A Lesson in Poetry
Nirodbaran writes:
“This talk took place before the others had come up, when he was all alone with Sri Aurobindo. He read out some of Tagore’s last poems, which were supposed to express spiritual experiences.” [12 December 1938]
NIRODBARAN: Is there anything here?
SRI AUROBINDO (smiling): Nothing much, except that he speaks of some light in the first poem.
NIRODBARAN: In the rest he speaks of losing the body-consciousness and of the world-memory getting fainter and fainter.
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, but that means death.
NIRODBARAN: Doesn’t it mean that he is getting into another world? He speaks of stars, etc.
SRI AUROBINDO: Well, if he was getting into another world, why on earth doesn’t he say so? The poem is hazy. The Vaishnava poets have clearly stated their experiences.
NIRODBARAN: Dilip told me that once Tagore in an agony of pain tried hard to concentrate and ultimately he separated himself from his pain and got relief. Isn’t that a spiritual experience?
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, that is a spiritual experience.
NIRODBARAN: I remember also to have read in his autobiography, Jivan Smriti, that one day he felt a sudden outburst of joy and all Nature seemed to be full of Ananda. The outcome of that feeling or experience of bliss is supposed to be the poem “Nirjharer Swapna Bhanga” (“Interruption of the Dream of the Fountain”).
SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, that too is a spiritual experience. What does he say in the poem?
NIRODBARAN: He speaks of a fountain breaking all barriers and rushing towards the sea in Ananda.
SRI AUROBINDO: But why does he take that symbol? Was it in that symbolic form that the experience came?
NIRODBARAN: I don’t think so.
SRI AUROBINDO: Then why doesn’t he write the experience as he got it? Nobody reading the poem will realise that he wrote it from some experience. He has a tendency to be decorative, and the danger of decorativeness is that the main thing gets suppressed by it.
Take, as an opposite example, that line about Usha, the Mystic Dawn, from the Rig Veda, which I have quoted in The Future Poetry:
Vyucchanti jivam udirayanti usa mritam kancana bodhayanti.
Raising high the living, awakening someone dead.
When one reads it, one feels at once that it is written out of experience. It tells us directly of the Dawn-Goddess that she is raising higher and higher whatever is manifested and brings out all that has remained latent, unmanifested. Of course, one has to be familiar with the symbols; then the thing becomes quite clear.
NIRODBARAN: But mystic poetry is bound to be a little hazy and vague, at least to those who are not mystically minded. Tagore also has written simple and clear poems in his Gitanjali: for example, “Amar matha nata kare dao” (“Let my head bow down”). Perhaps one can write poetry of that kind mentally too. Is personal experience always necessary?
SRI AUROBINDO: No. One need not have personal experience for such poetry.
NIRODBARAN: You once compared mystic poetry to moon light and spiritual poetry to sunlight.
SRI AUROBINDO: No, I meant occult poetry to be like moonlight. There are two kinds of mystic poetry: occult-mystic and spiritual-mystic. That poem of mine, “Trance”, with its moon and star, or my “Bird of Fire” is occult-mystic, while the sonnets are spiritual-mystic. For instance in the sonnet “Nirvana”, I have put exactly what Nirvana is. One is at liberty to use any symbol or image, but what one says must be very clear through the symbol or the image. Say, for example, those lines from the Rig Veda:
Condition after condition is born,
Covering after covering becomes conscious;
In the lap of the Mother he sees.
Here images are used but it is very clear to anyone knowing the symbols what is meant and that it is a result of genuine experience or take another example:
The Seers climb Indra like a ladder,
Along with the ascent all that remains to be done becomes clear.
It is an extraordinary passage, expressing perfectly the experience. Do you see that? Indra is the Divine Mind and, as one ascends higher and higher, whatever has still to be done grows visible and distinct. One who has had that experience can testify how perfectly true it is and that it must have been written from experience, not from any power of imagination.
NIRODBARAN: But sometimes cannot one write truly about spiritual things without experiencing them or being conscious of them?
SRI AUROBINDO: Why not? The inner being can have the vision and express it, without the outer having the least awareness of it.
NIRODBARAN: Can one who is not a mystic write mystic poems? Tagore — or Harin before he came here?
SRI AUROBINDO: Tagore had a tradition of religious tendencies in his family. Harin had a mystic part in him. Unfortunately, he had many other parts also. Reading his earlier poems I predicted that he could be a spiritual poet. As soon as he came here, he went on very well in the first year of his sadhana; his inner mind opened and the things he wrote about the Mother were felt by him. His poetry was always associated with his higher parts.
Nirodbaran: Talks with Sri Aurobindo
The Winds of Wonder 
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