THE SACRED FIRE

O keep the sacred fire

A prisoner poise

With walls that never wake

To earthly voice.

So delicate and small

This undefiled

Epiphany of joy,

This golden child,

That like a freezing blast

The unfruitful power

Of stormy mind will quench

The burning flower.

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Breathe tenderly your love:

Feed the pure flame

By secret offerings

Of one far Name

Whose rhythms make more rich

That smiling face

Of angel glow within

The heart's embrace—

Until the dreamy hue

Grows wide enough

To flash upon time's chill

A warrior laugh

Piercing through twilight walls

Of calm to blind

With a noon of ecstasy

The space of mind.

A sword divine which darts

From clay's dull sheath,

The luminous tongue shall rise

Devouring death

And every icy thought's

Oblivion

Of earth's untarnished soul,

Its core of sun.

Sri Aurobindo's comment

"It is a very fine lyric. The inspiration is not equally intense through-

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out—it is most felicitous in the three stanzas marked; the first also is almost that and also the three first lines of the sixth. The rest is admirable, though it has not quite the same intuitive edge; but still it is the right thought with the just, poetic expression. I don't know exactly what plane, but it comes from the inner being—there is a fine psychic touch in stanzas I, 2, 4, 5, 7 and it is the psychic truth that is expressed throughout."

(Would the emergence of the psychic being make the writing of "above-head" poetry more possible?)

"To get the psychic being to emerge is not easy, though it is a very necessary thing for sadhana and when it does it is not certain that it will switch on to the above-head planes at once. But obviously anyone who could psychicise his poetry would get a unique place among the poets.

"The direct psychic touch is not frequent in poetry. It breaks in sometimes—more often there is only a tinge here and there."

(Would the emergence of the psychic being cut across any above-head inspiration ?)

"I don't suppose the emergence of the psychic would interfere at all with the inspiration from above. It would be more likely to help it by making the connection with these planes more direct and conscious."

*

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