Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 1. On His Poetry and Poetic Method
On Some Poems Written during the 1930s

Thought the Paraclete [1]

Thought the Paraclete is a difficult poem liable to many interpretations. I would be very happy if you could give a brief analysis of the thought-structure of the poem or at least indicate the main lines of the ascent.

Well, then leave each to find out one of the many interpretations for himself. Analysis! Well, well!

There is no thought-structure in the poem; there is only a succession of vision and experience; it is a mystic poem, its unity is spiritual and concrete, not a mental and logical building. When you see a flower, do you ask the gardener to reduce the flower to its chemical components? There would then be no flower left and no beauty. The poem is not built upon intellectual definitions or philosophical theorisings; it is something seen. When you ascend a mountain, you see the scenery and feel the delight of the ascent; you don’t sit down to make a map with names for every rock and peak or spend time studying its geological structure — that is work for the geologist, not for the traveller. Iyengar’s geological account (to make one is part of his métier as a critic and a student and writer on literature) is probably as good as any other is likely to be; but each is free to make his own according to his own idea. Reasoning and argumentation are not likely to make one account truer and invalidate the rest. A mystic poem may explain itself or a general idea may emerge from it, but it is the vision that is important or what one can get from it by intuitive feeling, not the explanation or idea; it [Thought the Paraclete] is a vision or revelation of an ascent through spiritual planes, but gives no names and no photographic descriptions of the planes crossed. I leave it there.

The “pale blue” or intuitivised aspect of the face is only at the start; when it “gleamed” it had already overpassed the Overmind phase beyond which there are only the “world-bare summits”.

How do you know there are not many world-bare summits one above the other? Where do you place the self of the last line?

18 March 1944