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 Savitri

Comments on Specific Lines and Passages of the Poem [18]

About that bird, it is true that “one can only see”; but if not more than one can see, don’t others need a bit of explanation? To what region does it belong? Is it any relation of the Bird of Fire with “gold-white wings” or the Hippogriff with a face “lustred, pale-blue-lined”?

All birds of that region are relatives. But this is the bird of eternal Ananda, while the Hippogriff was the divinised Thought and the Bird of Fire is the Agni-bird, psychic and tapas. All that however is to mentalise too much and mentalising always takes most of the life out of spiritual things. That’s why I say it can be seen, but nothing said about it.

But joy cannot endure until the end:

There is a darkness in terrestrial things

That will not suffer long too glad a note. [pp. 16 – 17]

Are these lines the poetic intelligence at its deepest, say, like a mixture of Sophocles and Virgil? They may be the pure or the intuitivised higher mind.

I do not think it is the poetic intelligence any more than Virgil’s Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt, which I think to be the Higher Mind coming through to the psychic and blending with it. So also his O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem. Here it may be the intuitive inner mind with the psychic fused together.

5 November 1936