Poems
THEME/S
ISBN 81-7058-330-6
Poems seeking a new intensity of inner vision and emotion that would catch alive the deepest rhythms of the spirit secret behind man's life and the world in which he labours and aspires.
Rs. 550.00
THE SECRET SPLENDOUR
COLLECTED POEMS
of
K. D. Sethna (Amal Kiran)
SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM
PONDICHERRY
First Edition: 1993
(Typeset in 11/13 Times Roman)
NOTE
The jacket-picture and the frontispiece illustrate the poem "Two Birds" appearing on p. 131.
© K. D. Sethna
Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry - 605002
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry - 605002
PRINTED IN INDIA
A Self-Searching Introduction
Whoever hopes to publish a volume of "Collected Poems" - that is, poetic work in fair bulk - is expected to have formed some idea of what poetry is. A stray piece of verse now and then may not call for any understanding of the art at play in it. But a serious and sustained resort to this art is bound to evoke a sense of insight into it, meeting two basic questions. First, how do imagination, feeling, thought, language and rhythm combine in a living whole? Next, what is the general suggestion they spark off about the source of that totality?
As answering these questions, I cannot do better than consider in some detail a well-known example of the poetic art in action. When Keats made the first draft of his Endymion, his friend Henry Stephens remarked about the opening line -
A thing of beauty is a constant joy -
that it was good but still "wanting something". Evidently the fine sentiment correctly metred was not enough for him. Keats weighed the criticism for a few minutes, then cried out, "I have it", and rewrote:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
All readers of Keats would agree that here, as Abb6 Bremond once commented, "the current passes". But what exactly has brought about the difference between the original version and the revised one?
To begin with: the former sounded like a truth needing to be pressed upon our attention rather than going home to us in its own right with an innate power. This power endows the revised version with a ring of spontaneity, an air of immediate creativity, whereas the earlier bore the look of a built-up effect, a striking construction, even though it may have been written without effort. As Keats had to work for the revision, he cannot be called spontaneous in the ordinary sense. But in poetry the quality of the end-product alone counts. It does not matter how that quality is reached - at first blush or after labour. And only such spontaneity as consists in a straight shaping by the life within, swiftly or slowly,
Page xxv
and not a moulding by any sort of surface skill is what Keats, whose MSS witness to various changes, had in mind when he laid down in a letter to John Taylor that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all."1
Technically we may say that the passage between us and the poetic vision in Keats's final wording has been quite cleared by the removal of that cluster of consonants in the epithet "constant" so that the voice runs more smoothly from the fact of "beauty" perceived to the fact of "joy" felt. A further triumph of technique is that the substitute - "for ever" - stands precisely where it does. The aptness of its position will be realised if we compare the line with one in which, though all the words are the same, the position is reversed:
A thing of beauty is for ever a joy.
Here we get a special excitement woven into the declaration. Now there are no impeding consonants but the voice slightly jumps instead of finding an even sweep of moved significance. Another difference is that no syllable hangs over from the ten-syllabled five-foot pattern. The exceeding of the pentametrical scheme by the second syllable of "ever" in Keats's final version is a small hint of the breaking of limits by the joy. It provides a faint yet unescapable inkling of an indefinite beyond.
At a level subtler than the technical we may pronounce that Keats's rejection of his first draft has delicately deepened the sense. The sense has glided from an implicit to an explicit indication of perpetuity as though the joy given by loveliness were not such as to persist steadily - be "constant" - from moment to moment by some kind of push from the past but is, in its very essence, termless - proceeds "for ever" - by a pull from the whole future. In the final version the joy itself is presented as being by its own nature imperishable and this presentation depends appreciably on "for ever" following the word it qualifies instead of preceding it as in the alternative we have considered. The precedence would not quite convince us that "for ever" shows an
1 The most famous changes were those which resulted in that two-line master-piece of inexhaustible enchantment:
... magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
The first draft had "windows" for "casements" and "keelless" for "perilous"
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in-built quality of the happiness involved. The line as it stands speaks not only of a joy we can experience termlessly because of a capacity in us but also of a joy that is objectively and per se interminable. And such an impression of intrinsic freedom from termination by time is bound up with just one particular verbal turn - namely, "for ever" - selected for the close of the line. No other will do. The line would miss its mark if it ran, for instance:
A thing of beauty is a joy unending.
Keats has achieved his exquisite credo by means of an expression which signals specifically the temporal process as knowing no end. So, upon the flow of time which bears "a thing of beauty" onward endlessly as "a joy", there seems to fall with a quiet assurance the shadow of some archetypal permanence, as it were. The loveliness spoken of appears no longer to be earth-born in the course of the years but rather earth's echo of a hidden eternity, a remote ideality.
Within our own minds too a strange stir is experienced. Receiving the line's felicitous pointer to a mysterious Platonic realm of flawless existences immune from transience, we are vaguely led to figure something detached from the hold of time in the depths of our being. No philosophy is formulated, yet what Aristotle and, long before him, the seers of the Rigveda called "the immortal in the mortal" gets imagined as opening secret eyes to appreciate the visionary drift of Keats's assertion.
Along with this inmost response, the sensitive reader cannot help recognising that Keats's assertion applies to every poetic act at its climax, whether or not the act brings, as here, in its very content a glimmer of the permanent and the archetypal. For, each consummate piece of poetry is "a thing of beauty" by the perfection of its meaningful form, the absolute of expression which we feel in its significant word-order. The subject may be anything - the ruins of ancient Petra in the Near East as seen by Burgon -
A rose-red city half as old as time -or Antony's impassioned final gesture to Cleopatra in Shakespeare -
I am dying, Egypt, dying; only
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips -
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or the profound tragedy Wordsworth sums up:
And mighty poets in their misery dead.
As with Keats's line, the absolute of expression in Wordsworth's phrase may be thrown into relief by a slight change in the verbal sequence:
And mighty poets dead in their misery.
Then the phrase is no more a perfection of meaningful form. The extremity of the situation, the finality of the doom are lost by the word "dead" losing its end-place.
Wherever poetry has the accent which we may distinguish as "inevitable", the simple or complex light and delight it conveys give us the sense of the writer being the mouthpiece of some more-than-human agency. Here I may revert to the theme of "spontaneity" on which I have already touched. The truly spontaneous is not necessarily, though it can surely be at times, what springs up at once, no matter how forceful or ingenious it may be. Spontaneity carries a certain freshness fused with intensity, a speech coming as if direct from an intimacy with the heart of a subject. It is not a product of the mere mind. But this mind may serve to dig a channel, by trying out various versions, for the inmost to spring forth on a sudden. Yeats, one of the most authentic poets of our day, speaks on behalf of the practitioners of his craft:
A line will take us hours maybe:
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought.
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Reached in any way, the appearance of being "a moment's thought" defines poetic spontaneity and it points to an enigmatic inward presence uttering its native supra-intellectual tongue, inherently magical, through the poet's personality. The ancients recognised, without any cavil, the bard's extraordinary state by speaking of his "inspiration" - of his being the mouthpiece of the "Muse" - and there is no poet who has not known in his best hours a sovereign power beyond himself, breathing into him the works he creates. Moderns tend to shy away from mystical notions about their art because of so-called scientific views, though the story of science itself is full of what have come to be labelled as "intuitive" flashes or leaps behind its logical or mathematical structures from
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sense-data. Superficial fashions often prevent our poets from probing sufficiently their own subtle sources. But, whether they avow an attitude of mysticism or not, the pulse of the godlike in their highest productions is unavoidably their guide. Instinctively they are Platonists in their art, serving the mission of some faultless model of word-music. It is because of this unescapable idealism that even one who by intellectual persuasion is a sceptic or an atheist can still create great poetry through the keen artistic conscience in him and feel as if immortal presences were moving from one perfect poise to another in his verse. Did not Elizabeth Browning refer to the Roman poet Lucretius as denying divinely the Divine?
Marking how adaptable to the genuine poet's tirelessly corrective passion for perfection in his work is that faith of Hamlet -
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we may -
we might be right to think: "If one consciously puts oneself in tune with a mystical realm one is likely to be more receptive of the afflatus." But we should guard against the glib belief that merely a spiritual subject and a religious articulation would make the deepest layers in us vocal. For there is a most important proviso. We have to bring to our task the true poetic turn. Even though we may breathe of God with every syllable properly significant, we shall serve ill whatever deity there may be unless we have the art to make our words winged.
It is by his artistic instinct that Lucretius the scoffer and materialist could raise his verse to rare heights. Stupendous indeed on occasion is the godlike movement of his Latin lines. Take those phrases where he describes the philosopher Epicurus, of whom he was a disciple, as triumphing over the crude superstitions of popular religion that blocked the path of rational investigation, and as pressing his intelligence upon the secret ways of things:
Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi
Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.
Somewhat freely one may attempt to english these grand hexameters:
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Therefore his vivid vigour of mind stood everywhere victor: Forward afar beyond the world's flaming walls he ventured, Crossing all the immensities led by his thought and his longing.
Here, from the largeness and audacity of both imagination and language, we would be inclined to see conjured up, beyond any philosopher, some high figure of spiritual history - the Upani-shadic Yajnavalkya compassing the Self of selves, the Plotinus of "the flight of the alone to the Alone", the wide-searching Eckhart, the manifold adept Ramakrishna or, best of all, our own day's Master of the Integral Yoga that would divinise all earth-life: Sri Aurobindo.
With the name of Sri Aurobindo I may appropriately close this mystic-minded introduction to my collected poems; for, versatile poet and broad-based literary critic no less than supreme Yogi, he has been the end of my quest for a life-transforming spirituality as well as a poetry seeking a new intensity of vision and emotion, an illumined inwardness that would catch alive in words the deepest rhythms of the human soul evolving towards infinite beauty and eternal joy.
18.6.93
K. D. SETHNA (AMAL KIRAN)
Page xxx
SOME MATTERS OF FACT
When I joined the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry instead of completing my studies for the M.A. degree from Bombay University, I had already dabbled in verse-making. An earnest self-dedication to poetry came only under the guiding eye of the Master of the Integral Yoga and the benedictory hand of his spiritual co-worker whom the Ashram called the Mother. Their joint aim was not simply to find the illuminations and beatitudes of the inner life but also to fulfil by their aid all the high hopes of outer living and to initiate in the world a new age of human harmony. I was to be prepared for that age under a new evocative Sanskrit name from Sri Aurobindo: "Amal Kiran" - which he translated "The Clear Ray".
As a result of the poetic work done over several years as part of the attempt to practise a many-sided mysticism, a small book of selections was published with the, title, The Secret Splendour. This title has now been considered suitable to cover all the poems brought out afterwards under different captions as well as those that have remained in typescript. However, a number of pieces from the original volume have been omitted in the section bearing this name because they had been included in the later selection called "Overhead Poetry": Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments, which now appears in full as the second section. The rest of the books - The Adventure of the Apocalypse and Altar and Flame - have been reproduced as they were first published, except that an epilogue in prose has been added to the former.
The Adventure of the Apocalypse was the only publication to carry its contents in a chronological order. Chronology is also the guide for much of the material pat together towards the end of the volume under the general heading Uncollected Work, save for one group standing last as a Supplement with the name Eros Known and Unknown (a name already used to cover three poems in Altar and Flame).
To make the collection as complete as possible, this group subtitled "Images from Early Moods", has been added. But the question may arise: "Does it strike an unsympathetic note?" Though not always in strict line with the aspirations, insights and experiences outflowing in verse from the via mystica, it yet carries in one mode or another a visionary vein which may be considered
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as straining, however distantly and with whatever secular themes, towards the secret splendour of he spiritual pursuit. Besides, there are already chords in the other sections which are in what may be called transforming tune with a background presence of the known Eros.
Preceding this group come the precious comments made by Sri Aurobindo other than those already a part of "Overhead Poetry" and of the prose section at the end of The Apocalypse. These comments have not been obtruded on the reader in the main body of the book so that he may form his own opinion rather than be influenced by what my Guru has said.
In an appendix to the collection the titles have been arranged in an alphabetical order, followed by an alphabetical index of first lines.
It is highly gratifying to me that without reading Sri Aurobindo's remarks an Englishwoman of wide culture from outside India, though inwardly in deep connection with the Ashram, has come forward on her own to propose and sponsor the present volume, making me her most grateful debtor.
The Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust was responsible for the first appearance of "Overhead Poetry" is a research-project of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, and the Sri Aurobindo Circle of Bombay for that of The Adventure. Altar and Flame owes its debut to "Aspiration", Charlotteville, Virginia. My cordial thanks are due to all these publishers for granting me permission to reproduce my books.
Page xxxii
Tree of Time
I am a tree of time, a swaying shadow.
With one sole branch lit by eternity—
All of me dark save this song-fruitful hand.
There the large splendour tunes my blood and makes
Fragments of deathless ecstasy outflower;
And I but live in these few fingers that trace
On life's uncoloured air a burning cry
From God-abysses to God-pinnacles.
Some day the buried vast which holds me rooted
In dreamful kinship to the height of heaven
Shall wake: then through each quivering nerve shall course
No feeble brightness self-consumed in joy
Like the brief passions of earth, but nectar-flame—
A Force drunk with its own infinitude.
Page 3
Intangible
Intangible she glimmers
Through solitary night,
A nameless moonray weaving
Her body's deathless white.
From a virgin world she travels
In shadow-life awaile,
Her beauty far with the frozen flame
Of her unravished smile.
She lets no mortal lover
Her eyes' deep silence share
Or steal the scented aumour of heaven
From the pale harp of her hair...
How long will you relinquish,
O soul, the sweet relief
Of the myriad cry whose colour is day,
For a dim transcendent grief;
And her bare eternity
Be cruel to love's caress,
Roaming the heart, unfathomed,
Wearing forgetfulless?
Page 4
Young-Hearted River!
When to your marge the slow night comes
With its innumerable gleams
To strew upon your gliding dreams
Kisses like pale chrysanthemums—
Young-hearted river, mutable, gay!
Forget not, in that cool embrace
Of naked shadow or the play
Of dim desire which throngs your gaze,
The ancient urge, the rapturous throe,
Beneath your surface' stellar stain,
Of floods from heights of endless snow
And pure immeasurable rain
That voiceless silences might break
To echo far profundities
And the long-slumtering mountains wake
To seek for the unsleeping seas....
Forget not, while brief gladdenings flit
Like fireflies through your lowland years,
The longing of ecstatic tears
From infinite to infinite.
Page 5
Far flute throbbing across earth s somnolence,
What Yogi's rapture trembles in your call?
What sanctities has your dream-vigil known
While the vague deepening shadow falls immense
On eve's dim echoes of the sunken day
Ere the cold stars emerge?
What visionary urge
Has stolen from horizons watch id alone
Into your being like a fathomless smile,
That you can thus enisle
With slow prolonged miraculous rise and fall
Of liquid melody my darkening sense?
...Or else perhaps a village boy who bends
Homeward his steps beneath the drowsy sway
Of palms, hears the familiar instrument
Wake to strange potence in his wondering hands
Till all the air is tremulously rent
By wizardries of incorporeal tone,
Because for one brief moment, sweet, intense,
Into his thought the immortal legend strayed
Of how Lord Krishna once the flute had played
And made its simple heart of song His own!
...Whatever unknown lips' mellifluence
Be here, it's ecstasy to me; nor less,
When on his lonely path the charmer's gone
And from the shadows wavering with the breeze
The last gleam fades of all that passionate peace,
The music that has been.
For in its wake unearthly tenderness
Lingers, as though a press
Of benediction lay on me unseen
And love spoke to my heavenward groping mood
Out of the night's inhuman vastitude.
Page 6
I sought earth's lake of love, but she
With an ethereal treachery
My human hunger did betray
To heaven's glory cupped in clay!
I had not bargained to behold
A rhythm of cerulean gold
Nor with an aching mouth impress
Calm firmamental nakedness!
Through every wayward kiss I won
Quintessence of a spirit sun.
And all earth-relish I forgot
In far intoxicance of thought,
Condemned for ever more to be
A drunkard of infinity!
Page 7
Amid the whining of the saxophone
And the swift whisper of the dancing feet—
Amid the music's strangle-throated moan
And hundred swinging bodies' colour-heat,
She lures me with far world-triumphant lips
As though in one brief thrill of ecstasy
A wandering voice of epic destiny
Haunted the rhythmic swaying of her hips
.
Now ancient vows have vanished: for a space
We drift along a frenzied path of tune,
Although we know the stark morn will erase
This whirling scripture of the magic moon.
And kissing her vague mouth I scent the air
Of that lone night when neath the Trojan sail
Daughter of Leda passionate and pale
Unbound the tender gloaming of her hair.
I give the heart of Priam's ageless son
To star-born Helen for those paces few;
The clamorous labyrinth of the jazz is run
And faithless feet once more old ways pursue.
For thus we moderns drink of love's fierce joy:
We launch no ships: we yield—the Moment's thralls—
And disappear. With foxtrot and with waltz
We trace upon our lives the tale of Troy.
Page 8
The body's fire takes birth to Till a void
The half-awakened soul leaves in all love—
But our delight has room for not one kiss!
Lip-parted quietudes listening afar,
The hours go drunken with a honeyed hum
Of heartbeats round immortal fragrances
In a spirit wideness sown with spirit stars.
We build no more, to catch undying Beauty,
A transitory tangle of desire.
Does flame ache to possess its own warm gold
Or billow strain to seek its foamy blue?
What shall we thirst for, whither shall we burn,
Now that the flesh-garbs fall—a weight of sleep—
And the one God in us stands glowing bare?
Page 9
How would I pass into the souls great stillness?
Lead forth my love, but with a calm face turned
Let her look towards the lands of life and slowly
Unloosen all her pale hair's perfumed mass
Of delicate mystery. O halo of hair,
God's benediction on her mortal head,
Across my gloom ray down your tenderness!
O dream-cascade of splendour—to the quiet
Music of your faint falling I would die;
Upon heart-soothing spirit cadences
Carry me over the dread verge of time!...
And let there be to death no after-homage
Save the soft gathering of your shaken tones
Of living beauty into the old high stillness.
Page 10
Night in the Open
Darkness once more!—enveloping tired despair
Not with dull sleep but wide magnificence
Of silent beauty half-revealed, remote.
The dusty narrow ways are now forgot:
Each moment seems an everlasting eye
Of imperturbable omnipotence
Wherein towards an unimagined goal
Vast purposes move, glimmering, out of sight.
Plunged in deep gloom the flesh lies unaware
Of its own being, while the voiceless soul,
The little flame that struggled through daylight
In ghostly passion mocked by clamorous glare,
Feeds on the circumambient mystery
And grows august, articulate, immense—
A myriad tongues ablaze with ecstasy!
Page 11
Gautama
He sat aloof
Under the inhospitable roof
Of the nocturnal sky's indifference;
And lifted up
To its lost legendary spirithood
Worn hands of naked years—the chill stars stole
Passion and pride from his face, leaving a bare
Inscrutable glow beneath the uncrowned hair....
Yet each heart-beat of his rough solitude
Was a drop of unknown sweetness gathered in a cup
Of perfect life for the intense Burning and barren desert-lips of the world-soul!
Page 12
Rishi Parasara's Invocation
Lord of the Flame!
Flame that has stiffened into stone—
Flame that has melted into dew-
Flame that has leapt up into breath—
Wearing the robe of Time,
The tumult of life's protean hue,
The awful splendour of blind death—
Filling night's vacant clime
With the dim frenzy of star-wings!
I cry to Thee, O million-faced
Among Thy multitudes alone!
raise my prayer to Thee, swift-paced
Whose beauty quivers through all things,
Hearken unto the hymnal word
Begotten of the burling brain
And the long vigil of the heart
Through keen hours of distress,
Tense with the sacrificial pain
Of eyes pierced by he mystic dart
Of Thy vast loveliness!
My gloom with nameless ecstasy
Turns luminous, my earth-desire—
Companionless, dream-sepulchred—
Awakes, a yearning tongue afire
With taste of Thy divinity,
Thy form primordial manifest,
Whence streamed this passionate pageantry
That moves within our light of thought
Page 13
And shining orb of sense!
My heart grows wide with lust for Thee-
I reel, the hymnal word forgot—
My eyes with tears are dense!
Sudden my limbs hang ages old!
An unimaginable wind
Lifts me from crest to giant crest
Of joy—O merge my dazzled mind
Into Thy Truth's transcendent gold,
Page 14
A huge sky-passion sprouting from the earth
In branching vastnesses of leafy rapture,
Thy beauty quivers through my aching sense
into my soul, O Forest, like a fire!
Nor shall my memory fail thy fragile buds
Of poor wild wayside nameless fragrances,
Thin grasses with unrecognised small discs
Of humble colour—they too shall be mine!
For through the widening silence of my thought
The warrior wind, the tall tree's gorgeous cry,
The chilling slashed monotony of rain,
The frog's barbaric wail, the sedge's sigh
Pass like one mystic splendour.... O pure Spirit,
Love for thy beauty has made even my slumber
The smile of an invisible great light
Upon each limb; but thou hast also taught me
From the profundities of voiceless calm
To wake with an ever simple gay child-heart—
As, when the white emerging dawn first falls
On thy large wood-gloom green and murmurless,
The solemn meditation of slow night
Breaks into glimmering bird-melody!...
My whole self flames and flowers, an eternal
Wonder impregnate with thy paradise;
Each hue has kindled here an ecstasy,
Each swaying shadow left a benison.
I kneel, O Master: all my life is thine!
Page 15
Quest
Long have I sought I Him
Yet never could find,
In the heart's hollow
Or hill of mind;
Neither through lifted
Azure surmise
Nor the red darkness
Of calm shut eyes!
Will no ardour
Of solitude limn
My roving bareness
With image of Him?
Dreams His hair wayward
Gossamer-light
Or a cool heavy
Hanging night?
O once I knew joy
In unborn years
Ere the mist floated
Of earthly tears!. .
But sweeter than tangible
Loveliness yet,
This haloed absence
I never forget!
Page 16
Lalita
Why is she silent to the ear of day?
Why turns she now a loveless countenance
To life's appeal of fire, the turbulent lay
Of passion-colour to her listening glance?—
Listening, but with how distance a dream-hue
In answer to some world-end loveliness
Of spirit wood-voice flowering neath moon-dew!
Her heart's lone-throbbing music none can guess
Who has not watched when vigil silences
Of inward prayer upon her visage wrought
In perfect rhythm the gloom-glow of her thought.
Her love's a flute ensouled with timeless drouth,
Craving each night the touch of Krishna's mouth
To wake its exquisite eternities.
Page 17
Everything points now
Somewhere, somewhere,
Silverly straining
Through the dusk air.
The boughs have lifted
Pearl-tipped flames,
Tremulous, leafy,
Finding their aims.
From the sea rise up
Fingers of foam
Trying to pierce through
The veil of gloam.
The wind has drawn out
In calm cloud-streams
A beautiful pallor
Of guiding dreams.
And the lone crescent's
Two-horned light,
Where is it calling
The eyes of night?
Are they all pointing
Words to my mind,
Poems unwritten
Where I shall find
Page 18
In each pure cadence
A fall of foot
Bringing earthward
A mystical mute
Ecstasy, lover,
Immortal mate
To the poignant sorrow
Of human fate?
Page 19
Tryst
Fall shut, vain eyes, for you have never seen Him:
Your gaudy eagerness serves but to screen Him.
Forget your revel, O insatiate ears:
You have not heard the Heart of the universe.
Lips, guard all breath—awaiting on your own
Stillness the silent kiss of the Unknown....
Life flows a river foaming ferryless
Between the myriad marge of outwardness
And the Eternal Lover's lonelihood Of unseen bank—until a soul-sense mood
Winters the hurrying wave, a fozen sheet
Of trance to bear across the all-beautiful Feet.
Page 20
Night has a core
Sense never knows
Either through glove-worm wandering white
Or silver-calm tuberose.
Aimless the cloud
In half-light curls,
And the cool wideness of the breeze
Unmeaningfully whirls.
Human eyes gain,
Though long they pore,
No mood of secret paradise
From mutable foam-roar.
But when deep drowse
World-vision stops
Nor voices weave their weird design,
A sudden vesture drops!
Ineffable
The ecstasy
That, stripping clamour-hue,
divines Naked eternity...
Yet all too soon
Earth-joys dispel
The mute mysterious wonderment
Of the vast Invisible.
Too soon the bright
Bird-rabbles sweep
With changing colour-cry across
The sanctuary of sleep.
Page 21
"It is inconstancy
To watch the myriad dew of flickering light
Impearl the mystery
Of the enormous efflorescent night.
O close your eyes and press
Your face to mine: is not your heart appeased?
Leave to forgetfulness
The slow sky-moments wandering to the east!
Why must you love to scan
The boundless music-glimmer of the main?
Vast-souled surf-echoing man,
To me your songs are an eternity of pain!
"The flames in twilight's wake,
The twinkling miracles of unknown dream-dust,
In throbs of silver make
A wanton beauty's beckoning star-lust!
To my heart's frenzied glance
A siren soul builds with enchanted clay
The face of lonely trance
With which night waits for the illumining day!
The inscrutable foam cry
Spells some strange wayward passion's reverie,
Luring to far reply
Of world-forgetful thirst love's near-mouthed ecstasy!"
Page 22
All
Not mine the changeful flame of love that burns
With the brief strangeness of the passing hours—
Prey to the slow chill shadow that devours
The shining fantasy of loveliness.
You are to me, O girl, a vision upcaught
Into the passionate tranquillity
Of time-triumphant archetypal thought
Beyond the aching gaze, the mouth that yearns,
The cruel joys that glimmer and depart.
Not spirit alone but even the frail fair clay
I hold within that quintessential light
Above the pain and pallor of distress:
I saw you in a flash of eternity
And gathered your whole life into my heart—
All the young dazzle of your proud spring-day
And all the snow and sorrow of your winter-night!
Page 23
'Twas day nor night:
In a borderland of hues,
Facing each other
We sat a-muse.
Wing-sails were gone—
Air-waves forgot to rush;
With bodies of twilight
And souls of hush
We sat in a dream,
Yearning to vanish and be
A single-hearted
Eternity.
The swooning skies
Mingled our thoughts afar:
From the deep purple
Broke one star.
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Arcane
Always a rapture
Remains untold,
An infinite vista
No eyes behold.
Gleaming with beauty,
All musics thrill
Urged by some viewless
Ineffable.
Changes of silver
Are rung by each tune:
Who knows the other
Side of the moon?
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Plenitude
Men call Thee bare because they fear Thy light,
The dazzle of far chastity that brings
A joy but with the whole heart void of things
Dear to brief clay; yet grows Thy simple white
The virgin mother of each passionate tone,
Save for the mind that will not follow fast
The visionary winging of Thy Vast
Above the narrow blisses earth has known.
He whose desire from mortal love is freed
Catches the treasure veiled in Thy pure speed
And, from the bare white, views a luxury burst:
Truth-pulsing gold to which the sun were black,
A griefless carmine that all roses lack,
One ample azure brimming every thirst!
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I was a worshipper of gorgeous sound—
The rocky reboance of a waterfall,
Immeasurable the nightwind's lion-call,
The moonward baying of the great sea-hound.
I was a devotee of splendid hush—
Silvery moonglobe's surf-awaking sleep,
Purple precipitous lone-brooding steep
Of massive hills where wind and water rush.
But now, O Lord, Your puissances have grown
Such intimate love that my soul-dream has grasped
Grandeur through briefest beauty: I have viewed
A flying heart-beat of infinitudie
In every voiceful wing-waft and have known
Ages of joy from tiny blossoms clasped!
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(From the French of Henri Malteste)
To Christ gave Magdalen her exquisite soul.
Was it to God surrendered? Who can guess
The secret balsam soothing her distress,
The mystic urge that made his feet her goal?—
Unearthly feet touched by impassioned breath
And soft hair odorous with spikenard,
Losing their triumph—seeking, mournful, marred,
Through angry mobs the blind cold spikes of death!
O poet Jesus, love was your sole law;
Yet such strange love that Magdalen's matchless grace
Burned not so keen in your celestial thought
As the intractable heart of man you saw
Her wondrous worshipping mouth, yet gave your face
To the hollow kiss of the Iscariot!
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(From the French of Jose-Maria de Heredia)
A flight of vultures from their charnel home,
Tired of the burden of proud misery,
From Palos in Moguer, with their rude reverie
Drunk, daring plunderers winged through the sea-foam,
Fire-eyed to gain the ripe and glittering ore
That golden fabulous far Zipangu mined;
But their fierce prow the heedless gale inclined
Towards the western world's mysterious shore.
Each night, dream-messenger of epic dawn.
In a myriad miracle of enchanting hue
The phantom flame of tropic waters shone
Across the impetuous longing of their eyes.
While the dark limitless horizon threw
A wealth of strange stars into unknown skies.
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I
(From the French of Sully Prudhomme)
Dim archipelago of the endless sea,
The Great Bear's light foreshone earth's infant day—
August ere Chaldea watched its mystery
Or the soul's yearning vexed the ambiguous clay.
A myriad eyes since then have caught its gleam
Of unapproachable splendour blindly hurled;
In agelong unconcern its rays shall stream
On the last mortal's dumb death-desolate world.
No Christian look is thine: unchangeably,
O fatal form, thou glimmerest in the night,
Like seven gold nails fixed in c ark drapery.
Thy slow precision and thy frigid glare
Discourage faith: 'twas thou, monotonous light,
First chilled the passion of my evening prayer.
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II
(Suggested by Sully Prudhomme's Sonnet)
Remote, disdainful, the celestial Bear
Prowls through the desert centuries of gloom,
A Spirit whose stark spectral hush of doom
Blights the brief sanctity of human prayer.
Whence this invariable frigid stare
Of pitiless splendour? From what monstrous womb
Sprang these cold fires that vacantly consume
The sweet oblations of the soul's despair?
Or findst thou, fatal form, too lust-alloyed
Our hungry worship craving to commune
With heaven's light for fugitive earth-boon?
Lo then my love—a single-aimed flinchless dart!
Shall it not pierce, lone-leaping through the void.
The dim indifference of thy God-heart?
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Ilda
(From the French of Albert Samain)
Hers the still charm, the cold magnetic spell
Of a Norwegian autumn-dawn's pale glow;
Into harmonious calm around her fell
The thoughts of men, like footsteps hushed in snow.
Mingled with the brief tremor of human breath
Her countenance bore a tranquil prophecy
Of the infinite grandeur that enhaloes death,
Making all laughter seem a blasphemy.
World-strange desire plying an oar of dream
Roamed through the fathomless azure of her eye.
Lost in vague play with her curls' coiling stream,
She poured from her mood's far effulgences
On all she touched a hue of mystery,
And lived in the rapture of deep silences.
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("She who was the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all good, coming where 1 was, denied me her most sweet salutation, in which alone was my blessedness."—Dante's Vila Nuova)
O Beatrice, one word's saluting grace
Breathed from your mystery-haunted flower-sweet
Visage would have becalmed the passion-heat
Vexing my vague mind's melancholy space.
But dreams eternal beckoned to your gaze
Down the grey curve of this Florentine street!
Smileless you went; and I must turn my feet
To seek your love beyond all earthly days....
Following the track of your lost smile I pass
Now and for ever to the inmost deep
Where each dark hour shall be a mirroring glass
Of solitary giant-hearted sleep—
Resolved to wake not till your mien caress
My trancehood, like a Sun of deathlessness!
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Dante on the Eve of the 'Divina Commedia'
Gloom-bird they call me—for I brood apart.
One with night's incommunicable mind,
All human frenzy quenched within my heart
By the haunting rapture of the vast dream-wind
That blows, star-fragrant, from eternity.
Drunk with the Unknown, I wander mute and blind;
But not, O Beatrice, blind and mute to thee:
For ever across my inmost soul is flung
The vision of thy smile's virginity—
My very blood turns consecrated song,
An unappeasable mysterious surge
With thy moon-glory maddening its tongue!
O might I carry to the doomsday verge,
Filling all time with deathless harmony,
Thy name, fair Spirit that through the molten gurge
Of lava lusts kept fixed unchangeably
Thy guardian look till on my seared face shone
The constellated coolness of God's eye!
O thou whose liberating charm has drawn,
Uplifted into his native infinite,
Out of my body's burning Babylon
The sense-enchained ethereal Israelite!—
Young saviour, holding in thy calm child-gaze
Heaven's truth, as in a lake of silent night
Blossom the lilies of celestial space!
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The glamour-tide calling across each day
Borrows no beauty from the outer sun:
It is a mirrored moment of the way
Which wanders dreaming to the Inmost One.
We can but know brief light and fickle foam
Until through space and time we sail to win
Vespers and dawns and noons of God on some
Gigantic rapture rolling from within.
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Isis of the Black Veils
In veil on veil of silken gloom
She burns like a dark flame through the room.
Out of her whirling fantasy
Strange shadow-figures flash and flee:
A night-winged moth, a fierce blind rose,
A driving storm of sable snows!...
In a deeper rhythm cf impetuous dance
Echoing her mournful countenance,
Her swaying shrouded limbs express
The death-heart of life's loveliness:
The abysmal void round mortal hours,
The awful silence that devours
With gaping mouth cf sombre sky
The soul's adorant anguished cry!...
Suddenly her ominous beauty swerves
To a harmony of slow chaste curves,
That, like a dream-halo around cloud-hills.
With a glimmer and a rumour fills
The intent wide wonder of the mind.
Her flying drapery's tenebrous wind
Wearies and wavering falls to rest
Along calm earthward leaning breast
Of visionary motherhood
And her arm's entranced uplifting mood.
Now the diaphanous silk-glooms show
Her inward mystery, white, aglow!
The sense of unappeasable tears
Fades from their desolate universe,
As though across its terror shone
A revelation of moon-dawn!
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All that heavenly lustres
To earth reveal
Are roses mortal fingers
Never feel.
Ethereal blooms mock minds
Unluminous:
Faces of cold high beauty
Madden us.
How shall our common day
Clasp content
When glows afar a godlike
Firmament?......
But, dreaming a Deep within,
Our hearts can move
Beyond all gods and gather
A mate to our love—
And draw from a holy hidden
Core of night
A glimmer and a rumour
Of All-delight,
Until to our hush of gloom
Fire-tongues are given
Uttering eternities
Higher than heaven.
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The noon of night: twelve sounds linger and cease...
Silence again, but now a different peace
Floats on my dream as though the end of time's
Self-utterance were reached in those twelve chimes
Monotonously ebbing on night s breath.
The darkness is a miracle of death
Into mysterious God-life brimming high
With dewy singlehood of earth and sky.
The body-barriers, swooning, fall from me
And merge in a shoreless stirless rapture-sea
Unwaved of form and mutability!
And though too soon a stroke of time will pierce
The veil of trance hiding the universe,
Washed in eternal joy shall rise the poignant hours.
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She danced, a mournful wave below the dusk;
But with her human grief mingled a voice
Of universal sorrow, one great rose
Of light dissolving through the windy gloom
To a giant reverie upon the surge
And fall of her song-heart. Plumbless, she grew
In symbol-prayer the whole earth's futile beauty—
But so unbearable deep-churning a prayer
That, in strange answer to its aching wideness,
Out of her spirit's sea a rapture swayed
Into her body and for one poise-moment
All her enchanted shape was Aphrodite!...
Mortal again, she trembled; yet those limbs
Left the bare spaces perfumed with life's goal.
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Rooted in deep on measureless deep of love,
A rapture-rock intense with quietude—
They rise, companion-crests of dream above
A shadowy world, in mystic parenthood.
Their children shall be eyes new-born to climb-
Out of old dark, kissed by aluminous swoon
Of passion-prayer cleaving beyond all time—
Two summits haloed by one perfect moon.
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With skill of mortal tongue how shall I phrase
A mirroring glory for Her glorious face?—
The deep prefiguring halcyon of those eyes
Assuaging with love's intimate replies
The wounded cry of faith to destiny—
The smile wherein eternities awake
To human mercy, an ineffable sun's
August Omnipotence
Softened to rainbow-beauty for our sake,
That we of fearful vision may behold
What fount of delicate-hued felicity
Hides in that far keen terrible heart of gold—
The voice of passionate truth which beckons me
Towards pinnacled perfection fills my name
With such celestial music that I rise,
My shattered hours made whole,
Triumphant over the agelong grim distress
Of life's embodiment and shackled shame;
For, the adorer soul
Hearing its name turn godlike with Her tone
Feels all its essence grown
A gleam of her ecstatic loveliness!...
O ineffectual words, the endless tale
Of Her transmuting miracles you fail
To imprison in melody.
Needs must the soul express
Its thrilled response to Her divinity?
In silence 'twere more meet
To touch with lips of fervour those earth-sojourning feet!
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Grace
Take all my shining hours from me,
But hang upon my quiet soul's
Pale brow your dream-kiss like a gem.
Let life fall stricken to its knee,
If unto lone-faced poverty
You give your blessing's diadem.
Make of these proud eyes beggar-bowls,
But only drop your smile in them.
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Encliffed above the day's sky-fall,
Watching a gradual hush begloam
With purple somnolence the call
And quiver of labyrinthine foam—
She stands aloof in imperturb
Dream-ecstasy of nameless jet,
A symbol-mood of shades which curb
Life's glamour to soul-silhouette.
Then all is night: her self, more grave,
With the Invisible grows one,
And each dark monotoning wave
A pulse of time-oblivion.
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Vision
Rapt in her virgin smile I had no room
For any cry or colour of common days:
The world was one huge emptiness, a gloom
Lost in the angelic dreamlight on her face.
All lesser love passed from my memory—
But, far above the mind's unearthly gaze,
In deep miraculous spirit-poignancy
A dazzling paradise flowered alone,
Wafting a fragrant immortality
Of purple widenesses whose joy unknown
Throbbed in a multitudinous passion of light
To make her human breath one with its own!
And now her soul yearned out, a lily of white
Vigil and prayer unsheathed by sable years,
Seeking that gorgeous bloom of the Infinite
Whose perfume called across the atmospheres—
"O lily of soul long captive in the sod,
Uplift thy face beyond the un verse
And, time-bare, merge in thy mate, the Rose of God!"
But like an ageless sob from her—"Too long
A labyrinthine gloom the flesh has trod:
Surely with thy perennial colour-song
Thou wilt bestrew its unillumined way,
And with our nuptial's sky-warm reveries throng
The barren sleep of miserable clay?
Not on the heights alone but in the abyss
Love me, that from the passion of thy ray
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All future life may spring a child of bliss!
Why was I pent below if not to be
A heart of time which might d aw down thy kiss
And people earth with thy eternity?"...
Then I awoke. A delicate golden mirth.
Trembled through my dim veins: each cell of me
Lay like a seed of shadowless new-birth.
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No power could span
My fathomless
Agelong profundity
Of soul-forgetfulness.
Between the unheard
Deific shore
And my earth-captive life
Billowed a sense-uproar—
Until there dawned
Her haloed mien
Of silence beautiful
With love of the Unseen.
Her gaze might droop
Weary awhile,
But though each lash hung wet
Her lips of faith would smile.
And from that curve
of bliss I won
A dreamful boat to cross
My heart's oblivion
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Frailty
No delicate flower finds its perfume-poise
More chilled than now this timid flame of prayer;
A. rough wind blowing from the world's commotion
Leaves my heart-incense broken on the air!
But, O miraculous Calm, out of my weakness
Build up a sudden towering vehemence:
Make so death-frail the sprout of life's endeavour,
So void of help without Your tranquil beauty
That I must cling and cling to You for ever—
Ivied with love round Your omnipotence!
Page 47
In cloud-suspense the faint breeze died;
A deep glow spread on every side:
The firmamental hush came down,
A mirrored soul of aureate brown
Subduing each form-shade to one
Pervasive ecstasy of sun.
No leaf-stir and no flitting mood
Profaned the holy quietude
In which the strange responding earth
Travailed with some miraculous birth—
As though a presence richly far,
Flowering like a vague gold star,
Trembled within her undefiled
Womb-vision—a shadowless spirit-child
Whose splendour of futurity
Would celebrate in mortally
The secret hour when, on the dazzled clay,
Like an eternal lover silence lay.
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When lips go singing love,
The eyes are wet
Because of an unviewed
Visage They never can forget.
Immitigable gloom
Hangs between
Our dream and dawns of Beauty
No yearning heart has seen.
O vain all magic tune
Weaved by despair:
Who shall imprison Godhead
In moving nets of air?
Only the quiet fall
Of pure flesh-line
Rhyming with soul of worship
Beckons the far Divine;
And though clay-eyes are dim
The lips' lone drouth
Is sealed to a hush of heaven
By a viewless Love's mouth.
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A violet wisdom gathers in cool eve
To calm the loud day's many-coloured thought.
Now the whole wandering universe sleeps—one:
Purple the tree and purple every bird
And even flight is a vague flower thrown
From boughs of vaguenesses. The gloamy hour
Brings all far beauty close by some mauve throb
Of inner vigil echoed everywhere.
Desire lies numb, for distances are nought:
The walls of varied flame drop down awhile,
Sunk to one single Love's immensity.
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Dawn
How earth-strange on the ethereal way
Travels the first wing-carillon
A-tremble with the silver dawn
Ere rush of golden day!
Across slow-widening brightness, still
A dim-disclosured seerecy,
Quivers the foliage-tracery
Apart, inscrutable.
As though their breath was made divine
By dew of contemplative hours,
There hangs like aura round the flowers
A nameless shadow-shine.
The heart, a hovering consciousness,
Thrills on some paradisal verge
As if awakening to merge
With beauty sorrowless.
Familiar hues are yet unborn,
A veil half-hiding them lays bare,
Shimmering through the mystic air,
An alchemy of morn,
Wherein the sense of earthly eyes
If soul could only learn to steep,
Out of the human dross of sleep
A golden god would rise!
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August 15 — Sri Aurobindo's Birthday
I thought of a thousand marvels to implore—
Yet when I touched Thy mystery's heart, no more
The lust came crowding: not one plea I bear
Unto Thy altar as my penury's sign,
But bring my whole poor self to make it Thine!
Now goldenest boon hangs like a mote of air:
Deep-sunk in worship, void of puny prayer,
So large a hush of indigence is mine,
Nought save that ageless measureless charity—
Thy utter Self—can slake the abyss of me!
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The Real You
Draw near, O Love, draw very very near,
For I would see Your visage full and clear:
A distant adoration cannot ease
My heart's unbearable burning chastities.
Am I grown pure that I may worship nought
Save an elusive sweetness in my thought?
The white soul-dream but beckons You to trace
Upon its solitary calm Your face—
Your limbs of utter intimacy, Love!
And no mere flush of joy looming above.
The real You, imperishably fair,
Compared with whom our flesh is thin as air-
Body of light which makes all forms of clay
Dim replicas of its prefiguring play—
Let my unworlded eyes touch the true line
Of that primordial passion. O divine
Lover, I am now stripped of all I see,
That You may lose invisibility!
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"O thou who wast enamoured of earth's bloom
And intimate fragrance and charmed throbbing voice
Of mutable pleasure now disdained by thee—
Far-visaged wanderer, dost thou rejoice
Straining towards the empty-hearted gloom
To kiss the cold lips of eternity?"
"Barren nor drear the exalted sacrifice!
Unquenched I bring the keen revealing flame.
The warm magnificence of love's caress.
Not with sage calm but thrilled vast hands, I claim
The unfathomed dark which round my spirit lies—
d touch immortal rapturous Loveliness!"
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(Taking suggestions from one of Homer's hymns about the capture of the Spring-spirit Persephone by Pluto, the god of die Underworld, I wrote this poem more as an experiment than seriously, a pleasurable indulgence in word-colour touched with mystery. The suggestions from Homer are marked by an asterisk.)
The crocus like a sun made soft and small,
The pansy like a kiss of gleam and shadow
Begemmed, together with the colour-call
Of flag and hyacinth, Nysa's magic meadow.*
There sprang the great narcissus sent by earth*
To snare the rose-bloom rapture of one Face
Wandering mid faces whom the sea-foam's mirth
Gave soul and gathering every blossomed blaze.
Unnumbered on this plant the flowers were lit*
From deep miraculous roots of mystery—
A perfume-breath which made the infinite*
Heaven a smile and a laughter all the sea.*
But as cool fingers strove to catch their flame
The mute soil burst and deathless steeds' hoof-falls*
Broke into golden air the dreadful Name:
Lord of the myriad glooms, the myriad thralls!*
Swift in his chariot the dark Splendour's will
Mated Time's beauty with the Unfathomable.
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Ultima
If each delightful cadence
Mark not a flight to Thee,
My fancy's airiest radiance
Profanes its own mute core of mystery!
If song be no sea-faring
With words a wide-flung net
Deep thoughts of Thee ensnaring,
Brave rhythms leave a trail of futile fret!
Vain if, its ardour fading,
No more my minstrel mood
Call down Thy joy cascading
A living light into the heart's dim wood!
Grant that the lyric phrases
My spirit cannot stem
I make for heaven-rapt praises
But earthly rites, myself exceeding them!
Exceeding, as I open
Unfleshly lifted palms
And Thou in starred love token
Scatterest Thy own divinity as alms!
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"OVERHEAED POETRY"
(Poems with Sri Aurobindo's Comments)
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
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
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infinitude of conscious being above our brain-clamped mentality. Sri Aurobindo labels them Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. Above even Over-mind 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 Overmind, 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
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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 sound 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
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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" arc 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
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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 out 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 K. D. SETHNA
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1
CONSUMMATION
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'."
Further apropos remarks may be quoted:
"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
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poetic intelligence that he works.
"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
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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, 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 toes 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 1 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
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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.
*
FIRST SIGHT OF GIRNAR
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 tie expression of the Higher Thought, the Illumination, the pure Intuition giving great or
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brilliant results, but these cannot be classed as the very bod} 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 [on sleep] I have more than once quoted:
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eye; 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 over head 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,
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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?
—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
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: Sneak to me heart to heart words intimate,
1The last lines of the poem Young-hearted River, not quoted in this collection.
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And all Thy formless glory turn to love
And mould Thy love into a human face.1"
"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 cur present life-formation. The psychic being usually expresses irself 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."
THIS ERRANT LIFE
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.
1 From the poem quoted next.
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Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness!
I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.
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 mould Thy love into a human face.
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 placc 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 on'e—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 aid 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
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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] 1 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 1 special beauty (eyes, lips, head or hands), but the whole has a harmoniously modelled grace of equal perfection ever)where 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."
POOL OF LONELINESSES
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
1From Ne Plus Ultra, quoted a little la er.
2 From Sages, not quoted here.
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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 thurst for me!
"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 id of its trappings, but even then it always keeps a sort of lustrousness of robe which is its characteristic."
MADONNA MIA
I merge in her rhythm of haloed reverie
By spacious vigil-lonelinesses drawn
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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 he 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 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 revela-
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tions, 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 overmind 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 il, 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
1 II, 2. 11-12.
2 XI, 14-21.
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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. 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 alway; the error of the impatient aspirant, to think he can get ;he 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 same 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
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.)
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does not lean down and become part of mind, is super-conscient 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."
NE PLUS ULTRA
(To a poet lost in Sentimentalism)
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 dazzling 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!—
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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, overawed, the unnamable One
Beyond all gods, the Luminous, the Unknown?
'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
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difficulty about such words has struck me before—frequent use of 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, 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
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which the finite, not only the occult hut 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."
(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
2. A huge sky-passion sprouting from the earth
In branching 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.
1 Some of the phrases are part of poems quoted in the present collection.
2 This line as it stands now in the poem "Far Flute" has been partly changed
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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 rolls inward to eternal shores.)
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 ouch.
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 impeifectly—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
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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.
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?)
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"There is something from the Above in the rhythm also, but it is rather covered up by the ordinary rhythm of the first half line and the two lines that follow. It is curious that this line 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 Wordsworthian—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—
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
1 Alongside the lines themselves Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Tremendously vital."
(K.D.S.)
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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 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 he 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
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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 he 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
PRELUDE
O Fire divine, make this great marvel pass.
That some pure image of your shadowless will
May float within my song's enchanted glass!
Sweep over my breath of dream your mystic mood,
O Dragon-bird whose golden harmonies fill
With rays of rapture all nfinitude!...
Or else by unexplorable magic rouse
The distance of a superhuman drowse,
A paradisal vast of love jnknown,
That even through a nakedness of night
My heart may feel the piissance of your light,
The blinding lustre of a measureless sun!
"Very fine—language and rhythm remarkably harmonious, terres totusque rotundus1—the expression very felicitous and embodying exactly the thing seen. Source is poetic intelligence drawn back into inner mind and lifting towards the overhead planes from which it receives its vision and substance and a certain breath of subtlety and largeness."
INVOCATION TO THE FOURFOLD DIVINE
O Void where deathless power is merged in peace!
O myriad Passion lit to one self-fire!
O Breath like some vast lose that breaks through form!
O Hush of gold by whon all truth is heard!
Consume in me the blinded walls of mind:
1 "Smooth, complete anti rounded." (K.D.S.)
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Wing far above dull thought my speech with flame,
Make my desire an infinite sky's embrace,
A joy that feels through every colour's throb
One single heart kindling the universe—
And by strange sleep draw heaven closer still,
Blotting all distances of space and time!
That is perfect—it is all of one piece, an exceedingly fine poem expressing with revelatory images the consciousness of the cosmic Self into which one enters by breaking the walls of individual limitation. Higher Mind, touched with Illumined Mind, except lines 3, 4, 8, 9 which are more of the illumined Mind itself."
Asked what exactly was meant in line 3 by the phrase "that breaks through form", Sri Aurobindo replied:
"It means nothing exactly, but it gives the suggestion of a vast rose of illimitable life breaking out to manifest its splendour and colour through the limitations of form, as a rose breaks out of a bud."
SRI AUROBINDO
All heaven's secrecy lit to one face
Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry—
A soul of upright splendour like the noon.
But only shadowless love can breathe this pure
Sun-blossom fragrant with eternity—
Eagles of rapture lifting fliekerless
A golden trance wide-winged on golden air.
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"It comes from the higher mind except for the third and seventh lines which have illumination and are very fine."
THROUGH VESPER'S VEIL
A rose of fire like a secret smile
Won from the heart of lost eternity
Broke suddenly through vesper's virgin veil.
I A smoulder of strange joy—then time grew dark,
And all my vigil's burning cry a swoon
As if the soul were drawn into its God
Across that dream-curve dimming out of space....
Then from the inmost deep a white trance-eye
Kindled a throbbing core of the Unknown,
Some mute mysterious memory lit beyond
The wideness with one star that is the dusk.
"Very fine poetry—quite original. Its originality consists as in other poems of yours of the same kind in the expression of a truth or plane of vision and experience not yet expressed and, secondly, in the power of expression which gives it an exact body—a revelatory rot an intellectual exactitude. Lines 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11 are overhead lines—Illumined Mind."
The double and single marks against the lines were put by Sri Aurobindo.
(From where does the "trance-eye" appear? From the soul drawn up into the transcendent timeless or from the mystic swoon in which me time-consciousness is left by
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the soul's escape? I wonder, however, whether the expression warrants so definite a distinction.)
it is not necessary to intellectualise,—but if one supposes the trance-eye to come from the swoon, it may still create a throbbing core of the unknown or a memory of it beyond the dark wideness. That is indeed what usually happens in the inner trance."
AGNI
Not from the day but from the night he's born,
Night with her pang of dream—star on pale star
Winging strange rumour through a secret dawn.
For all the black uncanopied spaces mirror
The brooding distance of our plumbless mind.
O depth of gloom, revea your unknown light—
Awake our body to the alchemic touch
Of the great God who comes with minstrel hands!...
Lo, now my heart has grown his glimmering East:
Blown by his breath a cloud of colour runs:
The yearning curves of life are lit to a smile.
O mystic sun, arise upon our thought
And with your gold omnipotence make each face
The centre of some blue infinitude!
"The modifications now made are quite satisfactory and render the poem perfect. The last six lines still remain the finest part of the poem, they have a breath of revelation in them; especially the image 'my heart has grown his glimmering East' and the extreme felicity of 'the yearning curves of life are lit to a smile' have a very intense force of revealing
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intuitivity—and on a less minute, larger scale there is an equal revealing power and felicity in the boldness and strength of the image in the last three lines. These six lines may be classed as 'inevitable', not only separately but as a whole. The earlier part of the poem is also fine, though not in the same superlative degree—the last two lines have something of the same intuitive felicity, though with slighter less intense touches, as the first two of the (rhymeless) sestet—especially in the 'alchemic touch' of the 'minstrel hands'. Lines 2 to 5 have also some power of large illumination."
(How is it that people find my poetry difficult? I almost suspect that only Nolini and Arjava 1get the whole hang of it properly. Of course, many appreciate when I have explained it to them—but otherwise they admire the beauty of individual phrases without grasping the many-sided whole the phrases form. This morning Premanand, Vijayarai and Nirod read my Agni. None of them caught the precise relevances, the significant connections of the words and phrases of the opening five lines.
In the rest of the poem top they failed, now and again, to get the true point of fel city which constitutes poetic expression. My work is not surrealist: I put meaning into everything, not intellectualism but a coherent vision worked out suggestively in various detail. Why then the difficulty? Everybody feel: at home in Harin Chattopadhyaya's poetry though I dare say that if I catechised them I might find the deepest felicities missed. AU the same, there was something in his work which made his sense more accessible. Even Dilip says that my work passes a little over his head—Arjava's, of course, he finds still more difficult. Perhaps I tend to pack too much stuff into my words and to render my links a little less explicit than Harin did or Dilip himself does in
1 J. A. Chadwick, who received from Sri Aurobindo the name "Arjavananda —"Arjava" for short. (K.D.S.)
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Bengali. But would people have the same trouble with vernacular poetry, however like my own it might be?)
'It is precisely because what you put in is not intellectualism or a product of mental imagination that your poetry is difficult to those who are accustomed to a predominantly mental strain in poetry. One can grasp fully if one has some clue to what you put in, either the clue of personal experience or the clue of a sympathetic insight. One who has had the concrete experience of the consciousness as a night with stars coming out and the sense of the secret dawn can at once feel the force of those two lines, as one who has had experience of the mind as a wide space or infinity or a thing of distances and expanses can fathom those that follow. Or even if he has had not these experiences but others of the same order, he can feel what you mean and enter into it by a kind of identification. Failing this experience, sympathetic insight can bring the significance home; certainly, Nolini and Arjava who write poems of the inner vision and feeling must have that, moreover their mines are sufficiently subtle and plastic to enter into all kinds of poetic vision and expression. Premanand and Vijayarai have no such training; it is natural that they should find it difficult. Nirod ought to understand, but he would have to ponder and take some trouble before he got it; night with her labour of dream, the stars, the bird-winging, the bird-voices, the secret dawn are indeed familiar symbols in the poetry he is himself writing or with which he is familiar; but his mind seeks usually at first for precise allegories to fit the symbols and is less quick to see and feel by identification what is behind them—it is still intellectual and not concrete in its approach to these things, although his imagination has learned to make itself their transcribing medium. That is the difficulty, the crux of imaged spiritual poetry; it needs not only the fit writer but the fit audience —and that has yet to be made.
"Dilip wrote to me in recent times expressing great admiration for Arjava's poems and wanting to get some-
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thing of the same quality into, his own poetic style. But in any case Dilip has not the mystic mind and vision—Harin also. In quite different ways they receive and express their vision or experience through the poetic mind and imagination—even so, because it expressed something unusual, Dilip's poetry has had a difficulty in getting recognised except by people who were able to give the right response. Harin's poetry deals very skilfully with spiritual ideas or feelings through the language of the emotion and poetic imagination and intelligence--no difficulty there. As regards your poetry, it is indeed more compressed and carefully packed with substance and that creates a difficulty except to those who are alive to the language or have become alive to subtle shades, implications, depths in the words. Even those who understand a foreign language well in the ordinary way find it sometimes difficult to catch these in its poetry. Indications and suggestions easy to catch in one's own tongue are often missed there. So probably your last remark is founded."
(I hope people won't misunderstand what you have remarked about the mystic mind. One's not having the mystic mind and vision does not reflect upon one's poetic excellence, even us a singer of the Spirit. As regards Harin, you said long ago that he wrote from several planes. And surely his Dark Well poems come from a source beyond the poetic intelligence?)
"I used the word 'mystic' in the sense of a certain kind of inner seeing and feeling of things, a way which to the intellect would seem occult and visionary—for this is something different from imagination and its work with which the intellect is familiar. It was in this sense that I said Dilip had not the mystic mind and vision. One can go far in the spiritual way, have plenty of spiritual visions and dreams even without having this mystic mind and way of seeing things. So too one may write poetry from different planes or
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sources of inspiration and expressing spiritual feelings, knowledge, experience and yet use the poetic intelligence as the thought medium which gives them shape in speech; such poems are not of the mystic type. One may be mystic in this sense without being spiritual—one may also be spiritual without being mystic; or one nay be both spiritual and mystic in one. Poems ditto.
"I had not in view the Dark Well poems when I wrote about Harin. I was thinking of his ordinary way of writing. If I remember right, the Dark Well poems came from the inner mind centre, some from the Higher Mind—other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what was given and turned it into something very vivid, coloured and beautiful,— put surely not mystic in the sense given above."
"It is when the thing seen is spiritually lived and has an independent vivid reality of its own which exceeds any conceptual significance it may have on the surface that it is mystic."—"In mystic poetry the symbol ought to be as much as possible the natural body of the inner truth or vision, itself an intimate part of the experience."—"Symbols may be of various kinds; there are those that are concealing images capable of intellectual interpretation but still different from either symbolic or allegorical figures—and there are those that have a more intimate life of their own and are not conceptual so much as occultly vital in their significance; there are still others that need a psychic or spiritual or at least an inner and intuitive sight to identify oneself fully with their meaning."
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THE SANNYASI
(An old story relates how a princess over-proud of her beauty would not accept any lover unless he could first live like a Sannyasi in the Himalayas, practising austerities to purify himself in order to win her favour as of a divinity. One youth, famous for his handsomeness as well as heroic deeds, took up the difficult wager and a! the end of the stipulated three years returned to the eagerly waiting princess, but he came now no longer in the mood of a suitor...)
If every look I turn tramples your flesh
Forgive the pilgrim passion of a dream
That presses over the narrow path of limbs
To an azure height beaconing above the mind.
No love could dare to reach your mouth's red heaven
Without a spirit washed in whitenesses—
But who shall hear the call of flickering clay
When titan thunders of the avalanche leap,
A pinnacle-voice plunging to deeps below 9
As if the agelong barrier broke between 10
Our dubious day and some eternal light? 11
Nor can a small face fill the widening heart
Where in the ice-pure lonelihood of hush 13
A vast virginity devours all time! 14
O masquerader of the Measureless,
O beauty claiming the Invisible's crown,
The empire of the uncrying Mystery 11
Has burned across you like an infinite sun 8
Withering for me your body's puny veil!
Yet all this fire is but the dwarf soul's death:
O strain no more those pale and quivering arms:
Rise from the crumbling cry of littleness 22
Beyond each blinded boundary to feel 23
The immortal Lover flaming through your heart,
The golden smile of the one Self everywhere!
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SRI AURIOBINDO'S COMMENT
"The blank verse is quite successful. It is all fine poetry throughout, rising from time to time to overhead sublimity and profound force. Not being able to expatiate at length, I summarise my impression by the marks—double line means overhead inspiration, single line means poetry fine enough and strong but not from overhead, single line with dot means lines which have the overhead touch or might even reveal themselves as overhead if in proper immediate company—the last is the case with line 2. The overhead lines belong to the type that is now usual with you, Higher Mind lifted by Illumination to reach the Intuition level or else Illumined Mind rising to Intuition level; the latter in 9-11, 13-14, 17-18, 22-23. Both are very fine combinations."
INNERMOST
Each form a dancer whose pure naked sheen
Mirrors serenity, a moving sleep
White-echoed out of some mysterious deep
Where fade life's clamouring red and blue and green—
The priestesses of virgin reverie
Sway through the cavern heart of consciousness.
A marble rapture fronting frozenly
The cry of mortal hunger and distress,
A love superb moulded to rocks of flame,
A ring of rhythmic statues worship-hewn
From the pale vistas of a perfect moon—
They guard with silences the unbreathable Name.
"Very fine throughout. It is a combined inspiration, Illumined Mind with an element cf Higher Mind coming in to
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modify it and sometimes rising to touch Intuition—even what might be called Overmind intuition. The last touch is strongest in lines 2, 3, there is something of it in lines 5, 6, 7, a little in the last three lines.
"It is, I suppose, some Anandamaya rhythm of the divine inmost Silence lifted above the vital life, that is the significance of the image."
VITA NUOVA
Haloed by some vast blue withheld from us,
Her pure face smiles through her cascading hair:
Like a strange dawn of rainfall nectarous
It comes to amaranth each desert prayer.
Beyond themselves her clay-born beauties call:
Breathing the rich air round her is to find
An ageless God-delight embracing all.
The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind.
Across both night and day her secrets run.
For even through our deepest slumberings
we hearken to an embassy of the sun
And stir invisible of rapturous wings.
"A very fine poem. The second stanza is the finest; in the two others the first line strikes very deep. The lines that reach the highest and widest are the third and fourth of the middle stanza. Lines 1, 7, 8, 9 come from very high and express a vision the full significance of which can only be realised by spiritual experienee. Line 1—Illumined Mind taken upwards by a wide intuisive inspiration. Lines 7, 8—1 am inclined to ascribe them at their source of vision to an
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intermediate plane which is not Overmind itself but may be called the Overmind Intuition You are right about the' second line—'The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind'; it is one of the finest you have written and is absolutely authentic and true.1 Both lines have a strong revelatory power. Line 9—Intuition."
General remark apropos of the poem's manner: "A bold directness and a concrete audacity of image tells best in mystic poetry—it makes the thing live."
(You once distinguished two Overmind levels: mental and gnostic, the latter being the Overmind proper, the former like a massive and widened Intuition. Now you have spoken of Overmind Intuition as distinguished from the Overmind itself. In one letter you make four divisions: mental Overmind, intuitive Overmind, true Overmind and supramentalised Overmind. You have also used the expression: "Overmind Gnosis." This must correspond to "Overmind itself" and "true Overmind". But, if "intuitive Overmind" is different from "mental Overmind", "mental Overmind" must now mean something other than a massive and widened Intuition. Will you please give a hint as to the various significances and an idea as to what quality of rhythm, language and substance would constitute the differences in expression from the several levels. I should like particularly to know about the Overmind Gnosis.)
"As for the Overmind Gnosis, I cannot yet say anything—I am familiar with its workings, but they are not easily describable and, as for poetry, I have not yet observed sufficiently to say whether it enters in anywhere or not.... I
1 This line originally was part of another poem which was far from being overhead Sri Aurobindo there called it "splendid" and in a later analysis of sources said of it: "Intuitive with Overmind touch." In regard to that analysis and the description now of it as coming from the Overmind Intuition, see the next question and answer. (K.D.S.)
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should expect its intervention to be extremely rare even as a touch; but I refer at present all higher Overmind intervention to the Overmind Intuition in order to avoid any risk of overstatement. In the process if overmental transformation what I have observed is that the Overmind first takes up the illumined and higher mind and intellect (thinking, perceiving and reasoning intelligence) into itself and modifies itself to suit the operation—the result is what may be called a mental Overmind—then it lifts these lower movements and the intuitive mind together into a higher reach of itself, forming there the Overmind Intuition, and then all that into the Overmind Gnosis awaiting the supramental transformation. The Overmind 'touch' on the Higher Mind and Illumined Mind can thus raise towards the O.I. or to the O.G. or leave in the M.O.; but estimating at a glance as I have to do, it is not easy to be quite precise. I may have to revise my estimates later on a little, though perhaps not very appreciably, when I am able to look at things in a more leisurely way and fix the misty lines which often tend to fade away, being an indefinable border." (3.5.1937)
THE TRIUMPH OF DANTE
These arms, stretched through ten hollow years, have
brought her
Back to my heart! A light, a hush immense
Falls suddenly upon my voice of tears,
Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears
The sun-touch of a rapt omnipotence.
Ineffable the secrecies supreme
Pass and elude my gaze—an exquisite
Failure to hold some nectarous Infinite!
The uncertainties of time grow shadowless
And never but with startling loveliness,
A white shiver of breeze on moonlit water,
Flies the chill thought of death across my dream.
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For, how shall earth be dark when human eyes
Mirror the love whose smile is paradise?—
A love that misers not its golden store
But gives itself and yearns to give yet more,
As though God's light were inexhaustible
Not for His joy but this one heart to fill!
On an early version in which all the lines were not the same as in the final version but where those from "an exquisite" to "yet more" were already there, Sri Aurobindo wrote marking the latter:
"The lines are magnificent—of the highest order." On the present version of the whole poem he remarked:
"Exceedingly fine in all its lines. The one objection that could be made is that there are different kinds of inevitability and not one kind throughout, but that would be hypercriticism when there is so much that is of the first excellence."
'"There are three different tones or pitches of inspiration in the poem, each in its own manner reaching inevitability. The first seven lines up to 'gaze bear as a whole the stamp of a high elevation of thought and vision—height and illumination lifted up still farther by the Intuition to its own inspired level; one passage (lines 3, 4) seems to me almost to touch in its tone of expression an Overmind seeing. But here 'A light, a hush... a voice of tears' anticipates the second movement by an element of subtle inner intensity in it. This inner intensity—where a deep secret intimacy of feeling and seeing replaces the height and large luminosity—characterises the rest of the first part. This passage has a seizing originality and authenticity in it—it is here that one gets a pure inevitability. In the last [6] lines the intuition descends towards the higher mental plane with a less revelatory power in it but more precise in its illumination. That is the difference between sheer vision and thought. But the poem
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is exceedingly fine as a whole, the close also is of the first order."
The description "pure inevitability" in this comment is to be understood in reference to the various kinds of style which, apart from the various sources or planes of inspiration, have been distinguished by Sri Aurobindo. A letter of his, answering a question about pure inevitability, reads:
"To the two requisites you mention which are technical—'the lightness of individual words and phrases, the rightness of the general lingual reconstruction of the poetic vision: that is, the manner, syntactical and psychological, of whole sentences and their co-ordination'—two others have to be added, a certain smiling sureness of touch and inner breath of perfect perfection, born not made, in the words themselves, and a certain absolute winging movement in the rhythm. Without an inevitable rhythm there can be no inevitable wording. If you understand all that, you are lucky. But how to explain the inexplicable, something that is self-existent? That simply means an absoluteness, one might say, an inexplicably perfect and in-fitting thisness and thereness and thatness and everythingelseness so satisfying in every way as to be unalterable. All perfection is not necessarily inevitability. I have tried to explain in 'The Future Poetry' —very unsuccessfully I am afraid—that there are different grades of perfection in poetry: adequateness, effectivity, illumination of language, inspiredness—finally, inevitability. These are things one has to learn to feel, one can't analyse.
"All the styles, 'adequate', 'effective', etc., can be raised to inevitability in their own line.
"The supreme inevitability is something more even than that, a speech overwhelmingly sheer, pure and true, a quintessential essence of convincingly perfect utterance. That goes out of all classilication and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style —Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his
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'fields of sleep', Shakespeare's 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's 'Sunt lacrimae rerum' and his 'O passi graviora'.
"Homer's passage translated into English would be perfectly ordinary. He gets the best part of his effect from his rhythm. Translated it would run merely like this: 'And he descended from the peaks of Olympus, wroth at heart, bearing on his shoulders arrows and doubly pent-in quiver, and there arose the clang of his silver bow as he moved, and he came made like unto the night.' His words too are quite simple but the vowellation and the rhythm make the clang of the silver bow go smashing through the world into universes beyond while the last words give a most august and formidable impression of godhead.
"1 don't think there is any co-ordination between the differences of style and the different planes of inspiration -unless one can say that the effective style comes from the higher mind, illumined from the illumined mind, the inspired from the plane of intuition. But I don't know whether that would stand at all times— especially when each style reaches its inevitable power."
We may note here apropos of The Triumph of Dante that about Dante's own plane of poetry Sri Aurobindo has said: "Dante writes from the poetic intelligence with a strong intuitive drive behind it"—while about his style Sri Aurobindo has pronounced: "The 'forceful adequate' might apply to much of Dante's writing, but much also is sheer inevitable; elsewhere it is the inspired style.... Dante's simplicity comes from a penetrating directness of poetic vision. It is not the simplicity of an adequate style."
Three, out of the four possible inevitabilities other than the fifth and final and unclassifiable one, may be explicitly illustrated from a sonnet by the very author of The Triumph of Dante:
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MYSTIC MOTHER
Seeing You walk our little ways, they wonder
That I who scorn the common loves of life
Should kneel to You in absolute surrender,
Deeming Your visible perfection wife
Unto my spirit's immortality.
They think I have changed one weakness for another,
Because they mark not the new birth of me—
This body which by You, the Mystic Mother,
Has now become a child of my vast soul!
Loving Your feet's earth-visitation, I
Find each heart-throb miraculously flower
Out of the unplumbable God-mystery
Behind dark clay; and, hour by dreamful hour,
Upbear that fragrance like an aureole.
"Exceedingly good. The octet here is adequateness raised to inevitability except the fourth and fifth lines in which the effective undergoes the same transformation. In the sestet on the other hand it is the illumined style that becomes inevitable."
The inspired style reaching inevitability may be exemplified by the two lines apropos of which Sri Aurobindo in his pronouncement on Dante, quoted above, referred to "the inspired style" in his writing:
Si come quando Marsi'a traesti
Delia vagina delle membra sue.
These lines to Apollo may be tentatively rendered with a little freedom:
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In that dire mode of yours as when you plucked
Marsyas out of the scabbard of his limbs.
An instance directly in English may be provided from the author himself of Mystic Mother. In the poem, Vita Nuova, quoted some pages back, the third and fourth lines of the stanza—
An ageless God-delight embracing all,
The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind—
were characterised by Sri Aurobindo: "These are 'inspired inevitable'."
Another instance noted by Sri Aurobindo is a line from a passage in his own early blank-,verse narrative, Urvasie. He was induced to make a comment on this passage which tells us how the hero-king Pururavus, searching far and wide for his lost beloved Urvasie, did not linger on the inferior heights
But plunged o'er difficult gorge and prone ravine
And rivers thundering between dim walls,
Driven by immense desire, until he came
To dreadful silence of the peaks and trod
Regions as vast and lonely as his love.
Sri Aurobindo wrote: "This is. . high-pitch effective except the last line which is in the inspired style—perhaps!"
Two other judgments of Sri Aurobindo's in this field may be cited. They are again on excerpts from the poet of Mystic Mother. The first is from the poem Ne Plus Ultra, already quoted in the present collection at the end of Part I:
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"This seems to me the effective style at a high pitch."
The second is from the close of a sonnet, Little Passions —the sestet following on the last four words of the octave:
For I have viewed,
Astir within my clay's engulfing sleep,
An alien astonishment of light!
Let me be merged with its unsoundable deep
And mirror in futile farness the full height
Of a heaven barred for ever to my distress,
Rather than hoard life's happy littleness!
"This is indeed an example of the effective style at its best, that is to say rising to something of illumination, especially in the [sestet's] second, fourth and sixth lines.'
The third judgment is about a passage in Lacrimae Rerum, a poem on "A visionary flute-soul's plumbless woe". There occurs the moment:
Twilight hung mute and mauve: the bamboo's cry
Out of its pierced and hollow body came,
A God-dream yearning through mortality.
Sri Aurobindo, praising this moment, defined it as the illumined style passing into the inspired at the end.
SAVITRI
A rose of dawn, her smile lights every gaze—
Her love is like a nakedness of noon:
No flame but breathes in her the Spirit's calm
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And pours the omnipresence of a sun.
Her tongues of fire break from a voiceless deep
Dreaming the taste of some ineffable height—
A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all,
A universal hunger's white embrace
That from the Unknown leaps burning to the
Unknown.
"Exceedingly fine; both the language and rhythm are very powerful and highly inspired. When the inspiration is there, you reach more and more a peculiar fusion of the three influences, higher mental, illunined mental and intuitive, with a touch of the Overmind Intuition coming in. This touch is strongest here in the second and the two closing lines, but it is present in all except two—the third which is yet a very fine line indeed and the seventh where it is not present in the typed version (' A cry to clasp in all the one God-hush') but seems just to touch perhaps in the written one ('A cry to clasp the one God-hush in all'). In the typed version the higher mental is strongest but in the written one which is less emphatic but more harmonious, the rhythm gets in a higher influence. In the other lines the illumined mental influence lifting up the higher mental is strongest, but is itself lifted up to the intutive—in all but the third just high enough to get the touch of the overmental intuition."
GNOSIS
No clamorous wing-waft knew the deeps of gold.
An eagle lost in earth-forgetfulness,
Rising without one stir of dreamy feather,
Life gains the Unmeasured through a flame of sleep—
A love whose heart is white tranquillity
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Upborne by vast surrender o this Sun.
Flickering no longer with the cry of clay,
The distance-haunted fire of mystic mind
Embraces there its own eternal Self—
Truth's burning core poised over the universe!
"It has become by the omitted and added lines a finer poem than before. The first line had lost much of its power through being cut off from immediate connection with the eagle rising, now that it has been restored it gets its full beauty and by the change of the fourth line which is now on the same level as the preceding and following lines all these six become one piece with one power and level of inspiration: Higher Mind with some colour of Illumination and just touched by Overmind Intuition—a faultless movement of vision and colour, all welded together into a harmonious whole. The next two rise still more to an extraordinary lofty inspiration (Illumined Mind with he Overmind touch)—and present a most profoundly suggestive spiritual picture. The last two are very high up in the higher Mind—-just the right kind to form a powerful and luminous close. The ten lines make a consistently fine and admirably structured poem."
Nirodbaran's Query: Out of the two lines—7 and 8—which you say have an Overmind touch, I frankly think that the first one I could have written myself! Will you show me where exactly its super-excellence lies? I appreciated much more the lines that preceded it: why do you give it so much weight? Is its quality definable—and in what terms? Assonances, consonances, rhythm or what?
SRI AUROBINDO'S REPLY
"What super-excellence? As poetry? When I say that a line comes from a higher or overhead plane or has the Overmind
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1The "solar plexus" as a psychology al centre for contact with poetry in an
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"As for technique, there is a technique of this higher poetry hut it is not analysable and teachable. If, for instance, Amal had written 'No longer flickering with the cry of clay' it would no longer have been the same thing though the exact mental meaning would be just as before—for the overtone, the rhythm would nave been lost in the ordinary staccato clipped movement and with the overtone the rhythmic significance. It would not have given the suggestion of space and wideness full with the cry and the flicker, the intense impact of that cry and the agitation of the fire which is heard through the line as it is. But to realise that, one must have the inner sight and inner ear for these things, one must be able to hear the sound-meaning, feel the sound-spaces with their vibration. Again, if he had written 'Quivering no longer with the cry of clay', it would have been a good line, but meant much less and something quite different to the inner experience, though to the mind it would have been only the same thing expressed in a different image—not so to the solar plexus and the thousand-petalled lotus. In this technique it must be the right word and no other, in the right place and in no other, the right sounds and no others, in a design of sound that cannot be changed even a little. You may say that it must be so in all poetry; but in ordinary poetry the mind can play about, chop and change, use one image or another, put this word here or that word there—if the sense is much the same and has a poetical value, the mind does not feel that all is lost unless it is very sensitive and much influenced by the solar plexus. In the overhead poetry these things arc quite imperative, it is all or nothing —or at least all or a fall."
________________
instinctive-emotive way rather than intellectually is AE. Housman's terminology in his lecture. The Name and Nature of Poetry. The "thousand-petalled lotus" is Sri Aurobindo's addition denoting, in terms of the traditional Raja-Yogit psychology, the centre of consciousness just above the brain-mind, now a supra-intellectual source of contact by a direct spiritual sense. (K.D.S.)
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3
THE FALL
Our spirit is a paradise blown down,
A sun deflowered, a leprosy of light;
But all its crumbling sacrificial sparks
Drop from the inviolate etner 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."
OVERSELF
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,
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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."
DEEPS
Silent I roam by the tumultuous sea
That, unreminded of man's mortal noise,
My heart may feel the in perishable 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 tranquility 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 intuive, 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."
ANANDA
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."
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GODS
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 he 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 01 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."
ARCH-IMAGE
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
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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—exactly expressive of the thing seen."
RISHI
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, arumour of deathless love
Afloat like a vast moon upon the deep.
'A very fine poem, lines 1, 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 I 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 only"
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SILVER GRACE
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."
"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
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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 s 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 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:
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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 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
1Quoting 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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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 cut 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 nentem 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.
We might also add Wordsworth's line.
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.
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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 the e 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 association 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 unusual bringing togther of words
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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 translation1If you note the combination of words and sounds in Shakespeare's line,
And in this harsh world d aw 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 :an 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 Jelle 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 my own:
Haunted by tears is the world and our hearts by the touch of things mortal.
2 Leopardi's original has one different word and is spread over parts of two lines:
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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."
______________
I'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
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 gore 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 subtle plane through the creative vital and uses the outer mind and other external instruments for trans-
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mission 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.1 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
1 The expression—"the vital"—in this sentence is a special term of Sri Aurobindo's and must not be taken as one lacking by oversight a noun after it. Thus elsewhere he writes: "The vital has to be carefully distinguished from mind, even though it has a mind element transfused into it..." {Letters on Yoga, Birth Centenary, Vol. 22, p. 320). Of course, the term often occurs with a noun, as the very next sentence in the passage quoted testifies. (K.. D. S.)
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intelligence, from the plane 0f dynamic vision, from the psychic, from the illumined mind or Intuition,—even, though this is the rarest, from the Overmind widenesses. 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 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 is quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect, our habitual thought-production engine. This intellect in 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 ade-
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quate, 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 apropos of this very early poem: "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—
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 immotal 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."
"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.... If you could always write direct from the Illumined Mind—finding there not only the substance, as
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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."
(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 arc 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 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
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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".)
YOGA
"Torment not with intangible fulgenccs! O master, to my hungry life impart
The nectarous frith of yon Sky-Spirit unheard
Whose sole revealing word
Is a touch of cold far flame upon my heart!
Of what avail mate 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,
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The embracing fire
Of His inscrutable omnipotent peace!"
"1 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, Mi ton'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 that forbidden tree,
or
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides
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
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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; rhythm which docs 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', srotrasya srotram. 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
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bare intellectual fact—with no more vision in it than would convey mere wideness without any significance in it."
(With one line picked out a'most 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?)
MAYA
A scorching shadow masked as living light,
Earth's smile of painted passion withers now!
But is there hollow on black ravenous hollow
With never a gold core of love divine?
How pass then reveries of angelic wings
Or sudden stabs of paradise through clay
Revealing the blind heart of all desire?
Surely some haloed beauty hides within
The mournful spaces of unllustred 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...
SRI AUROBIDNO'S COMMENT
'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-INFINITES
Gloam-infinites 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 yearnig 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."
PLEROMA
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 Threat 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,
A deathless silence at each close of song.
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"Very fine. It is a vision of things from the Illumined Mind with the atmosphere of light and colours that reigns there."
TWO BIRDS
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 poigrance 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—auteoled, 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
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Mind—for there a high-uplifted thought is the characters tic—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."
EACH NIGHT
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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GOD-SCULPTURE
"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 parad sal 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?"
SRI AUROBIUNDO'S COMMENT
"It is a very fine poem, perfect in rhythm and expression. The inspiration is from an inner centre."
EVANESCENCE
Where lie the past noon-lilies
And vesper-violets gone?
Into what strange invisible deep
Fall out of time the roses of each dawn?
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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 lines 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?)
AGNI JATAVEDAS
(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
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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. 1 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 turn of imagination than the non-epic: it is powerfully wide or deep or high without being outstandingly bold, it also displays less colour.)
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"'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 Siecles' tries to be epic and often succeeds, perhaps even on the whole: Marlowe is sometimes great or sublime, but I would lot 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,
Be de kat' oulumpolo karenon choomenos ker
(He went down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart).1
Or Virgil's
Disce, puer, virtutem ex ine verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis,2
or Milton's
Fall'n Cherub, to be weak, is miserable.
1 Elsewhere Sri Aurobindo has translated 'he line in an hexameter: Down from the peaks of Olympus he came wrath vexing his heart-strings.
2 This may be hexametricaily rendered:
Learn from me, youth, what is courage and what true labour.
Fortune from others. (K.D.S.)
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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 be lacks is the epic elan 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 elan:
THE DIVINE DENIER
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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SRI AUROBINOD'S COMMENT
"A really fine poem. I think 'hell' is better than 'sin' [in line 1]. 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 I: "No, it is no the epic kind—the rhythm is rather large, calm and reflective than epic."
Nirodbaran wrote to Sri Aurobindo: "You have stated to Nishikanta 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 Nishikanto's
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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?)
GREEN TIGER
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.
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"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."
A DIAMOND IS BURNING UPWARD
A diamond is burning upward
In the roofless chamber walled
By the ivory mind;
An orb entranced glows
Where earth-storm lever 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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TALISMAN
(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".
TWO MOMENTS
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."
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WHITE HORSE
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."
ORISON
A godless temple is the dome of space:
Reveal the sun of thy love-splendoured face,
O lustrous flowering of invisible peace,
O glory breaking into curves of clay
From mute intangible dream-distances,
That like a wondrous ye familiar light
Eternity may mingle with our day!
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Leave thou no quiver of this time-born heart
A poor and visionless wanderer apart:
Make even my darkness a divine repose to
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 thioughout. 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-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 uncreativeness, 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? Quitting 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 wherever they feel inclined are rare birds.I don't know about the direction of conscious-
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ness'. 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 maturcr quality to which it attained atfterwards. 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."
"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
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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, cabined or stifled by any theories of '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 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
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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 yet1; he did not write 'I 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 manner. 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 less good poetry. But there is a 'poeticism' which establishes a sanitary cordon
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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 untransformed 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
HARMONIES
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 s rain 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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DESCENT
A secret of far sky burns suddenly close,
The deep blue wakes to a glory of 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, wrapped 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."
GULFS OF NIGHT
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.
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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 live lines, 7 and 11 also, have a more direct overhead ring.''
"It expresses its idea win great richness and force and images that carry one beyord the mental vision of things— that seems to me its main quality."
DISCLOSURE
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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MERE OF DREAM
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 is 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 trie 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
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what comes from above. These lines are original, convin-cing, have vision, they are not to be rejected, but they 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 went. 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, is 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: (1) 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, Overmind Intuition. The last you have not yet fully
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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—
A POET'S STAMMER
My dream is spoken,
As if by sound
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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 flickering 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."
THE SACRED FIRE
O keep the sacred fire
A prisoner poise
With walls that never wake
To earthly voice.
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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.
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.
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"It is a very fine lyric. The inspiration is not equally intense throughout—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 1, 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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APPEAL
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 fullness 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.
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GREAT MOTHER
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 th it serenity
Whence Thy far infinite face can be divined,
An endless song let all n y 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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PRAYER
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.
OJAS
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.
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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]."
ASCENT
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 lines more intensely illumined than others, but all fine."
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STORM-LIGHT
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.
"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."
1The reference is evidently to one of he five kinds of style Sri Aurobindo has .distinguished on pp. 100-104. 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 line: described here as "intuitive". (K.D.S.)
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NO MORTAL BREATH
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
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
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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 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-tormed 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 aves, 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
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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 through in a language unknown or ill-known—I have seen several instances of the former—it is not a usual case, since the samskaras of the mind, is 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 waves 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 aves 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
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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. Or 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
TIME-TELESCOPE
"How can thy reveire'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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NIGHT
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 cf the stars.
'It is very successful—the last wo 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 conceited-ness by the higher tone at which the inspiration arrives there."
(What do you think of this is attempt at expressing inner mystical fact by what may seem to be poetic fancy?)
WHITE MURDER
A quick stiletto's smile of poignancy,
The pang of paradise cletves 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 inscrutable deep,
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While over a precipice of infinitude Clay-burdens drop, a trance-fall out of time.
"Very forcibly conceited. In is 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?)
MOKSHA
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."
LOVE'S TRIUMPH
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:
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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."
APOTHEOSIS
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!
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"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."
INCARNATION
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 illunined style."1
1See pp. 100-104 and the footnote on p. 161. (K.D.s.)
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NIGHT OF TRANCE
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."
APE ON FIRE
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 bourne ess body of the beyond.
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"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."
IN TERRAM
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 winging 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."
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A METAPHYSICAL POET TO HIS MISTRESS
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
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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."
TRUTH VISION
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 birthh
In the weeping soul of ages,
The gloomy blow of earth!
Your eyes done
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.
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'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 subtlety of true perception" and "its intimate language" but touched with the "pure intuitive" 's "simple revealing directness and beauty".
***
ABOVE ALL ROSES
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.
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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."
EXILE
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
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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."
PHARPHAR
("...Abana and Pharpha; lucid streams"—Milton)
Where is the glass 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 blind career;
And the songs that sing are an image
Of quiets I long to hear.
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For, only this unreached beauty
No time shall mar —
This river of infinite distance,
Pharphar.
"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 Mac'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 is not hinted, it is caught—throughout —in all the expressions, but especially in such lines as
1ARABIA
Far are 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 'gains the phantom stars
Pale in the noonday skies
Sweet is the music of Arabia
In my heart when out of dreams
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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 Us 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?
__________
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-hained musicians
In the brooding silence of night.
They haunt me—her lutes and her forests;
No beauty on earth I seeee
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."
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That would be an instance of the concrete convincing reality of which 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.
T 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."
SPHERE-MUSIC
Bring not your stars the very same
Magic as mine? I give that name
Unto a touch of cool 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 full,
Scatter their white and winging 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."
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(I have the same impression about it as about Pharphar which, according to you, has come from the Intuition plane. Am I right?)
' I believe it is the same source."
NEAR AND FAR
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 Hash around my heart
A dream of distance;—
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 he kind formerly written by you—an entire precision and ease of language and rhythm, a precision that is intuitive and suggestive."
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(Has this poem too "brainy ' an air? What do you think of the turn in the last stanza?)
YOUR FACE
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 distance;
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.
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DRAGON
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
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."
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[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?)
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 charac-terising 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 Intuitior. and finally goes to the Overmind, the Supermind and the unmanifest Absolute. Do you think a special key is
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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?)
THE HIERARCHY OF BEING
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, he last stanza remarkable."
(Now I pick up the overhead theme at its culmination, (he 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 practically succeeded? Are not my lines somewhat stiff in expression and rhythm?)
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ABSOLUTE
Lustre whose vanishing joint we call the sun—
Joy whose one drop drowns seas of all desire—
Life rendering time's heart a hollow hush—
Potence of poise unplunbed 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 "
DELUGE
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—till 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 cf shadowy bliss:
With measureless life God comes, and flesh-form
Sways like a weed in His enfolding storm.
"It is extremely fine and quite revealing and effective."
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HIMALAYA
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, 1 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."
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SKY- RIMS
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."
"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 he up to the mark thus:
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To yet another rich revealing dawn!
Would you prefer
To yet another splendorous mood-dawn!
or else
To yet another mood-miriculous 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 is 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 Chattopadhyaya to put his head together with mine. He has come up with: 'lambency of dawn." A good phrase, r,o 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:
To yet another alchemy o 'dawn!
Do you like my "alchemy"?)
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"That is quite satisfactory—you have got the right thing at last."
MUKTI
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 alore,
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-pofundities:
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."
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NOCTURNE
My words would bring thtough 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 billow ing 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 sennet effect in spite of the absence of the rhyme structure "
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THE CLOSE OF DANTE'S "DIVINA COMMEDIA"
("PARADINO", Canto 33)
St. Bernard Supplicates on Behalf of Dante
"O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son!
Life's pinnacle of shadowless sanctity,
Yet, with the lustre of God-union, Outshining all in chaste humility—
Extreme fore-fixed by the supernal Mind,
Unto such grace rose thy humanity
That the Arch-dreamer who thy form designed
Scorned not to house His own vast self in clay:
For, thy womb's saered mystery enshrined
The omnific Love by whose untarnished ray
Now flowers this rose-heart of eternal peace!
A beaconing magnilicent midday
Art thou to us of saviour charities,
To mortal men hope's ever-living fount!
So great thy power that, save its fulgencies
Shed purifying gleam, whoso would mount
Unto this ecstasy might well desire
Wingless sky-soar! Nor dost thou needful count
Griefs tear, but even ere its gaze aspire
Thou minglest with its bitter drop thy bliss.
Whatever bounteous world-upkindling fire
Sparkles below, thy heart-infinities
Hold in full blaze... Here kneels one that has
viewed
All states of spirit frorn the dire abyss
To heaven's insuperable altitude:
1, who have never craved the rapturous sight
With such flame-voice of zeal for my soul's good
As now for him implores thy faultless light,
Beg answer to this orison: O pierce
The last gloom-vestige of his mortal night
By the miraculous beauty that bestirs
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The sleeping god in man with its pure sheen:
Disclose the immeasurable universe
Of ultimate joy, O time-victorious Queen!
Quench the blind hunger of his earth-despair
With flood of glory from the immense Unseen!
Deny him not perfection--lo, in prayer
Unnumbered saints with Beatrice upraise
Sinless love-splendoured hands that he may share
The vision of inviolable Grace!"
Dante Approaches The Beatific Vision
The Eyes that make all heaven their worshipper
Glowed on the suppliant's mouth and in their rays
Streamed the mute blessing deep prayers draw from
her.
Then to the Light which knows no dusk they turned
Full-open, gathering without one blur
What never in a creature s look has burned.
Neighbouring the Vast where the gold laughter
stood,
End of each clay-desire in clay unearned,
I ended every hunger in my blood.
Bernard was signalling up with smiling face
My soul, but to the crowning azurehood
My glance had winged already a long space;
For, that high splendour shapes all Nature new,
One with the Pure that needs no power or praise
Beyond its own white self to keep it true.
Henceforth so large an aureoled surprise
That words are shut in memories scarce break
through!
As fade dream-pageants from awaking eyes
At the rude touch of clamorous common day,
Even so my spirit loses paradise.
Yet though the enormous rapture rolls away,
A silent sweetness trickles in my heart!
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Even thus the snow is in the sun's hot ray
Unsealed or, when the vague breeze blew apart
The sibyl's thin leaves, back to the unknown
Vanished her secrets of sooth-saying art.
O Lustre seated on a reachless throne,
Rejoicing solitary and aloft
In ethers where no thought has ever flown
Out of the bound of earthly hours, enwaft
Once more the primal brilliance to my sight—
Slay my song's discord with Thy glory's shaft,
That I may leave of Thy miraculous light
A deathless sparkle to posterity!
Empower with Thy unconquerable might
The dim voice of my mortal memory
To lift above the minds of future men
The burning banner of Thy victory!
The grace withdraw not which Thou gav'st me when
With superhuman courage I pursued
Thy beckoning blaze of beauty till my ken
Reeled on the verge of cread infinitude!
In the depths divine the myriad universe
Clasped by a giant flame of love I viewed:
All that the wayward winds of time disperse
Stood luminous there in one ecstatic whole:
Beyond corruption and the taint of tears
Shone the deific destiny of man's soul!
The Crowning Vision of Dante
Stunned by that flash of limitless unity
I felt as though upon my being stole
The weight of one mute moment's lethargy
Heavier than the dead centuries that fall
On the Argo's plunge across the pristine sea....
What flickering earth-lure has tongue to call
The spirit grown wide with this magnificence?
Each longing here atains the rapturous All—
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Here life's lost heart of splendour beats immense!
But the deep relish of divinity
How shall my words convey?
Its radiance
Leaves my mouth Stricken with helpless infancy
Draining in dumb delight its mother's breast. Not that the Flame rose now more goldenly
(For ever unchanged its high perfections rest),
But my gaze found a growing miracle
No power of human speech could have expressed,
As orb within bright orb unthinkable
From that abyss of tense beatitude
Swam slowly into my wondering sight until
The mystery of heaven's triune mood
In mingling fire and rainbow-beauty shone!
O Light eternal, in self-plenitude
Dwelling exultant, fathomless, unknown
Save to the immaculate infinity
Of luminous omnipotence Thine alone!
'Twas Thy supremest joy Thou showed'st to me,
Thy grace most intimate masked by dazzling awe,
When, fixing on Thy uncurbed brilliancy
My marvelling look, with heart overwhelmed I saw
Thy nameless grandeurs wear the face of Man!
But as in vain without geometric law
An intricate figure one may strive to span,
So the impuissant scrutiny of thought
With which my labouring mind essayed to scan
This mighty secret, fell back dazed, distraught,
Till Thy mercy flashed a beam on its dark eye
And the heart found the ineffable knowledge
sought!...
Then vigour failed the towering fantasy;
Yet, like a wheel whose speed no tremble mars,
Desire rushed on-—its spur unceasingly
The Love that moves the sun and all the stars.
This poem was composed piecemeal and the last part
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written first, starting with the line, "What flickering earth-lure has tongue to call." The few lines before it were worked in afterwards. The passage was sent to Sri Aurobindo with the note: "Here is a translation of Dante. I hope it can pass as such in spite of whatever Amal-element has found play within the framework of ':he Awful Florentine'."1 Sri Aurobindo's comment ran:
"I don't think it can be called a translation, but it is a very fine performance. It is not Dantesque, though there is some subtle element of power contibuted by the influence of the original text, the severe cut of the Dantesque and its concentrated essence of ton e are not there but there is something else which is very fine."
The middle portion came Text, not exactly as it stands at present but beginning with the line, "As fade dream-pageants from awaking eyes " The seventeen lines preceding this were written years later. On the original piece Sri Aurobindo commented:
"It is again very fine poetry."
The opening section, written last, got the comment: "It is exceedingly good—one might say, perfect. Dante seems always to inspire you to your best."
Sri Aurobindo wrote to Dilip Kumar Roy about this section: "Amal in his translation of Dante has let himself go in the direction of eloquence more than Dante who is too succinct for eloquence and he has used also a mystical turn of phrase which is not Dante's—yet he has got something of
1It may be acknowledged that the line—
Then vigour failed the towering fantasy—
for Dante's
All' alta fantasia qui manco possa, has been taken bodily from Carey's 19th-century translation of the complete Divina Commedia in semi-Miltonic blank verse. Carey's expression here seemed impossible to better and so any attempt to be original would have been a betrayal of poetry. We may realise the necessity of the plagiarism by looking, for instance, at Laurence Binyon's
To the high imagination force now failed or Barbara Reynolds's
High phantasy lost power and here broke off. (K. D. S.)
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The spirit in the language, something of Dante's concen-raled force of expression into his lines."
FROM BEATRICE IN HEAVEN
Bach time your eyes of longing rose above
All transient colour to the Invisible,
Their viewless worship mingled with my love.
So, like the sun upon a blinded gaze
You found a warmth of secret splendour spill
And, though unvisioning felt my rapturous face.
From these unshadowed paradisal tops
No mortal beauty throws its narrow ray
But only a lustre of immensity drops!
Death leaves me here a timeless self behind—
A dream unvestured of both night and day-—
Truth-glory naked in the Immortal Mind—
An image sprung from God's untarnished core
Of mystery beyond the clasp of clay:
The heart's unhaloed cry is heard no more,
But every passion like a surge of light
Carries within a sempiternal sea
Laughter and love of the whole Infinite!
Hence to the hunger of your human call
I bring through nectarous divinity
Of one white wave the ocean of the All.
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"Very fine and quite successful . All through, the language and thought are very felicitcus, even though the lines marked stand out among the others."
The following exchange of letters is the last literary correspondence in which Sri Aurobindo participated before he left his body on December 5, 1950. His reply is particularly interesting and helpfil for its threefold general classification of poetic quality illustrated by concrete examples.
Letter to Sri Aurobindo
Here are two poems for your consideration—perhaps with some overhead breath in them. Please evaluate them critically. They seem to be somewhat antithetical in theme. Are there any lines in them you particularly like?
Amal
27-10-1950
GOD'S WORLD
How shall the witness mind's tranquillity
+Catch the extravagant happiness of God's world?
To reach one goal He flings a million paths
+Laughing with sheer love of the limitless,
Wandering for centuries in secret glory,
Then striking home a single light of lights!
Marvellous the pattern of His prodigal power.
But vainly the philosopher will brood
+This sable serpent flecked with sudden stars.
+Coil after coil of unpredictable dream
Will set his logic whirling till it drops.
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Only the poet with wide eyes that feel
+ Each form a shining gate to depths beyond
Knows through the magic measures of his tune
+ Our world is the overflow of an infinite wine
+ Self-tasted in the myster) -drunken heart.
WORLD-POET
With song on radiant song I clasp the world,
+ Weaving its wonder and wideness into my heart—
But ever the music misses some huge star
Or else some flower too small for the minstrel hand.
No skill can turn all life my harmony.
Perchance a tablet of magic mood will make
The truth of the whole universe write itself—
But only when with mortal thoughts in-drawn
I learn the secret time-transcending art:
+Silence that, losing all, grows infinite Self...
"The + marking indicates lines which are of the first poetic order. The ordinary mark indicates those which are excellent. The other lines not marked are all of them good but not of a special quality. Both the poems are very successful, especially the first."
7-11-1950
The classification here seer is to hark back to the grades of poetic perfection Sri Aurobindo has distinguished by five kinds of styles. "The first poetic order" appears to fit principally what he has called the pure or sheer inevitable but also any one of the four lesser styles—adequate, effective, illumined, inspired—raised to an inevitability of its own. "Excellent" would point to the same styles at a high pitch. "Good" must be these styles well-achieved but falling short of their greater possibilities.
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As for planes, if we may go by Sri Aurobindo's evaluations elsewhere, the cast of vision, word and rhythm in the lines marked by a cross suggests overhead poetry. The remaining lines belong to the mental plane.
(Once the consciousness is aware of a certain vibration and poetic quality, it is possible to reach out towards its source of inspiration. As poetry for us here must be a way of Yoga, I suppose this reaching out is a helpful attempt; but it would become easier if there were some constant vibration present in the consciousness, which we know to have descended from the higher ranges. Very often the creative spark comes to me from the poems I read. I shall be obliged if you will indicate the origin of the few examples below—only the first of which is from my own work.)
1. Plumbless inaudible waves of shining sleep. (Amal)
2. The diamond dimness of the domed air.
(Harindranath Chattopadhyaya)
3. Withdrawn in a lost attitude of prayer. (Ibid.)
4. This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude Of Truth's abidingness, Self-blissful and alone.
(Arjava [J. A. Chadwick)
5. Million d'oiseaux d'or, 6 future Vigueur!'(Rimbaud)
6. Rapt above earth by power of one fair face.
7. I saw them walking in an air of glory. (Vaughan)
8. Solitary thinkings such as dodge Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain. (Keats)
9. But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness. (Vaughan)
10. I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright. (Ibid.)
1 Millions of golden birds. O Vigour to conic! (K..D.S.)
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!. "Illumined Mind.
2. "Illumined Mind.
3. "Intuition.
4. "Illumined Mind with an intuitive element and a strong Overmind touch.
5. "Illumined Mind.
6. "Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else—but something of illumination and intuition also.
7. "it is a mixture. Something of the Illumined Mind, something of the Poetic Intelligence diluting the full sovereignty of the higher expression.
8. "Higher Mind combined with Illumined.
9. "Illumined Mind with something from Intuition.
10. "Illumined Mind with something from Overmind."
(Here is your passage describing Savitri in whom the God of Love found "his perfect shrine":
Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,
Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit
Voyaging through worlds; of splendour and of calm
Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things.
Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will;
Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,
Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave.
As in a mystic and dynamic dance
A priestess of immaculate ecstasies
Inspired and ruled from Truth's revealing vault
Moves in some prophet cavern of the gods,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy
Inhabited with rich creative beats
A body like a parable of dawn
That seemed a niche for veiled divinity
Or golden temple door to things beyond.
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Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-born steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives.
The great unsatisfied godhead here could dwell:
Vacant of the dwarf self's imprisoned air
Her mood could harbour his sublimer breath
Spiritual that can make all things divine.
For even her gulfs were secrecies of light.
At once she was the stillness and the word,
A continent of self-diffusing peace,
An ocean of untrembling virgin fire.
In her he met a vastness like his own,
His high warm subtle ether he refound
And moved in her as in his natural home.1
Are not these lines, which I regard as the ne plus ultra in world-poetry, a snatch of the sheer Overmind?)
"This passage is, I believe, what I might call the Overmind Intuition at work expressing itself in something like its own rhythm and language. It is difficult to say about one's own poetry, but I think I have succeeded here and in some passages later on in catching that very difficult note; in separate lines or briefer passages (i.e. a few lines at a time) I think it comes in not unoften."2
(1936)
1 In the final form of Savitri the description has been expanded from its original 31 lines of the 1936 version to 51. (K.D.S.)
2 We may revert to the remark of Sri Aurobindo made in 1946 and already quoted by us, in which he refers to his attitude ten years earlier: "At that time I hesitated to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this order." Round about 1946 he gave up his hesitation about a number of lines. At that time, if he had been privately asked, it seems certain that he would have ascribed the Savitri-passage to Overmind itself rather than to a plane defined by him as intermediate between Intuition and Overmind. (K.D.S.)
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(You have made me believe in my poetic destiny. But I want as soon as possible to outgrow the remnants of the decorative and rhetorical level which, along with a finer intuitive and a larger overhead one, you have pointed out in my inspiration. I want to write more and more with a power near to the Overmind if not actually from it. What should I do? It is difficult to keep the consciousness merely uplifted: I feel "high and dry". Can't you pour some cataract from above? Both in Yoga and in poetry I crave for the potent ease of the highest planes. I aspire to live, as well as to echo in quality of inspiration, those four lines of yours which I consider a plenary Mantra:
Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,
An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
Force one with unimaginable rest.1
Show me a way to realise my aspiration. I feel very impatient—though I must confess to my shame that the aspiration of the poet is more frequently in the forefront than that of the Yogi.)
"Impatience does not help; intensity of aspiration does. The use of keeping the consciousness uplifted is that it then remains ready for the flow from above when that comes. To get as early as possible to the highest range one must keep the consciousness steadily turned towards it and maintain the call. First one has to establish the permanent opening— or get it to establish itself, then the ascension and frequent, afterwards constant descent. It is only afterwards that one can have the ease."
(1937)
1 From The Life Heavens.
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(J said to Nirod and Jyoti that it has been a habit with me to re-read and repeat and hum lines which I have felt to have come from very high sources. I mentioned your recent poems as my aid to drawing inspiration from the overhead planes. Jyoti begged me to type for her all the lines of this character from these poems. I have chosen the following:
1. O marvel bird with the burning wings of light
and the unbarred lids that look beyond all space...
(The Bird of Fire)
2. Lost the titan winging of the thought...
(The Life Heavens)
3. Arms taking to a voiceless supreme delight,
Life that meets the Eternal with close breast, An unwalled mind dissolved in the Infinite,
Force one with unimaginable rest. (Ibid.)
4. My consciousness climbed.like a topless hill... (Ibid.)
5. He who from Time's dull motion escapes and thrills, Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast,
Unrolls the form and sign of being. Seated above in the omniscient Silence.
(Jivanmukta)
6. Calm faces of the gods on backgrounds vast
Bringing the marvel of the infinitudes...
(The Other Earths)
7. A silent unnamed emptiness content
Either to fade in the Unknowable
Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.
(Nirvana)
8. Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned, Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned...
(Thought the Paraclete)
9. I have drunk the Infinite like a giant's wine...
( Transformation)
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10. My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight...
(Ibid.)
11. Rose of God like a blush of rapture on Eternity's
face,
Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of
Grace!
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in
Nature's abyss:
Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life
Beatitude's kiss.
(Rose of God)
I shan't ask you to tell me in detail the sources of all these lines—but what do you think in general of my choice? Only for one quotation I must crave the favour of your closer attention. Please do try to tell me something about it, for I like it so much that I cannot remain without knowing all that can be known: it is, of course, No. 3 here. I consider these lines the most satisfying I have ever read: poetically as well as spiritually, you have written others as great—what I mean to say is that the whole essence of the truth of life is given by them and every cry in the being seems answered. So be kind enough to take a little trouble and give me an intimate knowledge of them. I'll be very happy to know their source and the sort of enthousiasmos you had when writing them. How exactly did they come into being?)
"The choice is excellent. I am afraid I couldn't tell you in detail the sources, though I suppose they all belong to the Overhead inspiration. In all I simply remained silent and allowed the lines to come down shaped or shaping themselves on the way—I don't know that I know anything else about it. All depends on the stress of the enthousiasmos, the force of the creative thrill and largeness of the wave of its Ananda, but how is that descriaable or definable? What is prominent in No. 3 is a certain calm, deep and intense
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spiritual emotion taken up by the spiritual vision that sees exactly the state or experience and gives it its exact revelatory words. It is an Overmind vision and experience and condition that is given a full power of expression by the word and the rhythm—there is a success in 'embodying' them or at least the sight and emotion of them which gives the lines their force."
(My lines—
Across the keen apocalypse of gold
and
A white word breaks the eternal quietude—
which you consider fine may be authentic poetry and true to spiritual reality but I find nothing strikingly new in them in their present context. Don't you believe that to repeat excellently is as much a fault in its own way as to do so half successfully? I may be in a peculiar mood, but I am sick of these shining monotonies. I think some of my poetic colleagues need as much as myself to get rid of them.)
"Obviously, it is desirable not to repeat oneself or, if one has to, it is desirable to repeat in another language and in a new light. Still, even that cannot be overdone. The difficulty with most writers of spiritual poetry is that they have either a limited field of experience or are tacked on to a limited inspiration though an intense one. How to get out of it? The only recipe I know is to widen oneself (or one's receptivity) always. Or else perhaps wait in the eternal quietude for a new 'white word' to break it—if it does not come, telephone."
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"On the other hand to cease writing altogether might be a doubtful remedy. By your writing here you have got rid of most of your former defects, and reached a stage of preparation in which you may reasonably hope for a greater development hereafter. I myself have more than once abstained for some time from writing because I did not wish to produce anything except as an expression from a higher plane of consciousness, but to do that you must be sure of your poetic gift, that it will not rust by too long a disuse."
"I have said that overhead poetry is not necessarily greater or more perfect than any other kind of poetry. But perhaps a subtle qualification may be made to this statement. It is true that each kind of poetical writing can reach a highest or perfect perfection in its own line and in its own quality and what can be more perfect than a perfect perfection and can we say that one kind of absolute perfection is greater than another kind? What can be more absolute than the absolute? But then what do we mean by the perfection of poetry? There is the perfection of the language and there is the perfection of the word-music and the rhythm, beauty of speech and beauty of sound, but there is the quality of the thing said which counts for something. If we consider only word and sound and what in themselves they evoke, we arrive at the application of the theory of art for art's sake to poetry. On that ground we might say that a lyric of Anacreon is as good poetry and as perfect poetry as anything in Aeschylus or Sophocles or Homer. The question of elevation or depth or of intrinsic beauty of the thing said cannot enter into our consideration of poetry; and yet it does enter, with most of us at any rate, and is part of the aesthetic reaction even in the most aesthetic of critics and readers. From this point of view the elevation from which the inspiration comes may after all matter, provided the one who receives it is a fit and powerful instrument; for a great
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poet will do more with a lower level of the origin of inspiration than a smaller poet can do even when helped from the highest sources. In a certain sense all genius comes from Overhead; for genius is the entry or inrush of a greater consciousness into the mind or the possession of the mind by a greater power. Every operation of genius has at its back or infused within it an intuition, a revelation, an inspiration, an illumination or at the least a hint or touch or influx from some greater power or level of conscious being than those which men ordinarily possess or use. But this power has two ways of acting: in one it touches the ordinary modes of the mind and deepens, heightens, intensifies or exquisitely refines their action but without changing its modes or transforming its normal character; in the other it brings down into these normal modes something of itself, something supernormal, something which one at once feels to be extraordinary and suggestive of a superhuman level. These two ways of action when working in poetry may produce things equally exquisite and beautiful, but the word 'greater' may perhaps be applied, with the necessary qualification, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation.
"The greater bulk of the highest poetry belongs to the first of these two orders. In the second order there are again two or perhaps three levels; sometimes a felicitous turn or an unusual force of language or a deeper note of feeling brings in the overhead touch. More often it is the power of the rhythm that lifts up language that is simple and common or a feeling or idea that has often been expressed and awakes something which is not ordinarily there. If one listens with the mind only or from the vital centre only, one may have a wondering admiration for the skill and beauty of woven word and sound or be struck by the happy way or the power with which the feeling or idea is expressed. But there is something more in it than that; it is this that a deeper, more inward strand of the consciousness has seen and is speaking, and if we listen more profoundly we can get something more than the admiration and delight of the mind or Housman's
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thrill of the solar plexus. We can feel perhaps the Spirit of the universe lending its own depths to our mortal speech or listening from behind to some expression of itself, listening perhaps to its memories of
old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago
or feeling and hearing, it may be said, the vast oceanic stillness and the cry of the cuckoo
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides
or it may enter again into Vyasa's
A void and dreadful forest ringing with the crickets' cry
Vanam pratibhayarh sunyam jhillikdgananaditam1
or remember its call to the soul of man
Anityam asukham lokam imam prapya bhajasva mam
Thou who hast come into this transient and unhappy world, love and worship Me.
There is a second level on which the poetry draws into itself a fuller language of intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana, not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the
1 In Savitri Sri Aurobindo has brought in Vyasa's line thus:
some lone tremendous wood
Ringing for ever with the crickets' cry. (K.D.S.)
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Rig Veda have this inspiration. It is a poetry 'thick inlaid with patines of bright gold' or welling up in a stream of passion, beauty and force. But sometimes there comes down a supreme voice, the overmind voice and the overmind music and it is to be observed that the lines and passages where that happens rank among the greatest and most admired in all poetic literature. It would be therefore too much to say that overhead inspiration cannot bring in a greatness into poetry which could surpass the other levels of inspiration, greater even from the purely aesthetic point of view and certainly greater in the power of its substance.
"A conscious attempt to write overhead poetry with a mind aware of the planes from which this inspiration comes and seeking always to ascend to those levels or bring down something from them, would probably result in a partial success; at its lowest it might attain to what I have called the first order, ordinarily it would achieve the two lower levels of the second order and in its supreme moments it might in lines and in sustained passages achieve the supreme level, something of the highest summit of its potency. But the greatest work will be to express adequately and constantly what is now only occasionally and inadequately some kind of utterance of the things above, the things beyond, the things behind the apparent world and its external or superficial happenings and phenomena. It would not only bring in the occult in its larger and deeper ranges but the truths of the spiritual heights, the spiritual depths, the spiritual intimacies and vastnesses as also the truths of the inner mind, the inner life, an inner or subtle physical beauty and reality. It would bring in the concreteness, the authentic image, the inmost soul of identity and the heart of meaning of these things, so that it could never lack in beauty. If this could be achieved by one possessed, if not of a supreme, still of a sufficiently high and wide poetic genius, something new could be added to the domains of poetry and there would be no danger of the power of poetry beginning to fade, to fall into decadence, to fail us. It might even enter into the domain of the
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infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of the Ineffable, show us revealing images which bring us near to the Reality that is secret in us and in all, of which the Upanishad speaks,
Anejad ekam manaso javIyo nainad deva apnuvam
purvam arsat...
Tad ejati tan naijati tad dure tad u antike.
The One unmoving is swifter than thought, the
Gods cannot overtake It, for It travels ever in front;
It moves and It moves not, It is far away
from us and It is very close.
"The gods of the Overhead planes can do much to bridge that distance and to bring out that closeness, even if they cannot altogether overtake the Reality that exceeds and transcends them."
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EPILOGUE
THE OVERHEAD PLANES
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,
Lights up the occult chambers of the heart;
Its spear-point ictus of discovery
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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 suns;
Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard;
All Time is one body, Space a single look:
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,
The Mighty Mother sits in lucent calm
And holds the eternal Child upon her knees,
Attending the day when he shall speak to Fate.
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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 Supermind
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 find 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,
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,
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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 land 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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THE ADVENTURE OF THE APOCALYPSE
A PERSONAL PREFACE
Between the heart-strain known as myocardial defect and (he heart-strain, the cri de coeur, that is poetry no connection has been noted by either doctor or critic. But the story of the poems here collected has its beginning in a collapse due to over-tension of the poet's heart-muscle.
1 was rushing about a good deal in order to manage certain financial ventures undertaken to meet demands with which pure literature is proverbially incapable of coping. On top of this were months of intensive research in the philosophical implications of modern physics. Making a close and wide study of relativity theory and quantum theory and trying to find what lay at the back of so many and often so conflicting interpretations was quite a tax on the mind, especially as even mathematical technicalities had to be attacked. The result of the physical exertion and this scientific exploration was a general tired feeling. Another result was the receding of whatever poetic faculty I had into the background.
Then came the sudden collapse—on the 8th of May, 1948. 1 was coming home after a rather strenuous morning. There was some fatigue, but nothing more unusual than was the order every day. However, when 1 reached home at nearly 3 p.m. and was climbing the hillock on which our house is perched, I found myself breathing very hard and suffering from a drained-out sensation in the middle of the chest. I had to make two or three halts. With difficulty I reached the gate and slowly, step after determined step, I got up to the first floor.
My body was in no state e either to eat or undress. With my habitual rashness I tried to make it do both. But I seemed to drip ice from my face and be forcibly bent and broken. So there was nothing else I could do except creep to bed and lie flat. The feeling of a hollow in my chest was growing deeper and deeper. So sucked in and dragged down I felt that I thought 1 would soon die. Various home-remedies were
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tried to keep me up. Yet the terrible sinking increased. It struck me that the only decisive help could be drawn by inwardly appealing to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, in whose Ashram at Pondicherry I had spent eight years and whose disciple I still was. With all my power of faith and aspiration I kept outstretching invisible hands to them, calling and calling. I pulled at the saving and healing light that is their Yogic consciousness and when I thought a blue sheen and a gold glow enveloped my heart I sensed a subtle supporting strength gradually taking outward effect.
A doctor had been summoned. By the time he came I had emerged to a considerable extent from the vacuity in the heart-region. He gave me an injection and advised complete rest, saying my heart had been strained. I lay for a couple of hours, safe now but still weary with the terrible passage. As the evening wore on I found my mind getting extraordinarily quiet and clear, until I seemed to look into a new dimension of things. Suddenly the whole universe appeared to be a great living being, a wonderul substance of Spirit, and every piece of matter tingled with a divine presence drawing my worship: the very chairs and tables of my room were like gods and goddesses to whom I could have knelt down. I had an intense impulse to read that canto of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, which is named The World-Soul. It is a thrilled cry of mystical insight bringing up image on strange yet apt image of some hidden Heart of Hearts which in its many-toned unity carries all experience transfigured into bliss. For the first time the entire canto came to me glowing with an absolute perfection. Not even a word anywhere was to my mind human and flawed. This impression extended then to all that had been published so far of Savitri and I could not help worshipping the Yogic power that was embodied in it.
Night came, but I was wide awake. I closed my eyes and in a short while could see right through their lids. I saw the whole room in a thin dark haze. I marked my wife's posture in the next bed and opened my eyes to verify the impression. The verification was complete. After a time a flood of
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poetry raced through my mind. Line after line, charged with spontaneous vision and symbol, ran before my shut eyes. I had the sense that I was composing and yet it would be equally true to say I was reading off the lines as they themselves appeared. The two processes were aspects of the same phenomenon. Composition was being rapidly done by a "me" which was more than myself; and the lines, as far as the habitual ' I" was concerned, were like living creatures acting on their own. Whenever there was a slight pause in their appearance I applied a little pressure of attention, as it were, and the vivid phrases glimmered out. This went on and on. It may sound presumptuous but I felt as if a new canto of Savitri were being written. 1 have never in my life had such a flow of inspiration sustained through such a length of time. As the doctor had advised as much sleep as possible, I begged the sweet immortal presences that were seeming to be shaped into words, to withdraw for a while, though never to be lost. There was not the slightest heed taken of my appeal.
More and more lines streamed past as I lay in that state of in-drawnness. But it was difficult to remember them. I had to locus my mind on them to be able to retain a few and set them down. Every one or two minutes I would emerge out of the semi-trance and scribble verses on the back and cover and other blank pages of the canto of Savitri which, together with a pencil to mark passages in it, 1 had near me in bed. 1 was writing in total darkness and with extreme rapidity. There was no time to halt and make sure about anything; I had to hurry because the moment I opened my eyes the lines started slipping away and because to get new lines I must return to my semi-trance which might not come if I waited awake too long. This continued up to four o' clock in the morning. Then I dozed off.
1 got up again quite early without any sense of fatigue. Throughout the day there was no sleepy feeling. Two nights back I had kept awake similarly; but there had been no poetic inspiration. I had, however, been making inward
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contact again and again with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and hearing what I hear in my best and calmest moods, a low universal croon, a far-away rhythm with a deep monotone overlaid with small variations: even the variations repeat one and the same softly trembling theme: Some ultimate Mother Spirit seems to be gently singing to her child the cosmos.... The next morning I had felt absolutely fresh, just as I was now.
Almost the first thing 1 did on waking now was to go through the night's scrawl. It was in a jumble: several lines had been written over one another. Even those that stood legible were a series of snatches caught out of the night's flowing song. I willed them to cohere, and waited. Out of the many different strains one short ensemble was the first to result; whatever gaps had been there were filled by means of a conscious entering into the mood of the existing lines to create a continuation. This conscious effort must have pulled at the inner being which had come into contact with the afflatus at night. For, soon two new poems quite apart from what had been scribbled took shape. They were in a different tempo, so to speak--more lyrical—but still with what appeared to me a living touch on the occult. The not day, some of the remaining lines from the semi-trance pieced together. And the rest became connected soon after. All of them (as also many written later) have a vein of surrealism though without, I hope, the capricious and the chaotic which usually mark surrealism in Europe and which strike one as rather the froth of the dream-consciousness than its true supra-physical profundity, its genuine plumbing of mysterious universes behind the one we know in ordinary waking moments.
I was now in a hypersensitive condition. Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain was surprised to find he had talked prose all his life: I was discovering that, when I talked prose, there came suddenly in the midst of commonplace language bright poetic phrases that led me away from the conversation along strange trails of image and rhythm. Or, out of the talk of
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others, some casual word would bring me vivid suggestions and set me off to write a poem. And at the oddest moments poetry would lush in; while being sponged, for instance, I would be all lit up with ideas that ran into rhythmic expression. Poems would start also from words or phrases in the books I read. My reading was mainly of Savitri and it tended to keep my faculties at concert-pitch. A dip now and then into the first canto of The Ring and the Book by browning struck, too, on some creative hints, but I could not abide Browning for long: he had a vigorously found felicity, yet not much lift. That extremely poetic and mystically pregnant novel by Elizabeth Myers, A Well Full of Leaves, was the only other reading-matter at my bedside. 1 tried on occasion to look at less congenial stuff, but so strong a ''No'' swept out from within my chest that 1 got most uncomfortable and had soon to drop it.
Day after day brought more and more poetry. I was writing with a kind of automatic energy. It was as if I were a mere gale through which poems strode out. Occasionally I had to pull them forth and also correct on afterthought, but there was little now of the piecemeal writing and the long and careful chiselling to which 1 had been accustomed in the old days of poetic composition. I seemed to be plastic in the lands of the inner being. As the heart-specialist called by my doctor had found my electrocardiogram clearly indicative of muscular strain, I had been ordered to be in bed for at least eight weeks—until the "muffled first sound" (as medical jargon has it) should become normal. I had been asked to avoid even lifting my head up. I did not take this regime seriously and spent hours resting in a slanted position. 1 felt that if I could open myself to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother they would effect a cure much sooner than the doctor expected. I kept concentrating more and more intensely on them, feeling that a grip had broken loose in my chest, with no longer a dreadful hollow as in the experience on May 8, but a sweet warm restful wideness that held deeper and deeper their presence. The poetic inspiration
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and their presence were really one and the same thing—and after each poem had been written I could not help inwardly divesting myself of its authorship and offering it into their hands. This was like putting away from me the poetic power. but actually with each gesture of offering I found myself richer—a larger room grew in me for both spiritual and poetic experience.
I knew a happiness such as 1 had never known. The weeks 1 spent in bed, regularly taking injections and medicines, floated in a sea of bliss and light. 1 would not for anything have missed the heart-strain which brought so much inward nourishment and strength and so much poetic flowering. The doctor told me I would have to go easy for a long time and avoid doing a lot of things I used to. Nothing dampened my spirits. I was getting the best nursing imaginable from my wife; so even the physical routine of being in bed was not irksome. I took my bed-riddenness as pure nectar, though never, of course, encouraging the suggestion of illness. 1 was eager to get well soon; but, while I lay unwell, there was no fretting—on the contrary, a happy realisation of how through the worst the best could cone and how the Divine could utilise everything for a purpose beyond our calculation.
The poetic impulse kept me in an excitement which no doctor would have sanctioned—if he had seen what was happening. So vivid were the symbols that made their impact on my consciousness that my whole body appeared to live with them; almost automatically I would move my hands to feel the visions that dawned on me; my limbs would tend to act out a response to what they signified; it was as if the scenes and figures had been physically in my room and as they grew and found expression they kindled my eyes with wonder and drew exclamations from my lips. Often the words in which they got uttered would be found by me with forceful physical gestures. And several of the rhythms came plunging from some remote wideness and thundering out with a bursting sensation in my chest: the opening passage of the poem entitled The Two Crosses is a typical example. The
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heart would beat faster and would be thrilled through and through and left somewhat exhausted. But behind all the excitement there was a great peace and every act of exertion brought in its wake an intense depth of contact with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. What I did and experienced might not have been according to medical rules, yet it helped me immensely and kept me so cheerful that the doctor said he simply loved o visit me and have a chat with me and listen to my comments and jokes. The heart was improving—and every phase of its history I communicated by letter to the Mother. In fact I was writing to her every day and sending poem after poem. I was sure I was on the right lines in doing what I did and in believing that she would look after me and anyhow put me again on my feet. Her reply to one of my letters set the seal on my own conviction. She wrote: "My dear child, I quite agree with you that there is a power other and much more powerful than that of the doctors and the medicines and I am glad to see that you put your trust in it. Surely it will lead you throughout all difficulties and in spite of all catastrophic warnings. Keep your faith intact and all will be all right."
After eight weeks I was allowed to toddle about a little. The poetry did not cease when I left the bed. It grew, however, a but less abundant and towards the close of the third month there was a marked diminution and I was afraid that soon the flow might stop. Stop it did—almost exactly at the termination of the third month. But it left me with a certain confidence I had always lacked even when during my stay in the Ashram I was writing poetry pretty often. I had wondered whether I should ever be able to write a long poem. The present collect on does not contain any really long poem, but a number of pieces have a distinct tendency to length, several took birth on one and the same day and I was conscious of an irresistible drive in nearly everything 1 wrote: all this has made me feel as though a whole sea of unuttered song were waiting somewhere in the deep background of the being and might some day flow out if I opened
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myself sufficiently to the influence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Till then, the present collection must stand as my most fluent and prolific art-experience of what a poem of mine calls the adventure of the apocalypse. I hope the three months" mass it forms, with its many moods simple or complex and its various turns of sight and speech, gives at least some promise that, should the prayed for outburst come, its quality would not kg too far behind its quantity.
K. D. SETHNA
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Seated above in a measure ess trance of truth—
A thunder wearing the lightning's streak of smile,
A lonely monolith of frozen fire,
Sole pyramid piercing to the vast of the One—
Waits Shiva throned on an all-supporting void.
Wing after wing smites to the cosmic sky.
Gathering flame-speed out of their own wild heart—
That tunnel of dream through the body's swoon of rock—
They find their home in this sweet.silent Face
With the terrible brain that bursts to a hammer of heaven
And deluges hell with mercies without end.
The abysmal night opens its secret smile
And all the world cries out it is the dawn!
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Page 227
All mirrors in which we seek the bliss
Of our small self are an abyss
At the bottom of whose night
Is a mockery of light,
A tiny stagnant pool
Where darkles the flattened face,
With gaping empty gaze,
Of the demon and the ghoul.
But when the Great Self glows
Like a golden cosmic rose,
The petals fanning out from one sweet core.
No strangeness anywhere Remains for stare and stare
Seeking to itself door.
The central Eye of eyes
Can shut in all-repose,
For the Great Flower knows
Its perfume of paradise.
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Page 228
Treasure of the Infinite
Within a stretch of our hand!
But the key to the Infinite
Is hard to understand.
God's single Sun is lying,
Sealed in atrance of night—
Trickling one ray through the key-hole
To honey our wins of sight.
O what shall turn in the grooves,
Set free the Orb of gold
And burst a noon of knowledge
From mysteries untold?
Vainly we grope lor the key,
To the ends of the earth we run,
While just a fragile finger
Making the sign of the One
Can touch through the narrow tunnel
The spring of the secret cry
With which the lid breaks open
The all-seeing central Eye!
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Lord of the lampless lonelihoods of drowse,
Speak your calm thunder that fills the dark with dreams,
Stand a black angel athwart a sky all sun,
Our shield of mystery against sudden power,
A shadow like a benediction falling
On every crest of the surge of human sight.
Then, shutting my lids, I shall see through a thin night-haze
All the world's outlines framing prisoner souls:
Each jagged boulder a god who groans to no ear.
Gulfs of divinity shall gape in me,
Calling the glittering peaks of thought to plunge
Head downward in those quiet wisdom-wells.
Deep and more deep the blinded puissances
Hurl to the womb of some sweet mother-space—
Then birth out like a swarm of birds that shine
And, with soft croon and effortless pinion-song
Breasting the eternal Blue that all things are,
Meet in the merciless sun the face of a friend.
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Page 230
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 tortious 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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Page 231
Over an endless groove that plunges and plunges,
The globed liberties of the silver Calm
Rejoice aloof from the all-en gulfing pain.
Against the background of that mystic Moon
Roar the infinitude seas, the eternity hills
Volcano to the Hush. Mere mocks in our sky,
Stand the bare craters and the deep dry beds,
Children of the burning pallor of mortal love.
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Time
Mystery before and Mystery behind,
A nothing Now, a tremble and a fall—
God of the future, Devil of the past,
Man of the meaningless moment—here I stand.
Great thought is all; life is a shell by the sea.
When the great thought knows dim who moves in the deep,
Joining the Self to the Self across the Self,
Come, Gone and Now are the Flame that licks up Time.
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Sharp-hewn yet undertoned with mystery,
A brief black sign from the Incommunicable
Making the Eternal's Night mix with our day
To deepen ever the shallow goldenness
We hug to our heart! Laughing whip-lash of love
That leaves a wonder-weal holding bright secrets
Within its snake whose coils art centuries
But whose straight sweep is the backbone of One Bliss!
The characters go flaming up and down
With all time's venture twixt two ecstatic ends.
Clutching with gentle finger our dumb desire
A slanting full-bodied soar loops a firm loop
Of light around some lone invisible peak—
Followed by steady twin strokes toward the same goal,
Yet smooth and statured close to the human's heart.
Then one curve-straightening gracefully girdled stance,
A peace and pulchritude and potency,
A slender pyramid chasing a viewless line
Within, to an upright noon that knows all truth.
Soon from the girdle a quick smiling leap
Across, spaced with a pair of vertical dreams
Still hinting unfallen heights, and then the term
Of all this labour and rapture in a full sweet circle,
Lackless, complete with godhead boundless in a point.
But, never a stagnant splendour, it casts a hook
Answering the curl before, with which the Name
Of the Nameless unwound in the hours, by a curl behind
Downward to dig and drag the dark Divine
Out of some heaven made hell, the Abyss that is All!
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Page 234
Lost arc the ancient mournings, the old mirths
Of Gods grown men, holding the world in their hearts
And breaking with its beauty and its bale
And washing with blood of roses every limb!
The epic's hurricane, the lyric's gurgle,
"The pastoral's tremolo of bending reeds,
The drama's splendoured hells and darkling heavens—
And through them all the Voice without a name,
Crying beyond power, passion, pleasure, pang,
Hushing to an ecstasy that has blind eyes
And sees but through a hole suddenly shining
In the magic centre of the marbled brow!
Then were the Angels afloa , the Devils wore wings,
And even the tiny squeaks of insect lives
Came past the antennae's pitiable prayer
Like the Soul of all creation sobbing to the Blue.
Now the deep song sputters on a glutton's lip,
And the azure hungers drown in a drunken orb;
The Abysm is the belly of the prostitute.
Grandeurs are dumb and misery has no muse;
Homeric laughters crack through the hyena's teeth,
Virgil drops tears of things through a crocodile
And Dante climbs from the pit to pap and mouth!
Only some glances parted by lids that quiver
Catch the Soul pinking through the world-vast sleep,
The Spirit golding the streaks a-dream in the haze.
But the Gods arc never dead; their flame is frozen
Till from the locked Inferno of their hearts
They burst to Purgatory and Paradise
And lick up earth with a tongue that sears with bliss.
One waits like a Sun eclipsed by His own Moon,
Soft face coronaed with in initude,
Page 235
Counting the hours till, thundering with light.
His chant shall chariot through the universe.
O He shall nebula the body's night
And He shall darken the 1ittle day of the mind,
Quenching the cosmos in a nectar sea
One moment without shore, one moment strewn
With archipelagos of apocalypse!
The ancient ages looming ike an eagle
Will seem a sparrow twittering the infancy
Of pygmy stars, twinkle on twinkle tossed
From eternity to eternity in a trice.
The Alchemic Touch what human heart can bear?
Prophets with burning beards cling round His feet;
They view all heaven's roses in a kingly nail
That with one touch can shatter the Winged Rock
Brooding upon the broken breast of Time.
O Master of Dragon and of Hippogriff,
Saviour of the luminous Toad's barbaric bass.
Planter of the Column that is all life's cry
From stone to utmost opal of ether's hush!
O diamond telescope into the Inane,
Deep after deep of crystal untorn by the suns,
And Thou that gemmest through ruby microscope
The pin-point universe with red chaoses!
Reach out to us that spraying fount of beams,
Thy palm of five great fires that burn as one.
Bless us true children of Thy Golden Self,
Crown us pure children of Thy Silvery Wife!
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Page 236
Coward who criest to lose a single soul,
Yellow heart lapped in the omnipotent sun,
Traitor who flingest our loves to heavenly hands,
fifth-columnist of fire, hooded in hush
To break a door of dreams through Matter's sleep
Or else to hide a time-bomb in our heart
For blowing up wife and child to eternity!
Torpedo to our lusts and luxuries,
Magnetic mine for shipwrecks of desire,
Diver with gold block-busters from the Inane.
Huge paratrooper out of primal Night,
Now have I caught Thy stratagem of the Unknown,
Broadcasting bliss from racios under earth,
Swooping, on the myriad cries that quiver and clash,
The supersonic doom of white V-l!
Sure shall Thy mystery burst through the Maginot Line
Of all things built secure by guardian thought,
Wall upon wall against the void of the Unseen.
Out of the timeless gap of the zero hour
Tanks thunder out truths, lame-throws of secrecies
Wound the smooth certitude-cemented forts.
Before, behind, below, above, around,
Ringing with raptures beyond birth and death—
Then, with a pincer-movement of Sun and Moon,
Plucking the blindness off The inmost Eye,
Comest Thou, sweet tiger and wolf, serpent and fox,
A lunge of lightning, a stab of sudden stars,
A crescent smile smiting from the Immense.
Take Thou my puny armours, drive in my breast
Page 237
Thy hooved dictatorship of diamond and gold.
Make, as Thou wilt, of my small vacant lite
Thy living space, Thy Space that lives and loves.
Warfare is futile, surrender sole defence:
Stript of the shades I stand, naked to Thy noon,
O Lord... O Lover... O Embrace of all the Blue
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Page 238
Pierced by a shaf
Of golden ray
From a sky that laughed
Through endless day,
The human heart
Has hung impaled
Midway the dart
Come from the Unveiled
To the hidden house
Below the earth,
Where angels drowse,
Padlocked from mirth.
Like some bright key
To that lost room,
The pole's reverie
Wakes the God-gloom.
The captived cry
Of heaven to heaven
Lifts from hell's eye
Where time has striven
Vainly to reach
The eternal noon.
The silvering speech
Climbs—a festoon—
The silent bar
Planted upright
Between the sun-star
And the floor of night.
Page 239
Struggling with earth
The seraphs can wind
Upward through birth
From muteness to mind,
Never save through
The rose-heart hung,
Mortal in hue
With the wound far-flung!
No gate to the free
Zenith above,
But through the plea
Of human love
Vigilling for God—
A lamp whose flame
Is a spurt of blood
To the azure Name!
And till the heat
Of the Honey-Cruse
Is won, the sweet
Mediator muse
Of the stricken, warm
Soul-core of man
Must ache to form
Night's door through the tan
Of twilight to the grot
Of gold on the height
Whence timeward tell shut
The splendourous Sight!
O beautiful creature,
Child of God-past,
Fathering God-future,
How long shall last
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Thy mournful Now?
Perchance a balm
Is set aflow
Out of high calm
To heal the old scar —
A serpent of grace
Slips down the bar
To bite out more space
For the prisoner powers
More throngingly
To press up their flowers
Through the mystery
Of mortal hours,
And, by the increase
Of their leap to the Towers,
Bring swifter peace
To thy agelong watch...
Hast thou not seen
The summit-sun catch
A Mother's mien—
Merciful gaze,
Soft lips that assure,
Smile-curves which trace
That serpentine cure?
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Page 241
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.
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And through the music and colour
Looks forth a Vast,
In its own self reposing,
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, Noontide, Even
Kiss and embrace,
Weaving to threefold beauty
A spirif space.
Ecstasies curvelike clouds
And their smiles are seven
For the house built without walls
From blue-print of heaven.
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Page 243
My Life
I live not from hour to hour
But in dream on dream of you, Sweet!
The dawn is the ten-petalled flower
Of your holy feet.
I am told that midday appears,
But the perfect globe of noon
Is made from the hemispheres
Of your breasts where shadows swoon.
1 hark to a rumour of even,
But all that I know are your eyes
Drooping their gleams of heaven
To the deep where the child earth lies.
I have heard of an hour that is night;
O how should I tell, when I see
Nothing but your hail's hidden light
Break loose its mystery?
All time is the shine of your shape,
All space is the stretch of your soul;
When the truths of your silence undrape,
The rhythms of Creation roll!
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Page 244
Why, Soul, look ever ahead to the unborn Gods?
The flute of the future can pour its goldenest honey
liven now if the ear is tuned to the inmost hush.
The ecstatic end is each instant: here on thy brow
Sit all the epiphanies. Lustres that gather
Today are no flowerless path to paradise,
But a music and mystery hiding every heaven
Washed by the secret waves of prophecy.
Lovely the rainbowed horizon, the shimmery heart
Of the dreaming distance, but to live afar
Is blindness toward the deeps of wine within!...
Leaping below to unbottomed bliss, the gap
Twixt throb and aching throb of the pulse of life
Crypts in a Calm that is mother of the worlds
The whole future's farness of the unblown rose!
Vast over thee the noon is everywhere:
An upward tunnel opens through the sun
To expanses that have never known a name
Nor broken with the faintest gossamer wing.
All the great Gods are waiting thy finger-flames
To rise and reach and taste with ten white tongues.
Straight runs the shaft of the flawless infinite hour
From pinnacle to abyss in a sheathed Now.
O the dark waste of this sweet pillar of gold,
A crystal python vertically hung
From burning mouth to burning tail, with a body
Plunging like groove on groove through endless light!
Timeless is the nectar laughing in that jar
Moment by moment: if never hast thou seen
That fullness How in thy form, barren thy life
And a wide mirage the call of coming dawns.
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What secrets suddenly peer
Through the flicker-point of beauty's parting
And the twinkled cry of its vanishing tear
But never through the laugh and light of its starting?..
All day the sun is glorious thunder,
But taking his opalescent leave
After the last wine-flush of wonder—
Hinting the mother-of-pearl that is eve,
He puts on our lip a finger that closes
All speech—and mysteries tremble and wake
In the wink of an instant!... The star-spotted snake
Coil after indigo coil unlooses
And our eyes are crowded with peace or power
But the touch beyond thinking is gone—till the hour
When the gloom has slid, and the tip of its tail
Quivers with an ultimate fleck of white.
Then through a moment of fugitive night
Once more the wordless wizardries wail!...
Great is the splendour of vision breaking
In the songs the gold-hearted poets hurl,
But when the wide wings flutter and furl
And the ear its final thirst is slaking,
A tiny ember of time is haunted
By a spark the minstrel scarcely saw
But which through the passion of lips that chanted
Was aching to utter its dream without flaw.
Only the ending's hush-haloed sound
Touches and drops what the lilt never found!...
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Page 246
I have been quiet a long while
To till my singing smile
With a magic beyond the lips of man.
And very quiet will I be
After the burst of minstrelsly
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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As the lotus of a lamp
Swims in one place
On the gutter's gurgle and jump
And scurry without grace—
As that cool blossom floats
Like a silver stain
Made by deep organ- notes
On a painter's brain—
Trembling a little and breaking
Yet clinging as one,
Stamped on the water's waking
Like a dream-sun
That nothing of crude clay
Can touch or mine—
So, fixed though far away,
Some haloed Love
Shines down its secret soul,
Flame-flower with no root,
Which life with its slushy roll
Leaves still and mute,
A birth-mark out of a womb
Deeper than thought,
Flinging a godlike doom
From a golden grot
Hung virgin above the tosst
Wave of time's dirt,
The crown of a steel-post
Vigilling inert,
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Withdrawn from snaky swirl
Of mortal cries,
True to the mother-of-pearl
Lustre that lies
Immovable though thin
On each desire
Winding its froth within
The walls of mire
Which build the body of man....
O might I feel—
Through dreams that hushward run—
A Self of steel,
Upright and hurtless and high,
Then hiddenly climb
To the lotus-lamp of the Eye
That is lord of time!
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Page 249
Veilless Word
Mine be the veilless word,
Pure spirit grown!
No more in the mould of stone
Blindly bestirred
At the foot of the mountain-muse
Calling to its peak
The chasmed cries and hues
That wander and seek--
No more in the dusky bark
Built round dream-day,
Or even the quivering coat
Of bright and dark
Hungers for unseen prey.
To free the stainless note
Each swathe must fall aswoon;
Nor must the glorious skin
Whose passionate pores outbreathe
The splendoured soul within
Be left—the very last
Subtlest and gauziest sheath
Has keenly to be cast
Down if the hidden glow
Would bare the deathless tune
That lay like a floating moon
In the pool of night below!
Stripped of all vesture-sign
And symbol-robe,
Sheer sense of the Divine
Must burn and throb,
Etching with naked flame
The immortal summit-name
Whose heaven unheard
Awoke the abysm's word!
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Page 250
O Wide-winged crucifixion in the sky,
Floating in a light of sempiteinal ease,
Singing in a fire of incorruptible joy—
Bird with full stretch of golden reverie
Spanning thy own vast soul and breaking forth
To sapphire liberties of the Unknown!
O same bright body that on blinded earth
Liest pinned by steely spikes of mortal law,
With human hands thrown out in time's fatigue,
Palms bearing the dark boor of torn life-blood,
Nails frozen to a sky's blue cut and crushed!
O supine sorrowful creature, lift thy gaze
There where the invisible cross creating all
And speeding all to the Space-Self's four extremes—
Rapt Being, locked Knowledge, poised Ecstasy,
Gigantic Rhythm of oneness millionfold—
Is an omnipresent moving mystery,
With those white pinions of thy Archetype
Held ever unfurled beneath the viewless power
In deep suspense yet wide discovery!
Mirror in thy inmost heart the apocalypse
That hangs above thee as thy timeless truth.
Then, like a miracled lightning which at once
Shoots down and up, thou It catch to a single fate
Of freedom there and freedom here, in a bliss of the All,
Thy pulse of beauty cloven now in two
By a cross of heaven and a cross of hell!
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Page 251
Why should I fear the body's burning siege,
Deeming its colour a war on eternity?
The secrecy within now feels scorched ash,
Since still unknown is the salamander soul,
The immune indweller of the baze of time,
Outpassioning passion by its cry for God.
This soul is native to the crimson throb:
It archetypes all animal ecstasy
Body is its own dream half-realised yet.
When wakes that reveller of the alchemic deep,
Whose golden eyes see heaven everywhere,
The peace that plumbs the Imniutable's mystery
Finds in those leaping tongues of the fire of form
No hell blaspheming with a hundred mouths.
The singing chaos that unsheathes the spirit
Grows suddenly a rapture-drunk embrace
Of the hidden God by a God who bursts to flame!
The loves of earth are stained with sin no more.
They turn a crystal jar of deathless wine
Shedding an aura through each glassy wall
To envelop the whole universe and touch
The seraph's secret smile on every face!
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Page 252
Vain is the immensity of the one God
If all that vast is but intolerance
Of time and life and earth' s long cry for love!
No laughter crosses with its rippling light
Monotonies of measureless Self-space
Where Being broods on Being evermore
And heaven seeks not heaven in a hundred shapes.
Undepthed of the One the many are futile foam;
But losing the love-smite of soul on soul
The single God is a darkness in full noon!
O we must shatter the walls of mortal mind,
Grow white waves of the universal sea,
Win our true selves by loss in the breakless All;
But how shall loss of narrow humanhood—
The small snake with its tail in its own mouth—
Gain freedom in existence without end
If still the wide mouth grips its own wide tail?
The Eternal is not bound by being sole;
His unity is not blind to its sun-face—
Starved with abysses of unfathomed honey:
He drains them through the multi-flaming touch
Of seraph meeting seraph breast to breast,
Or through heart answering to angel heart
From star and star unthinkably aloof—
Countless caprices of comnunion.
The Eternal is not bound by millionness;
Crystalling to unnumbered forms apart,
His rapture is innumerably nude—
Wonder to wonder shouting its inmost glow
And seizing every shout like a rhythm found
By the sheer harking to one's own blood-tune.
Extinction with no faintes hue of the hours
Left wavering like a rainbow glimpsed in sleep,
Nirvana dense with the inscrutable Void—
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And yet a termless marvel of new birth,
A goalless galaxy of all-viewing Eyes!
Gigantic calm feeding each glimnery mote
With a packed omnipresence till that spark
Flowers out a universe of aureole
To capture all things in a magic net—
And every mote a master and a slave!
A lonely throb which echoes everywhere
And learns a myriad lore of lonelihood—
Beat upon beat of bliss ever the same
Yet ringing infinite tones of goldenness—
A solitary word self-scattering
To illimitable multitudes of sound
That swell like dawns and sink like eventides.
Chameleons of a thousand fugitve truths,
Clingings and clashings of reckless nectar-deeps,
Unbarriered rhapsodies that have no aim,
Musics magnificent with meanings lost,
Weaving a maze that sings all thought aswoon,
A shining chaos of unquenchable chords
Each calling from the unknown to the unknown,
Straining as if the heart could never speak,
Quivering as if no passion could be heard,
Bursting as if no dream could find a voice
And, by that teeming nameless miracle
Uttering the unutterable Secrecy!...
Such is the Eternal who fulfils all time.
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Page 254
So many ways I had gone,
Called by the hues
Of a myriad thronging dreams
That never could fuse.
You showed the one white path;
Treading its calm, all else
I saw as a leap of sand
Away from the magic wells
That seem so faint and far
Through the wandering haze
Which now at last I know
As the outward human gaze.
Gone is the straining look;
Blissfully blind
With love of the Secret Crescent
Whose vanishing point is the mind,
I walk a pearly roadstead
Beyond all drossy days—
A curve to heaven drawn by
That Silver Smile of Your face.
Deep and more deep within,
I am guided to my rest
Where the wells of deathless nectar
Hide in each mortal breast.
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Page 255
Breath of the boundless blue,
Throb of the perfect gold,
Poise of the peak that is purple.
Green wideness rapture-rolled—
Streak of new moon that trickles
Some immortality.
Trance-touch of stars like a love
Whose depth no man can see—
All these are felt by us,
Our aching eyes are called
To many a far wood-gloom
Fairily waterfalled—
Our trembling hand bares heaven
With a tiny stroke of the brush,
Or through the quill's faint quiver
Eagles of ecstasy rush—
Wonders are all about,
Wonders well up within,
A gurgle sweeter than any name.
A deep unworded din.
Yet with so rich a scatter
Of moment-miracles,
A pang and a poverty
Darken our pulse.
O passing the paradises.
Till we have gone
Behind the myriad marvels
To the Marvelous One!
Page 256
Haphazard are the jewels
The brief hours bring.
Unless they hold together
On a timeless string.
A gap of gloom will ever
Haunt flashes of mere mind,
lire in some Whole of infinite fire
Our little flames go blind.
How shall the unchanging bliss's
Ether be known,
If the gods who throng conceal
The God who is alone—
Single without a second,
The unbroken master-mood,
With no beyond to ache for,
The peace of penitude—
No fear of foeman's ambush,
Each hidden face
A deep of self-disclosure,
A secret of self -gaze!
Him must we find in the blue,
The gold, the purple, the green,
The silver and even the shadow—
A light that is unseen!
One ray of Him can pierce
All mortal misery, And every lock of the universe
Shall open to this Key.
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Page 257
Sunk in a gulf that seems to reach no close.
Winged to a mountain climbing without end,
Stretched till the heart has grown horizonless.
We touch the Vast of the supracosmic Self.
Night is not there, nor day; yet both lie dense
For ever in a mighty measureless mood
Coloured with That for which no word is born—
A night where frozen is all mortal sound,
A day that burns up every tongue of time!
But though the earth-cry shrive's and falls away
And human gaze is buried by the mass
Of an infinite sun no sky can utter forth,
A salamander of omniscient sleep
Is laughing and dancing in the invisible blaze.
Body that calls with eyes that are beyond,
He bears the smile that makes all things divine,
His stainless fingers touch truth everywhere.
Ear cannot seize his rhythm of deathless life.
But if deep calm can drown the universe
The rapt enchanter slips into our soul
And through his own self-hearing reverie
We learn the secret of the eternal Vast.
Page 258
I build Thee not on golden dreams
Nor on the wide world's winsomeness:
Deeper than all I set my love—
A faith that is foundationless!
Not only where Thy silver steps
Twinkle a night of nenuphars,
But everywhere I see Thy heaven:
I love the night between the stars.
O mine the smiling power to feel
A secret sun with blinded eyes.
And through a dreaming worship bear
As benediction wintry skies.
For ever in my heart I hear
A time beat of eternal bliss.
White Omnipresence! where is fear?
The mouth of hell can be Thy kiss
The whole world is my resting-place:
Thy beauty is my motherland:
Sweet enemies ax wounds of age—
My body breaks but by Thy hand.
Triumph is all—as though beneath
An unseen flag of raptures red
beating of great drums went on
With every giant drummer dead!
26.5.48
Page 259
Ideal
I crave not poised perfection in my words,
Jewelled complacence cut to a self-muse.
Song dense with such cool beaut) is the goal
Of the mere finite, haloing its own heart,
Crystalling a godhead of the small and brief.
Beyond this beauty, above all perfect poise
Arches the Ineffable who is endless light,
A noon that has no dawn or sunsetting,
Yet every moment a fresh noon whose veil
Is the vast zenith which was white before:
Paradise on paradise ever new, He moves
In a myriad miracle of the measureless!
How shall the rapture of a gemmed repose,
Safe in locked lustre, brilliantly blind,
Throbbing to no hush-haunted distances—
How shall so charmed a circle of content
Convey the heavenly homelessness of God?
Him would I win through words that strain afar,
Each sound a listening trance, self-unaware,
Flooding with a life that overflows all form,
Thrilling awhile to ethers older than time,
Spaces of shadowless superconscious sleep
Where star on star is effortlessly dreamed
Ere every dream is read through crooked eyes
By some clairvoyant buried in a cave
Of coiling darkness with a dragon's mouth!
This cave disgorged the world of our outgaze
To quiver between a dungeon and a dome.
Until the prime virginities shine down,
Breathing a rumour of the bourneless Womb,
Vain are our days—all songs that sing themselve
s And never That which breaks through every song
Lure us with false perfections brightly caught
From magic realms hanging twixt earth and heaven
Page 260
Spellbound: these neither pain nor ecstasy
Purples with a yonder of undiscovered fire.
Here a strange smile, like sorrow never known
Yet bliss found never, dents a rocky face
Watching a million mirrors strangely smile back.
No rhythm of this thin rigid line I seek,
The soul in me is an abyss and a sky,
A chaos and a plumbless mysery.
O I would make my chaos the huge gap
Of a dumb door waiting to wake at last
Vibrant with a wind whose perfume has no end,
Golden with the glow whose name is Eternity.
28.5.48
Page 261
Above all time he towers..., Voronoff
Will ask: "How can the Omnipotent have no lust,
When lust is the sole sign of potency?"
Herr Freud will find the eternity n his eyes
Haunted by memories of his mother's womb—
And the oneness with the Ancient of Days
An outrage dreamed upon his grandmother!
Then Doctor Bates will say, "He blinks so well—
Perfectly simple why he sees all truth!"
And face-cream makers want his recipe
Of the skin growing fairer with Light's touch.
When rhythms like singing flame; break from his mouth
Even though his beard is chilled with age's snow.
The Faculty of Science woders what
Complex of Vitamins A, B or C
Is the food of his sun-thought—they never guess
The Alpha and the Omega of the world
Can from beyond the cries of birth and death
Vitamin him with the Golden Word made flesh.
A miracle of glandular therapy
He seems, when laughing at the grave's deep threat
As at the silly gape of a vast fool :
How shall they see the ductlessness divine
Hidden like lotuses of a viewless moon,
Secreting nectars that can keep the clay
Hormoned with blissful immortality?
And if he lays the hand which heals the heart
Of chronic sorrow and acute desire,
They call him hypnotist sending Drain-waves
To drown in cool oblivion: do they know
That he awakes with benedictior's palm
Sudden remembrance of the ecstatic soul
Lost in the unlustred labyrinth of the limbs
And seeking vainly for its godlike crown?...
Page 262
O pack of learned dolts who waste your eyes
looking for body, body everywhere.
Will you feel never that He who made clay-form
Can make Himself a little form of clay
To unveil the Infinite which has fathered all
By skill beyond the ape-grafting Voronoff
And far above the power Jung can grant
The beast in us to sit in mind's bright cage,
Mating with dreams instead of female folk?
O gropers for the key to physical secrets.
Might not the physical open like a door
Through which the Eternal comes out of the unknown?
If you would gauge the grandeur of this Man,
Look deep within yourselves while watching him:
Not by the probing knife or microscope
Or psycho-analysis' small prurient prick
But by the ineffable trance you'll touch the abyss
Of the shining Seed that flowers in the Avatar!
29.5.48
Page 263
White stallion champing the barley
Of silent bliss—
Gathering into thy heart's
Vermilion abyss
A power outrunning time,
As if to a witching west
Out of a wizard east
Racing were one with rest,
A calm that suddenly views
Here grown to There,
A wide-awake sleep devouring
Aeons with a single stare!
Fastest of all the flames
Born of the Cave beyond sight.
Bringing on starry nostrils
A neigh that is night—
Carrier of immortality
Between blue wings.,
Yet hooved with a hurry to spurn
Imperishable things —
On all the tracks of truth
Speed without peer,
But unappeased by winning
God's Derby every year!
O never-ageing stallion,
Down to lean-breasted earth
Thou contest like a lover
Through the low gate of birth,
Page 264
Renouncing the vast triumphs,
Graciously gore to stud
For mixing nameless nectar
With sobbing mortal blood!
Alone among the godheads
Thy soul was never drunk
With self-infinitudes.
But saw the Den far-sunk
Where weak yet estive fetlocks
Were secrets without keys,
Unknowing why or all the weakness
The running would not cease—
Why the dim quiver of fatigue
Was a tremble of blind joy
As if behind the fallen ears
There rose a heavenly "Hoy!"
Thou on thy thunderous hill
Couldst hear the strange despair
In those four tottering mysteries
Of the black bodied mare.
Many a groping steed
Sought her for dam
Of darkling colts and fillies,
But like an oriflamme
The mane on her neck of night
Fluttered to a wind of dream,
And never from her heart ran forth
The future's shadowy stream.
But now the lives to come
Take singing start
In the crimson distances
Of the deep heart.
Page 265
The laugh of the mountain Cave,
The sigh of the Den below
Have married their mystic sounds:
Their children shall grow
A wonder-dappled pack.
Love's rich surprise
Even to the gaze of grandeur
That is pradise!
30.5.48
Page 266
When?
When shall my heart be broken
By the horizon-pull of the witcheried waves of twilight
Or the world-silencing slaughter that is sunset?
Till then the god is unwoken
Who dreams in the crushing splendour or the shy light
And grips the heart flame-gold or distantly duns it.
O ears, sink deep when you listen
To the downward sighing spiral of dead leaves
Or the waterfall dragging the mountain away!
Lose, little eyes, your glisten:
All shimmers, grandeurs, far plunges and near heaves
Find their own secrets in the nameless Night-Day
Wearing a crown that dazzles time aswoon,
Bearing a robe that darkens space asleep—
Locked in the heart, till a stifled sob is the moon
And the sun a tear we strive in vain to weep:
A pang of beauty thrown back from lips and eyes
To a Cave within that knows self-paradise!
31.5.48
Page 2677
Never through Angelo's eye, Beethoven's ear.
Is caught the Timeless Wonder tense and sheer.
Eternity comes outvasting all their art,
An intimate blindness breaking in the heart
To sudden seizure of a shadowless sky,
Deep blue unheard, huge wind shutting the eye.
And yet the music and magnificence
A rapture that is everything at once,
So colour is audible and symphony seen
And both a plunging mystery too keen
To rest on painter's canvas, phyer's score,
As if an endless edge infinity bore,
Cleaving a chasm of splendour and surprise
From shaken brain down unto trembling thighs—
A straight canal of dreaming opaline,
Shot through the darkness of the mortal spine
For tryst of God below with God above
In spark on lotus-spark of deathless love!...
Colour is a burst of rhythm which cannot move,
Tune is a fire whose tongue is never still,
And both go yearning with a wordless will.
Now a new art must passion, a strange bent
To pluck miraculous signs from God's intent
Power and peace that pledge their hearts away
Each to the other in everlasting play
And, striking heart on heart, ring forth a call
To unborn universes, a rise and fall
And rise again of lion-thunders fraught
With lightning-bolts of brief yet boundless thought
Uttering the mystic ocean, the magic land
In shining speech the seraphs understand,
Words that are more than tune, words that make mind
Crystallise from the Unknowable behind
Page 268
And give a shape to elusive secrecy
That silver moments for the ear and eye
May spring like stars to rumour the immense
Sable of Spirit devouring intelligence!
The echoer of the Eternal's master-mood—
Plumbing more truly His infinitude
Than the bright seer brush-fixed in heaven's court
Or the vast somnambule of the pianoforte
Wandering from key to key of ivory gates—
Is the art where sight and sound mingle their fates
By symbol and by rhythm sharing one birth
Out of that deepest thrill of beauty's mirth,
The million-meaninged wonderment of name
Which poets carry to God's ether and God's flame!
1.6.48
Page 269
O where in painter's hue, musician's tone
Is the marvel touch of the myriadly Alone
Whom without hands our hunger has to seek
And whose clairaudient cave and prophet peak
Are found like a burst of self-discovery
Blotting the mind with hushed eternity?
How shall tense poet or keen sculptor know
The vault of wonder stunning all below—
A never-resting never-moving shy,
Huge mouth unheard, far sun outlasting the eye?
Only the vigil of the worshipping heart
Carries the one apocalyptic art,
The power to fashion the whole body anew.
Mirroring the All-Beautiful, echoing the All-True!
2.6 48
Page 270
Magic gem-cutter, lapidary of light,
Transmuter of the crystalling consciousness,
Swiftly converting each dull bead of glass
To a flawless and omniscient Koh-i-noor!
Soon may thy plan scintillate into sight,
A myriad divinity of diamoid
Set in a sable vast of silences.
A heart of unified humanity
immense with the invisible muse of the One,
Wakeful within to numberless life-beats
Silvering out in the abysm of clay
Star-moments of a paradisal peace!
An adamantine energy shall break
bach mortal bound, yet seem for ever still,
Even as Arcturus and his fiery hosts
Hurl with undreamable speed through infinite space
Yet stand firm-fixed for earth's astronomy.
All movements of that energy take rise
In the farness of a supracosmic sleep
And the most gorgeous plunging forth of flame
Knows no fatigue, no shattering of cool rest,
Since one sole Being stretches everywhere,
Leaping through time from self to deathless self.
2.6.48
Page 271
A myriad voices
Quiver and leap
Out of our being's
Myriad deep.
How shall we gather
The tone of the True
From such a chaos
Of the heart's hue ?
Mind cannot gauge
Vermilion,
Carmine or scarlet,
Damask or dun,
Shades of desire
Self-uttering—
Strange heavens and hells
That suddenly fling
Reasonless reveries
Longing to make
Our body their crater
Of fierce flame-break.
One colour of colour;
That cry from the dark
Is the song all time
Has waited to hare,
But sly are the powers
Burning within
And well can they wear
The angel's mien
Page 272
To drive the pilgrim
Along rock-ways
Where the feet seeking
The Perfect face
Forgotten by earth
Are bled to a halt
And lost for ever
Is the lure of the Vault!
Only when mind
Puts reasoning by
And with an abrupt
Shutting of eve
Draws back from the brain
To a Self that is mute,
We hear in the distance
The call of a flute,
A pang of roses
An attar-floow,
A liquid dawn
Whose trembling glow
Lifts from a deathless
Alchemy
Hiding its sun
In mortality!
This tune of rapture
Can never be found
Until we give it
'That calm background.
Alone its ardour
Can breathe in the peace
While all other passions
Flicker and cease
Page 273
At touch of the vast
Virginity
Behind the thinker's
Small ache to sec
What pleasures are locked
In clay-born things
Alone the hunger
Which Truth outsings
From the human heart
Quivers more bright
Its fiery tongue
On tasting such white.
For only this love
Is pure in its cry.
Reddening to clasp
Though none reply
Torn by no jealous
Self-concern,
Steadily throbbing
Its beauties burn.
And, always a craving
Winsomely wild.
It shoots up a mingle
Of lover and child.
And into their fervence
A wisdom is wrought.
The red heat verging
On the white-hot!
Warm and wise
And innocent
The cherub flies
To the firmament.
Page 274
Offering its all,
Quenchlessly keen—
Age after age—
For the Face unseen.
Page 275
Words
Let me not utter five things in five words.
But by one word of densest diamond
Pack five things to a shining secrecy
That gathers a deep truth missed by them all;
Or else with five words capture one sole thing.
Pluck from it fires that light up earth's abysm -
Fires that were veiled by being locked together,
But now a fourfold seizure from without
Of splendours and terrors ruling time and space
And then a sudden self-sight, a fifth flame
That knows by a sheer eternity within!...
Words have not come to measure things that are;
They plunge to the unheard, leap to the unseen,
Bring ear and eye a chaos of surprise
Till through a dark delight of consciousness
Huge nebulas swirl out dream-distances,
Stretching the soul to a rapt infinity!...
Words are the shadows of enhaloed hawks:
The shadows cling to clay and seem clay-born,
But he who marks their moving mystery
Feels how a strange spontaneous quiver wings
Their passage here and how intangible
They float for all their close and massive shapes.
Alone the poet looks up to the Inane,
Sees the gold wanderers of the boundless blue,
Catches the radiant rhythms each burning heart
Puts forth in every line of the wide form
Spanning the silences with pin on-song.
Thus in his scheme of shades from the vast throng
Haunting the earth-mind he shows across brief thought
Glimmers immortal, throbbings of the bliss
That reels through heaven a drunkard of Truth's sun.
Page 276
Or. in rare moments quiet with dawn and noon
And eve at once, our tittle human dreams
Love with such far-flung eyes the undying birds
That the large lust comes swooping down for prey
And, where the shadows mystically shone,
Falls—crushing, piercing, lavishing every sense—
The living body and beauty and blaze of God!
3.6.48
Page 277
Make me thy child, wrap round thy viewless vault.
Thy endlessly expanding ether's globe
Cherishing in its depth globules of God.
Star me within that sable mother -space,
Hushfully heavened by the enfolding dream
Which without effort feeds all infant glows
To brighten and broaden into kingly seers
Thrilled with a universal harmony.
Then will I reach behind my own self's light
The Eternal who is birthless in things born,
Equal to pin-point and infinity,
Fused mother and child, one seer who is multiform.
Merger of the whole cosmic consciousness
In That which none can know but all can be!
O leave me wingless on the earth no more;
Bird me in thy dark dawning overhead,
Invisible ere the heart burns up. a love
Hungering to lose its life in the unknown!
How shall I laugh in the dust clouding my gaze
To the bliss beyond, whose quiet is new birth
Of every mortal dream as truth's gold fire?
I raise to thee my flickering hands of clay.
Lean from thy dome of diamond secrecies,
Quench the pale longing of my dwarf despair,
Blow a great wind of mystery on small eyes.
Drive my diffuse blood-heat to the hidden heart
For one intensest ache to plunge in thee,
O nectarous night of superhuman trance!
4.6.48
Page 278
Why art thou slow, with grey somnambulist gait,
Eyes like small gems gripped in a giant rock,
An elephant swaying to sorte dense delight
Whose mystery bulks too heavy for time's heart?
"Loaded with a dream outmeasuring common deed,
Ponderous I come and all swift slynesses
Laugh to themselves, 'He never shall lay bare
The wisdom-grandeur locked in that huge head.'
Dust are these wanton jeerings, when I hold
Their doom in my belly of beatitude!
Little they guess the immobile vigilling
And the enormous hesitation pack
A plenitude's power deep and more deep within
Like the drawn cord of some omniscient bow
Happy to wait for ages with tense truth
Because it views already the blind targe
Hidden in the body of mutable desire.
This centuried poise shall tire all crafty claws.
Then strikes my hour: none harks the signal sound:
I quicken to no earth-impelled alarm:
At some white call across the hills of trance
The gradual elephant shall rear his chest,
Rouse to a sudden sky his sleepy trunk
And wake in the pure tusks a war on passion
By one far bellow of earthquaking joy,
A burst of some unbearable secrecy
That turns the slow limbs to a lava of light
Blotting all greeds and burying all glooms
And burning through the jungles of mortal mind
A wide and virgin way to eternity!
Standing I am seen, a mountain-muse apart;
Never is known the mystical mahout,
Page 279
The invisible sun of my own timeless Self
Under a canopy of infinitude
Hung with star-bells that ring to a single bliss
The present and the future and the past.
He rides the rapt volcano of my brain—
His goad is the breaking of life's boundaries!"
4.0.48
Page 280
Let the Ear Read
Read not with eye alone.
Let the ear read:
Then shall you see the lines
Of rhythmic speed
Gather and curve to form
Bodies of gold—
A glory that can never
To the eye unfold
Unless a hush, intent
With wondering.
Hears that unearthly sweetness
Goldenly ring!
Sight is the surface mind,
Sound the deep heart:
Until you catch in the poet's
Magical art
The throb and thrill and throe
Of this profound.
The gods of unbearable beauty
Are never found.
Not when the brain goes dreaming.
But when we kiss
A night unknown and the heart
Breaks with blind bliss,
Our tunes are suddenly born
Out of a calm
Vaster than all the world
And in our palm
Page 281
Is felt a quenchless fire
And our fingers are flames,
Bright tongues that quiver out
Revealing names
For all they touch on earth,
Names echoing
Secrets aglow behind
Each mortal thing.
Thus do we bear to you
With every word
Thoughts that seem tangible
As soon as heard—
Thoughts that can open eyes
To search within,
Where souls uncrossed by shadow.
Shapes without sin
Await in smiling slumber
The dawn-hour when
Their immortalities
Shall wake in men.
But eyes will never sec them
If ears cannot hark
The wind of a mystery
Divinely dark,
The ageless all-creative
Ecstatic Breath
Which blew the rhythm of life
Through chaos and death.
5.6.48
Page 282
Height and Depth
The Archangels burn before the Perfect Face—
Lighting all deeds from the Omnipotent's gaze.
With heads upon His breast the Seraphim
l'une their whole lives to the heavenly heart of Him.
The cherubs laugh within His lap and play
On faultless harps their rhythms of night and day.
What shall we mortals do? O ours to meet
With worshipping brow the flowers of His feet!
Keen are the raptures of the sky-born host,
Raptures with not one glorioled reverie lost.
We who have known the abyss of blinded birth,
How can we share those Vastitudes of mirth?
Yet, through the passion of frail feet which stray,
A peace beyond all peace, a gold through grey
Felt goldener, the quiet and the height
Come to our wanderer love's upturning sight,
And by the bowed surrender of our mind
Deepest the immortal Secret is divined!
Archangels, Seraphim and Cherubs, you
Shall suddenly discover the All-True,
The All-Beautiful, a dark you cannot scan—
A Mystery that wears the face of man!
6.6.48
Page 283
Earth's roof is heaven's floor—
The dome of mind
Must bear a trampling terror
Before we find
Through a sudden gap the mythic
Eternity alive!
It cannot reach our body
Ere hard heels drive
Deep into gilded dreams
Arching a false
Heaven for life's sad longing.
Secretly calls
The true infinitude-
Gong of God's day
Or bells of unknown bliss
Tintinning far away.
But who shall ever answer
The bourneless blue
Unless the proud dome break
Its stony hue
Under an unseen dancer's
Timeless foot—
Rapture whose rhythms are
A tearing of thought?
Some drunkenness on high
Demands the whole
Destruction of each fresco
Made of the soul
Page 284
On the ceiling intellect,
Where never a chink has drawn
Out of the sun of Truth
The dimmest dawn!
Not for a smooth confirming
Of coloured guess,
But for an all-surprising
New loveliness
The mind must s rain—a curve
Pulled more and more intent
With a hush that has no name,
Till one sheer rent
Aches forth the marvel word
Whose quiverings make
Each deathless mystery
Timeward awake!
Alone this burst of love,
The crumbling cry
Of earth's rich roof, can bring
The apocalypt sky.
Page 285
O we must plunge to the Great Face behind
The myriad vanity of our mortal look.
Not in that house of mirrors, the small mind,
Dwells the Great Face. Never this glory took
Pleasure of glory. The golden eyes are blind
To their immortal preciousness: they find
Paradise through the deep discovery
Of their sweet self-forgetfulnesses by
The aching gaze of man which suddenly
Recalling them forgets for ever all ache!
Here lives a light that knows life's secret source—
Omniscience with no single shadow-break—
Yet here too is the thoughtless rain that pours
In crystal quavers deaf to their rich tone,
The hill dawn-crimsoning like some angel's birth
But dark to its own epiphany on earth,
The well-water sunk far from cool self-taste,
A sleeping sweetness, or the wonder-waste
Of emerald innocent of its green allure.
Divinity is quick flesh and vague stone,
Arms stretched in a lost attitude of trance,
Palpitant marble rapt in giving grace
Of radiant love to every tear-filled glance,
Perfection's breathing statue unconcerned
With the luminous line all ages come to adore:
Ever for others the white peace has burned!
A power beyond all lack, yet save to a sigh
From lips that pray or to frail lifting hands—
Heart like the sun shining without demands—
Hunger which finds appeasement when void days
Of the world's hunger brim—God is intense
With bliss undying that would gladly die
If one time-creature's gold might never grey
His splendour flows and flows with the same dense
Page 286
Desire to every depth: He will not shrink
From making His whole wine the desert's drink!
The abyss He built from His magnificence
That He might hurl into its vacant stare
His Being's heaven—of heaven unaware
Except when hurled below. How shall He stay
An inexhaustible love? Got is immense
To have immensity to throw away!
7.6.48
Page 287
From 8th May to 8th June
A month has flown like some Archangel's form
Dripping a light of God-drunk reverie.
And I have lain aloof and still to see
The truth-gold pinions of that singing storm.
Men move with days; but 1 have reached a rest
From where I view days moving wondrously
Out of an east of crimson gaiety
Unto a violet wisdom in the west!
Even in the drowsy hours that ever fade
Far and more far into a black beyond,
The same Archangel's secret heartbeats chime.
A dimness of divinest diamond.
Rapture is all, because my mind is made
One with a Mother Mystery above time.
8.6.48
Page 288
lord of Dream-Love
Eyes like blue lotuses,
Figure and face of gold,
Each finger-nail a gem—
The seers behold
The Perfect and Eternal,
Past wonderings:
Moved by His glorious calm
The whole heart sings!
With halo of silver hair
Out-timing time—
Beard like a starless night,
Secret sublime
Of a young infinity—
The nameless One
Is waiting and vigilling
Yet calling none .
Love ocean-deep, sky-high,
Dreams in that gaze;
Tongues of a fire of love,
The arms upraise
Their gold to the unknown
From which He came
For showing the cull earth
How to be flame!
Not through a lust to win
His glowing grace
But through an ache to be
That formless Space
Page 289
He draws the heart of man:
Lacking void peace —
Support of utter freedom—
Form can release
No conqueror energy,
Outflowering
From weary broken shoulders
Wing and vast wing.
So never does He shine
His own appeal,
But makes the mind of the seers
Inwardly feel
Profound on dim profound
Where they must fall
To echo the overarching
Unseen beyond all
And from that chasm of trance
Wake to new birth
Discovering in their bodies
A heaven of earth
An image of the Shape
Burning above,
The omnipotently tranquil
Lord of dream-love.
Page 29090
Mystic Mountains
The Alps soar to lone pinnacles of light,
Intensities of isolated trance,
An upward rush of separate sanctities
The mind can cherish in its narrow sight
And worship with its flitting wonderment.
But O the thought-bewildering wall of white
Outrunning the extremes of human gaze,
Vanishing to the right, fading to the left
And lifting a universe of dreaming ice,
A vast virginity with no gaa in God
To let the world's familiar face yearn through—
All life plucked from its level loiterings
To one dense danger of divinity,
A sheer leap everywhere of soul made rock
Of rapture unperturbable by time—
The Himalay's immense epiphany!
No thin melodic themes drawn to high hush
Which yet weighs never the ineffable on earth's ear
Nor wipes out the earth's eye with infinite blank:
Here an all-instrumental harmony
Sweeps to a multitudinous peace beyond—
Both ear and eye numb with eternal snow,
Stunned by an adamant absolute of height,
Until new senses burst from the unknown—
A vision of the farthest truth above,
Around, below: a hearing of heaven's heart
Behind each pulse-throb of mortality!
Too often have we adored the Alpine mood,
Submitted to the cleavage between crests,
Followed the peak of love or peak of power
Or wisdom rising to a silver summit.
The uttermost of each hangs still ungrasped:
Life is a breakless cry: without the whole
Page 291
Self towering up in massive mystic sleep
How shall it wear the crown of the endless sky?...
O wanderer soul, drunkard of distances,
Perfection's pilgrim, touch with votive brow
The foot of the one transcendent Himalay!
Page 292
Beneath, Above
My dawn's first glimpse, the last glimpse of my night
is a small window framing one slim tree,
The mid-trunk visible, a groping brown,
The top and base a secret to my sight.
One pace from bed, in the morning of the mind
Or in the heart's nocturnal glimmer and grey.
Shows me the stem below, the leaves on high,
A birth in clay, in void air a long search.
But there's a cry from some great window lost:
"Look not for truth without truth lives within!"...
Across the lonely strangenesses of sleep
Looms a far vision that is night nor day:
Between my drowse and my awakening,
The tree is an Omniscience at blind play—
Not from beneath but from above it grows.
The murmurous leaves a power of green gloom
Hurled downward for new self-discovery,
The roots a rapture sucking the infinite sky!
9.6.48
Page 293
Great wings, one while and one of gold
Our dreaming spirit must unfold,
The wing of shadowless purity,
The wing of power that cannot die.
But life gains not this liberty
Unless a wideness ever free
Is the formless depth of what we are,
A mystery standing near and far,
An omnipresence of rapt air,
No need to rush forth anywhere,
An all-supporting breakless peace
That makes the soul of form release
Wings beyond earthly nights and days.
And bears with cool invisible grace
Their waft of gold-white victory:
Godhead is only godhead by
A soar of Self within Self-space.
Page 294
The Adventure of the Apocalypse
We deem the darkness and the throe
True measure of each ecstasy's glow:
Only the background of huge night
Reveals our drama of delight.
We are enamoured of each fall
That high winds of the mountain's call
May kiss the sweeter. How shall we
Crave sorrowless divinity?
Wanderer of gleam and gloom, man's orb
Of vision never can absorb
The adventure of the apocalypse—
Until his passion inward dips
Where hides, behind both dazzle and dark,
Perfection's pygmy, the soul-spark
Plunged in the abyss to grow by strange
Cry of contraries, chequer and change
Of pain and pleasure, to the bliss
Whose utter sky the utter abyss
Wagered to mirror and manifest.
That flaming finger can attest The paradox of eternity,
The endless smile that knows no sigh,
Yet in the peace and plenitude
Keeps every sting of the restless mood.
The ethers of Perfection are
No loss of sight that strains afar.
Nothing those glories lack, yet bear
New wonders kindling everywhere.
God is two colours of one light,
A heavenly hermaphrodite—
Calm husband, master of all life,
Radiant incalculable wife-
Magic caprice without a lull,
Joined to a wisdom ever full
Page 295
With secret of each sudden flash
Yet feeling the bright laughter-lash
As if the Unknown's epiphany
Could take the Unknown's self unaware!
Hush that is infinitely hare
Only to catch an infinite voice—
A love that thrills from here to there
With a hundred hearts of reverie
Though holding by a vast of space
All glimmering goals in one embrace—
A rose-break of dawn after dawn
Despite a sunflower's zenith poise
Of noon that never is withdrawn—
Burst of vermilion surprise
Even to gold omniscient eyes—
Such is the Godhead whose sublime
Fusion of two fires strokes of time
Have split to joys and miseries—
Such is the Godhead of our fears:
Treasuring short-lived smiles and tears.
We shun the grandeur-smite that hurls
Away small rubies and brief pearls!
10.6.48
Page 296
Bard rhyming earth to paradise,
Time-conqueror with prophet eyes.
Body of upright flawless fire,
Star-strewing hands that never tire—
In Him at last earth-gropings reach
Omniscient calm, omnipotent speech,
Love omnipresent without ache!
Does still a stone that cannot wake
Keep hurling through your mortal mind
Its challenge at the epiphany?
If you would see this blindness break,
Follow the heart's humility—
Question not with your shallow gaze
The Infinite focussed in that face,
But, when the unshadowed limbs go by,
Touch with your brow the white footfall:
A rhythm profound shall silence all!
11.6.48
Page 297
In a deep dusk between the known
Day and the night which broods alone,
There moves—with primrose-sparkles thrown
Across—the shady-pat led beyond
Of a superhuman demi -monde.
That wayward mystery we outcast.
Deeming its free heart-flame too fast,
Too wandering and too multiform:
We love the mind's clear-bodied norm
And not this wile of d stant hue
Across a shimmer of rectar-dew—
Strange lure of the untamable,
Soliciting our lips to cease
Their oaths of rigid loyalties
And mutely summoning us to break
Out of the marriage of thought and speech
Towards the thought no word can reach,
No cry of intellect overtake,
But just the heart's wide discontent
Catches in a sudden throb and thrill!
The demi-monde of the half-divine
Is a wondrous weakness of the will,
Striving for a vague firmament,
Letting the tangible earth far-fall.
It offers but a fickle shine
Of raptures never thine or mine,
Dim ecstasies that are conjoint,
Each moment a new magic mood
Of piercing brief beatitude,
Infinity's touch by paradise-point,
Giving its miracle to all
Who pay the passionate pangful price
Of near things precious in our eyes—
Self-pride, wealth-hoard, home-life, world-fame.
Page 298
But, save through the soul's demi-monde
Where time is stripped of every shame
Of being drunk wit 1 the unseen voice
Of some eternal liberty,
There never can be a true bond
Between earth's shallow wakeful joys
And high Perfection's stellar poise
Of measureless secrecy above.
The extremes are drawn close only by
This Venus-lit homonry,
This dream-dusk of unfettered love!
12.6.48
Page 299
Above, Within
This hour of dusk
Thrills in my heart a cry for precious things:
How wilt thou please, O life with so small wings,
O thou great heap of straw and a grain of musk?
Over me reigns
The empire of a superhuman sleep
Precious with secret plenitudes that keep
A teeming twinkling infinite of musk-grains!
Breathes far away
That mystery measureless above all time.
Will ever the Vast wake even here a chime
Of heavenly gold transmuting common day?
Heart within heart—
Calls a wide garden sown in a mirrored sky,
Deep day of some divine world-soul with eye
On blossoming eye dream-single though apart!
O roses, bright
With love of a calm space that is all sun!
O space of calm, miraculously one
With each rose by a limitless love-light!
14.6.48
Page 300
O vastness waiting for my small heart's touch
To hare the beat of your colossal heart
Hidden behind that hush of mountain-rock!
Piled with an ageless love is your grey poise,
But all a dreaming distance till we stretch
Our hands with a cry no gra lite gloom can crush;
Then like an echo million tines rolled back
Come the same yearning tones and the aloof
Eternities enfold the limbs that die....
Now life is a circling sea of skies afloat,
Chanting one truth whose rhythms are numberless,
Each wave a dragon of the Infinite
Waking from the sleep that s omniscience
Plunged in its own abyss of nectar-light.
And though to all gaze I am rooted in silent trance
I reach on the vast embraces of God's deep
A golden shore of immortality,
Earth's secret Self lost by the shallows of mind.
15.6.48
Page 301
Joy is the homing luminous,
Grief is the brightness flown from us,
Eluding mortal limbs mat tire—
Both are a single song of fire
Whose everlasting harmonies
We lose because the strokes of time,
Waking for transient things desire.
Have split the one creative chime.
In God we keep poised fulgencies
By travelling with each flame that flies
And, through a Self of boundless skies.
Conquer the distance that is pain.
So winning a more golden gain
Than pleasure flickeringly caught
Between small hands by feeble thought.
In God both pain and pleasure rhyme—
A single seizure of sublime
Radiance beyond both grief and joy:
A wide white peace without alloy,
Which moves so quick. it's everywhere.
One infinite life no hungers tear!
Page 302
I have seen the inmost truth behind man's form.
No man it is but a multi-mooded wonder
Of reasonless beauty and strength: his brain an eagle
His heart a tiger, his belly an elephant,
His legs the great trunks of two baobabs!
The sun-stare and the pinions of wide dream,
The warm magnificence of leaping love.
The endurance that abysses every pain,
The blind unbreakable poise on primal earth—
All these are born from a subhuman life
Lighted up by a superhuman soul,
The mere man nothing but a mask of mind
Behind which mysteries below, beyond,
Are caught together.... The eagle shall grow one
With a secrecy of freedom infinite
And consciousness like an ill-knowing fire,
The tiger a freedom and a lire combined
To an all-desiring all-enfolding bliss.
The elephant a loneliness of trance
Where world on world is lost without one sigh,
The baobab trunks a hushed companionship
Of some unutterable First and Last
Founded on strange earth-hued eternities!
A pyramidding miracle based above
Hangs downward concentrating to pass on
The immense and the intense of deathless power
To the intense and the imnense of force
Pyramidding upward out of mutable time.
Lo the soul's magic kindles their touch and thrill,
Then their deep fusion to a single Self
Making the soul Its new creation's cry
Sent from the inmost to the outermost:
A huge star breaks with halo of boundlessness,
And the mask of mind becomes the face of God!
Page 303
Night's noon! Does mystery reveal a rent
When the peak hour of sable loneliness
Strikes on the tranquil space of the unseen?
A bolt of superhuman secrecy
Drops in my brain as if a veil were torn
By that intensest point of vigilant gloom!
Has some dense word of power shot suddenly down
Out of rapt overarching widenesses?—
Word like a strange shut eye that views all things
By brooding on some inward glow of truth.
So dark and day of mortal sigh. are one
To this omniscience that transcends our time—
Word travelling through my body to the ground—
Message of the high immense to the dumb deep
From whose heart rose our hurger for the sky!
Have now at last drawn close the calm extremes
Betwixt which glimmer and grope our little lives?
But, O brief passage of immortal bliss,
Keen answer come to agelong questionings
Whether my mortal mood shall know God's touch,
Thou leapest like a dire descent of doom,
With my whole body crying round thy laugh!
Only a hidden cave, where all he lines
Of consciousness trembling along the nerves
Have their joint source and goal, has a smiling mouth
That whispers like a sage and child at once:
"Doom hurls down ever when life's dream must climb
Out of small self towards self which is world-vast:
Under the invisible shock of a lost heaven
Each dwarf death breaks to a new and greater birth,
Until behind all birth and death wakes up
Life to its own divinity's endless day!"
18.6.48
Page 304
Suns
The golden sphere of the sun in earthly skies
Echoes a globe of God whose self is light
Hung over mortal mind in a blue of bliss.
Even as the soil's cry feels in the warm day
A wonder-seed within whose circled deep
Glows a great life which answers all its need,
So the mind's longing sees in that far Eye
All knowledge rounded to a rapturous whole.
Rishis have risen there and borne bright news
Hack to the multitudes weeping in the dark
And time has thought the immortal hour was won.
But when the touch of this high burning orb
Lay on the gross and heavy heart of man
Each throb was a white flash, yet in between
The Hashes gaped the gloom of an abyss.
The utter alchemy no dream called down.
A sun beyond this sun above the mind
Waits in a mystery beyond the blue:
A night more vast than the Hind distances
Between our reveries and the flame they reach
Is spread between that flame and fathomless truth's
Gigantic star seen like one diamond speck
Lost in a time transcending loneliness.
Remote from the globed sun is that strange blaze—
It rounds not human knowledge but reveals
A gold in which mind's glimmering bents are drawn
Straight by a pattern holding God's full self—
Being and consciousness-force, delight and truth—
In a gathering of the immense to the intense,
A foursquare sun focussing eternity,
formless perfection caught n perfect form!
Mere is the all-creating primal Face
Veiled by its own projected rondure of fire
Midway the enormous gap twixt earth and heaven.
Page 305
Here is the all-transmuting final Face
Which shall remove that fire and make heaven earth.
That fire is man wearing the mask of God:
Here is God wearing the true face of man!
19.6.48
Page 306
The forest cathedrals are tolling their loud leaves.
A blue wind blows through the green towers of trance.
Waking them to a song of secrecies
Between the dark earth ant the dazzling sun.
What, name is murmured by those trembling bells
I hat move to no religion of man's heart?
We of the fetterless feet are homeless ever.
We quest a paradise that looms beyond.
Our ache is an Infinite afar and above.
Away from the soil we strain, leaving behind
The dumb deep whence our clay has sprung towards heaven.
Our souls have cut us free from the earth's dream:
Rootless our bodies roam, answering their will.
And when the souls step out into the unknown
Our bodies drop back, careless if they fail.
But here in the wood-glooms a reverie
That craves no earth-escape stands vigilant.
Here too is failure of the body's strength
Unless some vast elixir of ecstasy
Falls in the future from the implored Unseen;
Yet every branch's call, the whole sap's cry
And the tense yearning of he knotted bole
Drag with relentless roots the earth to the sky!
Or else the sky is sought with a hundred arms
For no response of saviour grace to lift
The striving life apart from the dull dust
And merge it in a timeless quietude:
Those seeking arms fling high their wide embrace
To draw the spirit of ether and of fire
Down into earth through the root's plunging power...
O blue wind, blow your most awaking breath,
O green leaves, toll loudes your mystery,
O blind clay, send up your profoundest pull,
Page 307
O bright sun, slip like a seed mist intense
Into our hearts that a new truth may spring
Like a great tree whose love wants heaven for earth!
20.6.48
Page 308
Milk in almighty breasts for the magic babe
Born of the cave of trance is the Light beyond!
From teats of mystery to a tiny mouth
Pass all the mantras: sages who burn wide
Shrink to a blinded bliss in giant arms
To drain the Whiteness hid in the highest blue!
One breast the nectarous truth of eternity.
One breast the honeyed secret of all time—
Huge hemispheres that make a rapturous whole
Of knowledge in the child-heart sucking both
And rhyming its small throb to the vast thrill
Of the single Heart behind two richnesses!
A gloom of God strewn with a million stars
The sages view in silence above thought:
How shall the largest wonder of man's mind
Treasure that luminous sprinkle of the Immense?
Not by large dream but by intense self-loss
In one all-gathering point of the deep soul
Are pierced the utter abysses of the Unknown
Where hang those million stars together drawn
In a mother bosom—drop on drop divine
Of ecstasy's elixir massed by twin
Heavenly halves of passion and of peace—
Life-mastering sun and life-forgetting moon!
Weak with a wondrous innocence, our will
Must cling in rapt surrender to this sweet
Nourishing Supernature's deathless love.
This mother-bosom holds Infinity's
Ultimate revelation, last reply
To mortal hungers, and the marvellous gate
To its glory lies through a mystic heart within.
An aureoled agelessness that knows to gain
Omnipotence by helpless infancy!
21.6.48
Page 309
The Blind Bellow
O the blind bellow in the pit of sleep!
A galloping strength lifts a huge neck of night
To utter some lost luminosity
But breaks into a blank of raptureless roar.
Eyes that are suns covered with lids that are rock
Yearn for a lightning-stroke from thunderous heavens
Where power is one self-lustered harmony.
No answer flashes down to the vague cry.
The burning heart is beating ecstasy's rhythm
Yet the broad tongue is a grey bitterness;
The ears are deaf to the bright truth within.
The wild breath seeks rose-pas lured paradise -
All that it wins are grasses without sap.
Rare tufts fringing relentless cooked stones
Far is each thought; fool feet run round and round........
Eternal seems the doom burying in the brute
A god's soul, but the bellow never ends,
Fallen lover of the glimmering herds on the hill.
Beast of immortal beauty that is blocked
From bursting back into beatitude
By a dense body built of gross desire,
Shall he not struggle with the enfolding deep
That ever would oblivion the gold grace
Lingering a thin white memory in his gloom?
O some great noon will blaze to draw him high.
He shall be plucked up if he keeps his dream
Aloft—pale arms of prayer from the abyss.
Horns of a crescent on a black bull's head!
22.6.48
Page 310
"O Moslem Men..."
O Moslem men, keep all your gazes down!"
Cries the firm law to the lire heart of love:
The dusky earth shall ease the crimson ache
And pull the outflung arms to a limp rest.
But ever the dawn-break of woman's smile
Calls us to pink horizons of delight,
And vain the stern will of the moralist
Who, chaining thought to the soil's reticence,
Would curb the flame within from leaping far!
How shall such letter soothe life's huge desire?
No cure is here for those wire open wounds,
The eyes smitten with wonder and witchery.
Alone the mystic comes with healing hands.
Uplifting them, he shows the true release.
Dawn-break of woman's smile is a prelude thrown
Over time's edge by hidden eternity
And colour makes a vast cerescendoed day
Of the Divine. Beyond all human gleam
light largens to a nakedness of noon.
One omnipresence of apocalypse.
Intensest love poised on a peak of trance!
Slowly the rhythm of golden amplitude
Draws then the eyes lower with cadences
Of orange and of carmine and of rose
Till a mauve mood's magic and mystery
Shimmering with unknown raptures plunges all
Our mind in a deathless deep whose veil is earth.
Now too the sight falls, but no rigid chain
Holds it: a tree surrender's worshipping
Humility before high heaven calms
The fire heart, gathering its whole outblaze
To a hushful point of self-discovery
By whose rapt knowledge every truth is known.
Page 311
Oblivioned is the smile whose lure was fought
With fear's loud cry to keep all gazes down.
If down must drop man's beauty-drunken eyes
Without revolt for loss of ecstasy,
Up first from face of woman must we burn:
"Above! Above!" must ever be the call.
O Moslem men, cast all your gazes high!
23.6.48
Page 312
Vanishing Edges
All forms have vanishing edges!
Colour and lint now seem
To shade off in the farness
Of an infinite cream!
The mind awakes to a presence
No eye can see—
Enfolding every earth-shape
With aura of mystery.
Time-figures have grown portions
Of a hidden world
Ruling by utter quiet:
Shiningly swirled
In spaces which are viewless,
They cry to me, "O sweep,
Beyond our little thrillings,
To the all-creative Deep,
Breakless and self-complete—
Bliss free of bound-
One whole of truth forever,
Needing no sound
To relish its own nectar
Of knowledge immense
That never can be fathomed
By the brief sense
You read in forms about you
As if were conned
Life's secret, without feeling
The vast beyond!"
Page 313
This cry bespells my body;
It tingles on vague nerves,
And a mystic gleam goes stealing
Along the clay-built curves.
Suddenly that strange twilight
Flickering on my skin
Draws to a conscious rapture
Some greatness locked within.
Through a gold-grey reverie
I largen out of space:
Birthless and deathless, I am playing
With a mask of human face!
24.6.48
Page 314
Greatness of earth—high mountain, ocean deep—
God's solar zenith, watching it, shall find
No difference 'twixt small thinker and huge mind!
Between sea-level and the Himalaya's leap.
Between shore-level and the Pacific's plunge,
Full five miles stretch—five miles that ever sound
Marvellous, the earth's sublime, the earth's profound,
But a mere nought the astronomers expunge
From calculation of the grandeured gap
Across which throws the pure transcendent noon
Its shadow-banishing universal boon
As if the uneven earth were a single lap!
The Glory and the Power beyond all clay.
Poised in a mystic vacancy of trance—
The eternal Seerhood of one golden glance
Piercing each darkness with its infinite day—
Laughs at our wonder and terror of great men.
If some soar high and some strike deep, pride goes
With them to its pinnacle or self-thought grows
A larger hollows In the Ethereal's ken
Their victories within earth's own domain
Are trifles: the undimmable truth-star
Millions and millions of dreaming miles afar
From mortal mights which never without stain
Reach their Himalayan or Pacific mood—
How shall this Splendour, with all dross consumed,
Care for such triumph? Every might is gloomed
To littleness when so divinely viewed.
Not human greatness but the ungauged soul
Widening in superhuman secrecy
And catching with no mountainous sweep the eye.
Calling the ear with no oceanic roll —
The light within that wake; when mortals sleep—
Page 315
Is measured the true majesty—a rhyme
To eternity's sun-heart by earth-heart's time!
Therefore the Grace Supreme shall never keep
The surface-judgments by which depth or height
We mark: it nulls them with its nameless law,
Moulds by swift miracles that none foresaw
History's long curve: its crowning favours slight
Our vision's winnowing of the great and small:
Even gambler, sinner, weakling, fool or waif
It picks out, leading the lost wanderer safe
Where every life attains the ecstatic All!
25.6.48
Page 316
O body, modern tongue swayed by thought's flicker,
How shall you be the outbreak of God's fire
Whose tones are an ancient mystery beyond thought,
A luminous Sanskrit of the secret soul
Breathing a windless vastitude within—
Singer and seer of the omnipresent dream
Lost by the fickle light of the arguer mind?
To your many-mooded mutability
Dead is the language of the timeless One,
Which through wide harmonies of goldenness
Steadily thrills with yet a single cry
Echoing ecstatically everywhere!
Can ever your fluctuant form facilely leaning
To a hundred different lures and loves translate
The soul's truth-pledged intense Upanishad?
Not till your cherished liberties have grown
A reasonless rapture of ineffable faith!
Wavering no longer with time's glow and gloom,
Deaf to sun-mobile day, star-tremulous night,
Immerged in peace that seems a living tomb—
Thus only can you shrine the immortal blaze,
Burn with the deep originality
Of a loveliness unchangeable yet new!
Alone the superconscious sleep can wake
To the miracle-shades of the omniscient speech
Whose limitless undertone and overtone
Rhyme, through strange words that make a million worlds,
The Infinite to the self-same Infinite.
O body, restless with thought-jangled nerves,
Rein back response to clamouring multitudes:
Page 317
Dissolve your sounds in measureless silences
To learn the rhythms of eternal life.
Let the loud thinker hold breath—a rapt muse
Withdrawing beyond birth. Time's quivering tongue,
Lie still an age if you would utter God!
26.6.48
Page 318
What is Truth?
Agelong the query, "What is truth?"
To catch on an ecstatic tongue
The answer that keeps men ever young,
Men lose their youth!
Wrinkling and grey, we lapse to the ground—
Eyes dim, mouth pale, hands helpless grown.
The answer that brings all rapture's tone
Is never found....
Never—until the eyelids drop.
The mouth falls silent suddenly:
Alone the hands, a blind dumb cry,
Are lifted up,
As though to explore strange voids of sleep
Hanging beyond all universe,
Calm spaces no astronomer's
Long glass can sweep—
Invisible infinity
Where dream, like perfect stars, the pure
And vast originals of the unsure
Time-throbs we see.
Waking in them a quiver of ruth
Those hands of hushful prayer below
Draw down to the heart a deathless glow—
And this is truth!
28.6.48
Page 319
Turn Your Back
Turn your back on everything
Utterly—
There's no other way to wing
Infinity.
Spirit's grandeur cannot brook
Compromise—
Once for all you must surrender
To the skies.
But when all earth fades behind
Soul's firm back,
It has not become for soul
One huge black.
By a magic most divine,
Things we spurn
For the sake of Spirit's ether
Always turn
Part of the same mystery
That we quest,
But within that near Unknown
None can rest:
O this Wonder will not tear
Its wide veil
Ere we first in the beyond
Learn to hail
The one Marvel which shall give
Soul release:
We must fly afar from little
Poignancies,
Page 320
Merge in quiets that are never
Bound by birth,
Then with eyes of dreaming distance
Look on earth:
Like a many-mooded mirror
Time shall be,
And in each hour's hue shall wake
Eternity!
Page 321
Not far enough our mystic soul has strained.
Above thought's flicker, the mind—a trance of truth—
Grows a white ether which embraces all;
Still higher a life of lone beatitude
That knows all things by knowing its own self;
But highest a calm secret more intense
Than mind's epiphany, life's apocalypse,
Than infinite truth or timeless ecstasy—
Sheer God, at once eternity and earth!
In this ineffable extreme our soul
Finds the pure substance of the undying One,
Catches the power that proves the deepest gloom
A veiled beauty more bright than widest day,
And comes back with the alchemic touch that turns
Even flesh a dense gold grip of divinity!
29.6.48
Page 322
In the cave of Altamira, hidden afar
On walls of ancient rock, lie the dawn-streaks
Of art, the painter soul's awakening
To animal beauty and animal energy—
Bison for ever caught by primitive hands!
But older than this cave, a secrecy
Hung between earth and eternity, is the rapt
Room of the inmost reverie within man.
Here hides a power of world-creating art,
Here dawns the ultimate simplicity
From whose omniscient oneness springs the birth
Of the million moods that make our universe.
The truth-soul vigilling through time's changing tones
Writes, on the walls of this profound of trance,
Visions which archetype the animal heart—
Miraculous strengths fighting mortality!
Both seer and child is that ecstatic soul,
For this deep cave is a mother-mystery,
A paradising wisdom-wondrous womb.
But we who broke from it have lost the smile
Dreaming eternally on its magic mouth.
Wanderers are we, blind to the mountain-poise
Where heavenly inwardness delights itself!
Once more the womb must cake us. Far withdrawn
From fragmentary lustres, scattered loves,
We through a shining sleep above the mind
Must gather back the prime beatitude.
Awake again to our own divinity
And come new-born, wearing an aura of gold.
But O some voice of grace from heights occult
Must tune us to the path silverly straining.
Behind life's veil, towards the lone harmony!
What mantra shall draw down that guiding grace?
Page 323
Sublime and sweet Source of all lovely light,
Goddess! how should we name Thee, by what prayer
For clay's perfection call Thy word of help
From the hill-cave of Thy omnipotent calm!
Shall we from Altamira learn to invoke
Thy spirit as Mira of the Altitudes?...
30.6.48
Page 324
Name after name I give to God:
Sweet or sublime are they—
More magical than birth of stars,
Mightier than death of day.
Like some great lion stretched below
The horizon of the west,
His gold magnificence I see,
Dazzling itself to rest.
Like some huge harmony of swans
Sprung from a sable sleep,
Hangs the far vigil of white love
His infinite mysteries keep.
He stands, a rapture-haunted hill
From which vast perfume blows-—
A hill upon whose summit drops
A sky that is all rose.
He calls, a sea whose thunder is light,
A truth-revealing sound,
As though the abyss of a million dreams
Explored its own profound....
Name after name!—when close to me
Come out of distances
The grandeur and he grace of Him
Through time's intensities.
But O the all-submerging shock
When He and I are the same
Eternity's changeless marvel!
Then How blind and bare each name.
1.7.48
Page 325
God is asleep!
The great eyes keep
No watch on us:
Love-luminous
Are they with the gleam
Of a magic dream
In which they behold
Man's heart a gold
Of deathless light:
Never they sight
The sobbing dark
We hark and hark
Within our breast.
Vainly we quest
Power from that glance
Of lonely trance
To change our own
Life's trembling tone.
O we must break
The trance awake
And free the dense
Making it know
The world is woe
And not the bliss
God's dream-abyss
Kindles to Him!
Until the gaze
Of God outblaze
To catch the dim
Misery below,
There can be no
Earth-alchemy.
Prayer after prayer
Page 326
Must cleave the air,
An ocean-cry
To shake the sky:
All life must yearn
Without one stop:
Then suddenly
The high gold hue
Of eternity
Shall timeward drop
And God's dream turn
Dazzlingly true!
4.7.48
Page 327
Eternal rest, the Almighty's deepest power—
Unchanging Self that makes all beings one
And draws together the uttermost extremes
With never the smallest break in motionless peace—
Sleeper on the serpent of infinity,
The ever-still Lord of the universe
Ruling all time from those gigantic coils
That keep a single folded secrecy
In which no past and future stretch away
But the far tail lies gripped in the far mouth,
A circled calm of packed omniscience!
We toil to gain brief riches of repose
Or tiny treasures of uncertain lore:
Tranquillity here is wealth for ever full,
Intense gold hush won by no heave of breath
But winning every truth our toil has missed.
The immense world-energies bear us in their sweep
And toss from life to death, from death to life,
While here that multitudinous tyranny
Is conquered by a silence effortless:
It swims like a smooth fish in appoised bowl—
The imperturbable Sleeper's docile dream,
A shadowy play within white quietudes.
O luminous liberty of unending, ease,
We strain our hands to thy transcendent gaze
Rapt inward from the turbulence of time;
But ever we forget thou liest aloof
And free because spread under; thee as couch
Is the whole turbulence of time controlled,
A concentrated python's vigilance,
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A dense divinity holding each world-force,
Ring within ring of centuries caught and calmed.
Nought save such infinite mastery can support
The Almighty's deepest power, eternal rest.
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Thought after thought bears up a storm of wings:
Downward the sapphire Deep for ever flings
Each thrill by a yonder to all ecstasies—
Infinitude conquering mind with motionless ease!
But when the titan wings fall back subdued,
One secret Presence formless and alone
Makes the whole sapphire sovereignty our own—
Mind drawn within to a self-infinitude!
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No creature of rare moments white and gold
Nor powered with a few flashes of wizardry
But claiming each lifedight as heaven's own,
The soul sits smiling in the heart of time.
Wondrous chameleon equal to all hues,
Spurning no mood as void of the perfect dream,
It breaks forth everywhere the epiphany:
Out of its miracle deep it can lay bare
With selfsame beauty of omnipotent ease
The aureate Eternal, the argent Infinite,
The grey God and the black Beatitude!
Stainless, it makes of the most shadowy tones
Ineffable mysteries of a deathless fire....
Each gaze divine, it leaps to every lure:
No delicate fantast, no austere recluse,
A universal hunger out of heaven.
It has come to lick up with ecstatic tongue
The whole domain of time's brief flutterings,
The insect-instants that are man's heartbeats!
Let then all hours grow one great harmony
Of paradise plucked from both dark and day—
Let all the moth-thrills of mortality
Lose separate insignificant smallnesses
To feed from strength to strength the magical
Chameleon at life's core, that many-coloured
Artist of the single-selfed apocalypse!
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Two months of song have swept my soul
Out to the very nerves of sense
And with the body's vehemence
I have taken to myself the whole
Wonder of the timeless Secrecy!
Visions of day and dreams of night
Have thrilled with a single master-tone
Healing the broken world to one
Great globe of truth illumined Eye
Behind the flickers of human sight.
My ear has caught a, harmony
Like some huge gloriole of sound
Circling infinities around
The blindly beating heart of me.
With every breath I have inhaled
A perfume of eternal peace
From all the fluttering transiencies.
And my ten fingers like ten rays
Sprung out of hidden knowledge, move,
Awaking everywhere a love
Whose deathless heat was lying veiled
By matter's blank unfeeling face.
But deeper than the eye or ear,
Breathing or touching, is the sheer
Sense of immortal bliss within
When, through each song whose rhythms fill
With nectar-waves of trance, I win
A taste of the Ineffable!
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O I am earth's idolater! Truth's peak
Is here when the head bows, touching dense clay:
In the blue beyond are time's foundations laid,
Downward the mystery of the Eternal plunges,
Inverted pyramid whose triumphant top
Of absolute all-penetrating force
Is clay—source of deep hurt, peril to life—
Smallest among God's self-disclosing deeds—
Because sheer point and acme of miracle!
Blind are we, dreading or despising earth.
She comes so dense by concentrated dream.
Grandeur and grace of granite—fearful strength—
But O the unbreakable beatitude
That is God's grip when rapture is all rook!
A dumbness and a deafness and a dark-
Intensity of ignorance—till with eyes
Deep-shut we search for the deathless Self within:
Then our lost limbs measure the earth's profound!
Therefore I ever kneel and wait the Eternal's
Fullest epiphany with dust-worshipping brow:
Pitiless packed matter presses truth most near
And the vague clods are the Infinite's utmost power—
Divinity calm though trampled by human feet!
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The strokes of time have left no scar on her:
Death after death upbuilt a fairer face:
Now God's whole secret buried within earth
Laughs in the two sunflowers of her gaze.
Out of a heaven haloing each hour
She wakes the truth-gold in our limbs of lust:
Intense with a glowing absolute of life
She brings even dust the glory of being dust.
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The full moon comes to make all life complete,
But ever a shadow on the broad white disk
Mars the one perfect and entire dream
Earth-nature strives to reach through changing lights—
High beauty haunted by a nameless lack!
I look within and bear the same bliss-break.
The full moon like some mighty mirror hangs
And the shadow answers a gap in my own heart:
Splendour of song and lustre of love—yet loss
Of the one all-consummating harmony!
O soul of man, O spirit of the universe,
That sable touch on time's intensest hour
Is the mystery of the God forgotten in you!
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Not the cool mind blinking with a million eyes
But the hungry heart that struggles to see once
With as intense a sight as its blindness now,
Is the blaze that catches time and eternity.
All things in a single glow suddenly break
To an infinite harmony in the human breast:
When the heart's hidden apocalypt cracks his cave
Vision is no delight of heavens hung far—
To see is to drink up divinity!
Through one great gaze the whole universe of truth
Is drawn within by a tyranny of love
That brooks no distance betwixt seer and seen.
Colour becomes a laugh of inmost life—
Red rapture, blue bliss, yellow ecstasy,
A multi-mooded nectar tasting its own
Immortal deep and finding its self-taste man!
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How shall mortality's grey golden to God'?...
Behind earth's law a luminous liberty laughs.
O it can break a lotus from blind stone,
A sun from voidnesses of midnight's black!
Our life is a divine desire's demain:
Over us lords a splendouring secrecy—
Eternal wizard of the absolute eye,
Artist almighty, colour's infinte Czar.
Within him all things grow one single self:
The universal harmony of his heart
Gives him the power to paint man's body anew:
He keeps the bright salvation of our clay.
But 'twixt his freedom and our fixities
A vast blank washing each time-hue away
Hangs its miraculous sleep for magic dreams
To bring unmarred their alchemies to our mind.
Deep in a trance of world-forgetfulness
Each mood must plunge: the despot of life's dye
Comes then to wake God's gold in mortal grey.
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Space is the infinite of God's witness Self
Permitting the endless will of God that is time;
But still the twin near glories shine apart.
Beyond them burns a mingle of mysteries—
Divinity reaches every goal at once
And a boundless Eye draws into its living deeps
The distances of future and of past—
Time merged in space through a supracosmic fire.
Beyond even this intense totality
Is the freedom of an all-forge ting light:
No space, no time, no four-dimensional muse.
Yet the pure Being rapt in its own immense
Marks not the sovereign term. Outtopping each
Grade, dwells a lustre of absolute victory:
Three golden faces of a single bliss
In which the whole time-drama and space-sight—
With changing mood or mood unchangeable—
Are lost for ever yet for ever found:
The kindling cosmos, the fused flaming All
Blaze without break from a timeless spaceless glow—
Brahma outstretching omnipiesent life,
Vishnu upholding one omniscient truth,
Shiva sustaining both by omnipotent peace!
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A demon's grip is the wide universe—
Unending space and termless time, yet each
Distance and day hold ever the same heart-break
Sunlight falls like a fire-whip on the flesh:
From pulse-throb to small quivering pulse-throb
Our life keeps running neath that titan stroke.
And every star opens a wound of dream
In the inescapable gloom that is our soul.
Even beauty is a rainbow hung on tears....
But through the terror and the tyranny
And yet the blind defiance by our blood
A wondrous word steals out in lonely calms
When on itself man's mind looks with long gaze
And broods on the secret of mortality.
Too vast the doom of boundless space and time
Seems for so tiny a creature and too keen
For a pygmy such denial of defeat!
Are then the monster hours a wizard's wand
Smiting to wake up some veiled heaven within—
Challenge to charm out lost omnipotence?
O freedom to gold freedom calls across
The iron infinite of a world of woe!
Pain eats up joy that we may crave God's deep,
Fate drives us to a quest of God's immense,
We bleed that God in us may break through clay
And the whole tyranny and terror we face
Are a perilous pressure of God on His own self
To smile from blankest sleep. But once we wake
The superhuman light behind our eyes
All that we dread laughs suddenly divine!
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Voice from the Wideness
A voice of myriad raptures with one soul,
Hum of a measureless bee drunk with all flowers,
Borne by a secret wind through night and day,
Thrills from the wideness of the universe
To an inmost silence lifting hands of prayer.
The multitudinous call of transient things
Comes perfumed now from an eternal deep
And grows the breath of some far silver flute
Playing a dream of earth's divinity.
From everywhere it blows, yet like a word
Brought delicately on a smile of trance
By some vast lover to the loved one's ear—
No name, but the rumour of a nameless fire,
A tremulous tongue of golden mystery
Whispering beatitudes beyond lime's ken.
A beauty breaking from behind all life,
A lustre falling from above all mind,
It laughs like the meeting of two hidden heavens
That suddenly shine out their single truth.
Softest of tones, yet infinite in its sweep,
Sovereign it circles, soothing every pain,
Conqueror of mortal grief by the touch of a kiss.
The primal Heart's creative song is here:
A mother-croon cradles a cosmic child
And rhythms its body with the Omnipotent's will.
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If the whole cosmic utterance suddenly ceased,
The ocean's roar died down not even came
The vague and wavering whisper of thin leaves,
The deepest slumber would be struck, awake
By that immeasurable surprise of hush!
So too the gloom of ignorant nortal mind,
That ever-present sleep with open eyes,
Breaks under a vast pressure of potent peace
When all a sudden the multitudinous lure
Of transient things wafts never more its call
And the heart is left with fathomless secrecies.
Time washed in vast white waters of inwardness
Throbs through still space a cosmic chastity—
The universe moves divine with no desire,
Impelled by a truth in love with its own light.
Following no need but only a rapturous will
Flamed by God's vision of His myriad Self.
This is the world whose magic moods are we
In a wondrous waking to our soul's profound;
And, when we thrill there, clamorous common day
Vanishes or else lingers the ghost of a dream
Like one small fish haunting an infinite sea.
But whoso with a golden gurgle drowns
In eternity's pacific splendences
Makes of their dazzle a blinding sleep once more.
Bearing the new-found nectarous wakefulness
Like a cool aura clinging to our clay
We through the old eyes cleansed of ignorance
Must turn the intense inlook a God's outview,
Catch in the million lures of things that die
Flash after flash of an immortal fire
And, drawing from their fugitive strengths a stuff
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Of brightness to build up a new life's core,
Hold in our heart the glamours of the dust
Transfigured to a breakless beauty and power,
Innumerably faceted yet one, A diamond of earth's divinity!
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Evening! The west is a giant Tamburlaine
Bannering with a sky of blood the marching main.
The east, a hush of white work -witchery,
Is some unveiled supreme Zenocrate.
Yet one transfiguring touch both marvels miss,
Touch that would bring an infinite of bliss,
And in that one touch lost by sun sublime
And moon intense are all the tears of time!
Dream after mystic dream my painter heart
Mixes to erase the tiny shadow and smart
Spoiling earth's mightiest mood of loveliness.
Vain are all dreams—for O the little less
That kills perfection, blinds eternity,
Is the puny spot of self I grasp as me!
If I could feel no more a speck self-dense
But a point of vacant peace, Omnipotence
Would shine through and the finishing touch be given
To make, of earth's light, harmonies of heaven.
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O Who Shall Tame the Tarpan?*
O who shall tame the tarpan,
Horse of wild Tartary?
No word of wisdom in his ear
Blows out the fire in his eye!
He tosses off the saddle,
He never brooks the bit—
His snort at the earth comes clamouring
For a freedom infinite.
Out of the wastes of passion
He brings within his soul
A brutal beauty none can break;
Earth-life is not his goal.
He shakes up all our slumber.
He tramples on our light;
So deep his hoof-prints that they seem
A scorn of heaven's height.
But the vast and pathless places
He longs for are a love
Lost when he wandered into earth:
Wideness now waits above.
So, like a scorching chaos
He gallops through our mind,
And who shall teach him to forget
The abyss he has left behind?
We try to make him serve us;
But how can ever the pale
* "Tarpan": accent on the first syllable; "a" in the first syllable sounded as in "far", in the second as in "man".
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Gleams that we catch of infinite truth
Outshine his scarlet gale?
O there must come a lustre
Blown like a golden wind
To bear down his own fury of flame
And dazzle his beauty blind!
Alone a giant splendour
Beyond the sou that is man's,
A limitless liberty that falls
Out of the untracked trance
Which overhangs the little
Seizures of human thought,
Can leap secure on that bare back:
Suddenly, secretly caught
By a strength from unknown summits,
Dropping with stunning weight.
The thunderous magnificence
Is led into our gate.
The burning beast and radiant
Rider grow one surprise
Of rapturous harmony that rhymes
Hell's heat with paradise
But never can this marvel
Suffuse our common day
Until the safeties and the shames
We treasure are thrown away.
For here is naked beauty,
Stark impulse with no fright,
And here truth naked of all mind.
The Eternal's pure self-sight!
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I Bring a Song..
Fingers of light fall on my vague heart-strings.
They wake a tremble that glimmers and is gone.
A little secrecy shines out in each tune,
But in that shining moment is no end
Of the power that falls'and the passion that flies up.
A small bird with seven colours on its throat
Lifts on wide wings that are invisible
With quivers of a rapture infra-red
Rhyming to a wisdom ultra-violet.
Those black fires merging in a mystic sky
Bear in their beat a burthen of Imeasureless bliss:
Sounds that are wonder-vast with things undreamed
Call to the ear from far beyond the eye.
A music whose meanings never can be seen
Throbs to be deeply felt and suddenly known
As if truth's light were grown one's utter self!...
I bring a song that shows the mind's outgaze
Colours of a beauty fading with strange cry
To thrill in the soul an intimate Infinite.
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O Pygmy of Perfection!.
When will I break through this blind stone of a breast?
O warrior light caverned in my small heart,
O dwarf with the hatchet forged in holy fire,
Lift thy edged ecstasy and drive through clay
The mystic fissure of a luminous laugh
Answering the golden infinite of God's love!
O pygmy of perfection, leap beyond
To thy full stature of bliss that knows no birth!
Then from the overarched eternities
Come back time's king to trample the gilded roof
Of the arrogant mind of me and plunge through thought
With the cry of a thousand oceans pouring down
Deep after deep of an inexhaustible truth!
Brim this whole body with one will ever white
And through each pore burst into the universe
To drown it in a measureless Self that turns
All touches God discovering God anew!
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Most heart-consuming, most intensely cold,
A statue of unbearable loveliness
Above all intimate warm divinity,
Stands the white figure of the Absolute Dream
Breaking us with a bliss no life can hold.
Each heaven falls back from this Ineffable.
That smiling mouth is sealed, those great eyes locked,
The beatific limbs stay gestureless;
But by their sovereign secrecy of stone
All splendour is shaken to exceed itself:
We are drawn to a depth of trance that has no end,
We are lured into eternal distances,
We yearn for ever on from light to light
Since no reply the marble mystery makes.
So beautiful that, moveless, it moves all,
So still that beauty grows a vast beyond.
This is the fathomless strength by which we gauge
The paradise after paradise that is God—
This is the omnipotent support of the whole
Boundless adventure of the apocalypse—
Implacable lord of truth's infinity!
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Two are the mystic makers of earth's life.
Their passion is for ever and their joy
is the breaking forth of the hidden truth of time.
But while the ages sing out of their lips
The eyes are lost beyond both life and love:
Like hierophants feeding a temple fire
With silent sweetnesses of sandalwood,
They offer the two rapturous bodies and breaths
To a single sun of omnipresent mind
That knows all by sheer sense of its own gold.
This glory keeps the lovers statue-pure;
An absolute hush in an eternal poise
Contains the keen creative ecstasy—
No hunger runs from face to shining face,
No lust quivers in the heart-revealing touch:
Here is not union of fragmented flesh
Nor strife to merge divided dreams: the Alone
Magically quaffs the nectar of being twain!
Ever a shadowless identity
With no call even for tiniest flicker of a kiss,
These two have joined with lackless souls for a new
Burst of the deep self-light in which they are one.
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Goddess
A Goddess rapt in the sun of her timeless self
Waits ever aloof with shut eyes and lips sealed,
Both arms lifted to a bodiless blue beyond.
A mystery burns that I can never grasp:
I search and search through void eternities
And my blood is a song in the dark with drift unknown.
But, while that face is a superhuman dream
And the figure a farness of transcendent bliss,
The feet touch earth and give themselves to me—
Feet that are standing still, yet with a calm
As of all boundaries reached and journeys done:
Here time lies conquered neath a weight of trance.
Light has come down—a heaven close to clay
Keeps offering to my bewildered brow
A strength to rest on, to my longing lips
A warmth of love to kiss. By refuge here
My heart feels in its own brief blinded cry
The overture of some crescendoed life
Through which mortality shall kindle up
And seize truth's perfect form with minstrel hands!
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A golden hand has plucked the deep heart's string
To outward space, but a dark hand has kept
It ever drawn away from the inward rest.
How shall it tremble into melody
If never the grip lets go? The plucking power
Was meant for music, not for the outward's spell....
Nor must the string be loosened to fall asleep
After one ravishing note uttering all heaven:
The rapturous rest was made to be pulled forth,
Since not else God can grow world-harmony.
A traffic to and fro 'twixt heaven and earth
And not earth-tension or heaven-calm is the goal.
Music for ever, music above all,
Music to marry the two extremes of Self,
Is the aim of time and the game of eternity.
O let soul live uncaught without or within
And the golden hand fulfil its perfect dream!
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From 8 th May to 8th August
Forsake me not, Sweet Power!
Make my life music with Thy kiss—
I pray that if one hour
Be without breath of Thy blue bliss,
Let it be like the stop of a flute
Where a master finger turns mute
The magic air, that air may stream
A perfect shape of the heart's dream
Through other stops, and with each stifle free
More subtle tones of the Infinite Mystery.
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To complete the story of this book, cast in personal terms that are connected with my spiritual guides at Pondicherry, it is appropriate not only to record, as I have done, their solicitous response, as summed up by one of them, to the strange experiences through which I was passing. It is appropriate also to present the literary response of the other, whose words of helpful criticism and evaluation had been precious to me for their rare insight throughout my life as a writer in both prose and poetry. Here are Sri Aurobindo's dictated comments in the form of two letters:
"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, Un-birthed, the images grow more audacious and tense and might seem to be almost violent in their push but they usually justify themselves by their originality and success.'
"The poems inspired by the Savitri model have the same qualities as the shorter ones; here too I shall have to wait until I have gone through them individually before I can write anything. One thing only is a little doubtful to me whether you have always achieved a perfect unity of total rhythm blending all the passages into a perfect whole. I have just heard the poem, Here and Now, where you seem to have attained success in a total unifying rhythm; but this has
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been done by employing a fine irregularity in the lines which gives a different build from the Savitri model. In other poems, even when you have employed enjambment to loosen the rigorousness of the model and get a greater swing and freedom, this has not always happened. Long passages in the Savitri manner are not easy to manage; short sentences or paragraphs can succeed, but great care in the development is needed. Otherwise one may have a series of stiffly standing stone pillars or straight lines of intense colour packed side by side instead of a successive harmony. I shall, however, consider this more carefully after studying individually more of these poems; I only suggest the possibility for the moment; in a later letter I shall return to the subject and either withdraw or confirm the suggestion."
(July 20, 1948)
"I have gone through your manuscript of poems and I propose that they should be immediately published without further delay. I had started making comments on each poem as 1 think you had wanted me to do; but this would have been an interminable process and your poems would have had to wait till after Doomsday. I don't, think there is anything in the poems that needs to be changed; even when you become too original for some critics who would call you violently forceful or wilfully extravagant in your images, expressions or idea-substance, these very qualities are the breath of life of a poem and to change or modify them would take away its whole value. There are perhaps one or two poems in which my doubt about the Savitri rhythm in blank verse lending itself to long continuous passages might seem to have some sort of justification, as if rows of giant ninepins have been set up somewhat stiffly but powerfully on an inexorable flatness of surface. But here too I find that change could not be tolerated for somehow this rhythm manages to be the right one for the poems' posture. So if
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you agree we will send the manuscript at once to the Press as soon as we hear to that effect from you."
(December 25, 1948)
In his second letter Sri Auiobindo says: "I had started making comments on each poem..." But no such comments were sent to me—and only those dictated on one poem were found among his papers after he had passed away. As against the praise abundantly given, it is fair to reproduce them for what seems to indicate a possibility of censure when a certain trend is pushed to its extreme though Sri Aurobindo takes care to offset the imagined censure by not directly identifying himself with it. Even apart from my motive of being fair, they are worth citing for their lively teasing style. The poem is the very first in the book, in which the new inspiration may be considered somewhat tentative.
Seated Above
Seated above in a measureless trance of truth—
A lonely monolith of frozen fire.
Sole pyramid piercing to the "vast of the One—
They find their home in this sweet silent Face
SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENTS
"Seated Above is a striking poem but its violent connections and disconnections—I am lot condemning them—have
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somehow awakened the Johnsonian critic in me and I give voice to his objections here without supporting them. His first objection is to 'streak of smile' and he wants to know how thunder can wear a smile, because thunder is a sound, not a visible object. The next three lines are very fine, he admits, though he wriggles a little at the frozen fire. He would like to know how a wing can have a heart and want also to know whether it is the heart that is a tunnel of dream and whether it is the tunnel that finds a home and what can be meant by the home of a tunnel. He is startled by the deluge from Shiva's brain and his own brain is ready to burst at the idea that Shiva's brain is being knocked out of his head by the hammer of heaven. The last two lines elicit his first unquestioning approval; that, he says, is the right union of poetry and common sense.
"I don't ask you to take these Johnsonianisms seriously; I have only been taking a little exercise in a field foreign to me; but 1 am not sure that this is not how some critics will grumble and groan under this particular hammer of heaven." (12.11.1948)
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ALTAR AND FLAME
Not with new altar-plan but with new flame
Life lays on Godhead a king-coloured claim
The shadowless Liberty can never deny!
To cut the marble shape more beautiful
Is but to pleasure distantly the Eye
Burning above the mind: it cannot pull
The great invisible Sun into earth's heart.
Beyond ourselves, beyond the chisel's art
Offering cold beauty motionless below,
We must with visionary vehemence go,
Calling and calling through unmeasured space,
Changing the small fire's smile to a maddened blaze
That laughs like a golden wilderness of whips
And slashes the skies of secrecy hung between
Our groping sight and the miracled Unseen.
Thus only we drag down the Apocalypse!
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Your little purities, your temperate pleasures
I fling away. For ever mine the fierce
Hunger of the naked fakir or the lover nude,
For some huge heart-break of ecstatic tears!
Through limitless freedoms of bareness or of beauty
To a superhuman sky's effulgent peace
Or an oceaned eternity of love I strain—
A lonely traveller of transcendences.
No rest until—beyond brief clay's control
And past our mortal senses' flickering charms—
The abysm of timelessness at Buddha's feet,
Time's treasure of infinite truth in Krishna's arms!
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Psyche
Eyes see you not—
Only your fragrant breath
Steals into our thought.
Then from pink sleep
Drowning the mind,
A point of gold
Breaks through each hour
And the heartbeats hold
A dawn above death
And each cell of the body a bliss
Thrown from behind
By an aureoled kiss—
A flame that is All,
Yet the touch of a flower—
A Sun grown soft and small.
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Tears
Let the tears tremble
Within the eye
But fall not over,
Leaving it dry.
Keep the tears standing,
A quivering calm
That leaps not outward
To the moment's balm.
Tears that are loosened
Drain the small heart
Of man: his sorrows
Too soon depart
And the lack that is nameless,
Beyond all brief
Losses, grows never
A glisten of grief
Calling the azure's
Light without end
To be for a life-time
The mortal's friend.
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I woke up in the night and found
Seduced silver all around,
A cool conspiracy the air.
Touched by a dream I saw not there.
The shadow in the moon's white core
Lay like a love of the unseen—
The world to which I had clung before
Withdrew behind an alien sheen.
I, groping through that veil of frost,
Spying, eavesdropping upon life,
Caught it like an unfaithful wife
On whom had come the Holy Ghost.
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When a rose meditates,
Does it grow less red?
The carmine burns but inward
To the core, instead
Of flaring out to the tips
Of petals from
That tranquil centre, beauty
Points back to its home,
Gathers the oneness-within
That broke into flame,
Tongue upon tremulous tongue
Of a secret name.
Damask is damask still,
But the life-breath knows
By what deep blissfulness fed
Its perfume blows—
Cup of creative calm
Where the root unseen
Dreaming the invisible
Ethereal sheen
Rises from buried blindness
In the pistil's spire
And, through the spark of the pollen,
Catches sky-fire—
Mystery underneath,
Mystery beyond.
Merging in a mid-space
Where darkness is dawned—
A heart of hidden honey,
Wing-visited shrine
Within whose child-gaze vigil
Dust feels divine.
Page 364
Life's Extremist
The heart's sweet lava, lips trembling to star-shine,
Clutch on the atom, foot on Everest-
Nothing suffices save immortal life.
And, though the deathless soul may flame out free,
A gulf is yet the unbodied infinite.
Nor can the dust's deep ache to laugh for ever
Be stilled in the mere marble our hand craves
To meet the ages with a god's form and face.
Our very limbs strain for the timeless smile.
Its single lack empties the universe,
A worm that eats up the whole core of the sun.
The Eternal even in this small soft flesh-Else a quick end that cuts short the long cry
Of the naked nerve throbbing to the horizon's edge.
O soon the peace of the perfect Avatar
Guarded by an aura of unfading day—
Or the safe dead armoured in their sleep of steel!
Page 365
Surely in future ages some
Thinker will brood upon a theory
That my strange poet-passion of love has come
To worship an august philosophy
Whose intellectual rays
Of truth have woven all this dream of hair
Streaming in beauty from an angel face:
Else how could man give such ideal praise?
Was ever woman pure enough to bear
A mirrored paradise
Within the changeful glory of her eyes?
Poor sage! whose bloodless kin denied
Lips to the smile that Dante sighed
Through hollow years to see again—
Will you with your unpassioned abstract brain
Make clear how the august philosophy
Which I was song-allured to speak
By symbol of a white brow's majesty
Had one dark mole upon its rapturous cheek?...
That miracle you never shall explain,
For incorruptible truth has beckoned me
Not through a drudging wisdom but because
A woman's mouth breathed like a perfect rose
Deep-rooted in her soul's divinity!
Page 366
I have mastered the antinomies of Kant
And the four-dimensional continuum
And the daedal scheme of Joyce-wrought Ulysses—
Of Dali's weird signs I am a hierophant,
And how through Narcist quiverings they come
I have learned by subtle psychoanalysis.
Now, Lord, I pray make me most ignorant,
Drown in huge sleep the ever-dancing hum
Of knowledge so that like a strange abyss
Of waveless water I may brood intent
The ineffable Truth—then suddenly find room
For Thy thousand-petalled lotus-break of Bliss!
Gold core: packed poise of the infinite Permanent—
Silver leaves: world on world in magic bloom—
Light's lone rapt self, Light's all-enkindling kiss!
Page 367
When poems are born
No man and woman meet:
A lion and a nebula
Vanish in a single heat!
A light that is nameless and formless
Plucks up the master of life—
Limbs of carved thunder take
An infinite silence for wife.
And, by the unfathomed fusing
Of below with beyond,
A mystery leaps out of slumber,
Breaking time's bond.
A cry like immortal honey
Foretastes of the Truth behind
Our human grope—the almighty
Body of Supermind.
Page 368
O the Rare Fall..
All men can die where the battle's blaze is red,
All men can throw their bodies to green earth—
But in the still high places have they died?
What lonely sacrifice among the stars?
O the rare fall for the flag unseen, the wound
For the unborn God in depths beyond all dream,
The black bite of the silent snake that coils
Infinite among the silver secrecies!
Page 369
Ask not yourself: "How shall I climb God's steep?"
O not by reason rose that impassible hill
And reason shall not be its conqueror.
Only some animal hunger for he height,
Dreaming not of the path but of the goal,
A cry from the dazzled depth of a child-heart,
Can dare as in somnambulist ecstasy
The sheer face of the Superconscious Calm.
No look behind at the broadening abyss,
No scrutiny of the beetling rock above,
But a close clasping of ledge on small keen ledge,
A love that clings in blindness to the light
And feels in every inch of intimate crag
A foretaste of the all-fulfilling peak,
Till suddenly the hushed infinitudes
Halo the thought-transcending human head—
While wise men chattering faintly far below
Argue forever the unattainable!
Page 370
An arctic or an alpine night
Is silence, yet life never dims—
But who shall wake her body's white,
This lunar landscape of still limbs?
The mouth is Sappho's but no fret
Breaks over that rose of Helicon:
"It's midnight and time passes"—yet
In peace her body lies alone.
Page 371
We love, but scarcely know
What they mean—
The unsated kisses, the deep quiets
Hung between.
Suddenly in our eyes
A full moon glows
And, quick with tears, the mind
Feels that it knows.
Aloof, some rounded hush,
A secrecy
Of Oneness, troubles the heart's surge
And breaking cry.
Page 372
"The trees grow dangerous at eight"—
The gloomy branches drop
Their pointing: paths the eye knew straight
Suddenly stop.
O trust no tree in the moon—
Great arms will tear
Your heart and make its tiny tune
Spread everywhere.
A dark tree looms between
Yourself and you,
And, in that gap of the unseen,
Time never flew.
Page 373
A Black Swan broods over the waters
And the brightness is stilled by his shape....
O Mystery drowsing the waters,
Will ever your night undrape?...
But I care not if never naked
You stand of your dress of doom—
You widen, a lovely forgetting,
And the heart is drunk with your gloom.
Drowned are all throbbing planets
In the viewless depth of your wine—
O nectarous numbing quencher
Of my reverie's skyward shine!
Not death is your beauty's shadow:
For those who have made their eyes
Your two vague wings of farness,
Each tear of mortality dries.
Page 374
Coil after coil, now large, now small,
Roams in me ever that deep unrest,
The red snake lured by a shining call
Heard by the blindness in my breast.
Through silent eye and clamorous lip
The living labyrinth seeks light,
Craves of the sun and moon a sip
But falls back hungry. O throbbing home
Of the ageless million twisted heat,
Hurl—free of all misguiding gloom
That rises from the earth-plunged feet—
Long love to the skull that shuts off sky,
The old ache out of lip and eye
Turn a rapt reverie of height,
A serpent swallowing up each sense,
Time's endless travel grown one new
Swift superhuman leaping through
The crown of the head to be lost in a blue
Infinite circling omniscience!
Page 375
Truth at the Bottom.
What's a well?
Fathomed well,
It's an "I"
Whose hidden eye
Has never forgot
What skies have got.
Deep in the soil,
Free from all soil
A spirit sees
What moving seas
Always behold
Yet never hold.
Here a still spot
Can ever spot
As selfed in it
The infinite.
Page 376
Preach pity to the lammergeye's breast,
Make its brute claws grasp intellectual truth—
Vain strife! Yet only the subhuman nest
Bears the untrammelled vigour that can strain
To skies like some vast super-rose of ruth,
Seer suns beyond the gold of Plato's brain.
The exquisite heart, the delicate reverie gain
Miracled escape, but never the God-life's zest.
Blind hungers alone draw down transcendent things,
And we must scour the Infinite with wild wings
Spread by that giant vulture of the West!
Page 377
O Heart..."
"O heart that would be saint,
How will you wash the taint
Of your own blood?
Before the child eyes knew
A light between their lids.
Some ancient fire threw
Hell's heat into this flood
And woke to unsleeping lust
Each atom of the dust.
"Where can you fly O heart,
From your own throb?
Even if you mount the sun's cart
And watch the gold wheels turn,
Still must you live with that red
Shouting or russet sob."
But the heart knows strange depths
And why its cry was born—
The meaning of the colour
It took from Creation's morn.
Within its narrow room
Infinities are heard.
Did not the Holy Ghost
Come over a woman's lust
And from the mouth of the womb
Break forth the immaculate Word?
Powers that are more old
Than the dust have gone to mould
The flesh: in the blood's din
Page 378
Is the voice that Augustine
Caught speaking to eternity:
"Thou hast made us for Thyself,
And in our breast
Can be no rest
Till the heart rests in Thee."
Page 379
In the body's crowded city,
In the hubbub of life's town,
There is a secret palace
Where waits an empty crown.
No thought can beat its pressure,
No virtue's strong enough,
And vainly in their loves men seek
The unchallengeable stuff
Of royalty which puts it on
Like any common hat.
We strive and dream and call with words
The glorious autocrat—
But He cannot come because our speech
Has never the force to name
His splendour and both mind and heart
Burn not with a still flame
Whose tongue can taste the silences
Where dwells, unhurrying,
The Purple Mystery that needs
No crown to be a king.
Page 380
Not memory's load
But a winged power
Of Imagination sits
On that peak hour.
Not from our pale
Strengths and dim weaknesses
Are measured the go den more,
The leaden less
Of our souls. Too poor the show
Life makes of what we mean—
We are judged by an apocalypse
Of the Might-have-been,
Where love had room to grow
An angel without blur,
And every venomous spark
A Lucifer....
An eagle of reverie,
The Summing Eye is sent
Through the large haze of what we'd do
If born omnipotent.
Page 381
I am one who seeks on hidden hills of trance
A wideness free from barbs of iron speech,
A golden life safe from the ravener's reach,
A beauty brooding in some blue expanse
Beyond the long bows of the Tartar Khans.
Nothing they see, but hunger to draw nigh
And grasp in their red hands where the blood's fire
Leaps in ten flames that would devour the sky.
Far from the arrows screaming ever higher,
O for a Yonder to the abysmal eye!
Carrying within their hearts a sputtering hell.
Sleepless the gaunt black-bearded archers scan
Night for white wings that wish serene waft span
The distances that keep me mortal man.
May those rapt swans merge in the Ineffable!
Page 382
An unknown sky breaks through my sleep today.
This brilliant blue is an ether of ecstasy
Wakening to immortal roots the lotus heart-
Depth beyond depth strikes inward, gripping God.
Without this secret ether none can live.
Its boundless azure glows not by sun-gold
But laughs with some eternal radiance
By whose one quiver Time's truth flashes out!
A beauty that needs no form to seize the soul,
Because it bursts a sheer infinity:
A love that is effortlessly everywhere:
Oneness in which a myriad hells grow heaven:
Fount of all, fire of all, fate of all—Bliss!
Page 383
Dante meets Beatrice in Purgatory
(From Purgatorio, Canto XXX)
A woman, white-veiled, crowned with olive, came—
Under the shade of her green mantle, all
Her body clothed in colour of living flame.
Long years had passed since the first trembling fall
My spirit knew, love-broken in youth's hour
Before her beauty's height, but the same thrall
I stood now, caught by her secret flow of power
And needing not mine eyes to gauge the source
Of the old mighty love which made me cower.
As soon as on my vision struck the force
That through and through I had felt my boy's heart shake
I, like a child who seeks his mother and pours
Into her ear his sudden dread or ache,
Cried thus to Virgil as I pressed me nigher:
"Not one small blood-drop mine that does not quake—
I know the signals of the ancient fire!"
Page 384
Libido
O beauty swirling in the heart,
O loinward cry of rapture's flow,
Rise to the summit of the brain—
Distil to a shining word, O strain
Of burning blood, ere you depart!
Lost rhythm, nectar blind,
Leave the dense life below—
Brabble of covered flame,
Know Light to be your name
In the mountain-speech of the mind!
Page 385
Between Us Two
O I would give myself to you
But for a tiny thing, my dear:
There hangs the sea of a strange tear
Between us two.
If some earth-bright less crumbles down,
You'll stand in a brief while
Within its gap; but can your smile
Feed the blind hunger for the Unknown?
The name of God, no more a name,
Sat, a heaven-taste, upon my lip—
Vainly unto your kiss I came
For that wine's sip.
Salt are my eyes because your sweet
Face cannot fill this homeless heart:
My hands are lovers, yet we part,
Since there's a pilgrim in my feet.
Page 386
Waste
(Suggested by a poem of Yeats's)
If she had been a statue with last arms,
We might have dreamed her soul a mystic fire
Of ecstasy clasping invisible gods.
But she has let her love gird like a crown
Ablaze with planet prodigalities
The sleepy head of a fool... O limbs of light
Wasting the nectar of your destiny
Save for the two rapt kisses of my gaze—
O silver benediction on the air,
Your call was like a moon glimmering through rain!
For spirit-poignancies, like nightingales,
Awoke from some vague silence in my heart;
But neither by deep song nor the seraphic
Whiteness of your own beauty could the soul
In you be roused. Deaf unto deaf desire,
Mortal unto a mortal groped your clay—
The shining secret of a love unknown
Lost in the tenebrous embrace of time.
Page 387
Not every hour can glow a perfect gem:
Pallor of glass mingles with diamond fire—
But there is here no lower and no higher—
O let thy love's hand gather both of them!
For strangely the Great Jeweller cons the soul,
Computing richness by the care each day
Lavished on throwing not one hour away:
Love's life is precious only if given whole.
Because a cup is earthen, trivial, bare,
Moulded of moments smirched by the world's eye
And no rapt ore of golden secrecy,
Forget not in the least life-flow of thine
That clay and gold can measure the same wine
And love pour out perfection everywhere.
Page 388
Out of my heart love pours and pours and pours—
And should I live a thousand centuries,
No more might heaven's rainfall feed the trees
But I would keep with love's enchanted source
Thy form a-flower in my dreaming sight,
Even if those limbs that set my kiss a-glow
Grew dust a thousand centuries ago...
Vain words! the dreamer of the Infinite
Tunes with his heart a cry of crumbling clay:
Soon shall his yearning face be locked in sleep:
How then will limitless ardours overleap
The boundaries of one life's mortal day?...
This hand on fire—love's scribe—has power to undrape
For a thousand centuries thy perfect shape!
Page 389
Eros Known and Unknown
Love's Truth
The sage has seen love blind because
Blind are we loving mortal faces
When, seeing, we would know what Splendour draws
The heart to such gigantic paces,
Surely to stumble not into a brief
Tremor and a fool's somnolent relief.
So Much
So much of the moment's beauty I demand,
So far this tiny human heart would race,
Dearest, your body hurts my heavenward hand,
My soaring eyes are broken by your face.
A lustre calls through you—yet when I gain
Your lips, a bolt of blackness is my brain.
Fold now to quiet fragrance your rich rose:
Deep hush is of all love the perfect close.
Unflower to bud, breathe inward to the mute
Unnamable mystery clutched by rapture's root.
No longer thrill to sound love's myriad sense—
Gauge through calm clay the immutable, the immense!
Page 390
The Sea
The day floated for the last time on the sea.
Twilight's blur, washing the horizon's edge,
Made the immense waters loom infinite.
Two lonelinesses linked by one far love,
We came, earth-empty, but our small eyes sank
In the grey distance flowing evermore.
Our arms stretched toward the eternal shore beyond,
Which seemed divided by Time endlessly.
You, with lips quivering on the Great Name
Borne by the deep to this side of the unknown,
Murmured of the human heart's poor faltering strength.
But a faint touch of random spray on my brow
Moved me to breathe suddenly of fathomless Grace
That calls for nought save the surrendering cry
And gives all to the dwarf soul given entire.
'How shall we cross the sea?' ... "The sea shall cross us!"
Page 391
Was it not Enough...?
Was it not enough to show
Above my straining head
Your white uncatchable arms,
O crescent, that you throw—
Here at my feet, in this pond,
To double your glow and my gloom—
Your arms of flawless white.
Surrendering, yet beyond?
Page 392
It's not the darkness that brings out
Star after star in the sky.
What looks like gloom is a vast retreat
Of the world from the outer eye.
A waking sleep falls on the gaze,
Draws it to the depth of things—
And there through a hush that feels no bound
Break sudden silver springs:
Drop on great glimmery pulsing drop
To appease our small heart's drouth,
Beats of an answering infinite Heart—
The stainless stars come out.
Page 393
(Suggested by a phrase from Milton)
The "utmost Indian isle,
Taprobane",
Where the soul is ringed by the coolness
Of a sleeping sea—
There the mute sages go,
Washing away A
ll touch of colour and climbing
The nameless gray
Of hills that give no answer
Across the foam
To the cry of wanderer ages
For an ultimate home.
But, reaching those still peaks,
Austerity's end,
They bring from the face of granite
The smile of a friend!
Page 394
The Parthenon's pillars built to upbear the sky
Could keep not even an earthly roof; and all
That colour kindled for the Eternal's eye
In deep Ajanta fades; no rhythms recall
The two grand plays the terrible chisel-stroke
Of the titan mind of Aeschylus set beside
Prometheus Bound: their power Time's brute hand broke.
Heaven's light passes—divine Aurobindo died.
But this one death where Heaven's own self gave room
For dire eclipse of its eternity
Has spent the whole blind force of mortal doom
Against the Soul's vision of a wondrous sod
In which the Undying can work His artistry.
Now Man breaks free to grow for ever God.
Page 395
Seven suns are plunging down like diamonds
To deck the body of man with, deathlessness.
Bursting the brain to an omnipresent truth,
Piercing the brows to a gaze unbound by time,
Thrilling the throat with a word which rhythms the worlds,
Gripping the heart with a oneness that is all,
Wakening the belly to a laugh of infinite space,
Unloosing within the loins a swirl of stars,
Coiling at the base of the spine an almighty calm,
They take their splendorous stations in frail flesh—
And the flesh suddenly knows itself supreme
As though heaven's roses bore dust-intimate roots!
No gods are they from foreign farnesses
But the dust's own divinity beyond
Its brief and blind and broken beauty here.
One viewless Marvel plays a twofold game,
The solar shine and the terrestrial shade,
Empyrean and abyss each measuring each:
The seven suns descending to the earth
Are the seven earths awaiting in the sun.
Page 396
There are two ways of bowing
To you, O Splendour sweet!
One craves the boon of blessedness,
One gives the soul to your feet.
Pulling your touch to ourselves we feel
Holy and happy—we think huge heaven
Comes close with you that we may pluck
A redder dawn, a purpler even.
This is but rapturous robbery
Deaf to infinity's call
That we should leap and plunge in you
Our aching empty all
And, in the surge of being your own,
Grow blind and quite forget
Whether our day be a richer rose,
A wealthier violet.
Precious each moment laid in your hands,
Whatever the hue it bear—
A flame and fragrance just because
Your fingers hold it dear.
Make me your nothing, my whole life
I would drown in your vastnesses—
A cry to be ruled by your flawless touch,
Your will alone my peace.
Page 397
Out of our darkness lead us into light,
Out of false love to your truth-piercing height,
Out of the clutch of death to immortal space,
O Perfect One with the all-forgiving face!
From your white lustre build the mind anew,
From your unshadowed bliss draw the heart's hue,
From your immense bring forth a godlike clay,
O Timeless One self-sought through night and day!
Page 398
UNCOLLECTED WORK
At the Foot of Kanchinjanga
I have loved thee though thy beauty stands
Aloof from me,
And hoped that dwelling in thy sight
From dawn to dawn at last I might
Become like thee—
Become like thee and soar above
My mortal woe And to the heavens,
passionless And mute, from dawn to dawn address
Thoughts white like snow.
1930
Page 401
Revelation*
Where ghostlike gleamed the vanishing day
Against abysmal space,
And dumb, with orbless gaze,
Monsoon-hung loured the Himalay,
My mind essayed on stormy wings the universe to span.
I plunged a deep, aspiring eye
Into the holy hue
Which twilight sprayed like dew
On the corolla of the sky,
And sought ethereal joys whose breath could
disembody man.
I crossed in dream unceasing Powers,
Their high and devious ways
Guarding some ultimate haze
Of infinite, immaculate hours
Whence fell the shadow of a Presence near yet seeming lost.
My mind grew numb, knew sight nor speech;
A vast simplicity
Rushed yearning out of me
With ever childlike lips to reach
A Mother's Face behind the mask of Awful Outermost.
1931
* a poem of 1926 recast.
Page 402
Surya
At sight of thee upon thy splendid path,
Blissful with step of dawn,
Or sage at eve, or in thy noonday wrath—
A flame of worship leaps out from my eyes,
Immaculate essence drawn
To mingle with Thy mystery. God-surmise
Quickens the aspiration of my lust
For Thy celestial limbs—
Towards Light I raise behind this mask of dust
Quivering intangible lips of timeless drouth,
Whose longing no night dims
For mystic marriage with thy ambrosial mouth!
An ache for Truth beauteous, unstained, entire,
Unvisioned yet adored
In the heart's deep, a paramour of fire,
Cries for fulfilment across sundering space,
Utters its vigil-word
Unto thy ear. The spirit stands at gaze,
Striving through dazzled eyes to reach the arcane
Love-treasure of its Lord
And golden to ecstatic tears all pain!
?.2.31-2.10.34
Page 403
This is my prayer: let me all things forget
Save that the Spirit remains unfathomed yet
In its omnipotent tranquillity.
I crave not the too bitter-sweet uncase
Of those who crush time's rich alluring fruit
In an insatiate mouth. Enough for me
If every eve a more awakened soul
I draw from nature's symbol mystery
Signed with the unhasting moon above the bruit
And undulous passion of the great grey seas,
Its consecrated trance for ever mute
Holding their myriad horses keen of foot,
Maned with high-tossing spume, in white control-
Calm gracious guidance to their mighty roll
Drowning life's untransmuted memories!
Page 404
Importune not the evanescent hour
To lend its beauty to your eloquence.
Barren your hope that its unstable power
Can permeate your fragile, earth-born phrase
With incorruptible magnificence!
To the soul's vision of unbodied Grace
Compel your eager artifice to submit;
For music that outsoars the murk of time
Needs vaster wings than brief, capricious joys.
Curb the impulsive brain's fame-hungry wit,
The self-sufficient clang of facile rhyme,
The fitful, immature, fantastic mood!
Make the deep spirit-within your sovereign poise—
Willing to wait in agelong quietude
To hear but once the Everlasting Voice.
1.9.31
Page 405
"O Divine Adorable Mere..."
No words can tell down what enkindled ways
Those unassuming footsteps earthward fare—
What mysteries inviolate make her bear
Beauty like benediction on her face....
In vain the wilful visionary soar!
O not by keen conceiving is she known:
Our very self must mingle with her own.
Descend, O seer, from your majestic top
Of azure contemplation, learn to implore,
With sightless awe and frailty's fear of sin,
Disclosure of the unutterable Grace
Whose image is her blissful countenance!
Enclasp her feet in prostrate ignorance,
With simple love sweeter than prayer or praise,
Till, from the measureless vacancy within,
A holy gleam is shed on the dark gaze
And the still heart c rinks heaven drop by drop.
4.9.31
Page 406
O not that I may shed on earth The undiminishable rays
Of thoughts that take harmonious birth
On Thy lips' dawn-pure loveliness,
I hold so unforgettably dear
Thy visionary face!
Deny, if thou wilt, my heaven-enchanted ear,
And I shall not regret
To live ineloquent, honourless.
But one grace, O Beloved, I beseech—
May never Thy stainless lips forget
Upon my soul's dim lifted brow
The sweetness to bestow
That is more precious than immortal speech.
15.9.31
Page 407
Your benediction is to me
The sweetest thing
My mournful heart can ever know,
But never so divine as when I see
Upon your pale feet glow
The hidden bruises of your wayfaring
From peaks of paradise down to our woe.
Your smile is the most luminous thing
I ever saw take birth,
But never so celestial a spring
Of honey to my dearth
As when your secret sacrifice
I watch within your quiet eyes'
Mauve universe—
Glimmer and gloom of earth-transmuting tears.
3.8.33
Page 434
Sages
Sages who scan the solitudes of thought
With passionless fervour for the Ineffable,
Disdainful of the souls astir
With longings of transcendent woe
For intimate skies And stars that glow
With human beauty —your austere emprise
I envy not!
Can the cold climbing will
Which lifts no poignant hands to pray
Taste of the keen felicities that know
The eternal Glory is a wanderer
Hungry for lips of clay?
And what shall save the mind that seeks
Battle with voice less destiny
August beyond the cry of pain.
When on the sheer truth-luminous peaks
Its quivering eyes recall
The abyss of desolate mortality,
And no sweet answering arms of Love restrain
The miserable binding fall?
18.10.31
Page 409
Maya
"Ardent your gaze—yet sorrowful, mystery-haunted, lone
Have I not answered your world-wandering cry
With love's intense surrender? Must your eye
Still seek the dumb star-beauty of the unknown?
In the tremulous gloom what vanishing dream-face
Torments your spirit when my mouth you claim?"
"Vainly beyond your earth-impassioned grace
Beckons the perfect Splendour, flame on flame
Of incorruptible calm. Can aught redress
The exalted, keen, eternal misery
Glowing within my heart, that I should be
So drunk with joy when lip to mortal lip we press?"
30.3.32
Page 410
Bard
The nameless dust is aureoled by his mood
Of infinite reverie: the slumbrous brood
Of frail terrestrial hours grow giant wings;
Far-visioned with the homeless heart he sings.
When his unquenchable fervour seeks the pale
Tremulous brief beauty of life's yearning mouth,
Omniscient raptures touch earth's gloomy drouth,
Dim-streaming through that passion-parted veil.
Each death he dies builds more magnificent
The body of time—till the heroic grim
Flesh-spurning of his soul, grown prayer-intent,
Lures from the mystic darkness over him
Light like immortal youth into each limb.
March 1932
Page 411
O glory of unimaginable love
Arisen in the abject clay's
Cold slumbering night,
Destroy each wilful passion-gust that dims
Within my heart the secret paradise
Thou mirrorest in Thy unsullied eyes!
May my whole life in a flame of worship move
Towards the spirit-splendour of Thy limbs
Wherein our lost and fragmentary days
Find a uniting rapture and the unknown
Helpless dream-longing of the earth, star-sown,
Blossoms into undying words of light!
25.4.32
Page 412
How can I tread life's mean thronged way
With feet that answer the wizard play
Of His heaven-hearred lone flute-voice,
His myriad trill of star-delight
Born of the sacred trance of night?
Shall I yearn with arms of futile flame,
Passion-enkindled, who have known
The immortal glow of worshipping
With flowering flesh the Ethereal One,
The Calm, the Pure, the Unperishing?
Hunger for earth-stained fitful joys
Fled on the mystery-drunken day
When my mouth first found the ecstasy
Of His unfathomable name!
To dust all fugitive beauty dims,
For now the inviolate harmony
Of His gracious spirit-splendoured limbs
Has blinded my eyes with eternity!
3.6.32
Page 413
First Phase
Dumb echo of the Mother-mystery
Beyond the light of birth—
Darkness divine, enveloping weary earth
In vast felicity
With your impartial sense-dissolving hue
And slow cool sacred miracle of dew!
Solemn perfection, stay
Your lofty season, lest the dawn disperse
Too soon this indivisible universe
Of calm and from your star-impregnate womb
Of paradisal gloom
I issue into the heart-searing day!
Second Phase
Foretaste of the death-sombre Destiny
Whose far-eyed grace
Haunts the child-dream of passionate pain
Storming through time to fathom yet again
The wondrous in-world whence life, wailing, strays!
Ineffable power,
Drunk with your lonely dim prophetic mood
My flesh wears like an aureole
The beauty of the unborn hour
When with immeasurable quietude
Eternity
Shall quench the futile wanderlust of my soul!
7.6.32
Page 414
Names*
"Ayesha" I'll call you when the day resounds
With bold and beautiful things,
The carmined sea, the tuneful rounds
Of blithe ambitious wings,
And windy hills with green tossed hair,
Maenads drawn ever higher,
As by their side the sun lays bare
His loins of gorgeous fire!
And from the scabbard of calm sleep
My heart shall like a sabre leap
And flash to you its quivering cry
Keen with the riotous passion of the sky!
But when the shadowy hours of evening steal
On bold and beautiful things,
And wistful silences reveal
Phantasmal whisperings,
And flowers whom day gave dazzled birth
Sip the dim dew of night And stir the moon-tranced thought of earth
With fairy-winged delight—
When weary grows the wandering breeze,
Lost in a wilderness of trees,
And mists enwreathe the ocean's din,
Then will I plumb your dream-depths with "Yasmin!"
* A poem of 1926 touched up.
Page 415
The Dead*
"No more shall thy hearth show thee welcoming fire,
Nor perfect wife nor children crave thy kiss
And touch thy wandered soul with quiet bliss;
No longer shall thy life bear faultless bloom
Of loving labour and brave constancy:
O miserable heart of man for whom
One fatal day despoiled all sweetnesses!"
But they speak not: "Now never keen desire
For vanished rapture can come over thee."
Nor pity us, the living dead who roam
The Spirit's snowy grandeur, far from home
And human joy. Know you the ecstasy,
The loveliness, the immortality
Concealed from us till like an infinite flower
Awoke a shining silence in our heart?
We are heaven-haunted wanderers apart
For whom earth's lures have ceased since that strange hour.
Speak over our graves within you: "Never breath
Of sorrowful longing mars their passion-death."
20.6.32
* The first stanza is a free translation of some lines of Lucretius:
Iam iam non domus accipiet te laeta, neque uxor
Optima nec dulces occurrent oscula nati
Praeripere et tacita pectus lulcedine tangent;
Non petris factis florentibu i esse, tuisque
Prasidium: misere misere amnt omnia ademit
Una dies infesta tibi tot praemia vitae.
Illud in his rebus non addunt, Nec tibi earum
I am desiderium rerum supi r insidet una.
Page 416
Moon-Worship
Like the bird
Whose far melodious word
Springs, magieal, out of the womb of dim delight,
My heart learns music only when the day's
Dense veil of passionate clamour is withdrawn
And—Glory of Inviolable Grace!—
Your soothing miracles of dream-rumour dawn!
The immortal Mystery whose thought-fathomless
Splendour within I travail to express
Shines, mirrored, from the snow-pure countenance
Of your tranquillity,
That from the enormous altitudes of night
Quells the intransient feverish clay in me!
Might I create impeccable loveliness
Of death-defying soul-irradiance
Voicing your sanctity of silver trance—
A perfect statue by slow worship hewn
Out of your white revelatory silences, O moon!
28.6.32
Page 417
From the dark silence of the sod
The hidden ecstasy of God
We venture to reclaim,
And in the dross of life unfold
The mystery of spirit-gold
With magical song-flame.
On withering sorrow and frigid sleep
The banners of our beauty leap
In a blast of rapture! Eyes
That, dim earth-prisoners, vainly grope,
Upkindled by our heaven-faced hope
Wander infinities.
When our exultant flute-lips play,
Upon each listening heart they lay
A spell of holy light
Which makes in high communion
Moon-echo to the deathless sun
Beyond life's Maya-night.
Our tones of fathomless joy instil
A taste of the Ineffable—
Ours is the mystic urge
Of mighty mobile shining seas
Mirroring sky-eternities
In the revel of their surge!
18.7.32
Page 418
The Stranger*
How oft I ask myself: "Whence wandered you?
Nought chains your soul to earth with happiness:
Coldly you turn from human love's caress,
As though a rapture infinite were your due!
What memories haunt you of lost paradise?
What cause once served, celestially august,
Makes all here seem disfigured barren dust?
What beauty shines in your impassible eyes?"
Vainly I question the clay-built heart of time
How this remote sky-yearning reverie came....
I hear, astonished at my own vast mood,
In my vague tenebrous dream-solitude
The inexplicable grief of a sublime
Stranger who ever hides his country and name!
28.7.32
* After the French L'Etranger of Silly Prudhomme.
Page 419
The Slave*
Naked and hungry, abject, pale with fright,
A slave—behold my ageing, tortured clay—
Free once I revelled through the foam-fresh day
Of honeyed Hybla with her dim blue height.
I left the happy isle!.... If ever you rove
Towards the bee-music and the wine-delight
Of Syracuse, following he swan's spring-flight,
O friend, remember the fair soul I love.
When shall I see again he welcoming glow
In pure Clearista's gaze of mauve sky-trance
Beneath her dark eye-brow's victorious bow?
Fly, seek her, voice my longing—you shall know
Her by the lonesome question in her glance,
Love's dream-eternity of fathomless woe.
31.7.32
* After the French L'Esclave of Jose-Maria tiereclia.
Page 420
Toussaint L'Ouverture
"Children at arms!" Toussaint cried out,
"Ere you shed your bravery's bloom,
Breathe deep of hate that you may meet
The cold white visage of Deceit
With the blackest blast of doom.
"Heroes who crushed a hundred crowns
Teem in those sudden ships,
That France may fetter your proud eyes
And lay on the back of your paradise
An eternity of whips.
"Yet we too hold the Tricolour:
Shall our grasp be that of slaves?"...
But though the battle swayed loud and long,
The invaders broke on the negro throng
In a fury of iron waves,
Pounding the desperate ranks against
The arduous hill-rock—
When Toussaint amid the slow fierce flight
Halted as one whose groping sight
Receives a lightning shock.
"Ere your veins go dry, upraise
Through the throbbing blood of your battered mouth
The mystic cry that burned from the South,
The flame of the Marseillaise."
His bare blade flashed like a ring of light
As he swerved to the foe again
And out of a gigantic world
To the shaken spirits around him hurled
The unconquerable strain.
Page 421
The chasing men see flying men
Turn back—a miracle
Of murderous beauty rapture-driven,
With sabres from a forge of heaven
In pitiless hands of hell.
A luminous storm of sudden death,
The ragged legion dips,
Roaring down catastrophic skies
With vision of victory in their eyes
And the Marseillaise on their lips.
The faces of the French grow strange
In marvelling distress:
Blinded they fall—what veteran
Can fight the song-blaze of that sun
Of rebel loveliness?
Into the heart of the enemy passed
Their own earth-scorning will,
And the fire-wind of the Marseillaise smote
Their fearful fame as its burning throat
Had blasted the Bastille.
For who shall fight with human might
The voice of Liberty?
Broken by her immortal word
The glory of the enslaving sword
Reeled back into the sea.
20.11.32
Page 422
Give her no name,
Let silence fall:
Your heart shall know the wordless way to call
With a tongue of flame—
A tongue whose keen
Effulgence-cry
Lifts ever to the sempiternal sky,
Home of all sheen....
Not by your gaze
But through a deep
Forgetful discipline of sacred sleep
You'll know her face—
An alchemy
Of shadowless will:
Truth-core of light plucked from the Invisible
To heaven your eye.
Page 423
Shiva
No clay-dream curves with rapture
The lips of that lone face:
A film of unearthly light
Has blinded the gaze—
A light which bears no colour
Of transient love
But falls from a silver secrecy
Caught high above
The surge of heart or mind,
A virgin blaze
Of beauty carved to a crescent moon
Smiling in spirit space.
Though calm the countenance,
A warrior-will afar
Slays every shadow with this smile
Of heaven's scimitar.
Page 424
Garuda
Sweep down keen dweller on the eyrie height
Of ultimate self-vision—in the blaze
Of your tree-born sapphire
Delight
Consume eath's ineffectual stray desire!
Its narrow joy, plucked by your swift control
Of claws that grasp the edge of the infinite,
Absorb in your eagle-zest, O secret Soul!
Prey on each crawling passion and increase
The sinews of your boundless braveries—
Irradiant wing-waft through eternal space,
Pride of lone rapture and invincible sun-gaze!
22.12.32
Page 425
Like the dim voice of vagrant
Water among leaf-shadowed hours
Ripples the soft remembrance of her sable-shining hair.
Like the nocturnal fragrant
Dew-mystery of hidden flowers,
Hallow my dream the ecstatic tears in the gloom-glow
of her eye;
Vague with a serpent-shimmer,
To my enchanted heart's love-tune
Waken flame-echoes of her arms in the slumbering void air
Tense with a timeless glimmer
Grief-slaying, her spirit's crescent moon
Spreads by a virgin scimitar the peace of paradise.
22.1.33
Page 426
Vespertide*
They ask me: Was she not your life's joy-breath?
Will not pained love a War of music wage,
Beholding ruthless destiny uncage
On her winged vision the monstrous claw of death?...
My grief is hushed by calm cloud-flower age!
The hour hangs, wondering on its nameless age—
For it is both sky-evening and earth-night!
Strange waters glimmer, flecked with wandering white,
Like some enormous missal's cloistered page!
Amid such hues of solemn ecstasy
I loved her form ensouled with mauve dream-mist:
O I was ever twilight's rhapsodist,
Seeing in her but spirit of wave and sky!
Her mystic smile—lo there its mood unspent
In the cloud's heart of shine and shadow blent!
Deathless to me the deep earth-heaven trance
Of her far-calling sorrow-splendoured glance—
A dim wave-world of floating firmament!
12.4.33
* A poem of 1926 re-composed.
Page 427
"Whence astray
Across the dark
Vain waters of living death
Have you, unbidden, come, O burning barque
With sails of ecstasy?"
"Blown by the luminous breath
Of a secret sun of eternity,
Dream-light they bear
To your blind despair
Till, perfect, rises the heart-hidden Day!"
14.4.33
Page 428
In the hidden face of my own mind
With apocalypt surprise I see
The grandeurdiaunted misery
Of two ecstatic eyes grown blind!
Some fallen god plays counterpart
To my earth-self with tortured bliss,
A hieroglyphic star-abyss
The dim perfection of his heart!
But sweeter your remote distress
Than joys the senses can recall,
O mute mysterious shadowfall
Of fiery forgetfulness!
18.4.33
Page 429
Appeal
Will you not know
That aching hearts around you beat
When lonely-rapturous you go
Beyond our friendless feet?
Is there some godlike star,
Alchemic flame earth has not seen?
Will you not, gazing far and far,
Reveal its message by your mien?
O take us past our human tears
To the ultimate shore—
A truth unchangeable to core
This labyrinthine universe!
1.2.34
Page 430
"Sero te Amavi..."
Enhaloed love, why flowerest thou to bless
So late with fume of God my wilderness?
Haven of glory, all-transfiguring peace—
Won with what travail through the heart's dim seas!
O the vain hours ere this eternity!
O the void dreams till thy vast flamed in me!
30.6.33
Page 431
Towards the visionary calm of night,
Like some pure liberator, soul of flight
To the immense unknown, the winging wonder
Kindled its aspiration, clove asunder
The lofty darknesses of heavenly space,
Swung out into the quiet blossoming blaze
Of far innumerable beauty. O
The vast relief, the thrilled escape from slow
Vain horizontal hours' monotony
Of gilded gloom amid the feverish cry
Of transient rapture, to the inviolate
Divine abysses of celestial fate!
How must all-potent peace regard poor earth? ...
But look! what miracle has flamed to birth
Beneath our flight—a mute and limitless dark
Spangled with visionary spark on spark—
A silent sky of golden lamps below
Responding to the fathomless silver glow
Of sky above—a human infinite
Of trance with planetary joy alit—
Burning disclosure of earth's hidden soul
Tense with the secret of a godlike goal!
12.7.33
Page 432
Each moment now is fraught with an immense
Allure and impulse of omnipotence;
For I have wandered from man's crowded will
And through the lone enormous mysteries
Of dithyrambic wave and voiceless hill
Found truth's white passion and impurpled peace.
Now all my sleep is one huge mountain wrought
With height on far height of ineffable thought
Touching the spirit's rapture of calm sky.
And all my waking grows a fathomless force,
An ocean-hearted ecstasy am I
Where time rolls inward to eternal shores.
31.7.33
Page 433
Poet, be yours the sculptor's art—
A visionary force of sound
Carving from the white profound
Of the trance-secluded heart
Symbols of fiery repose—
A rapture-resonance
Bright-shaping to disclose
With every song a monumental dream
Of some supreme
Inalterable hushed omnipotence!
22.8.33
Page 435
I would be very still,
That no enhaloed drop
Of Her confiding love might spill
From the heart's cup.
I would be very calm,
For the dark mind to fill
With Her desire-uplifting psalm
Of shadowless will.
I would be very mute,
Lest one harsh breath destroy
The burgeoning flame of Her absolute
Rhythmic joy.
30.8.33
Page 436
Silently in the dark
Roamed Truth across my mind
Nor ever left behind
Her footfall's radiant mark,
Because no quiet lay
Of purity on thought:
The dust-whir s never caught
Her happy hushful way.
But now all passions drowse
Beneath unmoved trance-snow
And Truth's calm footprints glow,
Guides to her secret house.
3.9.33
Page 437
Brims there a fathomless blue?
Then love's deep surge has made her ocean-souled!
Shed they a fiery hue?
Then truth has lit her mind to pure sun-gold!
Are they like purple wine?
O she is drunk with the Ineffable!
Outbeams a dark dew-shine?
With pity of your gloom her lustres fill.
But when that varied glance
Is fading to a quiet none can see
Behind snow-lids of trance.
She's waking in you all eternity!
20.9.33
Page 438
Would you dream-pierce
The concentrated still
Arcane God-glow Hung over the death-dismal universe?
Then, heart, string your lax will,
Hush to an in-drawn bow
Of single aspiration all vail speech.
Save with one-pointed arrow-mood can love explore
Gigantic-vistaed timelessness to reach
The lonely target of Truth's quiet burning core?
5.9.33
Page 439
Song-change
Now from the bitter monotony of tears
Touched by Truth's sorrowless sun-gold
Rises into the azure universe
Of God-suspense
My soul of mortal music. Changed to a dense
Yet delicately floating silver hush
Its far fumes soar
High and yet higher till, through heaven's blue-white,
Wind-raptures rush
Waking to pure cascading light
The trance of those cloud seas—
A nectarous downpour
Of unpremeditated harmonies
Rejoicing my starved earth. They pass and all its gloom
Of buried beauty daybreaks into paradisal bloom.
8.9.33
Page 440
Soul of poet, he thou quiet
Like an ageless wood-dream royal-pined,
Yielding all thy chorded hush
Unto the epic fingers of His wind.
Soul of poet, merge thy quiet
With the moon's eternal mystery,
Rousing by uplifted calm
A hierophantic rapturous song-sea.
Soul of poet, thine be quiet
Of the Virgin when the deathless morn
Flashed from heaven clove time's veil
And in her tranceful womb the Word was born.
11.9.33
Page 441
Dilemma
Often I strive to flee
The enrapturing tyranny
Of her truth-loveliness.
For I who have lived a thrall
To hours dark-shapen by distress,
How can I bear
Her being so divinely fair
That her whole body is a silver call
To share some golden vastitude of spirit-hush?
Yet every time I rush
Away from her to taste again
The bitter-sweetness of mortality,
The sweet 1 find a woeful memory
Of her white limb-accord, the bitter a sharp sense
Of all the incorruptible magnipotence
I lose by leaving wantonly behind
The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind!
There is no flight for me,
Wherever now I turn 'tis she
Bewildering my life with glorious joy or pain.
Why have I cast impuissant eyes
Upon a dazzling paradise
They neither can relinquish nor possess?
Why kept her spirit such creative calm
As fashioned so heart-widening a psalm
Of earth-insufferable loveliness?
...Is it because the human heart must break
With blind excess
Of burning wonderment ere she can make
Its little fearful bud assume
An infinite flowerage of flawless God-perfume?
14.9.33
Page 442
Dream-piercing by an apex of intent
Earthward desire in pyramidal blaze
The unknown Power descends from a gold base
Of visionary voiceless firmament.
The pale mind reels beneath the rapture-gaze
Of godhead focused to a flaming point
And swoons, a self-forgetfulness conjoint
In gradual glory with eternal space.
Through hours of beauty unescapable
All life is shaped to a miraculous breadth
Of calm inverse pyramidal god-poise
A fire timelessly—a conscious hill
Down-sloped by some King-builder of the skies
To monument His lordship over death.
25.9.33
Page 443
From Her each pore as from a womb
Is born a soul-spark richening
My consciousness of mortal gloom
With buds of an ethereal Spring.
And through that mystic blossoming
My body grows a god in whom
Each thought is a pure petalling
Star-loveliness of trance-perfume.
But though divinest dye illume
My life, it seems so poor a thing
Unless Her gift of skiey bloom
Go back to Her, feet-garlanding.
26.9.33
Page 444
Askesis
Each mood's oblation of world-sacrifice
The revelatory God-fire craves:
When the flesh braves
A living death, then shall you realise
The eternal calm within that never dies!
Until your days are tear-empearled
How can you share His gorgeous world,
Or join the pageant of omnipotence
Unless by pain's warm ruby-scattering opulence?
Welcome the threat of thorns—each gaping wound
Is one more eye to seek the inward Rose:
Nought save that wound-eye can you ever close
In timeless trance-epiphany of light!
It's Love supreme whose potence overthrows
All lesser paradise till life is tuned
To richest concords of the Infinite!
28.9.33
Page 445
O voiceful words, strive only to instil
By contemplative hue of harmony
A deathless image of inaudible
Lip-parted soul-trance—firm serenity
Stemming the universe of stray desire,
Like cool rock-rapture lifted motionless
In purple poise against the loud sapphire
Foam-mood of passion—agelong loneliness
Through which life's sorrowing visage learns to wear
A hidden smile of God-futurity
And the deep heart's occult apocalypse dare
Though with an earthquake throe it leave behind
A nameless ruin smouldering silently
Where ran the shock of vision through the mind.
2.10.33
Page 446
Edging earth's beauty shadow-wise,
A floating elusive aura-gloom
Of God-dream veiled from unshut eyes
Wafts to the hidden soul sense-opiate fume.
Whoso desires the pure Divine
Must dare the eclipse of numb self-nought
Where form-lights still their clamour-shine
In a gigantic viewlessness of thought.
Darkly await long hours the appeasing
Apocalypse beyond change-rush:
Then some eternal lover, seizing
The heart of time, dazzles the tranceful hush.
1.12.33
Page 447
Trance-solitude
By unexplored vague vistas speechless-stirred,
Lone tears of God-surmise have often blurred
My gaze; and to the earth-self suddenly
Came, through remote trance-visaged marvelling
Then lips could form no prayer, a calm so deep
In-drew the soul; but to my plumbless sleep
The wind's majestic moan, bird-happy trill,
Sedge-whisper, cataracted eloquence
Were all a wordless music-frankincense
Kindled by dream of the Immutable.
9.12.33
Page 448
Yoga
I shut my eyes and saw a Face
Of everlasting fire
Against abysses of calm space
Where no world-wings aspire.
Under the invulnerable gaze
Of that prodigious Sun
My spirit grew a giant daze
Of self-oblivion.
But suddenly the mystic blaze
And I were a single sense
Of some eternal fount of rays
Pouring omnipotence ...
Then I awoke. Yet all my days
Some mute in sky made bright
And all their span of tearful haze
Rainbowed a deathless light.
13.12.33
Page 449
Tyaga
O vanished Face beyond the reach of thought,
Beauty the soul must love ere eyes can view!—
Shed lustre once again: have I not through
Forgetfulness of human faces sought,
Year on dark year, Thy memory divine?
The old alchemic touch of peace renew:
Within my meditation s blinded hue
Thy aureate immortality enshrine!
Craving, O Vast, no lesser radiance,
I bare of all change-garb my reverie—
Pine-odorous sway, cloud richnesses that rove,
Oceanic rapture's royal resonance!
Shall not my tranceful sacrificial love,
Stripped of the universe, grow one with Thee?
9.1.34
Page 450
The unapproachable sea-rim
Mauve spells of shadow-glamour dim.
A half-seen hush, cloud-reveries ride
The speckled resonance of tide.
Spray-beauty quivers, vaguely blown
Through vistas of a joy unknown ....
Dawn now, O fugitive soul-shine,
Above thought's voyageless skyline!
O waves of wonder, God-surprise
Bring to the vigil-shore of eyes!
10.1.34
Page 451
Brahman
Why need I fear to merge with Him my heart?
Although the magic message of the moon
Be lost within Him, nor the starry rune
Nor day's rich rhapsody have counterpart,
He is no solitary blinded swoon
Of infinite forgetfulness, a void
Where every throb of colour is destroyed
For those who with His potence dare commune.
If not a star can bare its glimmering eye
And moon-rays wither and the sun grows black
When he absorbs the soul, it is not lack
Of light in Him; but all this splendcured sky
Fades-to a phantom shrivelled, shadowy,
Before the conflagratian of His ecstasy!
18.1.34
Page 452
Avatar
"Who knows the travail of my earthward vow—
The self-subdued descension of my powers
For you, O man!--my daily death that dowers
Life with immortal relish? Richly now
The rooted trance of my perfection flowers
Into strange-glowing rapturous agony
Of sacrificial fruit yearning to be
Plucked by the hungry hands of mortal hours!
Infinity was mine: enhaloed bliss:
Empire of timeless truth! And yet I bore
In my heart's pinnacled ecstatic core
A dream to join your soul from the abyss.
Behold, at last I come your love to gain—
Eternal music wearing lips of pain!"
25.1.34
Page 453
I am an agony of glooms that know
At last their own immeasurable loss!
Struck by Thy superhuman sheen I grow
Unveiled to my self-gaze in all the gross
Betrayal of Thy presence with each breath
That I have drawn apart from Thy soul-rays.
A conscious martyrdom of living death,
A funeral pyre of fallen years, I blaze
Into wide aspiration for new birth!
O quenchless Truth, sorrow shall make my earth
Through this unblinded burning self-shame one
With Thy pure vast—each holocausting hour
Flame-wedded unto Thee shall keep Thy power
Held in the heart like a prodigious sun!
29.1.34
Page 454
To the All-Beautiful
So very poor the life I brought You, Sweet!
But my whole poverty enclasped Your feet.
Though such dim treasure none would precious call,
A miser 1 had been, hoarding it all
For You alone, to keep or cast away—
Since never even with this common clay
Could I serve lesser beauty. My earth-cup
You have transfigured now, brimming it up
With sudden nectar of eternity.
Miraculous, O Love, Your alchemy
Of quiet heaven-creative luminous
Eyes that evoke the hidden god in us
Through drossiest self-offering on our part!
Out of the candle-flicker of each heart
You build a calm inviolable Sun
Rayed with enormous time-oblivion!
For we but grow an image of the light
Whose dream has quickened our clay-captive night,
The rapture that has lured our blind distress.
O Splendour, You have made my raggedness
Reveal through every shameful tatter and hole
A luminous immortality of soul!
30.1.34
Page 455
How?
How shall I praise You, Charmer,
For the spell You cast on me,
The glow and breath and harmony
You bring beneath embowering skies
Of inly-lustred paradise
Each time You draw me, Charmer,
Through darkness of shut eyes?
The blossoms there are music
On stems of silences
And from the tune-effulgences
A-tremble in that world apart
Whose petals bear no searing smart
You give one flower of music
To treasure in my heart!
Again through shut-eyed darkness
I reach the world of death,
But there's a flame upon my breath
Inhaling ever more a fume
Of joy untouched by withering gloom
And from my heart of darkness
Out-burns a music-bloom!
I know not how this beauty
Of soul takes earthly form;
But never shall a blinding storm
Destroy the mystery-blossomed rays
Of song that makes with dreaming gaze
Each tone a mirrored beauty
Of Your enhaloed face!
3.2.34
Page 456
Untamable,
A leaping pride
I strove to pierce the veils which hide
The lustre of His will.
My gaze would dash
With soul unbowed,
Searching the enormous thunder-cloud
For His revealing flash.
I roamed within
Gigantic caves
To hear His joy enspirit the waves'
Illimitable din.
A huge sunbird.
My heart uprose
To catch in terrible dawn-glows
A smile of the Unheard.
Yet neither gale
Of surge nor sky
Could help, and sheen but flung the eye
A still more blinding veil.
The venturous mind
Wearied of chase—
Sudden there came through darkened days
A delicate voice behind:
"In vain thy thought!
Omnipotence
Never ambitious pride of sense
By leaping love has caught.
Page 457
"Whither, O wild
Wanderer? Be
Haloed with chaste tranquillity
Like a reposeful child.
"For all pursuit
Bears thee apart
From my divine pursuing heart!
Stay thou a fire dream-mute,
"Nor strain to seize
With groping grasp;
For Love Eternal comes to clasp
The soul's impassioned peace!"
4.2.34
Page 458
O Silent Love..
Because You never claim of us a tear,
O silent Love, how often we forget
The eyes of countless centuries were wet
To bring Your smile so near!
Forgive if I remember not the blaze,
Imperishable, perfect, infinite,
Of far Omnipotence from which
You lit Your lamp of human face!
Make me a worship-vigil everywhere,
Slumber and wakefulness one memory
That You are God: O let each pore of me
Become a mouth of prayer!
6.2.34
Page 459
Gigantic wood-glooms fill my consciousness,
Throwing strange spirit-shadows everywhere
With solitary-stretching numberless
Great arms of invocation in he air.
A massive unextinguishable fire.
Captive of clay, has dreamfull embrowned
Those secret limbs, uplifting ever higher
The tremulous beauty with which they are crowned.
I am a songward soar of dumb desire:
Rooted in earth, my silentnesses driven
By kinship with the Unknowable aspire
To house the winging ecstasy of heaven.
15.2.34
Page 460
Heart-hollow
Through my abysmal solitude vainly pass
Pageants of budded bough and rapturous wing;
The omnipresent sparkle of green grass
Is now a drear phantasmal flickering.
Tumults of water leap precipitous glooms
And long importunate billows beachward press,
But all their voices float like opiate fumes
Making yet more profound my voicelessness.
Is it Your secret boon, O Lord, this strain
Of life and love and longing drawn apart
Into a tenebrous hollow of dull pain?
Have You prepared the breathless swooning heart
For Your immutable bliss—a vacancy
To treasure unalloyed eternity?
4.3.34
Page 461
They will laugh at me and scoff at me
But never will I care:
What matters all the world's black visage
If Thine be exceeding fair?
Because they cannot view Thee, Splendour!
Their gloom must call me blind;
But I shall never forget Thy face's
Pure lamp of shadowless mind.
How can their fretful vision follow
My voyage of mystery
Within a boat of spirit -slumber
Guided by dream of Thee?
With every hurtled shaft of darkness
More inward I will move:
Each wounding voice shall drive me nearer
Thy healing hush of love!
5.3.34
Page 462
Descend, O Joy!—in sorest need of Thee
I lift my moan from the abyssal din
That robs me of the pinnacled Within
Where Thou and I are one Eternity.
Of what avail the glow of peaks sublime
If I can never draw their heavenly heat
Into the chasm of the clay's heart-beat
And make our loves a single-haloed Time?
Let all the passion of my mortal blood
Labyrinth like a fiery ocean-flood
Through the sad spaces of unlustred limbs—
Transfiguring life's discord into hymns
That voice athwart the body's cavern-night
Thy moon-arcane of rapture on the height.
6.3.34
Page 463
No surface-silvering fugitive aerolite,
He came a star to be sown deep in earth
And kindle out a tree that grips grey rock
Yet takes with a husband's arms the blue of the sky.
He roots the sun-gold in earth's centuries.
We that are foreigners to he immortal fire
Cry "Fatherland" to the azure's liberty:
Our home in the highest heaven is this earth-god,
With him our dust builds up beatitude.
Page 607
Your little passions tire me—-I would clasp
A huge magnificent futility
To heart, rather than with brief rapture grasp
A mote of sure success. A whole wide sky,
Impossible with lone God-reverie
No thought has compassed and no will subdued,
Shall hold in agelong pain of ecstasy
My drunk desire! No less, for I have viewed,
Rather than hoard life's happy littleness.
8.8.34
Page 465
AE
No fragile joy were those song-briefnesses:
They brought our gloom a simple flowering grace.
But laden with a breath of mysteries
Rooted beyond the transience of our days.
For out of Spirit's spacious altitude
The silver rhythms floated unto man—
Each song the tiny-seeming giant mood
Of a world aglow in a far empyrean.
21.8.35 (first 6 lines)
16.4.92 (last 2)
Page 466
The breath of night grows calm.
And darkly broods each palm
In quiet eminence;
The branching masses lay
Upon earth's dimming day
Shadows of time-suspense.
Around me and above
Are secrecies of love
Whose veil was but the breeze:
A presence makes the air
Deific everywhere
With all-embracing peace.
Moon-glimmers falling through
The branch-hush bear a new
Transforming mystery,
As though from passing night
Were strained an essence-light
Of immortality.
One sole miraculous sound
Cores the immense profound
Of lull: my body hears,
Revealed within its breast,
The untimed unmanifest
Heart of the un verse.
23.8.34
Page 467
(These lines were written in Bombay on 31 March 1956, when nobody yet knew of the Supramental Manifestation in the earth's subtle-physical layer, that had taken place in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram on February 29, 1956 in the late evening. The first stanza intuits what took place. The second goes beyond to a final stage still secret in the future: the emergence of the Supermind involved in earth itself.)
Doors in the ultimate Secrecy cleave wide
And out of them dances an immortal dust,
A shower of scintillacing silences
Falling forever on a city of dream....
Softly the splendour stirs in every stone;
To a single wideness grow the seeds of sleep:
A fathomless flower outbreaking with no sound-
Omnipotence unfolds from earth to sky.
31.3.56
Page 594
The valley of life crowns in a sea of vapour Isled with a reverie of purple height
Whose giant ruggednesses darkly taper
Against eve-spaces, silhouetting night!
No cry of human rapture, no distress:
Only a hushful adamantine flight
Through widening rarities of consciousness—
Wrapt in a nameless gloom waiting self-sight.
Lord of the ascetic vow, is it from Thee
This massive boon of towering mastery—
To lose all universe yet feel no loss?
Life-clamour spurned, will there not dawn across
The silent shadow's on my lifted brow
A moon-white memory that I am Thou?
1.9.34
Page 469
And now that I have spoken of all things else,
How Her still heavens; core our wandering hells—
With one last beauty I will inlay my speech
And some enchanted echo strive to reach
Of secret truth learned by adorant lips
Touching those lambencies—Her finger-tips!
Inviolate tapers on Her palm of love,
They bring its many-twining mysteries of
Transmuting fate near in rich warmth, or by
A dream-uplifted queenship mightily
Bless the bare head of human penury
That grows to sudden godhood, kneeling down
With Her curved palm as its immortal crown!
Nor least Her miracle the large music-mood
When ivories of strange beatitude
Awake and quiver, th rilled to pinioned prayer
By hands that kindle through life's hueless air
A dawn eternally beyond despair.
But most divine the beauty of Her palms
Stretched unto mortal man, begging for alius:
"Behold I come who found the heavens above
Hollow without your little fragile love.
Let me not weary, unfulfilled, depart:
O house my lone perfection in your heart!"
13.9.34
Page 470
All things express themselves in hues
Which batter on the gates of sense;
But He to giant peace subdues
The fires of His omnipotence.
A calm soul-light belongs to Him:
My heart with deepmost visioning word
Essays for ever bat to limn
The secret smile of the Unheard.
I crave a tuneful ecstasy
Lit by a sun beyond earth-skies—
The in-soaring bird of mystery
Whose pinions are trance-lifted eyes.
14.9.34
Page 471
I heard in gloam like a withdrawing wave A visionary flute-soul's plumbless woe
As if all beauty were one living grave.
There was a glow of tears upon that dim
Music whose myriad poignance seemed to flow,
Burdened with ages, to the far sky-rim.
Out of its pierced and hollow body came—
A god-dream yearning through mortality.
I knew all human breath a wounded rush
Of mateless ecstasy crying tie name
Of some remote imperishable flush.
23.9.34
Page 472
Zenith
Intolerable hung the white noon-flush;
The hot tree sucked its own cool shadow up,
And melody ran cry in each bird's throat,
While human eyes ached for the dewy dark.
But in my mood the solitary stark
Sun was an ultimate crown whereunder thought
Shadeless, unblurred by life's heavy tear-drop,
Arose into a kingship of God-hush!
30.9.34
Page 473
Strange tunes are now struck on the mortal nerves
By fingers of far dream: rich agony
They pluck from the tense hushful intstrument
And like a million-petalled rose upbear
In skyward dedication. Brightly curves
The flower and frankincense of melody
To some vague Altitude calm, omnipotent—
A shining self-forgetfulness of prayer!
High and yet higher the earth-sacrifice
Floats through the gloom its visionary appeal
For life's completion Gods by whom were sown
All seeds of beauty cry they had never known
Clay could, with such divine heart-name, reveal
Her passion the true mate of paradise!
6.10.34
Page 474
Amazed I hear tonight
A sudden chirrup of birds—
Undreamable delight
Of quivering magic words.
Why are they rich with joy
When hollow glooms surround?
What streams of fire upbuoy
Their tiny boats of sound?
O birds, whom do you praise
From your green slumbering height?
You have not seen Her face,
The wondrous Day of our night!—
Nor known Her quiet call
Out of the Spirit's deep
Arise to golden all
The penury of sleep!
My heart for ever sings,
From mortal glooms withdrawn.
Because her calm! mouth brings
A smile of deathless dawn.
7.10.34
Page 475
In her virginity there is no pain
Of solitude: she is the single-hearted
Heaven and earth, within whose love-arcane
Eternity and time have never parted.
No self-control aches voidly through her gaze.
Around her spirit, clay has put no bars:
Her body's gloom is but a midnight space
Unfolding calm infinitudes of stars.
8.10.34
Page 476
Great is your Beauty, Earth.
Great is your beauty, earth!
All poets sing your praise,
And deck their reverie like a king
With your pearl nights and diamond days.
But I have fathomed now
A beauty greater still:
Your wealth so shines because a Light
Far richer keeps invisible.
For when across you, earth,
I strain God-dazzled eyes,
They can but view an ashy sun
Groping through blinded sable skies.
11.10.34
Page 477
My victories of song shrivel up now
In fires speech cannot twine to wreath my brow—
The Spirit's golden truth! What conquering word
Shall crown my life when God remains unheard?
He marks a measureless magnificent pause,
A reverie ineffable, because
Not through one gate alone—the chanting mouth—
His giant splendour can procession out.
But every pore must open to express
The myriad wealth of Everlastingness
Until the dark clay, tense with I mitless soul,
Breathes out a universe of aureole!
13.10.34
Page 478
I love thee for the scented rumour clinging
To thy pure limbs, of amaranthine peaks—
O luminous form whose every line goes singing
The immortality which void earth seeks.
Unto my shadow-calm thy beauty's passion
Glows like an inward-surging spirit force:
Over thy body's rhythm of adoration
My floating eyes attain eternal shores.
15.10.34
Page 479
My limbs are heavy—
Incomprehensible stars have made me old:
With one vast weariness I am ensouled.
But has my sorrow
An echo in God's own dream-universe?
Thrills there a constellated cry of tears
Divinely longing
For the strange darkened beauty of human eyes?
And is there loneliness too in paradise?
My limbs fall heavy,
Perchance because the tranceful time has come
For me to lie miraculously dumb.
Grow deep, my spirit,
And by your solitude mate His lonely light:
In giant emptiness measure His height!
17.10.34
Page 480
I scarce can tell what love's communion
Has made my life miraculously sweet;
All that I know is nameless rapture-heat
Held in the heart like a prodigious sun.
My solitude of inmost hush kneels down
For benediction to invisible feet,
And all my broken splendours grow complete
With some curved palm as paradisal crown.
Although the face i long for never shows
Its rich beatitude of reverie,
On the pale mouth of my mortality
Each song now blossoms like a deathless rose,
As if in answer to the unseen press
Of lips divine upgrew that loveliness.
25.10.34
Page 481
O When
O when shall I frame
The luminous word
To catch, without caging,
The bird
Whose glimmering wings
Are the two
Brave eyes which uplift
The soul of you?
'Twere a gaudy waste
To hold
With bar on tinkling bar
Of lifeless gold
The riches and rhythm
You flutter abroad
Whenever your dream
Is a dawn of God.
O wide must I be,
A freedom of skies,
For words to image
Those soaring eyes
And mar no quiver
Of shadow or shine
By which you journey
To a trance divine.
1935
Page 482
Climb the white hush within, and you shall pierce
The veil which hides the dream of the universe.
Your gaze shall brim no more with mirrorings
Of tearful, broken hearted, mutable things,
But trace in all their quiver and cry a still.
Glowing eternity of flawless Will.
For you shall be as on a mountain crest
Whereunder some far ocean's loud unrest,
Flash of foam-heave and scattering glimmer-tune
Change to one giant sapphire of swoon—
A moveless light, a strange inaudible mirth,
An eye of trance gemming the face of earth.
9.6.35
Page 483
I have viewed many miracled whitenesses—
The passionless pure anger of thick snow
Falling from heaven; a crest of icy glow
Like the eternal laughter of a god;
And Taj Mahal's imperishable peace,
An emperor's flawless dream ecstatic-hewn
By wizard hands out of a plenilune
Of love untarnished by the mouldering sod.
But once I knew a whiteness stranger still:
Limb-mystery kindled to dancing gesture—
A rhythm of adoration its sole vesture,
And every line a call from paradise
Singing to earth the rapture of shut eyes
Impregnate with some vast Invisible!
17.6.35
Page 484
Inward
All night long
I see the flames afar,
But I voyage inward
In a boat of star.
Deep and deeper,
Beyond your loves and hates—
A cool dream laden
With silver freights,
My lonely calm
Follows a rapture-breeze,
Until I wander
Dazzling seas.
Billows of light
Rise up and press me down;
In a golden beauty
My silvers drown.
Past all gloom
My voyager heart 's in-drawn,
One with eternal
Depths of dawn.
25.6.35
Page 485
Sweet Calm! forgive the many times I hurled
My hard undreamful glance upon Thy face:
Forgive the irreparable nights and days
I gloried in Thy farness from the world.
Forgive the folly that pronounced Thee far—
Thou whom all creatures breathe or else they die:
Life of our life, yet hidden to our eye
Because we have forgotten that each scar
Brims with Thy God-hue, just as every glow
Of joy is but Thy blossoming in our heart!
Even forgive sad hours when all too low
And earth-born I have felt, deeming Thou wert
Too heaven-high—as if time-changes could
Mar my soul's birth from Thy eternal Motherhood!
26.6.35
Page 486
When the purple
Calm of night
Veils the roving
Outer sight,
I feel You—Beauty
Void of blame!—
And my whole being
Sinks in shame.
But, with this falling
Worship-mood,
Falls from me
My humanhood.
A giant glow
Honies the heart:
Across each atom
Sun-rays dart
Within a hushful
Firmament
Deep-arching through
My figure bent
In dross-surrender
To your sweet
Invisible
God-precious feet.
And when this Day
Of night is gone,
I call but darkness
Each new dawn.
29.6.35
Page 487
"You deem me a bliss
That never can die;
But death comes gathering flowers,
And a flower am I.
Why do you strain
To a little thing
Your mouth of limitless
Heart-hungering?
Tear down this timeful
Mask of me:
What you desire,
O flame Is eternity!
Seeker of unflawed
Loveliness—
Let all your passion or body
Inward press
Unto a Splendour
Beyond decay:
Hold in a deep embrace
Of sheathing clay
The ineffable Spirit:
Whose mystery
Alone can fill your love's
Immensity!"
30.6.35
Page 48888
Verge
When glow and gloom are one before day-rise
And half sleep hears in every sound a secret,
Miraculous horizons touch the eye.
But oh the long day-void of outer space!
What sea can charm us to the shimmery goal
Of unknown musics surging through the mind?...
We journey till the breeze sinks to a prayer
And stirless shadows seem a hidden light.
Then slowly round the hush an aureole dreams,
Building cool paradise out of old pain.
But ere we plumb the haze-world, poignancies
Cry through our soul and sharp crags cut the moon
4.11.35
Page 489
Beyond
Now dream-gods die, extinguished by a deep
Incomprehensible breath of sudden sleep,
A dark breath craving for diviner bliss!
O night of soul, are you a secret kiss
Sworn to an ultimate Bridegroom yet unknown,
Some giant goldenness waiting alone
Beyond the half-lit dalliance of star-skies
That weave a mesh of myriad paradise?
Are you a virgin hunger for Truth's one
Love-splendoured mouth of sacramental sun?
15.11.35
Page 490
Life has no aim for me
Save to behold
In a sleep of ebony
Dreams of gold;
To stretch my little hand—
Suddenly feel
Over the drowsy fingers
A new life steal,
Because they pluck, afar
One magic bloom
Out of the dreams that star
The hush of gloom;
Then to awake and see
Still on my palm
The flower of mystery,
Quenchless and calm!
23.11.35
Page 491
{There was a legend among the alchemists that the discovery of the elixir vitae would be proved by the form of a vaguely luminous rose floating up in the liquid.)
The swift soliloquy of a waterfall—
The passionate wide communion of seas—
Twilight's cool rain-blur heralding dark peace—
A lake's half-audible wind-quiver—all
Sound-flows of earth, immense or delicate,
I merge in a bowl of dream and, hushful, wait
Perfumes of Spirit borned upon world-voice ...
Glimmer, O Deep, a mystic petal-poise
Within my clouded crucible: O breath
Of God's calm rapture rooted beyond death,
Love's word that from the unknowable Silence came,
Upsurge in me: break through my hush your flame,
O perfect Rose of the eternal Name!
18.2.36
Page 492
Immense blue Light that has marred
The earth's small grace,
Leaving my heart a hollow
Filled by no human face!
Can ever the body's fire
Mingle with Thine?
Why didst thou lure me, Splendour,
If Thou wert all divine? ...
Or is Thy hand in the dusk,
Left by the sun-
Fingers of fugitive gold
That crave communion?
Or through a streak of moon
Showst Thou love's mirth—
Presage of hidden lips
Mating the sky to earth?
Page 493
Glimmerings*
My soul's deep glimmerings
Are a passionate mystery:
My eyes can never see
What colour sits and sings
Upon its hidden face;
For they can but behold
Its loveliness unfold
In all that charms their gaze
When cast on outward things.
Often I see it glow
In the rhythmic radiance
That coils a white suspense
Round waves that dimly flow
Towards the Occident
While the nocturnal track
Of the girdling Zodiac
Is wet with star-dew sprent
From skies across which blow
Wind-birds on wings of green
In whose enormous sweep
Unto the land of sleep
I feel my soul has been!
For out of foam and mist
Wherewith past eves were fraught
Perchance my bra n was wrought
To love—a rhapsodist—
Vague sorceries of sheen!
For I cannot escape
This dream which holds my mind
That I would be too blind
To mark the gorgeous shape
Of what inflames my soul,
* A poem of 1926 revised.
Page 494
If never cloudy sails
Fluttered through gleaming gales
And white waves did not roll
Nor changeful lights undrape
Their coloured nudities
Within my spirit's zone!
My look is outward thrown
In tuneful sympathies
On every quivering haze
As if that gloom were kin
To a secrecy within,
Because of passioning clay's
Pre-human memories....
?.736
Page 495
Nirvana
The ear is a flame,
And a fire the mouth,
The eye is a burning
Deep of drouth.
O give no longer
Your soul to feed
This myriad dragon
Of glowing greed!
Each time you blow
Your passion higher
Beauty goes mounting
A funeral pyre:
If ever the spirit
Leaps like a flash,
What can stay after
But a heap of ash?...
All figures of joy
You rush to meet
Captive your self
In a narrow heat.
Let no form-vision
Your heart compress:
Then life shall cool
To a boundlessness
That never will die!
For who can raze
The flying rampart
Of infinite space?
25.7.36
Page 496
Paradox
The illimitable chamber of the soul
Opens but through a little door of clay,
And if God wills to find a passage there
He must go moving in a mortal way.
Though he should bring a light that has no bound,
To fill the large and leisurely soul-space,
Yet He can only enter with a love
Whose beauty aureoles a human face.
Omnipotence unfathomably far
The soul's gigantic room of hush demands;
But the frail door of body vigils, waiting
God's pressure through enamoured earthly hands.
?.8.36
Page 497
O take from me
That wizard-wail
Out of dense greenery—
The nightingale!
Blinded am I,
For this dark tune
Robs from the dream of sky
The quiet moon.
No silver wind
Blows heaven-fresh—
But, gropingly, the mind
Falls deep through flesh.
2.8.36
Page 498
"I have not trod on thorns: do I deserve
The paradise
Of Thy cool presence? I can plead no rough
Austere emprise.
I never won a combat with life's ill,
Nor luxury spurned:
Only for sweeter joy when joy was mine
This heart has yearned.
Its single grief was a love that nought so rich
On earth could see
As what it longed for" ... "Hence, dear child, am I
Revealed to thee!
Easy to win my grace if men but knew—
No blood of pain
Do I extort, no wrench of spirit or flesh,
And strife is vain.
One sole demand I lay upon each life—
To realise
That earth can never calm the deep heart's call
Through love-lit eyes!"
20.8.36
Page 499
Francesco of Rimini
From Dante's Inferno, Canto 5
(Francesco, daughter of the Lord of Ravenna, was given in marriage to the Lord of Rimini, a man of extraordinary courage but deformed in appearance. His brother Paolo, who possessed great personal charm, was sent by him as his representative to the ceremony. Francesca and Paolo fell in love. Once the husband came suddenly and surprised them in bed. In his rage he severed the necks of both of them with his sword. Dante, guided by Virgil, meets their souls in the second circle of Hell, and Francesca tells him their story.)
"My land of birth is seated on the shore
Whither in quest of peace the Po descends
And all his tributary waters pour.
Love, to whose call the warm heart quickly bends,
Attracted him with my once-comely shape
Now lost in cruel mode that still offends.
Love, whose desire no loved one shall escape,
Caught me for being found so beauteous
That never he from mine diverts his step.
Love to one single ruin guided us:
But deep hell waits the soul who spilled our youth."
Then, by the anguish she had spoken thus,
Moved to a silence of unbearable ruth
I looking down drooped long my countenance
Until the Poet questioned: "Why so mute?"
And I replied: "Alas, by what intense
Sweetness of yearning thought could these have come
To such a dolorous fate?" Tuning my glance
Page 500
Upon the pair I said: "Your martyrdom,
Francesca, wrings my heart till tears arise:
But tell me how, in hours unwearisome
When every sigh was sweet, love's full surprise
You felt and by a kindred passion's glow
His own obscure desire could recognise."
Whereon she cried: "There is no greater woe
Than to remember days of happiness
In misery—as well your Guide must know.
But if your touched soul craves now to possess
Our story, then our love's prime root I will,
As one who murmurs though he weep, express.
One day for joy we read what deep love's thrill
Bound by its tyranny even Lancelot:
Alone we were, with no suspicion still.
But often over the script our glances sought
Each other and our cheeks changed hue the while.
Only at one sole point our doom was wrought.
When read we of that long-desired smile
Kissed by a lover of such ardency
Then he whom nought can far from me beguile
Kissed me upon my mouth all tremblingly.
Love's tempter proved for us both scribe and book
That day no further page could draw our eye."
As told one spirit thus, the other shook
My heart with pity by the tears he shed,
Until my sense a mortal darkness took,
And, swooning, I fell down as fall the dead.
25.8.36
Page 501
(An adaptation and fusion of two famous speeches of Beatrice to Virgil in the Divina Commedia)
"O courteous soul of Mantuar poesy,
Whose fame for ever on God's earth endures -
A friend not of my fortune but of me
Roves through a desert, driven from his course
By obstacles so grave my I heart has fear
Lest I too late should bear him succouring force,
Too late if nought in heaven save truth I hear.
Speed thou and by thy art deliverance teach
Unto his mind: thus shalt thou bring me cheer.
Beatrice am I who now thy haste beseech:
Out of a place that lures me back I come -
Love brought me here and love impels my speech.
When I shall view again my Master's home,
Then to His ear thy praises will I sing ...
Thou wonderest how my feet unfrightened roam
This region where eternal tortures sting:
Now by the grace of God I am fashioned such,
I move untroubled by your suffering
Nor me these cruel tongues of fire can touch.
In paradise one everlasting Love,
Mother of all, is queen, mourning so much
The fate of him I call thee to reprove,
That even God's stern will unbends to Her.
She spoke to Lucia: 'Go forth and remove
His sorrow, thou who art grief's minister.'
So Lucia, winging there where I abode
With Rachel of past ages, bade me stir:
'O blessed Beatrice, true praise of God!
Why lingerest thou when he, who for thy sake
Has thrown away all treasures men applaud.
Page 502
Strains up to thee? Dost thou not hear him make
Most miserable moan, hast thou not seen
Death's storm, wider than oceans, round him break.
Never did human heart rush with more keen
Desire to follow safety or fly doom
Than I who sweep down from the heights serene,
Bidding thy silver accent pierce his gloom." ]
Page 503
O Ganga of the In-world!
O Ganga of the in-world! luminous
With the calm passion of the Master's Will,
Celestial Grace, thou flowest unto us,
Voiceful, from the remote Inerrable, -
Pure in thy beauty, softening the might
Of summits absolute or our valleyed ways,
That like a wondrous yet familiar light
Eternity may mingle with our days.
And, in thy deep melodious ecstasy
Drowning all fear, our souls go fortified,
Daring the ultimate peaks of destiny,
Seeking the dazzling fountain of thy tide,
To contemplate the illimitable form
Of Shiva silent like a frozen storm!
Page 504
Not only with the voice of mighty things,
Exultant rain or swift importunate sea,
But even on the unnoticeable wings
Of nameless birdsong I shall quest for Thee.
To consecrate - however magnificent -
No fragmentary passion I aspire,
But one glad life cf mingling hours intent
Upon Thy beauty, touched with selfsame fire.
For, what avail great moments if their flight
Leave the familiar day a fruitless din,
Nor give their glory's tone antiphonal note
Each wanderer wind-lark, nor the common night
Find the soul's gaze a placid mere wherein
Worship holds argently the heavens afloat?
Page 505
The Call*
Solitude
A sudden sorrow has covered her eyes
And they mirror not branch or bird in their lakes,
But a heavy wind blows that earth never knew
Across their shadow-profundities,
And her glance has swept along with that breeze
To some end of the world where spaces of blue
Are lost in a colourless blind surmise
And sweet forms perish and a great hush wakes
And all the wandering white stars cease....
No music have I - she cares not to hear,
When divine distresses are haunting her brow
Though her mouth knows not grief and her eyes no tear.
In this Indian night of her dead desire,
Cold with a calm of sacred bliss,
She loves no more with the body's fire:
Unpassioned she yearns to he God's far kiss
As the Kanchinjanga lifts to the sky!
Renunciation
In one night - one dread right
I have killed the whole rich earth:
You called on me to seek the formless light
And slay the passionate beauty of this birth -
So through my heart's deep pain
Has died the lure of love and blossoming mirth.
I feared you would be fleet
And leave me lonely in life's narrow street
While you across your shut eyes' calm arcane
* Adapted from poems of 1927.
Page 506
Would soar beyond the last cold spark
Of matter dreaming in the endless dark.
Now 1 have wooed
The Unseen above the pageant of our joys
And fled from all your colour and your voice
To find you formless in my soul's infinitude!
1936
Page 507
(Belisarius was the greatest general during the reign of Justinian. Both he and his emperor married dancing girls. The empress conspired his ruin and had him degraded. His wife ran away with a monk. In the end the once-famous soldier used to stand under the Arch of his own triumph in Byzantium - a blind beggar but still unbroken in spirit.)
All griefs flung at my darkness I devour
In the illimitable chasm that breaks
Wide-open where my heart feels their keen touch!
So deep its sudden mouth of conquering calm
That towers of joy doom-shaken topple sheer
Into the passionless gulf, leaving no weight
Upon my soul and never the least cry.
There all those shattered gleans are lost, the proud
Marble and bronze of statued victories:
There the large wealth of day, and there the sun
Of love, a woman's face now turned for ever...
Now in the chill of a scornful earth 1 stand,
A blinded beggar's palm outstretched to grope
His few bare crumbs' delight. Who knows that I
Put forth this hand, craving but fiercer pains
To fathom my immortal widenesses?
27.11.36
Page 508
With arms that curve to a garland of brief foam
And crumble in the very joy of clinging,
The enormous strengths and majesties surge home;
They yearn with music and they part with singing:
No passionate grasp on goals of blue endeavour
Shackles the laughter and the liberty
Winning by cool erosion rocks for ever
To the infinite self-forge fulness of sea.
A rapturous unconcern, a worship-will
Unmarred by lust that makes the conqueror slave,
Their hands of moon-love gather but to spill
Victory as pure libation through each wave.
4.2.37
Page 509
In a grave of trance my flesh lies dead:
But unknown sparks are quivering through
Its slumber till a sky is spread
Teeming with poignant starry hue.
A sepulchre of night I ve grown,
Pierced by strange planets far away -
Seeds of eternal beauty sown
In the darkened dust of human day.
22.3.37
Page 510
To the Ashram Poet
Harindranath Chattopadhyaya,
Hidden within the temple space
Of the unknown soul you're living - but
Though our forsaken eyes seem shut
Upon your mien, your lips keep opening wide
Innermost eyes in us dream-glorified,
By sending sonnet on keen sonnet
To float across our dark and dawn it
With vision of that great angelical
Day of eternity we call
The Mother's Face
1937
Page 511
All dumb things draw us by a secret love
Now that one cherished soul lies ever dumb:
Each flower strains hp meet our straining breath
And rocks are calm because they wait for us.
Nor have we fear of winds that hurl the eye
Into deep darkness, Or white tongues of thunder,
Or the chill murderous monotone of sea:
They too are messengers of the one Quiet
With whom we yearn to mingle - beautiful Quiet
-Love's perfume wafted on the voice of death!
Unto some God within our common clay
She burned her perfect hair's gold frankincense
And those bright thuribles of dream upbore
And gave her hands - a many-tapered flame!
Piercing our veil of weakness, her life's vigil
Has lit in us a vision-power that turns
The woeful void left by her unseen shape
A door to reach one all-embracing Hush.
30.3.37
Page 512
The archetypal Rose thy singer sought
Through all the blossoming of his thought
He found upon thy visionary mouth -
A moulded fire capturing the spirit's cry,
A beacon to Petrarchan poesy,
A living sonnet of the mystic South,
Whose octave of one large lip's dreamy glow
Trembled, with grave and delicate lines, apart
From the intense sestet of joy below
To breathe the secret of Love's heaven-rooted heart.
16.5.37
Page 513
(After a poem of Nishikanta's)
One curve ethereal white, one earth-embrowned -
A Giant Wheel within some Fair goes round
Upon a timeless pole fixed in each hour.
Bearing its load of lives, the magic power
Moves in perpetual self-oblivion,
A cycle of desire half shade half sun.
But he whose fingers' lone miraculous play
Turns the dream-mystery of gold and gray
Looks with far eyes of calm where still that strange
Twilight of motion mirrors every change.
Equal for him the laughing heavenward sweep
And melancholy rhythm back to the deep...
After the rise and fall of a myriad days,
My vision merges now with his wide gaze
And through all changing cry of colour sees
One single beauty born of deathless peace -
The dim earth flowering to starry lust,
The nebulas blown like a swirl of dust!
26.5.37
Page 514
Voices of large-eyed day
Have fallen now.
The birds in a huddle of sleep
Their small heads bow.
A worshipping quiet broods -
Until the moon
Presses a silver call
Through lids of swoon.
Kindling with name less joy
Answers each throat:
From neither night nor day
The strange cries float -
As if bird-reveries climbed
Unearthly skies
Their wings a moonlight flicker
Of tranceful eyes.
31.5.37
Page 515
Her eyes embrace all life;
They are brimmed with love,
A weight which drew her down
From heaven above.
Two nectar-clouds are her breasts,
Tipped with strange fire—
A reverie of roses
Unknown to the mire—
Roses of God that tremble
Like budding suns
Within her spirit's wombed
Omnipotence.
Now that her sheen of clay
Flows through the air,
Time's secret destiny
Lies glowing bare:
Along each curve of dream
Moulded in earth,
We sweep on a wave of bliss
To shadowless new-birth.
4.6.37
Page 516
Each drop of beauty brings a power to slake
The fire-abysses of the human soul
Yearning for infinite ecstasy through clay.
But some vague distance ever cleaves apart
The hungry dreamer and the nectarous dream—
A distance dwarfing to pale starry quiver
The dance of universes everywhere ...
O pierce with mystic love the outward veil:
Draw close by trance your heart to the deep heart
Of each clay-mote and feel its intimate throb
A paradisal cataract of the Vast!
12.7.37
Page 517
A Son of God
From heaven you came—
Your soul a word Of airy flame,
As though the white
Wings of a bird
No man had seen brought rumour of strange light.
Mortal you went;
Your passage grew
Within life's veil a rent
Where suddenly broke
The gold sun through—
And out of every heart a god awoke!
5.8.37
Page 518
With a pen dipped in many-coloured mist
Yet reaching through the mauve and amethyst
To the one blazing gold above all change,
I'll write the scripture of the universe, strange
With the hidden heart of life's familiar things
And every page shall be a throne where kings
Made by that strangeness out of common clay
Shall sit awhile and go their purple way.
I'll not recount that I took birth; for when
There broke into the universe's ken
The atomical apocalypse of me
I did not know, though everyone could see,
That I was born; so I shall write that some
Mystery within the dark contracting womb
Brought me into earth's light—it was a Power
Both in my mother and myself—each hour
It works deep-seated all-where—-most perhaps
Within those burning drouths and glowing gaps
That never can be healed to slumbering cool
Content by a crowd, however beautiful,
Of small earth-joys. That Force of hidden breath
Aiming through every small desire's death
At some wide immortality with which
To make the future's sable depths God-rich
Has set me moving, willy-nilly, on
To that veiled Sun of superhuman dawn.
Perchance I'll never view the Blaze, though I
Feel in my flesh an eastward-brightening sky....
Page 519
A mount keeps vigil here beneath vague skies,
A throne of shadow: claim it with closed eyes.
Grow deaf to your heart, the brain's hot hunger still,
To catch the curbed omnipotence of this hill,
This sovereign height of sleep-itensity
Where the universe is lost without one sigh—
Secret of deathless self-dominion
Waiting for evermore yet calling none,
A vast withdrawal from our transient sun!
6.10.40
Page 520
Grass
Not lowly is the grass:
Nodding this way and that
It shows the world how keen it is
To be a democrat
And welcome both the dark and bright,
The beggar and the king,
With a sensitive equality
That bows to everything.
1941
Page 521
That blow upon his face
Struck all his boyhood dim—
But suddenly like a Hash
The man awoke in him.
His youthful hairless chin
A weathered fortress stood—
Full-grown and fierce and firm,
Bearded with blood.
And in that disrespect
Unto his flesh and bone
He found a foretaste of his body
Completely overthrown,
Crumbled into nothing
By the black boxer Death,
And scorning the clay's fall he knew
A deeper life than breath!
Page 522
(Found in a railway compartment)
As with unthinkable rapidity
Those fan-blades move, an unseen barrier flinging
Back from its whirling poise all trifles thrown,
So hangs invisible the ecstatic calm
Of the Spirit's power, checking each small surmise
Uplifted by the vanity of our brain.
21.8.41
Page 523
When He went abroad,
He covered the great glow
Which proved Him to be Lord:
He went incognito,
And by His magic framed
A myriad alibi
And took the devious different roads
That are you and I.
He travels without noise,
Invisible even by day,
But leaving everywhere
Footprints upon our clay.
Sometimes He meets Himself—
Then folks light up and love,
Not understanding what immense
Secrecies move
Their tiny hands and mouths
To treasure in sealed touch
The joy they fear would scatter and fade
If they spoke too much.
But ever the one soulless word
Is spoken and again
The gleams are shadows that diverge—
Footprints remain.
8.10.41
Page 524
Loss
Through smallest whorls of colour I sucked song
From depths below, within, above this earth;
I laid a moment's ear upon each hue
And caught innumerable centuries
Kindling their whole heart's passion to one throb.
The same miraculous world gathering a voice
Of Godhead from horizon-glow is here—
But the inner light which listened has grown blind:
A blackness now is the brain, a drowsy shore
Where the great glittering seas hurl without sound.
20.1.42
Page 525
("Purbal has no natural water-supply; so a health-resort cannot be established there as on the opposite hill, Matheran" — Guide Book)
They will not vex thee with their lowland chatter,
The wanton littlenesses of their thought;
Aloof, without the friendly word of water,
Thy soaring secrecies remain uncaught.
Green tribes of trance people tiny indigo steep—
Called forth by heavenly rainfall's fugitive stir;
But lake nor spring within thy granite keep
Man-nourishing coolth a crystal prisoner.
No thirst for cheap dominions of delight
Thy grandeurs slake. Not thou the body's goal:
Our flesh can feed no weakness with thy might—
Those lofty rocks push through to the sheer soul!
31.5.42
Page 526
Bharata
(The Ramayana tells how Bharata, a brother of Rama—by another wife of Dasaratha's—and an extreme devotee of his avatarhood, was sorely grieved to learn that Rama had been sent into exile and that he himself was to succeed to the throne owing to an unfortunate promise made by Dasaratha to Bharata's mother. He set out to find Rama and after a strenuous journey reached his goal. He fell at Rama's feet, but Rama lifted him up and embraced him, yet while appreciating his devotion exhorted him to stand by the word of their father. Bharata surrendered his will to Rama's and returned to the capital; but he took with him Rama's sandals and placed them on the throne to rule in his stead.)
Sandals of the great Wanderer's feet rest here—
Calm on the desolate throne, still as the Spirit
That moves not with the moving universe
But, imperturbable, bears the toil of Time,
The ache of heavenly feet through a wilderness
Of worlds that Truth may live and laugh in the dust!
Here in this kingdom's vigilant heart I place
Twin lamps—the quiet sandals touched by the heat
Of God's pure trample on His own wide power!
Rule, while the Lord's bleeding and beggar steps
Go printing deep His love on forest paths
Tangled with wry desires and shadowed over
By titan clutchings at the glow of heaven:
Rule without stir and light each soul to peace!
13.7.42
Page 527
Remember that my pulse is a poet's blood,
A thick wild honey drawn from light and love:
Nothing save keener love and closer light
Can shake it to a tune that is not earth.
How shall my heart redden with mystic moods
Unless your God comes forth a lustrous form
Touching and taking me as if all earth
Were swallowed up within a Sun of bliss
Where every sight is dazzled, each thought burned,
Leaving no universe but His sweet Self,
A glory of infinitude enfolding me?
Page 528
Behind the broken world is the shattered self—
A million bits thrown outward, leaving one
Small centre where the lost God knows himself.
Can ever the varied discords cling and fuse
In some great glowing essence of all time?...
Through the most tiny fragment—the lone core—
Trembles a quicksilver of ecstasy
That feels a magicai and mingling touch
Secret within all parts—a power to slip
Without a seam or scar or aching strangeness
Mood into wandering mood and plunge together
The blinded globules to one globe of Eye
In which the scattered universe smiles whole!
15.7.42
Page 529
O dry lips longing in a face grown pale!
No sudden fate is yours but an old tale
That comes out of the very mouth of the womb.
Lust for brief joy enkindling a blind flash
Leaves in the deeps of life a taste of ash
Covering the Eternal's laughter with its gloom.
Beyond your little breath of flames that flee
Seek a large dying—with infinity
The immutable end. divinity the doom!
3.8.42
Page 530
(Symbolic view of Purbal from Matheran)
From the stunned rapture of a single rock
Thrust forward by a cleft in the mountain mood
Two purple peaks wake into our night and day,
One mastering the blind hours, one mothering
The moments that uplift their cry to the Vast.
Behind them stretches breakless and aloof—
Mile on straight mile—the unseizable sovereignty
Of force that sheds all feature, love that wears
No face for the deep prayer of the valley's heart—
Sheer walls upon whose granite godhead crumble
The ages of mankind—a trackless quiet
Where light looks inward and the world is lost!
Out of that mystery sprang your passionate Word,
O sweet companion-crests—two syllables
Of beauty softening down to our myriad dream
The timeless steep and silence of the One.
6.11.42
Page 531
Hard hills that bar my view,
I worship you
For your divine control
Upon my restless soul.
Valleys that lend
A softness to my gating without end,
You too I worship for the immensity
With which you bee con forth impuissant me.
9.12.42
Page 532
In the hour of death oh lonesomely
To fall on a mountain-rock
With sunset in the eye
And the wild eagle waiting above
For the flesh to die —
The last life-quiver in that flesh
An eagle about to ne born,
Waiting for the body's veil to tear
From the sky of a nameless morn!
23.4.43
Page 533
The Death of Vivekananda
He is gone from us—deep within Truth's secrecy beyond.
How could we hold him from the abyss of the Almighty?
Can the wild water be reined it the precipice's edge?
Can the lightning be statued between heaven and earth?
Can we clutch the heart of the ion and the leap of its desire?
When the soul of him, so measureless, has left us,
What bewailing of small mouths can help our love?
Silent and aloof we will sit on some shore
And let the boom of the surging ocean be our grief.
14.5.43
Page 534
Infra-red:
Ultra-violet:
The blind heart in us stretches out to you.
"Beyond the rainbow, beyond the rainbow"
Is ever its cry.
The secret on either side of the spectrum
Is the God within the splendour of our sun.
From the bow of seven colours
We would be shot into the Invisible
Edging the vivid veil of time.
24.8.43
Page 535
White birds of magic depths,
Throbbing are your long throats—
But O they stretch beyond
Earth's range of notes!
Eyes alone can gather,
From the lift of each head
And the tremble of fluff beneath
And the cloven red
Of arching beak, the rapture
Your hearts outfling
When the lofty sun of noontide
Crowns the day king.
The mystery of your music
Our lips shall never find
Until they leave their common
Words utterly behind,
And a moveless silencce deepens,
Mirroring the zenith-skies
To which, white birds, your beauty
Tunes inmost secrecies.
12.10.43
Page 5366
Some praise You for Your blue hush without end,
Some for Your march of ages into mist—
I for Your microscopic lust: poor me,
Offered Your flaming cosmos for one kiss!
O sweet magnificent fool, all universe
Spending upon a heart of such small love!
21.11.43
Page 537
Weary, for the world brings nothing new,
I waited for the New Year's light on the dew.
The twelve strokes came to beat me down
With the tiring sense that only the old
Will deck itself with the glittering crown
Of a new name and fool into hope
Of a godlike halo the minds that grope....
But something stirred in my heart as I stood,
And the pulse-throbs twinkled with magic blood,
For I looked above at the measureless dome
And knew the crown of the year that had come
Was old but ah so quenchlessly old—
The infinity-haunted starry gold.
Bombay, 1.1.44
Page 538
(Lines for a card with the painting of a boat being launched amidst a flying mass of foam, waves rising and toppling over, and against a background of endless-seeming sea and sky.)
Frail boat of mine,
Be brave! Far though you wander,
Your prow will face a secret yonder:
Ever the gleam of a new horizon-line
Is the Divine.
1.1.44
Page 539
God's victories are
No tramp of elephant—
Huge effort crumbling hell-
But hushful, innocent,
Feared by the monster glooms
Lest one smile break—
A little child asleep
Whom giants dare not wake!
1.2.44
Page 540
Our heart is a time-bomb
And its love-load
Is lapped in earth until the day
It must explode.
What Saboteur has planned
The abysmal sigh
That breaks wide open the earth's hold.
Blows us sky-high?
9.3.44
Page 541
Your touch is ever so soft upon my heart,
As though the slumbering veils would never part
Which blind me to Your noon of nakedness.
You come most shyly nor Your beauty press
With all that irresistible leap of light
Which focuses to flesh the Infinite
And breaks to rapturous cinders human will.
You leave me strong to clasp earth-darkness still:
You pluck no pale surrender from the mind,
But, like a breath or beam, would urge me find
By lustrous winging of my mortal gaze
The fadeless sun that flowers in Your face.
So might I, burning godlike through brief days
To vaster vision, be not humbled much
By Your supreme effulgences of touch.
1944
Page 542
Between Two Loves
Between two loves
I weep and weep.
To the one I wake,
With the other sleep.
Torn is my soul
Which both have kissed—
And I must struggle,
A bigamist,
Till waking and sleeping
Are caught as one,
And the shut eyes hold
An inward sun.
20.3.44
Page 543
What country shall I take as mine? Iran
Is but the perfume of a rose long dead;
While India that has moulded me a man
Whose heart goes throbbing with a sunset-red
And straining towards a mystery beyond eyes
Makes deeper yet the homelessness of me.
I move a stranger whose horizon flies
Hither and thither, settles on no sea
Guarding and lulling one dear and alone.
Fire-cult that neighboured the Greek world of thought
Burns through my Persian blood to Europe's large
Earth-richness; India's infinite Unknown
Lures up the same fire-cry—both stay uncaught.
My country's a future where all dream-lights merge.
1945
Page 544
O the dew-dipped delicious drudgery
For red and blue and white and yellow pomps
Reigning with perfect petals over the dust!
Back bent, 1 serve them and on grateful knees
Touch with a mighty worship the frail kings.
One careless finger is their empire's doom—
Yet on my thoughts their pollen strews a blessing
And every breath of scent is a command;
For, each small tuft of quiet colour pricks
A flawless hole in some enormous veil—
A light shoots up and lays bare all my flowers
Tiny and precarious by brief difficult
Thrusting of paradise through clods of clay!
28.8.45
Page 545
O Love, O Lustre
O Love, O Lustre,
Downward flow—
Now stormy, now tranquil,
But never slow—
For little is our time here,
And it only grows great
If filled by your splendour's
Wonderful weight.
A burden of beauty,
Your smiling power
Breaks open the secret
Heaven of each hour —
Your reverie presses
Our feet of clay
To grip forever
Some deathless way!
Brim my whole body
Right up to the brain
Till the gathering god head
Flows over to stain,
With hues of rapture
You bring from above,
My outermost manhood—
O Lustre, O Love!
1946
Page 546
Where the mountains cast their shadow,
There let us lie:
When the eyes fall shut in that shadow.
Sleep comes from the sky.
Out of the shackled regions
Under our feet
Strains then no groping spectre
To blind the frail heartbeat.
Drawn from the air that is haunted
By calm hill-crest,
A secret crown is our slumber—
And a god wakes in our breast.
Page 547
Colours so deeply quiet here upbrim,
If God could worship He would worship these—
But since there is no winging above Him,
He gave her all Himself, as on a sea's
Wideness the lustres of the whole sky swim.
Heaven's equal, carrying us to unknown shores
Of bliss and beauty!—if but once I limn
Your vigil on my soul, by that blue force
The body's stain would wash away from me—
Rather this body standing now so coarse
Would serve the soul with bright transparency.
Page 548
Each thought is gliding like a stone.
The flesh is a burden to the bone,
The bone an aching goad within
Till I have paid with wounded sin
For the wounds of that nailed Purity.
"Why hast Thou, God, forsaken me?"
All songs are routed from man's face
By that divine distorted word
Bringing into each perfumed place
The earth-crossed' life of Heaven's Lord.
Page 549
What power is in that Blue asleep for ever
Beyond the burning freedoms of endeavour?
Thought after thought carries a storm of wings
To span the moveless Deep that downward flings
Each thrill with a yonder to all ecstasies—
A cool unpierceable colour wherein light
Takes no fixed form but in supremest ease
Hangs like a crown above both day and night!
Page 550
My silence I lay at your feet,
Snow-space for you to tread
And leave on its dreamless white
The print of your path that led
From the aching heart of time
To the soul's serenity
And, through the immense Unknown,
To a new Earth in the sky.
Page 551
The whole earth blotted by a blind space within,
A black bliss of unbounded vacancy,
And in the far-stretched freedom a scintillant speck
Broken loose from each cry that clings to clay,
A home for the heartbeat in a heaven of sleep,
Yet haunted by the cadence of clay-tears—
One small star piercing unknown eternities
And burning for their outburst into time!
Slowly the silver point draws near, breaks wide
To a gold immensity of inwardness,
An all-transcending all-transmuting sun.
Then its keen core is a grip of God in the chest
And the lost earth is found with a new form
Etched by an aura of immortal day.
Page 552
I have come to the secret hour
All love desired:
My heart, a distant music,
Awaits earth-tired.
My parching sight grows cool
With vague star-dew
And a breathless night within
Unfolds its infinite hue.
To reach beyond time's veil
The eyes strain not their gaze:
They shut, and eternity
Is held in hushed embrace.
Page 553
Runner
Out of each dawn
A runner comes—
Glowing face,
.Swelled chest, keen limbs,
Whole body straining to break
Magical news
I've waited so long to hear
Ere the light I lose.
But always a-sudden
At my feet he drops,
And all that I hear is he falling
Of a golden corpse.
30.8.45
Page 554
God
A sudden Vast breaks forth above the brain—
Form, feature vanish in that rapt Inane—
God is free light, an unwalled timelessness!
But, when the soul settles in the Infinite's day,
And sees no more the Eternal from cooped clay,
God is a golden form wearing the bond
Of limb and visage: all the immense beyond
Is but His aura of love limitless
Bent on a flooding down of skies to bless
The human body, so time's slave may find
Through deep self-sight crowning a life long blind
The immortal sun-face that is Supermind!
26.6.50
Page 555
December 5, 1950
(A new disciple's cry to Sri Aurobindo)
Till the fall of your body a void was my day,
You sank like a sun and made me your west:
O Deathless who died since in no other way
Could you be buried for ever in my breast!
Page 556
In this full moon no golden mean can live.
Immensest wisdom or intensest joy
Springs from this virgin mother of mystery:
The brain, a rapt crystal, sees all life's core
Or the heart drains a giant wine of the world.
Flat earth is no home for eyes that shut out time,
For lips that open abysses infinite:
An argent absolute blotting colourful day's
Confident clarity breaks each level mood
To a mountain haloed with ineffable white
Or a silver ocean singing the Unseen.
21.4.51
Page 557
Pillar on massive pillar plunging down
From some foundation of immobile sky—
Inverted temple of tranquillity, white
With secrets quarried out of constellate deeps—
An offering and a call from stirless heavens
To tremulous earth: "Behold this structure, bare
Of golden presence, waiting for some vast
Power to be shrined in its pure silences.
This holy void is the Infinite bowing low
To the sleep that is a locked Almightiness.
Wake, godhead greater than the unfallen spheres.
Turn the resplendent roof touching dull clay
A floor for thy small feet to trample stars!
Fill the descending pillars with the force
Of thy arousal: lift through them the Word
Unknown to us but gemmed in the ancient dark
Where One above the azure hierarchies
Sealed His eternal image—One who dared
Self-death to unveil omnipotence in blind dust."
Page 558
Snow
All hurt should go
With the fall of snow:
Fissures are filled,
Vain searchings stilled—
The Unknown, for which the black cave broke
And love of the labyrinth's core awoke.
Is here if only the eyes could know
The trance-touch that is snow.
20.7.51
Page 559
The wondrous lure
Of outward hues
Must fall away
Ere the soul views
God's light eternal,
Truth bare and free—
Body of deathless calm
And purity.
But still beyond
That loveliness
Unstained by time
The soul must press.
Within the body
Of God's sheer light
Is the soul of God's
Creative might.
There burns the Beauty
To make divine
Even life's luring
Outward shine.
Short of that inmost
Fire of the world
Eternity itself
Is half unfurled.
1.10.51
Page 560
Majestic master of the immutable Light,
Love like a universe thronged within your heart:
Brooding in silence across lonely years
On secret heavens a-dream in infinite hells,
You found the hammer to break the Dragon's sleep
And free from burying black the fallen stars.
But for each throb of God kindled in earth
You flung a human heart-beat out of Time:
You shortened your sovereign life to greaten the dust
Your body, dropped from your spirit's hold on high,
Lays the foundation of a clay-built sky!
Always the Light came down from the limitless blue,
Gold gushing through the head to a heart God-drunk
Now from the soil's sleep rose one dazzling wave,
Uttering a secret of eternity! locked
In caves dumbfounded with a vast black bliss.
It sang how sheer divinity grew dust,
The miracled Love which left the heart of the sun
And crouched with folded fires below Time's feet
To give huge wings to the atom's reverie.
The surge of light lifted our bodies up
As though, in laughing answer to heaven's leap down
Into the prisoning space of bone and flesh,
Earth now was ready to enter infinitude.
A blind snake that had swallowed all the stars
Unrolled a boundless mystery flecked with flame
And undulated shining centimes.
But none riding the rapture and the glow
Page 561
Saw the still King of the new life's luminous realm,
Tamer and charmer of mortality s night—
One Heart whose deep on gold-dense deep of love
Measured the abyss whose cry is the whole world's death!
23.3.52
Page 562
O wound of splendour that can never heal!
My hand on the heart seems stained with sunrise-red....
A god breaks here from the long night that is man,
A rose that will not rest in her clay-roots
But quivers to be plucked up by the sky.
How shall I give, to crowding forms that fade,
This lonely load of immortality?
A love crimsoning to a light beyond all arms.
Why have you dwelt in earth's small tenement
If your sole ache is to burst every bliss
And leave me homeless in my own heart's core?
Must you bleed vainly into! black abysms,
A waste of wonder till time flows no more?
Or are you Heaven's deep striving to be housed
Even where the sheer cold- darkness is an edge
That cuts into all flowering towards the Gold?
1952
Sri Aurobindo: 15.8.1872-5.12.1950
Einstein of the super-science of he soul,
He found the Immutable's space of trance a field
Grooved with almighty thought- transcending arcs—
Figures of a single Truth bent everywhere
On linking the ultimate Suns to our mortal sod....
A rapt geometer in the deepmost heart
Saw the long line of human hungering
Towards infinite freedom from the drag of clay
As no straight movement on and ever on,
Leaving the body a vanishing cry of woe,
But a huge curve that reaches farthest light
And comes back kindled to the darkling dust....
O mystic energy of re-entrant love,
Springing immense into the Immortal's bliss
Yet keeping earth's small poignancy your goal!
9.6.52
Page 564
A band of light is now the horizon's line:
No more the old recession of the unknown—
But inexhaustible Truth goes goldening on
From depth to blissful depth of the Divine.
Intimate immensities no flesh can thwart
Drown the old poignancies of far and near:
Wonderful waters widening everywhere
Pulse in each breast the whole universe's heart!
19.1.53
Page 565
(Before returning permanently to the Ashram)
Poise of the tense noon, tremulous between
Passion and worship, warm flesh and bare soul!
One touch of heat, and the whole heart breaks out
To clasp the body of earth—drunk, blind to heaven.
One touch of light, and love leaps all within—
The entire seducing greenness flecked with gold
Quivers to draw beyond its own bright curves
The hungry heart to the Unseen the Unheard,
And with elusive farness wakens deep
On sudden deep in the mute dazzled mind.
Hermaphrodite hour, disclose my nature's truth,
So I may learn to catch ere evening's end
White Venus's wonder-word or plumb through night
A superhuman space of secrecies.
21.1.53
"O give me chastity, but not too soon!"
Saint would I be and live a lone y star,
But now that my heart heaves to the intimate moon
Let not the immeasurable mystery mar
The splendour of close kisses and locked limbs.
Yet grant this mercy that, ere body dims,
I wake to the viewless Beauty by whose call
Of solitude and superhuman sleep
We strain from light to light and, through each small
Loveliness see some infinite rapture leap
Page 566
To plunge our souls in work -oblivion....
Burn me pure gold at last, O secret Sun!
4.2.53
The unreachable horizon is my love—
All other marvels, delicate or vast,
End with the embracing: here alone the arms
Stand full for ever with the rapturous
Failure to exhaust the body of the Beyond.
O haunting line of infinite ocean-tone,
Touched by the luminous quiet of the sky,
Draw me aloof from lips that sing no surge
Of the homeless heart to bourneless mystery!
30.3.53
Above my head 1 am one with God's huge gold,
Within my heart God's white-fire depth am I;
But both these freedoms like far dreams 1 hold,
Wonderful futures caught n a cryptic eye—
A light without lids—suspended timelessly
Twixt flickering glimpses cf mortality.
I am they and yet no part of body or mind
Shares in their splendour: a nameless strength alone
Possesses every limb: a block of stone
Dead to all hungers, void of smile or sigh,
The outer self endures the strokes of time,
But feels each stroke flash from beyond, behind
The world of man, a smite of the God on high
Page 567
And the God within to wake from the packed peace
Of that stone-block a shapeliness; sublime
Which shall be God to the very finger-tips
By the falling of brute superfluities.
Treasuring that sculpture yet unborn, I wait
For the luminous outflowering of my fate—
Blindness that is a locked apocalypse!
12.2.53
A viewless Will, an undiscovered sun,
Fixed in an ether of trance above my brain!
These feet may stumble into night, these hands
Let fall the flambeau: still, in that happy blue,
Flickerless the gold of God masters all Time.
There is no failure save forgetfulness
Of the omnipotent Light whose spark is our soul.
The Eternal One whose word is victory
Is now the unpierceable secret of my life:
Nothing can draggle His epiphany,
None else than He can lift me from the mire,
His Will alone is my serenity.
While He enhaloes the summit of the mind
And His dazzle is caught in the cavern of the heart
And all my limbs are a grope for His world-vast love.
Can mortal hungers hold me paradised?
Some giant loneliness breaks through each embrace!...
My faltering steps are a truth to human eyes,
But already the great sun-sight overhead
Has burnt it to ashes in the future's fire.
I wear mortality like a fading mask:
The white decree in the brooding spirit-space
Shall stop not till the immortal Sun is my face.
2.5.53
Page 568
(On my fiftieth birthday, for the ultimate future)
The whole world is poverty-stricken now: what shall
Men give to him who has freed the shadowless All
From his own blinded form and narrow name?
The prisoner Light that strains towards diamond-flame
Out of the quenching carbon has now sprung,
Boundlessly white, illimitably young.
Up through small head, through fragile feet below!
Nothing of me but facets the God-glow
In which the secret wealth of the universe
Sits in immense self-sight no weeping blurs.
What will you give me when the Eternal One,
Whose spark is your very soul, I' ve made my own?
25.11.53
Page 569
A bull's body uplifted by eagle wings
Looms in the twilight air whose breath is sleep.
When the vast world has grown a wondrous void—
Each bird and beast sunk in a secret dream—
This lord of a supernatural loneliness
Breaks through the silence and the glooming grey
The sudden clarity of a boundless truth!
The unknown All-Life is he, the veiled God-touch—
His head piercing the night's antiquity
Builds ever the two-horned mystery of the moon
And his wing-waft is the tremor and thrill of the stars.
20.3.54
Page 570
An Appreciation and an Appeal*
Till now you've drawn my soul
Out to the doors of sense—
But now you are pushing my sight
Deep to the lushed intense
Core of the secret heaven
Hung in the heart
Where sits your beauty forever
Alone, apart
From the crowding hands of the world—
A love complete,
Offering to one sole clasp
Its deathless Feet.
If my life takes not their seal,
Never shall I win
Safety from gloom and greed:
The abyss is all within.
Time must be conquered there
For the Eternal's play
To flower into flesh
And never fade away.
I know that your sweet limbs
Withdraw from gaze and touch
Because the outward light
I crave and prize too much.
* One day I thought the Divine Mother was moving away from me in outer contact This hurt very much. But, if it was a fact, 1 tried to see the truth behind it. The result was the personal poem here.
Page 571
I know that the dim distance
You place between us two
Is only the beckoning path
Of an inward rendezvous.
But O my earth-embodied
Darling divinity,
Be not too swift in the grace
Of the deeps you plunge on me.
Keep yet a visible smile—
How in so short a span
Do you hope to make a griefless
God of this fragile man?
24.3.54
Page 572
("The Supermind had descended long ago—very long ago-— into the mind and even into the vital: it was working in the physical also but indirectly through those intermediaries. The question now was about the, direct action of the Supermind in the physical. Sri Aurobindo said it could be possible only if the physical mind received the supramental light: the physical mind was the instrument for direct action upon the most material. The physical mind receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light."—Note received from the Mother.)
The core of a deathless sun is now the brain
And each grey cell bursts of omniscient gold.
Thought leaps—and an inmost light speaks out from things;
Will, a new miracled Matter's dense white flame.
Swerves with one touch the sweep of the brute world.
Eyes focus now the Perfect everywhere.
In a body changing to chiselled translucency.
Through nerve on fire-cleansed nerve a wine of the Vast
Thrills from hcaven-piercing head to earth-blessing feet.
The whole sky weighs down with love of the abyss.
Deeper than death the all-penetrant rays take root
To make the Eternal's sun a rose of the dust.*
4.4.54
* The Mother, after reading this poem, said that the first two lines were sheer revelation. That is, they catch exactly what happened when, on December 5. 1950. the Mind of Light was realised by her at the moment Sri Aurobindo left his body. The rest of the lines were, she said. an imaginative reconstruction of what the realisation had involved.
Page 573
Yours is a universe-filling smile.
No smallest need left anywhere—
Bliss that is life and life that is bliss
In the whole immense of circling air!
What shall we crave when all seems ours,
Bathed in this all-transfiguring light
Greeting us from your lips and eyes—
Smile of a joy that is infinite
And therefore brings in every flash
The secret heaven-heart of each thing,
Whose golden throb we never seize
When to the blinded crust we cling?
For you Eternity's inwardness
Echoes in the e outwardness of Time;
Your eyes' clear depth and your lips' soft swell
Catch us up in that rapturous rhyme.
O strange love wanting for your own
The salt taste of our tiny tears
And giving us through day and night
The smile that fills the universe!
28.6.54
Page 57474
Gnosis
The day is not the dumb earth glowing red
Nor the green waters at their shining speech
Nor the blue-white inaudible flame-tongued sky:
The great gold of the sun himself is the day!
There is the Truth whose light makes all things true—
Clay burns, sea glows, the firmament is fire
When this World-Alchemist grips them for his own.
And till we touch his hand in all bright forms
Life's core remains shut fast, we reach but the husk.
O we must thrill to his far flash everywhere,
Then learn to look his omnipotence in the face,
Feel our small eyes drowned in his dazzling deep,
Catch in our hearts the hidden heat of the whole
Sun-centred infinite-rhythmed universe....
Nothing is known ere the One is ablaze in all
And the knower cries to the gold God, "Thou am I!"
23.8.54
Page 575
The Asura
Yoga by force of the titanic will.
The mind caught mercilessly and made still—
Fenced with barbed nerves electrified by fear
Of the free world, the ascetic heart beats clear
Of all the flushed variety of time—
Lonely and lean, tortured by one sublime
Mania of world-loss and self-sacrifice
In the locked light of trance-immobile eyes,
His body prostrate under his spirit's stamp,
He turns rapt life God's concentration camp.
The Deva
Alone, like the horn of the rhinoceros—
Yet in his solitude the world's fires are shaped:
Omnipotence looks out from a athomless peace—
Farness and freedom are the source of all light.
The animal, drawn into depths and distances.
Burns a pure power bursting a deathless gold
Through the black heart and the grey brain of Time—
An all-knowing Sun whose heat is infinite love.
O loins remote, consuming each desire,
Plunging the whole universe into an abysm of Bliss!
4.5.54
Page 576
Towards Transformation
Soul of the Sun, the Deathless, He am I!
Calm rays that pierce the infinite trance above
Shoot, through keen rays that cut all sleep below,
An immortal milk feeding the flesh for ever.
Now thought is endless light bared flash by flash—
Feeling, a flame-pulse of Unbounded bliss—
Sense, a warm touch of the Perfect everywhere—
Will, the white heat of a world-alchemy.
Even the blind belly is God's grave no more.
The buried astronomer at the base of things,
Watching in vain through The spine's telescope
For some vast splendour Of the blue unknown
To burst the doming dimness of the mind,
Leaps with a dazzle of illimitable truth!
The omnipotent rays take root in the abyss
To make the omniscient Orb a flower of the dust.
Soon shall life's breath be a rose-break beyond time
And each footfall eternity blessing earth.
5.5.54
Page 577
I stand here for all time, rooted in God.
A thousand heart-gropes find each root their goal.
I am caught by a depth and a warmth of eternal Love,
Love that by being eternity is true earth,
The rock-grip of a bliss that cannot end.
Here is my Country, my Creatrix, my World's Core.
To the old out-scattered life there is no return.
But my fixed tree is a branching magnificence:
Everywhere spread huge arms that pierce all space,
Nothing the sweep of the universe can give
Eludes; but now from a stainless height I search
Earth's distances of lost divinity.
Here is the Abroad, the All-Mother, the World's Edge.
To the low rush, the blind grasp there is no return.
27.5.54
Page 578
She seems but playing tennis—
The whole world is in that game!
A little ball she is striking—
What is struck is a huge white flame
Leaping across time's barrier
Between God's hush, man's heart,
And while the exchange goes speeding
The two shall never part.
In scoring the play's progress
The result of minds that move,
One word in constant usage
Is the mystic syllable "Love".
And the one high act repeated
Over and over again
By either side is "Service",
And it never is done in vain.
For, whether defeat or triumph
Is the end, each movement goes
Soulward: through this short pastime
Eternity comes more close!
Page 579
Art
After the equatorial dithyramb,
The Antarctica unheard—
The quiverless stare of ice probing
The fire a-dance in teach word.
After the all-abysm of the embrace,
The tight-lipped enemy—
The silence of the steel piercing
The kiss a-throb in each cry.
Unmeltable, implacable,
On the sun-daze of the heart
Falls a mind bare like a crescent-edge
And the smitten splendour is Art.
30.5.54
Page 580
God is the refuge of lions,
Lions that have felt fear—
Their body's tawny thunder
Remembers the heaven-hurled spear
Deep in an unknown darkness,
The plunge of their lightning soul
Whence spread that glorious sound-burst
Of muscle to a murderous goal!
O suddenly this secret
Spiked whiteness from on high
Within their roaring life-lust
Breaks from behind their eye,
And they know that not by gorging
The time-world's fugitive meat
But by that inmost fire-fall
Sprang up their huge heart's heat.
A wonder and a terror,
A pure flame not their own,
They crouch before that sky-shaft
Piercing their! blood and bone.
And to the infinite spaces
They bow their hero's head,
Craving the touch of the Master
From whom this javelin sped.
His love, calm, power they seek—
The curve of! His blessing hand
Their cave—the death of the tremor
No lion's pride will stand.
Page 581
O secret celibate swore,
No flesh you make your sheath—
Unspent, unresting anywhere,
You spurn the conqueror's wreath
Of tremulous virgin blood.
Packed with a pure white peace
You stand with never an earthly flicker
Spilling heaven's potencies.
From the outward steely point
Inward to an alchemist cup
Your fluent brightness, goldening, draws
For a weakened god to sup.
He wins from you lost strength
To cleave beyond the brain
And thrust home to the furnace-fount
Whence swords that bear no stain
Leap out in rays with a single
Centre and hilt of sun
To pierce all things with a myriad love
Of the One for the self-same One!
3.6.54
Page 582
Infinity's void whose loneliness is the All—
Eternity's core sun-blazed with truth of Time—
The Unshadowed lost in a dragon dark of His own.
Sparks in black earth crying to be heaven's gold—
Crumbled beatitude slowly gathering up—
Form a trance-statue where God flames alive.
11.6.54
Page 583
Not the ghost food of a mortal mouth's caress
Nor the brief bread the heart can never eat—
Not eyes of pity and not charity's hands—
But a new-birth's gift: within the flesh strange flesh
That feels no hunger, heart's heart that needs no kiss,
Some infinite spirit and substance suddenly ours,
Time-free yet brimmed with all that time holds rich,
A world-vast Rose kindling a fathomless Void.
Page 584
There is a moment of deep night
In which the sky is more than still:
The soundlessness becomes a peace
That is surrender to some Will.
Then; through the stars as through white holes
Pricked in a universe hung blind,
Steal into the vast web of Fate
The mercies of an infinite Mind.
Within the rapt mechanic law
A touch is found of the Ever-Free
Who made this system of sun-grooves
But has the power unendingly
To change it in strange secret ways
Through moments of communion
When the myriad cosmos grows aware
That by some Will it works as one.
Each night the slumberer soul in things
Wakes for a while from time and space
To the love by which the spheres are moved
And feels, unveiled, Eternity's Face.
26.6.54
Page 585
Yoga of Sri Aurobindo
Not like a sky of scattered kindlings I come to you, Master!
Round the great sun that your Will is, held in my
heart's wide heaven,
Planet on planet bears life's varied movements like mirrors—
Wisdom-packed messengers twixt the deep gold and the
grey of the out-gaze,
Nine rhythms of deathless world- rapture born of a
silver silence,
Chariots of God-fire tirelessly rolling through
spaces of slumber—
And, in the Night of Nothing, three more soul-globes,
wheeling
Mysteries, nameless, lost to all save to the
all-seeing Sun-heart,
Waiting to break from the coil and clutch of the
infinite Dragon—
Twelve-fold being, spun as a unity, system of splendour,
Flaming family ruled by love of that Truth-lighted Centre,
Offered in wholeness to One whose spirit is
harmony eternal!
1.7.54
Page 586
The Mother: Two Phases
Infinite Bliss at work
In self-elected chains,
Bearing with a luminous smile
Love's load of myriad pains—
The Universal Mother,
Eternity seized by Time,
Dealing out hourly blessings
To earth for a goal sublime.
Infinite Bliss at play
In a fetter light as flowers,
Laughing with radiant motion
In the midst of hampering hours—
The Transcendental Mother,
Triumphant over all,
Swinging a care-free racquet
As if earth were a tennis ball!
18.8.54
Page 587
This too is Her Love*
This too is her love—that with unseeing gaze
She goes as if I were but empty space.
Not my poor soul's ill-carven presence now
But all the dreamed perfection, the pure brow
And falterless foot of the God unborn in me,
The white Absence of my mortality
Her eyes are fixed on, calling into time
The Eternal Truth whose gold my days begrime
And teaching me the time-transfigurant art
To make her alchemy's crucible my heart.
When, self-submerged in her vision's depth, I cease
To my own thought and grow a nameless peace,
Then all that's crude will fade to an apocalypt flare
And ever her eyes will rest on the light laid bare
By my dense clay she treats now like thin air!
10.5.55
* The background of this poem is the following letter, dated May 11, 1955, to the Mother: "I was waiting for you outside your bathroom yesterday. When you came out, you did not look at me at all. I couldn't understand why and it was simply awful—but, as always, I tried to feel that every act of yours is really a grace to me and is meant to remould me into the Divine truth The incident moved me to write a poem. Here it is—a symbolic transcription of my faith—but, of course, 1 hope I shan't have to write such poems very often."
Page 588
Blake
Each child to him a new star's halo bore,
Calling from his heart's mystic orient
Of hush and vigil and huge wonderment
Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior.
Life's End
(The emptiness of life's end as would be Grecianly thought and felt.)
In a little while to lie
Shut off from holy sky—
Deep in the dull earth thrust,
Oblivious even of dust.
Jet stone fringed with pale grass, I crave to know
What godhead you become when I stand so
Your hue is a mystery and no mere black:
Tell me what heaven you hold behind my back?
Page 589
Poems are dreams
That tear apart from our sleep
To walk the world upon their vibrant way
To break into a thousand slumbers' deep.
All poetry is but a tongue a-thrill
Between the unsaid and the unsayable.
The mystic ray comes stealthily to earth—
Subtle the spirit murdering our gloom—
A scrupulous crime-artist, it prefers
To loud extravagance of bludgeon-stroke
The lean stiletto's swift economy.
Page 590
A cave eaten by time in a mountain's flank
Fills with eternity the soul of man:
The rugged darkness deepens to a god
And looks out at the known world from the unknown,
Breathing on visible things an ancient sleep
That is omniscience sunk in its own light:
Here breaks the secret of that sovereign hush,
Cry of Infinity's creation heard
By none save seekers of Infinity's calm
With all their self one inward listening cave.
4.7.55
Page 591
The white of the moon
Glints in the wood,
Each bough and bole
Wafts a vague tune
Which leaves overbrood.....
O love of my soul!
The lake has set
A mirror deep
For the silhouette
Of willows a-lour
Where the winds weep.
It's the dream-hour.
A tender and vast
Solace has come,
Downward cast
From the star-lit Opaline dome.
Hour exquisite!
1955
Page 5922
Explosion of sunrise never can be heard:
That magic circle, golden core of life,
All-mothering womb of some ineffable bliss,
Bares no gloom-breaking drum of the infinite—
Its sign is one mate flower of shadowless sky.
1.1.56*
* this poem was composed before seeing the Mother's New-Year Message "The greatest victories are not announced by beat of drum!".
Page 593
No Hope Unless.
(Written after being shown, as a special favour, on my birthday—November 25, 1956—what the Mother had written about her experience of the Supramental Manifestation on February 29 of the same year)
No hope for me unless you break
Even from within my Cave
The gate of God the Gloom
Just as you broke from the infinite room
The door of God the Gold
And set free wave on dazzling wave,
Omnipotence-sea that rolled
Over all earth and gulfed all things
In the love that turns clay Supermind.
But, O sweet splendour, find
Yourself not only high above
But deep below in the blindnesses
And crumble down my stone
Of a heart! Unless
You are one with my night I shall never be
One with your solar infinity.
25.11.56
Page 595
A pecking bird's desire
To fly in the mirror-space—
Soul's fretting to wing higher
Meets with no gentler grace.
The hardness of that heaven
Is answer to the bright
Surface of self unrivens
We take for earth-delight.
When the small hungers gaze
Inward, a pinion-sweep
Knows the high mirror-space
An all-enfolding Deep.
19.9.57
Page 596
(Response to the news that what had once been thought impossible was achieved by science)
The other side of the moon,
Ambrosia ultimate
For dream's tongue, is now brought
On a photographic plate.
The savour of that silence—
The impossible—we speak forth.
But through this cosmic capture
More strange grows intimate earth:
Behind rapt eyes that scan
The back of the Man in the Moon,
Stirs deeper some almighty dark,
A self that is more than man.
12.12.59
Page 597
Crystal of calm held deep in the heart,
Wide wordless ether in the mind;
Out of the pure White all desire,
From the blue silence each winged cry!
Wake inward to hid light in life.
Upward to the unborn life in light!
I am weary of waking, weary of sleep,
Too weary to gain even peace from death
You only, O double divinity,
Lord overhead, Love caved in the core,
Can heal and rest and make me whole,
A source of shining energies
Just by one Grace-touch making me Yours!
1959
Page 598
O scarlet trembling into sleep,
O violet throbbing into trance,
Your edges of the invisible
Are touched for ever by my glance.
Eachwhere I see the rainbow's pomp
Bordered with nameless quietude,
Colour's cry vanishing to some vast
Of incommunicable mood.
Page 599
A rainbow-sound
The kingfisher floats,
Thrilled is the air
To seven notes.
What hidden voice
Of gold is heard
Singing through this
Spectrum of bird—
Mid all change-mist
Ever the same,
A seven-raptured
Single flame?
Page 600
Wide art thou, Fire, priest of our offering, free
Wideness within us, lavish the sky glow!
As a wheel's nave contains the spokes, so thou
Containest all the golden gods in thee!
Priest-souls, to win that laughing Sea of Sight,
By their vast ranging have uncovered all
The hidden rivers voiceful with the Light.
Inmost felicity free of every form
Leaps forth fire-tongued to taste life's myriad name....
A lightning is the outbreaking of Truth's Dream,
A thunder is the outstriking of Truth's Word.
Guarding the seasons of the Truth, He knows
All in me: Him I know not nor possess—
The Enemy-binder, all-felicity's Lord....
Who are the keepers of the blinded word,
Thy comrades once, now muttering crookedness?
The heart of sacrifice, the head that bows
Gain the King-Bull in whom all life is stored—
Wide fear-free pasture of the shining cows—
That honeyed World, Richness still left,
the unplumbed Excess!
No whirler of a brute and stupid Ring,
A senseless Law whose cycles fruitless roll,
He makes a Path and leads on it as King:
There is a myriad March to a single Goal....
In the Vast, where no foundation is, the Inmost One
Pyramids high the fuel of sacrifice
Flame-feeding the white body of Truth's Sun.
Page 601
My soul draws inward from horizonries
The rush of all its rapture to a hill
Uplifting with a single-pointed will
The myriad magic of those farnesses—
Enormous hill that pierces, high above
The fire and fragrance of the dream-sown air,
A sempiternal womb of vastness where
An all-appeasing quietude is love.
Page 602
Facing you, hill.
My gaze is drawn
From your indigo foot to your top of tawn
With a worshipping will.
I look and look until your stance
Suddenly weighs
My lifted glance
Deep down to some unnamable base
Of silent self within—
Whence to a haloing blue
My own soul masses up, out-moutaining you
Page 603
Sun's centre a rapt earth no man has viewed,
Centre of earth a lost beatitude
Whose gold immensity no god has found:
When that high trance and this light underground
Marry, then gods will here take burning birth
And a cool cradle with curtaining aureole
Know man born there above—one breakless Whole
Of perfect life will bear new sun, new earth.
Page 604
Eyes shut when the lips break the Spirit's seal
And rhythmic rents dawn through a measureless dark,
Lines that are gold streaks in eternity's veil:
Thought, stilled, looks inward—then God's light laughs out.
From mighty farnesses the Truth-sun strikes:
Its seer and singer bodies that mystery—
He works apart in his sod's secret strength-
Omniscient loneliness creator of worlds.
Page 605
Night
Cool vigil by rapt ear and far-drawn sight
Helping to hold—through hours unroofed, apart—
Within that throbbing void which is my heart
The stillness and the starriness of night.
25.9.90
Page 658
Earth's lamp is lit on the Master's table,
A vigil above the white-sheet trance,
Watching some world-creative fable
Break there—divine truth's silhouette-dance—
Black lines of beauty, curvings sable,
Like lashes moved by mystery's glance,
Dream-signs that trace through all time's babel
The calm of a godlike countenance.
Page 608
Great poems came to him begging for birth,
Knowing that he alone could make heaven earth,
That never in the human heart their truths could stand
Ere on their knees they bowed their heads to his hand.
Page 609
The sea, one quivering grey,
Is wroth that ample day
Has gone with its hours of golden spume and spray.
Soon night's deep mood
Sinks in: now fades all sullen stress
Of time-loss: mystery-hued
The sea foam-flecks to eternal s arriness.
23.12.60
Page 610
Is it Archangel Gabriel by God's throne
Sounding the advent of the Day of Wrath?
Suddenly the wonder-widerness fades. A path
Draws back from the future's depth of the unknown,
Leaps out from inner vision to earth-space.
Ending in a neighbour's window, a frowsy face....
The distant trumpet of a nose is blown.
Page 611
Waiting
Humble and calm will wait
Until the hour of Grace
Fulfils Your ancient vow
To lift my fallen face.
10.4.63
Page 612
Paint not the thing but its quiver in your brain.
Name not an object, build up by its line—
Touch on mood-touch—a symbolled mystery.
Give all the initiative to unthought words.
Live in the palace on the other side of the stone.
Raise by strange harmonies some white Beyond—
A Flash supreme that wakes, in the abyss
Filling the heart, the Shape that no one is.
Page 613
The solitude before the world was made—
Quiet so vast it cried out to be filled!
A throbbing gold buried within God's deep
Broke into sight and the One was all a plunge
From infinite to waiting infinite.
Farnesses everywhere sought some lost love
Across a sudden gulf they knew as time,
A wondrous wine which thrilled on to draw out
The secret heaven of an ever-wandering hell.
12.6.67
Page 614
When the rose opens,
Who can hear The explosion of its beauty?
Still unclear, In all that redness breaking,
The real rose Deeper in the outshining cup
A silence grows....
Forever the veil, the secret,
Till we have furled Back into bud within us
Our wide-awake world
And, free from the mind's flutter,
In spelled repose
Over some core of being
Eye-petals close.
10.7.67
Page 615
A Line is There..
A line is there that runs like sudden sleep
Between the dusk of one world and the dawn
Of some surprising sky undreamed before.
Inward and upward through that streak a flux
Of sight and sound fades to a blank of bliss,
The soul—foreglint of every end uncaught.
25.10.67
Page 616
Above, the calm blue light quelling each sigh-
Below, the singing rose-deeps of the soul.
Sorrow is a pinch of dust left by dead dreams,
Joy is the starry toil by which things live.
Vast throbs the world with a wonder in its womb.
21.12.69
Page 617
This hand, small hungerer for infinities,
Craving the whole future of earth's flowers, outstretching
Five fingers to the million-lustred sun,
Praying that invisible breasts of goddesses
Shape it to a dream that wings beyond all deeds—
This hand is ever empty, ever open
Lest there be a close to the mystery in life's heart,
The beating of a rhythm without a name,
Call of a deep that shakes the silent stars.
10.6.70
Page 618
Has fire already answered us
With its quick-gold convolvulus?
Or the rose lighted its reply
In crimson-circled symmetry?
Does downward Jew's translucent ball
Need let no secret utterance fall?
Will never the hollow of man's ear
Catch aught save tones earth etches clear?
To unviewed heights flame-tongue must leap,
Endless horizons rose-round sweep.
What soul-abyss will dew-drop plumb?
Ear, seek some Godhead waiting dumb!
1970
Page 619
My Soul
Into the depths of night
I sent my soul—
A little searching speck,
It was clasped by the Whole.
Out of the depths of right
My soul turned home,
Feeling its own small lead
A starred sky-dome.
20.8.70
Page 620
Still Water
Still water, reverie's gymnast, standing even
The Himalaya on its head! Occult-eyed seer
To whom the depths are hidden heights and all
Heaven is a prophecy floating in earth's heart!
Magician laying the sky at man's frail feet,
Yet by cool flattery flaming higher the ache
Of the prisoner soul for the bodiless beyond.
Page 621
The Yogi''s Death
Out of the eyes the thought took wing to the clouds;
Out of the nostrils the small life blew free;
From the lax lips the earth-spirit drifted down
To vagues of primal sleep. An arrow shot
From the deep heart to the head's crown, the soul
Broke into wideness, grew the All, the One.
22.5.71
Page 622
Worship and wideness—gold fire in calm space—
Heart-core intensities fed by the immense
Silence that comes of farness from all clay—
Lotuses of laughter sprung out of the deep,
Plucked high by the hushed lotus overhead—
Limbs that forever love unveiled within
By fixed stars silvering some remote of sleep.
12.4.73
Page 623
Out of what lampless grief with what dark cry
I sought your grace, O Mother heavenly yet mine—
And you with hands of patient artistry
Moulded my broken life to a peace divine!
Then into that superb marmoreal poise
You lent a pulse, a motion and a voice
Alive with a laughing light's eternity.
I cast no shadow now, for all my limbs
Move in a bliss of shining servitude
Pledged to your love whose beauty bears no flaw.
And, by that passionate and plastic mood,
I break the groping freedom of my whims—
To claim forever your godhead's fetterless law.
Page 624
O This Old Age..
O this old age that makes a mockery
Of Helen and Troy's fire a waste of love
To Menelaus's blurred and bounded eye!
Alone the poet's will—"Tine shall not move
When once the flawless note is struck"—keeps bright
The Swan-sired face and the reddening topless towers.
Nought save his reverie knows through human sig
Eternities go flashing mid the hours.
17.11.73
Page 625
Within this vast and vacant night
Dwindling to nothingness all light,
How shall my soul burn to the unknown?
But oh the high dark firmament—
Is not that empty calm God's own
Incomprehensible silence blent
With the universe? H s secrecy
Hangs overhead—no huge dread eye
Refusing the heart's search but one
Wide world-effacing sign to go
Inward to a hidden hush and know
His superhuman Self alone.
13.12.76
Page 626
(This is an 8-line experiment in a 4-foot metre of 8 syllables per line, in which the first line contains 8 words, the second 7, the third 6, and so on in a regular diminishing series until the eighth, which has just a single 8-syllabled word.)
Dumb dusk has taught his heart to sing.
He shuts his mortal ears and eyes—
He pierces through each outlined thing
And strains beyond earth's harmonies:
Poet with visionary wing
Penetrates supernatured skies—
Innumerably glimmering
Incomprehensibilities!
Page 627
Sehra
Freedom—24.4.1980
With the Far-away's call
Quickening your heart-beat
You freed yourself from all
Earth's bitter-sweet.
Terrible at times the means
By which the soul
Drops out of mortal space
To its inmost goal.
A moment your whole life hung
'Twixt heaven and abyss;
Then the Great Mother caught you
In Her arms of bliss.
No shadow fell from the past.
A smiling future's light
Flowered through your face to answer
Our clamorous questioning sight.
26.4.80
Page 628
Road Down—Road Up
Without a word you went.
Ungracious not to tell—
Unless your silence meant
The sheer Ineffable....
The dark abyss devised
A horror for your part.
Suddenly you surprised
Death by your Godward heart.
While playing his tragic role,
In a bravery of sleep
Heaven's depth within your soul
You plumbed with your blind leap.
6.5.1980
Page 629
Voice from Within
"Your work is ended, your time over.
Look now for all your bliss beyond.
Forsake the world, let go your lover,
Break every bend
That links the body to the soul
With transitory smiles and tears.
Plunge to the diamond pure and whole
Coring frail years!
O does it matter how you die—
Undone by self on in sick bed—
If either way to its Mother-sky
Your soul is lei?
The passage may be rough or smooth—
What difference to the Light's true child?
Great hands await to calm and soothe
The wounded, the wild.
Sweeter to seek the gentle hour,
But if the heart stands lost and lone
Waver not, claim the sudden power
To pierce the Unknown!"
10.5.80
Page 630
To My Own Heart
A little more, a little less
Of transitory breath,
What can it bring of blessedness,
What can it bar of death—
An ever-present inner throe—
When the great Master's gone
And the sweet Mother chose to go
And left their children lone?
Only remains a lustre-touch
On Spirit by the soul—
But this one joy is always such,
Be the body broken or whole.
It makes no change that one should leave
Sooner or later, die
Self-slain or let slow Time achieve
Its finishing artistry.
If triumph is to meet, all clear
Of veils, the vanished Light,
Heart, grieve not that the face most dear
Has robbed you of its sight!
12.5.80
Page 631
Two Months
Since her own flight, two months have flown
Out of the earth's mad whirl,
Joining in the depths of the unknown
The eternity of my girl.
Our life is woven of vanishing time,
Death after death are we.
When will this heart be hushed to rhyme
With my girl's eternity?
Soon may that miracle be done—
A bliss-bolt from God's blue
That, piercing day and night, makes one
Eternity of us two!
24.6.80
Page 632
Life and Death
Death broke our lives
Wide apart—
But death has cut my distance
From your deep heart.
So close by night and day,
Yet touch I empty air—
This new life's double way,
Sweetness most hard to bear.
Never would I have grown
One with your soul of love
If never left alone
A body which death clove
From your abandoned form
And urged to f train
Void arms to the Unseen
Calling to clasp my pain.
30.9.80
Page 633
7
Love's Plunge
She was born with so great love
It broke her heart
And, plunging outward, clove
Death's veil apart.
She cried: "Where lives the one
I've sought each hour?
All that I deemed my own
Flees my love's power.
"Shall I find you in the deep
That gathers all
To a single soothing sleep
Beyond life's call?
"Within that gulfing peace
The dreamed and the true
Might merge—and eternities
Be endless you."
5.11.80
Page 634
8
At the Mother's Samadhi
A glory You've made my days
Because Your feet
Have let me count their steps
With each heart-beat.
Though pain on pain has struck,
I'll not blaspheme,
Calling death's sleep to drown
Life's shipwrecked dream.
Forever Yours until
The appointed close—
Only in eyes of light
I seek repose
My days You've made a glory.
Abysms I'll cross
Yet reach the Immense, the Full
And lose all loss.
6.11.80
Page 635
9
Transmutation
Seeing you freed from the long tremor of human breath,
Each flame in me straightened in that deep calm,
your death.
Flickerless, the soul now strained to an empyrean air
Through your still face of all-forgetting endless prayer.
Surrendered limbs, in-gaze, faint smiling lips apart—
It's so you unknotted forever the time-grip on my heart.
16.11.80
Page 636
Solace
I grieve not when I see you in my dream,
Wandering your garden: lovely were the flowers
But lovelier still your fingers plucking them:
Even so the grip of God on your sweet hours....
Page 637
The crescent edges up. A ghost wind grieves.
O lovers watching the white sickle rise
And quivering like a harvest that had eyes,
Your souls have root in earth, but each dusk-while
They are cut away by heaven's perfect smile
Before the gross blade Death gathers its sheaves.
Page 638
God's sun makes all life the same black—the white
Man and the negro stop with equal night
This gold and cast their shadows of ignorance
Not less dark in the wise man and the dunce.
Page 639
Not the mind's soul but the dim soul of body
Sits on the top of human prayer ascending—
Quick fire with its flame-tip a stone of slumber—
A weight of blinded hungers bending
This bright tongue backward from the rapturous music
By which the secrecy of heaven knows rending.
Page 640
So few can understand
My emptiness
Which the Ineffable
Chooses to bless;
With a day-by-day undoming
Of the little mind,
Each night a break in the cavern
That keeps the heart blind.
Dreams and desires pressing
On transparences
Are drawn away to nothing
By sudden skies.
Now waits my life without
A gripping "I"___
A hush that hearkens ever
For a world-cry
To people the vast void
With golden gods
Whose feet make everywhere
A rapture of roads
For men to reach a future
Of soul in soul,
Harmonies love-lighted
To a deathless goal.
How shall those unseen glories
Poor words express,
When all I show is a vigil
Of emptiness?
26.2.81
Page 641
Will water ever be itself?
With or without a boa
Always an other is afloat—
Tree bending over, cloud poised high,
Bird wandering or blue birdless sky,
An answer to unquestioning life,
Swift seizing of the passing-by—
Never a clear in its own right,
Never the void that by sheer light
Shows its own surface or true deep-
Here is an ever-open eye
Possessed by day, obsessed with night—
No freedom till un-wattered by
Self-loss in the Eternal's sleep.
25.4.83
Page 642
Between
Between the brief heart-beats snail silences—
Small like thin clefts of fathomless canyons,
Abysses of the unknown, God-gaps in man.
A fabulous future waits our frailties there.
He whom the throbs that measure passing life
Hold not engrossed—who stands aware of the dark
Hidden twixt flash and flash of earth-desire
Seizes even now a sudden divinity—
The timelessness haunting sleep's solitude—
That infinite distance, death's forgetful face—
The fullness of the void whose gaze is the sun—
The Omnipresent's secret pierced by the stars.
Page 643
Moon shadowed by earth-love
Bliss-image of truth's gold
In eclipse that will not move—
Eternity wrapt in time's embrace!
Suddenly the wide sense-hold
Slips and the haunting haze
Floats off the full white face—
Now freedom dawns—the dream grows one
Forever with a stainless sun!
3.7.83
Page 644
Minnie—10.8.1982
1. To Her
Heart whose each beat cried "Brother" to my heart,
Love that shone ever from a depth of gold—
Could such keen life fall victim to time's dart?
Surely some secret of the Timeless came,
A sweet undying vibrance, to unfold
Infinity's hue to richen your own flame.
Clear sign you had borne of high God-given birth—
Those lips of beauty touched by truths unseen!
Verse, winging free beyond the nights and days
That smile or sigh a short spell over earth,
Revealed the Immortal's trance to be your gaze ...
Yet from the white of visionary space
Your mystery shared our common grey and green,
Throbbed to each ache of the dust and, till your death,
Sistered my body and soul in one warm breath.
14.10.82
Page 645
2. From Her
"Let the pang pass!
Why must you grieve
When the gold summons came
For the small life to leave
"All its dim joys and tears?
I am one with the Heart in whom
My wandering days and nights
Sought infinite room.
"But, from that godlike glow,
Still my arms stretch to you
Bridging the loneliness between
Earth's eye and heaven's hue.
"O let their dream-touch wake
Your sleep to an inmost sight
That clasps in my loved face
The dawn of a deathless light!"
16.10.82
Page 646
Mind free from thought, heart void of hunger's bond
Make room for a gold link with a vast Beyond.
A silence opens to an eternily,
Like some wide, quiverless, unsleeping eye.
A flame unflickering, rooted in core of clay,
Flies up to kiss a secret deathless Day.
2.8.83
Out of the heart a fire goes flowering up
To unfold a secret halo round the face.
No vision of time's unrest can ever stop
The fathomless silence kindling in the gaze—
Sign of the Immortal in the mortal, lit
By the self-wakening bodied Infinite.
8.8.83
"Nothing the kindled soul has known is lost:
There's but a seeming desert to be crossed.
Strive not. Stand deedless, silent, bare.
All 1 shall do. I wait within, to out-flare.
The godhead filling your muteness with his name,
A rhythm and rapture of the Undying's world-game!"
17.8.83
Page 647
Deep in heart's space a self-enraptured void
Eats ever the honey of a gold loneliness.
Out of that secrecy as in a dream
Earth's tossing seas and musing hills are born.
They are crossed, they are climbed, but through the
labour and love
Always the sense is aglow with the mysteried One
Who is all yet world-free, infinitely None.
27.8.83
Page 648
There is no turning back
Once the small face has known
A sudden waking up
To the vast that is All and One.
A stroke of measureless light,
In a blind moment caught
Through life's rebuff, sinks deep,
Hushing all hungry thought.
When arms outstretched to enclose
The dream of a perfect earth
Hold but a void, in a flash
The Ever-Free takes birth.
30.5.84
Page 649
Night has its wakefulness
When space is all dark—
An opening of myriad eyes,
Spark on pale spark
Watches the unlimited
Waits for the unknown.
They mirror a future
Of potencies sown
In hours of dreaming
When the soul is alone
With the sky's far mysteries
Of flights unflown.
He who can capture
The flutter of those eyes
In a twinkle of hear -beats
Prepares paradise.
1.9.85
Page 650
At Last
At last the unfading Rose—
Felt mine yet sought afar
In the flowering of forms
That proved but surface-sheens.
Mirrors of a mystery
That never broke to a star.
Now wakes a sudden sky
In the centre of my chest.
Bliss-wafts that never die
Float from a petalled fire
Rooted in godlike rest.
They spread in the whole world's air,
Gold distances breathe close.
Worship burns everywhere.
Life flows to the Eternal's face.
Unveiled within, light's spire,
At last the unfading Rose.
15.5.86
Page 651
Suddenly life's sweetest love was snatched away
To a veiled Within that gave no marvel back.
Then a strange silence found its final word:
"This paradise must swallow up all bliss,
Each smile and laugh and earth-intoxicate cry
Must plunge beyond its goldenest dream to a deep
Of heaven-honeyed less, a void ever full,
Where sits the Solitary who is All,
Drunk with the infinitude of the One Self.
10.10.87
Page 652
Love
Love makes the world go roand"—yes, ever round
With never a breaking of the blissful bound.
Is it for eternities of a single gyre
That from the heart's core leaped the quenchless fire
Not to be gathered in one charmed embrace
But called by the silences of endless space
The Dweller in the dreaming depths arose,
Touched by a shadow which no mortal throws.
To pass beyond all orbit-dazzled joy,
To reach an ecstasy's edge and then destroy
The magic curve that holds back the huge light
Born of a fathomless mystery of self-sight—
Such winging from wide blue to wider sky
Marks that ineffable Eagle's destiny.
Page 653
This Scattered Life
This scattered life, both flux and flame,
You must seize as one and stamp
As a love-letter to Eternity
From the transience of a tramp.
2.6.88
Poet-Vision
The sun through shutters loosed on the poet's floor
Gold stripes of tigers none had housed before.
Feel, mid time's fret and fall and fevered noise.
Some endless Egypt's pyramid-equipoise!
Page 654
I've visioned many barenesses—the beach
Of an untrod isle lost in a secret sea—
A hill, pure rock, out soaring all bird-speech—
Skies of unbroken blue serenity.
An unforgettable moment I have stood
Bereft of voice to act interpreter
To a timeless flash of unveiled Aphrodite!
But oh the nakedness when one deep night
Caught suddenly my nind beyond thought's stir,
Shorn of a million stars to grope sheer God!
14.11.89—23.12.89
Page 655
Who rings those bells,
Numberless, white?
What happy hands a: work
In the towering night?
None hears the myriad tune
Trembling afar
To wake the infinite sleep
Twixt star and star.
The Immense await:; beyond
All fling of eye.
Only when lids weigh down
With a burden of sky
A Self within all selves
Breaks wide the brain
And we reach at last the secret
Of the silver strain
To which the
Unknown sets free
Its core of care
For the tiny aches which wonder
Who twinkles the dark air.
Unveiled are then the workers
At each gloom tide.
Calling our heartbeats where
Eternities hide
15.9.90
Page 656
There is a falling-off
From true infinity
Until you heed and hail
Its glory in forms that die.
They are step on step by which
From point to point of Time
Godhead moves through a chequered course
Of lowly or sublime
Back to the eternal hush
It never really left
Even though by each small cry it seems
Of plenitude bereft.
But if your heart is caught
In forms that flame and fade
And the slightest aching shifts
From the maker to the made,
You'll never plumb he depth
Of everlastingness.
Accept His world but give no pledge
To a beauty that is less
Than the Unborn, the Untimed
Who is nothing if not all
That your heart in the midst of hours
Chooses to crave and call.
22-29.4.90
Page 657
A Fancy of the Elements
Earth gives its patience to your calm heartbeat,
Water its singing search for a hue remote,
Air marks you neighbour to that far-off note,
And fire lays bare in you the dream complete.
Earth moulds the firm delicacy of your chin,
Water the distant smile and the pure kiss,
Air the deep-carven nostrils breathing bliss,
And fire looks out through your eyes the God within.
Page 659
15 August—Eternal India
How can you say our day is dimming?
We live by a never-setting sun
While sacred memories cease not hymning
The beauty of the timeless One.
Here where the running hours remember
The life that saints of old have led,
The holy steep you strive to clamber
Shall turn familiar to your read.
For here our heart is linked with ages
And burns with all that flamed before,
And clasps through union with past sages
The Unknown as if a friend of yore.
Among us ancient spirits hove
To lift the young aspirant high—
Take but a step and you'll discover
That you have climbed a mile thereby.
For Gods shall come half way. arisen
To bear towards heaven your earth's small song
And the One you strain to seek for a season
Himself shall seek you all year long!
1991
Page 660
When the heart hushes to the night,
A wound grows wide with aching
Because I have failed in taking
Within my trembling tune
The calm white lines of the moon—
The godlike presence that must light
All fumblings of my human sight
And with majestic mystery move
Through each outburst of lyric love.
17.4.1992
Page 661
Greatness
Greatness and gaiety go hand in hand.
Breaking through common bonds of human kind,
The epoch-maker knows no wavering
Or tremor—least the Mystic Messenger.
No panic for the Splendour from the peaks-
Its gaze outruns all distances and grips
Each danger far ahead of the dire stroke
And laughs with deep prepotence. There's no fate
With sudden leap from darkness. Even in grim
Postures of life its heart has shed all fear.
Reckless of what may wound its venturings,
It goes upon its gleaming way With a smile.
No rest until its own self's image, lost
In the world-abyss, grows one with the summit-shine
And climbs the peaks with greatness's gaiety!
26.7.1992
Far
Far from his own heartbeat, his wakeful day
Breathes a huge mountain-air is lucidity
And views a wide earth many-faced yet one.
A calm conspiracy of signalling stars,
An infinite mystery's throb or silvery throb
Of news from nowhere tingling everywhere,
Is now his sleep. Within his fragile form
Gods move with radiant smiles from hush to hush
Of inmost heaven: an immortality
Touches with healing hands the million shards
Left round his stillness by the tramp of time.
1.7.1993
Page 662
On a Number of Poems not included in Overhead Poetry
"Flic poem is a good one, with beauty and distinction both in its thought and in its language." (1930)
Revelaition
"The poem contains nothing of the highest quality but it is well-conceived and well-written and well-rhythmed. The last verse is the best because at once large in thought and simple and poetically sincere." (1931)
[On an early version (7.2.31), Sri Aurobindo commented:]
"Your language and rhythm are much more perfect, more full and deep and harmonious than before. There is still wanting the last subtle element which makes both language and rhythm sovereign and inevitable; but that may come in time—as you have already had it or something very close to it in a line or couplet here and there."
[Later (2.10.1934) I wrote "This is a slightly altered form of a poem seen by you years ago (1931). I have tried to give a last touch which seemed to have been lacking. How is it now, and what kind of style does it have?" Sri Aurobindo replied:
"It is good. (Effective [style] with a heightening towards the illumined as it goes on.)"
Far Flute
"Yes, it is a good poem. The beauty of the last two verses, especially the third, lies in a certain strong, straightforward, subtle and delicate simplicity rising to profundity and
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grandeur in the last two lines." The following lines were marked: 6,7,8: "are among the best you have written"; 10,11,12: "you have a very striking and profoundly suggestive image"; last line of verse 2: "Very good line"; lines 4-11 of verse 3: "All this close is excellent." (9,4,31)
"It is very good, especially the last verse. The closing line of the first stanza and that of the third—to say nothing of the last line of all which is the best—are very fine poetry . As a whole it shows an easy mastery of poetic language and rhythm in English—the natural mastery an English poet might have." (18.5.31)
Canticle
"Very good." (?.5.31)
The Secret Splendour
[On the first draft:] "First verse admirable—also the fourth line of the second verse. But the second verse is far from perfect. Poetry that arrives at its aim gives the reader a sense of satisfying finality in the expression (even when the substance is insignificant); it is like an arrow that hits the target in the centre. Poetry that passes by the target or hits only the outside of it, either fails or gets a partial success, but in any case it does not carry that sense of satisfying finality. This is the difference between the two verses."
[On the second draft of verse 2:] Lines 1-3 "stand with a very bad grace beside the poetic quality of the closing lines."
[On the third version of lines 1-3 in verse 2:] "Your new version will do."
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Young-hearted River
"Good—especially the last twelve lines, which are very fine. This is genuine lyrical poetry, felicitous in speech, unexceptionable in rhythm." (22.8.31)
Hierophantic
"A very good poem." [The lines 'Curb and 'The self-sufficient clang were noted by Sri Aurobindo for their expressive quality.] (1.9.31)
"O Divine Adorable Mere ..."
"It is not so poor as you seem to make out. The thought is fine and the feeling is there; the expression is good but in places there are failures of fineness in the details, especially in certain turns of the language." [In the version printed here the few 'failures' have disappeared owing to Sri Aurobindo's finishing touch.] (4.9.31)
To Maheshwari
"The poem does not call for destruction; it has a sort of modernised Elizabethanness about it that is very attractive." (15.9.31)
[In reply to the question "Please tell me if these fifteen lines can stand as a complete, satisfying poem. At present I don't quite know how to continue or improve them." Sri Aurobindo replied:]
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"It seems to me complete as it is, and satisfying also." (7.10.31)
Canzonet
"It is very good, remarkably graceful and delicate."
(15.10.31)
"The poem is very fine. I find your rhymes often rather coldly and vacantly distant from one another; there is, for example, between 'astir' and 'wanderer' all the space that divides London from Tokyo. However, that is perhaps on my part the prejudice of an ear trained to closer and more companionate rhyme systems; in any case this poem is felicitous enough for it not to matter. Let me point out, however, that once 'on the sheer, truth-luminous peaks' there is no chance of a fall—a willed descent would be possible but not a tumble! That, however, is no objection from the poetic point of view; the poet is allowed to pose impossibilities in order to drive his suggestions more intensely home." (18.10.31)
My Prayer
[Sri Aurobindo's comment on the version of which this is the final draft:]
"I think, if you omit the two weak lines and make the three or four slight alterations 1 suggest, it will make a fine poem, close-knit and single idea'd as you want it, and also grave and profound, with a very penetrating mystic and symbolic image." (1931)
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On my poetry up to the end of August 1931:
"Your possibility lies in a combination of refined elevation and subtle elegance, the Virgilian and not the Aeschylean manner, with which an attempt at overterse compactness of thought does not agree." (26.8.1931)
AE's comment on some poems of mine sent by D.K. Roy:
"Many lines show a talent for rhythm which is remarkable, since the poet is not Writing in his native but in a learned language." (6.1.1932)
'Yes, it is good poetry. The fourth line and the opening of the last verse seem to me very striking and felicitous in thought and phrase. The rhythm is very good throughout."
(March 1932)
"It is a good poem." (30.3.32]
Sri Krishna
"The poem just missed being a fine one. With these few alterations (very slight, after all) in wording and rhythm, I think the miss becomes a hit But how does it express the essence of Avatarhood? It may be said to express the response of the embodied Soul to the divine Descent.
"I don't quite understand the 'from' in the second line and suggest 'in' instead. If the 'glory of unimaginable Love' is the Avatar, it does not arise from the abject clay but descends into it and manifests in it. In any case 'in' gives a more poetic suggestion." (25.1.32)
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Rishi Parasara's; Invocation
"It is very good indeed. In this there is the true inspiration, felicity and power of phrase, and rhythms that are not common or obvious and are subtly effective." (8.5.32)
Radha's Rebuke to the Worldly-minded
[I wrote: "This poem almost out-Brookes Rupert Brooke, at two or three places, in distant rhyming. I hope this defect is not unforgivable. Has it, otherwise, inspiration enough?"] "Yes, it is a good poem." (3 6.32)
A Freudian's Midnight Meditation
[In reply to my question, ''If you don't mind, will you make a brief criticism of this, shall I say 'mystical phantasy'?" Sri Aurobindo replied:]
"I have no criticism to offer it is very well done. I don't know why it is called Freudian; it seems, so far as I can understand it, an agnosticisation of a semi-Christian-mystic materialised Buddhist-Adwaita Inconscience-subconscience-superconscience worship. Is that right? Probably not,—for as I am not in sympathy with the worship of Divine or Undivine Darkness, my penchant being for Light, I have probably not grasped the hear of the mystery." (7.6.32)
Names
"It is well done." (7.6.32)
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The Great Bear
"It is a very good poem." (9.6 32)
The Great Bear [trs.]
"It is a good translation." (14. 6.32)
The Dead
"It is well done." (20.6.32)
Singers of the Spirit
a) [First version:] "there are good lines (couplets) marked ... [stanza 2, lines 1-2; stanza 5, lines 4-5; stanza 4, lines 1-2, 4-5], though they fall off to closing lines of a more common manufacture." (19.6.32)
b) [In a second version "Our banners of song-beauty leap" replaced "The banners of our beauty'leap":] "Surely it was not like this in the previous version. It struck me then as having magic in the expression, here it sounds commonplace." [On a new stanza, now 3:] "This verse is very good. But alter the 'we'—it makes the thing too personal and boastful. It is the action of the powers of these forces that should be kept in front—and their personality should not be suggested. [Sri Aurobindo altered 'we' to 'they' in line 2.] ['The line "Our tones of fathomless joy instil" was altered to "With tones of fathomless joy we instil":] "If you alter in that way, the whole beauty is gone. When a perfect inspiration comes, to alter it is a crime and usually carries its own punishment. The alteration you propose makes a deep and solemn psychic truth turn at once into an intellectual statement." [On a new closing line:] "The closing line should
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agree more with the mystic suggestiveness of the phrasing of the rest." (22.6.32)
c) [On a third version, with an entirely new opening stanza] "The first verse is very good; but I don't know whether "We venture to reclaim" [line 3] would not sound in many ears too colloquially familiar, as in 'I venture to object'. These locutions are dangerous things—those I mean which are capable of suggesting such familiarity. There are lines in the Victorian poets which have become to the present day mind almost comic from this cause.
d) [On the final version:] Stanzas 1 and 3: "Very good"; lines 7,8 and 19-20: "Good". (18.7.32)
a) [On the version originally submitted:]
"The idea and vision in it are something greater than anything in the other two poems [Albert Samain's 'Pannyre aux talons d'or" and Flecker''] translation of it] but most of the time you are trying to express your idea and vision rather than expressing them. All the same it is a good poem, and the lines I have marked [1-6, '0-14, 19, 27-28] are very fine, while the rest are skilful enough in a way in expression and rhythm and would be adequate for a smaller purpose."
b) [On the version printed here, which embodies some alterations suggested by Sri Aurobindo and others made by myself: ]
"It has become a very fine poem. Your two new lines [17 and 20] are exceedingly good [and 'wearies and wavering falls to rest' is also very fine, are immense improvement upon what you wrote before." (2716.32)
[In reply to the note, "As poets are often mistaken about both
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their defects and their merits, I should like to know from you whether to regard this poem as a finished product or not.":]
"It seems to me a finished product." (28.6.32)
The Kiss of Man (trans.)
"I find the original rather silly in the brilliant French way of silliness; but it is well-turned -- also in the well-built French way. Your translation is well alone and 1 find it more poetic than the original, and it has the merit of getting rid of the note of half sentimental half sensual fatuity that was there." (23.7.32)
The Stranger (trans.)
"The poem of Sully Prudhomme is an exceedingly fine one."
[In answer to my query whether he had sent back my translation without passing at y judgment because I had not followed with absolute faithfulness the turn of expression in the close of the original:]
"If I did not make any comment on your translation, it was in the sense that silence is consent or content or satisfaction, if you like. It was a very perfect translation, and the departure from the original towards the close was quite justified; for the sestet was the best part of the poem." (28.7.32)
The Slave (trans.)
"Heredia's poem is excellent in form, insignificant in substance; the translation is very well done." (31.7.32)
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Conquerors (trans.)
[I wrote: "I have translated Heredia's Les Conquerants which, I believe, many Frenchmen regard as the eighth wonder of the world. Will you assign Heredia his right place in the poetic hierarchy? Flecker says of him that he was 'the most perfect poet that ever Uvea—Horace not in it.' "]
"I cannot say that I find Heredia's sonnet to be either an eighth wonder or any wonder. Heredia was a careful workman in word and rhythm and from that point of view the sonnet is faultless. If that is all that is needed for perfection, it is perfect. But otherwise, except for the image in the first two lines and the vagour of the fourth, I find it empty. Horace, at least, was seldom that.
"The first six lines of your translation do not come to much1 — but the seventh and eighth and the whole sestet are fine. There is much more of the precious, if not of the 'the fabulous metal' in them than in the burnished perfection of the corresponding lines of Heredia." (5.8.32)
Ilda (trans.)
"The octet is exceedingly good, as harmonious as the original and profounder in its poetry and sense. The next four lines are not successful in rhythm and do not go home.2 The last two lines are good; so if you accept my suggestions it will be a very fine poem." ( 8.8.32)
Love's Complaint
"It is a very good poem." (28.8.32)
1. The present version is touched up in places by Sri Aurobindo.
2. These lines as they stand are win Sri Aurobindo's correction. In my translation there was a misunderstanding of an image in the French.
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'There is nothing outstanding in the poem, but it is a good poem, harmonious in expression and rhythm and the form is good also." (1.11.32)
"It is very graceful and finished in form." (17.12.32)
[I wrote: " You must have read of the heroic fight of Toussaint L'Ouverture and his negrozs against the armies sent by Napoleon to Haiti to reintroduce slavery there. Below is a ballad describing one of its most memorable incidents, with of course, the license of poetic imagination. What would be your criticism of it?" Sri Aurobindo replied:]
"I don't know that I can pronounce. I have not much taste for the English ballad form; it is generally either too flat or too loud and artificial and its basic stuff is a strenuous popular obviousness that needs a very rare genius to transform it. As far as I can see, yours is a ballad that is not a ballad and yet does not succeed in being a pure poem because the ballad strain clings to it still. Yet I dare say it may be effective for its purpose." (20.11.1932)
[In reply to the query, "Doe: this apostrophe strike the critical tympanum as somewhat of a 'barbaric yap'?":]
"No, it seems to me very good —except that 'Delight' sounds rather abrupt and inconclusive as a line all by itself."
(22.12.32)
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Arabesque
[To the question, "As the title indicates, this poem is designedly recherche, but has it inspiration enough to make it successful? And does the form-symmetry hold the parts together sufficiently?":]
"Yes, it is successful enough and has sufficient symmetry."
"It is very good poetry. As a sonnet, the building is very well done." (4.4.1933)
"It seems to me a good poem." (5.4.33)
Vesper tide
"It is quite good — throughout." (12.4.33)
The Crescent of Beauty
"Yes, it is good." (14.4.33)
Euthanasia
"It is the best blank verse, I think, you have written as yet. There is a consistence in the building and a definite and effective rhythm— necessary characters of which your blank verse was quite blank before." (25.6.33)
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Sakuntala's Farewell
"It is very good poetry and there are many fine lines. I don't know about influence — probably several have coalesced together. Perhaps Keats, Yeats, Love and Death and one or two others." (28.6.33)
"Each line is a cut gem by itself and there is sufficient variation of movement or at east of rhythmic tone." (8.7.33)
"Sero te amavi ..."
The lines are very good." 130.6.33)
The Aeroplane
"It is a good poem — a 'well-built' one also." (12.7.33)
Pilgrim of Truth
"It is a good poem — the second stanza is very fine and perfect in expression and building. In the first your rather academic 'purpureal' does not please me and comes in like a false note. With a good alteration there the first stanza would be almost as good as the second."1 (31.7.33)
"It is very good." (3.8.33)
1. Sri Aurobindo accepted the alteration: 'impurpled'.
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Song-sculpture
"This too is a very good poem —- there is inspiration and an expression that corresponds to the inspiration." (22.8.33)
Pointers
"It is a very melodious and delicate lyric — this is a new music for you and very successful." (26.8.33)
"It is a very successful lyric." (.0.8.33)
A Song of Quiet
"This too is very successful." (30.8.33)
Her Changing Eyes
[In answer to the query, "Is this poem very commonplace, especially with that ending in 'Eternity'?":]
"It is rather good, I think.(12.9.33)
Truth's Wayfaring
"It is good." (3.9.33)
Truth-archery
[In reply to the question "How does this poem express its Upanishadic idea?":]
"Very well." (5.9.33)
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[I asked, "Should this poem be limboed?")
"It has its qualities and especially much poetic colour. The substance is a little lost in the colour—at least through a good part of it, gets vague in the wash of the colour wave. I don't think it need be limboed." (8.9.33)
Creative Calm
"It is a good poem, but gives some impression of having come through with difficulty, not getting altgether the right (inevitable) transcription. There is power in the last stanza." [Lines 10, 11, 12 were marked:] "Very fine and vigorous." (11.9.33)
"It is good poetry, with one splendid line 'The mute unshadowed spaces of her fund.' " (14.9.33)
Earth-heaven
"It is very good indeed—perfect in its own manner."
(22.9.33)
Transformation
"It is a good sonnet and there is certainly both vision and poetry in it." (25.9.33)
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Gift-cycle
[In answer to my note, "A song written in the wee sma' hours, between 2 and 3 this morning":]
"It is wee and sma' but good " (26.9.33)
"It is a good poem—with some power in it."
[Lines 3, 4, 5 were marked:] ''Very good." (28.9.33)
O Voiceful Words
"Not so good as a sonnet as some others. It lacks outline which is very necessary in a sonnet — but it has poetic merit." (2.10.33)
Initiation
"It is an excellent poem from all points of view —the first and third stanzas very good, the second admirable."
(1.12.33)
Symbol-mood
"It is very good." (3.12.33)
"Yes, it is very good — and the expression quite complete." (9.12.33)
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"'It is a good poem." (13.12.33)
"Santo Riso"
"I find it very good. I like your new style very well."
(20.12.33)
Night's Core
"It is very good. Your poetry has recently taken a great step forward." (4.1.34)
"It is very good." (9.1.34)
Gramarye
"It is good." (10.1.34)
"It is very good." (18.1.34)
"It is a very good sonnet." (18.1.34)
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Grandeur
"It is a very good sonnet." (19.1 .34)
"It is a very good sonnet." (25.1.34)
De Profundis
"It is a good sonnet." (29.1.34)
"It is very fine." (30.1.34)
[To the question, "Do you like these lines?", Sri Aurobindo replied:]
"Yes, they are good." (1.2.14)
"It is not a failure —it is good, though not quite so good as some others you have recently written." (3.2.34)
Chaser Chased
"It is good" (4.2.34)
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O Silence Love .
"It is very good. The last poems showed a fatigued inspiration, but here there is full recovery, freshness and perfection" (6.2.34)
Sun-spell
"It is very good." (?.2.34)
Wood-glooms
"Very good." (15.2.34)
"It is a very good sonnet. The octet has much atmosphere and strength and colour—and the sestet points the thought very well." (4.3.34)
Towards Babylon
"It is good." (5.3.34)
Invocation
[In reply to the question, "Are the style and imagery of this sonnet too hackneyed?":]
"I don't think so. It is a good sonnet." (6.3.34)
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"It is good." (71934)
Wind-swoon
"It is a very good poem." (23.8.34)
Fulfilment
"It is very good." (24.8.34)
"It is a very fine poem." (25.8 34)
Towards Shiva
[In answer to the question whether the poem had enough of the quality which would make it worth preserving:] "It is sufficiently fine." (1.9.34)
The Finishing Touch
"Not negligible — the poem has quality, but is not inevitable in expression." (13.9.1934)
Aspiration
"I find it very good." (14.9.34)
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Lacrimae Rerum
[In answer to the question, "Does this poem reach the perfection it should?":]
"Yes, quite." (23.9.34)
[In reply to the question, "What sort of poetry do these eight lines make, and is their experiment to combine the effects of blank and rhymed verses successful?":]
"It seems to me quite successful and makes very good poetry indeed." (30.9.34)
Strange Tunes
[Answering the question, "Would you rank this experimental sonnet, trying though in a different way to combine like the other poem the effects of blank verse and rhyme, as one of my very good ones?":]
'Yes, I think so." (6.10.34)
Birds in the Night
"It is a very beautiful little lyric." (7.10.34)
Beatitude
[Replying to my note, "Just eight lines, wondering whether they have anything to do with Helicon. And is the philosophy of the first stanza too difficult?":]
"The philosophy is clear enough. I don't know why you want to bar Helicon to these eight lines—they are very good
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indeed—the first four lines especially, as they put the idea with much originality and power—but the second stanza also reaches a high level." (8. 10.34)
Great is Your Beauty, Earth
"Very good." (11.10.34)
"The lines are very good — I ought to say perhaps 'very fine'." (13.10.34)
I Love Thee ...
"Very fine." (15.10.34)
Signa Coeli
"It is a very good poem and the last two stanzas are very fine." (17.10.34)
[I asked "How do you find these fourteen lines? What sort of blank verse are they? And do they possess characteristics which might allow one to call them a blank verse sonnet?"] "These lines are very good and this time you have got a true movement of blank verse; but I don't think 1 would call it a sonnet. Rhyme structure is essential to a sonnet. But, all the same, the sonnet tendency and the limitation to fourteen lines has given a 'building' to ;he lines which much enhances their value." (23.10.34)
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Incognita
"It lacks a little in spontaneity, but is otherwise successful and the building is good and there is a strong harmony in the diction and rhythm."
[Later, in reply to the questions, "If it lacks a little in spontaneity, should it not be put aside? Will you kindly say what lines or phrases I ought to modify to bring it up to the right level?" :]
"'I can only say that it is very good, but the impression about deficient spontaneity continues. I don't see why it should be put aside. There is much in it that is original and striking and as a whole it is quite effective. I can't say that such and such lines ought to be altered, for all the lines have a poetic quality and there is no defect in them. All poetry is not necessarily spontaneous; and if all poetry that is not spontaneous were to be put aside, the stock of the world's poetic literature would be much reduced; so let the sonnet stand." (25.10.34)
Anticipation
"This is successful."
[When asked whether 'successful' meant a perfect success or not, Sri Aurobindo replied:]
"What do you mean by 'a perfect success'? I meant that pitched in a certain key and style it had worked itself out very well in that key and style in a very satisfying way from the point of view of thought, expression and rhythm. From that standpoint it is a perfect success. If you ask whether it is at your highest possible pitch of inspiration, I would say no, but it is nowhere weak or inadequate and it says something poetically well worth saying and says it well. One cannot always be writing at the highest pitch of one's possibility, but that is no reason why work of very good quality in itself should be rejected." (13.11.34)
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"It is very good." (16.3.35)
[To the question, "Is this poem too conversational or has it some saving intensity?", Sri Aurobindo answered:] "It is very good. The intensity is there." (8.4.35)
Glamour-tide
"Very beautiful." (30.4.35)
Time's End
"Very fine." (31.5.35)
In Horis Aeternum
"The lines are very fine." (9.6.35)
Whitenesses
"It is a very good sonnet." (17.6.35)
Day nor Night
"It is very fine." (23.6.35)
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"Very good." (25.6.35)
Disloyalty
"It is very fine." (26.6.35)
Night's day
[Question: "Any good? And what plane?":]
"Very good. Intuition but a little less intense in detail."
(29.6.35)
The Paramour of Soordas
"It is very good." (30.6.35)
(Original form)
No transient joy were those song-briefnesses:
They brought our gloom a simple flowering grace,
But laden with a glow of mysteries
Rooted beyond our fragile nights and days.
Each tiny song a far gigantic mood
Of some Arcturus or Aldebaran.
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(Sri Aurobindo was asked: "What do you think of this? Is the conclusion rather artificial?" He replied:)
"It is rather - the rest of the poem is very fine." (21.8.35)
Platonic
"It is very good—a harmonous whole with a perfect evolution of the thought." (30.10.35)
Prefigure
"As blank verse, it is very good. The vision is not confused—the whole is very clear and well worked out, A fine poem." (2.11.35)
"It is fine poetry, but it is less strongly cut in language and rhythm than the previous one. It is more dim in its suggestion, 'shimmery' and 'haze- world' I suppose in form and colour.
"The last half is cut into throe 'two lines', they cannot be called couplets, not being rhymed. This is a spacing difficult to carry out without creating some monotony in the total effect. The first half's spacing 3.1.2. is an easier arrangement to execute.
"...I suppose on a reading of the whole poem one can without much difficulty realise that the two parts of the poem are correspondents, one of the dawn-depths and the either of the evening-depths.". (4.11.35)
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Beyond...
[To the query "Does the language catch the symbolic force of the poetic vision?":]
"It does—perfect—with a real splendour of poetic style." (15.11.35)
Realisation
"Very happy." (23.11.35)
Creators
[In answer to the note, "A poem after almost an age of silence. Your impression, please, in (is much critical detail as possible. Is there any back-sliding in quality of inspiration?":]
"No. It is a fine poem. I don't see any reason for critical detail." (9.2.36)
"Very beautiful." (13.2.36)
"Very fine." (15.2.36)
Elixir Vitae
"I think it is successful. Certainly the language and rhythm are—to the full. I don't know whether the symbol you speak of comes out with perfect clearness, but I am inclined to
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think that the suggestion of it is sufficient." (18.2.36)
Far and Near
"It is very beautiful." (5.5.36)
Glimmerings
"It is a very good poem—perhaps a little diffuse and wanting in grip, but the thought and expression have a certain beauty in them and the close is very fine." (1936)
Beatrice Missions Virgil...
"It gives the satisfaction of a certain quiet adequacy."
"It is very beautiful—quite inspired and perfect." (25.7.36)
"It is fine in expression and movement." (?.8.36)
Black Magic
The mystic value, however, is more significance... It is not 'too vague things like the Veda." (2.8.36)
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'It is quite good as poetry. But I fear that in matter of fact things are not so comfortably easy as that!" (20.8.36)
Francesca of Rimini
"The translation is very good—though not Dantesque at all points."
"After reading more at leisure I find it is an admirable translation with no weak line;—it is a success." (25.8.36)
[In answer to the query, "Does this sonnet deserve a place in my collection?":]
"A good poem on the whole, with some fine lines; not absolutely one of your best,:but quite deserving a place." Lines 7-9 were marked: "This is very good." "The last couplet forming the climax Ought to stand out strongly; it becomes inadmissibly weak if you tag it on to what goes before with an 'and'—especially a second 'and', making it a subordinate tail to the rest. On the contrary the other clauses should be subordinate not only in sense but form— the thought of the last couplet leaping out clear and distinct as a culmination." [Lines 11,12,13 as they stand incorporate Sri Aurobindo's alterations.]
"A very fine sonnet in all respects." (28.8.36)
[The next day, to the suggestion that the last five lines of the octet should be altered to:
...yet grows thy virgin white
The mystic mother of each passionate tone,
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Save for the mind that will not dare to cast
All life within thy visionary Vast
Above the narrow blesses earth has known
. Sri Aurobindo replied:]
"Man alive! The virgin mother was magnificent, and you kick her out! And the two last lines in their original form were the finest in the poem and you reduce them to something good but not above the ordinary!! Beware of the meddling correcting mind."
The Call: Solitude; Renunciation
"There is much beauty in the poems, though not everywhere quite a fully self-realised beauty. The lines marked [I: 7,8,9,14,15; II: 1-4 and the last seven] are extremely line." (1936)
Belisarius
"It is a very fine piece of poetic eloquence—a little strange in the mouth of Belisarius, especially the last line, but I suppose that, poetically, it does not matter. The lines marked [from 'leaving no weight' to 'cry', and from 'the proud' to 'victories'} are especially fine." (27.11.36)
Modern Love
"It is a very good poem,—worth preserving. It is a sort of satire by apotheosis bringing into contrast the two things that are yet assimilated by what is behind them. Very effective." (1.12.36)
Page 694
Wave-Break
"It is a little mental as if you were constructing a thought, not seeing things. The lines marked [6,8] have some uplift. The rest has energy of language and strength of thought— but not anything deeper." (4,2.37)
Grave of Trance
"The poem is otherwise successful, but the 'bright worms of eternity' is, I am afraid, bizarre and creates a sense of overstressed effect with no flash of revealing breath in it to justify it. The macabre can be successful altogether only when it deals with what is terrible and repulsive—but here it is more like a violent conceit—gargoyling what is in itself noble. The rest of the poem is very fine."1 (22.3.1937)
"Admirable poetry. An extremely beautiful development of the suggestion going finely beyond it." (25.3.37)
Elegiacs
[Sri Aurobindo was asked, "Does the basic idea here strike you as stale and the blank verse rather ineffective? What impression does the form-scheme (2,2: 3,3: 4,4) produce? I have a mind to scrap the whole thing.":]
'It is not possible always to say something quite new. If one has a subject old or new worth treating and treats it with originality, that is all that is essential. The blank verse is very good, each line sufficiently firm in itself and each verse-clause also. The form-scheme and building of the thought
1. The last two lines were later changed.
Page 695
are all right and come off very well. The one defect is too much sameness or monotone—even though not 'chill' or 'murderous'—of iambic rhythm, especially in the closing eight lines. But the poetic quality is considerable. It certainly should not be scrapped.' (30.3.37)
Violet Wisdom
"Very fine. I think you have mastered the blank verse movement; the movement here is faultless and very skilful. I mark the outstanding lines [1, 4-6, 7-8, last], but all have their quality." (2.4.37)
Laura de Sade
"It is a very fine caprice beautifully worked out. The image of the octet and sestet is evidently a conceit but where everything else is so successful this seems to justify itself also." (16.5.37)
Giant Wheel
"The lines marked [the second stanza] are very fine and more of higher mind than the mental: the rest are fine-though more mental. But the poem finishes very abruptly." (26.5.1937)
Bird-Keveries
[In answer to the question whether the expression here was more of fancy than true insight:]
"It is a very beautiful and delicate fancy in any case. The last stanza is admirable, but there is a subtle imaginative beauty throughout." (31.5.37)
Page 696
Mother of New-Birth
"It is a very beautiful lyric quite equal to the others. I don't think there is the least sense of splitting—the images flow naturally one after the other." (4.6.37)
Magnitudes
[In reply to the questions, "On its own plane—that is to say, the mental—what is the degree of success reached by this poem? Are any lines worth marking?":]
"The poem is very successful throughout—it expresses with great power and beauty what it wants to say. All the lines are markable." (12.7.37)
"An admirable poem with a very strong point or double point of significance." (5.8.37)
Far Away
"It is a 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." (22.8.37)
Heartbreak
[Sri Aurobindo did not find it successful. He thought it was very clever but just a conceit ] (9.3.44)
Page 697
"Good; some of the lines are very fine, especially the last line and a half of the second stanza and the whole of the last stanza. But can a sea hang? Well, perhaps it can in a faintly Donnish style. And 'sat like a taste' has not much force: I would myself have written 'Sat a heaven-taste'." (14.1.1945)
Lammergeyer
"O.K. It is all right now." [In the first version Sri Aurobindo did not approve of Our guts alone draw down transcendent things.' A line he appreciated very much is 'Seer-suns beyond the gold of Plato's brain.'] (21.10.1949)
Page 698
EROS KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
IMAGES FROM EARLY MOODS
(In ancient times a mystical eroticism enjoined men and women to mate only under the cover of darkness.)
Lie not in the arms of day,
With gaze a-gleam
Deep in the heart of clay
Love lies with a dream,
But the Lips that are lost by our birth,
The Kiss that has never a name,
Are gone when the face is earth
Too clear in the sun's flame.
O lie in the arms of night,
And the darkness may wed
Your mouth to the Mouth daylight
Mars even in Helen's bed.
Page 701
Helena—Two Visions
Moon-quarried tower before which marble Troy
Was a tiny transience, well worth throwing away—
Whiteness ineffable, drawing towards timeless joy
Man's arms through passioning night and longing day.
Did Menelaus enfold your secret light?
Did Paris plumb your radiant mystery?
They knew but longing day and passioning night:
The timeless splendour touched blind Homer's eye.
Once caught in the reverie-rapture of his heart,
Never from us the immortal You can part.
Only a troubled, brief, foreshadowing power
Was the proud beauty of your perilous life—
Nought save the far glint of a voyaging light
Glimpsed once before the plenary wonder struck
The dreaming loneliness of Homer's brow.
Page 702
Your buried limbs are a midnight to themselves
But torches of high noon to the heart of me,
O dead arms lifted once above my flesh.
Calling its weak ways towards the hidden Hill
Whose foot is on cur lust and whose one peak
Aims where calm spaces know no sunsetting.
I too will mould my love a cone of fire
That, climbing, draws all thought to a single point
Fixed on immeasurable distances.
The inner heart will break from the outer husk.
The heavy limbs drop down, a weight of trance,
And a shining blue wake up beyond the brain.
Page 703
Heloise
(After a passage in one of her letters)
Holier is the wife's name—
But, O my love, to the core
Of my heart would I truer be
As thy worthless whore,
Fallen at thy feet, with no hands to lay
On the torch of thy fame!
I would lie most low
To feel like a flame
The height my heart-throbs know
Of thy beauty and brain.
What tribute could I pay
Deeper than harlotry
Smiling at sneers as vain
If Abelard be my stain?
Page 704
Abelard
To a oneness of invisible sun
We strained wit I heart on heart—
But how through dense clay-union
Could ever the wide veil part?
The break between us now has grown
A rift in cloudy sky—
Some haloed hush of Joy unknown
Gleams through love's cloven cry.
Page 705
(Yeats records that in old Irish legends the perfect woman was not merely beautiful in looks but also vigorous in her bodily functions, and that a special mark was the force with which she could empty her bladder. The poem voices the Irish king who picks out Emer for his wife.)
Six queens in the chill air straddled
And the secret waters purled—
O thine as though thou wert striking
Thy will into the world!
Lovely great-bladdered queen
Who madest with crystalline blow,
From parts like a kingdom within,
The deepest hole in the snow—
Emer, I choose thee and give
To the inward strength of thy keeping
The load of the formless future
That now in my loins is sleeping.
Come with thy hidden powers—
Thy organs of purple and gold—
Press forth a perfect hour
From the ancient mother-mould!
The Gods have their home in thy belly,
They spoke in thy thundering stream;
The snow where thy sign lay the deepest
Was the tablet of my dream.
Page 706
"What use that now like a bird of love
My pulses cry to thee
And every word wings like a kiss
To the face I cannot see?
Alas that the heart 'should screech and caw
Ere the loved one's face be fled.
And the heart become a nightingale
To the deaf ears of the dead!"
Page 707
No movement is worth while
Unless it sings towards your smile.
What harmony can ie in rest
Until my slumber lies caressed
By one long dream of your blue gaze?
Between a waking void and sleep's bare space
I hang with my whole future stretching far,
A wandering waste.
Upon my lips the single taste
Left of the marvel of your name—
Bliss like a tongue of phantom flame
Caught from an unattainable star.
But in this glimmer-ghost of sound
Forevermore is found
A secret pearl with n my poverty set:
"Margaret!"
Page 708
Of the Irish Revolt
Who could put a bolt
On your swift mind
That ever could find
A cure for each ill
In the land of your love?
On the edge of the Liffey
You asked your warden
If in the black garden
You could step out for a "spill".
Swift into the Liffey,
God's wintry water,
You plunged with the shrill
Shots over your head.
Cold stream, cold lead—
But what did you care?
Heaven was pleased with your prayer
That if the next dawn's
Light found you in safety
You'd give the grey river
Two perfect swans
Years later, Yeats thrilled
To see how the bare
Liffey grew fair
With your vow fulfilled—
O Doctor Gogarty
Who took new birth
From a white-winged pair
To free Irish earth!
Page 709
Men say: "What can't be open to the world
And publicly acknowledged, but lives curled
Within the silence of our selves, must be
Not right." But why should sweetest secrecy
Count as a crime? Each being dwells on two
Planes of life-throb. One level meets the view
Of all our fellows: fronting the broad sun,
It shares a wide-gazed joy. But: there is one
Part that goes inward to every self unique,
Shut off from the world's touch so it may seek
Dreams that have shapes fitting each lonely mind.
Pathways of purple peace through which we find
Mysteries whose lips are shut, eyes of far flame
Whose meaning we can't catch with any name.
Here are unsharable kindlings—here, alone.
Each heart has its truth-taste of the Unknown.
All dumbly, darkly held in that deep core—
The human merged with what it strains to adore—
The heaven hiding there is no less right
Than happiness thrown open to earth's light.
And when two souls have come forth face to face,
Suddenly moved by a gathering hand of grace—
When they have met as if in some profound
Where time forgets all common; cleaving sound—
O when they've caught together an inmost bliss,
Dug like a diamond out of God's abyss,
Why should they breathe to the world's ear their kiss?
Perfume of passion alien to gross thought—
How shall its sylph on crowded air be a-float?
Till some new ether shines around, this cry
Of star to star must throb in reverie's sky.
Enough if the Eternal Watcher knows—
Wizard who from world-ends brought faces close
To make two mouths a single rapture's rose.
Page 710
Tell not your joy to even your own heart,
Lest those loud beats prove blabberers to a world
Whose air's a-swann with a myriad jealousies
Or haunted by cloud and rain and the rose's fall.
Silence selfduminous is the true speech
Of all things rare within the human hours.
Hide deep the inexhaustible gold that is love
Safe from the greedy gaze of a hollow crowd:
Keep the smile-touch of everlasting suns
Secret in some inviolate cave of dream.
There, in a hush, sit storing the great bliss
You gather with each heaven-hungry kiss.
Page 711
You
Not in the God at my heart's care but the God
That is your inmost deep I plunge my love.
Although the same pure Sun rides everywhere,
Goldenest the honey of its heavenly hush
Culled by those bees, throb on sweet secret throb
Building your life's long business with earth's bloom.
This God is no miraculous solitude
But wonder-wide with all things beauty-born,
God bringing me His infinite taste in you.
Page 712
Mantra
All's struck away,
The gold and the grey —
A mystic silence suddenly broke out
Drowning all symphony, all shout,
And left a glowing gap,
A slumber aching for miraculous dreams,
Dreams that would step
From the in-world into clay
And build a shadowless day.
A new creation's quivering constellate gleams
Call to my sight, charm the strange void to move.
A wonder-world is waiting to come true,
Yearning for you
To utter from around, below, above,
The all-embracing all-remaking Mantra: Love.
Page 713
These small hands offer
Nought save their poverty,
But the whole of their poor selves
They bring to thee—
Hollows of hunger that take
No other gift to slake
The heart's cry, they will burn
Lonesomely if thou turn
Thy beauty away!
So deeply poor are they,
Nothing can richen them enough,
Nothing but the love-splendoured stuff
The dreamer in me quests:
My two curved beggar-palms
Shall only bear as alms
The warm perfection of thy breasts.
Page 714
Rosa Mystica—A Colloquy
The Cynic
Tell Dante when he shows
High heaven—-where earth-lust falls away—
In the image of a rose:
"Not by forgetting all
Earth-hunger does that bloom display
Carmines so magical"
Do mystics ever ken
What tumult bees and butterflies
Make in the rose-core when
To the pistil's mouth they've brought
Winged pollen? Dante's paradise
Is full of mating! Not
Through sheer oblivion
Of longing and earth-rooted love
This flower's deep work is done.
Poet, your mystic rose
Is the reproductive organ of
The plant on which it blows!
Page 715
The Idealist
Surely, that organ is
An image of love's source and goal—
Sign of ineffable bliss
Most beautifully given
For soul to draw with comrade soul
Even here a glint of heaven.
Page 716
Secrets
The heart has many secrets.
I will not show
The world how the deep currents flow
Within me, crying over your name.
The heart has endless secrets.
You cannot tell
The crowd the warm wild words that fell
From me in moments of utter flame.
Unnumbered the heart's secrets.
We cannot say
To men that while I gave my life away,
Not with one small kiss could you part.
The heart has infinite secrets.
Perchance you'll know
Some sharp and sudden day that, though
You knew not, I was hiding in your heart.
Page 717
One magic day
All men will know
You were most beautiful—
And their eyes will glow.
But who shall guess
How lonesomely
Like a prayer your loveliness
You gave to me?
Will they touch the spirit
Whose body came
To all like a flower
But to one like a flarie
Lit on some altar
Of ancient rock
In a cavern whose secret
No words unlock?
Page 718
How shall those immortalities
Of light bring back my sun
Or terror of that ageless doom
Add darkness to my dun?
If there is Heaven, the touch it lays
Upon my life is pain—
Death plundering the face I love
And bankrupting my brain.
If there is Hell, its gap of gloom
Is here already given—
My void heart when that gracious look
Crumbled into some Heaven.
Page 719
Hearts have great hungers—some would stand, earth-free.
On lonely peak or plunge in secret sea
Searching for lost Atlantis; some would scan
Boundless horizons for the future man.
I quest for mystic silence and strange song,
But not for sky or wave or hid I long.
Distance and depth and dizzy dream I win
If I, for music-burst or trance within,
Touch—lip to lip—at the end of all world-ways
That fairest, freckled, unforgettable face.
Page 720
How has this little face
Filled for me infinite Space?
It is as though gold rays
Leaping from north and south and east and west
Came to enchanted rest
In that mysterious hair falling like heaven's own grace,
Those eyes of deep dusk many-starred,
The gently curved truth-pointing nose,
The lips that open doors to me earth-barred,
The chin that rounds off all my broken dreams,
The delicate ears to which my moon-struck woes
Are music's nectar-streams—
O that small long-lost face, through many a smart
Now reached again—from shadows won
Back to my heart—
O smiling silence of all journeys done!
Page 721
Cast out all fear—
Only my heart's keen cry is here—
No pull but one immense
Giving of world on world, rapt frankincense
Burning to a Farness suddenly found near.
Grant it the grace
Of a single smile from your so long-sought face,
The silent answer that your heart has room
To hold what claims no right
To hold you but would even seek its doom
Happily if thus your eyes could shine more bright.
O let those eyes but bless
With a starry "Yes"
My whole love's gift to you of Truth's intensest white!
Page 722
Your love for me is like unearthly water
Singing in silver curves along my flesh—
A wizard mesh
Of melted moonlight fallen from afar
To capture and dissolve in lustrous sleep
The heart's unvisioning hurry towards the grave.
O seraph wave,
White prelude of some incorruptible Deep
Whose rumour haunts me like an aureole,
You come to wash and heal forever the scar
That is my body on the secret soul.
Page 723
My thoughts are a quiet lake beneath your sky:
Spirit to spirit gathers—one calm hue;
But every cell of flesh is a blind eye—
This hand quivers each time I think of you....
Oh the small hand in a wide universe!
No peace for me until my love I strain
To that far face of you and touch your tears
And know their sweet salt on my lips again.
Page 724
Symbol-Vision of Full Moon
The expanses of the moon
Have neither cloud
Nor cry to enshroud
Their calm of naked noon.
An imperturbable light
Is sovereign there:
No tremor of wayward air
Breaks on the tense soul-sight.
What shadowy words can roam
This vacuum space?
Unmarred the ineffable rays
Make the heart's hush their home.
O rapture lit above
To deepen the earth's eye—
How blind is our reply:
Limbs locked in mental love!
Page 725
Love is a nectar never still,
An endless tireless laughter's thrill
Seeking to voice the Ineffable.
Life cannot like a godhead move
Through the heartbeats till shimmering love
Breaks news of the golden Truth above.
Precious the quiver pi light love bears—
But the cup of these ecstatic tears
Spills if a changeful universe
Mingles its own mood. Lifted high,
Our hands must take; entrancedly
The throb of time to Eternity.
Page 726
Deep after deep is your heart's home, O flower, O flame!
Height over height is home to your heart, O flame,
O flower!
May never the intimate gold of your earth-loved name
Blur to my gaze the ineffable dream I knew in that hour
When to my pilgrim-path the fire and fragrance came,
A girl whose eyes were distances grown warm and
close and dear,
Whose mouth was an ancient mystery in a cave made
silent-sweet,
Whose hands held forth ten tapers shining as if to clear
Glooms of each lonely soul with a touch of human heat
Yet burning upward in their beauty of inmost quiver and call
Through an infinite space that shrined forever the
unseen All....
And if your body of passion and peace should stumble
at times to a fall,
O let me remember that even this fall may kiss the
Eternal's feet!
Page 727
A tremulous net is thrown
All over me—
A net of shielding shadow
From one tall tree.
Not even a leafs weight
Falls with that spare—
Intangible the embrace
Out of green air!
Immense cool arms of a love
That lays no bar-
Is it You, called down by branches
Lifted afar?
Page 728
Where was I when my face lay numb
And you when your love was a smile apart
And the dusky distance between grew dumb
As the mirrored moon in our eyes climbed higher?
Our pulses knew no burring start,
Our limbs were still and drew no nigher,
Yet all of a sudden I felt your heart,
A fire that quenched my own heart's fire—
All hunger lost in a silvery tune....
Did we meet in the moon?
Page 729
Oh..!
Their music knows no back-tug on heart-strings:
Smooth ever the same forward path they've gone.
Sunshine is theirs—no mystery to be won
By hands that grope and tear at blinded things.
Flowers they have plucked from beds of scarlet springs,
Their lips have shared sweet songs and laughed
and kissed...
Oh, the great deeps they have missed!
Page 730
Together we walked just once in a summer night,
But there are things that reach no end: this walk
Goes on forever, it will laugh and take
The grave in its calm stride,care not at all
That now the world is winter in my body.
For not through hours but time ticked by star-beats
we moved
Through a dream that suddenly stepped out of the
Page 731
From quivering parts we've pierced to the calm whole,
Timeless and spaceless mid the lengthening streets.
Skies of fixed stars we've caught in lone heartbeats.
Farness is now a bow-string stretched to a taut
In-seeking, so love's arrow be fire-shot
Deeper than intimate touch's warmest goal.
We've reached the Rapt One every lover has sought:
Devourer of distances—the dreamer Soul.
Page 732
Wild rose with petals of crackling fire,
Crimson call luring me higher and higher
Only to hurl me on the fanged stone-
Pitiless laughing sword with my bone
As quivering sheath— Thanks for the terrible beauty, the blood-wreath,
The ecstasy's jangle and the smashed star—
My wondrous war!
Tender rose folded back into bud,
Scarlet grown deeper with nursing my blood,
Soul of my body when my eyelids shut,
Body of my soul when my gaze leaps out,
Sound of the Unseen, gleam of the Inaudible,
Thanks for the marriage in the one God-Will,
Sweetheart of a love no hands ever seize,
My marvellous peace!
Page 733
I want you—ere my body break in two
With the sharp cry of passion's heat unslaked:
I want you—come before my heart has quaked
And lust strays far from fruitless love of you.
For you I stretch my soul's arms vainly so,
To call and capture that proud dazzling breast
Within my body's arms when through the west
Blind hungers seem to suck the sun below.
You kill my love by being over-chaste:
You drive my love to bite its own dry tongue
Whereon these words lie writhing: I have clung
Unto the rainbow-thread of hope: make haste
Lest it should snap and throw me to the bed
Of some more easy rapture stript by gold.
What joy!—were you that harlot, suddenly bold
Now that in heaven's womb star-seed is shed!
Paint thick your virgin cheeks red evermore—
Lend those pure lips to every vulgar mouth
That even I may wet on them my drouth
And not lie panting at your white love's door!
Be spoiled and low, be gilded, worn and cheap,
Be the world's woman with whom all may wive,
But strain my love not—lightlessly alive,
Make it not wanton while you calmly sleep
And by that sleep my sacred vow entomb:
Let me be constant though your troth you break:
Be you base traffic that I still may wake
A faithful lover to your wasted womb!
Page 734
They gauge not the whole godhead of true love
Who leap into noon's fire and fall quick ash—
Stunned to a peace that holds no hue of heaven.
But those who near the giant glow with small
Delightings in a dawn of singing birds
Grown kisses, they can bear the noon's full flush
And catch with colour-conning hearts the deep
Within gold deep, the laugh on shadowless laugh
Breaking from that sun-throb of paradise.
No ecstasy that ends in a void sleep,
No brief consuming blindness, but a core
Of bliss with aureoles widening through all hours—
Such flame goes curving from supreme midday
To a dusk that echoes the soft smile of dawn.
Page 735
You love frail hamlets sunk amid soft green—
I long for the great poignance, the hard hue
Of mountains plucking up to the Unseen
All valleyed shimmers breaking gently through
The small throbs of your unadventurous heart.
Height on dense height is blindness unto you—
Faced by king-crags you hurry to depart
With peevish cry: "Oh how they block my view!"
Page 736
Falling..
Falling in love I fell
To a depth no heart could see,
But never dreamt that I would drop
Down sheer infinity.
Where am I falling
Through day, through night—
Beyond the face be loved,
Past sound, past sight?
Inward and still more inward
The deep urge plumbing goes,
Words are a distance left behind,
On the future the eyelids close.
Suddenly the drop mending
Is a stillness, bare
Of miles to cross and hours to span—
An Ever that is everywhere.
No more is the heart a-strain
To clasp the Shining One.
All is within the body's warmth,
The heart a deathless sun.
Page 737
Now earth and air are Gods and a God flows
And some large lustre makes all shapes divine
And all divinities have met in her look
Because the burning heart of me draws up
Love from the loins' abysses of blind honey
To throw it like a fountaining aureole
Around my thoughts.... The fountain leaps and falls
Across the night of her hair, the day of her face.
To a timeless hunger calling through her heart.
There the whole shining ecstasy is caught,
With never a sparkle missed, no single drop
Sunk loinward, washing all the Gods away!
Page 738
O Waste Me Not
O waste me not—a hill is in your hands!
Turn not to easier joys, the pale lowlands.
Does your foot fear the steepness of this hill,
The cry of its wayless wind, the sudden spill
Of its dangerous cataracts? Do you shy away,
Thinking that other feet have climbed it?... Nay,
One crest there is that never has been scaled
To read its secret every passion has failed:
High above all it towers to the heavens' glow,
Its longing lines hidden by a hush of snow.
None knows its mystic call. Scorning each claim,
This lonely peak off love bears but your name.
Page 739
Beyond, Within
I long for your soul but not your soul alone:
Stretched to your body forever are my hands—
For one small kiss I would squander Samarcands!
But each white curve building your limbs' soft glows
Is the strange smile of a hidden inner sun-—
You kiss a door to a love beyond our own....
And if your body were, all, the abyss time throws
So oft between would leave an infinite need.
My heart still laughs: by a clutch within we arc close:
Two flowers of fire from one Light's secret seed.
Page 740
It was the last day of my life--but not
Last by the gradual ebbing of all light:
Rather, the splendour of the world was caught
To a sudden dazzle and deluge of wondrous white;
And who shall count such glory dearly bought
At the small price of never-ending night?
Fate said: "A gold infinity will be thine
For one days utter clasp of ecstasy
If evermore thy heart has courage to sign
The sun and moon and stars away and be
A black abyss." I answered: "Like vast wine
I'll drink this death: first let her once be mine!"
Farewell, sweet lips that held my life between,
Soft eyes that made divine my very doom.
Girl-body that will never more be seen
By this mad poet and passionate dreamer whom
You gave for a day some deathless Beauty's sheen—
Farewell, but deepest thanks from a god's gloom!
Page 741
In the palace of our love
The fires meet face to face;
But in love's secret temple
We hunger through dim space.
Laughter and music race
Along our kindled nerves,
But in love's temple a far cry
Goes fading on clay-curves.
We throng with our eyes the palace
Where gleam may fuse with gleam—
But in our deep heart's temple
Love lies alone with a dream.
Page 742
Many have sworn to follow you
Nor ever rest
Their eyes from clinging to your sun
Till the bitter West.
How shall my gaze bear standing wide
To catch no light at all?
On your full glow may God command
These eyelids fall.
One prayer was mine at the dawn of your face:
"Let my dark be soon,
But never your sunset—may my night
Tryst with your noon!"
Page 743
Your Power's Secret
You know how vain it is,
Striving to give you up,
When you can sit and sup
On my whole life with just one kiss.
You try to prove lost youth—
Hair half-grey, wrinkle-lines;
How should I wander to such signs
When my soul's centre is your mouth?
I feel no Winter's nip
While yours the lower to bring
A breath of ageless Spring
With those two petals—lip and lip.
Charmed by their smiling rhyme,
The dull years backward fly:
Eternity flowers when I
Remember how you kissed first time!
Page 744
On a Road in Deolali
Only our hands made love—all time was a touch
Of burning fivefold beauty on the heart.
Fingers a-glow with the lift and laughter of flames
Reached out for some high home of ageless Fire
While lighting earth-eyes to earth-ecstasies.
On the Plateau of Panchgani
The heat of all th s universe's heart,
The pure sun bared to us our heaven of love—
A joy consuming body-fastnesses,
A golden luxury one with the wide hours
Riding in noonday nakedness the still
Procession of the elephant-headed rocks.
On a Hill in Khandala
Love through a death of colour everywhere—
The trees a bodiless sigh upon dusk air—
The hills a lost cry to a blue grown blind—
Our faces dim with a mysterious Mind
Which hung gigantically unaware,
Save when far temple-bells studded the wind
Of vastness with a gemlike pulse of prayer.
Page 745
Quiet as a candle,
She burned the brief
White span of her beauty
With a golden grief.
For 1 took her wondrous
Flame but to find
Secrets within me
Of a minstrel mind—
Or made it glimmer
A votive dance
In my spirit's temple
Of lonely trance—
And O so seldom
Did I wake to see
Love burning away
Her life for me!
Page 746
A monument of music
Out-pyramidding all!
Seeing it none shall grieve
To see me fall—
None save the heart of you
That make no feast on fame:
What can you can for splendours
Signed with my name
If, to your sweetest calling
By word or waiting lip,
That monument is an answer
While the warn hungers slip
Out of my flesh for ever,
Leaving no joy to your lust
But the final hour of forgetting
My dust in your dust?
Page 747
"Keen spirit, sleepless breath,
By the love of these arms will you ever be bound?
O sword, will ever a girl be your sheath?
Not a sheath but a wound am I
If you leave me, under no man will I lie
But only under the ground."
You learned to love
You learned to weep;
But now, my dear,
There is no tear,
For you have learned to sleep.
Page 748
Dearest of girls, too little is the time
For our small hearts to beat a world-vast rhyme—
To feel in each heart-throb eternity.
O brief is that bodied miracle left for me!
Long years you'll have without one touch of lip
Infinite in hunger for your beauty's sip.
This dreaming face will soon be fast asleep.
Lose not a single day: no years can weep
Enough for love unvalued while it burned
Incense of gold to the goddess who has yearned
In unknown depths of you to flame and flower.
My love has looked through every transient hour
And kissed your future farness of full life
Like a near, intimate, heaven-haloed wife.
Wife of my soul, I pray you be as close
As earth permits in the passing present. Rose
Rooted in God's profound, your beauty's breath
Is all I need to laugh in the face of death.
Page 749
She's lifting no small hand to draw
Homage unto her flawless fingers—
She does not flutter her blue eyes
To wing the hearts of singers.
To sway the banner of her beauty
Above brave minds she does not care:
Upon her mouth the smile is an echo
Of sunset in a twilight air.
All love we bring is to her breast
Not warm enough for a breast so chill:
To hear a sweetness earth can speak not,
Her lovely limbs lie very still.
Page 750
Farewell, sweet earth, but I shall find you sweeter
When I return
With eyes in which all heaven's farnesses
Intimately burn.
Then you will show in all I once held dear
The cause cf my keen flame:
The holy hush my poet tongue miscalled
Name on poor mortal name.
Page 751
ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF TITLES
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Page 763
Page 765
ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF FIRST LINES
Page 769
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Page 780
Page 781
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Amal Kiran
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