Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 1. On His Poetry and Poetic Method
Metrical Experiments

The Genesis of In Horis Aeternum [2]

I have written two more stanzas of the stress-scansion poem so as to complete it and send them to you. In this scansion as I conceive it, the lines may be analysed into feet, as you say all good rhythm can, but in that case the foot measures must be regarded as a quite subsidiary element without any fixed regularity — just as the (true) quantitative element is treated in ordinary verse. The whole indispensable structure of the lines depends upon stress and they must be read on a different principle from the current view — full value must be given to the true stresses and no fictitious stresses, no weight laid on naturally unstressed syllables must be allowed — that is the most important point. Thus:

A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea,

A world of power hushed into symbols of hue, silent unendingly;

Over its head like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play

Follows its curve,— a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day.

Here or otherwhere,— poised on the unreachable abrupt snow-solitary ascent

Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and spent,

Or in the glowing expanse, arid, fiery and austere, of the desert’s hungry soul,—

A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity’s face, in a fragment the mystic Whole.

Moment-mere, yet with all eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense,

Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die, caught by the spirit in sense,

In the greatness of a man, in music’s outspread wings, in a touch, in a smile, in a sound,

Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a once Nothing that was all and is found.

It is an experiment and I shall have to do more before I can be sure that I have caught the whole spirit or sense of this movement; nor do I mean to say that stress-scansion cannot be built on any other principle,— say, on one with more concessions to the old music or with less, breaking more away in the direction of free verse; but the essential, I think, is there.

P.S. It is with some hesitation that I write “a once Nothing”, because I am far from sure that the “once” does not overweight the rhythm and make the expression too difficult and compact; but on the other hand without it the sense appears ambiguous and incomplete,— for “a Nothing that was all” might be taken in a too metaphysical light and my object is not to thrust in a metaphysical subtlety but to express the burden of an experience. In the final form I shall probably risk the ambiguity and reject the intruding “once”.

19 April 1932