Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
Your letter this morning was perfectly crystal-clear. And I felt also like that. I will now start revising my long [?]. Yesterday I was extremely busy correcting proofs from 7.30p.m. till 2.30 a.m. at a stretch, fancy! Today too I had to work hard at it.
Jyoti has sent me another poem, which I like very much but I find the last verse rather cryptic. I understand you opined it was perfectly clear to you. But what idea did it convey to you?
A propos, a question. I was reading in your Future Poetry to-day that mysticism comes “When either we glimpse but do not intimately realise the now secret things of the spirit, or, realising, yet cannot find their direct language, their intrinsic way of utterance, and have to use obscurely luminous hints or a thick drapery of symbol, when we have the revelation, but not the inspiration, the sight but not the word.” This, I think, I follow 
heartily and applaud lustily. For I have had a feeling often (though not always) that mystic poetry hides behind the symbols the author’s comparative inability to find a proper expression for what he has vaguely felt. I have often seen that when the feeling is very concrete I can express what I can’t if it isn’t concrete enough. Much of the mystic poetry of Tagore during the last few years we are all altogether baffled by and can’t but set down to his comparative failure to seize what loomed before him. It suggests but only faintly – glimmers but does not illumine. His prose-poetry of late are often altogether cryptic.... And now I find you say also something kindred in the passage I quoted – calling the source of much mystic poetry (though not all, mind you) “revelation” but not “inspiration”. Apropos, does not inspiration mean something more intimate to our conscious than a visioned “revelation” which is perforce somewhat remote, I gather or rather infer from your passage? In Jyoti’s poem the last verse will, happily, exemplify what I mean. I don’t doubt she felt something but has she adequately conveyed it with a more adequate power of expression? I am not unsympathetic to mystic poetry (I can’t possibly be) but I am, I fear, a little fond of clarity and as such perhaps a little apathetic to symbolic esotericism. But enough. Now do say something radiant to dissipate my hazes, O please Guru – for god’s sake – .
I find no difficulty in the last stanza of Jyotirmayi’s poem nor any in connecting [it] with the two former stanzas. It is a single feeling and subjective idea or vision expressing itself in three facets: In the full night of the spirit there is a luminosity from above in the very heart of the darkness – imaged by the moon and stars in the bosom of the Night. (The night-sky with the moon (spiritual light) and the stars is a well-known symbol and it is seen frequently by sadhaks even when they do not know its meaning.) In that night of the spirit is the Dream to which or through which a path is found that in the 
ordinary light of waking day one forgets or misses. In the night of the spirit are shadowy avenues of pain, but even in that shadow the Power of Beauty and Beatitude sings secretly and unseen the strains of Paradise. But in the light of day the mystic heart of moonlight sorrowfully weeps, suppressed, for even though the nectar of it is there behind, it falters away from this garish light because it is itself a subtle thing of dream, not of conscious waking mind-nature. That is how I understand or rather try mentally to express it. But it is putting a very abstract sense into what should be kept vague in outline but vivid in feeling – by mentalising one puts at once too much and too little in it.
I do not remember the context of the passage you quote from The Future Poetry, but I suppose I meant to contrast the veiled utterance of what is usually called mystic poetry with the spiritual clarity of the fully expressed experience. I did not mean to contrast it with the mental clarity which is aimed at usually by poetry. The concreteness of intellectual imaged description is one thing and spiritual concreteness is another. “Two birds perched on one tree, but one eats the fruit, the other eats not but watches his fellow”1 – that has an illumining spiritual clarity and concreteness to one who has had the experience, but mentally and intellectually it might mean anything or nothing. Poetry uttered with the spiritual clarity may be compared to sunlight, poetry uttered with the mystic veil to moonlight. But it was not my intention to deny beauty, power or value to the moonlight. Note that I have distinguished between two kinds of mysticism, one in which the realisation is vague, the other in which the realisation is revelatory and intimate, but the utterance is veiled by the image, not thoroughly revealed by it. I do not know to which Tagore’s recent poetry belongs, I have not read it. But the latter kind of poetry (where there is the intimate experience) can be of great power and value – witness Blake. Revelation is greater than inspiration – it brings the direct knowledge and seeing, inspiration gives the expression. If there is inspiration without revelation, one may get the word while the 
thing remains behind the veil; it is better to get the sight of the thing itself than merely express it by an inspiration which comes from behind the veil. Of course both together is the best... Mark also that the inspiration I speak of is the coming of intrinsic word, the spiritual mantra – it would not do to say that the mystic poetry has no inspiration, no inspired word at all. No inspiration, no poetry.
(Written in great hurry – hope it is not impossible to follow.)