Poems
THEME/S
2
PRELUDE
O Fire divine, make this great marvel pass.
That some pure image of your shadowless will
May float within my song's enchanted glass!
Sweep over my breath of dream your mystic mood,
O Dragon-bird whose golden harmonies fill
With rays of rapture all nfinitude!...
Or else by unexplorable magic rouse
The distance of a superhuman drowse,
A paradisal vast of love jnknown,
That even through a nakedness of night
My heart may feel the piissance of your light,
The blinding lustre of a measureless sun!
SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT
"Very fine—language and rhythm remarkably harmonious, terres totusque rotundus1—the expression very felicitous and embodying exactly the thing seen. Source is poetic intelligence drawn back into inner mind and lifting towards the overhead planes from which it receives its vision and substance and a certain breath of subtlety and largeness."
*
INVOCATION TO THE FOURFOLD DIVINE
O Void where deathless power is merged in peace!
O myriad Passion lit to one self-fire!
O Breath like some vast lose that breaks through form!
O Hush of gold by whon all truth is heard!
Consume in me the blinded walls of mind:
1 "Smooth, complete anti rounded." (K.D.S.)
Page 86
Wing far above dull thought my speech with flame,
Make my desire an infinite sky's embrace,
A joy that feels through every colour's throb
One single heart kindling the universe—
And by strange sleep draw heaven closer still,
Blotting all distances of space and time!
That is perfect—it is all of one piece, an exceedingly fine poem expressing with revelatory images the consciousness of the cosmic Self into which one enters by breaking the walls of individual limitation. Higher Mind, touched with Illumined Mind, except lines 3, 4, 8, 9 which are more of the illumined Mind itself."
Asked what exactly was meant in line 3 by the phrase "that breaks through form", Sri Aurobindo replied:
"It means nothing exactly, but it gives the suggestion of a vast rose of illimitable life breaking out to manifest its splendour and colour through the limitations of form, as a rose breaks out of a bud."
SRI AUROBINDO
All heaven's secrecy lit to one face
Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry—
A soul of upright splendour like the noon.
But only shadowless love can breathe this pure
Sun-blossom fragrant with eternity—
Eagles of rapture lifting fliekerless
A golden trance wide-winged on golden air.
Page 87
"It comes from the higher mind except for the third and seventh lines which have illumination and are very fine."
THROUGH VESPER'S VEIL
A rose of fire like a secret smile
Won from the heart of lost eternity
Broke suddenly through vesper's virgin veil.
I A smoulder of strange joy—then time grew dark,
And all my vigil's burning cry a swoon
As if the soul were drawn into its God
Across that dream-curve dimming out of space....
Then from the inmost deep a white trance-eye
Kindled a throbbing core of the Unknown,
Some mute mysterious memory lit beyond
The wideness with one star that is the dusk.
"Very fine poetry—quite original. Its originality consists as in other poems of yours of the same kind in the expression of a truth or plane of vision and experience not yet expressed and, secondly, in the power of expression which gives it an exact body—a revelatory rot an intellectual exactitude. Lines 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11 are overhead lines—Illumined Mind."
The double and single marks against the lines were put by Sri Aurobindo.
(From where does the "trance-eye" appear? From the soul drawn up into the transcendent timeless or from the mystic swoon in which me time-consciousness is left by
Page 88
the soul's escape? I wonder, however, whether the expression warrants so definite a distinction.)
it is not necessary to intellectualise,—but if one supposes the trance-eye to come from the swoon, it may still create a throbbing core of the unknown or a memory of it beyond the dark wideness. That is indeed what usually happens in the inner trance."
AGNI
Not from the day but from the night he's born,
Night with her pang of dream—star on pale star
Winging strange rumour through a secret dawn.
For all the black uncanopied spaces mirror
The brooding distance of our plumbless mind.
O depth of gloom, revea your unknown light—
Awake our body to the alchemic touch
Of the great God who comes with minstrel hands!...
Lo, now my heart has grown his glimmering East:
Blown by his breath a cloud of colour runs:
The yearning curves of life are lit to a smile.
O mystic sun, arise upon our thought
And with your gold omnipotence make each face
The centre of some blue infinitude!
"The modifications now made are quite satisfactory and render the poem perfect. The last six lines still remain the finest part of the poem, they have a breath of revelation in them; especially the image 'my heart has grown his glimmering East' and the extreme felicity of 'the yearning curves of life are lit to a smile' have a very intense force of revealing
Page 89
intuitivity—and on a less minute, larger scale there is an equal revealing power and felicity in the boldness and strength of the image in the last three lines. These six lines may be classed as 'inevitable', not only separately but as a whole. The earlier part of the poem is also fine, though not in the same superlative degree—the last two lines have something of the same intuitive felicity, though with slighter less intense touches, as the first two of the (rhymeless) sestet—especially in the 'alchemic touch' of the 'minstrel hands'. Lines 2 to 5 have also some power of large illumination."
(How is it that people find my poetry difficult? I almost suspect that only Nolini and Arjava 1get the whole hang of it properly. Of course, many appreciate when I have explained it to them—but otherwise they admire the beauty of individual phrases without grasping the many-sided whole the phrases form. This morning Premanand, Vijayarai and Nirod read my Agni. None of them caught the precise relevances, the significant connections of the words and phrases of the opening five lines.
In the rest of the poem top they failed, now and again, to get the true point of fel city which constitutes poetic expression. My work is not surrealist: I put meaning into everything, not intellectualism but a coherent vision worked out suggestively in various detail. Why then the difficulty? Everybody feel: at home in Harin Chattopadhyaya's poetry though I dare say that if I catechised them I might find the deepest felicities missed. AU the same, there was something in his work which made his sense more accessible. Even Dilip says that my work passes a little over his head—Arjava's, of course, he finds still more difficult. Perhaps I tend to pack too much stuff into my words and to render my links a little less explicit than Harin did or Dilip himself does in
1 J. A. Chadwick, who received from Sri Aurobindo the name "Arjavananda —"Arjava" for short. (K.D.S.)
Page 90
Bengali. But would people have the same trouble with vernacular poetry, however like my own it might be?)
'It is precisely because what you put in is not intellectualism or a product of mental imagination that your poetry is difficult to those who are accustomed to a predominantly mental strain in poetry. One can grasp fully if one has some clue to what you put in, either the clue of personal experience or the clue of a sympathetic insight. One who has had the concrete experience of the consciousness as a night with stars coming out and the sense of the secret dawn can at once feel the force of those two lines, as one who has had experience of the mind as a wide space or infinity or a thing of distances and expanses can fathom those that follow. Or even if he has had not these experiences but others of the same order, he can feel what you mean and enter into it by a kind of identification. Failing this experience, sympathetic insight can bring the significance home; certainly, Nolini and Arjava who write poems of the inner vision and feeling must have that, moreover their mines are sufficiently subtle and plastic to enter into all kinds of poetic vision and expression. Premanand and Vijayarai have no such training; it is natural that they should find it difficult. Nirod ought to understand, but he would have to ponder and take some trouble before he got it; night with her labour of dream, the stars, the bird-winging, the bird-voices, the secret dawn are indeed familiar symbols in the poetry he is himself writing or with which he is familiar; but his mind seeks usually at first for precise allegories to fit the symbols and is less quick to see and feel by identification what is behind them—it is still intellectual and not concrete in its approach to these things, although his imagination has learned to make itself their transcribing medium. That is the difficulty, the crux of imaged spiritual poetry; it needs not only the fit writer but the fit audience —and that has yet to be made.
"Dilip wrote to me in recent times expressing great admiration for Arjava's poems and wanting to get some-
Page 91
thing of the same quality into, his own poetic style. But in any case Dilip has not the mystic mind and vision—Harin also. In quite different ways they receive and express their vision or experience through the poetic mind and imagination—even so, because it expressed something unusual, Dilip's poetry has had a difficulty in getting recognised except by people who were able to give the right response. Harin's poetry deals very skilfully with spiritual ideas or feelings through the language of the emotion and poetic imagination and intelligence--no difficulty there. As regards your poetry, it is indeed more compressed and carefully packed with substance and that creates a difficulty except to those who are alive to the language or have become alive to subtle shades, implications, depths in the words. Even those who understand a foreign language well in the ordinary way find it sometimes difficult to catch these in its poetry. Indications and suggestions easy to catch in one's own tongue are often missed there. So probably your last remark is founded."
(I hope people won't misunderstand what you have remarked about the mystic mind. One's not having the mystic mind and vision does not reflect upon one's poetic excellence, even us a singer of the Spirit. As regards Harin, you said long ago that he wrote from several planes. And surely his Dark Well poems come from a source beyond the poetic intelligence?)
"I used the word 'mystic' in the sense of a certain kind of inner seeing and feeling of things, a way which to the intellect would seem occult and visionary—for this is something different from imagination and its work with which the intellect is familiar. It was in this sense that I said Dilip had not the mystic mind and vision. One can go far in the spiritual way, have plenty of spiritual visions and dreams even without having this mystic mind and way of seeing things. So too one may write poetry from different planes or
Page 92
sources of inspiration and expressing spiritual feelings, knowledge, experience and yet use the poetic intelligence as the thought medium which gives them shape in speech; such poems are not of the mystic type. One may be mystic in this sense without being spiritual—one may also be spiritual without being mystic; or one nay be both spiritual and mystic in one. Poems ditto.
"I had not in view the Dark Well poems when I wrote about Harin. I was thinking of his ordinary way of writing. If I remember right, the Dark Well poems came from the inner mind centre, some from the Higher Mind—other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what was given and turned it into something very vivid, coloured and beautiful,— put surely not mystic in the sense given above."
"It is when the thing seen is spiritually lived and has an independent vivid reality of its own which exceeds any conceptual significance it may have on the surface that it is mystic."—"In mystic poetry the symbol ought to be as much as possible the natural body of the inner truth or vision, itself an intimate part of the experience."—"Symbols may be of various kinds; there are those that are concealing images capable of intellectual interpretation but still different from either symbolic or allegorical figures—and there are those that have a more intimate life of their own and are not conceptual so much as occultly vital in their significance; there are still others that need a psychic or spiritual or at least an inner and intuitive sight to identify oneself fully with their meaning."
Page 93
THE SANNYASI
(An old story relates how a princess over-proud of her beauty would not accept any lover unless he could first live like a Sannyasi in the Himalayas, practising austerities to purify himself in order to win her favour as of a divinity. One youth, famous for his handsomeness as well as heroic deeds, took up the difficult wager and a! the end of the stipulated three years returned to the eagerly waiting princess, but he came now no longer in the mood of a suitor...)
If every look I turn tramples your flesh
Forgive the pilgrim passion of a dream
That presses over the narrow path of limbs
To an azure height beaconing above the mind.
No love could dare to reach your mouth's red heaven
Without a spirit washed in whitenesses—
But who shall hear the call of flickering clay
When titan thunders of the avalanche leap,
A pinnacle-voice plunging to deeps below 9
As if the agelong barrier broke between 10
Our dubious day and some eternal light? 11
Nor can a small face fill the widening heart
Where in the ice-pure lonelihood of hush 13
A vast virginity devours all time! 14
O masquerader of the Measureless,
O beauty claiming the Invisible's crown,
The empire of the uncrying Mystery 11
Has burned across you like an infinite sun 8
Withering for me your body's puny veil!
Yet all this fire is but the dwarf soul's death:
O strain no more those pale and quivering arms:
Rise from the crumbling cry of littleness 22
Beyond each blinded boundary to feel 23
The immortal Lover flaming through your heart,
The golden smile of the one Self everywhere!
Page 94
SRI AURIOBINDO'S COMMENT
"The blank verse is quite successful. It is all fine poetry throughout, rising from time to time to overhead sublimity and profound force. Not being able to expatiate at length, I summarise my impression by the marks—double line means overhead inspiration, single line means poetry fine enough and strong but not from overhead, single line with dot means lines which have the overhead touch or might even reveal themselves as overhead if in proper immediate company—the last is the case with line 2. The overhead lines belong to the type that is now usual with you, Higher Mind lifted by Illumination to reach the Intuition level or else Illumined Mind rising to Intuition level; the latter in 9-11, 13-14, 17-18, 22-23. Both are very fine combinations."
INNERMOST
Each form a dancer whose pure naked sheen
Mirrors serenity, a moving sleep
White-echoed out of some mysterious deep
Where fade life's clamouring red and blue and green—
The priestesses of virgin reverie
Sway through the cavern heart of consciousness.
A marble rapture fronting frozenly
The cry of mortal hunger and distress,
A love superb moulded to rocks of flame,
A ring of rhythmic statues worship-hewn
From the pale vistas of a perfect moon—
They guard with silences the unbreathable Name.
"Very fine throughout. It is a combined inspiration, Illumined Mind with an element cf Higher Mind coming in to
Page 95
modify it and sometimes rising to touch Intuition—even what might be called Overmind intuition. The last touch is strongest in lines 2, 3, there is something of it in lines 5, 6, 7, a little in the last three lines.
"It is, I suppose, some Anandamaya rhythm of the divine inmost Silence lifted above the vital life, that is the significance of the image."
VITA NUOVA
Haloed by some vast blue withheld from us,
Her pure face smiles through her cascading hair:
Like a strange dawn of rainfall nectarous
It comes to amaranth each desert prayer.
Beyond themselves her clay-born beauties call:
Breathing the rich air round her is to find
An ageless God-delight embracing all.
The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind.
Across both night and day her secrets run.
For even through our deepest slumberings
we hearken to an embassy of the sun
And stir invisible of rapturous wings.
"A very fine poem. The second stanza is the finest; in the two others the first line strikes very deep. The lines that reach the highest and widest are the third and fourth of the middle stanza. Lines 1, 7, 8, 9 come from very high and express a vision the full significance of which can only be realised by spiritual experienee. Line 1—Illumined Mind taken upwards by a wide intuisive inspiration. Lines 7, 8—1 am inclined to ascribe them at their source of vision to an
Page 96
intermediate plane which is not Overmind itself but may be called the Overmind Intuition You are right about the' second line—'The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind'; it is one of the finest you have written and is absolutely authentic and true.1 Both lines have a strong revelatory power. Line 9—Intuition."
General remark apropos of the poem's manner: "A bold directness and a concrete audacity of image tells best in mystic poetry—it makes the thing live."
(You once distinguished two Overmind levels: mental and gnostic, the latter being the Overmind proper, the former like a massive and widened Intuition. Now you have spoken of Overmind Intuition as distinguished from the Overmind itself. In one letter you make four divisions: mental Overmind, intuitive Overmind, true Overmind and supramentalised Overmind. You have also used the expression: "Overmind Gnosis." This must correspond to "Overmind itself" and "true Overmind". But, if "intuitive Overmind" is different from "mental Overmind", "mental Overmind" must now mean something other than a massive and widened Intuition. Will you please give a hint as to the various significances and an idea as to what quality of rhythm, language and substance would constitute the differences in expression from the several levels. I should like particularly to know about the Overmind Gnosis.)
"As for the Overmind Gnosis, I cannot yet say anything—I am familiar with its workings, but they are not easily describable and, as for poetry, I have not yet observed sufficiently to say whether it enters in anywhere or not.... I
1 This line originally was part of another poem which was far from being overhead Sri Aurobindo there called it "splendid" and in a later analysis of sources said of it: "Intuitive with Overmind touch." In regard to that analysis and the description now of it as coming from the Overmind Intuition, see the next question and answer. (K.D.S.)
Page 97
should expect its intervention to be extremely rare even as a touch; but I refer at present all higher Overmind intervention to the Overmind Intuition in order to avoid any risk of overstatement. In the process if overmental transformation what I have observed is that the Overmind first takes up the illumined and higher mind and intellect (thinking, perceiving and reasoning intelligence) into itself and modifies itself to suit the operation—the result is what may be called a mental Overmind—then it lifts these lower movements and the intuitive mind together into a higher reach of itself, forming there the Overmind Intuition, and then all that into the Overmind Gnosis awaiting the supramental transformation. The Overmind 'touch' on the Higher Mind and Illumined Mind can thus raise towards the O.I. or to the O.G. or leave in the M.O.; but estimating at a glance as I have to do, it is not easy to be quite precise. I may have to revise my estimates later on a little, though perhaps not very appreciably, when I am able to look at things in a more leisurely way and fix the misty lines which often tend to fade away, being an indefinable border." (3.5.1937)
THE TRIUMPH OF DANTE
These arms, stretched through ten hollow years, have
brought her
Back to my heart! A light, a hush immense
Falls suddenly upon my voice of tears,
Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears
The sun-touch of a rapt omnipotence.
Ineffable the secrecies supreme
Pass and elude my gaze—an exquisite
Failure to hold some nectarous Infinite!
The uncertainties of time grow shadowless
And never but with startling loveliness,
A white shiver of breeze on moonlit water,
Flies the chill thought of death across my dream.
Page 98
For, how shall earth be dark when human eyes
Mirror the love whose smile is paradise?—
A love that misers not its golden store
But gives itself and yearns to give yet more,
As though God's light were inexhaustible
Not for His joy but this one heart to fill!
On an early version in which all the lines were not the same as in the final version but where those from "an exquisite" to "yet more" were already there, Sri Aurobindo wrote marking the latter:
"The lines are magnificent—of the highest order." On the present version of the whole poem he remarked:
"Exceedingly fine in all its lines. The one objection that could be made is that there are different kinds of inevitability and not one kind throughout, but that would be hypercriticism when there is so much that is of the first excellence."
'"There are three different tones or pitches of inspiration in the poem, each in its own manner reaching inevitability. The first seven lines up to 'gaze bear as a whole the stamp of a high elevation of thought and vision—height and illumination lifted up still farther by the Intuition to its own inspired level; one passage (lines 3, 4) seems to me almost to touch in its tone of expression an Overmind seeing. But here 'A light, a hush... a voice of tears' anticipates the second movement by an element of subtle inner intensity in it. This inner intensity—where a deep secret intimacy of feeling and seeing replaces the height and large luminosity—characterises the rest of the first part. This passage has a seizing originality and authenticity in it—it is here that one gets a pure inevitability. In the last [6] lines the intuition descends towards the higher mental plane with a less revelatory power in it but more precise in its illumination. That is the difference between sheer vision and thought. But the poem
Page 99
is exceedingly fine as a whole, the close also is of the first order."
The description "pure inevitability" in this comment is to be understood in reference to the various kinds of style which, apart from the various sources or planes of inspiration, have been distinguished by Sri Aurobindo. A letter of his, answering a question about pure inevitability, reads:
"To the two requisites you mention which are technical—'the lightness of individual words and phrases, the rightness of the general lingual reconstruction of the poetic vision: that is, the manner, syntactical and psychological, of whole sentences and their co-ordination'—two others have to be added, a certain smiling sureness of touch and inner breath of perfect perfection, born not made, in the words themselves, and a certain absolute winging movement in the rhythm. Without an inevitable rhythm there can be no inevitable wording. If you understand all that, you are lucky. But how to explain the inexplicable, something that is self-existent? That simply means an absoluteness, one might say, an inexplicably perfect and in-fitting thisness and thereness and thatness and everythingelseness so satisfying in every way as to be unalterable. All perfection is not necessarily inevitability. I have tried to explain in 'The Future Poetry' —very unsuccessfully I am afraid—that there are different grades of perfection in poetry: adequateness, effectivity, illumination of language, inspiredness—finally, inevitability. These are things one has to learn to feel, one can't analyse.
"All the styles, 'adequate', 'effective', etc., can be raised to inevitability in their own line.
"The supreme inevitability is something more even than that, a speech overwhelmingly sheer, pure and true, a quintessential essence of convincingly perfect utterance. That goes out of all classilication and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style —Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his
Page 100
'fields of sleep', Shakespeare's 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's 'Sunt lacrimae rerum' and his 'O passi graviora'.
"Homer's passage translated into English would be perfectly ordinary. He gets the best part of his effect from his rhythm. Translated it would run merely like this: 'And he descended from the peaks of Olympus, wroth at heart, bearing on his shoulders arrows and doubly pent-in quiver, and there arose the clang of his silver bow as he moved, and he came made like unto the night.' His words too are quite simple but the vowellation and the rhythm make the clang of the silver bow go smashing through the world into universes beyond while the last words give a most august and formidable impression of godhead.
"1 don't think there is any co-ordination between the differences of style and the different planes of inspiration -unless one can say that the effective style comes from the higher mind, illumined from the illumined mind, the inspired from the plane of intuition. But I don't know whether that would stand at all times— especially when each style reaches its inevitable power."
We may note here apropos of The Triumph of Dante that about Dante's own plane of poetry Sri Aurobindo has said: "Dante writes from the poetic intelligence with a strong intuitive drive behind it"—while about his style Sri Aurobindo has pronounced: "The 'forceful adequate' might apply to much of Dante's writing, but much also is sheer inevitable; elsewhere it is the inspired style.... Dante's simplicity comes from a penetrating directness of poetic vision. It is not the simplicity of an adequate style."
Three, out of the four possible inevitabilities other than the fifth and final and unclassifiable one, may be explicitly illustrated from a sonnet by the very author of The Triumph of Dante:
Page 101
MYSTIC MOTHER
Seeing You walk our little ways, they wonder
That I who scorn the common loves of life
Should kneel to You in absolute surrender,
Deeming Your visible perfection wife
Unto my spirit's immortality.
They think I have changed one weakness for another,
Because they mark not the new birth of me—
This body which by You, the Mystic Mother,
Has now become a child of my vast soul!
Loving Your feet's earth-visitation, I
Find each heart-throb miraculously flower
Out of the unplumbable God-mystery
Behind dark clay; and, hour by dreamful hour,
Upbear that fragrance like an aureole.
"Exceedingly good. The octet here is adequateness raised to inevitability except the fourth and fifth lines in which the effective undergoes the same transformation. In the sestet on the other hand it is the illumined style that becomes inevitable."
The inspired style reaching inevitability may be exemplified by the two lines apropos of which Sri Aurobindo in his pronouncement on Dante, quoted above, referred to "the inspired style" in his writing:
Si come quando Marsi'a traesti
Delia vagina delle membra sue.
These lines to Apollo may be tentatively rendered with a little freedom:
Page 102
In that dire mode of yours as when you plucked
Marsyas out of the scabbard of his limbs.
An instance directly in English may be provided from the author himself of Mystic Mother. In the poem, Vita Nuova, quoted some pages back, the third and fourth lines of the stanza—
An ageless God-delight embracing all,
The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind—
were characterised by Sri Aurobindo: "These are 'inspired inevitable'."
Another instance noted by Sri Aurobindo is a line from a passage in his own early blank-,verse narrative, Urvasie. He was induced to make a comment on this passage which tells us how the hero-king Pururavus, searching far and wide for his lost beloved Urvasie, did not linger on the inferior heights
But plunged o'er difficult gorge and prone ravine
And rivers thundering between dim walls,
Driven by immense desire, until he came
To dreadful silence of the peaks and trod
Regions as vast and lonely as his love.
Sri Aurobindo wrote: "This is. . high-pitch effective except the last line which is in the inspired style—perhaps!"
Two other judgments of Sri Aurobindo's in this field may be cited. They are again on excerpts from the poet of Mystic Mother. The first is from the poem Ne Plus Ultra, already quoted in the present collection at the end of Part I:
Is the keen voice of tuneful ecstasy
To be denied its winged omnipotence,
Page 103
Its ancient kinship to immensity
And dazzling suns?
"This seems to me the effective style at a high pitch."
The second is from the close of a sonnet, Little Passions —the sestet following on the last four words of the octave:
For I have viewed,
Astir within my clay's engulfing sleep,
An alien astonishment of light!
Let me be merged with its unsoundable deep
And mirror in futile farness the full height
Of a heaven barred for ever to my distress,
Rather than hoard life's happy littleness!
"This is indeed an example of the effective style at its best, that is to say rising to something of illumination, especially in the [sestet's] second, fourth and sixth lines.'
The third judgment is about a passage in Lacrimae Rerum, a poem on "A visionary flute-soul's plumbless woe". There occurs the moment:
Twilight hung mute and mauve: the bamboo's cry
Out of its pierced and hollow body came,
A God-dream yearning through mortality.
Sri Aurobindo, praising this moment, defined it as the illumined style passing into the inspired at the end.
SAVITRI
A rose of dawn, her smile lights every gaze—
Her love is like a nakedness of noon:
No flame but breathes in her the Spirit's calm
Page 104
And pours the omnipresence of a sun.
Her tongues of fire break from a voiceless deep
Dreaming the taste of some ineffable height—
A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all,
A universal hunger's white embrace
That from the Unknown leaps burning to the
Unknown.
"Exceedingly fine; both the language and rhythm are very powerful and highly inspired. When the inspiration is there, you reach more and more a peculiar fusion of the three influences, higher mental, illunined mental and intuitive, with a touch of the Overmind Intuition coming in. This touch is strongest here in the second and the two closing lines, but it is present in all except two—the third which is yet a very fine line indeed and the seventh where it is not present in the typed version (' A cry to clasp in all the one God-hush') but seems just to touch perhaps in the written one ('A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all'). In the typed version the higher mental is strongest but in the written one which is less emphatic but more harmonious, the rhythm gets in a higher influence. In the other lines the illumined mental influence lifting up the higher mental is strongest, but is itself lifted up to the intutive—in all but the third just high enough to get the touch of the overmental intuition."
GNOSIS
No clamorous wing-waft knew the deeps of gold.
An eagle lost in earth-forgetfulness,
Rising without one stir of dreamy feather,
Life gains the Unmeasured through a flame of sleep—
A love whose heart is white tranquillity
Page 105
Upborne by vast surrender o this Sun.
Flickering no longer with the cry of clay,
The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind
Embraces there its own eternal Self—
Truth's burning core poised over the universe!
"It has become by the omitted and added lines a finer poem than before. The first line had lost much of its power through being cut off from immediate connection with the eagle rising, now that it has been restored it gets its full beauty and by the change of the fourth line which is now on the same level as the preceding and following lines all these six become one piece with one power and level of inspiration: Higher Mind with some colour of Illumination and just touched by Overmind Intuition—a faultless movement of vision and colour, all welded together into a harmonious whole. The next two rise still more to an extraordinary lofty inspiration (Illumined Mind with he Overmind touch)—and present a most profoundly suggestive spiritual picture. The last two are very high up in the higher Mind—-just the right kind to form a powerful and luminous close. The ten lines make a consistently fine and admirably structured poem."
Nirodbaran's Query: Out of the two lines—7 and 8—which you say have an Overmind touch, I frankly think that the first one I could have written myself! Will you show me where exactly its super-excellence lies? I appreciated much more the lines that preceded it: why do you give it so much weight? Is its quality definable—and in what terms? Assonances, consonances, rhythm or what?
SRI AUROBINDO'S REPLY
"What super-excellence? As poetry? When I say that a line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the Overmind
Page 106
1The "solar plexus" as a psychology al centre for contact with poetry in an
Page 107
"As for technique, there is a technique of this higher poetry hut it is not analysable and teachable. If, for instance, Amal had written 'No longer flickering with the cry of clay' it would no longer have been the same thing though the exact mental meaning would be just as before—for the overtone, the rhythm would nave been lost in the ordinary staccato clipped movement and with the overtone the rhythmic significance. It would not have given the suggestion of space and wideness full with the cry and the flicker, the intense impact of that cry and the agitation of the fire which is heard through the line as it is. But to realise that, one must have the inner sight and inner ear for these things, one must be able to hear the sound-meaning, feel the sound-spaces with their vibration. Again, if he had written 'Quivering no longer with the cry of clay', it would have been a good line, but meant much less and something quite different to the inner experience, though to the mind it would have been only the same thing expressed in a different image—not so to the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus. In this technique it must be the right word and no other, in the right place and in no other, the right sounds and no others, in a design of sound that cannot be changed even a little. You may say that it must be so in all poetry; but in ordinary poetry the mind can play about, chop and change, use one image or another, put this word here or that word there—if the sense is much the same and has a poetical value, the mind does not feel that all is lost unless it is very sensitive and much influenced by the solar plexus. In the overhead poetry these things arc quite imperative, it is all or nothing —or at least all or a fall."
________________
instinctive-emotive way rather than intellectually is AE. Housman's terminology in his lecture. The Name and Nature of Poetry. The "thousand-petalled lotus" is Sri Aurobindo's addition denoting, in terms of the traditional Raja-Yogit psychology, the centre of consciousness just above the brain-mind, now a supra-intellectual source of contact by a direct spiritual sense. (K.D.S.)
Page 108
Home
Disciples
Amal Kiran
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.