On Poetry
A Rishi may be a Yogi, but also he may not; a Yogi too may be a Rishi, but also he may not. Just as a philosopher may or may not be a poetand a poet may or may not be a philosopher.Poetic intuition and illumination is not the same thing as Rishi intuition and illumination.
- Sri Aurobindo
11 February 1936
Mystic poetry can be written from any plane, provided the writer gets an inspiration from the inner consciousness whether mind, vital or subtle physical.
Sri Aurobindo
Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol
Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol
From Book I, Canto I: The Symbol Dawn
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
Across the path of the divine Event
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity,
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence’ marge.
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her boundless self,
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite;
A fathomless zero occupied the world.
A power of fallen boundless self awake
Between the first and the last Nothingness,
Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came,
Turned from the insoluble mystery of birth
And the tardy process of mortality
And longed to reach its end in vacant Nought.
I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was particular – if part seemed to me to come from any lower level, I was not satisfied to leave it because it was good poetry. All has to be as far as possible of the same mint. In fact, Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one’s own Yogic consciousness and how far that could be made creative.
Sri Aurobindo
Thought the Paraclete
- SriAurobindo
As some bright archangel in vision flies
Plunged in dream-caught spirit immensities,
Past the long green crests of the seas of life,
Past the orange skies of the mystic mind
Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God.
Transformation
- SriAurobindo
My breath runs in a subtle rhythmic stream;It fills my members with a might divine:I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine.Time is my drama or my pageant dream.Now are my illumined cells joy’s flaming schemeAnd changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fineChannels of rapture opal and hyalineFor the influx of the Unknown and the Supreme.I am no more a vassal of the flesh,A slave to Nature and her leaden rule;I am caught no more in the senses’ narrow mesh.My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,My body is God’s happy living tool,My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.
Music and Poetry
I do not know what to say on the subject you propose to me —the superiority of music to poetry,—for my appreciation ofmusic is bodiless and inexpressiblewhile about poetry I canwrite at ease and with an expert knowledge. But is it necessary to fix a scale of greatness between two fine arts when each has its own greatness and can touch in its own way the extremes of aesthetic Ananda?Music, no doubt, goes nearest to the infinite and to the essence of things because it relies wholly on the ethereal vehicle, ´sabda (architecture by the by can do something of the same kind at the other extreme even in its imprisonment in mass); but painting and sculpture have their revenge by liberating visible form into ecstasy, while poetry though it cannot do with sound what music does, yet can make a many-stringed harmony, a sound-revelation winging the creation by the word and setting afloat vivid suggestions of form and colour,—that gives it ina very subtle kind the combined power of all the arts. Who shall decide between such claims or be a judge between these godheads?
- Sri Aurobindo
26 April 1933
Vision shall see, the heart shall confide, the soul shall learn to adore,
Seeking the light that is one with the life, the love that is more.
Come! let us go to the fields of the sun and the forests of light,
Leaving the shadows of earth and the heavy-winged pulses of night.
Come! let us walk in the garden of God, where the lilies are white,
Where the roses of heaven are red and the stars are a fire of delight.
Ahana
The Call of the Dawn
Who
- SriAurobindo
Invitation
- SriAurobindo
With wind and the weather beating round me
Up to the hill and the moorland I go.
Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?
Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?
Not in the petty circle of cities
Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell;
Over me God is blue in the welkin,
Against me the wind and the storm rebel.
Rose of God
On 31 December 1934. , Sri Aurobindo wrote to his secretary that the just-typed “Rose of God” could be “circulated first as a sort of New Year invocation”.
On 2 March 1935, his secretary wrote to him saying that the editor of a quarterly journal had asked for a poem to be published, and asking whether “Rose of God” could be sent. Sri Aurobindo replied: “I feel squeamish about publishing the ‘Rose of God’ in a magazine or newspaper. It seems to me the wrong place altogether.”
Rose of God
-SriAurobindo
Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven,
Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven!
Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame,
Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name.
Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being,
Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing!
Live in the mind of our earthhood; O golden Mystery, flower,
Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour.
Rose of God, damask force of Infinity, red icon of might,
Rose of Power with thy diamond halo piercing the night!
Ablaze in the will of the mortal, design the wonder of thy plan,
Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in man.
Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire,
Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colour’s lyre!
Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical rhyme;
Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the children of Time.
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.
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.
Sri Aurobindo
The Tiger and the Deer
SriAurobindo
Brilliant, crouching, slouching, what crept through the green heart of the forest,
Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless paws of grandeur and murder?
The wind slipped through the leaves as if afraid lest its voice and the noise of its steps perturb the pitiless Splendour,
Hardly daring to breathe. But the great beast crouched and crept, and crept and crouched a last time, noiseless, fatal,
Love and Death
- Sri Aurobindo
The lament of Ruru for his lost love
"O pale flower,
Thou fear’st the touch of the cold morning wind.
I will not let thee go. What, is the night
So cruel? and the stars? and the white moon?
They have no heart, they have no love. But I,
I will enfold thee with my arms, my love,
And keep thee from the cold."
Spiritual Poetry
The spiritual vision must never be intellectual, philosophical or abstract, it must always give the sense of something vivid, living and concrete, a thing of vibrant beauty or a thing of power. An abstract spiritual poetry is possible but that is not Amal’s manner. The poetry of spiritual vision as distinct from that of spiritual thought abounds in images, unavoidably because that is the straight way to avoid abstractness; but these images must be felt as very real and concrete things, otherwise they become like the images used by the philosophic poets, decorative to the thought rather than realities of the inner vision and experience.
Sri Aurobindo
Transformation
- SriAurobindo
My breath runs in a subtle rhythmic stream;
It fills my members with a might divine:
I have drunk the Infinite like a giant’s wine.
Time is my drama or my pageant dream.
Now are my illumined cells joy’s flaming scheme
And changed my thrilled and branching nerves to fine
Channels of rapture opal and hyaline
For the influx of the Unknown and the Supreme.
I am no more a vassal of the flesh,
A slave to Nature and her leaden rule;
I am caught no more in the senses’ narrow mesh.
My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
My body is God’s happy living tool,
My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.
Bride of the Fire
- SriAurobindo
"All can be done of the god-touch is there.""