Poems
THEME/S
THE CLOSE OF DANTE'S "DIVINA COMMEDIA"
("PARADINO", Canto 33)
St. Bernard Supplicates on Behalf of Dante
"O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son!
Life's pinnacle of shadowless sanctity,
Yet, with the lustre of God-union, Outshining all in chaste humility—
Extreme fore-fixed by the supernal Mind,
Unto such grace rose thy humanity
That the Arch-dreamer who thy form designed
Scorned not to house His own vast self in clay:
For, thy womb's saered mystery enshrined
The omnific Love by whose untarnished ray
Now flowers this rose-heart of eternal peace!
A beaconing magnilicent midday
Art thou to us of saviour charities,
To mortal men hope's ever-living fount!
So great thy power that, save its fulgencies
Shed purifying gleam, whoso would mount
Unto this ecstasy might well desire
Wingless sky-soar! Nor dost thou needful count
Griefs tear, but even ere its gaze aspire
Thou minglest with its bitter drop thy bliss.
Whatever bounteous world-upkindling fire
Sparkles below, thy heart-infinities
Hold in full blaze... Here kneels one that has
viewed
All states of spirit frorn the dire abyss
To heaven's insuperable altitude:
1, who have never craved the rapturous sight
With such flame-voice of zeal for my soul's good
As now for him implores thy faultless light,
Beg answer to this orison: O pierce
The last gloom-vestige of his mortal night
By the miraculous beauty that bestirs
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The sleeping god in man with its pure sheen:
Disclose the immeasurable universe
Of ultimate joy, O time-victorious Queen!
Quench the blind hunger of his earth-despair
With flood of glory from the immense Unseen!
Deny him not perfection--lo, in prayer
Unnumbered saints with Beatrice upraise
Sinless love-splendoured hands that he may share
The vision of inviolable Grace!"
Dante Approaches The Beatific Vision
The Eyes that make all heaven their worshipper
Glowed on the suppliant's mouth and in their rays
Streamed the mute blessing deep prayers draw from
her.
Then to the Light which knows no dusk they turned
Full-open, gathering without one blur
What never in a creature s look has burned.
Neighbouring the Vast where the gold laughter
stood,
End of each clay-desire in clay unearned,
I ended every hunger in my blood.
Bernard was signalling up with smiling face
My soul, but to the crowning azurehood
My glance had winged already a long space;
For, that high splendour shapes all Nature new,
One with the Pure that needs no power or praise
Beyond its own white self to keep it true.
Henceforth so large an aureoled surprise
That words are shut in memories scarce break
through!
As fade dream-pageants from awaking eyes
At the rude touch of clamorous common day,
Even so my spirit loses paradise.
Yet though the enormous rapture rolls away,
A silent sweetness trickles in my heart!
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Even thus the snow is in the sun's hot ray
Unsealed or, when the vague breeze blew apart
The sibyl's thin leaves, back to the unknown
Vanished her secrets of sooth-saying art.
O Lustre seated on a reachless throne,
Rejoicing solitary and aloft
In ethers where no thought has ever flown
Out of the bound of earthly hours, enwaft
Once more the primal brilliance to my sight—
Slay my song's discord with Thy glory's shaft,
That I may leave of Thy miraculous light
A deathless sparkle to posterity!
Empower with Thy unconquerable might
The dim voice of my mortal memory
To lift above the minds of future men
The burning banner of Thy victory!
The grace withdraw not which Thou gav'st me when
With superhuman courage I pursued
Thy beckoning blaze of beauty till my ken
Reeled on the verge of cread infinitude!
In the depths divine the myriad universe
Clasped by a giant flame of love I viewed:
All that the wayward winds of time disperse
Stood luminous there in one ecstatic whole:
Beyond corruption and the taint of tears
Shone the deific destiny of man's soul!
The Crowning Vision of Dante
Stunned by that flash of limitless unity
I felt as though upon my being stole
The weight of one mute moment's lethargy
Heavier than the dead centuries that fall
On the Argo's plunge across the pristine sea....
What flickering earth-lure has tongue to call
The spirit grown wide with this magnificence?
Each longing here atains the rapturous All—
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Here life's lost heart of splendour beats immense!
But the deep relish of divinity
How shall my words convey?
Its radiance
Leaves my mouth Stricken with helpless infancy
Draining in dumb delight its mother's breast. Not that the Flame rose now more goldenly
(For ever unchanged its high perfections rest),
But my gaze found a growing miracle
No power of human speech could have expressed,
As orb within bright orb unthinkable
From that abyss of tense beatitude
Swam slowly into my wondering sight until
The mystery of heaven's triune mood
In mingling fire and rainbow-beauty shone!
O Light eternal, in self-plenitude
Dwelling exultant, fathomless, unknown
Save to the immaculate infinity
Of luminous omnipotence Thine alone!
'Twas Thy supremest joy Thou showed'st to me,
Thy grace most intimate masked by dazzling awe,
When, fixing on Thy uncurbed brilliancy
My marvelling look, with heart overwhelmed I saw
Thy nameless grandeurs wear the face of Man!
But as in vain without geometric law
An intricate figure one may strive to span,
So the impuissant scrutiny of thought
With which my labouring mind essayed to scan
This mighty secret, fell back dazed, distraught,
Till Thy mercy flashed a beam on its dark eye
And the heart found the ineffable knowledge
sought!...
Then vigour failed the towering fantasy;
Yet, like a wheel whose speed no tremble mars,
Desire rushed on-—its spur unceasingly
The Love that moves the sun and all the stars.
This poem was composed piecemeal and the last part
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written first, starting with the line, "What flickering earth-lure has tongue to call." The few lines before it were worked in afterwards. The passage was sent to Sri Aurobindo with the note: "Here is a translation of Dante. I hope it can pass as such in spite of whatever Amal-element has found play within the framework of ':he Awful Florentine'."1 Sri Aurobindo's comment ran:
"I don't think it can be called a translation, but it is a very fine performance. It is not Dantesque, though there is some subtle element of power contibuted by the influence of the original text, the severe cut of the Dantesque and its concentrated essence of ton e are not there but there is something else which is very fine."
The middle portion came Text, not exactly as it stands at present but beginning with the line, "As fade dream-pageants from awaking eyes " The seventeen lines preceding this were written years later. On the original piece Sri Aurobindo commented:
"It is again very fine poetry."
The opening section, written last, got the comment: "It is exceedingly good—one might say, perfect. Dante seems always to inspire you to your best."
Sri Aurobindo wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy about this section: "Amal in his translation of Dante has let himself go in the direction of eloquence more than Dante who is too succinct for eloquence and he has used also a mystical turn of phrase which is not Dante's—yet he has got something of
1It may be acknowledged that the line—
Then vigour failed the towering fantasy—
for Dante's
All' alta fantasia qui manco possa, has been taken bodily from Carey's 19th-century translation of the complete Divina Commedia in semi-Miltonic blank verse. Carey's expression here seemed impossible to better and so any attempt to be original would have been a betrayal of poetry. We may realise the necessity of the plagiarism by looking, for instance, at Laurence Binyon's
To the high imagination force now failed or Barbara Reynolds's
High phantasy lost power and here broke off. (K. D. S.)
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The spirit in the language, something of Dante's concen-raled force of expression into his lines."
*
FROM BEATRICE IN HEAVEN
Bach time your eyes of longing rose above
All transient colour to the Invisible,
Their viewless worship mingled with my love.
So, like the sun upon a blinded gaze
You found a warmth of secret splendour spill
And, though unvisioning felt my rapturous face.
From these unshadowed paradisal tops
No mortal beauty throws its narrow ray
But only a lustre of immensity drops!
Death leaves me here a timeless self behind—
A dream unvestured of both night and day-—
Truth-glory naked in the Immortal Mind—
An image sprung from God's untarnished core
Of mystery beyond the clasp of clay:
The heart's unhaloed cry is heard no more,
But every passion like a surge of light
Carries within a sempiternal sea
Laughter and love of the whole Infinite!
Hence to the hunger of your human call
I bring through nectarous divinity
Of one white wave the ocean of the All.
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SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT
"Very fine and quite successful . All through, the language and thought are very felicitcus, even though the lines marked stand out among the others."
The following exchange of letters is the last literary correspondence in which Sri Aurobindo participated before he left his body on December 5, 1950. His reply is particularly interesting and helpfil for its threefold general classification of poetic quality illustrated by concrete examples.
Letter to Sri Aurobindo
Here are two poems for your consideration—perhaps with some overhead breath in them. Please evaluate them critically. They seem to be somewhat antithetical in theme. Are there any lines in them you particularly like?
Amal
27-10-1950
GOD'S WORLD
How shall the witness mind's tranquillity
+Catch the extravagant happiness of God's world?
To reach one goal He flings a million paths
+Laughing with sheer love of the limitless,
Wandering for centuries in secret glory,
Then striking home a single light of lights!
Marvellous the pattern of His prodigal power.
But vainly the philosopher will brood
+This sable serpent flecked with sudden stars.
+Coil after coil of unpredictable dream
Will set his logic whirling till it drops.
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Only the poet with wide eyes that feel
+ Each form a shining gate to depths beyond
Knows through the magic measures of his tune
+ Our world is the overflow of an infinite wine
+ Self-tasted in the myster) -drunken heart.
WORLD-POET
With song on radiant song I clasp the world,
+ Weaving its wonder and wideness into my heart—
But ever the music misses some huge star
Or else some flower too small for the minstrel hand.
No skill can turn all life my harmony.
Perchance a tablet of magic mood will make
The truth of the whole universe write itself—
But only when with mortal thoughts in-drawn
I learn the secret time-transcending art:
+Silence that, losing all, grows infinite Self...
"The + marking indicates lines which are of the first poetic order. The ordinary mark indicates those which are excellent. The other lines not marked are all of them good but not of a special quality. Both the poems are very successful, especially the first."
7-11-1950
The classification here seer is to hark back to the grades of poetic perfection Sri Aurobindo has distinguished by five kinds of styles. "The first poetic order" appears to fit principally what he has called the pure or sheer inevitable but also any one of the four lesser styles—adequate, effective, illumined, inspired—raised to an inevitability of its own. "Excellent" would point to the same styles at a high pitch. "Good" must be these styles well-achieved but falling short of their greater possibilities.
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As for planes, if we may go by Sri Aurobindo's evaluations elsewhere, the cast of vision, word and rhythm in the lines marked by a cross suggests overhead poetry. The remaining lines belong to the mental plane.
(Once the consciousness is aware of a certain vibration and poetic quality, it is possible to reach out towards its source of inspiration. As poetry for us here must be a way of Yoga, I suppose this reaching out is a helpful attempt; but it would become easier if there were some constant vibration present in the consciousness, which we know to have descended from the higher ranges. Very often the creative spark comes to me from the poems I read. I shall be obliged if you will indicate the origin of the few examples below—only the first of which is from my own work.)
1. Plumbless inaudible waves of shining sleep. (Amal)
2. The diamond dimness of the domed air.
(Harindranath Chattopadhyaya)
3. Withdrawn in a lost attitude of prayer. (Ibid.)
4. This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude Of Truth's abidingness, Self-blissful and alone.
(Arjava [J. A. Chadwick)
5. Million d'oiseaux d'or, 6 future Vigueur!'(Rimbaud)
6. Rapt above earth by power of one fair face.
7. I saw them walking in an air of glory. (Vaughan)
8. Solitary thinkings such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain. (Keats)
9. But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness. (Vaughan)
10. I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright. (Ibid.)
1 Millions of golden birds. O Vigour to conic! (K..D.S.)
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!. "Illumined Mind.
2. "Illumined Mind.
3. "Intuition.
4. "Illumined Mind with an intuitive element and a strong Overmind touch.
5. "Illumined Mind.
6. "Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else—but something of illumination and intuition also.
7. "it is a mixture. Something of the Illumined Mind, something of the Poetic Intelligence diluting the full sovereignty of the higher expression.
8. "Higher Mind combined with Illumined.
9. "Illumined Mind with something from Intuition.
10. "Illumined Mind with something from Overmind."
(Here is your passage describing Savitri in whom the God of Love found "his perfect shrine":
Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds; of splendour and of calm
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.
Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;
Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,
Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple door to things beyond.
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Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.
The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:
Vacant of the dwarf self's imprisoned air
Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath
Spiritual that can make all things divine.
For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.
At once she was the stillness and the word,
A continent of self-diffusing peace,
An ocean of untrembling virgin fire.
In her he met a vastness like his own,
His high warm subtle ether he refound
And moved in her as in his natural home.1
Are not these lines, which I regard as the ne plus ultra in world-poetry, a snatch of the sheer Overmind?)
"This passage is, I believe, what I might call the Overmind Intuition at work expressing itself in something like its own rhythm and language. It is difficult to say about one's own poetry, but I think I have succeeded here and in some passages later on in catching that very difficult note; in separate lines or briefer passages (i.e. a few lines at a time) I think it comes in not unoften."2
(1936)
1 In the final form of Savitri the description has been expanded from its original 31 lines of the 1936 version to 51. (K.D.S.)
2 We may revert to the remark of Sri Aurobindo made in 1946 and already quoted by us, in which he refers to his attitude ten years earlier: "At that time I hesitated to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this order." Round about 1946 he gave up his hesitation about a number of lines. At that time, if he had been privately asked, it seems certain that he would have ascribed the Savitri-passage to Overmind itself rather than to a plane defined by him as intermediate between Intuition and Overmind. (K.D.S.)
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(You have made me believe in my poetic destiny. But I want as soon as possible to outgrow the remnants of the decorative and rhetorical level which, along with a finer intuitive and a larger overhead one, you have pointed out in my inspiration. I want to write more and more with a power near to the Overmind if not actually from it. What should I do? It is difficult to keep the consciousness merely uplifted: I feel "high and dry". Can't you pour some cataract from above? Both in Yoga and in poetry I crave for the potent ease of the highest planes. I aspire to live, as well as to echo in quality of inspiration, those four lines of yours which I consider a plenary Mantra:
Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,
An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
Force one with unimaginable rest.1
Show me a way to realise my aspiration. I feel very impatient—though I must confess to my shame that the aspiration of the poet is more frequently in the forefront than that of the Yogi.)
"Impatience does not help; intensity of aspiration does. The use of keeping the consciousness uplifted is that it then remains ready for the flow from above when that comes. To get as early as possible to the highest range one must keep the consciousness steadily turned towards it and maintain the call. First one has to establish the permanent opening— or get it to establish itself, then the ascension and frequent, afterwards constant descent. It is only afterwards that one can have the ease."
(1937)
1 From The Life Heavens.
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(J said to Nirod and Jyoti that it has been a habit with me to re-read and repeat and hum lines which I have felt to have come from very high sources. I mentioned your recent poems as my aid to drawing inspiration from the overhead planes. Jyoti begged me to type for her all the lines of this character from these poems. I have chosen the following:
1. O marvel bird with the burning wings of light
and the unbarred lids that look beyond all space...
(The Bird of Fire)
2. Lost the titan winging of the thought...
(The Life Heavens)
3. Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
Life that meets the Eternal with close breast, An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
Force one with unimaginable rest. (Ibid.)
4. My consciousness climbed.like a topless hill... (Ibid.)
5. He who from Time's dull motion escapes and thrills, Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast,
Unrolls the form and sign of being. Seated above in the omniscient Silence.
(Jivanmukta)
6. Calm faces of the gods on backgrounds vast
Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes...
(The Other Earths)
7. A silent unnamed emptiness content
Either to fade in the Unknowable
Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.
(Nirvana)
8. Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned, Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned...
(Thought the Paraclete)
9. I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine...
( Transformation)
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10. My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight...
(Ibid.)
11. Rose of God like a blush of rapture on Eternity's
face,
Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of
Grace!
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in
Nature's abyss:
Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life
Beatitude's kiss.
(Rose of God)
I shan't ask you to tell me in detail the sources of all these lines—but what do you think in general of my choice? Only for one quotation I must crave the favour of your closer attention. Please do try to tell me something about it, for I like it so much that I cannot remain without knowing all that can be known: it is, of course, No. 3 here. I consider these lines the most satisfying I have ever read: poetically as well as spiritually, you have written others as great—what I mean to say is that the whole essence of the truth of life is given by them and every cry in the being seems answered. So be kind enough to take a little trouble and give me an intimate knowledge of them. I'll be very happy to know their source and the sort of enthousiasmos you had when writing them. How exactly did they come into being?)
"The choice is excellent. I am afraid I couldn't tell you in detail the sources, though I suppose they all belong to the Overhead inspiration. In all I simply remained silent and allowed the lines to come down shaped or shaping themselves on the way—I don't know that I know anything else about it. All depends on the stress of the enthousiasmos, the force of the creative thrill and largeness of the wave of its Ananda, but how is that descriaable or definable? What is prominent in No. 3 is a certain calm, deep and intense
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spiritual emotion taken up by the spiritual vision that sees exactly the state or experience and gives it its exact revelatory words. It is an Overmind vision and experience and condition that is given a full power of expression by the word and the rhythm—there is a success in 'embodying' them or at least the sight and emotion of them which gives the lines their force."
(My lines—
Across the keen apocalypse of gold
and
A white word breaks the eternal quietude—
which you consider fine may be authentic poetry and true to spiritual reality but I find nothing strikingly new in them in their present context. Don't you believe that to repeat excellently is as much a fault in its own way as to do so half successfully? I may be in a peculiar mood, but I am sick of these shining monotonies. I think some of my poetic colleagues need as much as myself to get rid of them.)
"Obviously, it is desirable not to repeat oneself or, if one has to, it is desirable to repeat in another language and in a new light. Still, even that cannot be overdone. The difficulty with most writers of spiritual poetry is that they have either a limited field of experience or are tacked on to a limited inspiration though an intense one. How to get out of it? The only recipe I know is to widen oneself (or one's receptivity) always. Or else perhaps wait in the eternal quietude for a new 'white word' to break it—if it does not come, telephone."
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"On the other hand to cease writing altogether might be a doubtful remedy. By your writing here you have got rid of most of your former defects, and reached a stage of preparation in which you may reasonably hope for a greater development hereafter. I myself have more than once abstained for some time from writing because I did not wish to produce anything except as an expression from a higher plane of consciousness, but to do that you must be sure of your poetic gift, that it will not rust by too long a disuse."
"I have said that overhead poetry is not necessarily greater or more perfect than any other kind of poetry. But perhaps a subtle qualification may be made to this statement. It is true that each kind of poetical writing can reach a highest or perfect perfection in its own line and in its own quality and what can be more perfect than a perfect perfection and can we say that one kind of absolute perfection is greater than another kind? What can be more absolute than the absolute? But then what do we mean by the perfection of poetry? There is the perfection of the language and there is the perfection of the word-music and the rhythm, beauty of speech and beauty of sound, but there is the quality of the thing said which counts for something. If we consider only word and sound and what in themselves they evoke, we arrive at the application of the theory of art for art's sake to poetry. On that ground we might say that a lyric of Anacreon is as good poetry and as perfect poetry as anything in Aeschylus or Sophocles or Homer. The question of elevation or depth or of intrinsic beauty of the thing said cannot enter into our consideration of poetry; and yet it does enter, with most of us at any rate, and is part of the aesthetic reaction even in the most aesthetic of critics and readers. From this point of view the elevation from which the inspiration comes may after all matter, provided the one who receives it is a fit and powerful instrument; for a great
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poet will do more with a lower level of the origin of inspiration than a smaller poet can do even when helped from the highest sources. In a certain sense all genius comes from Overhead; for genius is the entry or inrush of a greater consciousness into the mind or the possession of the mind by a greater power. Every operation of genius has at its back or infused within it an intuition, a revelation, an inspiration, an illumination or at the least a hint or touch or influx from some greater power or level of conscious being than those which men ordinarily possess or use. But this power has two ways of acting: in one it touches the ordinary modes of the mind and deepens, heightens, intensifies or exquisitely refines their action but without changing its modes or transforming its normal character; in the other it brings down into these normal modes something of itself, something supernormal, something which one at once feels to be extraordinary and suggestive of a superhuman level. These two ways of action when working in poetry may produce things equally exquisite and beautiful, but the word 'greater' may perhaps be applied, with the necessary qualification, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation.
"The greater bulk of the highest poetry belongs to the first of these two orders. In the second order there are again two or perhaps three levels; sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual force of language or a deeper note of feeling brings in the overhead touch. More often it is the power of the rhythm that lifts up language that is simple and common or a feeling or idea that has often been expressed and awakes something which is not ordinarily there. If one listens with the mind only or from the vital centre only, one may have a wondering admiration for the skill and beauty of woven word and sound or be struck by the happy way or the power with which the feeling or idea is expressed. But there is something more in it than that; it is this that a deeper, more inward strand of the consciousness has seen and is speaking, and if we listen more profoundly we can get something more than the admiration and delight of the mind or Housman's
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thrill of the solar plexus. We can feel perhaps the Spirit of the universe lending its own depths to our mortal speech or listening from behind to some expression of itself, listening perhaps to its memories of
old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago
or feeling and hearing, it may be said, the vast oceanic stillness and the cry of the cuckoo
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides
or it may enter again into Vyasa's
A void and dreadful forest ringing with the crickets' cry
Vanam pratibhayarh sunyam jhillikdgananaditam1
or remember its call to the soul of man
Anityam asukham lokam imam prapya bhajasva mam
Thou who hast come into this transient and unhappy world, love and worship Me.
There is a second level on which the poetry draws into itself a fuller language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the
1 In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has brought in Vyasa's line thus:
some lone tremendous wood
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry. (K.D.S.)
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Rig Veda have this inspiration. It is a poetry 'thick inlaid with patines of bright gold' or welling up in a stream of passion, beauty and force. But sometimes there comes down a supreme voice, the overmind voice and the overmind music and it is to be observed that the lines and passages where that happens rank among the greatest and most admired in all poetic literature. It would be therefore too much to say that overhead inspiration cannot bring in a greatness into poetry which could surpass the other levels of inspiration, greater even from the purely aesthetic point of view and certainly greater in the power of its substance.
"A conscious attempt to write overhead poetry with a mind aware of the planes from which this inspiration comes and seeking always to ascend to those levels or bring down something from them, would probably result in a partial success; at its lowest it might attain to what I have called the first order, ordinarily it would achieve the two lower levels of the second order and in its supreme moments it might in lines and in sustained passages achieve the supreme level, something of the highest summit of its potency. But the greatest work will be to express adequately and constantly what is now only occasionally and inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above, the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its external or superficial happenings and phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, the inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality. It would bring in the concreteness, the authentic image, the inmost soul of identity and the heart of meaning of these things, so that it could never lack in beauty. If this could be achieved by one possessed, if not of a supreme, still of a sufficiently high and wide poetic genius, something new could be added to the domains of poetry and there would be no danger of the power of poetry beginning to fade, to fall into decadence, to fail us. It might even enter into the domain of the
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infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of the Ineffable, show us revealing images which bring us near to the Reality that is secret in us and in all, of which the Upanishad speaks,
Anejad ekam manaso javIyo nainad deva apnuvam
purvam arsat...
Tad ejati tan naijati tad dure tad u antike.
The One unmoving is swifter than thought, the
Gods cannot overtake It, for It travels ever in front;
It moves and It moves not, It is far away
from us and It is very close.
"The gods of the Overhead planes can do much to bridge that distance and to bring out that closeness, even if they cannot altogether overtake the Reality that exceeds and transcends them."
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