SOURCE: "Sri Aurobindo as Poet," in Sri Aurobindo: Indian Poet, Philosopher, and Mystic, David Marlowe, Ltd., 1949, pp. 113-33.

Sri Aurobindo defines poetry as "rhythmic speech which rises at once from the heart of the seer and from the distant home of truth". It is not by accident that the language is rhythmic, for rhythm gives individuality to the expression and enables the poet naturally to reproduce the creative unity and rhythm of life and spirit.

"The characteristic power of the poet", Aurobindo asserts, "is vision", and he contrasts this with the essentially different powers of the philosopher and scientist, the former of which he describes as "discriminative thought" and the latter as "analytic observation". "The greatest poets", he writes, "are those who have had a large and powerful interpretive and intuitive vision, and whose poetry has arisen out of that in a supreme revelatory utterance of it." Poetry has its source in man's unity with man and with Nature, and the poet's peculiar function is that of revealing what his sensitive spirit discerns with the deep intimacy of truth. Aurobindo makes two reflections regarding the poet's vision that are important. First, vision does not depend exclusively on the individual power of the poet. It depends also on the mind of his age and people, the level of their thought and experience, and the depth of their spiritual attainment. The poet, like other great men, is a product of his age and is representative of his people. Even though he be by nature a rebel, the roots of his personality are in the national spirit and the national mind. Secondly, the greatest poetry, Aurobindo insists, gives expression to the realisation of the Divine in the world and in man; and he explains that by this he means that the great poet discloses something of the divine possibilities for man, as well as the greatness of the power manifest in what man now is. By truer and deeper insight into the nature and meaning of the world he can aid man to bring diviner potentialities and more spiritual values into personal and social life. Aurobindo adds that the nations which most effectively make real these possibilities will produce the creative poets of the future and will lead the world in cultural and spiritual progress.

The dual character of the poet's function is fundamental. As arising from the heart of the seer, poetic expression must reflect the uniqueness and individuality of the personal consciousness of the poet; and, since the poet has his roots in his native soil, such individuality will naturally find expression within the special forms and movements of thought peculiar to his people and age. Hence the expression will be individualised and differentiated by the uniqueness of a people and time, as well as by that of a personal experience. At the same time the vision of the poet penetrates to the distant home of truth and, through expression of deep and significant personal experience, reveals a wider truth that cannot in any other way be attained.

The quotations from Aurobindo's poetic writings are arranged with the purpose of giving some impression of the manner in which he has achieved insight at various stages in the growth of his personal experience. He is convinced that fullness of vision is disclosed only in mystic spiritual experience, but… for him the mystic and Divine are integrated with the deeply human.

I

The first selections are from an early period of romantic poetry published between 1890 and 1908. They illustrate the range and penetration of Aurobindo's imagination even at that time. In the poems he employs Greek and Hindu myths and traditions and Greek metrical forms to create poems that were genuinely expressive of the view of life that was then forming in his reflective imagination. They are written in fine and forceful English, of the use of which Aurobindo is undoubtedly a master.

The group illustrates the early growth of conceptions that were later to become central in Aurobindo's outlook on life. They give imaginative expression to his sense of the limitations of sensuous love, however idealised the form of its manifestation, and of how the experience is transformed when integrated with the greater (divine) motives that should inspire human relations. The group includes Urvasie, Love and Death, The Hero and the Nymph, Perseus the Deliverer, and other poems.

Urvasie describes the love of King Pururavus for a sea nymph, and is based on a Sanskrit poem by Kalidasa which Aurobindo afterwards translated. The following lines describe how, when the gods had taken Urvasie from sharing Pururavus's earthly kingdom to dwell in their abode, he resolved to follow her whatever the cost:

                Now I
Endure no more the desolate wide rooms
And gardens empty of her. I will depart
And find her under imperishable trees
Or secret beside streams.

And

               Pururavus went forth
Through ranks of silent people and gleaming arms,
With the last cloud of sunset up the fields
And darkening meadows.
He in that light turned and saw under him
The mighty city, luminous and vast,
Colossally up-piled towards the heavens,
Temple and street and palace, and the sea
Of sorrowing faces and sad grieving eyes;
A moment saw, and disappeared from light
Into forest. Then a loud wail arose
From Pratisthana, as if barbarous hordes
Were in the streets and all its temples huge
Rising towards heaven in disastrous fire,
But he unlistening into darkness went.

After much painful searching, Pururavus was reunited to Urvasie:

Glad of his high reward, however dearly
Purchased, purchased with infinite downfall,
And they were left alone in that clear world.
Then all his soul towards her leaning, took
Pururavus into his clasp and felt,
Seriously glad, the golden bosom on his
Of Urvasie, his love; so pressing back
The longed-for sacred face, lingering he kissed.
Then love in his sweet heavens was satisfied.
But far below through silent mighty space
The green and strenuous earth abandoned rolled.

The bliss of sensuous union was gained, but it failed to bring satisfaction:

Always a sense of imperfection slipped
Between him and that passionate success.

A similar sense of frustration is expressed by the Brahmin, Manavaka, in Aurobindo's translation of Kalidasa's epic, under the title Vikramorvasie; or, The Hero and the Nymph:

After long pleasuring with Urvasie
In Nandan and all woodlands of the Gods,
Our King's at last returned, and he has entered
His city, by the jubilant people met
With splendid greetings, and resumed his toils.
Ah, were he but a father, nothing now
Were wanting to his fullness.

Love and Death records the love of Ruru, a Brahmin youth, and Priyumvada, the daughter of a nymph. In it the Hellenic story of Orpheus and Eurydice is transformed into a tale of love, Hindu in setting, sentiment, and expression. The poem begins by describing how Priyumvada

Opened her budded heart of crimson bloom
To love, to Ruru; Ruru, a happy flood
Of passion round a lotus dancing thrilled,
Blinded with his soul's waves Priyumvada.
To him the earth was a bed for this sole flower,
To her all the world was filled with his embrace.

It describes how Ruru after wandering from morn till noon through the forest, where everything beautiful reminded him of her:

Went homeward yearning to Priyumvada,
And near his home emerging from green leaves
He laughed towards the sun: "O father Sun",
He cried, "how good it is to live, to love!
Surely our joy shall never end, nor we
Grow old, but like bright rivers or pure winds
Sweetly continue, or revive with flowers,
Or live at least as long as senseless trees."

But this was not to be. Priyumvada was bitten by a snake, and while dying:

Her eyes that clung to sunlight yet, with pain
Were large and feebly round his neck her arms
She lifted and, desiring his pale cheek
Against her bosom, sobbed out piteously,
"Ah, love!" and stopped heart-broken; then, "O Love!
Alas the green dear home that I must leave
So early! I was so glad of love and kisses,
And thought that centuries would not exhaust
The deep embrace. And I have had so little
Of joy and the wild day and throbbing night,
Laughter, and tenderness, and strife and tears."

Ruru descends to the underworld in his passion to find Priyumvada. There he is warned by Kama, God of desire and love, of the price he would have to pay. The way would be hard, most hard to find, but harder still to tread, and for perishable feet almost impassable. Yet Ruru is not to be deterred:

But if with price, ah God! what easier! Tears
Dreadful, innumerable I will absolve,
Or pay with anguish through the centuries,
Soul's agony and torture physical,
So her small hands about my face at last
I feel.

Kama again urges:

O ignorant fond lover, not with tears
Shalt thou persuade immitigable Death.
                        sole thing the Gods
Demand from all men living, sacrifice:
Nor without this shall any crown be grasped.

Life the pale ghost requires: with half thy life
Thou may'st protract the thread too early cut
Of that delightful spirit—half sweet life.
O Ruru, lo, thy frail precarious days,
And yet how sweet they are! simply to breathe
How warm and sweet! And ordinary things
How exquisite, thou then shalt learn when lost,
How luminous the daylight was, mere sleep
How soft and friendly clasping tired limbs,
And the deliciousness of common food.
And things indifferent thou then shalt want,
Regret rejected beauty, brightnesses
Bestowed in vain. Wilt thou yield up, O lover,
Half thy sweet portion of this light and gladness,
Thy little insufficient share, and vainly
Give to another? She is not thyself.

Then Yama, God of death, continues with a yet more urgent plea. Would Ruru, in addition, be prepared to sacrifice the wisdom of age?

O mortal, O misled! But sacrifice
Is stronger, nor may law of Hell or Heaven
Its fierce effectual action supersede.
Thy dead I yield. Yet thou bethink thee, mortal,
Not as a tedious evil nor to be
Lightly rejected gave the gods old age,
But tranquil, but august, but making easy
The steep ascent to God. Therefore must Time
Still batter down the glory and form of youth
And animal magnificent strong ease,
To warn the earthly man that he is spirit
Dallying with transcience, nor by death he ends,
Nor to the dumb warm mother's arms is bound,
But called unborn into the unborn skies.

But finally love triumphed. Love is transformed by sacrifice, but the experience is bought at the price of much that goes to make up the worth of man's life.

Perseus the Deliverer shows love more fully transformed by the deepening and expansion of human feeling and the insight that comes from the awakening of mind and spirit. The love-story of Perseus and Andromeda is interwoven with the wider action of a play which exhibits the inevitable conflict between brute force and reason or wisdom, the former being represented by the sea monster Poseidon and Polydamon his priest, and the latter by Athene and her messenger Perseus.

While returning from a mission committed to him by Zeus, Perseus arrives in Syria at a time when two Babylonian merchants, who have been wrecked off the promontory on which the temple of Poseidon stands, have been confined within its precincts preparatory to being sacrificed to the sea monster. Moved by pity, the Princess Andromeda has entered the temple and made possible their escape. To her kinsmen who would deter her urging:

What! you will kill yourself, and for two strangers
You never saw?

she replies:

              If you must punish me,
Strike home. You should have given me no heart;
It is too late now to forbid it feeling.

And to the appeal:

You, little princess! Wherefore did you this?

she protests:

Because I would not have their human hearts
Mercilessly uprooted for the bloody
Monster you worship as a god! because
I am capable of pain and so can feel
The pain of others! For which if you I love
Must kill me, do it. I alone am guilty.

Roused by Polydamon and fearing the vengeance of Poseidon, the people cause Andromeda to be stripped and bound to a rock for the monster to come and devour. Yet she meditates:

          Heaven looks coldly on.
Yet I repent not. 0 thou dreadful god!
Yes, thou art dreadful and most mighty; perhaps
This world will always be a world of blood
And smiling cruelty, thou its fit sovereign.
But I have done what my own heart required of me,
And I repent not. Even if after death
Eternal pain and punishment await me.
And gods and men pursue me with their hate,
I have been true to myself and to my heart,
I have been true to the love it bore for men,
And I repent not.

Andromeda's deep human feeling draws the divine Perseus to her, and, revealing himself, he speaks:

Look up, O sunny-curled Andromeda!
Perseus, the son of Danae, is with thee
To whom thou now belongest. Fear no more!
Thou art as safe as if they mother's arms
Contained thee.
                     I take into my arms
My own that I have won.
O sweet chained body, chained to love not death.

Perseus slays the monster and, with him, the brute power of Poseidon. The fruits of his union with Andromeda are indicated by the requests they both make of the king, her father. Andromeda pleads: "This I ask",

                Let the dire cult
For ever cease and victims bleed no more
On its dark altar. Instead Athene's name
Spread over all the land and in men's hearts.
Then shall a calm and mighty Will prevail
And broader minds and kindlier manners reign
And men grow human, mild and merciful.

And to her wish Perseus adds:

                Then let the shrine
That looked out from the earth's breast into the sunlight,
Be cleansed of its red memory of blood,
And the dread Form that lived within its precincts
Transfigure into a bright compassionate God.
Whose strength shall aid men tossed upon the seas.

II

Shortly after the period to which the romantic poems belong Aurobindo left Baroda to immerse himself in the national renaissance of literary and political activity centred in his own province of Bengal. The change led to the publication in weekly periodicals of poems that reflected his political preoccupations. They show how, in the lives of many Indian leaders, national aspiration became fused with moral and religious conviction.

Baji Prabhou is an historical poem published in Karmayogin in 1910, and probably written some years earlier. Shivaji, the great Mahratta hero, is retreating towards Raigurh from the Bijapur army and, with the remnant of his army, is obliged to pass through a "tiger-throated gorge":

                Narrowing there
The hills draw close, and their forbidding cliffs
Threaten the prone incline.

Shivaji entrusts the defence of the gorge to Baji Prabhou while he goes on to bring up reinforcements. Baji accepts the dangerous task, answering:

                Not in this living net
Of flesh and nerve, nor in the flickering mind
Is a man's manhood seated. God within
Rules us, who in the Brahmin and the dog
Can, if He will, show equal godhead.

As the enemy approaches, Baji exhorts his men:

Chosen of Shivaji, Bhavani's swords,
For you the gods prepare. We die indeed,
But, let us die with the high-voiced assent
Of Heaven to our country's claim enforced
To freedom.

Then:

They came, they died; still on the previous dead
New dead fell thickening.
                          So was the fatal gorge
Filled with the clamour of the close-locked fight.
Sword rang on sword, the slogan shout; the cry
Of guns, the hiss of bullets filled the air,
And murderous strife heaped up the scanty space,
Rajput and strong Mahratta breathing hard
In desperate battle.

On and on they came till

                Baji with a gruesome hand
Wiping the blood from his fierce staring eyes
Saw round him only fifteen men erect
Of all his fifty.

Groaning, once more he turned and charged the exultant foe, until

                Eight men alone
Stood in the gorge's narrow end, not one
Unwounded.

And Baji

                turned and sought again the war.
So for few minutes desperately they strove.
Man after man of the Mahrattas fell
Till only three were left. Then suddenly
Baji stood still and sank upon the ground.
Quenched was the fiery gaze, nerveless the arm:
Baji lay dead in the unconquered gorge.

But Shivaji, his leader, had arrived, and there by Baji's empty frame he

Stood silent and his gaze was motionless
Upon the dead.

Another dramatic poem, "Vidula", is based on a tale from the Mahabharata. It tells how the widowed queen, passionate, fiery-souled, resolute, with "tameless heart of storm", is, by fierce eloquence, rousing her son, Sunjoy, to action. Sunjoy had been "hurled down from his lofty throne" by the King of Sindhu, and his mother had come upon him as he lay unnerved and abject. The verse expresses with remarkable power the intensity and rush of Vidula's passion:

Rise, thou coward, seek not slumber while the victors jeer around.
Out to battle, do thy man's work, falter not in high attempt;
So a man is quit before his God and saved from self-contempt.
For the great heart grieves not though he lose the glorious crown of strife,
But he does the work before him, holding cheap his body's life.
Show thy prowess, be the hero thou wast born, with flashing glaive
Hew thy way with God before thee to the heaven of the brave.

Again:

Shrink not from a noble action, stoop not to unworthy deed!
Vile are they who stoop, they gain not Heaven's doors, nor here succeed.
Man puts forth his manhood, wins and is or dies in the attempt.
All you who are men, awake and rise and struggle; free and great
Now resolve to be and shrink not from the dangerous face of Fate.

Finally Vidula rouses Sunjoy, and he responds:

O thou strong and resolute speaker, even the feeblest fainting soul
Would put darkness from him, listening, for thy words would make him whole.

In 1909 Aurobindo published a fine translation into English of Bankim Chandra's Bande Mâtaram under the title Hymn to the Mother. The following extract may give some impression of its beauty:

Mother, I bow to thee!
Thou art wisdom, thou art law,
Thou our heart, our soul, our breath,
Thou the love divine, the awe
In our hearts that conquers death.
Thine the strength that nerves the arm,
Thine the beauty, thine the charm.
Every image made divine
In our temples is but thine.

Loveliest of all earthly lands,

Showering wealth from well-stored hands!
Mother, mother mine!
Mother sweet, I bow to thee,
Mother great and free!

Then in 1941, after Aurobindo had ceased from active participation in politics, he published, under the title of Mother India, a translation of another patriotic hymn by Dvyjendralal Roy. The first stanza reads:

India, my India, where first human eyes awoke to heavenly light, All Asia's holy place of pilgrimage, great Motherland of might!
World-mother, first giver to humankind of philosophy and sacred lore,
Knowledge thou gav'st to man, God-love, works, art, religion's open door.

And the last:

O even with all that grandeur dwarfed or turned to bitter loss and maim,
How shall we mourn who are thy children and can vaunt thy mighty name?
Before us still there floats the ideal of those splendid days of gold:
A new world in our vision wakes, Love's India we shall rise to mould.
India, my India, who dare call thee a thing for pity's grace today?
Mother of wisdom, worship, works, nurse of the spirit's inward ray!

III

Between 1909 and 1920 Aurobindo published a number of reflective poems in which he gave imaginative expression to thoughts that had become central in his conception of life, and "Ahana", the Dawn of God, is the longest and perhaps the most important of these. It describes the eternal immanence of the Divine in the Universe, the emergence of consciousness from inconscient nature, and the unfolding of its powers through enjoyment of union with the Divine.

It is only possible to quote a few extracts, but these are selected so as to give some impression of the conception and of the beauty of much of the language in which it is expressed. We are

Children of Time whose spirits came down from eternity,
seizing
Joys that escape us, yoked by our hearts to a labour unceasing,
Earth-bound, torn with our longings, our life is a brief incompleteness.
Heaven unchanging, earth with her time-beats yearn to each other,—
Earth-souls needing the touch of heaven's peace to recapture,
Heaven needing earth's passion to quiver its peace into rapture.

Some contemporary thinkers may disagree.

Now have the wise men discovered that all is the craft of a super-
Magic of Chance and a movement of Void and inconscient Stupor.
                         Man who has towered
Out of the plasm and struggled by thought to Divinity's level,
Man, this miniature second creator of good and of evil,
He too was only a compost of Matter made living, organic,
Forged as her thinking tool by an Energy blind and mechanic.
Who can believe it?
Naught else is she but the power of the Spirit who dwells in her ever,
Witness and cause of her workings, lord of her pauseless endeavour.
                                 Holy
Silences brood in her heart and she feels in her ardent recesses
Passions too great for her frame, on her body immortal caresses.
Deep in our being inhabits the voiceless invisible Teacher;
Powers of his godhead we live; the Creator dwells in the creature.

Man's destiny is to ascend:

That which was mortal shall enter immortality's golden precincts,
Enter the splendour that broods now unseen on us, deity invading,
Sight without error, light without shadow, beauty unfading,
Infinite largeness, rapture eternal, love none can sever
Life, not this death-play, but a power God-driven and blissful for ever.

Some single lines are strikingly expressive:

Bliss is her goal, but her road is through whirlwind and death blast and storm-race.
There is a joy behind suffering; pain digs our road to his pleasance.
Open the barriers of Time, the world with thy beauty enamour.

In "Dawn over Ilion", which appears to be an experiment in rhymeless hexameters, Aurobindo makes use of the Greek story to express reflections characteristically his own. Of the passage of time he writes:

        The moment travels driving the past towards the future,
Only its face and its feet are seen, not the burden it carries.
Weight of the event and its surface we bear, but the meaning is hidden.
Earth sees not; life's clamour deafens the ear of the spirit.
Lights that we think our own, yet they are but tokens and counters,
Signs of the Forces that flow through us serving a Power that is secret.

One other quotation I would like to give. It describes the effect of the prolonged siege on the Greek army surrounding Troy. As the years passed the Greeks began to "repose from their toil and incline to the joy of the banquet, filling their hearts with ease". They

Passed from the wounded earth and its air that is ploughed with men's anguish;
Calm they reposed and their hearts inclined to the joy and the silence.
Lifted was the burden laid on our wills by their starry presence:
Man was restored to his smallness, the world to its inconscient labour.
Life felt a respite from height, the winds breathed freer delivered;
Light was released from their blaze and the earth was released from their greatness.

Other poems show the fusion of Aurobindo's thought with Hindu conceptions. The following lines are from "The Rakshasas"—supernatural beings symbolising violent strength and self-assertion:

He takes the brute into himself for man
Yielding it offerings, while with grandiose thoughts
And violent aspirations he controls;
He purifies the demon in the race
Slaying in wrath not cruelty.
                          Were he denied
His period, man could not progress. But since
He sees himself as Me [God], not Me in him,
And takes the life and body for the whole,
He cannot last.

A similar conception is finely expressed in an imaginative poem of a later period. It is an experiment in free quantitative verse, and is entitled "The Tiger and the Deer":

Brilliant, crouching, slouching, what crept through the green heart of the forest,
Gleaming eyes and mighty chest and soft soundless paws of grandeur and murder?
The wind slipped through the leaves as if afraid lest its voice and the noise of its steps perturb the pitiless Splendour,
Hardly daring to breathe. But the great beast crouched and crept, and crept and crouched a last time, noiseless, fatal,
Till suddenly death leaped on the beautiful wild deer as it drank
Unsuspecting from the great pool in the forest's coolness and shadow,
And it fell and, torn, died remembering its mate left sole in the deep woodland,—
Destroyed, the mild harmless beauty by the strong cruel beauty in Nature.
But a day may yet come when the tiger crouches and leaps no more in the dangerous heart of the forest,
As the mammoth shakes no more the plains of Asia;
Still then shall the beautiful wild deer drink from the coolness of great pools in the leaves' shadow.
The mighty perish in their might;
The slain survive the slayer.

For the reflective Hindu mind the ocean has always been a symbol of mysterious power, ever revealing its eternal and changeless deeps in the unceasing changes that trouble its surface:

The Power that moves it is the Ocean's force Invincible, eternal, free,
And by that impulse it pursues its course Inevitably.

Aurobindo's Songs of the Sea, published about 1923, is a magnificent series of translations of short poems on this theme by Chittaranjan Das. The following quotations are from the series:

I lean to thee a listening ear
And thy immense refrain I hear,
O ocean circled with the lights of morn.
What word is it thou sing'st? What tune
My heart is filled with, and it soon
Must overflow? What mystical unborn
Spirit is singing in thy white foam-caves?
What voice turns heaven to music from thy waves?
O vast musician! Take me, all thy mind
In light, in gloom, by day, by night express.
Into me, minstrel, breathe thy mightiness.
Evening has fallen upon the world; its fitting tone,
O sea, thy quiet bosom gives, making dim moan,
And that wide solemn murmur, passion's ceasing flow,
Becomes a chant of silence for our souls their depths to know.

Later Aurobindo himself, in another metrical experiment, writes:

"Ocean Oneness"

Silence is around me, wideness ineffable;
White birds on the ocean diving and wandering;
A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven,
Azure on azure, is mutely gazing.
Identified with silence and boundlessness
My spirit widens clasping the universe
Till all that seemed becomes the Real,
One in a mighty and single vastness.
Someone broods there nameless and bodiless,
Conscious and lonely, deathless and infinite,
And, sole in a still eternal rapture,
Gathers all things to his heart for ever.

IV

Finally, it is necessary to give examples of the poems in which Sri Aurobindo endeavours to express his mystic spiritual experience. Many Western readers may be confronted with difficulty when attempting to understand and appreciate these. They may lack the kind of experience Aurobindo is describing and may be unfamiliar with the symbolism employed. At the same time, I feel they will be impressed by the beauty and power of expression and by the depth of insight with which the poems are characterised. These poems were published from 1930 to 1941.

The following quotations from "The Bird of Fire" refer to the ascent of the soul to the Divine. The bird of fire represents the divine consciousness, immanent in every man, and tending to impel him upwards towards the light:

Gold-white wings of the miraculous bird of fire,
 late and slow have you come from the Timeless.
 Angel, here unto me
  Bring'st thou for travailing earth a spirit silent and free
   or His crimson passion of love divine,—
White-rose-altar the eternal Silence built, make now my nature wide, an intimate guest of His solitude.

But the ascent is arduous:

Rich and red is thy breast, 0 bird, like blood of a soul climbing the hard crag-teeth world, wounded and nude.

Of its goal he writes:

One strange leap of thy mystic stress breaking the barriers of mind and life, arrives at the luminous term thy flight;
    Invading the secret clasp of the Silence and crimson Fire thou frontest eyes in a timeless Face.

The experience of mystic union is described in the following lines that occur in "In horis aeternum". In its unending ascent the soul catches

A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity's face, in a fragment the mystic Whole.
Moment-mere, yet with all eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense,
Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die, caught by the spirit in sense,
In the greatness of a man, in music's outspread wings, in a touch, in a smile, in a sound,
Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a Nothing that was all and is found.

In one of the metrical experiments also the following lines occur:

Wisdom supernal looks down on me, Knowledge mind cannot measure;
Light that no vision can render garments the silence with splendour.
Filled with a rapturous Presence the crowded spaces of being
  Tremble with the Fire that knows, thrill with the might of repose.
Earth is now girded with trance and Heaven is put round her for vesture.
  Wings that are brilliant with fate sleep at Eternity's gate.
Time waits, vacant, the Lightning that kindles, the Word that transfigures:
Space is a stillness of God building his earthly abode.
All waits hushed for the fiat to come and the tread of the Eternal;
Passion of a bliss yet to be sweeps from Infinity's sea.

… [In "Nirvana"] Sri Aurobindo expresses his sense of the great silence. The following description of the rapture of such experience is from a short poem "Transformation":

I am no more a vassal of the flesh,
 A slave to Nature and her leaden rule;
  I am caught no more in the senses' narrow mesh.
My soul unhorizoned widens to measureless sight,
 My body is God's happy living tool,
  My spirit a vast sun of deathless light.

Nevertheless, there is need to pass beyond enjoyment of the mystic experience of oneness with the Divine, for the consummation comes, not with such enjoyment alone, but only as power flows from it and enables man to transform his humanhood after the image of the Divine. In "The Life Heavens", after describing how he had lain

In the clasp of a Power that enthrals to sheer
 Bliss and beauty body and rapt soul

Aurobindo proceeds:

  But suddenly there soared a dateless cry,
   Earth's outcry to the limitless Sublime.
I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;
   My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys.

He was conscious of the "Earth's heart beating below him still", and calling for the bringing down of divine power into life.

The same belief is again expressed in "Jivanmukta". It opens with:

There is a silence greater than any known
To earth's dumb spirit.

Splendour floods the soul, power descends on it, bliss surrounds it with ecstasy everlasting; and it escapes, rapt, thoughtless, into the Eternal's breast. Then comes the conviction:

Only to bring God's forces to waiting Nature,
To help with wide-winged Peace her tormented labour
 And heal with joy her ancient sorrow,
  Casting down light on the inconscient darkness,
He acts and lives. Vain things are mind's smaller motives
To one whose soul enjoys for its high possession
 Infinity and the sempiternal
   All is his guide and beloved and refuge.

The most impressive and perfect expression of this culminating experience, however, seems to me to be contained in "Rose of God", which, because of the depth of the insight it conveys and the beauty and power of the language in which this is expressed, I quote in full. The third line in each stanza of this poem expresses a cry from the awakened soul for the ingression into our humanhood of the divine attribute referred to in the first and second lines. [The critic explains in a note to the first line of the poem that the word stain—defined as a "mark made by a Hindu woman through the parting of her hair as a symbol of marriage"—is used in the poem to symbolize "the union of the soul with the Divine."]

"Rose of God"

Rose of God, vermilion stain on the sapphires of heaven,
Rose of Bliss, fire-sweet, seven-tinged with the ecstasies seven!'
Leap up in our heart of humanhood, O miracle, O flame,
Passion-flower of the Nameless, bud of the mystical Name.

Rose of God, great wisdom-bloom on the summits of being,
Rose of Light, immaculate core of the ultimate seeing!
Live in the mind of our earthhood; 0 golden Mystery, flower,
Sun on the head of the Timeless, guest of the marvellous Hour.
Rose of God, damask force of Infinity, red icon of might,
Rose of Power with thy diamond halo piercing the night!
Ablaze in the will of the mortal, design the wonder of thy plan,
Image of Immortality, outbreak of the Godhead in man.

Rose of God, smitten purple with the incarnate divine Desire,
Rose of Life, crowded with petals, colour's lyre!
Transform the body of the mortal like a sweet and magical ryhme;
Bridge our earthhood and heavenhood, make deathless the children of Time.

Rose of God like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,
Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss:
Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life Beatitude's kiss.