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Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1934 — 1935

Letter ID: 461

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

June 18, 1934

Yes, I think it will do very well as a rendering, now. As for what you say about the rhythmic movement and the stresses, that is something new (I believe) in this form in English even. It is an attempt to combine – avoiding the chaotic amorphousness of free verse – a system of regular metrical measures with the greatest possible plasticity and variety whether as to the number of syllables, management of feet, if any, distribution of stress beats or changing modulation of the rhythm. “In Horis Aeternum” is merely a first essay, a very simple and elementary model for this endeavour. How far it can go in one direction or another has yet to be seen; but I don’t very well see for the moment how that is to be got into a Bengali cadence.

P.S. I struggled to get time to reply on your book and read Nishikanta but could not. Monday! I keep the book.

*

In Horis Aeternum

A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea,

A world of power hushed into symbols of hue, silent unendingly;

Over its head like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play

Follows its curve,– a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day.

Here or otherwhere,– poised on the unreachable abrupt snow-solitary ascent

Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and spent,

Or in the glowing expanse, arid, fiery and austere, of the desert’s hungry soul,–

A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity’s face, in a fragment the mystic Whole.

Moment-mere, yet with all eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense,

Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die, caught by the spirit in sense,

In the greatness of a man, in music’s outspread wings, in a touch, in a smile, in a sound,

Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a Nothing that was all and is found.