Nirodbaran

Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo

Second Series

2. Art and Literature

Poetic Qualities (II)

You call this line, “A fathomless beauty in a sphere of pain,” a magnificent one, but I did not feel its magnificence when I wrote it and am unable to see where you find it. I think you find behind these things some inner truth which magnifies them before your eyes! Otherwise the rhythm and the word music can't possibly seem so extraordinary!

Well, have you become a disciple of Baron and the surrealists? You seem to suggest that significance does not matter and need not enter into the account in judging or feeling poetry! Rhythm and word music are indispensable, but are not the whole of poetry. For instance lines like these

In the human heart of Heligoland

A hunger wakes for the silver sea;

For waving the might of his magical wand

God sits on his throne in eternity,

has plenty of rhythm and word music – a surrealist might pass it, but I certainly would not. Your suggestion that my seeing the inner truth behind a line magnifies it to  me, i.e. gives a false value to me which it does not really have as poetry, mayor may not be correct. But, certainly, the significance and feeling suggested and borne home by the words and rhythm are in my view a capital part of the value of poetry. Shakespeare's lines

Absent thee from felicity awhile

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

have skilful and consummate rhythm and word combination, but this gets its full value as the perfect embodiment of a profound and moving significance, the expression in a few words of a whole range of human world-experience. It is for a similar quality that I have marked this line: coming after the striking and significant image of the stars in the skyline and the single Bliss that is the source of all, it expresses with a great force of poetic vision and emotion the sense of the original Delight contrasted with the world of sorrow born from it and yet the deep presence of that Delight in an unseizable beauty of things. It expresses it not intellectually but through vision and emotion. As for rhythm and word music, it is certainly not striking in the sense of being out of the way or unheard of, but it is perfect – technically in the variation of vowels and the weaving of the consonants and the distribution of longs and shorts, more deeply in the modulated rhythmic movement and the calling in of overtones. I don't know what more you want in that line.

02.09.1938