Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

2. Art and Literature

Poetic Qualities (I)

About yesterday's poem,¹ I am still “weak” in finding the “gold” you found in my fish. I don't see what beauty is there to make you mark certain lines thrice – e.g. “Into a heaven of light”, which is a very simple, ordinary sort of fine, I should say. I admit it is well-built and devoid of decoration, but to see it as you see it – well, could you explain a bit? But I can increase this sort of “wealth” if you are at my back!

There is probably a defect in your solar plexus which makes it refuse to thrill unless it receives a strong punch from poetry – an ornamental, romantic or pathetic punch. But there is also a poetry which expresses things with an absolute truth but without effort, simply and easily, without a word in excess or any laying on of colour, only just the necessary. That  kind of achievement is considered as among the greatest things poetry can do. The three lines are put in yesterday's poem wherever that happened.

A phrase, word or line may be quite simple and ordinary and yet taken with another phrase, line or word become the perfect thing. If you look you will see that my 3 lines are put against the two last lines taken together and not this one only by itself. So taken they express with perfect felicity something that can be seen or felt in spiritual experience. The same reason for the other three line encomiums. E.g. A line like “Life that is deep and wonder-vast” has what I have called the inevitable quality, with a perfect simplicity and straightforwardness it expresses something in a definitive and perfect way that cannot be bettered; so does “Lost in a breath of sound”, with less simplicity but with the same inevitability. The two lines that follow are very fine but they have to labour more to express what they want and express it less absolutely – still it does so much that it gets 2 lines, but not three. The same distinction applies to the next two lines “In the lulled silver stream” etc. and the four that follow. I don't mean that highly coloured poetry cannot be absolutely inevitable, it can e. g. Shakespeare's “In cradle of the rude imperious surge” and many others. But most of the highly coloured poetry attracts too much attention to the colour and its brilliances so that the thing in itself is less felt than the magnificence of its dress. All kinds are legitimate in poetry. I only wanted to point out that poetry can be great or perfect even if it uses  simple or ordinary expressions – e. g. Dante simply says “In His will is our peace” and in writing that in Italian produces one of the greatest lines in all poetic literature.

31.03.1938

¹ My life is veiled in a sleep of light,

A hush that nothing breaks;

The world before my inward sight

Into pure beauty wakes.

Life that is deep and wonder-vast,

Lost in a breath of sound;

The bubbling shadows have been cast

From its heart's timeless round.

In its lulled silver stream now shines

A lustrous smile of God

Whose brilliantly curved outlines,

Flashing on the memory-trod

Caverns of slumbering earth, there bring

A glow of the Infinite,

While my soul's diamond voices wing

Into a heaven of light.

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