Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1938
[Sri Aurobindo and the Mother]
Guru, no, I don’t suggest that significance doesn’t matter. On the other hand, I said it is more probably because of the significance of the line than rhythm etc. that you call it magnificent. “Magnifies” was used jokingly, of course. As I don’t yet understand much of longs, shorts, narrows and thicks of your prosody, I laid the beauty of the line at the door of significance or inner vision. So “false value” is not what I meant. I am rather limited, or my solar plexus is inhibitory to profound things told in a bare and rugged way. For instance, your three lines against:
“A rhythmic fire that opens a secret door,
And the treasures of eternity are found,”
don’t stir my mortal plexus very much, while perhaps your 
penetrating eyes see all the treasures of eternity behind the door and exclaim with rapturous delight, “How rich!” But the other three-lined one: “My moments pass with moon-imprinted sail” makes me say: “Ah, here is something real, wonderful, flashing!” You will admit that this line is more poetic than the previous two lines, though perhaps the force of poetic vision and truth is less? That will indicate to you probably that I am a bit of a romantic sentimental type who wants to see colour blend with vision before getting the plexus stirred from its depth, what?
I am afraid the language of your appreciations or criticisms here is not apposite. There is nothing “bare and rugged” in the two lines you quote; on the contrary they are rather violently figured – the osé image of a fire opening a door of a treasure-house would probably be objected to by Cousins or any other purist. The language of poetry is called bare when it is confined rigorously to just the words necessary to express the thought or feeling or to visualise what is described, without superfluous epithets, without imagery, without any least rhetorical turn in it. E.g. Cowper’s
Toll for the brave –
The brave! that are no more –
is bare. Byron’s
Jehovah’s vessels hold
The godless Heathen’s wine;
does not quite succeed because of a rhetorical tinge that he has not been able to keep out of the expression. When Baxter (I think it was Baxter) writes
I spoke as one who ne’er would speak again1
And as a dying man to dying men!
that might be taken as an example of strong and bare poetic language. I have written of Savitri waking on the day of destiny –
Immobile in herself, she gathered force:
This was the day when Sathyavan must die. –
that is designedly bare.
But none of these lines or passages can be called rugged; for ruggedness and austerity are not the same thing; poetry is rugged when it is rough in language and rhythm or rough and unpolished 
but sincere in feeling. Donne is often rugged,–
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees God’s face, that is self-life must die;
What a death were it then to see God die?
but it is only the first line that is at all bare.
On the other side, you describe the line of your preference
My moments pass with moon-imprinted sail
by the epithets “real, wonderful, flashing”. Real or surreal? It is precisely its unreality that makes the quality of the line; it is surreal, not in any depreciatory sense, but because of its supra-physical imaginativeness, its vivid suggestion of occult vision; one does not quite know what it means, but it suggests something that one can inwardly see. It is not flashing – gleaming or glinting would be nearer the mark – it penetrates the imagination and awakens sight and stirs or thrills with a sense of beauty but it is not something that carries one away by its sudden splendour.
You say that it is more poetic than the other quotation – perhaps, but not for the reason you give; rather because it is more felicitously complete in its image and more suggestive. But you seem to attach the word poetic to the idea of something brilliant, remotely beautiful, deeply coloured or strikingly imaged with a glitter in it or a magic glimmer. On the whole what you seem to mean is that this line is “real” poetry, because it has this quality and because it has a melodious sweetness of rhythm, while the other is of a less attractive character. Your solar plexus refuses to thrill where these qualities are absent – obviously that is a serious limitation in the plasticity of your solar plexus, not that it is wrong in thrilling to these things but that it is sadly wrong in thrilling to them only. It means that your plexus remains deaf and dead to most of the greater poetry of the world – to Homer, Milton, Valmiki, Vyasa, a great part even of Shakespeare. That is surely a serious limitation of the appreciative faculty. What is strange and beautiful has its appeal, but one ought to be able also to stir to what is grand and beautiful, or strong and noble, or simple and beautiful, or pure and exquisite. Not to do so would be like being blind of one eye and seeing with the other only very vividly strange outlines and intensely bright colours.
I may add that if really I appreciate any lines for something which I see behind them but they do not actually suggest or express, then I must be a very bad critic. The lines you quote not only say nothing about the treasures except that they are found, but do not suggest anything more. If then I see from some knowledge that has nothing to do with the actual expression and suggestion of the lines all the treasures of eternity and cry “How rich” – meaning the richness, not of the treasures, but of the poetry, then I am doing something quite illegitimate which is the sign of a great unreality and confusion in my mind, very undesirable in a critic. It is not for any reason of that kind that I made a mark indicating appreciation but because I find in the passage a just and striking image with a rhythm and expression which are a sufficient body for the significance.
In today’s poem the philosophy is old and poetry poor, what?
A poet is not bound to create a new philosophy – he may adopt an existing philosophy, only his expression of it must be his own, individual and true.
René wants tasteless castor-oil. We have plenty of “tasty” castor-oil, but he doesn’t fancy that. So shall we buy it?
[Mother:] Yes.