Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Third Series

Fragment ID: 21026

I have to admit that I am beaten by your metre. I have written something, but I am afraid it is a fake. I will first produce the fake:

A gold moon / raft floats / and swings / slowly

And it casts / a fire / of pale / holy / blue light

On the dra / gon tail / aglow / of the / faint night

That glim / mers far,– / swimming,

The illu / mined shoals / of stars / skimming,

Overspread / ing earth / and drown / ing the/

heart in sight

With the / ocean-depths / and breadths / of the

Infinite.

That is the official scansion, and except in the last foot of the two last lines it professes to follow very closely the metre of N’s poem. But in fact it is full of sins and the appearance is a counterfeit. In the first line the first foot is really an anti-bacchius: “A gold moon/-raft floats / ....”, and quantitatively, though not accentually, the second is a spondee which also disturbs the true rhythmic movement. “Slowly” and “holy” are in truth trochees disguised as pyrrhics, and if “slowly” can pass off the deceit a little, “holy” is quite unholy in the brazenness of its pretences. If I could have got a compound adjective like “god-holy”, it would have been all right and saved the situation, but I could find none that was appropriate. The next three lines are, I think, on the true model and have an honest metre. But the closing cretic of my last two lines is nothing but a cowardly flight from the difficulty of the spondee. I console myself by remembering that even Hector ran when he found himself in difficulties with Achilles and that the Bhagavat lays down palayanam (flight) as one of the ordinary occupations of the Avatar. But the evasion is a fact and I am afraid it spoils the correspondence of the metres. I have some idea of adding a second stanza,– this one will look less guilty perhaps if it has a companion in sin – but if you wish to use this, you need not wait for the other as it may never take birth at all.

Moon of two Hemispheres

A gold moon-raft floats and swings slowly

And it casts a fire of pale holy blue light

On the dragon tail aglow of the faint night

That glimmers far, swimming,

The illumined shoals of stars skimming,

Overspreading earth and drowning the heart in

sight

With the ocean-depths and breadths of the Infinite.

A gold moon-ship sails or drifts ever

In our spirit’s skies and halts never, blue-keeled,

And it throws its white-blue fire on this grey field,

Night’s dragon loop,– speeding,

The illumined star-thought sloops leading

To the Dawn, their harbour home, to the Light

unsealed, To the sun-face Infinite, the Untimed revealed.