Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7962

Q: I should like to know what exactly the meaning of the word “absolve” is in the following lines from your “Love and Death”. I have been puzzled because the ordinary dictionary meanings don’t seem to fit in.

But if with price, ah God! what easier! Tears

Dreadful, innumerable I will absolve,

Or pay with anguish through the centuries...

There is another passage a few pages later where the same word is used:

For late

I saw her mid those pale inhabitants

Whom bodily anguish visits not, but thoughts

Sorrowful and dumb memories absolve,

And martyrdom of scourged hearts quivering.

A: In the second passage it is used in its ordinary sense. “Absolution” means release from sins or from debts – the sorrowful thoughts and memories are the penalty or payment which procures the release from the debt which has been accumulated by the sins and errors of human life.

In the first passage “absolve” is used in its Latin and not in its English sense,– “to pay off a debt”, but here the sense is stretched a little. Instead of saying “I will pay off with tears”, Ruru says: “I will pay off tears” as the price of the absolution. This Latinisation and the inversion of syntactical connections are familiar licences in English poetry – of course, it is incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some others, likes, as Stephen Phillips used to say, to have liberties taken with it. But, of course, before one can take these liberties, one must be a master of the language – and, in this case, of the Latin also.

1931

Q: In my lines –

This heart grew brighter when your breath’s proud chill

Flung my disperse life-blood more richly in –

a terminal “d” will at once English that Latin fellow “disperse”, but is he really objectionable? At first I had “Drove” instead of “Flung” – so the desire for a less dental rhythm was his raison d’être, but if he seems a trifle weaker than his English Avatar, he can easily be dispensed with now.

A: I don’t think “disperse” as an adjective can pass – the dentals are certainly an objection but do not justify this Latin-English neologism.

12-6-1937