, as I say, the mental s rain is more pronounced than it has been in recent poems. The other lines are colourful and imaginative.
"Its vision brings out a truth of spiritual experience with sufficient force and exactness, though not with the deeper intimacy that sometimes comes in from above. It has a perfection of its own which is considerable."
*
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DESCENT
A secret of far sky burns suddenly close,
The deep blue wakes to a glory of pale blue:
Then large and calm and effortless wings of light
Swoop crimson through the paradisal air!
Talons of eyrie truth—a clutch of gold—
Numb every thought to a shining vacancy
Merged in the immortal spaciousness around
This haloed hawk that preys on time-desire...
My body, wrapped in the vast apocalypse,
Grows king of Nature with the mystic bird
A flaming crown of godhead over life!
'It is certainly very original and expresses with great force the spiritual experience. A very fine poem—most of it being in substance from the Illumined Mind (except 2 or 3 lines) but its rhythm belongs to the poetic intelligence, strong and clear-cut but not with the subtle or large inner tones of the overhead music. It is a very luminous and powerful image."
GULFS OF NIGHT
From hills inaureoled by a twilight trance,
Arms eager with the enchanted cry of love
Strain towards a mountain lost in timeless dawn.
But how shall arms of reverie clasp that fire
When gulfs of nameless night—a dragon's mouth—
Have stretched below their blinded centuries?...
O paradise-haunted pilgrims of the dusk,
Nothing save fall can bare the soul's rich deep.
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To the emperor height take tributary hands
Full of wide wounds like rubies proud and warm,
Cut from life's inmost core of mystery.
No rapture—till you appease with diamond tears
Truth's spirit throne of dross-consuming gold.
"There is something mental in the turn—which makes it sound like an overhead inspiration coming through the mind, rather than direct. At the same time the first live lines, 7 and 11 also, have a more direct overhead ring.''
"It expresses its idea win great richness and force and images that carry one beyord the mental vision of things— that seems to me its main quality."
DISCLOSURE
Stoop your calm beauty—let your shining hair
Unveil its ages of high secrecy
To float upon dull earth the frankincense
Your face of love burns to an infinite sky.
Fill life with mystic rondures of your breast
And all that worship dreamed unknowable
Bare through your body's perfect universe.
O mate the sculptor-vigil of our gloom
With those superb clay lines that sing your soul:
Then every stroke of time shall carve to birth
Immortal moods lit by your ecstasy.
"Very fine poetry. Blank verse rhythm very good. Illumined Higher Mind."
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MERE OF DREAM
The Unknown above is a mute vacancy—
But in the mere of dream wide wings are spread,
An ageless bird poising a rumour of gold
Upon prophetic waters hung asleep.
The veils of vastitude are cloven white,
The burden of unreachable blue is lost:
A ring of hills around a silver hush,
The far mind haloed with mysterious dawn
Treasures in the deep eye of thought-suspense
An eagle-destiny beaconing through all time.
On an earlier version not including lines 5 and 6:
"First line from the higher Mind, the next five from the illumined Mind—the last two I can't very well say: perhaps the inner Mind there has taken up the illumined inspiration and given it a turn belonging to an interpretative language of is own making. All the lines are of a fine quality, but the 2nd and 4th are the finest." On the present version:
"As a whole it gains by the two lines added; the line about trie veils of vastitude being on the general level of the first four and even on the specially high level of 2 and 4. 6 is also a fine line (illumined higher Mind)."
"The poem does not fall below the average mark [you have set yourself], but there are degrees even in the above-average and this is fine, even very fine, but not as a whole quite as absolute as some that went before. The 2nd and 4th and 5th lines are the finest."
"What you are writing now is 'overhead' poetry—I mean poetry inspired from those planes—before you used to write poems very often from the intuitive mind—these had a beauty and perfection of their own. What I mean by absoluteness here is a full intensely inevitable expression of
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what comes from above. These lines are original, convin-cing, have vision, they are not to be rejected, but they are not the highest flight except in single lines. Such variations are to be expected and would be more prominent if you were writing longer poems, for then to keep always or even usually to that highest level would be an extraordinary feat—no poet has managed as yet to write always at his highest flight and here in that kind of poetry it would be still more difficult. The important point is not to fall below a certain level—when you do I shall certainly tell you."
(How is it that after this training under you and getting inspiration from certain of the planes towards which I have kept straining my consciousness I relapse time and again into inferior poetry? Either a relapse or I grow dumb—and even otherwise it is no easy job to receive the kind of inspiration I went. There are fine flowings at times, but often there are blockings in places and I have to wait and wait for their removal. I feel dejected and wonder when the intense joy that poetry brings me will be free from these most discouraging impediments. My relapse at the moment, is regards some lines, fills me with shame.)
"It is not a relapse, but an oscillation which one finds in almost every poet. Each has a general level, a highest level and a lower range in which some defects of his poetical faculty come out. You have three manners: (1) a sort of decorative romantic manner that survives from your early days—this at a lower pitch turns to too much dressing of an ornamental kind, at a higher to post-Victorian Edwardian or Georgian rhetoric with a frequent saving touch of Yeats; (2) a level at which all is fused into a fine intuitive authenticity and beauty, there is seldom anything to change; (3) a higher level of grander movement and language in which you pull down or reach the influences of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Overmind Intuition. The last you have not yet fully
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mastered so as to write with an absolute certainty and faultlessness except by lines and stanzas or else as a whole in rare moments of total inspiration, but you are moving towards mastery in it. Sometimes these inspirations get mixed up together. It is this straining towards greater height that creates the difficulty, yet it is indispensable for the evolution of your genius. It is not surprising, therefore, that inspiration comes with difficulty often, or that there are dormant periods or returns of the decorative inspiration. All that is part of the day's work and dejection is quite out of place."
(20-4-1937)
(What exactly is the intuitive mind you have spoken of, and how does it differ from what you have called 'inner mind' and 'mystic mind'?)
The intuitive mind, strictly speaking, stretches from the Intuition proper down to the intuitivised inner mind—it is therefore at once an overhead power and a mental intelligence power. All depends on the amount, intensity, quality of the intuition and how far it is mixed with mind or pure. The inner mind is not necessarily intuitive, though it can easily become so. The mystic mind is turned towards the occult and spiritual, but the inner mind can act without direct reference to the occult and spiritual, it can act in the same field and in the same material as the ordinary mind, only with a larger and deeper power, range and light and in greater unison with the Universal Mind; it can open also more easily to what is within and what is above. Intuitive intelligence, mystic mind, inner mind intelligence are all part of the inner mind operation. In today's poem, for instance—
A POET'S STAMMER
My dream is spoken,
As if by sound
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Were tremulously broken
Some vow profound.
A timeless hush
Draws ever back
The winging music-rush
Upon thought's track.
Though syllables sweep
Like golden birds,
Far lonelihoods of sleep
Dwindle my words.
Beyond life's clamour,
A mystery mars
Speech-light to a myriad stammer
Of flickering stars.—
it is certainly the inner mind that has transformed the idea of stammering into a symbol of inner phenomena and into that operation a certain strain of mystic mind enters, but what is prominent is the intuitive inspiration throughout. It blends with the intuitive poetic intelligence in the first stanza, gets touched by the overhead intuition in the second, gets full of it in the third and again rises rapidly to that in the two last lines of the fourth stanza. This is what I call poetry of the intuitive mind."
"It is a very true and beautiful poem."
THE SACRED FIRE
O keep the sacred fire
A prisoner poise
With walls that never wake
To earthly voice.
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So delicate and small
This undefiled
Epiphany of joy,
This golden child,
That like a freezing blast
The unfruitful power
Of stormy mind will quench
The burning flower.
Breathe tenderly your love:
Feed the pure flame
By secret offerings
Of one far Name
Whose rhythms make more rich
That smiling face
Of angel glow within
The heart's embrace—
Until the dreamy hue
Grows wide enough
To flash upon time's chill
A warrior laugh
Piercing through twilight walls
Of calm to blind
With a noon of ecstasy
The space of mind.
A sword divine which darts
From clay's dull sheath,
The luminous tongue shall rise
Devouring death
And every icy thought's
Oblivion
Of earth's untarnished soul,
Its core of sun.
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"It is a very fine lyric. The inspiration is not equally intense throughout—it is most felicitous in the three stanzas marked; the first also is almost that and also the three first lines of the sixth. The rest is admirable, though it has not quite the same intuitive edge; but still it is the right thought with the just, poetic expression. I don't know exactly what plane, but it comes from the inner being—there is a fine psychic touch in stanzas 1, 2,4. 5, 7 and it is the psychic truth that is expressed throughout."
(Would the emergence of the psychic being make the writing of "above-head" poetry more possible?)
"To get the psychic being to emerge is not easy, though it is a very necessary thing for sadhana and when it does it is not certain that it will switch on to the above-head planes at once. But obviously anyone who could psychicise his poetry would get a unique place among the poets.
"The direct psychic touch is not frequent in poetry. It breaks in sometimes—more often there is only a tinge here and there."
(Would the emergence of the psychic being cut across any above-head inspiration?)
"I don't suppose the emergence of the psychic would interfere at all with the inspiration from above. It would be more likely to help it by making the connection with these planes more direct and conscious."
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APPEAL
My feet are sore, Beloved,
With agelong quest for Thee;
Wilt Thou not choose for dwelling
This lonesome heart of me?
Is it too poor a mansion?
But surely it is poor
Because Thou never bringest
Thy beauty through its door!
It lies all bare and darkened,
To hold nought save Thy light:
The door is shut because, Love,
It craves no lesser sight.
Though void, a fullness richens
The heart I give to Thee—
For, what more can I offer
Than all my penury?
(Anything special in this lyric? Is not the language too commonplace and the rhythm too hackneyed?)
"I like it very well. A rhythm or language can never be hackneyed or commonplace when it is beautiful and makes a direct inner appeal."
Considering that Sri Aurobindo, in a letter, describes "all psychic things" as "direct and simple" and psychic poetry as "simple and precise and penetrating" or "something deeply inward, esoteric in that sense, but simple, unveiled and clear, not esoteric in the more usual sense", the above lines may be taken to be a psychic poem.
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GREAT MOTHER
Great Mother, grant me this one boon
I crave: I will forgo all triumphs of the mind
And grandiose honours for which men have pined
If in its search for Thee my life be brave.
Beyond earth's crowded hours of brief delight,
Of passionate anarchy whose eyes are blind,
Let me on feet of calm devotion find
The lonely soul's sweet contemplative height.
And from the crest of th it serenity
Whence Thy far infinite face can be divined,
An endless song let all n y ardour be
To reach Thy beauty, leaving lust behind—
No stern forced worship but love self-consigned,
A river's leap towards the pristine sea.
"A very beautiful poem grave and harmonious and true in thought and feeling with a fine close."
In terms of poetic source, this comment may be interpreted in the light of Sri Aurobindo's letter mentioning "the psychic source of inspiration which can give a beautiful spiritual poetry" and referring to "the turn of the psychic" as having "an intense beauty of emotion, a fine subtlety of true perception, an intimate language".
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PRAYER
There is no lack of love in Thee,
But, O sweet Splendour, bless
My proud heart with a penury
Of dedicated emptiness.
Thy blue and gold and silver light
Can never cease to drop,
For Thou hast generously made
All heaven a wide inverted cup.
'Tis we are shut in outward self
Nor deepen eyes to see
That dawn and vesper, noon and night
Are pouring Thy divinity.
It is beautiful as well as simple and very felicitous in its suggestiveness."
To judge from the turn of the comment, one may guess the source of the lines to be jointly the psychic and the inner mind.
OJAS
Rise upward, stream of passion in the gloom!
Rise where lone pinnacles mate with heaven's womb!
Earth drags you down, but all your shimmers know
The stars' enchanted fire calling you home.
Mountains of mind are sacred: join your cry
Unto their peaceful marriage with the sky.
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Your children shall be words eternal, sprung
From golden seeds of packed immensity.
"It is a fine poem, the second stanza especially fine. Language and rhythm from the illumined Mind."
"I can't exactly say that it is equal to your best. It is a fine poem; but entire inevitability is not there, except perhaps in the second stanza's first three lines (the last is a very fine one full of light and fire but not quite with that realised and consummate perfection which is meant by 'inevitable'); perhaps also the 2nd line [of the first stanza]."
ASCENT
A nectar-dew falls glimmering from the Unknown
To wake the shadowless seed of mystic love
Lost in the blind abysses of the brain.
A memory stirs the locked immensity—
An occult creative Eye now yearns afar,
Dreams upward through a gilded sky of mind,
The hard deceiving dome of a false heaven,
To an infinite ether of apocalypt blue.
Then slowly breaks on hyalines of hush
A white rumour of flames and fragrances,
A vast virginity kindles above time.
The lotus of the soul has lifted high
A million rapturous petal-arms to clasp
The secret of a sempiternal sun.
"All from the illumined mind—only some lines more intensely illumined than others, but all fine."
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STORM-LIGHT
The immortal music of her mind
Sweeps through the earth a lustrous wind—
"Renounce, O man, thy arduous oar
And, opening out faith's song-charmed helpless sail,
Reach on my breath of love the ecstatic shore!
My rush is truth self-beaconed, not thy pale
Stranger-surmise:
I am a cyclic gale
That blows from paradise to paradise!"
This is now quite perfect. Only, the lines 2-5 are now of the illumined Mind, with a strong undertone of the effective,1 the first and last four intuitive. This is not a defect.
"The poetry of the Illumined Mind is usually full of a play of lights and colours, brilliant and striking in phrase, for illumination makes the Truth vivid—it acts usually by a luminous rush. The poetry of the Intuition may have a play of colour and bright lights, but it does not depend on them—it may be quite bare; it tells by a sort of close intimacy with the Truth, an inward expression of it. The Illumined Mind sometimes gets rid of its trappings, but even then it always keeps a sort of lustrousness of robe which is its characteristic."
1The reference is evidently to one of he five kinds of style Sri Aurobindo has .distinguished on pp. 100-104. In the present context he seems to take the style of the Illumined Mind to be ipso facto that which he has called "illumined" there. And the implication is that "the effective" is the style of the Higher Mind. But, if so, the "inspired" style would cover the line: described here as "intuitive". (K.D.S.)
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NO MORTAL BREATH
No mortal breath you bring us: love divine
Makes your whole countenance a silver call
To meet an unviewed vast of spirit-hush.
Far in the mystic vault your home is hung:
We turn our faces to your planet soul
And all infinity weighs upon our eye
Its plumbless sleep. O light unwithering,
O star-bloom mirrored in a lake of earth,
Remember that your roots suck the pure sky!
Dream not the brief and narrow curves of clay
Limit your destiny of pristine power—
A throne amid ecstatic thrones that rule
A loneliness of superhuman night.
"Very fine all through both in language and rhythm—the last part, except for the closing line, is not so near the absolute as the first half, but all the same it is very fine and powerful. The blank verse is very good, each line has sufficient power to stand by itself, yet all combine together to make a linked whole. The basis is the Higher Mind: in the first half many of the lines (2-7) are illumined and there is even a strong influence of the Overmind Intuition. In the latter half, the same with a slighter illumination (9, 10), last line again the uplifting Overmind Intuition influence."
(What precisely is meant when we say poems exist already on the higher planes and have only to be transmitted here by the human consciousness? If the parts of a poem hail from quite different planes, where exactly does the whole exist? Are there poetic fragments floating about which cohere only in the mind of the man
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who catches them? And have these fragments a form already of language or do they become expressed by us alone? Are all the innumerable languages of earth spoken in the higher planes or do the latter possess merely modes or states of consciousness?)
"A poem may pre-exist in the timeless as all creation pre-exists there or else in some plane where the past, present and future exist together. But it is not necessary to presuppose anything of the kind to explain the phenomenon of inspiration. All is here a matter of formation or creation. By the contact with the source of inspiration the creative power at one level or another and the human instrument, receptacle or channel get into contact. That is the essential point, all the rest depends upon the individual case. If the substance, rhythm, form, words come down all together ready-tormed from the plane of poetic creation, that is the perfect type of inspiration; it may give its own spontaneous gift or it may give something which corresponds to the idea or the aspiration of the poet, but in either case the human being is only a channel or receptacle, although he feels the joy of the creation and the joy of the aves, enthousiasmos, elation of the inrush and the passage. On the other hand, it may be that the creative source sends down the substance or stuff, the force and the idea, but the language, rhythm etc. are found somewhere in the instrument; he has to find the human transcription of something that is there in diviner essence above; then there is an illumination or excitement, a conscious labour of creation swift or slow, hampered or facile. Something of the language may be supplied by the mind or vital, something may break through from somewhere behind the veil, from whatever source gets into touch with the transcribing mind in the liberating or stimulating excitement or uplifting of the consciousness. Or a line or lines may come through from some plane and the poet excited to creation may build around them constructing his material or getting it from any source he can tap. There are
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many possibilities of this nature. There is also the possibility of an inspiration not from above, but from somewhere within on the ordinary levels, some inner mind, emotional, vital etc., which the mind practised in poetical technique works out according to its habitual faculty. Here again in a different way similar phenomena, similar variations may arise.
"As for the language, the tongue in which the poem comes or the whole lines from above, that offers no real difficulty. It all depends on the contact between the creative Power and the instrument or channel, the Power will naturally choose the language of the instrument or channel, that to which it is accustomed and can therefore readily hear and receive. The Power itself is not limited and can use any language, but although it is possible for things to come through in a language unknown or ill-known—I have seen several instances of the former—it is not a usual case, since the samskaras of the mind, is habits of action and conception would normally obstruct any such unprepared receptiveness; only a strong mediumistic faculty might be unaffected by the difficulty. These things, however, are obviously exceptional, abnormal or supernormal phenomena.
"If the parts of a poem come from different planes, it is because one starts from some high plane but the connecting consciousness cannot receive uninterruptedly from there and as soon as it flickers or waves it comes down to a lower perhaps without noticing it, or the lower comes in to supply the continuation of the flow or on the contrary the consciousness starts from a lower plane and is lifted in the aves perhaps occasionally, perhaps more continuously higher for a time or else the higher force attracted by the creative will breaks through or touches or catches up the less excited inspiration towards or into itself. I am speaking here especially of the Overhead planes where this is quite natural; for the Overmind, for instance, is the ultimate source of intuition, illumination or heightened power of the planes immediately below it. It can lift them up into its own
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greater intensity or give out of its intensity to them or touch and combine their powers together with something of its own greater power—or they can receive or draw something from it or from each other. Or the lower planes beginning from the mental downwards there can also be such variations, but the working is not the same, for the different powers here stand more on a footing of equality whether they stand apart from each other, each working in its own right, or cooperate."
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