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
Absent
thee from felicity awhile,
And
in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
have
the Overhead touch in the substance, the rhythm and the feeling; but
Shakespeare is not giving us here the sense of the One and the Infinite. He is,
as in the other lines of his which have this note, dealing as he always does
with life, with vital emotions and reactions or the thoughts that spring out in
the life-mind under the pressure of life. It is not any strict adhesion to a
transcendental view of things that constitutes this kind of poetry, but
something behind not belonging to the mind or the vital and physical
consciousness and with that a certain quality or power in the language and the
rhythm which helps to bring out that deeper something. If I had to select the
line in European poetry which most suggests an almost direct descent from the
Overmind consciousness there might come first Virgil's line about "the
touch of tears in mortal things"
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem
mortalia tangunt.
Another might be Shakespeare's
In
the dark backward and abysm of Time
or again
Those
thoughts that wander through eternity.
We might also add Wordsworth's line
The
winds come to me from the fields of sleep.
There are other lines 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
(Marlowe:
Doctor Faustus)
If
we could extract and describe the quality arid 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 Overmind is not strictly a transcendental consciousness that epithet would
more accurately apply to the supramental and to the Sachchidananda
consciousness—though it looks up to the transcendental and may receive
something from it and though it does transcend the ordinary human mind and in
its full and native self-power, when it does not lean down and become part of
mind, is superconscient to us. It is more properly a cosmic consciousness, even
the very base of the cosmic as we perceive, understand or feel it. It stands
behind every particular in the cosmos and is the source of all our mental,
vital or physical actualities and possibilities which are diminished and
degraded derivations and variations from it and have not, except in certain
formations and activities of genius and some intense self-exceeding, anything
of the native Overmind quality and power. Nevertheless, because it stands
behind as if covered by a veil, something of it can break through or shine
through or even only dimly glimmer through and that brings the Overmind touch
or note. We cannot get this touch frequently unless we have torn the veil, made
a gap in it or rent it largely away and seen the very face of what is beyond,
lived in the light of it or established some kind of constant intercourse. Or
we can draw upon it from time to time without ever ascending into it if we have
established a line of communication between the higher and the ordinary
consciousness. What comes down may be very much diminished but it has something
of that. The ordinary reader of poetry who has not that experience will usually
not be able to distinguish but would at the most feel that here is something
extraordinarily fine, profound, sublime or unusual,—or he might turn away from
it as something too high-pitched and excessive; he might even speak
depreciatingly of "purple passages", rhetoric, exaggeration or
excess. One who had the line of communication open could on the other hand feel
what is there and distinguish even if he could not adequately characterise or
describe it. 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 or close to the front by a combination of
words which carries the suggestion of a deeper meaning or by the forte of an
image or, most of all, by an intonation and a rhythm which carry up the depths
in their wide wash or long march or mounting surge. Sometimes it is left
lurking behind and only suggested so that a subtle feeling of what is not
actually expressed is needed if the reader is not to miss it. This is oftenest
the case when there is just a touch or note pressed upon something that would
be otherwise only of a mental, vital or physical poetic value and nothing of
the body of the Overhead power shows itself 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 together of words which has the power to force a deeper sense on the
mind as in Virgil's
sunt lacrimae rerum.
One
can note that this line if translated straight into English would sound awkward
and clumsy as would many of the finest lines in Rig Veda; that is precisely
because they are new and felicitous turns in the original language, discoveries
of an unexpected and absolute phrase, they defy translation. If you note the
combination of words and sounds in Shakespeare's line
And
in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
so
arranged as to force on the mind and still more on the subtle nerves and sense
the utter absoluteness of the difficulty and pain of living for the soul that
has awakened to the misery of the world, you can see how this technique works.
Here and elsewhere the very body and soul of the thing seen or felt come out
into the open. The same dominant characteristic can be found in other lines
which I have not cited,—in Leopardi's
l'insano
indegno mistero delle cose
(The
insane and ignoble mystery of things)
or
in Wordsworth's
Voyaging
through strange seas of thought, alone.
We look before and after,
And
pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With
some pain is fraught;
Our
sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
This
is perfect poetry with the most exquisite melody and beauty of wording and an
unsurpassable poignancy of pathos, but there is no touch or note of the
Overhead inspiration: it is the mind and the heart, the vital emotion, working
at their highest pitch under the stress of a psychic inspiration. The rhythm is
of the same character, a direct, straightforward, lucid and lucent movement
welling out limpidly straight from the psychic source. The same characteristics
are found in another short lyric of Shelley's which is perhaps the purest
example of the psychic inspiration in English poetry:
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?
We
have again extreme poetic beauty there, but nothing of the Overhead note.
In the other lines I have cited it is really the Overmind language and rhythm
that have been to some extent transmitted; but of course all Overhead poetry is
not from the Overmind, more often it comes from tile 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 these other Overhead levels can, be very
different from that which is proper to the Overmind; for the Overmind thinks in
a mass; its thought, feeling, vision is high or deep or wide or all these
things together: to use the Vedic expression about fire, the divine messenger,
it goes vast on its way to bring the divine riches, and it has a corresponding
language and rhythm. The Higher Thought has a strong tread often with bare
unsandalled feet and moves in a clear—cut light: a divine power, measure,
dignity is its most frequent character. The outflow of the Illumined Mind comes
in a flood brilliant with revealing words or a light of crowding images,
sometimes surcharged with its burden of revelations,—sometimes with a
luminous sweep. The Intuition is usually a lightning flash showing up a single
spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire and miraculous completeness of
vision to the surprised ecstasy of the inner eye, its rhythm has a decisive
inevitable sound which leaves nothing essential unheard, but very commonly 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,
but how much of this description will be to the ordinary reader of poetry at
all intelligible or clearly identifiable?
There are besides in mental poetry derivations or substitutes for all these
styles.
Of
man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of
that forbidden tree
or
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues
or
Blind
Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And
Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
Shakespeare's
poetry coruscates with a play of the hues of imagination which we may regard as
a mental substitute for the inspiration of the Illumined Mind and sometimes by
aiming at an exalted note he links on to the illumined Overhead inspiration
itself as in the lines I have more than once quoted:
Wilt
thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal
up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In
cradle of the rude imperious surge?
But
the rest of that passage falls away in spite of its high-pitched language and
resonant rhythm far below the Overhead strain. So it is easy for the mind to
mistake and take the higher for the lower inspiration or vice versa. Thus
Milton's lines might at first sight be taken because of a certain depth of emotion
in their large lingering rhythm as having the Overhead complexion, but this
rhythm loses something of its sovereign right because there are no depths of
sense behind it. It conveys nothing but the noble and dignified pathos of the
blindness and old age of a great personality fallen into evil days.
I do not know therefore whether I can speak with any certainty about the lines
you quote; I would perhaps have to read them in their context first, but it
seems to me that there is just a touch, as in the lines about the dying man.
The thing that is described there may have happened often enough in times like
those of the recent wars and upheavals and in times of violent strife and
persecution arid catastrophe, but the greatness of the experience does riot
come out or riot wholly, because men feel with the mind arid heart and not with
the soul; but here there is by some accident of wording and rhythm a suggestion
of something behind, of the greatness of the soul's experience and its
courageous acceptance of the tragic, the final, the fatal—and its resistance;
it is only just a suggestion, but it is enough: the Overhead has touched and
passed back to its heights. There is something very different but of the same
essential calibre in the line you quote:
Sad
eyes watch for feet that never come.
It
is still more difficult to say anything very tangible about the Overmind
aesthesis. When I wrote about it I was thinking of the static aesthesis that
perceives and receives rather than of the dynamic aesthesis which creates. I
was not thinking at all of superior or inferior grades of poetic greatness or
beauty. If the complete Overmind power or even that of the lower Overhead
planes could come down into the mind and entirely transform its action, then no
doubt there might be greater poetry written than any that man has yet achieved,
just as a greater superhuman life might be created if the Supermind could come
down wholly into life and lift life wholly into itself and transform it. But
what happens at present is that something comes down and accepts to work under
the law of the mind and with a mixture of the mind and it must be judged by the
laws and standards of the mind. It brings in new tones, new colours, new
elements, but it does not change radically as yet the stuff of the
consciousness with which we labour.
Whether it produces great poetry or not depends on the extent to which it
manifests its power and overrides rather than serves the mentality which it is
helping. At present it does not do that sufficiently to raise the work to the
full greatness of the worker.
And then what do you mean exactly by greatness in poetry? One can say that
Virgil is greater than Catullus and that many of Virgil's lines are greater
than anything Catullus ever achieved. But poetical perfection is not the same
thing as poetical greatness. Virgil is perfect at his best, but Catullus too is
perfect at his best: even each has a certain exquisiteness of perfection, each
in his own kind. Virgil's kind is large and deep, that of Catullus sweet and
intense. Virgil's art reached or had from its beginning a greater and more
constant ripeness than that of Catullus. We can say then that Virgil was a
greater poet and artist of word and rhythm but we cannot say that his poetry,
at his best, was more perfect poetry and that of Catullus less perfect. That
renders futile many of the attempts at comparison like
Let us then leave for the present the question of poetic greatness or
superiority aside and come back to the Overmind aesthesis. By aesthesis is
meant a reaction of the consciousness, mental and vital and even bodily, which
receives a certain element in things, something that can be called their taste,
Rasa, which, passing through the mind or sense or both, awakes a vital
enjoyment of the taste, Bhoga, and this can again awaken us, awaken even the
soul in us to something yet deeper and more fundamental than mere pleasure and
enjoyment, to some form of the spirit's delight of existence. Ananda. Poetry,
like all art, serves the seeking for these things, this aesthesis, this Rasa,
Bhoga, Ananda; it brings us a Rasa of word and sound but also of the idea and,
through the idea, of the things expressed by the word and sound and thought, a
mental or vital or sometimes the spiritual image of their form, quality, impact
upon us or even, if the poet is strong enough, of their world-essence, their
cosmic reality, the very soul of them, the spirit that resides in them as it
resides in all things. Poetry may do more than this, but this at least it must
do to however small an extent or it is not poetry. Aesthesis therefore is of
the very essence of poetry, as it is of all art. But it is not the sole element
and aesthesis too is not confined to a reception of poetry and art; it extends
to everything in the world: there is nothing we can sense, think or in any way
experience to which there cannot be an aesthetic reaction of our conscious
being. Ordinarily, we suppose that aesthesis is concerned with beauty, and that
indeed is its most prominent concern: but it is concerned with many other
things also. It is the universal Ananda that is the parent of aesthesis and the
universal Ananda takes three major and original forms, beauty, love and delight,
the delight of all existence, the delight in things, in all things. Universal
Ananda is the artist and creator of the universe witnessing, experiencing and
taking joy in its creation. In the lower consciousness it creates its
opposites, the sense of ugliness as well as the sense of beauty, hate and
repulsion and dislike as well as love and attraction and liking, grief and pain
as well as joy and delights and between these dualities or as a grey tint in
the background there is a general tone of neutrality and indifference born from
the universal insensibility into which the Ananda sinks in its dark negation in
the Inconscient. All this is the sphere of aesthesis, its dullest reaction is
indifference, its highest is ecstasy. Ecstasy is a sign of a return towards the
original or supreme Ananda: that art or poetry is supreme which can bring us
something of the supreme tone of ecstasy. For as the consciousness sinks from
the supreme levels through various degrees towards the Inconscience the general
sign of this descent is an always diminishing power of its intensity, intensity
of being, intensity of consciousness, intensity of force, intensity of the
delight in things and the delight of existence. So too as we ascend towards the
supreme level, these intensities increase. As we climb beyond Mind, higher and
wider values replace the values of our limited mind, life and bodily
consciousness. Aesthesis shares in this intensification of capacity. The
capacity for pleasure and pain, for liking and disliking is comparatively poor
on the level of our mind and life; our capacity for ecstasy is brief and
limited; these tones arise from a general ground of neutrality which is always
dragging them back towards itself. As it enters the Overhead planes the
ordinary aesthesis turns into a pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a
large or a deep abiding ecstasy. The ground is no longer a general neutrality,
but a pure spiritual ease and happiness upon which the special tones of the
aesthetic consciousness come out or from which they arise. This is the first
fundamental change.
Another change in this transition is a turn towards universality in place of
the isolations, the conflicting generalities, the mutually opposing dualities
of the lower consciousness. In the Overmind we have a first firm foundation of
the experience of a universal beauty, a universal love, a universal delight.
These things can come on the mental and vital plane even before those planes
are directly touched or influenced by the spiritual consciousness; but they are
there a temporary experience and not permanent or they are limited in their
field and do not touch the whole being. They are a glimpse and not a change of
vision or a change of nature. The artist for instance can look at things only
plain or shabby or ugly or even repulsive to the ordinary sense and see in them
and bring out of them beauty and the delight that goes with beauty. But this is
a sort of special grace for the artistic consciousness and is limited within
the field of his art. In the Overhead consciousness, especially in the
Overmind, these things become more and more the law of the vision and the law
of the nature. Wherever the Overmind spiritual man turns he sees a universal
beauty touching and uplifting all things, expressing itself through them,
moulding them into a field or objects of its divine aesthesis; a universal love
goes out from him to all beings; he feels the Bliss which has created the
worlds and upholds them and all that is expresses to him the universal delight,
is made of it, is a manifestation of it and moulded into its image. This
universal aesthesis of beauty and delight does not ignore or fail to understand
the differences and oppositions, the gradations, the harmony and disharmony
obvious to the ordinary consciousness; but, first of all, it draws a Rasa from
them and with that comes the enjoyment, Bhoga. and the touch or the mass of the
Ananda. It sees that all things have their meaning, their value, their deeper
or total significance which the mind does not see, for the mind is only
concerned with a surface vision, surface contacts and its own surface
reactions. When something expresses perfectly what it was meant to express, the
completeness brings with it a sense of harmony, a sense of artistic perfection;
it gives even to what is discordant a place in a system of cosmic concordances
and the discords become part of a vast harmony, and wherever there is harmony,
there is a sense of beauty. Even in form itself, apart from the significance,
the Overmind consciousness sees the object with a totality which changes its
effect on the percipient even while it remains the same thing. It sees lines
and masses and an underlying design which the physical eye does not see and
which escapes even the keenest mental vision. Every form becomes beautiful to
it in a deeper and larger sense of beauty than that commonly known to us. The
Overmind looks also straight at and into the soul of each thing and not only at
its form or its significance to the mind or to the life; this brings to it not
only the true truth of the thing but the delight of it. It sees also the one
spirit in all, the face of the Divine everywhere and there can be no greater
Ananda than that; it feels oneness with all, sympathy, love, the bliss of the
Brahman. In a highest, a most integral experience it sees all things as if made
of existence, consciousness, power, bliss, every atom of them charged with and
constituted of Sachchidananda. In all this the Overmind aesthesis takes its
share and gives its response; for these things come not merely as an idea in
the mind or a truth-seeing but as an experience of the whole being and a total
response is not only possible but above a certain level imperative.
I have said that aesthesis responds not only to what we call beauty and
beautiful things but to all things. 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. He can feel a poetic
and aesthetic joy in the expression of the true as well as in the expression of
the beautiful. He does not make a mere intellectual or philosophical statement
of the truth; it is his vision of its beauty, its power, his thrilled reception
of it, his joy in it that he tries to convey by an utmost perfection in word
and rhythm. If he has the passion, then even a philosophical statement of it he
can surcharge with this sense of power, force, light, beauty. On certain levels
of the Overmind, where the mind element predominates over the element of
gnosis, the distinction between truth and beauty is still valid. It is indeed
one of the chief functions of the Overmind to separate the main powers of the
consciousness and give to each its fun 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. It can take up each power of man
and give it its full potentiality, its highest characteristic development. It
can give to intellect its austerest intellectuality and to logic its most sheer
unsparing logicality. It can give to beauty its most splendid passion of luminous
form and the consciousness that receives it a supreme height and depth of
ecstasy. It can create a sheer and pure poetry impossible for the intellect to
sound to its depths or wholly grasp, much less to mentalise and analyse. It is
the function of Overmind to give to every possibility its full potential, its
own separate kingdom. But also there is another action of Overmind which sees
and thinks and creates in masses, which reunites separated things, which
reconciles opposites. On that level truth and beauty not only become constant
companions but become one, involved in each other, inseparable: on that level
the true is always beautiful and the beautiful is always true. Their highest
fusion perhaps only takes place in the Supermind; but Overmind on its summits
draws enough of the supramental light to see what the Supermind sees and do
what the Supermind does though in a lower key and with a less absolute truth
and power. On an inferior level Overmind may use the language of the intellect
to convey as far as that language can do it 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.
I hope you do not feel crushed under this avalanche of metaphysical psychology;
you have called it upon yourself by your questioning about the Overmind's
greater, larger and deeper aesthesis. What I have written is indeed very scanty
and sketchy, only some of the few essential things that have to be said; but
without it I could not try to give you any glimpse of the meaning of my phrase.
This greater aesthesis is inseparable from the greater truth, it is deeper
because of the depth of that truth, larger by all its immense largeness. I do
not expect the reader of poetry to come anywhere near to all that, he could not
without being a Yogi or at least a sadhak: but just as the Overhead poetry
brings some touch of a deeper power of vision and creation into the mind
without belonging itself wholly to the higher reaches, so also the full
appreciation of all its burden needs at least some touch of a deeper response
of the mind and some touch of a deeper aesthesis. Until that becomes general
the Overhead or at least the Overmind is not going to do more than to touch
here and there, as it did in the past, a few lines. a few passages, or perhaps
as things advance, a little more, nor is it likely to pour into our utterance
its own complete power and absolute value.
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 or 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 also 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 the elevation or
depth or intrinsic beauty of the thing said cannot then 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
tit and powerful instrument, for a great poet will do more with a lower level
of the origin of inspiration than a smaller poet can do even when helped from
the highest sources. In a certain sense all genius comes from Overhead; for
genius is the entry or inrush of a greater consciousness into the mind or a
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 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 qualifications,
to the second way and its too rare poetic creation.
The great bulk of the highest poetry belongs to the first of these two orders.
In the second order there are again two or perhaps three levels; sometimes a
felicitous turn or an unusual force of language or a deeper note of feeling
brings in the Overhead touch. More often it is the power of the rhythm that
lifts up language that is simple and common or a feeling or idea that has often
been expressed and awakes something which is not ordinarily there. If one
listens with the mind only or from the vital centre only, one may have a
wondering admiration for the skill and beauty of woven word and sound or be struck
by the happy way or the power with which the feeling or idea is expressed. But
there is something more in it than that: it is this that a deeper, more inward
strand of the consciousness has seen and is speaking, and if we listen more
profoundly we can get something more than the admiration and delight of the
mind or Housman's thrill of the solar plexus. We can feel perhaps the Spirit of
the universe lending its own depth 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
(Wordsworth:
The Solitary Reaper)
or it may enter again into Vyasa's
A
void and dreadful forest ringing with the crickets' cry
vanam pratibhayam śūnyam
jhillikāgananāditam
or
remember its call to the soul of man,
anityam asukham lokam imam prāpya
bhajasva mām
Thou
who hast come to this transient and unhappy world, love and worship Me.
There is a second level on which the poetry draws into itself a fuller language
of Intuitive inspiration, illumination or the higher thinking and feeling. A
very rich or great poetry may then emerge and many of the most powerful
passages in Shakespeare, Virgil or Lucretius or the Mahabharata and Ramayana,
not to speak of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Rig Veda. have this
inspiration. It is a poetry "thick inlaid with patines of bright
gold" or welling up in a stream of passion, beauty and force. But
sometimes there comes down a supreme voice, the Overmind voice and the Overmind
music and it is to be observed that the lines and passages where that happens
rank among the greatest and most admired in all poetic literature. It would be
therefore too much to say that the 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 its 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
domain of poetry and there would be no danger of the power of poetry beginning
to fade, to fall into decadence, to fail us. It might even enter into the
domain of the infinite and inexhaustible, catch some word of the Ineffable,
show us revealing images which bring us near to the Reality that is secret in
us and in all, of which the Upanishad speaks,
anejad
ekam manaso javīyo nainad devā āpnuvan pūrvarn arsat…
tad
ejati tan naijati tad dūre tad a 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.
—1946