Poems
THEME/S
1
CONSUMMATION
Immortal overhead the gold expanse—
An ultimate crown of joy's infinity.
But a king-power must grip all passion numb
And a gigantic loneliness draw down
The large gold throbbing on a silver hush.
Nought save an ice pure peak of trance can bear
The benediction of that aureole.
SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT
"It is very fine—it is the Higher Mind vision and movement throughout, except that in the fifth line a flash of Illumination comes through. Intense light-play and colour in this kind of utterance is usually the Illumined Mind's intervention."
In the first version submitted, the second line had run:
An ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy.
Sri Aurobindo remarked about that line:
"It is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually—in 'Paradise Lost'—some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his substance is, except at certain heights, mental—mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."
Further apropos remarks may be quoted:
"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
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poetic intelligence that he works.
"I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual consciousness where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness; but it is still very much on the mind level although highly spiritual in its essential substance; and its instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight-—not illumined by any of the intenser upper lights but as if in a large strong and clear daylight. It acts as an intermediate state between the Truth-Light above and the human mind; communicating the higher knowledge in a form that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded or dazzled by a Truth beyond it. The poetic intelligence is not at all part of that clarified spiritual seeing and thinking—it is only a high activity of the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane,—this does not answer to that description. But the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic, though in a different cast of thinking, is nearer to the Higher Mind than the ordinary intellect and can more easily receive its influence. When Milton starts his poem
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree—
he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the style or the substance. But there is often a largeness of rhythm and sweep of language in Milton which has a certain distant kinship to the manner natural to a higher supra-intellectual vision, and something from the substance of the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it.
"Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is
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fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence. But there are other influences which can suffuse and modify the pure poetic intelligence, making it perhaps less clear by limitations but more vivid, colourful, vivid with various lights and hues; it becomes less intellectual, more made of vision and a flame of insight. Very often this comes by an infiltration of the veiled inner Mind which is within us and has its own wider and deeper fields and subtler movements,—and can bring also the tinge of a higher afflatus to the poetic intelligence, sometimes a direct uplifting towards what is beyond it. It must be understood however that the greatness of poetry as poetry toes not necessarily or always depend on the level from which it is written. Shelley has more access to the inner Mind and through it to greater things than Milton, but he is not the greater poet.
"When 1 say that the inner Mind can get the tinge or reflection of the higher experience I am not speaking here of the 'descent' in Yoga by which the higher realisation can come down into the inferior planes and enlighten or transform them. I mean that the Higher Mind is itself a spiritual plane and one who lives in it has naturally and normally the realisation of the Self, the unity and harmony everywhere, and a vision and activity of knowledge that proceeds from this consciousness but the inner Mind has not that naturally and in its own right, yet can open to its influence more easily than the outer intelligence. All the same, between the reflected realisation in the mind and the automatic and authentic realisation in the spiritual mental planes there is a wide difference."
Distinguishing the general mode and the typical turn of the Inner Mind's poetry from those of the Higher Mind's, Sri Aurobindo wrote of a poem: "Not from the Higher Mind—for there a high-uplifted thought is the characteristic—but 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."
The distinction may be illustrated briefly by the last stanza
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of the poem in question which is entitled Two Birds after a parable from the Upanishads:
The watchful ravener below
Felt his time-tortured passion cease,
And flying upward knew himself
One with that bird of golden peace.
The whole stanza is considered to have come from the Inner Mind, except for "a touch of the Higher Mind perhaps" in line 2.
*
FIRST SIGHT OF GIRNAR
Strange with half-hewn god-faces that upbear
A listening quietude of giant caves,
The prisoner eternities of earth
Have wakened in this purple loneliness.
Each granite block comes cloven to the eye
As if the blue voice of the Unknowable
Broke through its sleep: like memories left behind
Of some enormous sculpture-cry of soul
The rocks reveal their shattered silences.
"A very fine poem—Illumined Mind throughout very perfectly expressed."—"No, it is not the epic kind [of blank verse]—the rhythm is rather large, calm and reflective than
epic."1
"There is a substitute for tie expression of the Higher Thought, the Illumination, the pure Intuition giving great or
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brilliant results, but these cannot be classed as the very bod} of the higher consciousness.... Shakespeare's poetry coruscates with a play of the hues of imagination which we may regard as a mental substitute for the inspiration of the Illumined Mind and sometimes by aiming at an exalted note he links on to the illumined overhead inspiration itself as in the lines [on sleep] I have more than once quoted:
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eye; and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge?
But the rest of that passage falls away in spite of its high-pitched language and resonant rhythm far below the over head strain. So it is easy for the mind to mistake and take the higher for the lower inspiration or vice versa."
Comparing the poetry of the Inner Mind with that of the Illumined, Sri Aurobindo writes:
"There are many kinds of vision in the inner Mind.... A certain spontaneous intensity of vision is usually there, but that large or rich sweep or power which belongs to the Illumined Mind is not part of its character. Moreover, it is subtle and fine and has not the wideness which is the characteristic of the planes that rise towards the vast universality of the Overmind."
(What distinguishes in manner and quality a pure inspiration of the Illumined Mind from that which has the psychic plane for its origin?)
"Your question reads like a poser in an examination paper. Even if I could give a satisfactory definition Euclideanly rigid, I don't know that it would be of much use or would really help you to distinguish between the two kinds; these things have to be felt and perceived by experience. I would prefer to give examples. I suppose it would not be easy to find a more perfect example of psychic inspiration in English literature than Shelley's well-known lines,
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I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?
—you will find there the true rhythm, expression and substance of poetry full of the psychic influence. For full examples of the poetry which comes from the Illumined Mind purely and simply and that in which the psychic and the spiritual illumination meet together, one has to go to poetry that tries to express a spiritual experience. You have yourself written things which can illustrate the difference. The lines
The longing of ecstatic tears
From infinite to infinite1
will do very well as an instance of the pure illumination, for here what would otherwise be a description of a spiritual heart-experience, psychic therefore in its origin, is lifted up to a quite different spiritual level and expressed with the vision and language sufficiently characteristic of a spiritual-mental illumination. In another passage there is this illumination but it is captured and dominated by the inner heart and by the psychic love for the Divine incarnate.
If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow Its mortal longings, lean down from above, Temper the unborn light no thought can trace, Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow. For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate: Sneak to me heart to heart words intimate,
1The last lines of the poem Young-hearted River, not quoted in this collection.
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And all Thy formless glory turn to love
And mould Thy love into a human face.1"
"There is... the psychic source of inspiration which can give a beautiful spiritual poetry. The psychic has two aspects—there is the soul principle itself which contains all soul possibilities and there is the psychic personality which represents whatever soul-power is developed from life to life or put forward for action in cur present life-formation. The psychic being usually expresses irself through its instruments, mental, vital and physical; it tries to put as much of its own stamp on them as possible. But it can seldom put on them the full psychic stamp—unless it comes fully out from its rather secluded and overshadowed position and takes into its hands the direct government of the nature. It can then receive and express all spiritual realisations in its own way and manner. For the turn of the psychic is different from that of the overhead planes—it has less of greatness, power, wideness, more of a smaller sweetness, delicate beauty, there is an intense beauty of emotion; a fine subtlety of true perception, an intimate language. The expression 'sweetness and light' can very well be applied to the psychic as the kernel of its nature. The spiritual plane, when it takes up these things, gives them a wider utterance, a greater splendour of light, a stronger sweetness, a breath of powerful audacity, strength and space."
THIS ERRANT LIFE
This errant life is dear although it dies;
And human lips are sweet though they but sing
Of stars estranged from us; and youth's emprise
Is wondrous yet, although an unsure thing.
1 From the poem quoted next.
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Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!
I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.
If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow
Its mortal longings, lean down from above.
Temper the unborn light no thought can trace,
Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.
For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:
Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,
And mould Thy love into a human face.
A very beautiful poem, one of the very best you have written. The last six lines, one may say even the last eight, are absolutely perfect. If you could always write like that, you would take your place among English poets and no low placc either. I consider they can rank—these eight lines— with the very best in English poetry."
To Dilip Kumar Roy: "Amal's lines are not easily translatable, least of all into Bengali. There is in them a union or rather fusion of high severity of speech with exaltation and both with a pervading intense sweetness which it is almost impossible to transfer bodily without loss into another language. There is no word in excess, none that could have been added or changed without spoiling the expression, every word just the right revelatory on'e—no colour, no ornamentation, but a sort of suppressed burning glow, no similes, but images which have been fused inseparably into the substance of the thought aid feeling—the thought itself perfectly developed, not idea added to idea at the will of the fancy, but perfectly interrelated and linked together like the limbs of an organic body. It is high poetic style in its full perfection and nothing at all that is transferable. You have taken his last line and put in a lotus-face and made divine love bloom in it,—a pretty image, but how far from the glowing impassioned severity of the phrase: 'And mould
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Thy love into a human face'!"
To the poet himself: "The quotations |AE] makes [from your poems]—
The song-impetuous mind...1
The Eternal Beauty is a wanderer Hungry for lips of clay2 _____
certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are moreover of the kind AE and Yeats also, I think, would naturally like. But the poem [This Errant Life] 1 selected for special praise had no striking expressions like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would be no single feature standing out in 1 special beauty (eyes, lips, head or hands), but the whole has a harmoniously modelled grace of equal perfection ever)where as, let us say, in the perfect charm of a statue by Praxiteles. This apart from the idea and feeling, which goes psychically and emotionally much deeper than the ideas in the lines quoted by AE, which are poetically striking but have not the same subtle spiritual appeal; they touch the mind and vital strongly, but the other goes home into the soul."
POOL OF LONELINESSES
I have become a secret pool
Of lonelinesses mountain-cool,
A dream-poise of unuttered song
Lifted above the restless throng
Of human moods' dark pitchers wrought
Of fragile and of flawful thought.
Now never more my tunes shall flow
1From Ne Plus Ultra, quoted a little la er.
2 From Sages, not quoted here.
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In moulds of common joy and woe;
But seraph hands reveal wide jars
Cut from the solitudes of stars
And stoop across the sky to fill
The perfect shapes of their calm will
With musical obedience
From my pellucid time-suspense;
And in their crystalline control
Of heaven-mooded ecstasy
Carry the waters of my soul
Unto God's sacred thurst for me!
"It is a very fine poem. It comes from the intuitive plane— belonging to the Intuition proper which brings with it a sort of subdued inspiration—I mean inspiration of the more quiet, not the more vivid kind and a great felicity of language. The meaning is not obscure but deep enough to make one reflect before getting the whole of it."
"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 id of its trappings, but even then it always keeps a sort of lustrousness of robe which is its characteristic."
MADONNA MIA
I merge in her rhythm of haloed reverie
By spacious vigil-lonelinesses drawn
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From star-birds winging through the vacancy
Of night's incomprehensible spirit-dawn.
My whole heart echoes the enchanted gloom
Where God-love shapes her visionary grace:
The sole truth my lips bear is the perfume
From the ecstatic flower of her face.
"I think it is one of your best. I could not very definitely say from where the inspiration comes. It seems to come from the Illumination through the Higher Mind—but there is an intuitive touch here and there, even some indirect touch of 'mental Overmind' vision hanging about the first stanza.
"There are two ranges of Overmind which might be called 'mental' and 'gnostic' Overmind respectively—the latter in direct touch with Supermind, the former more like a widened and massive intuition."
"...of course all overhead poetry is not from the Overmind, more often it comes from the higher thought, the illumined mind or the pure intuition. This last is different from the mental intuition which is frequent enough in poetry that does not transcend the mental level. The language and rhythm from other overhead levels can be very different from that which is proper to he Overmind; for the Overmind thinks in a mass; its thought, feeling, vision is high or deep or wide or all these things together: to use the Vedic expression about fire, the divine messenger, it goes vast on its way to bring the divine riches, and it has a corresponding language and rhythm. The higher thought has a strong tread often with bare unsandalled feet and moves in a clear-cut light: a divine power, measure, dignity is its most frequent character. The outflow of the illumined mind comes in a flood brilliant with revealing words or a light of crowding images, sometimes surcharged with its burden of revela-
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tions, sometimes with a luminous sweep. The intuition is usually a lightning flash showing up a single spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire and miraculous completeness of vision to the surprised ecstasy of the inner eye; its rhythm has a decisive inevitable sound which leaves nothing essential unheard, but very commonly it is embodied in a single stroke. These, however, are only general or dominant characters; any number of variations is possible. There are besides mingled inspirations, several levels meeting and combining or modifying each other's notes, and an overmind transmission can contain or bring with it all the rest...."
(Here are some passages from the Mundaka Upanishad on the transcendent and universal Brahman1 and some from the Gita's Vision of the Cosmic Spirit.2 Have they the accent of what you have described in The Future Poetry as the Mantra? The target of all mystic and spiritual poetry should be, in my opinion, the mantric utterance. At least the target of my own poetry certainly is. Will you shed some light on the Mantra's peculiar quality and original plane? And tell me, please, whether we can expect a poetry from the as-yet unmanifest Supermind?)
"The Mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into il, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental
1 II, 2. 11-12.
2 XI, 14-21.
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and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater. The passages you mention from the Upanishad and the Gita have certainly the Overmind accent. But ordinarily the Overmind inspiration does not come out pure in human poetry—it has to come down to an inferior consciousness and touch it or else to lift it by a seizure and surprise from above into some infinite largeness. There is always a mixture of the two elements, not an absolute transformation though the higher may sometimes dominate. You must remember that the Overmind is a superhuman consciousness and to be able to write always or purely from an Overmind inspiration would mean the elevation of at least a part of the nature beyond the human level.
"But how do you expect a Supramental inspiration to come down here when the Overmind itself is so rarely within human reach? That is alway; the error of the impatient aspirant, to think he can get ;he Supermind without going through the intervening stages or to imagine that he has got it when in fact he has only got something from the illumined or intuitive or at the highest same kind of mixed Overmind consciousness."
"To get the Overmind inspiration through 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."1
"The Overmind is not strictly a transcendental consciousness—that epithet would more accurately apply to the Supramental and to the Sachchidananda consciousness— though it looks up to the transcendental and may receive something from it and though it does transcend the ordinary human mind and, in its full and native self-power when it
1 In some qualification of this statement it may be mentioned that concerning the time when Madonna Mia and the subsequent poems had been commented upon, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1946: "At that time I hesitated to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English poetry or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this order. ' In 1946 several lines in the world's poetry which he had once hesitated about were adjudged by him to have been directly from the sheer Overmind. (K.D.S.)
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does not lean down and become part of mind, is super-conscient to us. It is more properly a cosmic consciousness, even the very base of the cosmic as we perceive, understand or feel it. It stands behind every particular in the cosmos and is the source of all our mental, vital or physical actualities and possibilities which are diminished and degraded derivations and variations from it and have not, except in certain formations and activities of genius and some intense self-exceeding, anything of the native overmind quality and power. Nevertheless, because it stands behind as if covered by a veil, something of it can break through or shine through or even only dimly glimmer through and that brings the overmind touch or note."
NE PLUS ULTRA
(To a poet lost in Sentimentalism)
A madrigal to enchant her—and no more?
With the brief beauty of her face—drunk, blind
To the inexhaustible vastnesses that lure
The song-impetuous mind?
Is the keen voice of tuneful ecstasy
To be denied its winged omnipotence,
Its ancient kinship to immensity
And dazzling suns?
When mystic grandeurs urge him from behind,
When all creation is a rapturous wind
Driving him towards an ever-limitless goal.
Can such pale moments crown the poet's soul?
Shall he—born nomad of the infinite heart!
Time-tamer! star-struck debauchee of light!
Warrior who hurls his spirit like a dart
Across the terrible night
Of death to conquer immortality!—
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Content with little loves that seek to bind
His giant feet with perishing joys, shall he
Remain confined
To languors of a narrow paradise-
He in the mirroring depths of whose far eyes
The gods behold, overawed, the unnamable One
Beyond all gods, the Luminous, the Unknown?
'This is magnificent. The three passages I have marked reach a high-water mark of poetic force, but the rest also is very fine. This poem can very well take its place by the other early poem [This Errant Life which I sent you back the other day, though the tone is different—that other was more subtly perfect, this reaches another kind of summit through sustained height and grandeur "
On the plane of inspiration of the lines marked in the second stanza: "Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch."
This comment came when, considerably after the comment on the whole poem, the lines concerned were separately submitted for classification. We may suppose that the rest of the lines marked by Sri Aurobindo—those in the first stanza—as equal in poetic force have more or less the same overhead quality as these.
(Ne Plus Ultra was one of half a dozen poems—the others included This Errant Life—that Dilip sent to AE. Reading them all, AE wrote back of "genuine poetic quality" and "many fine lines" and added that they "show a feeling for rhythm which is remarkable since the poet is not writing in his native but a learned language". However, from Ne Plus Ultra he notes with pleasure only one phrase--and I think mostly apropos of this poem he utters a general warning against frequent use of words like "infinite", "eternal", "limitless". The
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difficulty about such words has struck me before—frequent use of them gives a not-altogether-agreeable Hugoesque flavour to mystic Indian poetry; but I wonder whether I have cheapened or misused them. At least you have never taken me to task on that score.)
"I did not object to your frequent use of 'infinite', 'eternal', 'limitless', because these are adjectives that I myself freely pepper over my poetry. When one writes about the Infinite, the Eternal and the Limitless or when one feels them constantly, what is one to do? AE who has not this consciousness but only that of the temporal and finite (natural or occult) can avoid these words, but I can't. Besides, all poets have their favourite words and epithets which they constantly repeat. AE himself has been charged with a similar crime."
To Dilip Kumar Roy: "AE's remarks about 'immensity', etc., are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot apply to a new poetry dealing with spiritual things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. AE himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English language. His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent are mental realisations or intuitions occurring on the summits of the consciousness, rare 'high lights' over the low tones of the ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not to the average man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent the balance or harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere full of these high lights—in a consciousness in
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which the finite, not only the occult hut even the earthly finite, is bathed in the sense of the eternal, the illimitable infinite, the immensities or intimacies of the timeless? To follow AE's rule might well mean to falsify this atmosphere, to substitute a merely aesthetic fabrication for a true seeing and experience. Truth first—a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and, even if it did, the language will have to be made adequate It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however new; it must now be urged to a farther new progress. In fact, the power is there and has only to be brought out more fully to serve the full occult, mystic, spiritual purpose."
(To help me distinguish the planes of inspiration, could you just indicate where the following phrases from various poems of mine have their sources?1
1. What visionary urge
Has stolen from horizons watched alone
Into thy being with ethereal guile?2
2. A huge sky-passion sprouting from the earth
In branching vastnesses of leafy rapture.
3. The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind.
4. A sea unheard where spume nor spray is blown.
5. Irradiant wing-waft through eternal space,
Pride of lone rapture and invincible sun-gaze.
1 Some of the phrases are part of poems quoted in the present collection.
2 This line as it stands now in the poem "Far Flute" has been partly changed
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6. And to the earth-self suddenly
Came, through remote entranced marvelling
Of adoration ever-widening,
A spacious sense of immortality.
7. Here life's lost heart of splendour beats immense.
8. The haunting rapture of the vast dream-wind
That blows, star-fragrant, From eternity.
9. An ocean-hearted ecstasy am I,
Where time rolls inward to eternal shores.)
1 "Second line Intuitive with Overmind touch. Third line imaginative Poetic Intelligence.
2 "Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind.
3 "Intuitive with Overmind ouch.
4 "Intuitive.
5 "Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch.
6 "Mixture of Higher and Illumined Mind—in the last line the mental Overmind touch.
7. "Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch.
8. "Ditto.
9. "Intuitive, Illumined, Overmind touch all mixed together.
"I have analysed very impeifectly—because these influences are so mixed together that the descriptions are not exhaustive.
"Also remember that I speak of a touch, of the mental Overmind touch and that when there is the touch it is not always complete—it may be more apparent from something either in the language or substance or rhythm than in all three together.
"Even so, perhaps some of my descriptions are overhasty
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and denote the impression of the moment. Also the poetical value of the poetry exists independent of its source."
(I should like to know whether you intend any important distinction when you speak of "Overmind touch" and "mental Overmind touch".)
"Yes—the Overmind proper has some gnostic light in it which is absent in the mental Overmind."
(From what plane are the substance and rhythm of this phrase from Shakespeare?—
... the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
Are they really from what you have considered his usual plane—the vital?)
"The origin of the inspiration may be from anywhere, but in Shakespeare it always comes through the vital and strongly coloured by it as in some others it comes from the poetic intelligence. What play or poem is this from? I don't remember it. It sounds almost overmental in origin."
(The phrase occurs in Sonnet CVII beginning:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom.
What I am eager to know is whether the rhythm of the words I have picked out is a fusion of the overmental and the vital; or is it only the substance that is from the Overmind?)
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"There is something from the Above in the rhythm also, but it is rather covered up by the ordinary rhythm of the first half line and the two lines that follow. It is curious that this line and a half should have come in as if by an accident and have nothing really to do with the restricted subject of the rest."
(Is there something definite in the rhythm or language of a line of poetry which would prove it to be from a certain plane? Take the quotations from Shakespeare I am sending you. The first, according to you, has an Overmind movement as well as substance coming strongly coloured by the vital. But where and in what lies the vital colour which makes it the highest Shakespearean and not, say, the highest Wordsworthian—the line inspired by Newton? How does one catch here and elsewhere the essential differentiae?)
"It is a question of feeling, not of intellectual understanding. The second quotation from Shakespeare—
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven—
is plainly vital in its excited thrill. Only the vital can speak with that thrill of absolute passion—the rhythm too is vital.1 I have given the instance (in The Future Poetry) of Shakespeare's
... it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
That is a 'thought', a judgment on life, so would naturally be
1 Alongside the lines themselves Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Tremendously vital."
(K.D.S.)
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assigned to the intellect, but as a matter of fact it is a throw-up from Macbeth's vital, an emotional or sensational, not an intellectual judgment and its whole turn and rhythm are vital.
"About the first quotation, Shakespeare's
there might be some doubt, but still it is quite different in tone from Wordsworth's line on Newton—
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone—
which is an above-head vision—and the difference comes because the vision of the 'dreaming soul' is felt through the vital mind and heart before it finds expression. It is this constant vitality, vital surge in Shakespeare's language, which makes it a sovereign expression not of mind or knowledge but of life."
"We make a distinction between truth and beauty; but there can be an aesthetic response to truth also, a joy in its beauty, a love created by its charm, a rapture in the finding, a passion in the embrace, an aesthetic joy in its expression, a satisfaction of love in the giving of it to others. Truth is not merely a dry statement of facts or ideas to or by the intellect; it can be a splendid discovery, a rapturous revelation, a thing of beauty that is a joy for ever. The poet also can be a seeker and lover of truth as well as a seeker and lover of beauty.... On certain levels of the Overmind, where the mind element predominates over he element of gnosis, the distinction between truth and beauty is still valid. It is indeed one of the chief functions of the Overmind to separate the main powers of the consciousness and give to
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each its full separate development and satisfaction, bring out its utmost potency and meaning, its own soul and significant body and take it on its own way as far as it can go.... But also there is another action of the Overmind which sees and thinks and creates in masses, which reunites separated things, which reconciles opposites. On that level truth and beauty not only become constant companions but become one, involved in each other, inseparable: on that level the true is always beautiful and the beautiful is always true. Their highest fusion perhaps only takes place in the Supermind; but Overmind on its summits draws enough of the supramental light to see what the Supermind sees and do what the Supermind does though in a lower key and with a less absolute truth and power. On an inferior level Overmind may use the language of he intellect to convey as far as that language can do its own greater meaning and message but on its summits Overmind uses its own native language and gives to its truths their own supreme utterance, and no intellectual speech, no mentalised poetry can equal or even come near to that power and beauty. Here your intellectual dictum that poetry lives by its aesthetic quality alone and has no need of truth or that truth must depend upon aesthetics to become poetic at all, has no longer any meaning. For there truth itself is highest poetry and has only to appear to be utterly beautiful to the vision, the hearing, the sensibility of the soul. There dwells and from there springs the mystery of the inevitable word, the supreme immortal rhythm, the absolute significance and the absolute utterance."
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