Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3

Letter ID: 713

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

March 2, 1936

This poem of Nishikanta he asks me to send up to you. On re-reading it I am a little mystified as to its import. He told me what it meant, still it wasn’t quite clear to me. The sound, rhythm, etc. are fine enough indeed, but what about its drift?

Tell us what impression it makes on you. We like it for its word-portraiture, yet what is the portrait it achieves? Qu’en dites-vous? And would you call this a symbolic poem or a colourful mystic one? What?

I suppose it would be called a symbolic vision – it is not a mystic one. Not that a poem cannot be symbolic and mystic at the same time. For instance Nishikanta’s English poem of the vision of the Lion-flame and the Deer-flame, beauty and power, was symbolic and mystic at once. It is when the thing seen is lived and gets, as it were, an independent vivid reality of its own which exceeds any symbolic significance that it is mystic. In the symbolic poem the mind is more active and the reader wants to know what it means to the mind, as you do with this one, but as minds differ, the poet may attach one meaning to it and the reader may find another, if the image used is at all an imaginative one, not mentally clear and precise. In the mystic poem the mind is submerged in the vividness of the reality and any mental explanation falls far short of what is felt and lived in the deeper vital or psychic response to the poem. This is what Housman in his book tries to explain with regard to Blake’s poetry though he misses altogether the real nature of the response. What the poem suggests to me is the miraculous Divine Power (Kali) in the night of Time (Ignorance?) standing beside the occult consciousness, in that night (the Cake) and doing her miracles there. I don’t know whether that was Nishikanta’s own conception.