Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7939

Q: To help me distinguish the planes of inspiration, would you just indicate where the following lines from various poems of mine have their sources?

1. What visionary urge

Has stolen from horizons watched alone

Into thy being with ethereal guile?

2. A huge sky-passion sprouting from the earth

In branched vastnesses of leafy rapture.

3. The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind.

4. A sea unheard where spume nor spray is blown.

5. Irradiant wing-waft through eternal space,

Pride of lone rapture and invincible sun-gaze.

6. Born nomad of the infinite heart!

Time-tamer! star-struck debauchee of light!

Warrior who hurls his spirit like a dart

Across the terrible night

Of death to conquer immortality!

7. ...And to the earth-self suddenly

Came, through remote entranced marvelling

Of adoration ever-widening,

A spacious sense of immortality.

8. Here life’s lost heart of splendour beats immense.

9. The haunting rapture of the vast dream-wind

That blows, star-fragrant, from eternity.

10. An ocean-hearted ecstasy am I

Where time flows inward to eternal shores.

A: 1. Second line Intuitive with Overmind touch. Third line imaginative Poetic Intelligence.

2. Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind.

3. Intuitive with Overmind touch.

4. Intuitive.

5. Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch.

6. Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch.

7. Mixture of Higher and Illumined Mind – in the last line the mental Overmind touch.

8. Illumined Mind with mental Overmind touch.

9. Ditto.

10. Intuitive, Illumined, Overmind touch all mixed together.

I have analysed but very imperfectly – because these influences are so mixed together that the descriptions are not exhaustive.

Also remember that I speak of a touch, of the mental Overmind touch and that when there is the touch it is not always complete – it may be more apparent from something either in the language or substance or rhythm than in all three together.

Even so, perhaps some of my descriptions are overhasty and denote the impression of the moment. Also the poetical value of the poetry exists independent of its source.

13-2-1934