Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1936

Letter ID: 1790

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

December 3, 1936

No, I don’t know anything about the roses being opened by the rhythm of Nature or the Bride. Hence the question to know what you know.

What I know, is ineffable.

You seemed to have been in the worst of moods, due to heavy correspondence?

No, the best.

I hope you have had your fill of supramental glee by the merciless whipping on the inframental!

It was all done for your good with the most philanthropic motive.

But I don’t understand your point in spite of such whipping. Is poetry to be felt only, only to have an inner thrill, tremor and quiver?

What’s the use of saying poetry, with a universal sweep like that? It is a question of mystic poetry, not of all poetry.

Perhaps one must not use the intellect to understand what exactly or apparently is meant?

Mystic poetry does not mean anything exactly or apparently; it means things suggestively and reconditely,– things that are not known and classified by the intellect.

Or should one be satisfied only with the fineries, embroidery, ornamental decorations outside, and not see what it is that they are covering?

What you are asking is to reduce what is behind to intellectual terms, which is to make it something quite different from itself.

Must not one see if the body that these ornaments decorate is as beautiful and precious or more than these fineries?

It is not a question of the (intellectual) body, but of the mystic soul of the thing.

You want it intellectually beautiful and precious or mystically beautiful and precious?

The symbolic and spiritual images in your Bird of Fire, for instance, are so rich, high, poignant and poetic, but if one could follow the bhāva behind or through them, I believe the appreciation would become complete.

What do you mean by following the bhava behind? Putting a label on the bird and keeping it dried up in your intellectual museum, for Professors to describe to their pupils – “this is the species and that’s how it is constituted, these are the bones, feathers etc., etc. and now you know all about the bird. Or would you like me to dissect it farther?”

Suppose one said: “Why the devil do you want to know the meaning and not rest satisfied with the beauty of the expression?”

Why the deuce are you dwelling on the poetry of the expression as if that were all one feels in a mystic poem and unless one dissects and analyses it one can’t feel anything but words?

The little explanations you gave here and there of J’s mystic poems enhanced the rasa.

It didn’t to me – it simply intellectualised all the rasa out of it.

If the explanations are not necessary then Blake’s poems lose half the charm. People have perhaps appreciated the poetic qualities of his works, but now that they understand the significance also they consider him very great. Isn’t that so?

They understand the significance? in what way? By allegorising them?

Read the remarks of Housman on the magnificent poem of Blake he quotes in full and the attempts of people to explain it¹. I quite agree with him there though not in his too sweeping theory of poetry. To explain that poem is to murder it and dissect the corpse. One can’t explain it, one can only feel and live the truth behind it.

What I mean to say is that intellectual understanding is necessary to fully appreciate the beauty and worth of a poem, otherwise one feels only a subtle tremor or quiver of joy.

Rubbish!

Who is this “one”?

In symbolic or mystic poems one wants to know also the truths behind the symbols for proper appreciation.

Intellectual truths? Do you think that the intellectual truth of the Divine is its real truth? In that case there is no need of Yoga. Philosophy is enough.

For instance J has written “Crimson Rose”, and by crimson has suggested the painful feeling. Now if one could catch that instead of simply visualising a red rose, the rasa becomes more thick.

It would become much more thick if you felt the mystic red rose and all that it is in the subtle planes instead of merely visualising a red rose and thinking about pain.

I may farther say about J’s poem that I don’t care a damn who the woman is that is sitting there and I would rather not have a label put on her. It leaves me free to feel all the inner possible meaning of her waiting and what she is waiting for.

It is the same with the symbols in Yoga. One puts an intellectual label on the “White Light” and the mind is satisfied and says, “Now I know all about it; it is the pure divine Consciousness light,” and really it knows nothing. But if one allows the Divine White Light to manifest and pour through the being, then one comes to know it and get all its results. Even if there is no labelled knowledge, there is the luminous experience of all its significance –

¹ “My spectre around me night and day...”, The Name and Nature of Poetry by A.E. Housman. pp. 43-44.

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