Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
CWSA 27
Coleridge [3]
I objected to your criticisms and cutting up of the
Skylark, because the whole of it seems to me to proceed from a wrong 
starting point altogether. You seem to start with the assumption that the poem ought to be an intellectual whole with coherent parts, a logical structure. Your contention is that the main idea, consistent in other stanzas, is of a spiritual something, an incorporeal joy etc., and the stanzas you condemn as not consistent with the idea and tone of the rest come from an inferior less spiritual inspiration and lower the level of the poem. Accordingly you propose to cut out these excrescences and insert some manipulations which would make the amended whole the perfect poem the Skylark should be.
I do not deny that from that standpoint your deductions are logical. The poem arranged as you want it, without these too earthly verses, would be a single ethereal impalpable shining tissue. It would be more subtly ethereal (not more spiritual), far from the earth, winging between the rainbow and the lightnings and ignorant of anything less brilliant and unearthly. Only it would be Shelley with something of himself left out, the Skylark incomplete with part of its fullness of tone vanished and a big hole in the middle – a beautiful poem, but no longer so worthy of its place among the few supreme English lyrics. That at least is what I feel. One thing more – even if these stanzas are an imperfection, I do not think it wise to meddle with them either by elimination or re-doing. To interfere with the imperfections of the great poets of the past is a hazardous business – their imperfections as well as their perfections are part of themselves. Imagine a drama of Shakespeare with all the blots scratched out and all the scoriae done over and smoothed to a perfect polish! It would be Shakespeare no longer. And this is Shelley whose strange and sweet and luminous magic of lyrical rhythm and language, when he is at his best and here he is at his best, in the impugned stanzas as well as in the others, is his own secret and no other shall ever recover it. To meddle here is inevitably to mar. Things as great or greater in another kind may be done, but not with this unique and inimitable note. To omit, to change words or lines, to modify rhythms seems to me inadmissible.1
I do not altogether appreciate your references to Mrs. Shelley and the firefly and your cynical and sarcastic picture of the high-born maiden as she appears to you – all that has nothing to do with Shelley’s poetic conception which is alone relevant to the matter. I could draw a realistic picture of the poet “singing hymns unbidden” and unwanted and asking occasionally as he wrote whether dinner was ready – with hopes, but also with fears that he might not get it, his butcher’s bill being unpaid for a long time. Or I might cavil scientifically about the nature of sunsets and sunrise and rainbow drops and ask what was the use of all this romantic flummery when there are real things to write about. Or I might quote the critic – I don’t remember who he was – who said that Shelley certainly did not believe that the skylark was a spirit and not a bird and so the whole conception of the poem is false, insincere, ethereal humbug and therefore not true poetry because poetry must be sincere. Such points of view are irrelevant. Shelley is not concerned with the real life of the high-born maiden or the poet any more than with the ornithology of the skylark or with other material things. His glow-worm is something more than a material glow-worm. He is concerned with the soul love-laden, with the dreams of the poet, with the soul of beauty behind the glow-worm’s light and the colour and fragrance of the rose. It is that he is feeling and it is linked in his vision with the essential something he has felt behind the song of the skylark. And because he so felt it he was not only entitled but bound to make place for it in his inspired lyrical theme.
I may observe in passing that the ethereal and impalpable are not more spiritual than the tangible and the concrete – they may seem more easily subtle and ideal to the idealising and abstracting mind, but that is a different affair. One can feel the spiritual through the embodied and concrete as well as through its opposite. But Shelley was not a spiritual poet and the Skylark is not a spiritual lyric. Shelley looked, it is true, always towards a light, a beauty, a truth behind the appearance of things, but he never got through the idealising mind to the spiritual experience. What he did get was something of the purest emotional or aesthetic feeling or purest subtle mind-touch 
of an essence behind the appearance, an essence of ideal light, truth or beauty. It is that he expresses with a strange aerial magic or a curious supersensuously sensuous intensity in his finest lyrics. It is that we must seek in the
Skylark and, if we find it, we have no right to claim something else. It is there all through and in abundance – it is its perfection that creates the sustained perfection of the poem. There is not and there ought not to be an intellectual sequence, a linked argument, a logical structure. It is a sequence of feeling and of ideal perceptions with an occult logic of their own that sustains the lyric and makes it a faultless whole. In this sequence the verses you condemn have an indefeasible right of place. Shelley was not only a poet of other worlds, of
Epipsychidion and of The Witch of Atlas; he was passionately interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of the ideal super-world from which he came into the earth life – he tried to find it there wherever he could, he tried to infuse it wherever he missed it. The mental, the vital, the physical cannot be left out of the whole he saw in order to yield place only to the ethereal and impalpable. As he heard the skylark and felt the subtle essence of light and beauty in its song, he felt too the call of the same essence of light and beauty elsewhere and it is the things behind which he felt that he compares to the hymn of the skylark – the essence of ideal light and beauty behind things mental, the poet and his hymn, behind things vital, the soul of romantic love, behind things physical, the light of the glow-worm, the passionate intensity of the perfume of the rose. I cannot see an ordinary glow-worm in the lines of Shelley’s stanza – it is a light from beyond finding expression in that glimmer and illumining the dell of dew and the secrecy of flowers and grass, that is there. This illumination of the earthly mind, vital, physical with his super-world light is a main part of Shelley; excise that and the whole of Shelley is no longer there, there is only the ineffectual angel beating his wings in the void; excise it from the Skylark and the true whole of the
Skylark is no longer there.
18 November 1934