Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Fragment ID: 20294

Then through the pallid rift that seemed at first

Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns

Outpoured the revelation and the flame.¹

Your “barely enough”, instead of the finer and more suggestive “hardly”, falls flat upon my ear; one cannot substitute one word for another in this kind of poetry merely because it means intellectually the same thing; “hardly” is the mot juste in this context and, repetition or not, it must remain unless a word not only juste but inevitable comes to replace it.... On this point I may add that in certain contexts “barely” would be the right word, as for instance, “There is barely enough food left for two or three meals”, where “hardly” would be adequate but much less forceful. It is the other way about in this line.

1946

¹ P. 3.

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