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 Harindranath Chattopadhyaya

Your satisfaction with today’s poems is certainly justified, for they are very fine — they are among the best. The conciseness and clarity — which, by the way, were always there in lyric and sonnet — have grown very rapidly and there is nothing here of their opposites. To quote particular lines is difficult, but I may instance

a tremulous drop of rain

Silverly slipped over the voiceless hill

as an example of some kind of inevitability,— for there are many kinds,— or again in another kind

His marvellous experiment of wings

Crowned with a rich assurance of the height;

or, in yet another

Unmemory yourself of sign and mark

Which draw you still towards the greying earth.

The mark of this inevitability or perfect perfection is the saying of a thing that has to be said with such a felicity of phrase and rhythm that it seems as if it could not be better or otherwise said in the highest poetic way, it sounds final and irrevocable. All in a poem cannot be like that; one has to be satisfied with a more ordinary perfection — some critics even hold that this should be so as a matter of deliberate technique so as to bring the greater moments of the poetry into relief — all ought not to be Himalayan peaks clustering one upon the other, there must be valleys, plains, plateaus from which they rise. But in any case these moments lift poetical expression to its highest possibilities. There are other lines that could be quoted, but these will suffice.