Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Metrical Experiments in Bengali

New Metres in Bengali [2]

It is certainly not true that a good metre must necessarily be an easy metre — easy to read or easy to write. In fact even with old established perfectly familiar metres how many of the readers of poetry have an ear which seizes the true movement and the whole subtlety and beauty of the rhythm — it is only in the more popular kind of poems that it gets in their hearing its full value. It is all the more impossible when you bring in not only new rhythms but a new principle of rhythm — or at least one that is not very familiar — to expect it to be easily followed at first by the many. It is only if you are already a recognised master that by force of your reputation you can impose whatever you like on your public — for then even if they do not catch your drift, they will still applaud you and will take some pains to learn the new principle. If you are imposing a principle not only of rhythm but of scansion to which the ear in spite of past attempts is not trained so as to seize the basic law of the movement in all its variations, a fair amount of incomprehension, some difficulty in knowing how to read the verse is very probable. Easier forms of a new rhythm may be caught in their movement,— even if some will not be able to scan it; but other more difficult forms may give trouble. All that is no true objection to the attempt at something new; novelty is difficult for the human mind — or ear — to accept, but novelty is asked for all the same in all human activities for their growth, amplitude, richer life. As you say, the ear has to be educated — once it is trained, familiar with the principle, what was a difficulty becomes easy, the unusual,— first condemned as abnormal or impossible,— becomes a normal and daily movement.

As for the charge of being cryptic, that is quite another matter. Obscurity due to inadequate expression is one thing, but the cryptic may be simply the expression of more than can be seized at first sight by the ordinary mind. It may be that the ideas are not of a domain in which that mind is accustomed to move or that there is a new turn of expression other than the kind which it has been trained to follow. Again the ordinary turn of a language, as in French or Bengali, may be lucid, direct, easy: if you bring into it a more intricate and suggestive manner in which the connections or transitions of thought are less obvious, that may create a difficulty. A poet can be too easy to read, because there is not much in what he writes and it is exhausted at the first glance,— or too difficult because you have to burrow for the meaning. But otherwise it makes no difference to the excellence of the work, if the reader can catch its burden at the first glance or has to dwell a little on it for the full force of it to come to the surface. The feeling, the way of expression, the combinations of thought, word or image tend often to be new and unfamiliar, but that can very well be a strength and a merit, not an element of failure.

28 January 1933