Wordsworth was an admirer of Newton and wrote about his memorial statue at Cambridge these two lines:

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through the strange seas of thought, alone.

Sri Aurobindo has referred to the second line a number of times and put it as coming from the Overmind. These lines appear in early part of the Prelude’s Book III, narrating the poet’s visit to Cambridge. But it is also interesting to note that, at one time while revising the poem, the poet had dropped this portion, not aware of the distinctive and the wonderful, and the excellent, he had received! Here is the relevant passage that describes the campus scene and routines of the place:

I was the Dreamer, they the Dream; I roamed

Delighted through the motley spectacle;

Gowns grave, or gaudy, doctors, students, streets,

Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers:

Migration strange for a stripling of the hills,

A northern villager…

The Evangelist St John my patron was:

Three Gothic courts are his, and in the first

Was my abiding-place, a nook obscure;

Right underneath, the College kitchens made

A humming sound, less tuneable than bees,

But hardly less industrious; with shrill notes

Of sharp command and scolding intermixed.

Near me hung Trinity's loquacious clock,

Who never let the quarters, night or day,

Slip by him unproclaimed, and told the hours

Twice over with a male and female voice.

Her pealing organ was my neighbour too;

And from my pillow, looking forth by light

Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold

The antechapel where the statue stood

Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Further on we have

The memory languidly revolved, the heart

Reposed in noontide rest, the inner pulse

Of contemplation almost failed to beat.

The passage as a whole makes a very uninspiring narrative; even to the ordinary soul it is without contents, it is drab and dreary, without any deeper echoes from the inner recesses of life, without colour and lustre of the flight of a creative imagination. There is no winging across the purple and blue skies of the spirit, no elevating thoughts or emotions; it’s dull, it’s monotonous, it’s unexciting. Almost everything is “bathos and triviality”, in spite of the “the inner pulse of contemplation”. There’s only cerebration and that too on the surface. Once in a while Wordsworth is capable of giving us expressions such as “some fragment from his dream of human life”, or “apparelled in celestial light”, or the superb “the winds come to me from the fields of sleep”, but often they quite get lost in much that is tedious, boring, unexciting. And yet a miracle happens—and we get

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

How does that happen? Wordsworth was a poet of Nature and his poetry is full of daffodils and rainbows of different sizes, and skylarks and cuckoos, and phantoms of light, and sun and moon and stars. There is generally something remarkable in it. But here in the Cambridge-passage all that is just absent. Yet in the “strange seas of thought” there is the rush of a sudden sea, a rush that is tranquil in its assured and well-received, and sudden, in the marvel of its absoluteness. And rare are such pure and serene gems. Sri Aurobindo says: “…it is in the Nature strain of which he [Wordsworth] is the discoverer that he is unique, for it is then that the seer in him either speaks the revelatory thought of his spirit or gives us strains greater than thought’s, the imperishable substance of spiritual consciousness finding itself in sight and speech.” But here he was not talking of nature and yet there’s the miracle.

Sri Aurobindo continues that, his falls are greater than his ascents, that he “rises high, sometimes astonishingly high, for a few lines but cannot keep long to the high poetic expression and sometimes can sink low and sometimes astonishingly low, even to bathos and triviality, especially when he strains towards an excessive simplicity which can become puerile or worse. He intellectualises his poetic statement overmuch and in fact states too much and sings too little, has a dangerous turn for a too obvious sermonising, pushes too far his reliance on the worth of his substance and is not jealously careful to give it a form of beauty. In his works of long breath there are terrible stretches of flattest prose in verse with lines of power, sometimes of fathomless depth like that wonderful

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone,

interspersed or occurring like a lonely and splendid accident, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, (rare swimming in the vast gurge) …still one of the seer-poets he is, a seer of the calm spirit in Nature, the poet of man’s large identity with her and serene liberating communion: it is on this side that he is admirable and unique.” (The Future Poetry) Wordsworth rose “astonishingly high” in “Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”

There is no doubt that, in Sri Aurobindo’s

Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm,

there is the distinct echo of Wordsworth’s “Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone”. The echo becomes unmistakable, and stronger, when we mark that “Winging through worlds of splendour and of calm” of the earlier 1936-version was changed to “Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm”. The relevant passage belonging to the “perfect shrine for the God of Love” is as follows:

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.

Though the line “Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm” is kind of modelled along the pattern of “Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone”, and though both belong to the Overmind realm, there is a difference between the two, quite a difference. Metrically the dactyl at the beginning and the boosting pyrrhic at the fourth foot of Sri Aurobindo’s line give to it a wide-sweeping and conquering movement, in contrast to his own, with trochaic beginning “Winging through worlds of splendour and of calm” which rather sounds a bit loud; the line would become less effective, in fact hopeless, if it were “Voyaging through worlds of splendour and calm” though metrically still valid. In comparison to this, Wordsworth’s “Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” has a different Overmental rhythm and thought-substance; in it the occult force of “of splendour and of calm” that is present in the other is absent. The reason is, the Yogi-poet of “Voyaging through worlds of splendour and of calm” lives in those realms whereas the narrator of “Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” only receives it from somewhere else whose origin he does not know. To be a part of that world—that’s the thing.