Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Fragment ID: 20290

A slow miraculous gesture dimly came.

Man alive, your proposed emendations¹ are an admirable exposition of the art of bringing a line down the steps till my poor “slow miraculous” above-mind line meant to give or begin the concrete portrayal of an act of some hidden Godhead finally becomes a mere metaphor thrown out from its more facile mint by a brilliantly imaginative poetic intelligence. First of all, you shift my “dimly” out of the way and transfer it to some-thing to which it does not inwardly belong, make it an epithet of the gesture or an adverb qualifying its epithet instead of something that qualifies the atmosphere in which the act of the Godhead takes place. That is a preliminary havoc which destroys what is very important to the action, its atmosphere. I never intended the gesture to be dim, it is a luminous gesture, but forcing its way through the black quietude it comes dimly. Then again the bald phrase “a gesture came” without anything to psychicise it becomes simply something that “happened”, “came” being a poetic equivalent for “happened”, instead of the expression of the slow coming of the gesture. The words “slow” and “dimly” assure this sense of motion and this concreteness to the word’s sense here. Remove one or both whether entirely or elsewhere and you ruin the vision and change altogether its character. That is at least what happens wholly in your penultimate version and as for the last its “came” gets another meaning and one feels that some-body very slowly decided to let out the gesture from himself and it was quite a miracle that it came out at all! “Dimly miraculous” means what precisely or what “miraculously dim” – it was miraculous that it managed to be so dim or there was something vaguely miraculous about it after all? No doubt they try to mean something else – but these interpretations come in their way and trip them over. The only thing that can stand is the first version which is no doubt fine poetry, but the trouble is that it does not give the effect I wanted to give, the effect which is necessary for the dawn’s inner significance. Moreover, what becomes of the slow lingering rhythm of my line which is absolutely indispensable?

1936

¹ The suggested emendations of the original line which belonged to the 1936 version but apropos of which the comments by Sri Aurobindo are very pertinent in general to his art were:

Miraculous and dim

Miraculously dim a gesture came.

Dimly miraculous

Miraculous and slow

The emendations were not suggested as improvements in any way on the line Which was splendid (though Sri Aurobindo himself subsequently altered it to

A slow miraculous gesture’s dim appeal

because of a new interrelation in the final expanded recast of his poem). They were only a hypothetical desperate resort in the interests of a point which is made clear in the footnote at the end of the next item. The object was to see if a certain change in the manner of adjective-use was possible so that a technical variety might be introduced in the passage of which the line in question was a part. The emendations unfortunately involved, among other things, the omission of one or another of the descriptive terms used by Sri Aurobindo. But variants not involving this were also offered for discussion, as the footnote already referred to will show.

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