A poem by Sri Aurobindo
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
As thought rises in the scale, it ceases to be intellectual, becomes illumined, then intuitive, then overmental and finally disappears seeking the last Beyond. The poem does not express any philosophical thought, however, it is simply a perception of a certain movement, that is all. "Pale blue" is the colour of the higher ranges of mind up to the intuition. Above it begins to be golden with the supramental light.
14 January 1935
Thought is not the giver of Knowledge but the "mediator" between the Inconscient and the Superconscient. It compels the world born from the Inconscient to reach for a Knowledge other than the instinctive vital or merely empirical, for the Knowledge that itself exceeds thought; it calls for that superconscient Knowledge and prepares the consciousness here to receive it. It rises itself into the higher realms and even in disappearing into the supramental and Ananda levels is transformed into something that will bring down their powers into the silent Self which its cessation leaves behind it.
Gold-red is the colour of the supramental in the physical—the poem describes Thought in the stage when it is undergoing transformation and about to ascend into the Infinite above and disappear into it. The "flame-word rune" is the Word of the higher Inspiration, Intuition, Revelation which is the highest attainment of Thought.
29 December 1936
Letters on Poetry and Art > On Some Poems Written during the 1930s
In some of these poems, as in others of the Six Poems, a quantitative metrical system has been used which seems to have puzzled some critics, apparently because it does not follow the laws of quantity obtaining in the ancient classical languages. But those laws are quite alien to the rhythm and sound-structure of the English tongue; the attempt to observe them has always ended in deserved and inevitable failure. Another system has been followed here which is in agreement with the native rhythm of English speech. There what determines the metrical length or brevity of syllables is weight, the weight of the voice emphasis or the dwelling of the voice upon the sound. Where there is that emphasis or that dwelling of the voice, the syllable may be considered metrically long; where both are absent there will be, normally, a recognisable shortness which can only be cured by some aid of consonant weight or other lengthening circumstance. All stressed syllables are metrically long in English and cannot be otherwise, however short the vowel may be, for they dominate the verse movement; this is a fact which is ignored in the traditional account of English quantity and which many experimenters in quantitative verse have chosen to disregard with disastrous consequences,—all their genius or skill in metrical technique could not save them from failure. On the other hand, a long-vowel syllable can be regarded as metrically long even if there is no stress upon it. In the quantitative system used in these poems this possibility is converted into a law: metrical length is obligatory for all such natural syllabic longs, while a short-vowel syllable unstressed is normally short for metrical purposes unless it is very heavily weighted with consonants. But the mere occurrence of two or more consonants after a short vowel does not by itself make the syllable long as it necessarily does in Greek, Latin or Sanskrit.
The system may then be reduced to the following rules:
1) All stressed syllables are regarded as metrically long, as also all syllables supported on a long vowel.
2) All short-vowel syllables not stressed are regarded as short, unless they are heavily weighted with consonants. But on this last point no fixed rule can be given; in each case the ear must be the judge.
3) There are a great number of sounds in English which can be regarded according to circumstances either as longs or as shorts. Here too the ear must decide in each case.
4) English quantity metres cannot be as rigid as the metres of ancient tongues. The rhythm of the language demands a certain variability, free or sparing, without which monotony sets in; accordingly in all English metres modulation is admitted as possible. Even the most regular rhythms do not altogether shut out the substitution of other feet than those fixed in the normal basic arrangement of the line; they admit at least so much as is needed to give the necessary pliancy or variety to the movement. There is sometimes a very free use of such variations; but they ought not to be allowed to break the basic movement or overburden or overlay it. The same rule must apply in quantitative metres; especially in long poems modulations are indispensable.
This system is not only not at discord with the sound-structure of the language, it accords closely with its natural rhythm; it only regulates and intensifies into metrical pitch and tone the cadence that is already there even in prose, even in daily speech. If we take passages from English literature which were written as prose but with some intensity of rhythm, its movement can be at once detected. E.g.
or again,
or again, from Shakespeare's prose,
and so on with a constant recurrence of the same quantitative movement all through; or, yet more strikingly,
This last sentence can be read indeed as a very perfect hexameter. The first of these passages could be easily presented as four lines of free quantitative verse, each independent in its arrangement of feet, but all swaying in a single rhythm. Shakespeare's is most wonderfully balanced in a series of differing four-syllabled, with occasional shorter, feet, as if of deliberate purpose, though it is no intention of the mind but the ear of the poet that has constructed this fine design of rhythmic prose. A free quantitative verse in this kind would be perfectly possible.
A more regular quantitative metre can be of two kinds. There could be lines all with the same metrical arrangement following each other without break or else alternating lines with a different arrangement for each, forming a stanza,—as in the practice of accentual metres. But there could also be an arrangement in strophe and antistrophe as in the Greek chorus.
In "Thought the Paraclete" the first rule is followed; all the lines are on the same model. The metre of this poem has a certain rhythmic similarity to the Latin hendecasyllable which runs e.g.
Sōlēs | ōccĭdĕr(e) | ēt rĕ|dīrĕ | pōssūnt. Nōbīs | cūm sĕmĕl | ōccĭd|īt brĕ|vīs lūx, Nōx ēst | pērpĕtŭ(a) | ūnă | dōrmĭ|ēndă.1
But here the metre runs a trochee is transferred from the closing flow of trochees to the beginning of the line, the spondee and dactyl are pushed into the middle; the last syllable of the closing trochee is most often dropped altogether. Classical metres cannot always with success be taken over just as they are into the English rhythm; often some modifications are needed to make them more malleable.
In "Moon of Two Hemispheres" the strophe antistrophe system has been used: the lines of the stanza differ from each other in the nature and order of the feet, no identity or approach to identity is imposed; but each line of the antistrophe follows scrupulously the arrangement of the corresponding line of the strophe. An occasional modulation at most is allowed, e.g. the substitution of a trochee for a spondee. The whole poem, how-ever, in spite of its metrical variations, follows a single general rhythmic movement.
"Rose of God", like a previous poem "In Horis Aeternum", is written in pure stress metre. As stress and high accentual pitch usually coincide, it is possible to scan accentual metre on the stress principle and stress metre also can be so written that it can be scanned as accentual verse; but pure stress metre depends entirely on stress ictus. In ordinary poetry stress and natural syllabic quantity enter in as elements of the rhythm, but are not, qua stress and quantity, essential elements of the basic metre: in pure stress metre there is a reversal of these values; quantity and accentual inflexion are subordinate and help to build the rhythm, but stress alone determines the metrical basis. In "Rose of God" each line is composed of six stresses, and the whole poem is built of five stanzas, each containing four such lines; the arrangement of feet varies freely to suit the movement of thought and feeling in each line. Thus,
CWSA > Collected Poems > Poems (1941) - Note
I am sending you copies of two poems. One, Thought the Paraclete, is a development of four lines (now 3-6) originally written some time ago as an English metrical correspondence for a Bengali new metre of Dilip's. He had asked for some more lines and I thought the four I had written good enough to warrant a complete poem. Dilip's scheme was
but in English another arrangement might be preferable, either
or
It is not an easy metre and does not seem to admit of sufficient variations for a longer poem.
The other, Rose of God, is a lyric, an invocation. The metrical plan is—for the first two lines of the stanza, three parts with 2 main stresses in each, the first identical throughout, the other two variable at pleasure; for the last two lines, two parts of equal length, three stresses in each part.
Letters on Poetry and Art > Metrical Experiments
As some bright archangel in vision flies Plunged in dream-caught spirit immensities, Past the long green crests of the seas of life, Past the orange skies of the mystic mind Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God. Sleepless wide great glimmering wings of wind Bore the gold-red seeking of feet that trod Space and Time's mute vanishing ends. The face Lustred, pale-blue-lined of the hippogriff, Eremite, sole, daring the bourneless ways, Over world-bare summits of timeless being Gleamed; the deep twilights of the world-abyss Failed below. Sun-realms of supernal seeing,
Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss Drew its vague heart-yearning with voices sweet. Hungering large-souled to surprise the unconned Secrets white-fire-veiled of the last Beyond, Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned, Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned, Thought the great-winged wanderer paraclete Disappeared slow-singing a flame-word rune. Self was left, lone, limitless, nude, immune.
Part VII : Pondicherry (Circa 1927-1947) > Poems
How to read the color-coded changes below? 1. SABCL version : lines with any changes & specific changes 2. CWSA version : lines with any changes & specific changes
NOTES FROM EDITOR
31 December 1934 (this is the date on a typed manuscript; the handwritten manuscripts were probably written in June 1934). This poem originated as a metrical experiment, in which Sri Aurobindo tried to match a Bengali metrical model submitted to him by his disciple Dilip Kumar Roy.[^2] There are at least three hand-written and two typed manuscripts of this poem. A printed text was produced sometime before 1941, but apparently was never published.[^2]: Dilip Kumar Roy, Sri Aurobindo Came to Me (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1952), p. 237.
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