I WOULD like to make a distinction between mystic poetry and spiritual poetry. To equate mysticism and spirituality is not always happy or even correct. Thus, when Tagore sings:
Who comes along singing and steering his boat?
It seems a face familiar.
He goes in full sail, turns nor right nor left;
The waves break helplessly at the sides!
His face looks familiar... ¹
it is mysticism, mysticism in excelsis. Even A.E.'s
I turn
To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still:
White for Thy whiteness all desires burn.
Ah, with what longing once again I turn!²
is just on the borderland: it has succeeded in leaving behind the mystic domain, but has not yet entered the city of the Spirit – at the most, it has turned the corner and approached the gate. Listen now,
My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
My body is God's happy living tool,
My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.³
or the more occult yet luminously vibrant lines:
¹ "The Golden Boat."
² S A.E.: "Desire."
³ Sri Aurobindo: "Transformation."
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He stood upon a threshold serpent-watched,
And peered into gleaming endless corridors,
Silent and listening in the silent heart
For the coming of the new and the unknown.
He gazed across the empty stillness
And heard the footsteps of the undreamed Idea
In the far avenues of the Beyond.
He heard the secret Voice, the Word that knows,
And saw the secret face that is our own.¹...
Is there not a fundamental difference, difference not merely with regard to the poetic personality, but with regard to the very stuff of consciousness? There is direct vision here, the fullness of light, the native rhythm and substance of revelation, as if
In the dead wall closing from a wider self,
Parting a door to things unseized by earth-sense,
It lifted the heavy curtain of the flesh.². . .
When the Spirit speaks its own language in its own name, we have spiritual poetry. If, however, the Spirit speaks – from choice or necessity-an alien language and manner, e.g., that of a profane consciousness, or of the consciousness of another domain, idealistic or philosophical or even occult, puts on or imitates spirit's language and manner, we have what we propose to call mystic poetry proper. When Samain sings of the body of the dancer:
Et Pannyre devient fleur, flamme, papillon! ...
Comme au travers d'une eau soyeuse et continue;
Dans un divin éclair, montre Pannyre nue.³
¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book I, Canto III.
² Ibid.
Later version:
In the dead wall closing us from wider self,
Into a secrecy of apparent sleep,
The mystic tract beyond our waking thoughts,
A door parted, built in by Matter's force,
Releasing things unseized by earthly sense:
³ Albert Samain: "Pannyre awe talons d'or"-Aux Flancs du Vase.
And Pannyre became flower, flame, butterfly.. . .
As though through a silky continuity of water
In a divine flash showed Pannyre naked.
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or when Mallarmé describes the laurel flower:
Vermeil comme Ie pur orteil du séraphin
Que rougit la pudeur des aurores foulées, ¹
both so idealise, etherealize, almost spiritualise the earth and the flesh that they seem ostensibly only a vesture of something e1se behind, something mysterious and other-worldly, something other than, even just opposite to what they actually are or appear to be. That is the mystique of the senses which is a very characteristic feature of some of the best poetic inspirations of France. Baudelaire too, the Satanic poet, by the sheer intensity of sympathy and sincerity, pierces as it were into the soul of things and makes the ugly, the unclean, the diseased, the sordid throb and glow with an almost celestial light. Here is the Baudelairean manner:
Tout cassés
Qu'ils sont, its ant desyeux perçants comme une vrille,
Luisant comme ces trous où I' eau dart dans la nuit;
lis ant les yeux divins de la petite fille. ². . .
It is not merely by addressing the be1oved as your goddess that you can attain this mysticism; the Elizabethan did that in merry abundance, ad nauseam. A finer temper, a more delicate touch, a more subtle sensitiveness and a kind of artistic wizardry are necessary to tune the body into a rhythm of the spirit. The other line of mysticism is common enough, viz., to express the spirit in terms and rhythms of the flesh. Tagore did that liberally, the Vaishnava poets did nothing but that, the Song of Solomon is an exquisite example of that procedure. There is here, however, a difference in degrees which is an interesting feature worth noting. Thus in Tagore the reference to the spirit is evident, that is the major or central chord; the earthly and the sensuous are meant as the name
¹¹ Mallarme: "Les Fleurs".
"Vermilion like the pure toe of the seraph
Reddened by the blush of dawns it trampled through."
²"Quite broken they are, yet they have eyes that pierce like a drill, shine like those holes in which the water sleeps at night: they have the divine eyes of a little girl."-Baude1aire, "Les petites vieilles"
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and form, as the body to render concrete, living and vibrant, near and intimate what otherwise would perhaps be vague and abstract, afar, aloof. But this mundane or human appearance has a value in so far as it is a support, a pointer or symbol of the spiritual import. And the mysticism lies precisely in the play of the two, a hide-and-seek between them. On the other hand, as I said, the greater portion of Vaishnava poetry, like a precious and beautiful casket, no doubt, hides the spiritual import: not the pure significance but the sign and symbol are luxuriously elaborated, they are placed in the foreground in all magnificence: as if it was their very purpose to conceal the real meaning. When the Vaishnava poet says,
O love, what more shall I, shall Radha speak,
Since mortal words are weak?
In life, in death,
In being and in breath
No other lord but thee can Radha seek.!
there is nothing in the matter or manner which can indicate, to the uninitiated, any reference to the Spirit or the Divine. Or this again,
I have gazed upon beauty from my very birth
and yet my eyes
are not satiated; I have rested bosom upon bosom
for thousands
of aeons and yet my heart is not soothed.. . .
they all give a very beautiful, a very poignant experience of love, but one does not know if it is love human or divine, if it is soul's love or mere bodily love.
The famous Song of Solomon too is not on a different footing, when the poet cries:
Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse;
thou hast
ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with
one chain of thy neck.. . .
Sri Aurobindo: "Radha's Appeal" in Songs to Myrtilla.
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one can explain that it is the Christ calling the Church or God appealing to the human soul or one can simply find in it nothing more than a man pining for his woman. Anyhow I would not call it spiritual poetry or even mystic poetry. For in itself it does not carry any double or oblique meaning, there is no suggestion that it is applicable to other fields or domains of consciousness: it is, as it were, monovalent. An allegory is never mysticism. There is more mysticism in Wordsworth, even in Shelley and Keats, than in Spenser, for example, who stands in this respect on the same ground as Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress. Take Wordsworth as a Nature-worshipper,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.¹
or Wordsworth the Pagan,
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 2
I do not know if this is not mysticism, what else is. Neither is religious poetry true mysticism (or true spirituality). I find more mysticism in
Come, let us run
And give the world a girdle with the sun!³
than in this pious morning hymn,
Heaven is, dear Lord! where'er Thou art,
O never then from me depart !4
I am anticipating however, I shall come to the point presently again. I was speaking of spiritual poetry. Listen once more to these simple, transparent, yet vibrant lines:
But how shall body not seem a hollow space
When the soul bears eternity's embrace?5
¹ "The Solitary Reaper".
² "The World is too much with us"...
³ John Hall: "To his Tutor".
4Ken: "A Morning Hymn".
5 K. D. Sethna: "Deluge" in The Secret Splendour.
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or these again equally fraught with an intense experience a quiet in – gathered luminous consciousness:
I held my breath and from a world of din
Solitarily I sat apart
And felt the being vistaed into fire
Of truth which did acquire
Rhythm in the heart,
When lo, I knew the worlds without as worlds within.¹
But first let us go to the fans et origo, be acquainted with the very genuine article in its purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. I do not know of any other ideal exemplar than the Upanishad. Thus,
There the sun shines not and the moon has no
splendour and the stars are blind; there these
lightnings flash not, nor any earthly fire. For all
that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness
and by His shining all this shineth.²
Or this one equally deep, luminous and revealing:
Even as one Fire hath entered into the world but
it shapeth itself to the form it meeteth, so there
is one Spirit within all creatures but it shapeth
itself to form and form; it is likewise outside these.³
This is spiritual matter and spiritual manner that can never be improved upon. This is spiritual poetry in its quintessence. I am referring naturally here to the original and not to the translation which can never do full justice, even at its very best, to the poetic value in question. For apart from the individual genius of the poet, the greatness of the language, the instrument used by the poet, is also involved. It may well be what is comparatively easy and natural in the language of the
¹ Harindranath Chattopadhyaya: "Blue Profound" in Strange Journey.
² Katha Upanishad.
³ Ibid.
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gods (devabhasha) wouJd mean a tour de force, if not altogether an impossibility, in a human language. The Sanskrit language was moulded and fashioned in the hands of the Rishis, that is to say, those who lived and moved and had their being in the spiritual consciousness. The Hebrew or even the Zend does not seem to have reached that peak, that absoluteness of the spiritual tone which seems inherent in the Indian tongue, although those too breathed and grew in a spiritual atmosphere. The later languages, however, Greek or Latin or their modern descendants, have gone still farther from the source, they are much nearer to the earth and are suffused with the smell and effluvia of this vale of tears.
Among the ancients, strictly speaking, the later classical Lucretius was a remarkable phenomenon. By nature he was a poet, but his mental interest lay in metaphysical speculation, in philosophy, and unpoetical business. He turned away from arms and heroes, wrath and love and, like Seneca and Aurelius, gave himself up to moralising and philosophising, delving 'into the mystery, the why and the how and the whither of it all. He chose a dangerous subject for his poetic inspiration and yet it cannot be said that his attempt was a failure. Lucretius was not a religious or spiritual poet; he was rather Marxian, – atheistic, materialistic. The dialectical materialism of today could find in him a lot of nourishment and support. But whatever the content, the manner has made a whole difference. There was an idealism, a clarity of vision and an intensity of perception, which however scientific apparently, gave his creation a note, an accent, an atmosphere high, tense, aloof, ascetic, at times bordering on the suprasensual. It was a high light, a force of consciousness that at its highest pitch had the ring and vibration of something almost spiritual. For the basic principle of Lucretius' inspiration is a large thought-force, a tense perception, a taut nervous reaction– it is not, of course, the identity in being with the inner realities which is the hallmark of a spiritual consciousness, yet it is something on the way towards that.
There have been other philosophical poets, a good number of them since then – not merely rationally philosophical, as was the vogue in the eighteenth century, but metaphysically philosophical, that is to say, inquiring not merely into the
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phenomenal but also into the labyrinths of the noumenal, investigating not only what meets the senses, but also things that are behind or beyond. Amidst the earlier efflorescence of this movement the most outstanding philosopher poet is of
course Dante, the Dante of Paradiso, a philosopher in the mediaeval manner and to the extent a lesser poet, according to some. Goethe is another, almost in the grand modern manner. Wordsworth is full of metaphysics from the crown of his head to the tip of his toe although his poetry, perhaps the major portion of it, had to undergo some kind of martyrdom because of it. And Shelley, the supremely lyric singer, has had a very rich undertone of thought-content genuinely metaphysical. And Browning and Arnold and Hardy-indeed, if we come to the more moderns, we have to cite the whole host of them, none can be excepted.
We left out the Metaphysicals, for they can be grouped as a set apart. They are not so much metaphysical as theological, religious. They have a brain-content stirring with theological problems and. speculations, replete with scintillating conceits and intricate fancies. Perhaps it is because of this philosophical burden, this intellectual bias that the Metaphysicals went into obscurity for about two centuries and it is precisely because of that that they are slowly coming out to the forefront and assuming a special value with the moderns. For the modern mind is characteristically thoughtful, introspective – “introvert” – and philosophical; even the exact physical sciences of today are rounded off in the end with metaphysics.
The growth of a philosophical thought-content in poetry has been inevitable. For man's consciousness in its evolutionary march is driving towards a consummation which includes and presupposes a development along that line. The mot d'ordre in old-world poetry was "fancy", imagination-remember the famous lines of Shakespeare characterising a poet; in modern times it is Thought, even or perhaps particularly abstract metaphysical thought. Perceptions, experiences, realisations-of whatever order or world they may be-expressed in sensitive and aesthetic terms and figures, that is poetry known and appreciated familiarly. But a new turn has been coming on with an increasing insistence-a definite time has been given to that, since the Renaissance, it is said: it is
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the growing importance of Thought or brain-power as a medium or atmosphere in which poetic experiences find a sober and clear articulation, a definite and strong formulation. Rationalisation of all experiences and realisations is the keynote of the modern mentality. Even when it is said that reason and rationality are not ultimate or final or significant realities, that the irrational or the submental plays a greater role in our consciousness and that art and poetry likewise should be the expression of such a mentality, even then, all this is said and done in and through a strong rational and intellectual stress and frame the like of which cannot be found in the old-world frankly non-intellectual creations.
The religious, the mystic or the spiritual man was, in the past, more or Jess methodically and absolutely non-intellectual and anti-intellectual: but the modern age, the age of scientific culture, is tending to make him as strongly intellectual: he has to explain, not only present the object but show up its mechanism also-explain to himself so that he may have a total understanding and a firmer grasp of the thing which he presents and explains to others as well who demand a similar approach. He feels the necessity of explaining, giving the rationality – the rationale – the science, of his art; for without that, it appears to him, a solid ground is not given to the structure of his experience: analytic power, preoccupation with methodology seems inherent in the modern creative consciousness.
The philosophical trend in poetry has an interesting history with a significant role: it has acted as a force of purification, of sublimation, of katharsis. As man has risen from his exclusively or predominantly vital nature into :;tn increasing mental poise, in the same way his creative activities too have taken this new turn and status. In the earlier stages of evolution the mental life is secondary, subordinate to the physico-vital life; it is only subsequently that the mental finds an independent and self-sufficient reality. A similar movement is reflected in poetic and artistic creation too: the thinker, the philosopher remains in the background at the outset, he looks out; peers through chinks and holes from time to time; later he comes to the forefront, assumes a major role in man's creative activity.
Man's consciousness is further to rise from the mental to
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over-mental regions. Accordingly, his life and activities and along with that his artistic creations too will take on a new tone and rhythm, a new mould and constitution even. For this transition, the higher mental-which is normally the field of philosophical and idealistic activities-serves as the Paraclete, the Intercessor; it takes up the lower functionings of the consciousness, which are intense in their own way, but narrow and turbid, and gives, by purifying and enlarging, a wider frame, a more luminous pattern, a more subtly articulated , form for the higher, vaster and deeper realities, truths and harmonies to express and manifest. In the old-world spiritual and mystic poets, this intervening medium was overlooked for evident reasons, for human reason or even intelligence is a double-edged instrument, it can make as well as mar, it has a light that most often and naturally shuts off other higher lights beyond it. So it was bypassed, some kind of direct and immediate contact was sought to be established between the normal and the transcendental. The result was, as I have pointed out, a pure spiritual poetry, on the one hand, as in the Upanishads, or, on the other, religious poetry of various grades and denominations that spoke of the spiritual but in the terms and in the manner of the mundane, at least very much coloured and dominated by the latter. Vyasa was the great legendary figure in India who, as is shown in his Mahabharata, seems to have been one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, to forge and build the missing link of Thought Power. The exemplar of the manner is the Gita. Valmiki's represented a more ancient and primary inspiration, of a vast vital sensibility, something of the kind that was at the basis of Homer's genius. In Greece it was Socrates who initiated the movement of speculative philosophy and the emphasis of intellectual power slowly began to find expression in the later poets, Sophocles and Euripides. But all these were very simple beginnings. The moderns go in for something more radical and totalitarian. The rationalising element instead of being an additional or subordinate or contributing factor, must itself give its norm and form, its own substance and manner to the creative activity. Such is the present-day demand.
The earliest preoccupation of man was religious; even when he concerned himself with the world and worldly things, he
referred all that to the other world, thought of gods and goddesses, of after-death and otherwhere. That also will be his last and ultimate preoccupation though in a somewhat different way, when he has passed through a process of purification and growth, a "sea-change". For although religion is an aspiration towards the truth and reality beyond or behind the world, it is married too much to man's actual worldly nature and carries always with it the shadow of profanity.
The religious poet seeks to tone down or cover up the mundane taint, since he does not know how to transcend it totally, in two ways: (1) by a strong thought-element, the metaphysical way, as it may be called and (2) by a strong symbolism, the occult way. Donne takes to the first course, Blake the second. And it is the alchemy brought to bear in either of these processes that transforms the merely religious into the mystic poet. The truly spiritual, as I have said, is still a higher grade of consciousness: what I call Spirit's own poetry has its own matter and manner – swabhava and swadharma. A nearest approach to it is echoed in those famous lines of Blake:
To see a World in a grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.¹
And a considerable impact of it is vibrant and aglow in these lines of a contemporary Indian poet:
Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!
. . . . . . . . . . . .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 all Thy formless glory turn to love
And mould Thy love into a human face.²
¹ "Auguries of Innocence".
² K. D. Sethna: "This Errant Life" in The Secret Splentiour.
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Something of the fullness of spiritual matter and manner overflows in these epic lines:
His spirit mingles with eternity's heart
And bears the silence of the Infinite.
In a divine retreat from mortal thought,
In a prodigious gesture of soul-sight,
His being towered into pathless heights,
Naked of its vesture of humanity.¹
or this simple single line pregnant no less with the self-same fullness:
An eye awake in voiceless heights of trance,²
This, I say, is something different from the religious and even from the mystic. It is away from the merely religious, because it is naked of the vesture of humanity (in spite of a human face that masks it at times) ; it is something more than the merely mystic, for it does not stop being a signpost or an indication to the Beyond, but is itself the presence and embodiment of the Beyond. The mystic gives us, we can say, the magic of the Infinite; what I term the spiritual, the spiritual proper, gives in addition the logic of the Infinite. At least this is what distinguishes modern spiritual consciousness from the ancient, that is, Upanishadic spiritual consciousness. The Upanishad gives expression to the spiritual consciousness in its original and pristine purity and perfection, in its essential simplicity. It did not buttress itself with any logic. It is the record of fundamental experiences and there was no question of any logical exposition. But, as I have said, the modern mind requires and demands a logical element in its perceptions and presentations. Also it must needs be a different kind of logic that can satisfy and satisfy wholly the deeper and subtler movements of a modern consciousness. For the philosophical poet of an earlier age, when he had recourse to logic, it was the logic of the finite that always gave him the frame, unless
¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book I, Canto V.
² Ibid., Book I, Canto III.
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he threw the whole thing overboard and leaped straight into the occult, the illogical and the a logical, like Blake, for instance. Let me illustrate and compare a little. When the older poet explains indriyani hayan ahuh, it is an allegory he resorts to, it is the logic of the finite he marshals to point to the infinite and the beyond. The stress of reason is apparent and effective too, but the pattern is what we are normally familiar with – the movement, we can say, is almost Aristotelian in its rigour. Now let us turn to the following:
Our life is a holocaust of the Supreme.
The great World-Mother by her sacrifice
Has made her soul the body of our state;
Accepting sorrow and unconsciousness
Divinity's lapse from its own splendours wove
The many-patterned ground of all we are.
An idol of self is our mortality.¹
or this chiselled bit of diamond,
An inconscient Power groped towards consciousness,
Matter smitten by Matter glimmered to sense, ²
Here we have a pattern of thought-movement that does not seem to follow the lineaments of the normal brain-mind consciousness, although it too has a basis there: our customary line of reasoning receives a sudden shock, as it were, and then is shaken, moved, lifted up, transported – gradually or suddenly, according to the temperament of the listener. Besides, we have here the peculiar modern tone, which, for want of a better term, may be described as scientific. The impress – imprimatur – of Science is its rational coherence, justifying or justified by sense data, by physical experience, which gives us the pattern or model of an inexorable natural law. Here too we feel we are in the domain of such natural law but lifted on to a higher level.
This is what I was trying to make out as the distinguishing trait of the real spiritual consciousness that seems to be developing
¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book II, Canto I.
² Ibid., Book II, Canto IV.
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in the poetic creation of tomorrow, e.g., it has the same rationality, clarity, concreteness of perception as the scientific spirit has in its own domain and still it is rounded off with a halo of magic and miracle. That is the nature of the logic of the infinite proper to the spiritual consciousness. We can have a Science of the Spirit as well as a Science of Matter. This is the Thought element or what corresponds to it, of which I was speaking, the philosophical factor, that which gives form to the formless or definition to that which is vague, a nearness and familiarity to that which is far and alien. The fullness of the spiritual consciousness means such a thing, the presentation of a divine name and form. And this distinguishes it from the mystic consciousness which is not the supreme solar consciousness but the nearest approach to it. Or, perhaps, the mystic dwells in the domain of the Divine, he may even be suffused with a sense of unity but would not like to acquire the Divine's nature and function. Normally and generally he embodies all the aspiration and yearning moved by intimations and suggestions belonging to the human mentality, the divine urge retaining still the human flavour. We can say also, using a Vedantic terminology, that the mystic consciousness gives us the tatastha lakshana, the nearest approximative attribute of the attributeless; or otherwise, it is the hiranyagarbha consciousness which englobes the multiple play, the coruscated possibilities of the Reality: while the spiritual proper may be considered as prajñāghana, the solid mass, the essential lineaments of revelatory knowledge, the typal "wave-particles" of the Reality. In the former there is a play of imagination, even of fancy, a decorative aesthesis, while in the latter it is vision pure and simple. If the spiritual poetry is solar in its nature, we can say, by extending the analogy, that mystic poetry is characteristically lunar-Moon representing the delight and the magic that Mind and mental imagination, suffused, no doubt, with a light or a reflection of some light from beyond, is capable of (the Upanishad speaks of the Moon being born of the Mind).
To sum up and recapitulate. The evolution of the poetic expression in man has ever been an attempt at a return and a progressive approach to the spiritual source of poetic inspiration, which was also the original, though somewhat veiled, source from the very beginning. The movement has followed
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devious ways – strongly negative at times – even like man's life and consciousness in general of which it is an organic member; but the ultimate end and drift seems to have been always that ideal and principle even when fallen on evil days and evil tongues. The poet's ideal in the dawn of the world was, as the Vedic Rishi sang, to raise things of beauty in heaven by his poetic power, kavih kavitvā divi rūpam āsajat. Even a Satanic poet, the inaugurator, in a way, of modernism and modernistic consciousness, Charles Baudelaire, thus admonishes his spirit:
"Flyaway, far from these morbid miasmas, go and purify yourself in the higher air and drink, like a pure and divine liquor, the clear fire that fills the limpid spaces."¹
That angelic poets should be inspired by the same ideal is, of course, quite natural: for they sing:
Not a senseless, trancèd thing,
But divine melodious truth;
Philosophic numbers smooth;
since they
Have ye souls in heaven too,
Double-lived in regions new?²
Poetry, actually however, has been, by and large, a profane and mundane affair: for it expresses the normal man's perceptions and feelings and experiences, human loves and hates and desires and ambitions. True. And yet there has also always been an attempt, a tendency to deal with them in such a way as can bring calm and purity – katharsis – not trouble and confusion. That has been the purpose of all Art from the ancient
¹ Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;
Va te purifier dans l'air supérieur,
Et bois, comme tine pure et divine liqueur,
Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces Iimpides.
"Elévation" pleen et Idéal.
² Keats: "Ode on the Poets".
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days. Besides, there has been a growth and development in the historic process of this katharsis. As by the sublimation of his bodily and vital instincts and impulses.., man is gradually growing into the mental, moral and finally spiritual consciousness, even so the artistic expression of his creative activity has followed a similar line of transformation. The first and original transformation happened with religious poetry. The religious, one may say, is the profane inside out; that is to say, the religious man has almost the same tone and temper, the same urges and passions, only turned Godward. Religious poetry too marks a new turn and development of human speech, in taking the name of God human tongue acquires a new plasticity and flavour that transform or give a new modulation even to things profane and mundane it speaks of. Religious means at bottom the colouring of mental and moral idealism. A parallel process of katharsis is found in another class of poetic creation, viz., the allegory. Allegory or parable is the stage when the higher and inner realities are expressed wholly in the modes and manner, in the form and character of the normal and external, when moral, religious or spiritual truths are expressed in the terms and figures of the profane life. The higher or the inner ideal is like a loose clothing upon the ordinary consciousness, it does not fit closely or fuse. In the religious, however, the first step is taken for a mingling and fusion. The mystic is the beginning of a real fusion and a considerable ascension of the lower into the higher. The philosopher poet follows another line for the same katharsis – instead of uplifting emotions and sensibility, he proceeds by thought-power, by the ideas and principles that lie behind all movements and give a pattern to all things existing. The mystic can be of either type, the religious mystic or the philosopher mystic, although often the two are welded together and cannot be very well separated. Let us illustrate a little:
The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.¹
This is religious poetry, pure and simple, expressing man's
¹ Addison: "Hymn":
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earliest and most elementary feeling, marked by a broad candour, a rather shallow monotone. But that feeling is raised to a pitch of fervour and scintillating sensibility in Vaughan's
They are all gone into the world of light
And I alone sit lingering here, . . .
O Father of eternal life, and all
Created glories under Thee,
Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall
Into true liberty.¹
The same religious spirit seems to climb a little higher still. stretching towards the mystic vein in Donne,
My heart is by dejection, clay,
And by self-murder, red.
From this red earth, 0 Father, purge away
All vicious tinctures, that new fashioned
I may rise up from death, before ram dead.²
The allegorical element too finds here cleverly woven into the mystically religious texture. Here is another example of the mystically religious temper from Donne:
For though through many streights, and lands I roame,
I launch at paradise, and saile towards home,³
The same poet is at once religious and mystic f1.nd philosophical in these lines, for example:
That All, which always is All every where,
Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare,
Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die,
Loe, faithfull Virgin,.. . .
Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'd; yea thou art now
Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother;
¹ "They Are All Gone".
²"The Litanie"-Divine Poems.
³ The Progress of the Soule, VI.
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Thou 'hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome,
Immensity cloystered in thy deare wombe.¹
Blake's powerfully pregnant lines are mystically philosophic:
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.²
Blake had this wonderful gift of transmuting the baser metal of mundane experience into the gold of a deep mystic and spiritual experience:
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! 0 clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!³
An allegorical structure has been transfused into a living and burning symbolism of an inner world.
But all that is left far behind, when we hear a new voice announcing an altogether new manner, revelatory of the truly and supremely spiritual consciousness, not simply mystic or religious but magically occult and carved out of the highest if recondite philosophia:
A finite movement of the Infinite
Came winging its way through a wide air of Time;
A march of Knowledge moved in Nescience
And guarded in the form a separate soul. 4
¹ "Annvnciation"-Divine Poems.
² "Auguries of Innocence".
³ "Jerusalem".
4Sri Aurobindo: Sauitri, Book II, Canto IV.
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