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) [6]

Does not a compound like “flesh-fret” recall such typically Hopkinsian compounds as “bugle-blue”, “cuckoo-call”, “fast-flying” or “dapple-dawn-drawn”?

Surely, one cannot be accused of being Hopkinsian, merely because of a successfully copious alliteration and an alliterative compound? These things have happened before Hopkins and will go on happening after him even if he is no longer read. It may be that these turns came to Arjava because of the influence of Hopkins,— to that only he can plead Yes or No. What I say is that the way he uses them is not Hopkinsian, not Swinburnian, but Arjavan. “Flesh-fret” has not the least resemblance to “bugle-blue” or “cuckoo-call” or “fast-flying”, still less to “dapple-dawn-drawn” except the mere external fact of the alliterative structure; its spiritual quality is quite different. To take an idea or a formation or anything else from a former poet — as Molière took his “bien” wherever he found it,— is common to every maker of verse; we don’t write on a blank slate virgin of the past. Indian sculpture or architecture may have taken this form from the Greeks or that form from the Persians; but neither is in the least degree Achaemenian or Hellenistic.

1 April 1932