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
On Savitri

General Comments on. Some Criticisms of the Poem [1]

Now as to the many criticisms contained in your letter I have a good deal to say; some of them bring forward questions of the technique of mystic poetry about which I wanted to write in an introduction to Savitri when it is published, and I may as well say something about that here.

I am glad, however, that you have called my attention to some lapses such as the inadvertent substitution of “wideness” for “vastness”in the line about love and {{0}}Savitri.[[In her he met a wideness like his own, [cf. p. 16]]] In all these cases there was the same inadvertent and unintentional change. “A prophet cavern” should certainly have remained as “some prophet {{0}}cavern”.[[Moves in a prophet cavern of the gods, [cf. p. 15]]] Also, it should be “a niche for veiled divinity” and “of” is an obvious {{0}}slip.[[That seemed a niche of veiled divinity [cf. p. 15]]] Again, “still depths” is a similar inadvertent mistake for “sealed depths” which, of course, I have {{0}}restored.[[And, scattered on still depths, her luminous smile [cf. p. 4]]] Also “step twixt” instead of “link between” was a similar {{0}}mistake.[[Air was a vibrant step twixt earth and heaven, [cf. p. 4]]]

Now as to some other passages. You have made what seems to me a strange confusion as regards the passage about the “errant {{0}}marvel”[[As if solicited in an alien world(((1)))With timid and hazardous instinctive grace,(((1)))Orphaned and driven out to seek a home(((1)))An errant marvel with no place to live,(((1)))Into a far-off nook of heaven there came(((1)))A slow miraculous gesture’s dim appeal. [cf. p. 3]]] owing to the mistake in the punctuation which is now corrected. You took the word “solicited” as a past participle passive and this error seems to have remained fixed in your mind so as to distort the whole building and sense of the passage. The word “solicited” is the past tense and the subject of this verb is “an errant marvel” delayed to the fourth line by the parenthesis “Orphaned etc.” This kind of inversion, though longer than usual, is common enough in poetical style and the object is to throw a strong emphasis and prominence upon the line, “An errant marvel with no place to live”; that being explained, the rest about the “gesture” should be clear enough.

Your objection to the “finger” and the “clutch” moves me only to change “reminding” to “reminded” in the second line of that {{0}}passage.[[As if a childlike finger laid on a cheek(((1)))Reminding of the endless need in things(((1)))The heedless Mother of the universe,(((1)))An infant longing clutched the sombre Vast. [cf. p. 2]]] It is not intended that the two images “finger laid” and “clutch” should correspond exactly to each other; for the “void” and the “Mother of the universe” are not the same thing. The “void” is only a mask covering the Mother’s cheek or face. What the “void” feels as a clutch is felt by the Mother only as a reminding finger laid on her cheek. It is one advantage of the expression “as if” that it leaves the field open for such variation. It is intended to suggest without saying it that behind the sombre void is the face of a mother. The other two “as {{0}}if”s[[As if a soul long dead were moved to live: ...(((1)))As if solicited in an alien world ... [p. 3]]] have the same motive and I do not find them jarring upon me. The second is at a sufficient distance from the first and it is not obtrusive enough to prejudice the third which more nearly follows. In any case your suggestion “as though” [for the third “as if”] does not appeal to me: it almost makes a suggestion of falsity and in any case it makes no real difference as the two expressions are too much kin to each other to repel the charge of reiteration.

In the passage about {{0}}Dawn[[One lucent corner windowing hidden things(((1)))Forced the world’s blind immensity to sight.(((1)))The darkness failed and slipped like a falling cloak. [cf. p. 3]]] your two suggestions I again find unsatisfying. “Windowing hidden things” presents a vivid image and suggests what I want to suggest and I must refuse to alter it; “vistaing” brings in a very common image and does not suggest anything except perhaps that there is a long line or wide range of hidden things. But that is quite unwanted and not a part of the thing seen. “Shroud” sounds to me too literary and artificial and besides it almost suggests that what it covers is a corpse which would not do at all; a slipping shroud sounds inapt while “slipped like a falling cloak” gives a natural and true image. In any case, “shroud” would not be more naturally continuous in the succession of images than “cloak”. As to this succession, I may say that rapid transitions from one image to another are a constant feature in Savitri as in most mystic poetry. I am not here building a long sustained single picture of the Dawn with a single continuous image or variations of the same image. I am describing a rapid series of transitions, piling one suggestion upon another. There is first a black quietude, then the persistent touch, then the first “beauty and wonder” leading to the magical gate and the “lucent corner”. Then comes the failing of the darkness, the simile used suggesting the rapidity of the change. Then as a result the change of what was once a rift into a wide luminous gap,— if you want to be logically consistent you can look at the rift as a slit in the “cloak” which becomes a big {{0}}tear.[[And through the pallid rift that seemed at first(((1)))Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns,(((1)))Outpoured the revelation and the flame.(((1)))The brief perpetual sign recurred above. [cf. p. 3]]] Then all changes into a “brief perpetual sign”, the iridescence, then the blaze and the magnificent aura. In such a race of rapid transitions you cannot bind me down to a logical chain of figures or a classical monotone. The mystic Muse is more of an inspired Bacchante of the Dionysian wine than an orderly housewife.

As for other suggestions, I am afraid, {{0}}“soil”[[Our prostrate soil bore the awakening ray. [p. 5]]] must remain because that was what I meant, it cannot elevate itself even into a prostrate soul as that would be quite irrelevant. Your “barely enough”, instead of the finer and more suggestive {{0}}“hardly”,[[Hardly enough for a trickle from the suns, [p. 3] ]] falls flat upon my ear; one cannot substitute one word for another in this kind of poetry merely because it means intellectually the same thing; “hardly” is the mot juste in this context and, repetition or not, it must remain unless a word not only juste but inevitable comes to replace it. I am not disposed either to change “suns” to “stars” in the line about the creative slumber of the ignorant {{0}}Force;[[Cradled the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force(((1)))Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns(((1)))And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl. [p. 1] ]] “stars” does not create the same impression and brings in a different tone in the rhythm and the sense. This line and that which follows it bring in a general subordinate idea stressing the paradoxical nature of the creation and the contrasts which it contains, the drowsed somnambulist as the mother of the light of the suns and the activities of life. It is not intended as a present feature in the darkness of the Night. Again, do you seriously want me to give an accurate scientific description of the earth half in darkness and half in light so as to spoil my impressionist {{0}}symbol[[Athwart the vain enormous trance of Space,(((1)))Its formless stupor without mind or life,(((1)))A shadow spinning through a soulless Void,(((1)))Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams,(((1)))Earth wheeled abandoned in the hollow gulfs,(((1)))Forgetful of her spirit and her fate. [p. 1]]] or else to revert to the conception of earth as a flat and immobile surface? I am not writing a scientific treatise, I am selecting certain ideas and impressions to form a symbol of a partial and temporary darkness of the soul and Nature which seems to a temporary feeling of that which is caught in the Night as if it were universal and eternal. One who is lost in that Night does not think of the other half of the earth as full of light; to him all is Night and the earth a forsaken wanderer in an enduring darkness. If I sacrifice this impressionism and abandon the image of the earth wheeling through dark space I might as well abandon the symbol altogether, for this is a necessary part of it. As a matter of fact in the passage itself earth in its wheeling does come into the dawn and pass from darkness into the light. You must take the idea as a whole and in all its transitions and not press one detail with too literal an insistence. In this poem I present constantly one partial view of life or another temporarily as if it were the whole in order to give full value to the experience of those who are bound by that view, as for instance, the materialist conception and experience of life, but if any one charges me with philosophical inconsistency, then it only means that he does not understand the technique of the Overmind interpretation of life.

The line about “Wisdom nursing the child Laughter of Chance” [cf. p. 41] contained one of the inadvertent changes of which I have spoken; the real reading was and will remain “Wisdom suckling”. The verbal repetition of “nursing” and “nurse” therefore disappears, though there is the idea of nursing repeated in two successive lines and to that I see no objection. But for other reasons I have changed the two lines that follow as I was not altogether satisfied with them. I have changed them into

Silence, the nurse of the Almighty’s power,

The omnipotent hush, womb of the immortal Word. [p. 41]

As to the exact metrical identity in the first half of the two lines that {{0}}follow,[[And of the Timeless the still brooding face,(((1)))And the creative eye of Eternity. [p. 41]]] it was certainly intentional, if by intention is meant, not a manufacture by my personal mind but the spontaneous deliberateness of the inspiration which gave the lines to me and an acceptance in the receiving mind. The first halves of the two lines are metrically identical closely associating together the two things seen as of the same order, the “still Timeless” and the “dynamic creative Eternity” both of them together originating the manifest world: the latter halves of the lines diverge altogether, one into the slow massiveness of the “still brooding face”, with its strong close, the other into the combination of two high and emphatic syllables with an indeterminate run of short syllables between and after, allowing the line to drop away into some unuttered endlessness rather than cease. In this rhythmical significance I can see no weakness.

I come next to the passage which you so violently attack, about the Inconscient waking Ignorance. In the first place, the word “formless” is indeed defective, not so much because of any repetition but because it is not the right word or idea and I was not myself satisfied with it. I have changed the passage as follows:

Then something in the inscrutable darkness stirred;

A nameless movement, an unthought Idea

Insistent, dissatisfied, without an aim,

Something that wished but knew not how to be,

Teased the Inconscient to wake Ignorance.... [pp. 1–2]

But the teasing of the Inconscient remains and evidently you think that it is bad poetic taste to tease something so bodiless and unreal as the Inconscient. But here several fundamental issues arise. First of all, are words like Inconscient and Ignorance necessarily an abstract technical jargon? If so, do not words like consciousness, knowledge etc. undergo the same ban? Is it meant that they are abstract philosophical terms and can have no real or concrete meaning, cannot represent things that one feels and senses or must often fight as one fights a visible foe? The Inconscient and the Ignorance may be mere empty abstractions and can be dismissed as irrelevant jargon if one has not come into collision with them or plunged into their dark and bottomless reality. But to me they are realities, concrete powers whose resistance is present everywhere and at all times in its tremendous and boundless mass. In fact, in writing this line I had no intention of teaching philosophy or forcing in an irrelevant metaphysical idea, although the idea may be there in implication. I was presenting a happening that was to me something sensible and, as one might say, psychologically and spiritually concrete. The Inconscient comes in persistently in the cantos of the First Book of Savitri, e.g.

Opponent of that glory of escape,

The black Inconscient swung its dragon tail

Lashing a slumbrous Infinite by its force

Into the deep obscurities of form. [p. 79]

There too a metaphysical idea might be read into or behind the thing seen. But does that make it technical jargon or the whole thing an illegitimate mixture? It is not so to my poetic sense. But you might say, “It is so to the non-mystical reader and it is that reader whom you have to satisfy, as it is for the general reader that you are writing and not for yourself alone.” But if I had to write for the general reader I could not have written Savitri at all. It is in fact for myself that I have written it and for those who can lend themselves to the subject-matter, images, technique of mystic poetry.

This is the real stumbling-block of mystic poetry and specially mystic poetry of this {{0}}kind.[[This and the next five paragraphs were published separately in 1946 in a slightly different form. They are reproduced in that form on pages 93 – 97 of the present volume. — Ed.]] The mystic feels real and present, even ever-present to his experience, intimate to his being, truths which to the ordinary reader are intellectual abstractions or metaphysical speculations. He is writing of experiences that are foreign to the ordinary mentality. Either they are unintelligible to it and in meeting them it flounders about as in an obscure abyss or it takes them as poetic fancies expressed in intellectually devised images. That was how a critic in The Hindu condemned such poems as Nirvana and Transformation. He said that they were mere intellectual conceptions and images and there was nothing of religious feeling or spiritual experience. Yet Nirvana was as close a transcription of a major experience as could be given in language coined by the human mind of a realisation in which the mind was entirely silent and into which no intellectual conception could at all enter. One has to use words and images in order to convey to the mind some perception, some figure of that which is beyond thought. The critic’s non-understanding was made worse by such a line as: “Only the illimitable Permanent, Is there”. Evidently he took this as technical jargon, abstract philosophy. There was no such thing; I felt with an overpowering vividness the illimitability or at least something which could not be described by any other term and no other description except the “Permanent” could be made of That which alone existed. To the mystic there is no such thing as an abstraction. Everything which to the intellectual mind is abstract has a concreteness, substantiality which is more real than the sensible form of an object or of a physical event. To me, for instance, consciousness is the very stuff of existence and I can feel it everywhere enveloping and penetrating the stone as much as man or the animal. A movement, a flow of consciousness is not to me an image but a fact. If I wrote “His anger climbed against me in a stream”, it would be to the general reader a mere image, not something that was felt by me in a sensible experience; yet I would only be describing in exact terms what actually happened once, a stream of anger, a sensible and violent current of it rising up from downstairs and rushing upon me as I sat in the veranda of the guest-house, the truth of it being confirmed afterwards by the confession of the person who had the movement. This is only one instance, but all that is spiritual or psychological in Savitri is of that character. What is to be done under these circumstances? The mystical poet can only describe what he has felt, seen in himself or others or in the world just as he has felt or seen it or experienced through exact vision, close contact or identity and leave it to the general reader to understand or not understand or misunderstand according to his capacity. A new kind of poetry demands a new mentality in the recipient as well as in the writer.

Another question is the place of philosophy in poetry or whether it has any place at all. Some romanticists seem to believe that the poet has no right to think at all, only to see and feel. This accusation has been brought against me by many that I think too much and that when I try to write in verse, thought comes in and keeps out poetry. I hold, to the contrary, that philosophy has its place and can even take a leading place along with psychological experience as it does in the Gita. All depends on how it is done, whether it is a dry or a living philosophy, an arid intellectual statement or the expression not only of the living truth of thought but of something of its beauty, its light or its power.

The theory which discourages the poet from thinking or at least from thinking for the sake of the thought proceeds from an extreme romanticist temper; it reaches its acme on one side in the question of the surrealist, “Why do you want poetry to mean anything?” and on the other in Housman’s exaltation of pure poetry which he describes paradoxically as a sort of sublime nonsense which does not appeal at all to the mental intelligence but knocks at the solar plexus and awakes a vital and physical rather than intellectual sensation and response. It is of course not that really but a vividness of imagination and feeling which disregards the mind’s positive view of things and its logical sequences; the centre or centres it knocks at are not the brain-mind, not even the poetic intelligence but the subtle physical, the nervous, the vital or the psychic centre. The poem he quotes from Blake is certainly not nonsense, but it has no positive and exact meaning for the intellect or the surface mind; it expresses certain things that are true and real, not nonsense but a deeper sense which we feel powerfully with a great stirring of some inner emotion, but any attempt at exact intellectual statement of them sterilises their sense and spoils their appeal. This is not the method of Savitri. Its expression aims at a certain force, directness and spiritual clarity and reality. When it is not understood, it is because the truths it expresses are unfamiliar to the ordinary mind or belong to an untrodden domain or domains or enter into a field of occult experience; it is not because there is any attempt at a dark or vague profundity or at an escape from thought. The thinking is not intellectual but intuitive or more than intuitive, always expressing a vision, a spiritual contact or a knowledge which has come by entering into the thing itself, by identity.

It may be noted that the greater romantic poets did not shun thought; they thought abundantly, almost endlessly. They have their characteristic view of life, something that one might call their philosophy, their world-view, and they express it. Keats was the most romantic of poets, but he could write “To philosophise I dare not yet”; he did not write “I am too much of a poet to philosophise.” To philosophise he regarded evidently as mounting on the admiral’s flag-ship and flying an almost royal banner. The philosophy of Savitri is different but it is persistently there; it expresses or tries to express a total and many-sided vision and experience of all the planes of being and their action upon each other. Whatever language, whatever terms are necessary to convey this truth of vision and experience it uses without scruple, not admitting any mental rule of what is or is not poetic. It does not hesitate to employ terms which might be considered as technical when these can be turned to express something direct, vivid and powerful. That need not be an introduction of technical jargon, that is to say, I suppose, special and artificial language, expressing in this case only abstract ideas and generalities without any living truth or reality in them. Such jargon cannot make good literature, much less good poetry. But there is a “poeticism” which establishes a sanitary cordon against words and ideas which it considers as prosaic but which properly used can strengthen poetry and extend its range. That limitation I do not admit as legitimate.

I have been insisting on these points in view of certain criticisms that have been made by reviewers and others, some of them very capable, suggesting or flatly stating that there was too much thought in my poems or that I am even in my poetry a philosopher rather than a poet. I am justifying a poet’s right to think as well as to see and feel, his right to “dare to philosophise”. I agree with the modernists in their revolt against the romanticist’s insistence on emotionalism and his objection to thinking and philosophical reflection in poetry. But the modernist went too far in his revolt. In trying to avoid what I may call poeticism he ceased to be poetic, wishing to escape from rhetorical writing, rhetorical pretension to greatness and beauty of style, he threw out true poetic greatness and beauty, turned from a deliberately poetic style to a colloquial tone and even to very flat writing; especially he turned away from poetic rhythm to a prose or half-prose rhythm or to no rhythm at all. Also he has weighed too much on thought and has lost the habit of intuitive sight; by turning emotion out of its intimate chamber in the house of Poetry, he has had to bring in to relieve the dryness of much of his thought, too much exaggeration of the lower vital and sensational reactions untransformed or else transformed only by exaggeration. Nevertheless he has perhaps restored to the poet the freedom to think as well as to adopt a certain straightforwardness and directness of style.

Now I come to the law prohibiting repetition. This rule aims at a certain kind of intellectual elegance which comes into poetry when the poetic intelligence and the call for a refined and classical taste begin to predominate. It regards poetry as a cultural entertainment and amusement of the highly civilised mind; it interests by a faultless art of words, a constant and ingenious invention, a sustained novelty of ideas, incidents, word and phrase. An unfailing variety or the outward appearance of it is one of the elegances of this art. But all poetry is not of this kind; its rule does not apply to poets like Homer or Valmiki or other early writers. The Veda might almost be described as a mass of repetitions; so might the work of Vaishnava poets and the poetic literature of devotion generally in India. Arnold has noted this distinction when speaking of Homer; he mentioned especially that there is nothing objectionable in the close repetition of the same word in the Homeric way of writing. In many things Homer seems to make a point of repeating himself. He has stock descriptions, epithets always reiterated, lines even which are constantly repeated again and again when the same incident returns in his narrative, e.g. the line,

doupēsen de pesōn arabēse de teuche’ ep’ autōi.

“Down with a thud he fell and his armour clangoured upon him.”

He does not hesitate also to repeat the bulk of a line with a variation at the end, e.g.

bē de kat’ Oulumpoio karēn ōn chōomenos kēr.

And again the

bē de kat’ Oulumpoio karēnōn aïxasa.

“Down from the peaks of Olympus he came, wrath vexing his heart-strings” and again, “Down from the peaks of Olympus she came impetuously darting.” He begins another line elsewhere with the same word and a similar action and with the same nature of a human movement physical and psychological in a scene of Nature, here a man’s silent sorrow listening to the roar of the ocean:

bē d’akeōn para thina poluphloisboio thalassēs

“Silent he walked by the shore of the many-rumoured ocean.”

In mystic poetry also repetition is not objectionable; it is resorted to by many poets, sometimes with insistence. I may note as an example the constant repetition of the word Ritam, truth, sometimes eight or nine times in a short poem of nine or ten stanzas and often in the same line. This does not weaken the poem, it gives it a singular power and beauty. The repetition of the same key ideas, key images and symbols, key words or phrases, key epithets, sometimes key lines or half lines is a constant feature. They give an atmosphere, a significant structure, a sort of psychological frame, an architecture. The object here is not to amuse or entertain but the self-expression of an inner truth, a seeing of things and ideas not familiar to the common mind, a bringing out of inner experience. It is the true more than the new that the poet is after. He uses āvṛtti, repetition, as one of the most powerful means of carrying home what has been thought or seen and fixing it in the mind in an atmosphere of light and beauty. This kind of repetition I have used largely in Savitri. Moreover, the object is not only to present a secret truth in its true form and true vision but to drive it home by the finding of the true word, the true phrase, the mot juste, the true image or symbol, if possible the inevitable word; if that is there, nothing else, repetition included, matters much. This is natural when the repetition is intended, serves a purpose; but it can hold even when the repetition is not deliberate but comes in naturally in the stream of the inspiration. I see, therefore, no objection to the recurrence of the same or similar image such as sea and ocean, sky and heaven in one long passage provided each is the right thing and rightly worded in its place. The same rule applies to words, epithets, ideas. It is only if the repetition is clumsy or awkward, too burdensomely insistent, at once unneeded and inexpressive or amounts to a disagreeable and meaningless echo that it must be rejected.

There is one place, perhaps two, where I am disposed to make some concession. The first is where the word “awake” occurs at the beginning of the poem, twice within six lines in the same prominent place at the end of a {{0}}line.[[It was the hour before the Gods awake....(((1)))[four lines](((1)))A power of fallen boundless self, awake [cf. p. 1]]] In neither line can the word be changed, for it is needed and to change would spoil; but some modification can be made by restoring the original order putting the lines about the unbodied Infinite first and pushing those about the fallen self afterwards. The other place was in the other long passage where the word “delight” occurs also twice at the end of a line but with a somewhat longer interval {{0}}between;[[Her looks, her smile awoke celestial sense(((1)))Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight(((1)))Poured a supernal beauty on men’s lives....(((1)))As to a sheltering bosom a stricken bird(((1)))Escapes with tired wings from a world of storms,(((1)))In a safe haven of soft and splendid rest(((1)))One could restore life’s wounded happiness,(((1)))Recover the lost habit of delight, [cf. p. 15]]] here, however, I have not yet found any satisfying alternative.

I think there is none of your objections that did not occur to me as possible from a certain kind of criticism when I wrote or I re-read what I had written; but I brushed them aside as invalid or as irrelevant to the kind of poem I was writing. So you must not be surprised at my disregard of them as too slight and unimperative.

You have asked what is my positive opinion about your article. Well, it seems to me very fine both in style and substance, but as it is in high eulogy of my own writing, you must not expect me to say any more.

P.S. I have just received your last letter of the 15th. I have maintained all the {{0}}omissions[[Lines omitted when passages from Savitri were reproduced in the article “Sri Aurobindo — A New Age of Mystical Poetry”, by K. D. Sethna (see above, page 290, footnote 3). — Ed.]] you had made except the new lines in the description of Savitri which we have agreed to insert. The critic has a right to include or omit as he likes in his quotations. I doubt whether I shall have the courage to throw out again the stricken and too explicit bird into the cold and storm {{0}}outside;[[As to a sheltering bosom a stricken bird(((1)))Escapes with tired wings from a world of storms, [cf. p. 15]]] at most I might change that one line, the first and make it stronger. I confess I fail to see what is so objectionable in its explicitness; usually, according to my idea, it is only things that are in themselves vague that have to be kept vague. There is plenty of room for the implicit and suggestive, but I do not see the necessity for that where one has to bring home a physical image. I have, of course, restored the original reading where you have made an alteration not approved by me, as in the substitution of the word “barely” for “hardly”. On this point I may add that in certain contexts “barely” would be the right word, as for instance, “There is barely enough food left for two or three meals”, where “hardly” would be adequate but much less forceful. It is the other way about in this line. I think I have answered everything else in the body of this letter.

19 March 1946