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 Thought the Paraclete and Rose of God
I am sending you copies
of two poems. One, Thought the Paraclete, is a development of four lines
(now 3–6) originally written some time ago as an English metrical correspondence
for a Bengali new metre of Dilip’s. He had asked for some more lines and I
thought the four I had written good enough to warrant a complete poem. Dilip’s
scheme was
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but in English another arrangement might be preferable, either
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or
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It is not an easy metre and does not seem to admit of sufficient variations for a longer poem.
The other, Rose of God, is a lyric, an invocation. The metrical plan is — for the first two lines of the stanza, three parts with 2 main stresses in each, the first identical throughout, the other two variable at pleasure; for the last two lines, two parts of equal length, three stresses in each part.