On Poetry
THEME/S
"OVERHEAD POETRY"
POEMS
WITH
SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENTS
Edited by
K. D. SETHNA
SRI AU ROBINDO INTERNATIONAL
CENTRE OF EDUCATION
PONDICHERRY
First Edition : March 1972
March 1972
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1972
Published by Sri Aurobindo International
Centre of Education, Pondicherry
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press,
Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
As Sri Aurobindo's work in various fields comes more and more to be known, an increasing number of questions are put by earnest seekers. In the sphere of Yoga, we are most often asked the meanings of the terms "Supermind" and "Transformation". In the realm of literature, the recurrent query is: "What is 'Overhead Poetry'?"
We have invited Mr. K. D. Sethna of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and International Centre of Education to provide an answer with a mass of writing he has directly discussed with Sri Aurobindo through correspondence. After some natural hesitation because a fair amount of the answer would have a personal frame of reference, he has agreed to set aside his scruples in the larger interests of the literary public.
Mr. Sethna once remarked to his students in a light vein: "Overhead poetry is poetry that passes over everybody's head!" It often does at first, but it has a special way of doing it, as he has briefly explained in his Editor's Introduction and as his compilation will elucidate in concrete detail. This way has to be marked off from the zigzag of ambiguities and obscurities which makes a lot of modern verse frustrating in spite of being provocative. One may consider this way to be, in the words of the old mystics, "dark with excess of light". But it is possible to train the eye to the ultra-brightness, discern several shades of it and ultimately see the world and ourselves and the Great Unknown more deeply and clearly.
We are happy to state that the Government of India has given a grant to meet the cost of publishing Mr. Sethna's book.
22-3-1972
Here some poems are collected of a particular kind written by a disciple of Sri Aurobindo's, along with detailed appraisals of them by Sri Aurobindo himself. Following the appraisals are relevant excerpts from literary correspondence already published for the most part. This correspondence—barring a few instances—was with the same disciple and the excerpts have been either dovetailed to amplify the points of the immediate judgments or appended to present additional issues. They include, towards the end, a few remarks by Sri Aurobindo on some lines of his own. An epilogue consisting of a pertinently enlightening passage from Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri, concludes the book.
The disciple was aspiring to write systematically—with the help of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual influence, critical guidance and sometimes personal example—what the Master has called "Overhead Poetry" and distinguished as the most important element of what he has designated in general "The Future Poetry".
The Future Poetry would not be written from the usual sources of the world's literature—the levels of consciousness which, according to Sri Aurobindo, may be classified: subtle-physical mind (as in Homer and Chaucer, where the inner imaginative response is mostly to external gesture, movement and action); vital mind (as in Kalidasa and Shakespeare, where the vibrant play, delicate or vehement, of sensation, passion, emotion is directly expressed); intellectual mind (as in Vyasa, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante and Milton, where the poetic vision markedly brings out thought-values of whatever is caught up from subjective or objective existence).
The Future Poetry would be written from those rarer levels whose voices have occasionally joined the utterance from the usual sources to make the profoundest moments of past poetry. The rarest of those levels give birth to overhead poetry: they are "planes" whose afflatus comes as if from an infinitude of conscious being above our brain-clamped mentality. Sri Aurobindo labels them Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. Above even Overmind
is the sovereign divine dynamism which he names Supermind and whose ultimate manifestation is the goal of his Integral Yoga. But Supermind, in its essential and original form, has remained unexpressed up to now. It is only the other planes that can function more and more in poetry at present, either separately or in combination or by suffusing the usual poetic sources. And the overhead poet must drive increasingly towards a sustained inspiration from Over-mind, which is the home of what the ancient Indian seers called the "Mantra" and considered to be the Divine Word, the supreme revelatory speech of the Eternal.
The characteristics of these levels will become clear in the course of reading the book. In brief they may be summed up as follows. The Higher Mind displays a broad steady light of thought born of a spiritual and not intellectual consciousness: the reflective terms do not exist in their own right but as immediate formations of That which, in the language of the Upanishads, does not think by the mind but by which the mind is thought. The Illumined Mind has a greater intensity of spiritual light and comes forth with a direct vision of fundamental realities rather than with reflective terms. It discloses the very colours and contours, as it were, of Truth. The Intuition has keen flashes of an intimate sense of things: it deepens spiritual sight into spiritual insight, the luminosity goes straight and bare to its target with little need of image or interpretation. Truth's body is touched and explored. The Overmind not only brings the closest inner and outer grip but also moves massively with a radiant "globality". Interpretation, image and intimate sense are all raised here to their uttermost and transfigured by a vastness of sheer revelation, of knowledge by identity, as if a Cosmic Spirit were voicing its own secrets.
With regard to the quality of poems hailing from the overhead levels, two points have to be noted. As Sri Aurobindo once said in a letter, "the poetic (aesthetic) value or perfection of a line, passage or poem does not depend on the plane from which it comes, but on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense vision and inspiration from whatever source." At the same time, his pronouncement in another letter must be remembered.
There, while granting that even mysticism is not a monopoly of overhead verse, he ascribes to this verse a special virtue: "Mystic poetry can be written from any plane, provided the writer gets an inspiration from the inner consciousness whether mind, vital or subtle physical. Naturally, the lower planes cannot express the Spirit with its full and native voice as the higher planes do unless something comes down into them from the higher planes." To this we may add from a third letter: "The sense of the Infinite and the One which is pervasive in the overhead planes...can be expressed indeed by overhead poetry as no other can express it."
However, overhead poetry need not be explicitly mystic. Sri Aurobindo tells us that it can deal with quite other things than the Infinite and the One everywhere. Something behind mental or vital or physical consciousness has to be brought out in its own native tongue charged with its deeper values, rather than in a translation by that consciousness. But, of course, to be able to live constantly in that something behind we have to be practising mystics. And then mysticism and spirituality are bound to pervade, openly or by implication, our poetry—as in the overhead poems in the present collection. Also, perhaps the overhead will not function poetically on an extensive scale without importing the spiritual note.
This collection is divided into six parts. Each part is self-contained, demonstrating a gradation of inspired speech; and, although a slight overlapping occurs, the parts mostly offer different aspects of that gradation.
The first shows the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind and the Intuition in their pure characters at work in whole short pieces. It further shows a play of mixed inspiration, either raised to the pitch of the Overmind or plumbing the inmost self in us as distinguished from the upmost. This self Sri Aurobindo names the Psychic Being. It constitutes the plane of the "soul" proper, with its sweet poignancy and refining fire of aspiration, whose indirect presence on the more outer planes may be considered the secret power which transmits inspiration.
The next part and still more the third exhibit other blendings. The overhead poetry is accompanied by or fused with the intellectual
mind which, in its exalted operation, Sri Aurobindo often terms "the creative intelligence". Again, the same poetry draws into itself something of the Inner Mind, that many-dimensioned realm of a deeper look than the normal vision of the subtle-physical, vital or intellectual mentality. There are glimpses too of the "occult", snatches of a poetry communicating from the inner consciousness a pattern of delicately suggestive or dynamically piercing symbols with mysterious reverberations, and occasionally giving rise to a chequer of baffling beautiful surrealism.
Parts four, five and six are much longer and carry, together with a mixture of the overhead planes among themselves, a wider variety of interweavings and, for the sake of striking comparison, several examples of spiritual self-expression not only from the creative intelligence but also from the inner-mental, occult and psychic ranges. Thus diverse shades of "The Future Poetry" are openly illustrated, even while the main focus of attention is on the overhead afflatus with its extraordinarily profound sight and its tones at once of intensity and immensity mounting towards the "Mantra".
Parts four and five have each a few poems whose planes are not mentioned in the comments but may be inferred, from certain terms of characterisation, as the Inner Mind, either pure or charged with the overhead afflatus, for the one group and as the Psychic Being for the other.
In part six, some poems, not specified by Sri Aurobindo as overhead though highly appreciated, have also been included because they have obviously a close affinity in many respects if not in all to those specified as such.
The purpose of all the six series is not merely to preserve in compact significant arrangement an unusual body of verse and an expert analytic commentary on it. The purpose is, in addition, to be of service in two directions. First, poets of the spiritual life are to be helped to feel more strongly—through the systematic pursuit made by one of them—the power set working by Sri Aurobindo and to catch fire from it. Next, literary critics should be led to understand the expansion of possibility in vision and word and rhythm which it effects, and develop a detailed perception of both the "heart" and the
"art" of a poetry seeking to be vibrant—to quote a strikingly overhead verse itself from Sri Aurobindo—with
The lines that tear the veil from Deity's face.
And in the development of such perception a crowning aid may be sought in the long passage of poetry from Sri Aurobindo which constitutes our epilogue. It is an overhead description or rather evocation of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind in their specific qualities—and, as a grand finale, a general vision of Supermind in a revelatory language that may be considered to come as close as possible to the unknown power of inspiration whose glorious forerunner is all that we know as Overhead Poetry.
30.1.1972
I
Immortal overhead the gold expanse—
An ultimate crown of joy's infinity.
But a king-power must grip all passion numb
And a gigantic loneliness draw down
The large gold throbbing on a silver hush.
Nought save an ice-pure peak of trance can bear
The benediction of that aureole.
Sri Aurobindo's Comment
"It is very fine—it is the Higher Mind vision and movement throughout, except that in the fifth line a flash of Illumination comes through. Intense light-play and colour in this kind of utterance is usually the Illumined Mind's intervention."
In the first version submitted, the second line had run:
An ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy.
Sri Aurobindo remarked about that line:
"It is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually—in 'Paradise Lost'—some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his substance is, except at certain heights, mental—mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."
"Milton's architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence, for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he works."
Page 1
"I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual consciousness where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness; but it is still very much on the mind level although highly spiritual in its essential substance; and its instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight — not illumined by any of the intenser upper lights but as if in a large strong and clear daylight. It acts as an intermediate state between the Truth-Light above and the human mind; communicating the higher knowledge in a form that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded or dazzled by a Truth beyond it. The poetic intelligence is not at all part of that clarified spiritual seeing and thinking — it is only a high activity of the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane,—this does not answer to that description. But the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic, though in a different cast of thinking, is nearer to the Higher Mind than the ordinary intellect and can more easily receive its influence. When Milton starts his poem
Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree—
he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the style or the substance. But there is often a largeness of rhythm and sweep of language in Milton which has a certain distant kinship to the manner natural to a higher supra-intellectual vision, and something from the substance of the planes of spiritual seeing can come into this poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it.
"Milton is a classical poet and most classical poetry is fundamentally a poetry of the pure poetic intelligence. But there are other influences which can suffuse and modify the pure poetic intelligence, making it perhaps less clear by limitations but more vivid, colourful, vivid with various lights and hues; it becomes less intellectual,
Page 2
more made of vision and a flame of insight. Very often this comes by an infiltration of the veiled inner Mind which is within us and has its own wider and deeper fields and subtler movements,—and can bring also the tinge of a higher afflatus to the poetic intelligence, sometimes a direct uplifting towards what is beyond it. It must be understood however that the greatness of poetry as poetry does not necessarily or always depend on the level from which it is written. Shelley has more access to the inner Mind and through it to greater things than Milton, but he is not the greater poet."
"When I say that the inner Mind can get the tinge or reflection of the higher experience I am not speaking here of the 'descent' in Yoga by which the higher realisation can come down into the inferior planes and enlighten or transform them. I mean that the Higher Mind is itself a spiritual plane and one who lives in it has naturally and normally the realisation of the Self, the unity and harmony everywhere, and a vision and activity of knowledge that proceeds from this consciousness but the inner Mind has not that naturally and in its own right, yet can open to its influence more easily than the outer intelligence. All the same, between the reflected realisation in the mind and the automatic and authentic realisation in the spiritual mental planes there is a wide difference."
Distinguishing the general mode and the typical turn of the Inner Mind's poetry from those of the Higher Mind's, Sri Aurobindo wrote of a poem: "Not from the Higher Mind—for there a high-uplifted thought is the characteristic—but probably from some realm of the inner Mind where thought and vision are involved in each other—that kind of fusion gives the easy felicity that is found here."
The distinction may be illustrated briefly by the last stanza of the poem in question which is entitled Two Birds after a parable from the Upanishads:
The watchful ravener below
Felt his time-tortured passion cease,
And flying upward knew himself
One with that bird of golden peace.
The whole stanza is considered to have come from the Inner Mind, except for "a touch of the Higher Mind perhaps" in line 2.
Page 3
Strange with half-hewn god-faces that upbear
A listening quietude of giant caves,
The prisoner eternities of earth
Have wakened in this purple loneliness.
Each granite block comes cloven to the eye
As if the blue voice of the Unknowable
Broke through its sleep: like memories left behind
Of some enormous sculpture-cry of soul
The rocks reveal their shattered silences.
"A very fine poem—Illumined Mind throughout very perfectly expressed."—"No, it is not the epic kind [of blank verse]—the rhythm is rather large, calm and reflective than epic."1
"There is a substitute for the expression of the Higher Thought, the Illumination, the pure Intuition giving great or brilliant results, but these cannot be classed as the very body of the higher consciousness.... Shakespeare's poetry coruscates with a play of the hues of imagination which we may regard as a mental substitute for the inspiration of the Illumined Mind and sometimes by aiming at an exalted note he links on to the illumined overhead inspiration itself as in the lines I have more than once quoted:
1 Further light from Sri Aurobindo on the epic tone will be found in the comments on the poem Agni Fatavedas in Part 4. (K.D.S.)
Page 4
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge?
But the rest of that passage falls away in spite of its high-pitched language and resonant rhythm far below the overhead strain. So it is easy for the mind to mistake and take the higher for the lower inspiration or vice versa."
Comparing the poetry of the Inner Mind with that of the Illumined, Sri Aurobindo writes:
"There are many kinds of vision in the inner Mind.... A certain spontaneous intensity of vision is usually there, but that large or rich sweep or power which belongs to the Illumined Mind is not part of its character. Moreover, it is subtle and fine and has not the wideness which is the characteristic of the planes that rise towards the vast universality of the Overmind."
(What distinguishes in manner and quality a pure inspiration of the Illumined Mind from that which has the psychic plane for its origin?)
"Your question reads like a poser in an examination paper. Even if I could give a satisfactory definition Euclideanly rigid, I don't know that it would be of much use or would really help you to distinguish between the two kinds; these things have to be felt and perceived by experience. I would prefer to give examples. I suppose it would not be easy to find a more perfect example of psychic inspiration in English literature than Shelley's well-known lines,
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?
Page 5
—you will find there the true rhythm, expression and substance of poetry full of the psychic influence. For full examples of the poetry which comes from the Illumined Mind purely and simply and that in which the psychic and the spiritual illumination meet together, one has to go to poetry that tries to express a spiritual experience. You have yourself written things which can illustrate the difference. The lines
The longing of ecstatic tears
From infinite to infinite1
will do very well as an instance of the pure illumination, for here what would otherwise be a description of a spiritual heart-experience, psychic therefore in its origin, is lifted up to a quite different spiritual level and expressed with the vision and language sufficiently characteristic of a spiritual-mental illumination. In another passage there is this illumination but it is captured and dominated by the inner heart and by the psychic love for the Divine incarnate.
If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow
Its mortal longings, lean down from above,
Temper the unborn Light no thought can trace,
Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow.
For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:
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"
"There is...the psychic source of inspiration which can give a beautiful spiritual poetry. The psychic has two aspects—there is the soul principle itself which contains all soul possibilities and there is the psychic personality which represents whatever soul-power is developed from life to life or put forward for action in our present life-formation. The psychic being usually expresses itself through its instruments, mental, vital and physical; it tries to put as much of its own stamp on them as possible. But it can seldom put on them the full psychic stamp—unless it comes fully out from its rather secluded and overshadowed position and takes into its hands the direct government of the nature. It can then receive and express all spiritual realisations in its own way and manner. For the turn of the psychic is different from that of the overhead planes—it has less of greatness, power, wideness, more of a smaller sweetness, delicate beauty, there is an intense beauty of emotion; a fine subtlety of true perception, an intimate language. The expression 'sweetness and light' can very well be applied to the psychic as the kernel of its nature. The spiritual plane, when it takes up these things, gives them a wider utterance, a greater splendour of light, a stronger sweetness, a breath of powerful audacity, strength and space."
1 The last lines of the poem Young-hearted River, not quoted in this collection.
2 From the poem quoted next.
Page 6
This errant life is dear although it dies;
And human lips are sweet though they but sing
Of stars estranged from us; and youth's emprise
Is wondrous yet, although an unsure thing.
Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!
I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.
Temper the unborn light no thought can trace,
And mould Thy love into a human face.
Page 7
"A very beautiful poem, one of the very best you have written. The last six lines, one may say even the last eight, are absolutely perfect. If you could always write like that, you would take your place among English poets and no low place either. I consider they can rank— these eight lines—with the very best in English poetry."
To Dilip Kumar Roy: "Amal's lines are not easily translatable, least of all into Bengali. There is in them a union or rather fusion of high severity of speech with exaltation and both with a pervading intense sweetness which it is almost impossible to transfer bodily without loss into another language. There is no word in excess, none that could have been added or changed without spoiling the expression, every word just the right revelatory one—no colour, no ornamentation, but a sort of suppressed burning glow, no similes, but images which have been fused inseparably into the substance of the thought and feeling—the thought itself perfectly developed, not idea added to idea at the will of the fancy, but perfectly interrelated and linked together like the limbs of an organic body. It is high poetic style in its full perfection and nothing at all that is transferable. You have taken his last line and put in a lotus-face and made divine love bloom in it,—a pretty image, but how far from the glowing impassioned severity of the phrase: 'And mould Thy love into a human face'!"
To the poet himself: "The quotations [AE] makes [from your poems]—
The song-impetuous mind...1
The Eternal Beauty is a wanderer
Hungry for lips of clay2—
certainly deserve the praise he gives them and they are moreover of the kind AE and Yeats also, I think, would naturally like. But the
poem [This Errant Life] I selected for special praise had no striking expressions like these standing out from the rest, just as in a Greek statue there would be no single feature standing out in a special beauty (eyes, lips, head or hands), but the whole has a harmoniously modelled grace of equal perfection everywhere as, let us say, in the perfect charm of a statue by Praxiteles. This apart from the idea and feeling, which goes psychically and emotionally much deeper than the ideas in the lines quoted by AE, which are poetically striking but have not the same subtle spiritual appeal; they touch the mind and vital strongly, but the other goes home into the soul."
"At present you write, as you do other things, too much from the brain, the mere human intelligence. To get back from the surface vital into the psychic and psychic vital, to raise the level of your mental from the intellect to the Illumined Mind is your need both in poetry and in Yoga. I have told you already that your best poetry comes from the Illumined Mind, but as a rule it either comes from there with too much of the transcription diminished in its passage through the intellect or else is generated only in the creative poetic intelligence. But so many poets have written from that intelligence. If you could always write direct from the Illumined Mind—finding there not only the substance, as you often do, but the rhythm and language, that indeed would be a poetry exquisite, original and unique. The intellect produces the idea, even the poetic idea, too much for the sake of the idea alone; coming from the Illumined Mind the idea in a form of light and music is itself but the shining body of the Light Divine."
1From Ne Plus Ultra, quoted a little later.
2From Sages, not quoted here.
Page 8
I have become a secret pool
Of lonelinesses mountain-cool,
A dream-poise of unuttered song
Lifted above the restless throng
Of human moods' dark pitchers wrought
Of fragile and of flawful thought.
Now never more my tunes shall flow
In moulds of common joy and woe;
But seraph hands reveal wide jars
Cut from the solitudes of stars
And stoop across the sky to fill
The perfect shapes of their calm will
With musical obedience
From my pellucid time-suspense;
And in their crystalline control
Of heaven-mooded ecstasy
Carry the waters of my soul
Unto God's sacred thirst for me!
Page 9
"It is a very fine poem. It comes from the intuitive plane—belonging to the Intuition proper which brings with it a sort of subdued inspiration—I mean inspiration of the more quiet, not the more vivid kind and a great felicity of language. The meaning is not obscure but deep enough to make one reflect before getting the whole of it."
"The poetry of the Illumined Mind is usually full of a play of lights and colours, brilliant and striking in phrase, for illumination makes the Truth vivid—it acts usually by a luminous rush. The poetry of the Intuition may have a play of colour and bright lights, but it does not depend on them—it may be quite bare; it tells by a sort of close intimacy with the Truth, an inward expression of it. The Illumined Mind sometimes gets rid of its trappings, but even then it always keeps a sort of lustrousness of robe which is its characteristic."
Page 10
I merge in her rhythm of haloed reverie
By spacious vigil-lonelinesses drawn
From star-birds winging through the vacancy
Of night's incomprehensible spirit-dawn.
My whole heart echoes the enchanted gloom
Where God-love shapes her visionary grace:
The sole truth my lips bear is the perfume
From the ecstatic flower of her face.
"I think it is one of your best. I could not very definitely say from where the inspiration comes. It seems to come from the Illumination through the Higher Mind—but there is an intuitive touch here and there, even some indirect touch of 'mental Overmind' vision hanging about the first stanza.
"There are two ranges of Overmind which might be called 'mental' and 'gnostic' Overmind respectively—the latter in direct touch with Supermind, the former more like a widened and massive intuition."
"...of course all overhead poetry is not from the Overmind, more often it comes from the higher thought, the illumined mind or the pure intuition. This last is different from the mental intuition which is frequent enough in poetry that does not transcend the mental level. The language and rhythm from other overhead levels can be very different from that which is proper to the Overmind; for the Overmind thinks in a mass; its thought, feeling, vision is high or deep or wide or all these things together: to use the Vedic expression about fire, the divine messenger, it goes vast on its way to bring the divine riches, and it has a corresponding language and rhythm. The higher thought has a strong tread often with bare unsandalled feet and moves in a clear-cut light: a divine power, measure, dignity
Page 11
is its most frequent character. The outflow of the illumined mind comes in a flood brilliant with revealing words or a light of crowding images, sometimes surcharged with its burden of revelations, sometimes with a luminous sweep. The intuition is usually a lightning flash showing up a single spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire and miraculous completeness of vision to the surprised ecstasy of the inner eye; its rhythm has a decisive inevitable sound which leaves nothing essential unheard, but very commonly it is embodied in a single stroke. These, however, are only general or dominant characters; any number of variations is possible. There are besides mingled inspirations, several levels meeting and combining or modifying each other's notes, and an ovcrmind transmission can contain or bring with it all the rest...."
(Here are some passages from the Mundaka Upanishad on the transcendent and universal Brahman1 and some from the Gita's Vision of the Cosmic Spirit.2 Have they the accent of what you have described in The Future Poetry as the Mantra? The target of all mystic and spiritual poetry should be, in my opinion, the Mantric utterance. At least the target of my own poetry certainly is. Will you shed some light on the Mantra's peculiar quality and original plane? And tell me, please, whether we can expect a poetry from the as-yet-unmanifest Supermind ?)
"The Mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater. The passages you mention from the Upanishad and the Gita have certainly the Overmind accent.
1 II, 2. 11-12.
2 XI, 14-21
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But ordinarily the Overmind inspiration does not come out pure in human poetry—it has to come down to an inferior consciousness and touch it or else to lift it by a seizure and surprise from above into some infinite largeness. There is always a mixture of the two elements, not an absolute transformation though the higher may sometimes dominate. You must remember that the Overmind is a superhuman consciousness and to be able to write always or purely from an Overmind inspiration would mean the elevation of at least a part of the nature beyond the human level.
"But how do you expect a Supramental inspiration to come down here when the Overmind itself is so rarely within human reach? That is always the error of the impatient aspirant, to think he can get the Supermind without going through the intervening stages or to imagine that he has got it when in fact he has only got something from the illumined or intuitive or at the highest some kind of mixed Overmind consciousness."
"To get the Overmind inspiration through is so rare that there are only a few lines or short passages in all poetic literature that give at least some appearance or reflection of it."1
"The Overmind is not strictly a transcendental consciousness— that epithet would more accurately apply to the Supramental and to the Sachchidananda consciousness—though it looks up to the transcendental and may receive something from it and though it does transcend the ordinary human mind and, in its full and native self-power when it does not lean down and become part of mind, is superconscient to us. It is more properly a cosmic consciousness, even the very base of the cosmic as we perceive, understand or feel it. It stands behind every particular in the cosmos and is the source of all our mental, vital or physical actualities and possibilities which are diminished and degraded derivations and variations from it and have not, except in certain formations and activities of genius and some intense self-exceeding, anything of the native overmind quality and power. Nevertheless, because it stands behind as if covered by a veil, something of it can break through or shine through or even only dimly glimmer through and that brings the overmind touch or note."
1 In some qualification of this statement it may be mentioned that concerning the time when Madonna Mia and the subsequent poems had been commented upon, Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1946: "At that time I hesitated to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English poetry or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this order." In 1946 several lines in the world's poetry which he had once hesitated about were adjudged by him to have been directly from the sheer Overmind. (K.D.S.)
Page 13
A madrigal to enchant her—and no more?
With the brief beauty of her face—drunk, blind
To the inexhaustible vastnesses that lure
The song-impetuous mind?
Is the keen voice of tuneful ecstasy
To be denied its winged omnipotence,
Its ancient kinship to immensity
And the swift suns?
When mystic grandeurs urge him from behind,
When all creation is a rapturous wind
Driving him towards an ever-limitless goal,
Can such pale moments crown the poet's soul?
Shall he—born nomad of the infinite heart!
Time-tamer! star-struck debauchee of light!
Warrior who hurls his spirit like a dart
Across the terrible night Of death to conquer immortality!—
Content with little loves that seek to bind
His giant feet with perishing joys, shall he
Remain confined
To languors of a narrow paradise—
He in the mirroring depths of whose far eyes
The gods behold, o'erawed, the unnamable
One Beyond all gods, the Luminous, the Unknown?
Page 14
"This is magnificent. The three passages I have marked reach a high-water mark of poetic force, but the rest also is very fine. This poem can very well take its place by the other early poem [This Errant Life] which I sent you back the other day, though the tone is different-that other was more subtly perfect, this reaches another kind of summit through sustained height and grandeur."
On the plane of inspiration of the lines marked in the second stanza: "Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch."
This comment came when, considerably after the comment on the whole poem, the lines concerned were separately submitted for classification. We may suppose that the rest of the lines marked by Sri Aurobindo—those in the first stanza—as equal in poetic force have more or less the same overhead quality as these.
(Ne Plus Ultra was one of half a dozen poems—the others included This Errant Life-that Dilip sent to AE. Reading them all, AE wrote back of "genuine poetic quality" and "many fine lines" and added that they " show a feeling for rhythm which is remarkable since the poet is not writing in his native but a learned language". However, from Ne Plus Ultra he notes with pleasure only one phrase -and I think mostly apropos of this poem he utters a general warning against frequent use of words like " infinite", "eternal", "limitless". The difficulty about such words has struck me before-s-frequent use oj them gives a not-altogether-agreeable Hugoesque flavour to mystic Indian poetry; but I wonder whether I have cheapened or misused them. At least you have never taken me to task on that score.)
"I did not object to your frequent use of 'infinite', 'eternal', 'limitless', because these are adjectives that I myself freely pepper over my poetry. When one writes about the Infinite, the Eternal and the Limitless or when one feels them constantly, what is one to do? AE who has not this consciousness but only that of the temporal and finite (natural or occult) can avoid these words, but I can't. Besides,
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all poets have their favourite words and epithets which they constantly repeat. AE himself has been charged with a similar crime."
To Dilip Kumar Roy: "AE's remarks about 'immensity', etc., are very interesting to me; for these are the very words, with others like them, that are constantly recurring at short intervals in my poetry when I express not spiritual thought but spiritual experience. I knew perfectly well that this recurrence would be objected to as bad technique or an inadmissible technique; but this seems to me a reasoning from the conventions of a past order which cannot apply to a new poetry dealing with spiritual things. A new art of words written from a new consciousness demands a new technique. AE himself admits that this rule makes a great difficulty because these 'high light' words are few in the English language. His solution may do well enough where the realisations which they represent are mental realisations or intuitions occurring on the summits of the consciousness, rare 'high lights' over the low tones of the ordinary natural or occult experience (ordinary, of course, to the poet, not to the average man); there his solution would not violate the truth of the vision, would not misrepresent the balance or harmony of its actual tones. But what of one who lives in an atmosphere full of these high lights—in a consciousness in which the finite, not only the occult but even the earthly finite, is bathed in the sense of the eternal, the illimitable infinite, the immensities or intimacies of the timeless ? To follow AE's rule might well mean to falsify this atmosphere, to substitute a merely aesthetic fabrication for a true seeing and experience. Truth first—a technique expressive of the truth in the forms of beauty has to be found, if it does not exist. It is no use arguing from the spiritual inadequacy of the English language; the inadequacy does not exist and, even if it did, the language will have to be made adequate. It has been plastic enough in the past to succeed in expressing all that it was asked to express, however new; it must now be urged to a farther new progress. In fact, the power is there and has only to be brought out more fully to serve the full occult, mystic, spiritual purpose."
*
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(To help me distinguish the planes of inspiration, could you just indicate where the following phrases from various poems of mine have their sources?1
1. What visionary urge
Has stolen from horizons watched alone
Into thy being with ethereal guile?
2. A huge sky-passion sprouting from the earth
In branched vastnesses of leafy rapture.
3. The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind.
4. A sea unheard where spume nor spray is blown.
5. Irradiant wing-waft through eternal space,
Pride of lone rapture and invincible sun-gaze.
6. And to the earth-self suddenly
Came, through remote entranced marvelling
Of adoration ever-widening,
A spacious sense of immortality.
7. Here life's lost heart of splendour beats immense.
8. The haunting rapture of the vast dream-wind
That blows, star-fragrant, from eternity.
9. An ocean-hearted ecstasy am I,
Where time flows inward to eternal shores.)
1 Some of the phrases are part of poems quoted in the present collection.
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1."Second line Intuitive with Overmind touch. Third line imaginative Poetic Intelligence.
2."Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind.
3."Intuitive with Overmind touch.
4."Intuitive.
5."Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch.
6."Mixture of Higher and Illumined Mind—in the last line the mental Overmind touch.
7."Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch.
8."Ditto.
9."Intuitive, Illumined, Overmind touch all mixed together,
"I have analysed very imperfectly—because these influences are so mixed together that the descriptions are not exhaustive.
"Also remember that I speak of a touch, of the mental Overmind touch and that when there is the touch it is not always complete—it may be more apparent from something either in the language or substance or rhythm than in all three together.
"Even so, perhaps some of my descriptions are overhasty and denote the impression of the moment. Also the poetical value of the poetry exists independent of its source."
(I should like to know whether you intend any important distinction when you speak of "Overmind touch" and "mental Overmind touch".)
"Yes—the Overmind proper has some gnostic light in it which is absent in the mental Overmind."
(From what plane are the substance and rhythm of this phrase from Shakespeare ?—
...the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
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Are they really from what you have considered his usual plane—the vital ?)
"The origin of the inspiration may be from anywhere, but in Shakespeare it always comes through the vital and strongly coloured by it as in some others it comes from the poetic intelligence. What play or poem is this from? I don't remember it. It sounds almost overmental in origin."
(The phrase occurs in Sonnet CVII beginning:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom.
What I am eager to know is whether the rhythm of the words I have picked out is a fusion of the overmental and the vital; or is it only the substance that is from the Overmind ?)
"There is something from the Above in the rhythm also, but it is rather covered up by the ordinary rhythm of the first half fine and the two lines that follow. It is curious that this fine and a half should have come in as if by an accident and have nothing really to do with the restricted subject of the rest."
(Is there something definite in the rhythm or language of a line of poetry which would prove it to be from a certain plane ? Take the quotations from Shakespeare I am sending you. The first, according to you, has an Overmind movement as well as substance coming strongly coloured by the vital. But where and in what lies the vital colour which makes it the highest Shakespearean and not, say, the highest Words-worthian—the line inspired by Newton ? How does one catch here and elsewhere the essential differentiae ?)
"It is a question of feeling, not of intellectual understanding. The second quotation from Shakespeare—
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Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven—
is plainly vital in its excited thrill. Only the vital can speak with that thrill of absolute passion—the rhythm too is vital.1 I have given the instance (in The Future Poetry) of Shakespeare's
...it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
That is a 'thought', a judgment on life, so would naturally be assigned to the intellect, but as a matter of fact it is a throw-up from Macbeth's vital, an emotional or sensational, not an intellectual judgment and its whole turn and rhythm are vital. "About the first quotation, Shakespeare's
there might be some doubt, but still it is quite different in tone from Wordsworth's line on Newton—
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone—
which is an above-head vision—and the difference comes because the vision of the 'dreaming soul' is felt through the vital mind and heart before it finds expression. It is this constant vitality, vital surge in Shakespeare's language, which makes it a sovereign expression not of mind or knowledge but of life."
"We make a distinction between truth and beauty; but there can
1 Alongside the lines themselves Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Tremendously vital." (K.D.S)
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be an aesthetic response to truth also, a joy in its beauty, a love created by its charm, a rapture in the finding, a passion in the embrace, an aesthetic joy in its expression, a satisfaction of love in the giving of it to others. Truth is not merely a dry statement of facts or ideas to or by the intellect; it can be a splendid discovery, a rapturous revelation, a thing of beauty that is a joy for ever. The poet also can be a seeker and lover of truth as well as a seeker and lover of beauty.... On certain levels of the Overmind, where the mind element predominates over the element of gnosis, the distinction between truth and beauty is still valid. It is indeed one of the chief functions of the Overmind to separate the main powers of the consciousness and' give to each its full separate development and satisfaction, bring out its utmost potency and meaning, its own soul and significant body and take it on its own way as far as it can go....But also there is another action of the Overmind which sees and thinks and creates in masses, which reunites separated things, which reconciles opposites. On that level truth and beauty not only become constant companions but become one, involved in each other, inseparable: on that level the true is always beautiful and the beautiful is always true. Their highest fusion perhaps only takes place in the Supermind; but Overmind on its summits draws enough of the supramental light to see what the Supermind sees and do what the Supermind does though in a lower key and with a less absolute truth and power. On an inferior level Overmind may use the language of the intellect to convey as far as that language can do its own greater meaning and message but on its summits Overmind uses its own native language and gives to its truths their own supreme utterance, and no intellectual speech, no mentalised poetry can equal or even come near to that power and beauty. Here your intellectual dictum that poetry lives by its aesthetic quality alone and has no need of truth or that truth must depend upon aesthetics to become poetic at all, has no longer any meaning. For there truth itself is highest poetry and has only to appear to be utterly beautiful to the vision, the hearing, the sensibility of the soul. There dwells and from there springs the mystery of the inevitable word, the supreme immortal rhythm, the absolute significance and the absolute utterance."
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2
O Fire divine, make this great marvel pass,
That some pure image of thy shadowless will
May float within my song's enchanted glass!
Sweep over my breath of dream thy mystic mood,
O Dragon-bird whose golden harmonies fill
With rays of rapture all infinitude!...
Or else by unexplorable magic rouse
The distance of a superhuman drowse,
A paradisal vast of love unknown,
That even through a nakedness of night
My heart may feel the puissance of thy light,
The blinding lustre of a measureless sun!
"Very fine—language and rhythm remarkably harmonious, teres tot-usque 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."
1 "Smooth, complete and rounded." (K.D.S.)
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O Void where deathless power is merged in peace!
O myriad Passion lit to one self-fire!
O Breath like some vast rose that breaks through form!
O Hush of gold by whom all truth is heard!
Consume in me the blinded walls of mind:
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."
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 flickerless
A golden trance wide-winged on golden air.
"It comes from the higher mind except for the fourth and eighth lines which have illumination and are very fine."
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A rose of fire like a secret smile
Won from the heart of lost eternity
Broke suddenly through vesper's virgin veil.
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 not 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 the time-consciousness is left by 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."
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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, reveal thy 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 thy 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 intuitivity—and on a less minute, larger scale there is an equal revealing power and felicity in the boldness
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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 Arjava1 get 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 too they failed, now and again, to get the true point of felicity 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 feels at home in Harin Chattopadhyaya's poetry though I dare say that if I catechised them I might find the deepest felicities missed. All 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 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
1 J. A. Chadwick, who received from Sri Aurobindo the name "Arjavananda". (K.D.S.)
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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, a 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 minds 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 something 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
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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 as 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 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 may 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, —but 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."
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(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 at 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,
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A pinnacle-voice plunging to deeps below 9
As if the agelong barrier broke between 10
Our dubious day and some eternal light? 11
I 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 undying Mystery 17
Has burned across you like an infinite sun 18
Withering for me your body's puny veil!
I 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!
"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."
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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 of Higher Mind coming in to 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."
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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 i, 7, 8, 9, come from very high and express a vision the full significance of which can only be realised by spiritual experience. Line 1— Illumined Mind taken upwards by a wide intuitive inspiration. Lines 7,8—I am inclined to ascribe them at their source of vision to an 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
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.)
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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 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 of 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)
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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.
For, how shall earth be dark when human eyes
Mirror the love whose smile is paradise?—
A smile 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 fines 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:
"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
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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 Over-mind 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 lines the intuition descends towards the higher mental plane with á less revelatory power in it but more precise in its illumination. That is the difference between sheer vision and thought. But the poem 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 Tightness of individual words and phrases, the Tightness 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, bora 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 every-thingelseness 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,
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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 classification and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style—Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his '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.
"I 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:
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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:
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Si come quando Marsia traesti
Delia vagina delle membra sue.
These lines to Apollo may be tentatively rendered with a little freedom:
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 —
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!"
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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 1:
"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 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.
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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
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, illumined 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 intuitive—in all but the third just high enough to get the touch of the overmental intuition."
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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
Upborne by vast surrender to 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 the 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?
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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 touch I do not mean that it is superior in pure poetic excellence to others from lower planes—that Amal's lines outshine Shakespeare or Homer for instance. I simply mean that it has some vision, light, etc. from up there and the character of its expression and rhythm are from there. You do not appreciate probably because you catch only the surface mental meaning. The line—'Flickering no longer with the cry of clay'— is very fine from the technical point of view, the distribution of consonantal and vowel sounds being perfect. That, however, is possible on any level of inspiration. These are technical elements, the Over-mind touch does not consist in that but in the undertones or overtones of the rhythmic cry and a language which carries in it a great depth or height or width of spiritual vision, feeling or experience. But all that has to be felt, it is not analysable. If I say that the second line is a magnificent expression of an inner reality most intimate and powerful and the first line, with its conception of the fire once 'flickering' with the 'cry' of clay but now no longer, is admirably revelatory—you would probably reply that it does not convey anything of the kind to you. That is why I do not usually speak of these things in themselves or in their relation to poetry—only with Amal who is trying to get his inspiration into touch with these planes. Either one must have the experience—e.g., here one must have lived in or glimpsed the mystic mind, felt its fire, been aware of the distances that haunt it, heard the cry of clay mixing with it and the consequent unsteady flickering of its flames and the release into the straight upward burning and so known that this is not mere romantic rhetoric, not mere images or metaphors expressing something imaginative but unreal (that is how many would take it perhaps) but facts and realities of the self, actual and concrete, or else there must be a conspiracy between the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus which makes one feel, if not know, the suggestion of these things through the words and rhythm.
"As for technique, there is a technique of this higher poetry but it
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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 have 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 are quite imperative, it is all or nothing—or at least all or a fall."
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3
Our spirit is a paradise blown down,
A sun deflowered, a leprosy of light;
But all its crumbling sacrificial sparks
Drop from the inviolate ether to arouse
An earth-apocalypse slumbering unlit,
A brazier of giant mystery
Lost like a mouth of dream whose tongue lacks fire!
The shredded silver and the shrunken gold,
Caught by this dark divinity of clay,
Shall laugh and blossom brighter than the unmarred
Roses of heaven rooted in sapphire hush.
"Not overhead except in substance, but very fine poetry. The 'leprosy of light' is a rather violent expression perhaps, but still.... It is perhaps the rhythm of the lines that belongs to the mental rather than the overhead subtlety and largeness, though the rhythm is good being strong and effective. The ideas and language by themselves have the turn of the Illumined Mind, but the rhythmic breath and power are not of that kind. The images and language are very fine."
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All things are lost in Him, all things are found:
He rules an infinite hush that hears each sound.
But fragmentary quivers blossom there
To voice on mingling voice of shadowless air,
Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line
Where passion's mortal music grows divine—
For, in that spacious revel glimmers through
Each form one single trance of breakless blue.
"Higher Mind throughout, illumined. The first and third couplets exceedingly fine, perfect poetic expressions of what they want to say. —the other two are less inevitable, although the second lines in both are admirable. Lines 2, 5,6 are among the best you have written; they have a certain revelatory power."
Silent I roam by the tumultuous sea
That, unreminded of man's mortal noise,
My heart may feel the imperishable voice
Waken a solitary god in me.
Travails of time are sunk: the pure deeps grow,
By their miraculous infinite of sound,
Measure of some tranquillity profound
That never human grief can overthrow.
"It is quite up to the mark—very fine. Higher Mind, I think, with lines 6 and 7 raised up to what might be called (if we must find a name for these combinations) Higher Mind Intuition. There are various combinations possible, as in the process of sublimation each higher plane infuses itself into those below and then takes them up into itself."
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NIGHT-HILLS
Here on night-hills all passion-clamours cease:
And to the wonder-spacious lonely mind
The word of the incomprehensible wind
Bears but a perfume of eternal peace;
Until—on highest crags of heaven-surmise—
Evoked by a spirit moon from the heart's deep,
Plumbless inaudible waves of shining sleep
Drown the mortality of lifted eyes.
Lines 2, 3, 4—"It is from the Illumined Mind that they come with a touch of the mystic intuitive, but only a touch."
Lines 6, 7, 8—"These lines have a very high poetic and mystic value. They are a mixed result of Illumined Mind and occult vision with something else that is mystically indefinite."
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Rapture that cuts away time-transient shows
Like petals from the odour of a rose:
One breath of luminous all-absorbing hush—
So wide a love that nowhere need it rush:
Calm ether of an infinite embrace—
Beauty unblurred by limbs or longing face.
"Very beautiful. Higher and Illumined Minds rolled into each other with the Intuition to give an uplifting touch."
They give us life with some high burning breath,
Life which but draws a golden road to death.
In vain we lift warm hands that quiver and cry
Unto the blue salvation of the sky.
Above, transparencies divine are spread
Of fusing fires—gay purple, eager red;
But who there heeds our love? Thwarted, alone,
We struggle through an atmosphere of stone.
The heaven-coloured distances lie dumb—
But all our hush is sleep or clay grown numb:
A blinded beauty fills our heart, a sun
Lost in gigantic self-oblivion.
Those ever-shining quietudes of bliss
How shall we know—pale wanderers from kiss to kiss?
"Very fine. The markings in the poem are meant to indicate lines of a high and inevitable felicity—revelatory in their expression and significance. Intuition seems to be their source. The others are more mental, but fine in their kind."
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A kiss will break the quiet whole
Of your white soul;
Shape from the silver of that poise
A magic voice,
The lustre of a skyward call—
No flickering grace, but all
Your spirit's gathered virgin light
One death-oblivious height
Of shadowless body rapture-crowned—
A face of reverie caught beyond
Our time-throbs to strange heavens afar....
O build from hush of star on star
That shining statued secrecy
Of love's divinity!
"Very fine throughout—both the thought and expression very felicitous and intuitively right—exacacty expressive of the thing seen."
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He brought the calm of a gigantic sleep:
Earth's mind—a flicker gathering sudden gold—
Merged with unknowable vistas to come back
A fire whose tongue had tasted paradise.
A plumbless music rolled from his far mouth:
Waves of primeval secrecy broke white
Along the heart's shores, a rumour of deathless love
Afloat like a vast moon upon the deep.
"A very fine poem, lines I, 4 are from the Illumined Higher Mind. The second comes very splendidly from the Illumined Mind, the third is Higher Mind at a high level. The fifth comes from the Higher Mind—the sixth, seventh and eighth from the Illumined Mind touched with something from the Overmind Intuition, though the touch is more evident in 6 and 8."
A love has sealed us one with paradise—
A kiss of crescent moon upon earth's soul
By virgin raptures dreaming in the blue
That even the pit of hell is a buried sky.
No warrior gold can pierce the veil of time;
For God's own glory here has sunk asleep,
And how shall that abyss of majesty
Brook from its summit-self a lash of light?
Therefore this love's seducing glimmer came,
This haloed serpent of the Infinite,
A white bliss curving through our blinded deeps
To give the darkness' mouth a shadowless smile.
"A very fine poem throughout. The 2nd and 3rd lines are from the Illumined Mind. The first from the Higher Mind—the fourth is in substance from the Illumined Mind but there is a mental rhythm— very good and expressive rhythm, no doubt. The rest is the Higher Mind with touch of Illumination and Intuition—the last three lines are the Illumined Mind with Overmind Intuition touch, extremely fine."
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"If I have given high praise to a passage, it does not follow that it is from the Overmind; the poetic (aesthetic) value or perfection of a line, passage or poem does not depend on the plane from which it comes, but on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical, but there are no greater poets in any literature. No doubt, if we can get a continuous inspiration from the Overmind, that would mean a greater, sustained height of perfection and spiritual quality in poetry than has yet been achieved; but we are discussing here short passages and lines."
"The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons; it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose. It can take up and uplift any or every style or at least put some stamp of itself upon it. More or less all that we have called Overhead poetry has something of this character whether it be from the Overmind or simply intuitive, illumined or strong with the strength of the higher revealing Thought; even when it is not
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intrinsically Overhead poetry, still some touch can come in. Even Overhead poetry itself does not always deal in what is new or striking or strange; it can take up the obvious, the common, the bare and even the bald, the old, even that which without it would seem stale and hackneyed and raise it to greatness. Take the lines:
I spoke as one who ne'er would speak again
And as a dying man to dying men.
The writer is not a poet, not even a conspicuously talented versifier. The statement of the thought is bare and direct and the rhetorical device used is of the simplest, but the overhead touch somehow got in through a passionate emotion and sincerity and is unmistakable."1
"I do not know that it is possible for me to say why I regard one line or passage as having the overhead touch or the overhead note while another misses it. When I said that in the lines about the dying man the touch came in through some intense passion and sincerity in the writer, I was simply mentioning the psychological door through which the thing came. I did not mean to suggest that such passion and sincerity could of itself bring in the touch or that they constituted the overhead note in the lines. I am afraid I have to say what Arnold said about the grand style; it has to be felt and cannot be explained or accounted for. One has an intuitive feeling, a recognition of something familiar to one's experience or one's deeper perception in the substance and the rhythm or in one or the other which rings out and cannot be gainsaid. One might put forward a theory or a description of what the overhead character of the line consists in, but it is doubtful whether any such mentally constructed definition could be always applicable. You speak, for instance, of the
1 Quoting from memory, Sri Aurobindo has modified Richard Baxter's first line which in the original was:
I preached as never sure to preach again!
A wider poignancy, an elemental cry, has come in to replace the somewhat restricted though still keen feeling in a narrower context that is found in Baxter.(K.D.S.)
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sense of the Infinite and the One which is pervasive in the Overhead planes; that need not be explicitly there in the overhead poetic expression or in the substance of any given line: it can be expressed indeed by overhead poetry as no other can express it; but this poetry can deal with quite other things. I would certainly say that Shakespeare's lines,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
have the overhead touch in the substance, the rhythm and the feeling, but Shakespeare is not giving us here the sense of the One and the Infinite. He is, as in the other lines of his which have this note, dealing as he always does with life, with vital emotions and reactions or the thoughts that spring out in the life-mind under the pressure of life. It is not any strict adhesion to a transcendental view of things that constitutes this kind of poetry, but something behind not belonging to the mind or the vital and physical consciousness and with that a certain quality or power in the language and the rhythm which helps to bring out that deeper something. If I had to select the line in European poetry which most suggests an almost direct descent from the overmind consciousness there might come first Virgil's line about 'the touch of tears in mortal things':
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Another might be Shakespeare's
In the dark backward and abysm of Time
or again Milton's
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity.
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We might also add Wordsworth's line,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.
There are others less ideative and more emotional or simply descriptive which might be added, such as Marlowe's
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
If we could extract and describe the quality and the subtle something that mark the language and rhythm and feeling of these lines and underlie their substance we might attain hazardously to some mental understanding of the nature of overhead poetry....
"The essential character is perhaps that there is something behind of which I have already spoken and which comes not primarily from the mind or the vital emotion or the physical seeing but from the cosmic self and its consciousness standing behind them all and things then tend to be seen not as the mind or heart or body sees them but as this greater consciousness feels or sees or answers to them. In the direct overmind transmission this something behind is usually forced to the front by a combination of words which carries the suggestion of a deeper meaning or by the force of an image or, most of all, by an intonation and a rhythm which carry up the depths in their wide wash or long march or mounting surge. Sometimes it is left lurking behind and only suggested so that a subtle feeling of what is not actually expressed is needed if the reader is not to miss it. This is oftenest the case when there is just a touch or note pressed upon something that would be otherwise only of a mental, vital or physical poetic value and nothing of the body of the overhead power shows through the veil, but at most a tremor and vibration, a gleam or a glimpse. In the lines I have chosen there is always an unusual quality in the rhythm, as prominently in Virgil's line, often in the very building and constantly in the intonation and the asssociation of the sounds which meet in the line and find themselves linked together by a sort of inevitable felicity. There is also an inspired selection or an
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unusual bringing together of words which has the power to force a deeper sense on the mind as in Virgil's
Sunt lacrimae rerum.
One can note that this line if translated straight into English would sound awkward and clumsy as would many of the finest lines in Rig Veda; that is precisely because they are new and felicitous turns in the original language, discoveries of an unexpected and absolute phrase; they defy translation.1 If you note the combination of words and sounds in Shakespeare's line,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
so arranged as to force on the mind and still more on the subtle nerves and sense the utter absoluteness of the difficulty and pain of living for the soul that has awakened to the misery of the world, you can see how this technique works. Here and elsewhere the very body and soul of the thing seen or felt come out into the open. The same dominant characteristic can be found in other lines which I have not cited, — in Leopardi's
L'insano indegno mistero delle cose
(The insane and ignoble mystery of things)2
1Virgil's opening phrase, literally rendered, would be: "There are tears of things" or "Tears are of things".
C. Day Lewis translates the whole line: Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience. A somewhat freer version which, according to Sri Aurobindo, is "very fine" yet "has a density of colour which is absent from the bare economy and direct force Virgil manages to combine with his subtle and unusual turn of phrase" is:
Haunted by tears is the world and our hearts by the touch of things mortal. (K.D.S)
2Leopardi's original has one different word and is spread over parts of
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or in Wordsworth's
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
Milton's line lives by its choice of the word "wander" to collocate with "through eternity"; if he had chosen any other word, it would no longer have been an overhead line even if the surface sense had been exactly the same."
____________
two lines:
l'acerbo, indegno
Mistero delle cose...
"Acerbo" may be rendered "harsh" or "bitter." As the Overmind quality depends on fine shades of both sound and significance, we may wonder whether the original quite comes up to Sri Aurobindo's slight misquotation.
(K.D.S.)
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4
Out of the unknown, like meteor-rain
Fell glimmering on my dark despair
The syllables of a prophetic tongue:
"O heart disconsolate, beauty-wrung,
Wanderer unsated, not in vain
A voice of unattainable melody
Winging in heavenly air,
Came Brindavan's immortal memory
And turned thy human happiness
Into dim longing pain.
Thy life's search is not meaningless
Though Jumuna's banks are void and bare;
Now too a spirit-flute
Conveys again so holy a calm abroad
That even on misery's lips fallen mute
In uncompanioned throes
Pale silence blossoms like a rose
Deep-rooted in the soul's eternity.
Rest not till thou find sanctuary
Where Brindavan has gone behind its God.
For there the veil shall draw aside,
Which hangs between thy in-turned gaze
And Him of the irradiant face:
His musical tranquillity
Shall once more in thy ear abide
And all the heart-beats of thy life's increase Count but the starlike moments of His peace."
"Poetry, or at any rate a truly poetic poetry, comes always from some
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subtle plane through the creative vital and uses the outer mind and other external instruments for transmission only. There are three elements in the production of poetry; there is the original source of inspiration, there is the vital force of creative beauty which contributes its own substance and impetus and often determines the form, except when that also comes ready made from the original sources; there is finally the transmitting outer consciousness of the poet. The most genuine and perfect poetry is written when the original source is able to throw its inspiration pure and undiminished into the vital and there takes its true native form and power of speech exactly reproducing the inspiration, while the outer consciousness is entirely passive and transmits without alteration what it receives from the godheads of the inner or the superior spaces. When the vital mind and emotion are too active and give too much of their own initiation or a translation into more or less turbid vital stuff, the poetry remains powerful but is inferior in quality and less authentic. Finally, if the outer consciousness is too lethargic and blocks the transmission or too active and makes its own version, then you have the poetry that fails or is at best a creditable mental manufacture. It is the interference of these two parts either by obstruction or by too great an activity of their own or by both together that causes the difficulty and labour of writing. There would be no difficulty if the inspiration came through without obstruction or interference in a pure transcript—that is what happens in a poet's highest or freest moments when he writes not at all out of his own external human mind but by inspiration, as the mouthpiece of the Gods.
"The originating source may be anywhere; the poetry may arise or descend from the subtle physical plane, from the higher or lower vital itself, from the dynamic or creative intelligence, from the plane of dynamic vision, from the psychic, from the illumined mind or Intuition,—even, though this is the rarest, from the Overmind wide-nesses. To get the Overmind inspiration is so rare that there are only a few lines or short passages in all poetic literature that give at least some appearance or reflection of it. When the source of inspiration is in the heart or the psychic there is more easily a good will in the vital channel, the flow is spontaneous; the inspiration takes at once
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its true form and speech and is transmitted without any interference or only a minimum of interference by the brain-mind, that great spoiler of the higher or deeper splendours. It is the character of the lyrical inspiration to flow in a jet out of the being—whether it comes from the vital or the psychic, it is usually spontaneous, for these are the two most powerfully impelling and compelling parts of the nature. When on the contrary the source of inspiration is in the creative poetic intelligence or even the higher mind or the illumined mind, the poetry which comes from this quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect, our habitual thought-production engine. This intellect is an absurdly overactive part of the nature; it always thinks that nothing can be well done unless it puts its finger into the pie and therefore it instinctively interferes with the inspiration, blocks half or more than half of it and labours to substitute its own inferior and toilsome productions for the true speech and rhythm that ought to have come. The poet labours in anguish to get the one true word, the authentic rhythm, the real divine substance of what he has to say, while all the time it is waiting complete and ready behind; but it is denied free transmission by some part of the transmitting agency which prefers to translate and is not willing merely to receive and transcribe. When one gets something through from the illumined mind, then there is likely to come to birth work that is really fine and great. When there comes with labour or without it something reasonably like what the poetic intelligence wanted to say then there is something fine or adequate, though it may not be great unless there is an intervention from the higher levels. But when the outer brain is at work trying to fashion out of itself or to give its own version of what the higher sources are trying to pour down, then there results a manufacture or something quite inadequate or faulty or, at the best, 'good on the whole', but not the thing that ought to have come."
Touching on the direct personal question, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Your source is the creative (poetic) intelligence and, at your best, the illumined mind." His verdict on the first version of the poem was: "Good on the whole." The second version—the present one— had his approval. He marked off the last couplet and three other lines—
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Deep-rooted in the soul's eternity...
Where Brindavan has gone behind its God—
as having come "through from the illumined mind". He added:
"The lines,
Came Brindavan's immortal memory,
though not on the same level as the best in the poem, are yet not far below them; they are a fine expression of a psychic and mystic reality."
(What is the difference between the plane of "dynamic or creative intelligence" and that of "dynamic vision"?)
"On one the creation is by thought, by the idea-force and images constructed by the idea, mind-images; on the other one creates by sight, by direct vision either of the thing in itself or by some living significant symbol or expressive body of it. This dynamic sight is not the vision that comes by an intense reconstruction of physical seeing or through vital experience (e.g. Shakespeare's), it is a kind of occult sight which sees the things behind the veil, the forms that are more intimate and expressive than any outward appearance. It is a very vivid sight and the expression that comes with it is also extremely vivid and living but with a sort of inner super-life. To be able to write at will from this plane is sufficiently rare,—though a poet habitually writing from some other level may stumble into it from time to time."
"The plane of dynamic vision is a part of the inner Mind and perhaps should be called a province rather than a plane. There are many kinds of vision in the inner Mind and not dynamic vision only. So, to fix invariable characteristics for the poetry of the inner Mind
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is not easy or even possible. It is a thing to be felt rather than mentally definable."
(I don't know what to do with this mind of mine. As a poetic instrument it is extremely variable. Why can't it always get successfully inspired?)
"Perhaps one reason why your mind is so variable is because it has learned too much and has too many influences stamped upon it; it does not allow the real poet in you who is a little at the back to be himself—it wants to supply him with a form instead of allowing him to breathe into the instrument his own notes. It is, besides, too ingenious. What you have to learn is the art of allowing things to come through and recognising among them the one right thing—which is very much what you have to do in Yoga also. It is really this recognition that is the one important need—once you have that, things become much easier."
(I want to produce something Upanishadic. But I get no glimmering at all of the sovereignly transcendent. The poem below almost tells me what I should do to solve my difficulty; but the manner in which it tells seems to drive home the fact of my being so far from what I want —the sheer stupendous Mantra. "The way is long, the wind is cold", though luckily it is not true that "the minstrel is infirm and old".)
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"Torment not with intangible fulgences!
O master, to my hungry life impart
The nectarous truth of yon Sky-Spirit unheard
Whose sole revealing word
Is a touch of cold far flame upon my heart!
Of what avail mute mystic suns of snow?"
"Banish from your dream-night
The burning blindness of earth-hued desire,
That scorching shadow masked as living light!
Then only can your misery's
Heart-hunger know
The multi-splendoured sweetness of truth-glow,
The embracing fire
Of His inscrutable omnipotent peace!"
"I fear it is only eloquence—a long way from the Mantra. From the point of view of a poetic eloquence there are some forceful lines and the rest is well done, but— There is too much play of the mind, not the hushed intense receptivity of the seer which is necessary for the Mantra."
(Does "poetic eloquence" belong only to the mental plane which you have called "the poetic intelligence" and more generally "the creative intelligence"? Can it be part also of "the Higher Mind" or "the Higher Thought" which is an "overhead" plane ?)
"It belongs to the poetic intelligence, but as in most of Milton it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and language."
"There are besides in mental poetry derivations or substitutes for all [overhead] styles. Milton's 'grand style' is such a substitute for the manner of the Higher Thought. Take it anywhere at its ordinary level or in its elevation, there is always or almost always that echo there:
Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree,
or
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides
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And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old....
Milton's lines might at first sight be taken because of a certain depth of emotion in their large lingering rhythm as having the overhead complexion, but this rhythm loses something of its sovereign right because there are no depths of sense behind... Milton's architecture of thought and verse is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers; the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence,—for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he works."
"Naturally, something from the higher planes can come into the poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it. That happens in such lines as [Milton's]
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity."
"The Mantra (not necessarily in the Upanishads alone)...is what comes as here from the Overmind inspiration."—"One has the sense here of a rhythm which does not begin or end with the line, but has for ever been sounding in the eternal planes and began even in Time ages ago and which returns into the infinite to go sounding on for ages after. In fact, the word-rhythm is only part of what we hear; it is a support for the rhythm we listen to behind in 'the Ear of the ear', śrotrasya śrotram. To a certain extent, that is what all great poetry at its highest tries to have, but it is only the Overmind rhythm to which it is altogether native and in which it is not only behind the word-rhythm but gets into the word-movement itself and finds a fully supporting body there."
(On the expression "lofty region" in a poem of mine, with variations like "vasty" and "myriad" suggested for the adjective, you passed the verdict: "pseudo-Miltonic." What exactly did you mean?)
"By pseudo-Miltonic I mean a certain kind of traditional poetic eloquence which finds its roots in Milton but even when well done lacks in originality and can easily be vapid and sometimes hollow....
An expression like lofty region, vasty region, myriad region even expresses nothing but a bare intellectual fact—with no more vision in it than would convey mere wideness without any significance in it."
(With one line picked out almost wholly from my poem Yoga, I have started another poem. The closing image is also somewhat similar to the one in the earlier work. Still far from the Upanishadic goal, I am afraid, but how does it strike you?)
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A scorching shadow masked as living light,
Earth's smile of painted passion withers now!
But is there hollow on black ravenous hollow
How pass then reveries of angelic wings
Revealing the blind heart of all desire?
Surely some haloed beauty hides within
The mournful spaces of unlustred limbs
To call with secret eyes a perfect Sun
Whose glory yearns across the drouth of hell!
Behind the false glow dreams the epiphany—
But like a face of night implacable
Save to the soul's virginity, the unknown
White fire whose arms enclasp infinitude....
"Exceedingly fine. I have marked the best lines. It is a very powerful poetic expression of the idea. It is the poetic intelligence, of course, but the last lines 'the unknown White fire' etc. reach overhead."
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Gloam-innnites of trance!—but like a wound
Of vacancy unto my mortal heart
Came that aloof immeasurable peace.
The ear—a cavern lonely, echoless—
Waited in fear; then suddenly the spell
Of unknown firmaments broke to a close
Chirrup of some late passing bird, which drew
All the void dark and dreadful mystery
Into the music of one passionate kiss
Upon my blinded dream. I woke to feel
A human face yearning out of the vast.
"It is very fine. The first three lines are the Higher Mind rising into the Illumined and are very powerful. The rest is of the Higher Mind, except it may be the two before the last which are somewhat mixed with the poetic intelligence."
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Nor first nor last, but in a timeless gyre
The globes of Beauty burn—a hush made fire:
Their colours self-secluded one by one,
Yet sisters in a joyful union—
Rhythms of quiet, thrill on gemlike thrill
Necklaced around a Throat invisible...
When wearily I string word after word,
I call your flame, O Ecstasies unheard,
To guide my frailty with some touch of you!
Grant me a worship-glow that reaches, through
My dreamful silence ere the musics throng,
Your deathless silence at each close of song.
"Very fine. It is a vision of things from the Illumined Mind with the atmosphere of light and colours that reigns there."
A small bird crimson-hued
Among great realms of green
Fed on their multitudinous fruit—
But in his dark eye flamed more keen
A hunger as from joy to joy
He moved the poignance of his beak,
And ever in his heart he wailed,
"Where hangs the marvellous fruit I seek?"
Then suddenly above his head
A searching gaze of grief he turned:
Lo, there upon the topmost bough
A pride of golden plumage burned!
Lost in a dream no hunger broke,
This calm bird—aureoled, immense—
Sat motionless: all fruit he found
Within his own magnificence.
"It is very felicitous in expression, and taking. The fourth stanza is from the Intuitive, the rest not from the Higher Mind—for there a high-uplifted thought is the characteristic—but more probably from some realm of the inner Mind where thought and vision are involved in each other—that kind of fusion gives the easy felicity that is found here. All the same there is a touch of the Higher Mind perhaps in the 2nd lines of the second and the last stanza."
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Dream not with gaze hung low
By love
That earthward calls—but know
The silver spaces move
Within your eyes when sleep
Brings gloom:
Then will your hush grow deep
As heaven's lofty room
And in this chamber strange
With blue
A love unmarred by change
Shall ever tryst with you.
So, build Her each calm night
A swoon
That bears on outer sight
The padlock of the moon.
"The inspiration is, I think, from the same place. An easy and luminous simplicity that is at the same time very felicitous."
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"No man to immortal beauty woke
But by My music of stroke on stroke
Should I disdain to hurt your deep
Rigidities of clay-bound sleep,
How would you bear a thrilled impress
Of My unshadowed loveliness?
Pain like a chisel I've brought to trace
The death of pain upon your face:
Each curve and line new-wrought shall be
A tangible God-ecstasy.
If earth's hard gloom I never broke
With the keen fire of shaping stroke,
Creation would forfeit its aim—
To house the paradisal flame
In no vague momentary mood
But kindle with infinitude
Rapture as of eternal stone!
Must not My love be hammer-willed
Its crowning masterpiece to build
From the dense quarry of body and bone?"
"It is a very fine poem, perfect in rhythm and expression. The inspiration is from an inner centre."
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Where lie the past noon-lilies
And vesper-violets gone?
Into what strange invisible deep
Fall out of time the roses of each dawn?
They draw for us a dream-way
To ecstasies unhoured,
Where all earth's form-hues flicker and drop,
By some great wind of mystery overpowered.
"The simple revealing directness and beauty evoke without effort a pure sense of mystic truth. The opening stanza and continuation are exceedingly fine, full of magic suggestion. In the last two fines there is a mixture of the intuitive and the illumined, the rest is pure intuitive—but occult because it is from a province of the occult that the intuition of the substance comes. The last two lines have, I think, an equal poetic excellence with the rest, but it is not the same."
(How do you find this poem ? Is it very surrealistic ?)
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(In the Rigveda, Agni, called "Jatavedas" or "Knower of births", is the divine Fire visioned in various occult forms as the secret urge of our evolution towards the perfect splendour that is the Spirit.)
O smile of heaven locked in a seed of light—
O music burning through the heart's dumb rock—
O beast of beauty with the golden beard—
O lust-consumer in the virgin's bed—
Come with thy myriad eyes that face all truth,
Thy myriad arms equal to each desire!
Shatter or save, but fill this gap of gloom:
Rise from below and call thy far wealth down—
A straining supplicant of naked silver,
A jar of dream, a crystal emptiness
Draining through a mighty mouth above the mind
Some ageless alchemy of liquid sun.
Or bind us like a python-sleep of snow
Whose glory grips the flesh and leaves it numb
For soul to gather its forgotten fire,
A purple power no eagle's wing-waft knew,
A soar that makes time-towers a lonely fret
And all a futile victory the stars!
Work thy strange will, but load our gaze no more
With unexplorable freedoms of black air,
An infinite rapture veiled by infinite pain....
Lightning of Truth, God's lava passion—come!
"Very fine poetry throughout, not exactly 'surrealistic', at least not in the current sense, but occult in its vision and sequences. I have marked the most powerful lines."
Originally the last line stood:
Lightning of Truth, God's lava—come, O come!
Sri Aurobindo criticised its ending as too romantic in turn for the kind of mystic inspiration expressed. Then the present form of the line, with its second part strengthened in significance and the conclusion made terse in its emotion, was found.
(Into what category of blank verse does this poem fall ? Has it any epic quality ? If not, how do you differentiate between the epic and the other kinds of poetic power ? What would you say of the styles of Victor Hugo, Marlowe, Dante ? I should think epic poetry has a more natural
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turn of imagination than the non-epic: it is powerfully wide or deep or high without being outstandingly bold, it also displays less colour.)
" 'Agni Jatavedas' is a sort of violent sublime—ultra-Aeschylean perhaps. There are sometimes epic or almost epic lines, but the whole or most of it has not the epic ring. There is one epic line—
An infinite rapture veiled by infinite pain.
Perhaps the first three lines are near the epic—there may be one or two others I don't know how I differentiate. Victor Hugo in the 'Legende des Siècles' tries to be epic and often succeeds, perhaps even on the whole: Marlowe is sometimes great or sublime, but I would not call him epic. There is a greatness or sublimity that is epic, there is another that is not epic, but more of a romantic type. Shakespeare's line—
In cradle of the rude imperious surge—
is as sublime as anything in Homer or Milton, but it does not seem to me to have the epic ring, while a very simple line can have it,
Bēde kat' oulumpoio karēnōn chōömenos kēr
(He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart).1
Or Virgil's
Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis,2
or Milton's
Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable.
What is there in these lines that is not in Shakespeare's and makes them epic (Shakespeare's of course has something else as valuable)? For the moment at least, I can't tell you, but it is there. A tone of the inner spirit perhaps, expressing itself in the rhythm and the turn of the language. Dante has the epic spirit and tone, what he lacks is the epic élan and swiftness. The distinction you draw applies, no doubt, but I do not know whether it is the essence of the thing or only one result of a certain austerity in the epic Muse. I do not know whether one cannot be coloured provided one keeps that austerity which, be it understood, is not incompatible with a certain fineness and sweetness."
It may be of interest to have from the disciple-correspondent's own work a short complete passage—a whole sonnet—declared by Sri Aurobindo, in a characteristically penetrative comment, to have what he has called in the above letter the epic spirit, tone and élan:
1Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo has translated the line in an hexameter: Down from the peaks of Olympus he came wrath vexing his heart-strings.
2This may be hexametrically rendered:
Learn from me, youth, what is courage and what true labour, Fortune from others.(K.D.S.)
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Wanderer of hell's chimerical abyss,
Dreaming for ever of star-fragrance blown
From the efflorescent heart of the Unknown!
They knew thee not who scorned thy madnesses,
Nor plumbed the beauty of that terrible mood
Which hailed as a supreme apocalypse
The all-desiring and all-quenching lips
Of death's unfathomable solitude!
Thou wert Heaven's most God-haunted enemy.
The universe to thee was one vast tomb,
But of so tense, ineffable a gloom
That thou stoodst drunk with measureless mystery,
Ecstatic in the very shadow of doom
As though an infinite sun had blinded thee!
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"A really fine poem. I think 'hell' is better than 'sin' [in line I]. As there is a phrase 'goody-goody' expressing a morbid sentimentality of virtue, so there could be a phrase 'baddy-baddy' which could express a morbid sentimentality of vice-and 'sin' here would be dangerously near to that. Still it can stand, if you prefer it-though it does not give the full epic note which is sustained throughout the rest of the poem."
The poet had roughly Baudelaire in mind as his subject: hence the word "sin". Sri Aurobindo wrote of Baudelaire, "He was a good poet with a perverted imagination", but considered him quite inadequate for the role depicted in the poem. According to Sri Aurobindo, the figure of Archangel Satan would best give the type.
In connection with epic and non-epic blank verse, we may note that a blank verse other than epic but also different from the non-epic of Agni Jatavedas has been distinguished by Sri Aurobindo in commenting on the poet' s First Sight of Girnar in Part r: "No, it is not the epic kind-the rhythm is rather large, calm and reflective than epic."
Nirodbaran wrote to Sri Aurobindo: "You have stated to Nishi-kanta about his Bengali translation of Amal's Agni Jatavedas: 'It is a splendid translation rendering the full poetic force and colour and substance of the original which you have followed with a remarkable exactitude.' But Nishikanta, I understand, writes from the subtle vital plane. If a poem is from overhead, would not its spiritual value be lost in a translation from a different plane?"
Sri Aurobindo replied:
"If you mean the spiritual substance, I suppose it would be lost. I was looking at the poetic beauty of Nishikanta's rendering which is
on a par with the original. As for the subtle vital sublimated it enters largely into Amal's poem, even if it is a sort of supervital."
(This poem seems to have an occult air about it on the whole. But perhaps it is more surrealistic ? What would you say of its quality and value ?)
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There is no going to the Gold
Save on four feet
Of the Green Tiger in whose heart's hold
Is the ineffable heat.
Raw with a burning body
Ruled by no thought—
Hero of the huge head roaring
Ever to be caught!
Backward and forward he struggles,
Till Sun and Moon tame
By cutting his neck asunder:
Then the heart's flame
Is free and the blind gap brings
A new life's beat—
Red Dragon with eagle-wings
Yet tiger-feet!
Time's blood is sap between
God's flower, God's root—
Infinity waits but to crown
This Super-brute.
"Very powerful and original poem. There may be some doubt as to whether the images have coalesced into a perfect whole. But it may be that if they did, the startling originality of the combination might lose something of its vehement force, and in that case it may be allowed to stand as it is. At any rate it is an extremely original and powerful achievement."
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In the roofless chamber walled
By the ivory mind;
An orb entranced glows
Where earth-storm never blows—
But the two wide eyes are blind
To its virgin soar behind
Their ruby and emerald.
The one pure bird finds rest
In the crescent moon of a nest
Which infinite boughs upbear....
Flung out on phantom air
In a colour-to-colour race
Yet never ending their quest,
The two birds dream they fly
Though fixed in the narrow sky
Of a futile human face.
"It sounds very surrealistic. Images and poetry very beautiful, but significance and connections are cryptic. Very attractive, though."
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(Suggested by a refrain from Morris)
The hallowing moon-white
Obscurity of night—
Aroma of a love-hush blown
From the inviolate unknown—
And then once more time's cleaving cry...
But in wide wonder beyond death
A trance of beauty grew life-breath
Behind a shield of memory,
Limned with one red rose strewn
Across a perfect moon.
Sri Aurobindo picked out in particular the first two and the last three lines and characterised them as having "a delicate, richly-subdued colour of mystic light".
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Dark quietudes in a quiet gleam,
The branches woke with not a sough
The mere which made them water-souled,
Rapt from the rush of severing days.
One leaf forsook its hanging bough—
Fell through that agelessness of dream.
A wrinkle crept on the water's face,
And all light suddenly grew old.
"Very subtle and suggestive."
A series of poems were written in quick succession during three months in 1948, about which Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter:
"Your new poems are very remarkable and original in their power of thought and language and image. But precisely for that reason I have to study and consider carefully each individual poem separately before I can comment on them either generally or in detail. That will be possible only after some time, perhaps a considerable time. I am afraid you will have to possess your soul in patience till things are quieter and time less crowded. The only thing I can find meanwhile to send you is the note I put down in passing after reading a few of these poems. 'Some of the poems such as Soul of Song have a remarkable
perfection and this is often accompanied with a great felicity and power of revelatory image as in Cosmic Rhythms. In another poem, Unbirthed, the images grow more audacious and tense and might seem to some to be almost violent in their push but they usually justify themselves by their originality and success.' ''
I have been quiet a long while
To fill my singing smile
With a magic beyond the lips of man
And very quiet will I be
After the burst of minstrelsy
To find at the close
The light with which my tune began.
Glowing behind
The singer's mind,
A mystery journeys forth to meet
Across the rapture of rhyming feet
Its own unplumbed repose.
Come then, O listeners, with a tranquil mood
To feel far more than the loud heart knows;
Or else the King who moves through the common word
Shall never be heard
And keep unseen the strange infinitude
He bears above our mortal woes,
The purple of his dream divine.
Look deep for his true royalty's sign:
Haloed with hush he enters, coronaed with calm he goes!
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Now cosmic rhythms are a laughter in my pulse,
For the heart stands back immense and knows no aim,
Cool core of a body of tortuous paths to power.
My blood is the singing attar of that Rose
Rooted in rest beyond all universe.
Seraphs are crossing my brain that is wonder-wide,
Smiling to see even here an Eye like the sun,
And, where they halt, my love's touch breaks out wings.
All is perfection, thought and word and tune,
Because the Ineffable shines through each interspace.
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A grip is broken loose
Within my chest—
Titan steel jointures part
Their deep-grey rest
In some blind cosmic plan
Solidding night
To crypt the fire that is man,
To dungeon the height
His dreamful mind remembers....
With a shining start,
Suddenly rapture-russet,
A hammer is the heart!
Golden beat upon beat
Wounds the black room
Like a burst of rhythmic suns
Through vaulted gloom.
Ruined is the house of birth,
Time's steel is scrap,
And where the Shadow brooded
Is a glowing gap.
Eagles of truth sweep down
With their prophecies,
Doves of divine desire
Wing up white cries.
An odour of mystery blows
Purpling the air—
Out of wide nothingness
To wide nowhere.
And through the music and colour
Looks forth a Vast,
In its own self rejoicing,
The Calm that is first and last.
Infinity is a love
That never runs,
Present in every place
With the Silver Ones!
And all that is great or little
Is a single light
Myriadly crystalling,
Then sinking from sight.
Dawning, Moontide, Even
Kiss and embrace,
Weaving to threefold beauty
A spirit space.
Ecstasies curve like clouds
And their smiles are seven
For the house built without walls
From blueprint of heaven.
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White horse, white horse,
Deathlessly wake....
Out of the cavern of our sleep
Like laughter break
Into the moon's pure flush
And the stars' pale sheen!
How can thy magic colour mate
With grey or green,
The grey of drowsing soil
And the green of wood-gloom?
Thy feet have wings: for thee was built
Heaven's wide room.
Soar through the silver deeps
On a passion of prayer
Until the lost dawn echoes thy love
From its gold lair!
"Very good—a beautiful poem. Intuitive—intensely so."
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A godless temple is the dome of space:
Reveal the sun of thy love-splendoured face,
O lustrous flowering of invisible peace, 3
O glory breaking into curves of clay 4
From mute intangible dream-distances, 5
That like a wondrous yet familiar light
Eternity may mingle with our day!
Leave thou no quiver of this time-born heart
A poor and visionless wanderer apart:
Make even my darkness a divine repose 10
One with thy nameless root, O mystic rose— 11
The slumbering seasons of my mortal sight 12
A portion of the unknowable vast behind 13
Thy gold apocalypse of shadowless mind! 14
"That is extraordinarily fine throughout. But it is too fine for any need of remarks. Lines 3,4,5, also 10,11,12,13,14, Illumined Mind with Overmind Intuition touch—the rest Higher Mind suffused with Illumined Mind."
(The Muse is again away and I am feeling impatient. Can't you give me some clue about the direction of consciousness by which I may draw her back to me or reach out to her ? But, of course, I want the highest and I want a thorough perfection. Perhaps I am too careful and self-
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critical ? But that is my nature as an artist. Has it got something to do with the Muse's flight from me ? In any case, the experience of un-creativeness, the loss of the freedom of flying on the wings of inspiration, the sense of the poetic part of me caught in the mere mind and rendered vague and ineffective—all this is most unpleasant. Sometimes I fear the present lack of fluency may become a permanent defect. What method would you advise to counteract it ? Quieting the mind ? What do you do to get inspiration ?)
"Poetry seems to have intervals in its visits to you very often. I rather think the malady is fairly common. Dilip and Nishikanta who can write whenever they feel inclined are rare birds. I don't know about 'the direction of consciousness'. My own method is not to quiet the mind, for it is eternally quiet, but to turn upward and inward. You, I suppose, would have to quiet it first, which is not always easy. Have you tried it?
"It is precisely the people who are careful, self-critical, anxious for perfection who have interrupted visits from the Muse. Those who don't mind what they write, trusting to their genius, vigour, fluency to carry it off, are usually the abundant writers. There are exceptions, of course. 'The poetic part caught in the mere mind' is an admirable explanation of the phenomenon of interruption—it was the same with myself in the old days. Fluent poets are those who either do not mind if they do not always write their very best or whose minds are sufficiently poetic to make even their 'not best' verse pass muster well. Sometimes you write things that are good enough, but not your best—but both your insistence and mine—for I think it essential for you to write your best always, at least your 'level best' —may have curbed your fluency a good deal.
"The diminution of your prose was compensated by the much higher and maturer quality to which it attained afterwards. It would be so, I suppose, with the poetry and a new level of consciousness once attained there might well be a new fluency. So there is not much justification for the fear."
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"What does your correspondent mean by 'philosophy' in a poem? Of course if one sets out to write a metaphysical argument in verse like the Greek Empedocles or the Roman Lucretius it is a risky business and is likely to land you into prosaic poetry which is a less pardonable mixture than poetic prose. Even when philosophising in a less perilous way, one has to be careful not to be flat or heavy. It is obviously easier to be poetic when singing about a skylark than when one tries to weave a robe of verse to clothe the attributes of the Brahman. But that does not mean that there is to be no thought or no spiritual thought or no expression of truth in poetry; there is no great poet who has not tried to philosophise. Shelley wrote about the skylark, but he also wrote about the Brahman.
Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity
is as good poetry as
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
There are flights of unsurpassable poetry in the Gita and the Upanishads. These rigid dicta are always excessive and there is no reason why a poet should allow the expression of his personality or the spirit within him or his whole poetic mind to be clipped, cabinned or stifled by any theories or 'thou shalt not' of this character."
"The theory which discourages the poet from thinking or at least from thinking for the sake of the thought proceeds from an extreme romanticist temper; it reaches its acme on one side in the question of the surrealist, 'Why do you want poetry to mean anything?' and on the other in Housman's exaltation of pure poetry which he describes paradoxically as a sort of sublime nonsense which does not appeal at all to the mental intelligence but knocks at the solar plexus and awakes a vital and physical rather than intellectual sensation and response. It is of course not that really but a vividness of imagination and feeling which disregards the mind's positive view of things and its logical sequences; the centre or centres it knocks at are not
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the brain-mind, not even the poetic intelligence but the subtle physical, the nervous, the vital or the psychic centre. The poem he quotes from Blake is certainly not nonsense, but it has no positive and exact meaning for the intellect or the surface mind; it expresses certain things that are true and real, not nonsense but a deeper sense which we feel powerfully with a great stirring of some inner emotion, but any attempt at exact intellectual statement of them sterilises their sense and spoils their appeal. This is not the method of the highest spiritual poetry. Its expression aims at a certain force, directness and spiritual clarity and reality. When it is not understood, it is because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the ordinary mind or belong to an untrodden domain or domains or enter into a field of occult experience; it is not because there is any attempt at a dark or vague profundity or at an escape from thought. The thinking is not intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a vision, a spiritual contact or a knowledge which has come by entering into the thing itself, by identity.
"It may be noted that the greater romantic poets did not shun thought; they thought abundantly, almost endlessly. They have their characteristic view of life, something that one might call their philosophy, their world-view, and they express it. Keats was the most romantic of poets, but he could write 'To philosophise I dare not yet'; he did not write T am too much of a poet to philosophise.' To philosophise he regarded evidently as mounting on the admiral's flag-ship and flying an almost royal banner. Spiritual philosophic poetry is different; it expresses or tries to express a total and many-sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other. Whatever language, whatever terms are necessary to convey this truth of vision and experience it uses without scruple, not admitting any mental rule of what is or is not poetic. It does not hesitate to employ terms which might be considered as technical when these can be turned to express something direct, vivid and powerful. That need not be an introduction of 'technical jargon', that is to say, I suppose, special and artificial language, expressing in this case only abstract ideas and generalities without any living truth or reality in them. Such jargon cannot make good literature, much
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less good poetry. But there is a 'poeticism' which establishes a sanitary cordon against words and ideas which it considers as prosaic but which properly used can strengthen poetry and extend its range. That limitation I do not admit as legitimate.
"I am justifying the poet's right to think as well as to see and feel, his right to 'dare to philosophise'. I agree with the modernists in their revolt against the romanticist's insistence on emotionalism and his objection to thinking and philosophical reflection in poetry. But the modernist went too far in his revolt. In trying to avoid what I may call poeticism he ceased to be poetic; wishing to escape from rhetorical writing, rhetorical pretension to greatness and beauty of style, he threw out true poetic greatness and beauty, turned from a deliberately poetic style to a colloquial tone and even to very flat writing; especially he turned away from poetic rhythm to a prose or half-prose rhythm or to no rhythm at all. Also he has weighed too much on thought and has lost the habit of intuitive sight; by turning emotion out of its intimate chamber in the house of Poetry, he has had to bring in to relieve the dryness of much of his thought, too much exaggeration of the lower vital and sensational reactions un-transformed or else transformed only by exaggeration. Nevertheless he has perhaps restored to the poet the freedom to think as well as to adopt a certain straightforwardness and directness of style."
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5
Unfathomed harmonies roll, drowning our sight
In purple of their passionate abyss—
A superhuman solitude of night
Sprung from a deep where all the waves are bliss.
O waves divine, dark to our shuddering eyes,
You float a fire that glooms each common glow!
Sweep over foundering thought your rhythmic skies
Until we gain some marvellous earth below.
There still the pure Atlantis shall be found
Of rapture lost by souls unluminous:
There rings of silver memories surround
An empty throne of gold awaiting us.
"It is more mental than usual—but the vision and expression are there. The first stanza is the most powerful, a Higher Mind movement; lines 7, 8 belong to the same category—though, as I say, the mental strain is more pronounced than it has been in recent poems. The other lines are colourful and imaginative.
"Its vision brings out a truth of spiritual experience with sufficient force and exactness, though not with the deeper intimacy that sometimes comes in from above. It has a perfection of its own which is considerable."
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A secret of far sky burns suddenly close,
A deep blue wakes to glory from pale blue:
Then large and calm and effortless wings of light
Swoop crimson through the paradisal air!
Talons of eyrie truth—a clutch of gold—
Numb every thought to a shining vacancy
Merged in the immortal spaciousness around
This haloed hawk that preys on time-desire...
My body, wrapt in the vast apocalypse,
Grows king of Nature with the mystic bird
A flaming crown of godhead over life!
"It is certainly very original and expresses with great force the spiritual experience. A very fine poem—most of it being in substance from the Illumined Mind (except 2 or 3 lines) but its rhythm belongs to the poetic intelligence, strong and clear-cut but not with the subtle or large inner tones of the overhead music. It is a very luminous and powerful image."
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From hills inaureoled by a twilight trance,
Arms eager with the enchanted cry of love
Strain towards a mountain lost in timeless dawn.
But how shall arms of reverie clasp that fire
When gulfs of nameless night—a dragon's mouth—
Have stretched below their blinded centuries?...
O paradise-haunted pilgrims of the dusk,
Nothing save fall can bare the soul's rich deep.
To the emperor height take tributary hands
Full of wide wounds like rubies proud and warm,
Cut from life's inmost core of mystery.
No rapture—till you appease with diamond tears
Truth's spirit throne of dross-consuming gold.
"There is something mental in the turn—which makes it sound like an overhead inspiration coming through the mind, rather than direct. At the same time the first five lines, 7 and 11 also, have a more direct overhead ring."
"It expresses its idea with great richness and force and images that carry one beyond the mental vision of things—that seems to me its main quality."
Stoop your calm beauty—let your shining hair
Unveil its ages of high secrecy
To float upon dull earth the frankincense
Your face of love burns to an infinite sky.
Fill life with mystic rondures of your breast
And all that worship dreamed unknowable
Bare through your body's perfect universe.
O mate the sculptor-vigil of our gloom
With those superb clay-lines that sing your soul:
Then every stroke of time shall carve to birth
Immortal moods lit by your ecstasy.
"Very fine poetry. Blank verse rhythm very good. Illumined Higher Mind."
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The Unknown above is a mute vacancy—
But in the mere of dream wide wings are spread.
An ageless bird poising a rumour of gold
Upon prophetic waters hung asleep.
The veils of vastitude are cloven white,
The burden of unreachable blue is lost:
A ring of hills around a silver hush,
The far mind haloed with mysterious dawn
Treasures in the deep eye of thought-suspense
An eagle-destiny beaconing through all time.
On an earlier version not including lines 5 and 6:
"First line from the higher Mind, the next five from the illumined Mind—the last two I can't very well say: perhaps the inner Mind there has taken up the illumined inspiration and given it a turn belonging to an interpretative language of its own making. All the lines are of a fine quality, but the 2nd and 4th are the finest." On the present version:
"As a whole it gains by the two lines added; the line about the veils of vastitude being on the general level of the first four and even on the specially high level of 2 and 4. 6 is also a fine line (illumined higher Mind)."
"The poem does not fall below the average mark [you have set yourself], but there are degrees even in the above-average and this is fine, even very fine, but not as a whole quite as absolute as some that went before. The 2nd and 4th and 5th lines are the finest."
"What you are writing now is 'overhead' poetry—I mean poetry inspired from those planes—before you used to write poems very often from the intuitive mind—these had a beauty and perfection of their own. What I mean by absoluteness here is a full intensely inevitable expression of what comes from above. These lines are original, convincing, have vision, they are not to be rejected, but they
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are not the highest flight except in single lines. Such variations are to be expected and would be more prominent if you were writing longer poems, for then to keep always or even usually to that highest level would be an extraordinary feat—no poet has managed as yet to write always at his highest flight and here in that kind of poetry it would be still more difficult. The important point is not to fall below a certain level—when you do, I shall certainly tell you."
(How is it that after this training under you and getting inspiration from certain of the planes towards which I have kept straining my consciousness I relapse time and again into inferior poetry ? Either a relapse or I grow dumb—and even otherwise it is no easy job to receive the kind of inspiration I want. There are fine flowings at times, but often there are blockings in places and I have to wait and wait for their removal. I feel dejected and wonder when the intense joy that poetry brings me will be free from these most discouraging impediments. My relapse at the moment, as regards some lines, fills me with shame.)
"It is not a relapse, but an oscillation which one finds in almost every poet. Each has a general level, a highest level and a lower range in which some defects of his poetical faculty come out. You have three manners: (i) a sort of decorative romantic manner that survives from your early days—this at a lower pitch turns to too much dressing of an ornamental kind, at a higher to post-Victorian Edwardian or Georgian rhetoric with a frequent saving touch of Yeats; (2) a level at which all is fused into a fine intuitive authenticity and beauty, there is seldom anything to change; (3) a higher level of grander movement and language in which you pull down or reach the influences of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Over-mind Intuition. The last you have not yet fully mastered so as to write with an absolute certainty and faultlessness except by lines and stanzas or else as a whole in rare moments of total inspiration, but you are moving towards mastery in it. Sometimes these inspirations get mixed up together. It is this straining towards greater height that creates the difficulty, yet it is indispensable for the evolution of your genius. It is not surprising, therefore, that inspiration comes with difficulty often, or that there are dormant periods or returns of the decorative inspiration. All that is part of the day's work and dejection is quite out of place."
(20-4-1937)
(What exactly is the intuitive mind you have spoken of, and how does it differ from what you have called 'inner mind' and 'mystic mind' ?)
"The intuitive mind, strictly speaking, stretches from the Intuition proper down to the intuitivised inner mind—it is therefore at once an overhead power and a mental intelligence power. All depends on the amount, intensity, quality of the intuition and how far it is mixed with mind or pure. The inner mind is not necessarily intuitive, though it can easily become so. The mystic mind is turned towards the occult and spiritual, but the inner mind can act without direct reference to the occult and spiritual, it can act in the same field and in the same material as the ordinary mind, only with a larger and deeper power, range and light and in greater unison with the Universal Mind; it can open also more easily to what is within and what is above. Intuitive intelligence, mystic mind, inner mind intelligence are all part of the inner mind operation. In today's poem, for instance—
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My dream is spoken,
As if by sound
Were tremulously broken
Some vow profound.
A timeless hush
Draws ever back
The winging music-rush
Upon thought's track.
Though syllables sweep
Like golden birds.
Far lonelihoods of sleep
Dwindle my words.
Beyond life's clamour,
A mystery mars
Speech-light to a myriad stammer
Of nickering stars.—
it is certainly the inner mind that has transformed the idea of stammering into a symbol of inner phenomena and into that operation a certain strain of mystic mind enters, but what is prominent is the intuitive inspiration throughout. It blends with the intuitive poetic intelligence in the first stanza, gets touched by the overhead intuition in the second, gets full of it in the third and again rises rapidly to that in the two last lines of the fourth stanza. This is what I call poetry of the intuitive mind."
"It is a very true and beautiful poem."
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O keep the sacred fire
A prisoner poise
With walls that never wake
To earthly voice.
So delicate and small
This undefiled
Epiphany of joy,
This golden child,
That like a freezing blast
The unfruitful power
Of stormy mind will quench
The burning flower.
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Breathe tenderly your love:
Feed the pure flame
By secret offerings
Of one far Name
Whose rhythms make more rich
That smiling face
Of angel glow within
The heart's embrace—
Until the dreamy hue
Grows wide enough
To flash upon time's chill
A warrior laugh
Piercing through twilight walls
Of calm to blind
With a noon of ecstasy
The space of mind.
A sword divine which darts
From clay's dull sheath,
The luminous tongue shall rise
Devouring death
And every icy thought's
Oblivion
Of earth's untarnished soul,
Its core of sun.
Sri Aurobindo's comment
"It is a very fine lyric. The inspiration is not equally intense through-
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out—it is most felicitous in the three stanzas marked; the first also is almost that and also the three first lines of the sixth. The rest is admirable, though it has not quite the same intuitive edge; but still it is the right thought with the just, poetic expression. I don't know exactly what plane, but it comes from the inner being—there is a fine psychic touch in stanzas I, 2, 4, 5, 7 and it is the psychic truth that is expressed throughout."
(Would the emergence of the psychic being make the writing of "above-head" poetry more possible?)
"To get the psychic being to emerge is not easy, though it is a very necessary thing for sadhana and when it does it is not certain that it will switch on to the above-head planes at once. But obviously anyone who could psychicise his poetry would get a unique place among the poets.
"The direct psychic touch is not frequent in poetry. It breaks in sometimes—more often there is only a tinge here and there."
(Would the emergence of the psychic being cut across any above-head inspiration ?)
"I don't suppose the emergence of the psychic would interfere at all with the inspiration from above. It would be more likely to help it by making the connection with these planes more direct and conscious."
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My feet are sore, Beloved,
With agelong quest for Thee;
Wilt Thou not choose for dwelling
This lonesome heart of me?
Is it too poor a mansion?
But surely it is poor
Because Thou never bringest
Thy beauty through its door!
It lies all bare and darkened,
To hold nought save Thy light:
The door is shut because, Love,
It craves no lesser sight.
Though void, a fulness richens
The heart I give to Thee—
For, what more can I offer
Than all my penury?
(Anything special in this lyric? Is not the language too commonplace and the rhythm too hackneyed?)
"I like it very well. A rhythm or language can never be hackneyed or commonplace when it is beautiful and makes a direct inner appeal."
Considering that Sri Aurobindo, in a letter, describes "all psychic things" as "direct and simple" and psychic poetry as "simple and precise and penetrating" or "something deeply inward, esoteric in that sense, but simple, unveiled and clear, not esoteric in the more usual sense", the above lines may be taken to be a psychic poem.
Great Mother, grant me this one boon I crave:
I will forgo all triumphs of the mind
And grandiose honours for which men have pined
If in its search for Thee my life be brave.
Beyond earth's crowded hours of brief delight,
Of passionate anarchy whose eyes are blind,
Let me on feet of calm devotion find
The lonely soul's sweet contemplative height.
And from the crest of that serenity
Whence Thy far infinite face can be divined,
An endless song let all my ardour be
To reach Thy beauty, leaving lust behind —
No stern forced worship but love self-consigned,
A river's leap towards the pristine sea.
"A very beautiful poem grave and harmonious and true in thought and feeling with a fine close."
In terms of poetic source, this comment may be interpreted in the light of Sri Aurobindo's letter mentioning "the psychic source of inspiration which can give a beautiful spiritual poetry" and referring to "the turn of the psychic" as having "an intense beauty of emotion, a fine subtlety of true perception, an intimate language".
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There is no lack of love in Thee,
But, O sweet Splendour, bless
My proud heart with a penury
Of dedicated emptiness.
Thy blue and gold and silver light
Can never cease to drop,
For Thou hast generously made
All heaven a wide inverted cup.
'Tis we are shut in outward self
Nor deepen eyes to see
That dawn and vesper, noon and night
Are pouring Thy divinity.
"It is beautiful as well as simple and very felicitous in its suggestiveness."
To judge from the turn of the comment, one may guess the source of the lines to be jointly the psychic and the inner mind.
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Rise upward, stream of passion in the gloom!
Rise where lone pinnacles mate with heaven's womb!
Earth drags you down, but all your shimmers know
The stars' enchanted fire calling you home.
Mountains of mind are sacred: join your cry
Unto their peaceful marriage with the sky.
Your children shall be words eternal, sprung
From golden seeds of packed immensity.
"It is a fine poem, the second stanza especially fine. Language and rhythm from the illumined Mind."
"I can't exactly say that it is equal to your best. It is a fine poem; but entire inevitability is not there, except perhaps in the second stanza's first three lines (the last is a very fine one full of light and fire but not quite with that realised and consummate perfection which is meant by 'inevitable'); perhaps also the 2nd line [of the first stanza]."
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A nectar-dew falls glimmering from the Unknown
To wake the shadowless seed of mystic love
Lost in the blind abysses of the brain.
A memory stirs the locked immensity—
An occult creative Eye now yearns afar.
Dreams upward through a gilded sky of mind,
The hard deceiving dome of a false heaven,
To an infinite ether of apocalypt blue.
Then slowly breaks on hyalines of hush
A white rumour of flames and fragrances,
A vast virginity kindles above time.
The lotus of the soul has lifted high
A million rapturous petal-arms to clasp
The secret of a sempiternal sun.
"All from the illumined mind—only some fines more intensely illumined than others, but all fine."
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The immortal music of her mind
Sweeps through the earth a lustrous wind—
"Renounce, O man, thy arduous oar
And, opening out faith's song-charmed helpless sail,
Reach on my breath of love the ecstatic shore!
My rush is truth self-beaconed, not thy pale
Stranger-surmise:
I am a cyclic gale
That blows from paradise to paradise!"
"This is now quite perfect. Only, the lines 2-5 are now of the Illumined Mind, with a strong undertone of the effective,1 the first and last four intuitive. This is not a defect.
1 The reference is evidently to one of the five kinds of style Sri Aurobindo has distinguished on pp. 35-40. In the present context he seems to take the style of the Illumined Mind to be ipso facto that which he has called "illumined" there. And the implication is that "the effective" is the style of the Higher Mind. But, if so, the "inspired" style would cover the lines described her e as "intuitive" .
No mortal breath you bring us: love divine
Makes your whole countenance a silver call
To meet an unviewed vast of spirit-hush.
Far in the mystic vault your home is hung:
We turn our faces to your planet soul
And all infinity weighs upon our eye
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Its plumbless sleep. O light unwithering,
O star-bloom mirrored in a lake of earth,
Remember that your roots suck the pure sky!
Dream not the brief and narrow curves of clay
Limit your destiny of pristine power—
A throne amid ecstatic thrones that rule
A loneliness of superhuman night.
"Very fine all through both in language and rhythm—the last part, except for the closing line, is not so near the absolute as the first half, but all the same it is very fine and powerful. The blank verse is very good, each line has sufficient power to stand by itself, yet all combine together to make a linked whole. The basis is the Higher Mind: in the first half many of the lines (2-7) are illumined and there is even a strong influence of the Overmind Intuition. In the latter half, the same with a slighter illumination (9, 10), last line again the uplifting Overmind Intuition influence."
(What precisely is meant when we say poems exist already on the higher planes and have only to be transmitted here by the human consciousness ? If the parts of a poem hail from quite different planes, where exactly does the whole exist} Are there poetic fragments floating about which cohere only in the mind of the man who catches them ? And have these fragments a form already of language or do they become expressed by us alone ? Are all the innumerable languages of earth spoken in the higher planes or do the latter possess merely modes or states of consciousness ?)
"A poem may pre-exist in the timeless as all creation pre-exists there or else in some plane where the past, present and future exist together. But it is not necessary to presuppose anything of the kind to explain the phenomenon of inspiration. All is here a matter of
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formation or creation. By the contact with the source of inspiration the creative power at one level or another and the human instrument, receptacle or channel get into contact. That is the essential point, all the rest depends upon the individual case. If the substance, rhythm, form, words come down all together ready-formed from the plane of poetic creation, that is the perfect type of inspiration; it may give its own spontaneous gift or it may give something which corresponds to the idea or the aspiration of the poet, but in either case the human being is only a channel or receptacle, although he feels the joy of the creation and the joy of the aveś, enthousiasmos, elation of the inrush and the passage. On the other hand, it may be that the creative source sends down the substance or stuff, the force and the idea, but the language, rhythm etc. are found somewhere in the instrument; he has to find the human transcription of something that is there in diviner essence above; then there is an illumination or excitement, a conscious labour of creation swift or slow, hampered or facile. Something of the language may be supplied by the mind or vital, something may break through from somewhere behind the veil, from whatever source gets into touch with the transcribing mind in the liberating or stimulating excitement or uplifting of the consciousness. Or a line or lines may come through from some plane and the poet excited to creation may build around them constructing his material or getting it from any source he can tap. There are many possibilities of this nature. There is also the possibility of an inspiration not from above, but from somewhere within on the ordinary levels, some inner mind, emotional, vital etc., which the mind practised in poetical technique works out according to its habitual faculty. Here again in a different way similar phenomena, similar variations may arise.
"As for the language, the tongue in which the poem comes or the whole lines from above, that offers no real difficulty. It all depends on the contact between the creative Power and the instrument or channel, the Power will naturally choose the language of the instrument or channel, that to which it is accustomed and can therefore readily hear and receive. The Power itself is not limited and can use any language, but although it is possible for things to come
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through in a language unknown or ill-known—I have seen several instances of the former—it is not a usual case, since the samskāras of the mind, its habits of action and conception would normally obstruct any such unprepared receptiveness; only a strong mediumistic faculty might be unaffected by the difficulty. These things, however, are obviously exceptional, abnormal or supernormal phenomena.
"If the parts of a poem come from different planes, it is because one starts from some high plane but the connecting consciousness cannot receive uninterruptedly from there and as soon as it flickers or wavers it comes down to a lower, perhaps without noticing it, or the lower comes in to supply the continuation of the flow or on the contrary the consciousness starts from a lower plane and is lifted in the aveś perhaps occasionally, perhaps more continuously higher for a time or else the higher force attracted by the creative will breaks through or touches or catches up the less excited inspiration towards or into itself. I am speaking here especially of the Overhead planes where this is quite natural; for the Overmind, for instance, is the ultimate source of intuition, illumination or heightened power of the planes immediately below it. It can lift them up into its own greater intensity or give out of its intensity to them or touch and combine their powers together with something of its own greater power -or they can receive or draw something from it or from each other. On the lower planes beginning from the mental downwards there can also be such variations, but the working is not the same, for the different powers here stand more on a footing of equality whether they stand apart from each other, each working in its own right, or cooperate."
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6
"How can thy reverie's molecule of sight
Pierce the lone reaches of the starred Obscure?
Mix with my largening thought whose deep and pure
Quiet brings close the eternal harmonies!
Across my length of vigil, nectars move:
I am a crystal medium of far light,
Through whom the unattainable galaxies
Glow with a luminous Mother's intimate love!"
(Does my consistent sustaining of the telescope image throughout by expressions like "largening thought", "brings close", "length of vigil", "crystal medium of far light", etc., put the poem in the class of what might be called "inspired conceit" ?)
"No, I don't suppose it does—the turn has not that obvious ingenious cleverness which is the stamp of the conceit. The poem is a fine one—mental with a sort of reflection of the overhead manner; but it has not the overhead grip."
(What exactly is the mental process which would define "conceit" in poetry ?)
"When an image comes out of the mind not properly transmuted in the inner vision or delivered by the alchemy of language, it betrays itself as coin of the fancy or the conceiving intellect and is then called a conceit."
(Would you describe the following poem of mine as "coin of the fancy" ? What is the peculiarity of poetic effect, if any, here ?)
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No more the press and play of light release
Thrilling bird-news between high columned trees.
Upon the earth a blank of slumber drops:
Only cicadas toil in grassy shops—
But all their labours seem to cry "Peace, peace."
Nought travels down the roadway save the breeze;
And though beyond our gloom—throb after throb—
Gathers the great heart of a silver mob,
There is no haste in heaven, no frailty mars
The very quiet business of the stars.
"It is very successful—the last two lines are very fine and the rest have their perfection. I should call it a mixture of inspiration and cleverness—or perhaps ingenious discovery would be a better phrase. I am referring to such images as 'thrilling bird-news', 'grassy shops', 'silver mob'. Essentially they are conceits but saved by the note of inspiration running through the poem—while in the last line the conceit 'quiet business' is lifted beyond itself and out of conceitedness by the higher tone at which the inspiration arrives there."
(What do you think of this attempt at expressing inner mystical fact by what may seem to be poetic fancy ?)
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A quick stiletto's smile of poignancy,
The pang of paradise cleaves through the heart,
Committing against our human blood's career
A lustrous crime of immortality.
Truth's lightning stab—and from the core of life
Rich reveries flow to some unscrutable deep,
While over a precipice of infinitude
Clay-burdens drop, a trance-fall out of time.
"Very forcibly conceited. In its kind it is eminently successful."
(Another piece—somewhat similar in tone and turn to White Murder, but perhaps not openly " conceited" . What is its source of inspiration?)
A giant earth-oblivion numbs the brain,
A stroke of trance making each limb fall loose
And narrow-hearted hungers crumble down!
The soul has broken through the walls of time,
The unlustred prison of the dreaming clay,
To a palace of imperishable gold—
No transient pauper day but shadowless dawn,
Eternal Truth's sun-gated infinite.
"It is mental throughout except the last line which has a touch of Higher Mind; but it is fine all the same. Quite up to the mark."
Page 104
O face of scorn, you winter not my will:
This heart grew brighter when your breath's proud chill
Flung my diffuse life-blood more richly in!
Now mystic reveries halo mortal din:
No longer now the outward-burning stress,
The eternal Spirit's self-forgetfulness—
But through a superhuman quietude
The timeless secret of each rhythm is heard.
Love turns a living ether's infinite mood;
Your beauty's call, a brief and flickering word
Of clay, becomes in that divine expanse
Truth-whitenesses clasped by a hush of trance.
"The mental is no doubt prominent, but inspiration is present throughout and in the lines marked rises above the mental, for the overhead note is there. It is the mental lines that give the tone to the poem, these lines rise out of the mental like islands out of the sea. Moreover, except in the lines marked with a cross where the illumined Mind gets strongly in, the 'note' is not quite pure,—there is the higher Mind tone, even a little of the illumined Mind, but not enough to make it absolutely that. It is a fine poem with very fine lines in it."
Spurning the narrow cities of your mind,
Climb to the turquoise dome of distances
Where Nature's spirit wears a measureless crown—
The unwalled glory of some Tartar day,
The inscrutable puissance of a Negro night.
There every straining mood brims infinite,
An all-submerging primal mystery,
A waveless ocean of omnipotent ease—
Or like all heaven's truth-core flames the will!
"The Tartar day and Negro night have vividness and power; the other lines are very fine poetry. As a whole, the Higher Mind with a touch of Illumination."
Page 105
Would you conceive her self? A sheer abyss
Of reverie existing by its own
Grandeur of inexhaustible silences
That know all secrets through a light unknown.
Nor her divinity the clay ensheathes:
Those pure immitigable joys unblind
Each human pore and her whole body breathes
The large and lustrous odour of her mind.
"It is very good. Such inversions as in the fifth line should not be too often used, as in modern English they are apt to be puzzling. It is from the Illumined Mind that the poem as a whole seems to have come. Most of your poems now are from there.
"Lines 1-3: Illumined style. Line 4: Illumined inspired style. Lines 5-8: Effective illumined style."1
Page 106
Closing your eyes, outstretch vague hands of prayer
Beyond the prison-house of mortal air...
Then, soul-awakened, watch the universe thrill
With secrets drawn from the Invisible—
A force of gloom that makes each flicker-stress
Bare the full body of its goldenness
And yield in that embrace of mystery
A flaming focus of infinity,
A fire-tongue nourished by God's whole expanse
Through darknesses of superhuman trance.
"Lines five to eight (marked double) are from the Illumined Mind touched with the Intuition—the rest seem to be mainly from the Higher Mind, except that the last two [marked double] have a force of Illumination also. Perhaps the sustained intensity is less than that of your very best poems: that does not mean that it is a semi-success—it is a difference of shade rather than of category."
Fuelled with forests I come, an ape on fire,
A brown beast burning towards the unbarred Blue,
Fierce brain that feels suddenly the skull blown off,
Blind belly crying to be an abysm of stars!
Helpless with flame that snatches them from earth,
My terrible arms strain reddening in mid-air—
Love that has lost the ecstasy it can grasp,
To embrace the bourneless body of the beyond.
"The lines you have sent me no doubt have a remarkable force, especially three or four of them, but I do not know that I can say positively from what level or source they come. Perhaps the Illumined Mind but not purely from that. I would have to wait for more light from that illumined quarter before I could pronounce with a complete certainty."
Page 107
Why this indignity that from the brave
Height of soul-lustre into a broken grave
Man's yearning flesh should drop and all his drouth
Of planet-passion kiss the worm's cold mouth?
What treasure yet unknown draws down his mood,
Whose heart is fashioned for infinitude?
Surely some God-abyss calls out to him! ...
We die and all our winged senses dim
Because we have not dreamed the goal of birth,
The arcane eternity coring dull earth.
O omnipresent Light, break from below
As in the constellate seasons of our mind:
Rise up and flower in these cells of woe,
Flush the wan nerves, breathe your immense gold breath,
And make our limbs no longer grope to find
A heaven of quiet through world-weary death!
It is very fine. The thought is clear enough. Illumined Mind intuitive inspiration."
Page 108
Not for the light of limbs
But for the peace
Folding, when rapture dims,
Heart-poignancies—
The lull of ardour spent,
Which like a wind
Of some cool firmament
Blows out the mind,
Leaving our gaze a night
Timelessly deep
As if all heaven's height
Sank asleep—
O love, for that abyss'
Unnamable sky
The soul from kiss to kiss
Wings on, a cry
Of passion to be freed
From its own fire
And hurl away the seed
Of earth-desire!...
Though far the eternal day
Pure vigils view,
Its secret in my clay
I plumb with you.
"No, it is not weak or merely clever. It is a fine poem, the thought perfectly expressed—the thought itself may be 'queer', but it expresses something which people sometimes vaguely feel, a seeking in earthly desire for something beyond that desire. The lines marked are very striking and have a strong turn of intuitive revelation. The rest though it has not that originality is very felicitously phrased and rhythmed and has a certain finality or definitiveness in it which is always an achievement in poetry."
Page 109
How shall you see
Through a mist of tears
The laughing lips of beauty,
The golden heart of years?
Oh never say
That tears had birth
In the weeping soul of ages,
The gloomy brow of earth!
Your eyes alone
Carry the blame
For giving tearful answers
To questionings of flame.
What drew that film
Across your sight
Was only the great dazzle
Of everlasting Light!
Frailty begot
Your wounded gaze:
Eagle your mood, O spirit,
To see the Golden Face.
"It is exceedingly beautiful, one of the best things you have done. But don't ask me to analyse it. Things like that cannot be analysed, they can only be felt. It has throughout the perfection of simple inevitability about which no one can say, 'It is because of this that it is beautiful or because of that.' The more I read it, the more it gains upon me."
In terms of plane, we may conjecture "the perfection of simple inevitability" to be pointing—if we may go by Sri Aurobindo's own words elsewhere on mystic and spiritual poetry—to a manifold blending: the inner mind's "easy and luminous simplicity which is at the same time very felicitous", the psychic being's "fine subtiety of true perception" and "its intimate language" but touched with the "pure intuitive"'s "simple revealing directness and beauty".
Page 110
Giant roses,
Gods of light,
Glory and laugh and mingle
On a dreamy height.
But, ever and ever
Above rose-red
Flame and forgetfulness,
Vigilling unwed
Is a white, immense,
Miraculous-blown
Lily beyond time's dearth
Yet very alone.
Omnipotence,
Infinitude,
Eternity of splendour—
All are subdued
To a virgin breath
Calling the far
Earth-glooms of pain to marry
Its soul of star.
And therefore life
Yearns and yearns—
Feeling some limitless rapture
Unmated burns.
"Very fine. All such poems come from the Intuition plane."
Page 111
With you unseen, what shall my song adore?
Though waves foam-garland all the saffron shore
My music cannot mingle with their tone,
Because a purer worship I have known.
How shall I join the birds' delight of space,
Whose eyes have winged the heaven of your face?
Or with the rain urge blossoms to be sweet,
When I have lost the altar of your feet?
A lone tranquillity whose eyelids fall
Is now my only voice, for thus I call
Your godhead back: the gates of outwardness
I shut and my lost rapture repossess—
Your spirit in my spirit, deep in the deep,
Walled by a wizardry of shining sleep.
"I find it very good. It is not sentimental at all, for feeling and sentiment are not the same thing. It comes from the intuitive mind and has a note of fine adequacy which is often the best form for that inspiration to take. The last two lines are more intense and come straight from the Intuition itself—an expression not of mind, but of truth-sight pure and sheer."
Page 112
("...Abana and Pharphar, lucid streams"—Milton)
Where is the glassy gold of Pharphar
Or its echoing silver-grey
When the magic ethers of evening
Wash one the various day?
I have travelled the whole earth over
Yet never found
The beautiful body of Pharphar
Or its soul of secret sound.
But all my dreams are an answer
To Pharphar's blmd career;
And the songs that I sing are an image
Of quiets I long to hear.
For, only this unreached beauty
No time shall mar—
This river of infinite distance,
Pharphar.
Page 113
"Very beautiful indeed, subtle and gleaming and delicate. The sound-suggestions are perfect. I suppose it comes from some plane of intuitive inspiration."
A Comparison between "Pharphar" and
Walter De la Mare's "Arabia"1
"It is indeed charming—De la Mare seems to have an unfailing beauty of language and rhythm and an inspired loveliness of fancy that is captivating. But still it is fancy, the mind playing with its delicate imaginations. A hint of something deeper tries to get through sometimes, but it does not go beyond a hint. That is the difference between his poem and the one it inspired from you. There is some kinship though no sameness in the rhythm and the tone of delicate remoteness it brings with it. But in your poem that something deeper
1 ARABIA
Far arc the shades of Arabia
Where the Princes ride at noon,
'Mid the verdurous vales and thickets,
Under the ghost of a moon;
And so dark is that vaulted purple
Flowers in the forest rise
And toss into blossom 'gainst the phantom stars
Pale in the noonday skies.
Sweet is the music of Arabia
In my heart when out of dreams
I still in the thin clear mirk of dawn
Descry her gliding streams;
Hear her strange lutes on the green banks
Ring loud with the grief and delight
Of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians
In the brooding silence of night...
Page 114
is not hinted, it is caught—throughout—in all the expressions, but especially in such lines as
Wash one the various day
Or its soul of secret sound
These expressions give a sort of body to the occult without taking from it its strangeness and do not leave it in mist or in shadowy image or luminous silhouette. That is what a fully successful spiritual or occult poetry has to do, to make the occult and the spiritual real to the vision of the consciousness, the feeling. The occult is most often materialised as by Scott and Shakespeare or else pictured in mists, the spiritual mentalised, as in many attempts at spiritual poetry—a reflection in the mind is not enough. For success in the former, Arjava's 'Totalitarian' with the stark occult reality of its vision is a good example; for the latter there are lines both in his poems and yours that I could instance, but I cannot recall them accurately just now-but have you not somewhere a line
The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind?
That would be an instance of the concrete convincing reality of which
_______________
They haunt me—her lutes and her forests;
No beauty on earth I see
But shadowed with that dream recalls
Her loveliness to me:
Still eyes look coldly upon me,
Cold voices whisper and say—
"He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
They have stolen his wits away."
I am speaking—a spiritual state not hinted at or abstractly put as the metaphysical poets most often do it but presented with a tangible accuracy which one who has lived in the silent wideness of his spiritualised mind can at once recognise as the embodiment in word of his experience.
"I do not mean for a moment to deny the value of the exquisite texture of dream in De la Mare's representation, but still this completer embodiment achieves more."
Page 115
Bring not your stars the very same
Magic as mine? I give that name
Unto a touch of cool far flame
Upon my heart
When evening yearns beyond the brief
Monotonies of joy and grief
For some strange rhythmical relief
Shining apart—
And dim migrations, mindward sent
From reveries omnipotent
Through shadows of a firmament
Crowned by deep lull,
Scatter their white and winged powers
Of song across the barren hours
Till darkness lit to flying flowers
Breathes beautiful.
"It is a very good lyric, the rhythm and the thought very subtle and satisfying."
(I have the same impression about it as about Pharphar which, according to you, has comefrom the Intuition plane. Am I right?)
"I believe it is the same source."
Page 116
I see your limbs aglow
With passionate will,
But touching their white flesh I know
Your love's intangible—
As if each fiery line
Of yearning clay
Brought only a mirror-shine
Of beacons far away!
Your flames unquenchable dart
Yet burn not by their kiss:
They flash around my heart
A dream of distances—
A rich wave-aureole
That lures beyond its tune
Of time the lustre-haunted soul
To a paradisal moon.
"It is a very fine lyrical poem, expressing with perfection what it had to say—it has the same quality as other lyrics of the kind formerly written by you—an entire precision and ease of language and rhythm, a precision that is intuitive and suggestive."
(Has this poem too "brainy" an air ? What do you think of the turn in the last stanza ?)
Page 117
Your face unveils the cry,
Divinely deep,
Heard from the inscrutable core
Of mystic sleep—
A lure of rapturous tune
Where vision fails,
Like a nest of heaven-hearted
Nightingales.
No hush of love could catch
That soul of swoon:
Dawn's body ever crossed
My dream too soon.
But now with a face of dawn
Night yearns to me,
Kindling the distances
Of lost divinity.
"I don't find it brainy in any unpoetic sense—the turn in the last stanza might have been thought ingenious if it had not been given so fine a poetic form. A very fine little lyric with that intuitively felicitous choice of words which is very usual with you when you write in this kind."
The double marks in the margin are Sri Aurobindo's.
Page 118
A cry of gold piercing the spine's dark sleep,
A dragon fire consuming mortal thought,
An aureoled hunger that makes time fall dead,
My passion curves from bliss to heavenward bliss.
Kindling the rhythm of a myriad smile,
This white wave lifted by some virgin deep
I Breaks through the embodied moments of the mind
To a starry universe of infinite trance.
"All the lines are very fine, especially those marked. The three first of each stanza have a great intensity of vision—Higher Mind plus Overmind Intuition touch. The last—Higher Mind plus Illumined Mind—is not equal in vision but still not too far below."
(Is it a bad habit on my part or the natural movement of a certain type of inspiration to have several appositional lines in a poem ?)
"I suppose it is the natural movement of the inspiration cumulating illustrative images to light up something unfamiliar to the mind."
(I have the feeling that this work, which brings in the highest "overhead" as part of its theme, has on the whole the overhead afflatus. How would you estimate it as poetry?)
Page 119
THANK GOD...
Thank God for all this wretchedness of love—
The close apocalypt fires that only prove
The shutting of some golden gate in the face!
Not here beside us burning a brief space
Of life is ecstasy: immense, above,
The shining core of a divine abyss
Awaits the earth-unglamoured lonely gaze,
The tense heart broken into widenesses!
All quiver and cry of time is splendoured there
By an ageless alchemy smiling everywhere.
"Perfect in thought and expression. 'The tense heart broken into widenesses' is a very fine line. (I suppose 'alchemy' can smile— usually it doesn't.)"
Nirodbaran, who read the poem out to Sri Aurobindo, reports that Sri Aurobindo repeated several times to himself the phrase which he has called "a very fine line".
(Here is a poem about all the planes, briefly characterising them. It starts with the "inconscient" physical, then proceeds to the vital and the mental, with the psychic innermost recess between them—then sums up the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind and the Intuition and finally goes to the Overmind, the Supermind and the unmanifest Absolute. Do you think a special key is necessary to explain the poem or does it possess a sufficiently intelligible suggestiveness as a whole as well as in each part to give an intuitive sense of coherent meaning ?)
Abysmal shadow of the summit-soul—
Self-blinding grope toward the Sorrowless—
Trance-core of labyrinthine outwardness—
Visage of gloom with flowering aureole.
Streak on gold streak wounding the illusive night—
Miraculous monarchy of eagled gaze—
Eternal truth's time-measuring sun-blaze—
Lonely omnipotence locked in self-light.
"I can hardly say—it is quite clear to me, but I don't know what would happen to the ordinary reader. It is a fine poem, the last stanza remarkable."
(Now I pick up the overhead theme at its culmination, the supreme plane whose forefront is the Supermind and which bears behind the Supermind the Ananda or Delight-plenitude, the Chit-Tapas or fullness of Consciousness-Force, the Sat or status of immeasurable Existence—yes, I take the supreme manifesting plane and regard it as still less than the very being of the Absolute, the utter unfathomable all-sufficient Divine. But have I poetically succeeded ? Are not my lines somewhat stiff in expression and rhythm?)
Page 120
Lustre whose vanishing point we call the sun—
Joy whose one drop drowns seas of all desire—
Life rendering time's heart a hollow hush—
Potence of poise unplumbed by infinite space!
Not unto you I strain, O miracled boons,
But that most inward marvel, the sheer Self
Who bears your beauty; and, devoid of you,
His dark unknown would yet fulfil my love.
"No, they are not stiff: the expression is successful and the rhythm harmonious. The first three lines are magnificent."
Page 121
You fear clay's solid rapture will be gone
If once your love dives deep to the Unknown—
But how shall body not seem a hollow space
When the soul bears eternity's embrace?—
Eternity which to the outward glance
Is some unmoving painted sea of trance,
Lifeless, an artist's dream—but suddenly
Those phantom colours wake and the whole sea
Hurls from its pictured distance, drowning the eyes
In a passionate world of dense infinities!
No longer will you talk of shadowy bliss:
With measureless life God comes, and our flesh-form
Sways like a weed in His enfolding storm.
"It is extremely fine and quite revealing and effective."
Page 122
The tides of gold and silver sweep the sky
But bring no tremor to my countenance:
How shall sun-rise or moon-ebb lure, when I
Have gripped the Eternal in a rock of trance?
Here centuries lay down their pilgrim cry,
Drowsed with the power in me to press my whole
Bulk of unchanging peace upon the eye
And weigh that vision deep into the soul.
My frigid love no calls of earth can stir.
Straight upward climbs my hush—but this lone flight
Reveals me to broad earth an emperor
Ruling all time's horizons through sheer height!
"A very fine poem. The lines marked are very fine and line 4 superlatively so."
(You have said the poem is "very fine"; but why is it so, what does it succeed in expressing by its theme, and what quality does it have— subtlety, power, colour? Could you explain a little?)
"Why is a poem fine? By its power of expression and rhythm, I suppose, and its force of substance and image. As all these are there, I called it a fine poem. Here there is more power than subtlety—it is the power with which the image of Himalaya as the mountain soul of calm and aspiration and supereminent height is conveyed that makes it fine."
As each gigantic vision of sky-rim
Preludes yet stranger spaces of the sea,
For those who dare the rapturous wave-whim
Of soul's uncharted trance-profundity
There is no end to God-horizonry:
A wideness ever new awaits behind
Each ample sweep of plumbless harmony
Circling with vistaed gloriole the mind.
For the Divine is no fixed paradise,
But truth beyond great truth—a spirit-heave
From unimaginable sun-surprise
Of beauty to immense love-lunar eve,
Dreaming through lone sidereal silence on
To yet another alchemy of dawn!
The first version had for its last line:
To yet another revelatory dawn!
Sri Aurobindo was asked about that version: "Will you tell me the worth of these fourteen verses both as poetry and as sonnet? I want perfection—so be unrelentingly critical if there is any drop."
Page 123
"It is very good poetry and a very good sonnet—except for the last line where the vice is the word 'revelatory' which is flat and prosaic, at any rate here. I would use 'revealing' backed by another (and, if possible) revealing adjective."
(I am very glad and thankful you have drawn my attention to "revelatory". Will the line be up to the mark thus:
To yet another rich revealing dawn!
Would you prefer
To yet another splendorous mood-dawn!
or else
To yet another mood-miraculous dawn!)
"The first will do, I suppose, though 'rich' is not revealing—the others are too artificially splendorous. 'Miraculous' without 'mood' would be tempting if there were no gap to fill."
(I know "rich" is not quite adequate, though of all the epithets I can think of at present it seems the least objectionable. But how if I write the line like this:
To yet another ecstasy of dawn!)
"It is better than anything yet proposed. The difficulty's that the preceding lines of the sestet are so fine that anything ordinary in the last line sounds like a sinking or even an anticlimax. The real line that was intended to be there has not yet been found."
(I have got Harin to put his head together with mine. He has come up with: "lambency of dawn." A good phrase, no doubt—but I wonder if it suits the style and atmosphere and suggestion in my sonnet. After over a fortnight of groping I have myself struck upon:
Do you like my "alchemy" ?)
"That is quite satisfactory—you have got the right thing at last."
Page 124
What deep dishonour that the soul should have
Its passion moulded by a moon of change
And all its massive purpose be a wave
Ruled by time's gilded glamours that estrange
Being from its true goal of motionless
Eternity ecstatic and alone,
Poised in calm plenitudes of consciousness—
A sea unheard where spume nor spray is blown!
Be still, oceanic heart, withdraw thy sense
From fickle lure of outward fulgencies.
Clasp not in vain the myriad earth to appease
The hunger of thy God-profundities:
Not there but in self-rapturous suspense
Of all desire is thy omnipotence!
"Congratulations! It is an exceedingly good sonnet—you have got the sonnet movement very well."
Originally, line 7 ran:
Poised in calm vastitude of consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo was asked if "plenitude" would be better in place of "vastitude". He replied:
" 'Vastitude' is better than 'plenitude'—but 'plenitudes' (the plural) would perhaps be best. The singular gives a too abstract and philosophical turn—the plural suggests something concrete and experienceable."
Page 125
My words would bring through atmospheres of calm
The new moon's smile that breathes unto the heart
Secrets of love lost in clay-captured kisses;
The evening star like some great bird whose fury
Dies to a cold miraculous sudden pause—
Wings buoyed by sheer forgetfulness of earth;
And oh that dream-nostalgia in the air,
The sky-remembrance of dew-perfumed dust!
I would disclose the one ethereal beauty
Calling across lone fires and fragrances—
But vain were music, vain all light of rapture
That drew not sense a pathway to strange sleep
Nor woke a passion billowing through the body
In search of realms no eye-boats ever reached.
"Very fine indeed. This time you have got the blank verse all right, owing to the weight and power you have been able to put into the movement as well as the thought and language. Nothing to criticise. The lines give a quite coherent development and there is a single aspiration throughout. It has almost the full sonnet effect in spite of the absence of the rhyme structure."
Page 126
THE CLOSE OF DANTE'S "DIVINA COMMEDIA" ("PARADISO", 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 sacred mystery enshrined
The omnific Love by whose untarnished ray
Now flowers this rose-heart of eternal peace!
A beaconing magnificent midday
Art thou to us of saviour charities,
To mortal men hope's ever-living fount!
So great thy power that, save its fulgences
Shed purifying gleam, whoso would mount
Unto this ecstasy might well desire
Page 127
Wingless sky-soar! Nor dost thou needful count
Grief's tear, but even ere its soul 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 from the dire abyss
To heaven's insuperable altitude:
I, 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
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
A myriad 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.
Page 128
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!
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 dread 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
Page 129
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 attains the rapturous All—
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 o'erwhelmed I saw
Page 130
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 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 'the 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 contributed by the influence of the original text, the severe cut of the Dantesque and its concentrated essence of force are not there but there is something else which is very fine."
1 It may be acknowledged that the line-
Then vigour failed the towering fantasy—
for Dante's
All' altafantasia 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 neces sity 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.)
The middle portion came next, 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 the spirit in the language, something of Dante's concentrated force of expression into his lines."
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Each 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.
"Very fine and quite successful. All through, the language and thought are very felicitous, 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 helpful 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
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|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.
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 mystery-drunken heart.
"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
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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 classification here seems 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
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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.
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.
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, ô future Vigueur!1 (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)
1 Millions of golden birds, O future Force! (K.D.S.)
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10. I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright.(Ibid.)
1."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,
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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.
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)
1In the final form of Savitri the description has bee n expanded from its original 31 lines of the 1936 version to 5I. (K.D.S.)
2 We may revert to the remark of Sri Aurobindo made in 1946 and already, quoted by us, in which he refer s to hi s attitude ten years earlier : "At that
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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)
________
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.)
1 From The Life Heavens .
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(I 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,
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 describable or definable? What is prominent in No.3 is a certain calm, deep and intense 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'
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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."
"... 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."
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"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 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
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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 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
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Vanam pratibhayam śūnyam jhillikdgananāditam1
or remember its call to the soul of man
Anityam asukham lokam imam prāpya bhajasva mām
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 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 inks 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,
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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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 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 javīyo nainad devā āpnuvam pūrvam
arsat...
Tad ejati tan naijati tad dūre 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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EPILOGUE
THE OVERHEAD PLANES
Sri Aurobindo
... A few have dared the last supreme ascent
And break through borders of blinding light above,
And feel a breath around of mightier air,
Receive a vaster being's messages
And bathe in its immense intuitive Ray.
On summit Mind are radiant altitudes
Exposed to the lustre of Infinity,
Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth,
Upraised estates of Mind and measureless ...
A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes;
Its smallest parts are here philosophies
Challenging with their detailed immensity,
Each figuring an omniscient scheme of things.
But higher still can climb the ascending light;
There are vasts of vision and eternal suns,
Oceans of an immortal luminousness,
Flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks.
There dwelling all becomes a blaze of sight;
A burning head of vision leads the mind,
Thought trails behind it its long comet tail;
The heart glows, an illuminate and seer,
And sense is kindled into identity.
A highest flight climbs to a deepest view:
In a wide opening of its native sky
Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack
Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs,
Its fiery edge of seeing absolute
Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self,
Rummages the sky-recesses of the brain,
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Lights up the occult chambers of the heart;
Its spear-point ictus of discovery
Pressed on the cover of name, the screen of form,
Strips bare the secret soul of all that is.
Thought there has revelation's sun-bright eyes;
The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,
Enters Truth's inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and life.
Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse,
The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
Time's buffer state bordering Eternity,
Too vast for the experience of man's soul:
All here gathers beneath one golden sky:
The Powers that build the cosmos station take
In its house of infinite possibility;
Each god from there builds his own nature's world;
Ideas are phalanxed like a group of sums;
Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard;
All Time is one body, Space a single book:
There is the Godhead's universal gaze
And there the boundaries of immortal Mind:
The line that parts and joins the hemispheres
Closes in on the labour of the Gods
Fencing eternity from the toil of Time.
In her glorious kingdom of eternal light
All-ruler, ruled by none, the Truth supreme,
Omnipotent, omniscient and alone,
In a golden country keeps her measureless house;
In its corridor she hears the tread that comes
Out of the Unmanifest never to return
Till the Unknown is known and seen by men.
Above the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight,
Above the silence of the wordless Thought,
Formless creator of immortal forms,
Nameless, investitured with the name divine,
Transcending Time's hours, transcending Timelessness,
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The Mighty Mother sits in lucent calm
And holds the eternal Child upon her knees,
Attending the day when he shall speak to Fate.
There is the image of our future's hope;
There is the sun for which all darkness waits,
There is the imperishable harmony;
The world's contradictions climb to her and are one:
There is the Truth of which the world's truths are shreds,
The Light of which the world's ignorance is the shade
Till Truth draws back the shade that it has cast,
The Love our hearts call down to heal all strife,
The Bliss for which the world's derelict sorrows yearn:
Thence comes the glory sometimes seen on earth,
The visits of Godhead to the human soul,
The Beauty and the dream on Nature's face.
There the perfection born from Eternity
Calls to it the perfection born in Time,
The truth of God surprising human life,
The image of God overtaking finite shapes.
There is a world of everlasting Light,
In the realms of the immortal Superrnind
Truth who hides here her head in mystery,
Her riddle deemed by reason impossible
In the stark structure of material form,
Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there
Is Nature and the common law of things.
There in a body made of spirit stuff,
The hearth-stone of the everlasting Fire,
Action translates the movements of the soul,
Thought steps infallible and absolute
And life is a continual worship's rite,
A sacrifice of rapture to the One.
A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense
Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form
And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light
Discovers the bright face of the Bodiless,
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In the truth of a moment, in the moment's soul
Can sip the honey-wine of Eternity.
A Spirit who is no one and innumerable,
The one mystic infinite Person of his world
Multiplies his myriad personality,
On all his bodies seals his divinity's stamp
And sits in each immortal and unique.
The Immobile stands behind each daily act,
A background of the movement and the scene,
Upholding creation on its might and calm
And change on the Immutable's deathless poise.
The Timeless looks out from the travelling hours;
The Ineffable puts on a robe of speech
Where all its words are woven like magic threads
Moving with beauty, inspiring with their gleam,
And every thought takes up its destined place
Recorded in the memory of the world.
The Truth supreme, vast and impersonal
Fits faultlessly the hour and circumstance,
Its substance a pure gold ever the same
But shaped into vessels for the spirit's use,
Its gold becomes the wine jar and the vase.
All there is a supreme epiphany:
The All-Wonderful makes a marvel of each event,
The All-Beautiful is a miracle in each shape;
The All-Blissful smites with rapture the heart's throbs,
A pure celestial joy is the use of sense.
Each being there is a member of the Self,
A portion of the million-thoughted All,
A claimant to the timeless Unity,
The many's sweetness, the joy of difference
Edged with the intimacy of the One.
Savitri—Book X, Canto 4.
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