Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
SABCL 26
Fragment ID: 7943
Q: It is a bit of a surprise to me that Virgil’s Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt is now considered by you “an almost direct descent from the Overmind consciousness”.1 I was under the impression that, like that other line of his –
O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem
it was a perfect mixture of the Higher Mind with the Psychic; and the impression was based on something you had yourself written to me in the past. Similarly I remember you definitely declaring Wordsworth’s
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep
to be lacking precisely in the Overmind note and having only the note of Intuition in an intense form2. What you write now means a big change of opinion in both the instances – but how and why the change?
A: Yes, certainly, my ideas and reactions to some of the lines and passages about which you had asked me long ago, have developed and changed and could not but change. For at that time I was new to the overhead regions or at least to the highest of them – for the higher thought and the illumination were already old friends – and could not be sure or complete in my perception of many things concerning them. I hesitated therefore to assign anything like Overmind touch or inspiration to passages in English or other poetry and did not presume to claim any of my own writing as belonging to this order. Besides, the intellect took still too large a part in my reactions to poetry; for instance, I judged Virgil’s line too much from what seemed to be its surface intellectual import and too little from its deeper meaning and vision and its reverberations of the Overhead. So also with Wordsworth’s line about the “fields of sleep”: I have since then moved in those fields of sleep and felt the breath which is carried from them by the winds that came to the poet, so I can better appreciate the depth of vision in Wordsworth’s line. I could also see more clearly the impact of the Overhead on the work of poets who wrote usually from a mental, a psychic, an emotional or other vital inspiration, even when it gave only a tinge.
20-11-1946
1 See “Letters on Savitri” in Savitri (Centenary Edition, 1972), p. 803.
2 See ‘Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art’ in The Future Poetry (Centenary Edition, 1972), p. 368.