Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 1. The Sources of Poetry
Examples of Overhead Poetry

Evaluations of 1934 – 1937 [10]

Consummation

Immortal overhead the gold expanse —

An ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy!

But a king-power must grip all passion numb

And with gigantic loneliness draw down

This large gold throbbing on its silver hush.

For only an ice-pure peak of trance can bear

The benediction of that aureole.

I would suggest “a gigantic loneliness”. “With” makes the line rather weak; the loneliness must be brought out in its full effect and “with”subordinates it and prevents it from standing out.

There is something wrong in the fifth line. Perhaps it is the excess of sibilants — not that one cannot have a sibilant line, but the sounds must be otherwise dispersed. Besides your style of consonant and vowel harmonisation is of the liquid kind and here such combinations as “its silver hush” are best avoided. How would “the large gold throbbing in a silver hush” do?

The second line is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually (in Paradise Lost) some of the largeness and rhythm of the higher mind, but his substance except at certain heights is mental, mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from “above”.

17 November 1936