Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)

Swinburne [1]

I want to make a short series of notes according to some responses to great poetry — and what I am sending tonight is meant to be the opening section:

No better example, perhaps, of a certain style of great poetry can be produced than these lines from Swinburne:

Take thy limbs living, and new-mould with these

A lyre of many faultless agonies.

Considered thus separately, they have a suggestion richer than in their context, and convey on their passionate music a stimulus towards an idealistic discipline and high ascetic transport....

Does it all sound a stale old story?

It is not new — but it is difficult to say anything new in these matters. It is well written. I don’t know though that there is any “aching idealism” or “high ascetic transport” in these lines of Swinburne. An acceptance of suffering for oneself may have it — an infliction of suffering from one’s own perversely passionate pleasure on another can hardly have it.

23 December 1934