POOL OF LONELINESSES

I have become a secret pool

Of lonelinesses mountain-cool,

A dream-poise of unuttered song

Lifted above the restless throng

Of human moods' dark pitchers wrought

Of fragile and of flawful thought.

Now never more my tunes shall flow

In moulds of common joy and woe;

But seraph hands reveal wide jars

Cut from the solitudes of stars

And stoop across the sky to fill

The perfect shapes of their calm will

With musical obedience

From my pellucid time-suspense;

And in their crystalline control

Of heaven-mooded ecstasy

Carry the waters of my soul

Unto God's sacred thirst for me!

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Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"It is a very fine poem. It comes from the intuitive plane—belonging to the Intuition proper which brings with it a sort of subdued inspiration—I mean inspiration of the more quiet, not the more vivid kind and a great felicity of language. The meaning is not obscure but deep enough to make one reflect before getting the whole of it."

"The poetry of the Illumined Mind is usually full of a play of lights and colours, brilliant and striking in phrase, for illumination makes the Truth vivid—it acts usually by a luminous rush. The poetry of the Intuition may have a play of colour and bright lights, but it does not depend on them—it may be quite bare; it tells by a sort of close intimacy with the Truth, an inward expression of it. The Illumined Mind sometimes gets rid of its trappings, but even then it always keeps a sort of lustrousness of robe which is its characteristic."

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