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 [4]

If I took the lines in vacuo and stopped there, you might object, but I have not done that in my notes. What I have done, after saying that the lines are great poetry, is to catch their suggestion, first supposing one had come across them by themselves and did not know their original context, and, then, taking them in their proper context. If one saw them separately, would not one be inclined to read in them the suggestion I have submitted, owing to the image-word “lyre” and the adjective “faultless” applied to “agonies”? What harm can there be in using such an illustrative device?

I am unable to see what there is in the lines, whether taken separately or in the context or both that is anything more than what Swinburne meant to put it, a rhapsodic glorification and enthusiasmos of sadistic passion — just as the other {{0}}passage[[Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine, (((1)))Except these kisses of my lips on thine(((1)))Brand them with immortality; ...(((1)))But in the light and laughter, in the moan(((1)))And music, and in grasp of lip and hand(((1)))And shudder of water that makes felt on land(((1)))The immeasurable tremour of all the sea,(((1)))Memories shall mix and metaphor of me.]] is a magnificent outburst of the magnified ego. But one is no more ascetic or ideal or a discipline than the other — unless you mean the ideal of sadistic passion or the ideal of the magnified ego. The poetry is superb, but I do not see what the passion in them transfigures or into what it is transfigured — it is sublimated into its own extreme expression or figure, if you like — but that is all. To make somebody else’s body into a “lyre” of agonies does not transfigure the fact itself, the erotic side on which it expresses. Or if it does, what is this something high of which it is a glimmer? When one meets one’s own suffering with fortitude, there is an ascetic discipline, an ideal of self-mastery — but to meet somebody else’s pain caused by oneself with an ecstasy of pleasure in it is not quite the same thing. Or if one can turn one’s own pain into a sort of ecstasy of Ananda, not of perverse masochistic pleasure, so that pain disappears from one’s existence, then that is some kind of transfiguration — but can the same be said of turning somebody else’s agony into a subject for one’s own rapture? It may be a transfiguration, but a very Asuric transfiguration.

26 December 1934