About yesterday’s poem2, I dreamt that it was exceedingly fine – only a dream!Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1938
Letter ID: 2243
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
November 22, 1938
Guru, I couldn’t give much time today, as I was all the time thinking of finishing the poem, to catch your train! I hope it is not altogether a bad business, what? Most of it looks like repetition.1
It may be repetition but is an exceedingly fine repetition. I was going to say “damned” but Shakespeare only withdrew the expletive. Lines 4-6, also to a less degree lines 11-12 have an overhead accent in their substance and turn of expression. If you go on like that, some day you may find yourself writing overhead poetry without knowing it.
About yesterday’s poem2, I dreamt that it was exceedingly fine – only a dream!
But who said it wasn’t?
I am sorry I don’t understand where you get “lower and supreme consciousness” in yesterday’s poem, nor how you make “magic bars separate” them...
I don’t get these things anywhere “in” the poem – naturally, because the poem is not a treatise on metaphysics or spiritual philosophy, but only a series of mystic images, but I get it “from” the poem. You asked what was the meaning and I gave you what I gathered from it or, if you like, what it would have meant if I had written it. But anyone can put another intellectual version to it, if he likes.
Bars usually divide something and as they can’t very well be dividing the Spirit or supreme Being itself, it must be dividing the supreme from the lower, especially as you have shadow-spaces of sky immediately afterwards filling with transparent peace which can only come from the removal of the “lid” well-known to shut mind from what is beyond mind. Especially as there is an infinity of “thought”, the sky must be the sky of mind and mind is part of the lower (non-supreme) consciousness. If that is not the meaning, I am damned if I know what the meaning can be – at any rate, if there is any other, it surpasses my capacity and range of spiritual or occult knowledge. As for the superconscient, the Supreme is the superconscient, so that there can be no doubt of that – the tranquil spirit’s deep and the beatitude of sleep are not part of the ordinary consciousness but can only come in the superconscient or by the meeting of the superconscient and subconscient. You speak of Nature being a song of eternity which it can’t be (its roots being in the subconscient) unless there is the meeting of the superconscient and subconscient – the latter being a part of the fathomless deep of the spirit. That meeting is effected through the subtle or inner planes and the inarticulate prayer can only be the aspiration that rises from inconscient and half-conscious Nature calling for the union. That’s all.
1 “Primal Source”, Sun-Blossoms, p. 99.
2 “Flames of Vision”, Sun-Blossoms, p. 106