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

Arjava (J. A. Chadwick) [1]

An Afternoon

Earth-fashioned hush, dream-woken trees becalmed

On fields entranced, on sea of frozen sound

Rimmed by faint watchers billowing haze-embalmed,

Whose legions vast our dream-like raft surround.

Nature looks strange. Strange that, e’en so, she’s found

Closer to man. The dumb do voiceless meet,

Babel avoiding. See,— the very ground

Is silence-drenched — untrodden by earth’s feet.

On such a stillness might leap forth the Word,

On such sink down to rest Creative Power:

All those six days through which the Work occurred

Revolved round Rest, enshrined a silent bower.

Earth’s many melodies all are on Silence weaved.

Sleep foretells dawn’s fanfare. And peace is toil achieved.

You have a beginning of power of poetic speech, but it is quite unfinished and the technique is not there.

There are three defects in your verses —

(1) Failure of rhythm. In this poem the rhythm is laboured and heavy; there are often too many ponderous syllables packed together — especially the last line, first half,— it is so heavy with packed long syllables that it can hardly move. What rhythm there is is too staccato, not varied enough or varied in the wrong way, sometimes a conventional ineffective way, sometimes by adopting an impossible metrical movement (this last more in the other poem than here).

(2) The style in this poem is too laboured, as if you had tried to pack the expression overmuch, and gives a slow heavy movement to the sense as well as to the verse. There is an occasional tendency to obscurity of expression (more in the other poem than here) due probably to the same reason or sometimes to a rather recondite allusiveness as if you expected the reader to understand the thoughts passing in you — without your either expressly stating them or else suggesting them by some perfectly significant word or sound.

(3) A certain habit of prose-structure in the form given to the thought comes up from time to time, e.g. in the fifth and eleventh lines of this poem, and sometimes in the choice of words e.g. “occurred” in the latter line.

At the same time there is not only the potency of speech at least in promise, but some promise also of a rhythmical faculty struggling to be born.

April 1931