...This is a strain that we shall hear more and more, the song of the growing godhead of the kind, of human unity, of spiritual freedom, of the coming supermanhood of man, of the divine ideal seeking to actualise itself in the life of the earth, of the call to the individual to rise to his godlike possibility and to the race to live in the greatness of that which humanity feels within itself as a power of the spirit which it has to deliver into some yet ungrasped perfect form of clearness. To embellish life with beauty is only the most outward function of art and poetry, to make life more intimately beautiful and noble and great and full of meaning is its higher office, but its highest comes when the poet becomes the seer and reveals to man his eternal self and the godheads of its manifestation.

These new voices must needs be the result of the growth of the power of the spirit on the mind of man which is the promise of a coming era. It is always indeed the spirit in him that shapes his poetic utterance; but when that spirit is preoccupied with the outward life, the great poets are those who make his common life and action and its surroundings splendid and beautiful and noble to him by the power of their vision; when it is the intellect through which it labours, the great poets are those who give a profound enlightening idea and creative interpretation of the world and nature and all that man is and does and thinks and dreams, but when the spirit turns to its own large intuitive will and vision, then it is yet profounder things to which the great poet must give utterance, the inmost sense of things, the inmost consciousness of Nature, the movement of the deepest soul of man, the truth that reveals the meaning of existence and the universal delight and beauty and the power of a greater life and the infinite potentialities of our experience and self-creation. These may not be the only strains, but they will be the greatest and those which the highest human mind will demand from the poet and they will colour all the rest by their opening of new vistas to the general intelligence and life sense of the race. And whatever poetry may make its substance or its subject, this growth of the power of the spirit must necessarily bring into it a more intense and revealing speech, a more inward and subtle and penetrating rhythm, a greater stress of sight, a more vibrant and responsive sense, the eye that looks at all smallest and greatest things for the significances that have not yet been discovered and the secrets that are not on the surface. That will be the type of the new utterance and the boundless field of poetic discovery left for the inspiration of the humanity of the future.    more »

The highest intensity of style and movement which is the crest of the poetical impulse in its self-expression, the point at which the aesthetic, the vital, the intellectual elements of poetic speech pass into the spiritual, justifies itself perfectly when it is the body of a deep, high or wide spiritual vision into which the life-sense, the thought, the emotion, the appeal of beauty in the thing discovered and in its expression—for all great poetic utterance is discovery,—rise on the wave of the culminating poetic inspiration and pass into an ecstasy of sight. In the lesser poets these moments are rare and come like brilliant accidents, angels’ visits; in the greater they are more frequent outbursts; but in the greatest they abound because they arise from a constant faculty of poetic vision and poetic speech which has its lesser and its greater moments, but never entirely fails these supreme masters of the expressive word.

Vision is the characteristic power of the poet. The Kavi was in the idea of the ancients the seer and revealer of truth, and though we have wandered far enough from that ideal to demand from him only the pleasure of the ear and the amusement of the aesthetic faculty, still all great poetry instinctively preserves something of that higher turn of its own aim and significance. Poetry, in fact, must attempt to make us see, and since it is to the inner senses that it has to address itself,—for the ear is its only physical gate of entry and even there its real appeal is to an inner hearing,—and since its object is to make us live within ourselves what the poet has embodied in his verse, it is an inner sight which he opens in us, and this inner sight must have been intense in him before he can awaken it in us...   more »

...In regard to poetic style we have to make, for the purpose of the idea we have in view, the starting-point of the Mantra, precisely the same distinctions as in regard to poetic rhythm,—since here too we find actually everything admitted as poetry which has some power of style and is cast into some kind of rhythmical form. But the question is, what kind of power and in that kind what intensity of achievement? There is plenty of poetry signed by poets of present reputation or lasting fame which one is obliged to consign to a border region of half-poetry, because its principle of expression has not got far enough away from the principle of prose expression. It seems to forget that while the first aim of prose style is to define and fix an object, fact, feeling, thought before the appreciating intelligence with whatever clearness, power, richness or other beauty of presentation may be added to that essential aim, the first aim of poetic style is to make the thing presented living to the imaginative vision, the responsive inner emotion, the spiritual sense, the soul-feeling and soul-sight. Where the failure is to express at all with any sufficient power, to get home in any way, the distinction becomes palpable enough, and we readily say of such writings that this is verse but not poetry. But where there is some thought-power or other worth of substance attended with some power of expression, false values more easily become current and even a whole literary age may dwell on this borderland or be misled into an undue exaltation and cult for this half poetry.

Poetry, like the kindred arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, appeals to the spirit of man through significant images, and it makes no essential difference that in this case the image is mental and verbal and not material. The essential power of the poetic word is to make us see, not to make us think or feel; thought and feeling [1] must arise out of the sight or be included in it, but sight is the primary consequence and power of poetic speech. For the poet has to make us live in the soul and in the inner mind and heart what is ordinarily lived in the outer mind and the senses, and for that he must first make us see by the soul, in its light and with its deeper vision, what we ordinarily see in a more limited and halting fashion by the senses and the intelligence. He is, as the ancients knew, a seer and not merely a maker of rhymes, not merely a jongleur, rhapsodist or troubadour, and not merely a thinker in lines and stanzas. He sees beyond the sight of the surface mind and finds the revealing word, not merely the adequate and effective, but the illumined and illuminating, the inspired and inevitable word, which compels us to see also. To arrive at that word is the whole endeavour of poetic style.   more »

The Mantra, poetic expression of the deepest spiritual reality, is only possible when three highest intensities of poetic speech meet and become indissolubly one, a highest intensity of rhythmic movement, a highest intensity of interwoven verbal form and thought-substance, of style, and a highest intensity of the soul’s vision of truth. All great poetry comes about by a unison of these three elements; it is the insufficiency of one or another which makes the inequalities in the work of even the greatest poets, and it is the failure of some one element which is the cause of their lapses, of the scoriae in their work, the spots in the sun. But it is only at a certain highest level of the fused intensities that the Mantra becomes possible.

It is from a certain point of view the rhythm, the poetic movement that is of primary importance; for that is the first fundamental and indispensable element without which all the rest, whatever its other value, remains inacceptable to the Muse of poetry. A perfect rhythm will often even give immortality to work which is slight in vision and very far from the higher intensities of style. But it is not merely metrical rhythm, even in a perfect technical excellence, which we mean when we speak of poetic movement; that perfection is only a first step, a physical basis. There must be a deeper and more subtle music, a rhythmical soul-movement entering into the metrical form and often overflooding it before the real poetic achievement begins. A mere metrical excellence, however subtle, rich or varied, however perfectly it satisfies the outer ear, does not meet the deeper aims of the creative spirit; for there is an inner hearing which makes its greater claim, and to reach and satisfy it is the true aim of the creator of melody and harmony...   more »

When the mystical doors open out they do not necessarily take the poet to mantric utterance, nor do the emotion-charged devotional songs to the high-winging lyricism of the spirit. Occult ranges have their own snow-white peaks of achievements, their own grandeurs, but they may yet miss the pure ethereality of the seeing word and hearing sight. When it comes to the question of spiritual poetry aglow with several suns of beauty, of joy, power, truth, life, spirit, knowledge in manifold combinations or severally, one has to rise much above the human level, spend years of intense effort to enter into the world of the original sound where revelation and inspiration find their native expression. We may have ample poetic intelligence and creative insight, an unfailing aesthetic sense too, deeper and genuine perceptions, swift and luminous intuition of things, yet the vision and language and rhythm of the mantra may be quite lacking. A direct, an experienced awareness not only of the mysterious and the divinely haunting, a living contact with the reality is that which alone can give us such poetry. One large sustained example is in the ancient poetry of the Rig Veda; in our own time dimensions of the infinite joining the aspiring soul and the answering benediction is in Savitri. To get that kind of poetry one has to be a Yogi-Poet indeed.   more »

Savitri is really a condensation, a concentration of the universal Mother—the eternal universal Mother, Mother of all universes from all eternity—in an earthly personality for the Earth's salvation. And Satyavan is the soul of the Earth, the Earth's jīva. So when the Lord says, "he whom you love and whom you have chosen," it means the earth. All the details are there! When she comes back down, when Death has yielded at last, when all has been settled and the Supreme tells her, "Go, go with him, the one you have chosen," how does Sri Aurobindo describe it? He says that she very carefully takes the SOUL of Satyavan into her arms, like a little child, to pass through all the realms and come back down to earth. Everything is there! He hasn't forgotten a single detail to make it easy to understand--for someone who knows how to understand. And it is when Savitri reaches the earth that Satyavan regains his full human stature.    more »

There are many aspects of Savitri and there are many ways of looking at Savitri. The most important is of course its affirmation of the Spirit in things, Spirit as the dynamic Truth shaping in its expansive luminous freedom the destiny of this creation. This also implies that, to enter into Savitri, we have to make an extensive, a substantial, a broad-based many-sided preparation as far as our instruments are concerned; we have to also make progress leading to wideness of consciousness, including possibly the yogic-spiritual. While Savitri itself can become a means for that progress, there is needed the right kind of effort from our side, even a professional readiness to enter into its vast body. We must be prepared to undertake the hardship of its discipline by keeping ready all the instrumental aspects of our personality—with the mind capable of receiving intimations of a luminous knowledge, and the heart responding to the ardencies of life-movements in their thousand moods of magnificence and dignity, and the will steady in its intent, steady like a bright flame of sacrifice burning upward to heaven. What is it here that cannot be pressed into service for the fullness of realisation that Savitri offers? Indeed, nothing there is that cannot be transformed by Savitri. But, fundamentally, there has to be in us a “call” to live in Savitri which shall give us the Truth and the things of the Truth. With it alone can begin our yogic life in Savitri, of making Savitri our upāsanā grantha, making it our Book of Yoga.

In the meanwhile, however, we can live in Savitri’s presence in several ways. In Savitri there is deep spiritual philosophy put in the revealing language of a poet, its expression carrying the inspired and inevitable Word. We have in it mysticism, occult knowledge, religion, metaphysics, arts, sciences, literature, history of man and history of the earth, all that is noble and living, that can impart to our perception the sense of infinity which can give meaning to our daily occupations. Any one of these can become our foundational engagement. In fact, it has thus already opened out an altogether new world of creative action for us. Based on Savitri we already have Sunil Bhattacharya’s music, and Huta Hindocha’s paintings under the direct guidance of the Mother. These are examples of the new art that is to come in its wake, and there will be many more creations to bring Savitri itself closer to us. We thus envisage the coming of new schools of thought, new choreography, poetry, criticism, comparative research and studies, fiction, songs, oratorical dissertations, discourses, recitations and readings, all welling up from this inexhaustible fountain of creativity. The poem has also been translated into several languages, mostly in verse-form, but also at times as prose renderings. Maybe some of these are rudimentary attempts and much will have to be done to achieve some minimum aesthetic satisfaction that is to be expected from a work connected with it. Nonetheless, these attempts do demonstrate the possibilities that have sprung up from Savitri’s world of delight. If around the stone-still statue of Buddha, in Ellora, there is the calm of infinity that nothing can disturb, we shall expect a crystalline stream of sweetness and joy rushing from the marble face of Savitri; halo’d by the moon of beauty, or carved in the heart of amethyst, she shall prove to be “the Sun from which we kindle all our suns.” If only, Satyavan-like, our “mind transfigures to a rapturous seer”!   more »

Savitri is the record of Sri Aurobindo's yoga and the transcription as far as human language will permit of supraphysical realities and states of consciousness rarely if ever attained. The Mother has luminously pointed out that not even one word can be changed without changing the meaning. Reading or listening to Sri Aurobindo's poetry and trying mentally to turn it into a series of simple prose statements is a self-defeating exercise. Far better to take the Mother's advice and read "with a blank mind" than to worry over the interpretation of every line, thereby depriving oneself of everything that is most valuable, profound and significant! Much of Savitri is a mystery to the mind, and it will ever remain so if we go only by the mind.

We ought to find an approach that would get away from the traditional search for "explanations". Once again, the cue is available from the Mother:

… Read properly, with the right attitude, concentrating a little before opening the pages and trying to keep the mind as empty as possible, absolutely without a thought. The direct road is by the heart. I tell you, if you try to concentrate really with this aspiration you can light a flame, the psychic flame, the flame of purification in a very short time, perhaps in a few days. What you cannot do normally, you can do with the help of Savitri. Try and you will see how very different it is, how new, if you read with this attitude, with this something at the back of your consciousness: as though it were an offering to Sri Aurobindo. …

"The direct road is by the heart." These words became our inspiration and guiding light. This is how a friend of mine looks at Savitri, approaches Savitri...   more »

On the 18th January 1960, when a young disciple met the Mother for a personal interview, she said to him: "I shall give you something special; be prepared." The next day, when he again met her, she spoke in French first about how to kindle the psychic Flame and then in this connection started speaking about Sri Aurobindo’s great epic Savitri and continued to speak at length.

The disciple, after returning from the Mother, wanted to note down immediately what she had said, but he could not do so because he felt a great hesitation due to his sense of incapacity to transcribe exactly the Mother’s own words. After nearly seven years, however, he felt a strong urge to note down what the Mother had spoken; so in 1967 he wrote down from memory a report in French. The report was seen by the Mother and a few corrections were made by her. To another disciple who asked her permission to read this report, she wrote: Years ago I have spoken at length about Savitri to Mona Sarkar and he has noted in French what I said. Some time back I have seen what he has written and found it correct on the whole. (4 December 1967)

On a few other occasion also, the Mother had spoken to the same disciple on the value of reading Savitri which he had noted down afterwards. These notes have been added at the end of the main report.

A few members of the Ashram had privately read this report in French, but afterwards there were many requests for its English version. A translation was therefore made in November 1967. A proposal was made to the Mother in 1972 for its publication and it was submitted to her for approval. The Mother wanted to check the translation before permitting its publication but could check only a portion of it.

In view of the great value of what the Mother had said about Savitri and also because of the increasing demand for the English version, it is now being published in this here. This is a report written from memory but is amazingly distinct and vivid. We should be multiply thankful to Mona Sarkar for giving it to us all. The Mother says the direct road to Savitri is by 'the heart'.   more »

In a long Letter dated 4 May 1947 from Sri Aurobindo we have his comments on certain criticisms made against his poetry by a friend of Amal Kiran (KD Sethna) apropos of his book The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo (1947). Amal Kiran had asked Sri Aurobindo’s permission to show this letter to his friend, but in a second letter dated 7 July 1947, the present letter, Sri Aurobindo had explained the reasons why he did not favour the idea of making it public. Since, however, any possibility of the first long letter, of 4 May 1947, being misconstrued is removed if it is read along with the second explanatory letter, it was included in the Birth Centenary publication. It surely contains extremely valuable data relating to Sri Aurobindo’s own literary development. Amal Kiran’s friend, Frederick Mendonça, was a professor of English in St Xavier College, Bombay. That was now more than sixty years ago. Amal Kiran graduated from St Xavier College in the mid-1920s.   more »

The influences I spoke of were of course only such influences as every poet undergoes before he has entirely found himself. What you say about Arnold’s influence is quite correct; it acted mainly, however, as a power making for restraint and refinement, subduing any uncontrolled romanticism and insisting on clear lucidity and right form and building. Meredith had no influence on Songs to Myrtilla; even afterwards I did not make myself acquainted with all his poetry, it was only Modern Love and poems like the sonnet on Lucifer and the Ascent to Earth of the Daughter of Hades that I strongly admired and it had its effect on the formation of poetic style and its after-effects in that respect are not absent from Savitri. It is only Swinburne’s early lyrical poems that exercised any power on me, Dolores, Hertha, The Garden of Prosperine and others rank among his best works,—also Atlanta in Calydon, his later lyrical poetry I found too empty and his dramatic and narrative verse did not satisfy me. One critic characterized Love and Death as an extraordinarily brilliant and exact reproduction of Keats: what do you say to that? I think Stephen Phillips had more to do with it.   more »

Something more might need to be said in regard to the Overhead note in poetry and the Overmind aesthesis; but these are exactly the subjects on which it is difficult to write with any precision or satisfy the intellect's demand for clear and positive statement. 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 line: it can be expressed indeed by Overhead poetry as no other can express it, but this poetry can deal with quite other things.   more »

…I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced; if, for instance, I indulge in the wealth-burdened line or passage, it is not merely for the pleasure of the indulgence, but because there is that burden, or at least what I conceive to be that, in the vision or the experience. When the expression has been found, I have to judge, not by the intellect or by any set poetical rule, but by an intuitive feeling, whether it is entirely the right expression and, if it is not, I have to change and go on changing until I have received the absolutely right inspiration and the right transcription of it and must never be satisfied with any a peu pres or imperfect transcription even if that makes good poetry of one kind or another. This is what I have tried to do. The critic or reader will judge for himself whether I have succeeded or failed, but if he has seen nothing and understood nothing, it does not follow that his adverse judgment is sure to be the right and true one, there is at least a chance that he may so conclude, not because there is nothing to see and nothing to understand, only poor pseudo-stuff or a rhetorical emptiness but because he was not equipped for the vision or the understanding. Savitri is the record of a seeing, of an experience which is not of the common kind and is often very far from what the general human mind sees and experiences. You must not expect appreciation or understanding from the general public or even from many at the first touch; as I have pointed out, there must be a new extension of consciousness and aesthesis to appreciate a new kind of mystic poetry. Moreover if it is really new in kind, it may employ a new technique, not perhaps absolutely new, but new in some or many of its elements: in that case old rules and canons and standards may be quite inapplicable; evidently, you cannot justly apply to the poetry of Whitman the principles of technique which are proper to the old metrical verse or the established laws of the old traditional poetry; so too when we deal with a modernist poet. We have to see whether what is essential to poetry is there and how far the new technique justifies itself by new beauty and perfection, and a certain freedom of mind from old conventions is necessary if our judgment is to be valid or rightly objective.…   more »

Sri Aurobindo is giving all the process of rebuilding the Consciousness into the Unconscious. He calls the separation “the fall”: that is truly a fall of the Consciousness in the Unconscious. And now he describes how the message sent from the Supreme to repair the harm done wakens up again the Consciousness—as by a kind of imperative influence—to begin to climb up, back to the Supreme Consciousness.

This ascent is the evolution that will take so many thousands and thousands of years. But for a very long time it was not measured. It is only when Mind took the form in man, that time began to be measured. And, before that, who can know how long It took to wake up from the complete Unconsciousness? He is speaking of the starting-point of this evolution.

Savitri came to transform this world and make it fit to receive the Higher Light and Power. But in order to transform the world, one must come upon earth, accept it, and then accept at the same time its insincerity, its weakness, its incapacity to live this Higher Consciousness. That gives me the impression, a strong impression, of what has been for ages and centuries, but it is not the final destiny of the earth. Life is expected to transform itself in order to be able to express the divine things—the Divine Consciousness. And that is why She has come upon earth to prepare it.

That is the history of human life upon earth: each time that help has been sent to hasten the evolution, it has been received in that way. But each time the effort and the help are bigger, higher, truer; and each time a little work, some result, is achieved; and step by step, the world grows towards its Realisation. The whole story has been shown under a symbolic form, in a symbolic story, and it is that that Sri Aurobindo gives in Savitri…

It is this terrible story of the creation of earth and man as the means to save the world from suffering and destruction. The death of Satyavan becomes the symbol of the misery of the earth’s creation, of its fate and, through Savitri, of its liberation. She faces the doom in order to give the solution. The creation is plunged in misery, suffering and death. But it can and will be saved through Her intervention. …   more »

Sāvitrī has got the intense directness, vastness and comprehensiveness of the Vedas and the Upanishads. The Vedas and the Upanishads speak of the One, the Divine, the Supreme Ineffable. It is that which finds expression in myriad forms in the cosmic dance. In the seer's vision, the shadows of the lower planes of cosmic existence are shot through with the Light of this Eternal Reality and to him, therefore, the whole Nature seems to be bathed in an ether of Delight. This experience seems so far from the ordinary experience of man that one would have thought that its expression in poetry would lack the sense of a convincing Reality. But the most miraculous power of the Goddess of poetry is that the expression of this experience by the ancient sages carries with it a very intense sense of concreteness, what Mr. Sethna calls "a burning throb of realisation." This power of expression comes to them, not from the realms of mere mind but from Overhead regions of intuition, inspiration, revelation and even beyond it from the Overmind. It is the spiritual alchemy of this overhead poetical expression that renders this immeasurably remote realm of experiences intimately near to us, and carries a sense of their reality to our most outward mind. While reading those inspired utterances one feels opening before him altogether a new world of experiences, a world of beings, "more real than living man", for in it breathe and move "nurslings of immortality". Like Veda and the Upanishads, Sāvitrī also opens us to this realm of the Eternal. It is not merely a reproduction of the experience of the past; for, Sri Aurobindo has discovered new realms of the spirit. Sāvitrī , therefore, is charged with a similar inspirational afflatus but is also at the same time, "a springing forward". We are not here concerned with the difference of spiritual content, which could take us far,—but with the similarities in their content and mode of expression...   more »

It is in Sāvitrī that Love divine comes as the embodiment of the Supreme Grace to deliver the soul of man out of the clutches of Death. Sāvitrī raises the whole problem to its cosmic proportions and brings hi the necessary divine elements whose intervention alone can lead to the successful solution of the opposition. The colloquy between Sāvitrī, Love Divine incarnate, and Death is among the most inspired utterances of world's poetry. Conquest over death, attainment of immortality has been the dream of man from the dawn of his awakening. It finds expression in the Vedic hymns, in the famous aspiration of the seer of the Upanishad who chanted "from death lead me to immortality", and who affirmed in a mortal world the immortality of man's soul by addressing men as "children of immortality". Sāvitrī takes up the same subject, brings out all the necessary conditions for the realisation of this dream of man. It affirms the necessity of the birth of a new Power, the Power of Divine Grace, or Love, which alone can save man from the reign of Ignorance which is Death.    more »

Sāvitrī deals with a realm of experience that is not known to the common man and it is therefore likely that it may not meet with general appreciation or understanding at first. The creator of Sāvitrī knew this very well and so he wrote: "Sāvitrī is a record of a seeing, of an experience, which is not of the common kind, and it is often very far from what the general human mind sees or experiences". But even the modernist poet cannot lay claim to a universal understanding and appreciation of his work. Sāvitrī demands a certain minimum of capacity of vision in addition to a broad cosmopolitan enlightened outlook familiar with the latest advances in several branches of human knowledge. But that cannot be a bar to its high epic qualities. On the contrary, it opens out an altogether new and rich realm of experience to the reader and if he has to make an effort to enter into the spirit of it, lie will find that his labours are more than amply rewarded.    more »

The voice of the poet will reveal to us by the inspired rhythmic word the God who is the Self of all things and beings, the Life of the Universe, the Divinity in man, and he will express all the emotion and delight of the endeavour of the human soul, to discover the touch and joy of that Divinity within him in whom he feels the mighty founts of his own being and life and effort and his fullness and unity with all cosmic experience and with Nature and with all creatures.    more »

When we have a description of a. spiritual experience—and there are several dozens of them—we find the language adequate and appropriate to the experience. There are intensities of delight, of power, of ecstasy, of calm-wideness of self, each carrying its authentic atmosphere with the expression. When Aswapati felt the approach of the supreme Power, the Divine Mother, here is what he felt:

All at her contact broke from silence' seal;
Spirit and body thrilled identified,
Linked in the grasp of an unspoken joy;
Mind, members, life were merged in ecstasy.

The intensity of the experience of Delight and Power and its transforming influence penetrating right up to the physical body is vivid here. If this one gives us an experience of the higher consciousness and its nearness with at! the exaltation that accompanies it, there is another type in which Aswapati comes down to his physical consciousness from Trance,—after the intense experience on the highest level of his being, where he communicates with the Supreme Power.…   more »

The range of Sāvitrī is as wide as the cosmos and includes within it conditions pre-existent to the manifestation of the cosmos and ranges of Eternal and Infinite being and Superconscient levels of consciousness that have not yet manifested here on earth. That is to say, it includes unfathomable abyss of darkness of the Nescience mounting gradually to the realms of Eternal Day. There is very often a kind of parallelism between the lower ranges of Darkness and the higher realms of Light...

The reader will see a kind of parallel opposites which heightens the contrast even when the same words and adjectives are used. Both are voids, but what a difference!

When the whole poem moves on the heights of revelation, inspiration, illumined mind and never comes down to a lower plane than intuitive sight and expression, it is very difficult to make a choice of passages with special poetical merit. But there are single lines, double lines, quartets throughout the poem that have a power of poetic beauty which grips our mind and can go on revealing its wealth like a mine. See how the three lines reach an Upanishadic height and grandeur in the intensity of the Vision in "The Heavens of the Ideal"! Aswapati saw:

A million lotuses swaying on one stem,
World after coloured and ecstatic world
Climbs towards some far unseen epiphany.

   more »