Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

Letter ID: 399

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

September 25, 1933

Last night till 2 a.m. I composed this song in laghu guru chhanda: seven mātrās to the bar à la mātrā-vṛtta. Nishikanto has liked this chhanda so much that he has composed a sister song to this poem. I am sure this chhanda will be pronounced by the prosodists as original and full of power which laghu guru only can inspire.

I felt a sense of great power – a sense of upsurge of the vital. I am a little uneasy on that score, as I have no desire to let my poetry become what you call “vital poetry”. Please let me know if I truly run that risk. The tune I set it to is also very powerful and I felt a vivid thrill of power as I sang it last night in the dhrupad dhamar style.

The laghu guru here is quite obviously triumphant – it flows without any difficulty. What I mean by vital poetry is that in which appeal to sense or sensation, to the vital thrill, is so dominant that the mental content of the poetry takes quite a secondary place. Either word and sound tend to predominate over sense or else the nerves and blood are thrilled (as e.g. in war poetry) but the mind and soul do not find an equal satisfaction. This does not mean that there is to be no vital element in poetry – without the vital nothing living can be done. In this respect I do not find your poem at all defective so the fear is without foundation. When you write the psychic being is always behind it – even when you are in the depths of mental and vital despondency, as soon as you write the psychic being intervenes and throws its self-expression into what you write. It is that, that has made people with some inner life in them, those who have some touch of the spiritual, feel these poems of yours so much. That too is the main reason (there are others) why I have given unstinted encouragement to your poetry, because it is the psychic means of self-expression in you – there you are at once open.