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 [5]

I feel my poem The Triumph of Dante has now been sufficiently quintessenced. If it satisfies you, will you make whatever analysis is possible of its inspirational qualities?

These arms, stretched through ten hollow years, have brought her

Back to my heart! A light, a hush immense

Falls suddenly upon my voice of tears,

Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears

The sun-touch of a rapt omnipotence.

Ineffable the secrecies supreme

Pass and elude my gaze — an exquisite

Failure to hold some nectarous Infinite!

The uncertainties of time grow shadowless

And never but with startling loveliness,

A white shiver of breeze on moonlit water,

Flies the chill thought of death across my dream.

For, how shall earth be dark when human eyes

Mirror the love whose smile is paradise? —

A smile that misers not its golden store

But gives itself and yearns to give yet more,

As though God’s light were inexhaustible

Not for His joy but this one heart to fill!

There are three different tones or pitches of inspiration in the poem, each in its own manner reaching inevitability. The first seven lines up to “gaze” bear as a whole the stamp of a high elevation of thought and vision — height and illumination lifted up still farther by the Intuition to its own inspired level; one passage (lines 3, 4) seems to me almost to touch in its tone of expression an overmind seeing. But here “A light, a hush ... a voice of tears” anticipates the second movement by an element of subtle inner intensity in it. This inner intensity — where a deep secret intimacy of feeling and seeing replaces the height and large luminosity — characterises the rest of the first part. This passage has a seizing originality and authenticity in it — it is here that one gets a pure inevitability. In the last lines the intuition descends towards the mental plane with a less revelatory power in it but more precise in its illumination. That is the difference between sheer vision and thought. But the poem is exceedingly fine as a whole; the close also is of the first order.

16 November 1936