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 Examples of Twentieth-Century Poetry

Edwin Muir

Who curbed the lion long ago

And penned him in this towering field

And reared him wingless in the sky?

And quenched the dragon’s burning eye,

Chaining him here to make a show,

The faithful guardian of the shield?

A fabulous wave far back in time

Flung these calm trophies to this shore

That looks out on a different sea.

These relics of a buried war,

Empty as shape and cold as rhyme,

Gaze now on fabulous wars to be.

So well the storm must have fulfilled

Its work of perfect overthrow

That this new world to them must seem

Irrecognizably the same,

And looking from the flag and shield

They see the selfsame road they know.

Here now heraldic watch them ride

This path far up the mountainside

And backward never cast a look;

Ignorant that the dragon died

Long since and that the mountain shook

When the great lion was crucified.

Very good indeed — admirable throughout. It is refreshing to read a poem with such a good form, build, depth of suggested meaning amidst so much that is so freakish and uncertain as to take away half the value of what is attempted. Here the writer has something to say and knows how to say it.

1934