Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Third Series

Fragment ID: 21000

In the lines you quote from Wordsworth –

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;

I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,

The winds come to me from the fields of sleep

– it is precisely the Overmind movement that is wanting; in the last line there is something of the Overmind substance expressed not directly but through the highest intuitive consciousness (the plane between the illumined mind and Overmind), and, because it is not direct, the Overmind rhythm is absent. If I have given high praise to a passage, it does not follow that it is from the Overmind; the poetic (aesthetic) value or perfection of a line, passage or poem does not depend on the plane from which it comes, but on the purity and authenticity and power with which it transcribes an intense vision and inspiration from whatever source. Shakespeare is a poet of the vital inspiration, Homer of the subtle physical; but there are no greater poets in any literature. No doubt, if we can get a continuous inspiration from the Overmind, that would mean a greater, sustained height of perfection and spiritual quality in poetry than has yet been achieved; but we are discussing here short passages and lines.

As for the Overmind rhythm and inspiration,. we get nearer to it in another line of Wordsworth, but I do not remember it exactly and I may misquote,–

And marble face, the index of a mind

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone

or a line like Milton’s

Those thoughts that wander through eternity.

One has the sense here of a rhythm which does not begin or end with the line, but has for ever been sounding in the eternal planes and began even in Time ages ago and which returns into the infinite to go sounding on for ages after. In fact, the word-rhythm is only part of what we hear, a support for the rhythm we listen to behind in “the Ear of the ear,” shrotrasya shrotram. To a certain extent, that is what all great poetry tries to have, but it is only the Overmind rhythm to which it is natural and easy as breathing and in which it is not only behind the word-rhythm but gets into the word-movement itself and finds a kind of fully supporting body there.

P.S. Lines from the highest intuitive mind-consciousness, as well as those from the Overmind, can have a mantric character – the rhythm too may have a certain kinship with mantric rhythm, but it may not be the thing itself, only the nearest step towards it.