Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Examples of Grades of Perfection in Poetic Style

Examples from Amal Kiran and Sri Aurobindo [2]

Do you find the lines of this sonnet any good?

Seeing You walk our little ways, they wonder

That I who scorn the common loves of life

Should kneel to You in absolute surrender,

Deeming Your visible perfection wife

Unto my spirit’s immortality.

They think I have changed one weakness for another,

Because they mark not the new birth of me —

This body which by You, the Mystic Mother,

Has now become a child of my vast soul!

Loving Your feet’s earth-visitation, I

Find each heart-throb miraculously flower

Out of the unplumbable God-mystery

Behind dark clay, and hour by dreamful hour,

Upbear that fragrance like an aureole.

Exceedingly good. Here you have got to inevitability. I forgot to say that all the styles “adequate”, “effective” etc. can be raised to inevitability in their own {{0}}line.[[This sentence was incorporated in the composite letter printed on pages 185 – 86, which was revised in that form by Sri Aurobindo. — Ed.]] The octet here is adequateness raised to inevitability except the fourth and fifth lines in which the effective undergoes the same transformation. In the sestet on the other hand it is the illumined style that becomes inevitable.

17 September 1934