Savitri

      V

 

'Overhead' Poetry

 

      While describing Savitri's pilgrimaging in the "inner countries", Sri Aurobindo at one point snaps the scene where she confronts the throng of powers that are really the "messengers, the occult gods" who awake humanity to the beauty and truth of things:

 

Into dim spiritual somnolence they break

Or shed wide wonder on our waking self,

Ideas that haunt us with their radiant tread,

Dreams that are hints of unborn Reality,

Strange goddesses with deep-pooled magical eyes,

Strong wind-haired gods carrying harps of hope,

Great moon-hued visions gliding through gold air,

Aspiration's sun-dream head and star-carved limbs,

Emotions making common hearts sublime.⁴⁵

 

The nature of 'overhead' poetry cannot be more vividly brought out; all its immense range is suggested here, and the riot of its imagery

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well illustrates Middleton Murry's remark: "...the greatest mastery of imagery does not lie in the use, however beautiful and revealing, of isolated images, but in the harmonious total impression produced by a succession of subtly related images. In such cases the images appear to grow out of one another and to be Mulling an independent life of their own."⁴⁶ Dreams, goddesses, gods, visions, aspirations, emotions, all leap to life, and are seen to be the powers behind 'overhead' poetry, powers that invade our ordinary life to possess and change it. Varied though these powers are, their common traits are Light and 'the mystic voice'.

 

      Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo cites examples from world poetry of the overhead poignancy in thought, feeling, voice and rhythm:

 

Sunt lacrimae rerum;⁴⁷

                                                                  —Virgil

 

      Insano indegno mistero delle cose

     (The insane and ignoble mystery of things);⁴⁸

                                                                                        —Leopardi

     

      Absent thee from felicity awhile,

      And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain; 

                                                                                            —Shakespeare

 

      Voyaging though strange seas of thought, alone;

                                                                                           —Wordsworth

 

Anityam asukham lokam imām prāpya bhajasva mām

(Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy

  world, love and worship Me);

                                                                                      —Gita

 

 Those thoughts that wander through eternity;

                                                                      —Milton

 

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments;

                                                                        —P.B. Shelley

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      And Paradise was opened in his face.

                                                                        —John Dryden

 

These are what Sri Aurobindo has aptly described as "discoveries of an unexpected and absolute phrase",⁴⁹ and since phrase, thought, pitch, rhythm all fuse into a revelatory blaze in such lines, they defy the usual categories of analysis and criticism.

 

      The sharp difference between the normal and the overhead aesthesis may be illustrated by citing two passages on the same subject, here is W.J.Turner—

 

They hunt, the velvet tigers in the jungle,

The spotted jungle full of shapeless patches—

Sometimes they're leaves, sometimes they're

hanging flowers,

Sometimes they're hot gold patches of the sun.. .⁵⁰

 

 which is a vivid enough and realistic enough description of the man-eaters in an Indian jungle; but here is William Blake—

 

      Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

      In the forests of the night,

      What immortal hand or eye

      Could frame thy fearful symmetry?—

 

and what a difference! This is the very incandescence of poetry truly wrought by a cosmic consciousness; we see the tiger poised in its terrible beauty, and dread and wonder strive for mastery; isn't he Rudra the fierce, or is he only the God's great creation? In quick short gasps the frenzy of fascination finds self-expression:

 

      And what shoulder, and what art,

      Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

      And when thy heart began to beat,

      What dread hand? and what dread feet?

      What the hammer? What the chain?

      In what furnace was thy brain?

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      What the anvil? What dread grasp

      Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

 

The questions inevitably lead to the climactic "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"—is Rudra the fierce also Shiva the serene and auspicious? The last lines but feebly echo the first; as in Thompson's The Hound of Heaven, here too the chase of discovery is over; the wheel has come full circle; the revelation is complete. Turner and Blake both write about the Tiger; but one is the creation of the vital or mental aesthesis, the other is a torrent of suggestion or an onrush of power from a higher plane.

 

      Another example: here is Matthew Arnold on the prospect of death: 

 

      The air of heaven is soft,

      And warm, and pleasant; but the grave is cold.

      Heaven's air is better than the cold dead grave.¹¹

 

This is good as far as it goes, but here is Shakespeare on the same theme, and now the illumination from above pours down in a flood:

 

      Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

      To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

      This sensible warm motion to become

      A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

      To bathe in fiery floods or to reside

      In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

      To be imprison'd in the viewless winds

      And blown with restless violence round about

      The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

      Of those that lawless and incertain thought

      Imagine howling—'tis too horrible.

      The weariest and most loathed worldly life

      That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment,

      Can lay on nature is a paradise

      To what we fear of death.⁵²

 

It is true Arnold is devising a dignified speech suitable for the

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legendary hero, Rustum, while Shakespeare has to write a speech appropriate to the mentality of an errant youth like Claudio; yet, while Arnold is almost flat, Shakespeare has given a glow even to Claudio's frenzied fear of death. It is easy to beg the question and say: Well, Shakespeare is, after all, the greater poet. But, then, how exactly has he touched these lines with greatness? Claudio's images are drawn from the vital and the physical, and yet they are passed through the fire and purified in the fountain and lifted up to a higher plane—say, that of the Higher Mind or the Illumined Mind—because, "there is something behind...which comes not primarily from the mind or the vital emotions or the physical seeing but from the cosmic self and its consciousness standing behind them all." ⁵³ It is not only Claudio speaking but all frightened humanity recoiling helplessly at the very thought of the approach of the grim Spectre; it is limited life retreating tremblingly before Death. Arnold might have cited the passage as an example of the 'Grand Style' in Shakespeare; but its essential character is better suggested when we see it as an expression of the overhead aesthesis. To return to W. J. Turner again, when he writes—

 

      But the misery of the unsatisfied heart,

      The misery of the living life

      Whose flame is ever-renewed suffering— ⁵⁴

 

we see in it no more than the feeblest of feeble echoes of Sunt lacrimae rerum or Anityam asukham lokam; and when he writes—

 

      I gazed entranced upon his face

      Fairer than any flower—

      O shining Popocatapetl

      It was thy magic hour:

      The houses, people, traffic seemed

      Thin fading dreams by day,

      Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

      They had stolen my soul away— ⁵⁵

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we have doubtless moments of excitement, the mind is quickened for the nonce by the rasa of the passage, but a second or third reading brings disappointment. It is here Keats scores magnificently:

 

      Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam,

      Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn— ⁵⁶

 

for one may read or repeat the lines to oneself any number of times, and yet not find them emptied of significance.

 

      The overhead flight in poetry is, not unnaturally, seldom sustained over a passage of considerable length. It is generally a sudden blaze, a momentary swell. For even poets are but human beings and ordinarily function on the mental plane, although this plane itself is no uniform dry desert of reason but has its own sensuous arbours, delectable oases, and the towered castles of the imagination. It is interesting to watch the sudden rise in the tempo of a piece of poetry like Wallace Stevens' 'Negation:

 

      Hi! The creator too is blind,

      Struggling towards his harmonious whole,

      Rejecting intermediate parts,

      Horrors and falsities and wrongs;

      Incapable master of all force,

      Too vague idealist, overwhelmed

      By an afflatus that persists.

      For this, then, we endure brief lives,

      The evanescent symmetries—

      From that meticulous potter's thumb.⁵⁷

 

After circling with slow deliberation at the middle height (nearer earth than sky), Stevens suddenly, skylark-wise, makes an ascent in the last two lines; a higher inspiration has seized and carried him, and we can merely gaze wonderingly at the phenomenon.

 

      Isolated short passages or single lines of great beauty occur, of course, in modern American and English poetry, and it may not be far-fetched to recognise some kind of overhead inspiration in them. To cite a few almost at random:

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       Across my foundering deck shone

       A beacon, an eternal beam;⁵⁸

                                                               —Hopkins

 

      A quartz contentment like a stone;⁵⁹

                                                              —Emily Dickinson

 

      Night is the beginning and the end

      And in between the ends of distraction

      Waits mute speculation;⁶⁰

                                                                    —Allen Tate

 

      But there, where western glooms are gathering

      The dark will end the dark...;⁶¹

                                                                    —Edwin Arlington Robinson

 

       I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

       Which shall be the darkness of God;⁶²

                                                                                     —T.S. Eliot

 

      Yet man's life is thought

      And he, despite his terror, cannot cease

      Ravening through century after century,

      Ravening, raging and uprooting, that he may come

      Into the desolation of reality;

                                                                                 —W.B.Yeats

 

      The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.⁶³

                                                                                  —Stevens

 

It is easy to dismiss some of the above lines at least as no more than verbal legerdemain; Tate, Robinson and Eliot, all three seem to make play with 'night' or 'dark; Yeats seems to charge 'ravening' and 'desolation' with a certain violence; 'quartz' and 'stone' in Emily Dickinson and 'holy hush' in Wallace Stevens seem verbal tricks at first. Yet, in the particular contexts, when the words sink into the inward ear, the lines acquire a life and soul of their own, and, perhaps begging the question, we can only say that a higher inspiration has done its work.

 

      The overhead powers are essentially, in their origin as also in their

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instrumentation, spiritual powers. A plant, an animal, a man, all share within limits the same life; yet man the mental being outsoars the others; and the man with an awakened soul outsoars average humanity insensitive to the intimations of the soul. Tine rhythmic word, too, "has a subtly sensible element, its sound value, a quite immaterial element, its significance or thought-value, and both of these again, its sound and its sense, have separately and together a soul value, a direct spiritual power, which is infinitely the most important thing about them."⁶⁴ It would appear that the poets in the passages or lines cited above have somehow managed to awake the "soul value", the "direct spiritual power", in the words brought together. An adroit balance of ideas and sounds may turn out lines that are in Lord Alfred Tennyson's words,

 

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,

Dead perfection, no more.⁶⁵

 

Andrea del Sarto, in Robert Browning's poem, concedes that although he may be a faultless painter himself, it is Raphael "pouring his soul" that is the real master; when Raphael paints "its soul is right". If one fights shy of the word 'soul', one might say with J.L. Lowes that words in poetry have more connotation, that they are charged with suggestion, whereas mere prose words have only denotation, a physical content. Actually, although all art and poetry may start from the physical and the vital, without the spiral of dhwani or suggestion culminating in this spiritual quality, they must pall more and more and go the way of all flesh, not enjoy the soul's immortality. Keats by calling the nightingale 'immortal Bird' and Shelley by calling the skylark 'blithe Spirit' have thrown a challenge to common sense. A bird is but a bird and must share the mortality of the world; how, then, can a bird either be a spirit or be immortal?

 

      "There are people", Sri Aurobindo once wrote to a correspondent, "who thrill to Pope and find Keats and Shelley empty and misty... What the hell has 'a glowworm golden in a dell of dew to do with the song of the skylark? But that simply means they like things that are

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intellectually clear and can't appreciate the imaginative connections which reveal what is deeper than the surface."⁵⁶ The bird is both bird and symbol, both body and soul, hence both mortal and immortal. The lie in the material world becomes the truth in the spiritual world, and it is the business of poetry, at least of poetry partaking of the overhead aesthesis, to insinuate, even to proclaim, this truth. Mr A.B. Purani has, in the course of a private conversation, drawn my attention to the fact that ancient Sanskrit literature recognised the distinction between the poetic creations of the mind and those of the overhead levels. The former were laukika, the latter, ārsa; in the former, expression followed the poet's intention, while in the latter, the mantric utterances of the rishis, meaning but limped behind the expression.⁶⁷

 

      In other words, the overhead inspiration is unpredictable, and comes without any antecedent mental activity; once the wonder of poetic expression has been spontaneously accomplished, the meddling intellect can, if it likes, try to anatomise the poetry. It would, perhaps, be wiser on the whole to surrender to the poem instead of dissecting it, for, when the sahrdaya properly responds to the poem, he cannot fail to experience a feeling of freedom and joy. As Charles Morgan writes, "In a great style there is pressure behind the form. As you read, you are made aware of this pressure. You feel that all the heavens of reality are pressing upon the writer's mind; you look up, you imagine, and your own heavens open before you."⁶⁸ Longinus said simply that the 'sublime' was the 'echo of a great soul'; that it involved, at one end, elevation of language, and at the other end (the hearer's), 'transport'; and that, above all, the sublime pierces everything "like a lightning flash", a knock-out blow. Haas said "shock-like inspiration", " a sudden burst of light"; Sri Aurobindo's phrases, while describing Intuition, were "outleap of a superior light...a projecting blade"; and A.E. spoke of the sudden rising of a water-lily from the bottom of a tarn. Longinus' "transport" itself has been made to mean "religious mysticism" by Abbé Bremond and some sort of "ecstasy" by Arthur Machen; but all are -agreed that there is a supra-rational element in both the creation and the enjoyment of such 'great' or 'sublime' poetry, or poetry written in the 'grand style'.⁶⁹

 

      But the Aurobindonian theory of 'overhead' poetry is no question-begging phrase that these others are, for his theory is intimately linked up with his philosophy and his own yogic experiences and poetic experiments and achievements during the latter half of his life. His aesthetics chimes perfectly with his metaphysics and his psychology, and hence his theory of overhead aesthesis seems to come perhaps much nearer to an explanation of the mystery of poetic creation than almost any other theory that has been advanced hitherto. Being intimately related to his own integral view of Reality— Reality that is both Being and Becoming—the Aurobindonian theory of overhead aesthesis appears to have a sufficiency and inner logic of its own that is rather lacking in most other theories of poetry.

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