Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Fragment ID: 20289

As if solicited in an alien world

With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,

Orphaned and driven out to seek a home,

An errant marvel with no place to live,

Into a far-off nook of heaven there came

A slow miraculous gesture’s dim appeal.¹

You have made what seems to me a strange confusion as regards the passage about the “errant marvel” owing to the mistake in the punctuation which is now corrected. You took the word “solicited” as a past participle passive and this error seems to have remained fixed in your mind so as to distort the whole building and sense of the passage. The word “solicited” is the past tense and the subject of this verb is “an errant marvel” delayed to the fourth line by the parenthesis “Orphaned etc.” This kind of inversion, though longer than usual, is common enough in poetical style and the object is to throw a strong emphasis and prominence upon the line, “An errant marvel with no place to live.” That being explained, the rest about the gesture should be clear enough.

I see no sufficient reason to alter the passage; certainly, I could not alter the line beginning “Orphaned...”; it is indispensable to the total idea and its omission would leave an unfilled gap. If I may not expect a complete alertness from the reader,– but how without it can he grasp the subtleties of a mystical and symbolic poem? – he surely ought to be alert enough when he reads the second line to see that it is somebody who is soliciting with a timid grace and it can’t be somebody who is being grace-fully solicited; also the line “Orphaned etc.” ought to suggest to him at once that it is some orphan who is soliciting and not the other way round: the delusion of the past participle passive ought to be dissipated long before he reaches the subject of the verb in the fourth line. The obscurity through-out, if there is any, is in the mind of the hasty reader and not in the grammatical construction of the passage.

1946

¹ P. 3.

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