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 the Work of Poets of the Ashram

Harindranath Chattopadhyaya [6]

Harmony

... What ways shall baulk

These feet that have with Thee begun to walk

The only Way, the shining lonely Way

Leading out of the darkness and the clay

Into the sweet invulnerable bliss

Of inevitable [changed to irrevocable] apotheosis?

The defect you point to in the last lines of Harmony was an obvious flaw and the change was necessary. In any case “irrevocable” is better than “inevitable” — it has more depth and power of significance. These poems mark a very distinct advance on the earlier ones in the “Rose of {{0}}God”;[[The name of the series of poems in which Harmony occurs. This and an earlier series, “The Bird of Fire”, were named after poems written by Sri Aurobindo. Neither series was published. — Ed.]] those carried a slight sense of seeking and uncertainty, a new inspiration still feeling after its right diction, force of expression, rhythmic movement, finding them on the whole but not altogether. Here there is in all these respects an assured handling and full values. The new manner is very different from the “Bird of Fire”’s — in place of the rush and volume there is a subdued but very full richness of substance and subtlety of expression and a much more deliberately felicitous choice of word and phrase. This creates a quite different colour, tone and atmosphere.

18 January 1935