Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

2. Art and Literature

Mystic Poetry

I. Meaning and Intellectual Understanding

Is poetry to be felt only, not understood?

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 intellect and 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.

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 is as beautiful and precious as the soul?

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?

Your Bird of Fire, for instance, is full of colour and images, but if one can follow the bhāva behind or through them, I believe the appreciation becomes complete.

What do you mean by following the bhāva 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 X's mystic poems enchanced the rasa.

It didn't to me, it simply intellectualised all the rasa out of it.

Blake's poems also lose half the charm. Now that they understand their significance 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 it. 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.

In symbolic or mystic poems one wants to know also the truth behind the symbol.

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 X 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 X'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.