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

Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna) [1]

Out of the Unknown

Out of the Unknown, like meteor-rain

Glimmered across Fell glimmering on my dark despair

The syllables of a prophetic tongue:

“O thou whose heart is O heart disconsolate, beauty-wrung,

And roams Wanderer unsated,— not in vain

The wingéd floating shadow of a melody

Floating in Winging through heavenly air

Fell Was cast on thy human happiness

And dimmed its the eyes to with longing pain

With And Brindavun’s immortal memory!

Thy life’s a quest quest is not meaningless

Though Jumuna’s banks are wild void and bare;

For hark, Now too a spirit-flute

Now wafts Conveys again such holy so holy a calm abroad,

That on the lips of anguish even on misery’s lips fall’n mute

With In uncompanioned throes

Pale silence blossoms like a rose

Deep-rooted in the soul’s eternity.

Rest not till thou find sanctuary

Where Brindavun has gone behind its God.

There the red For there the veil shall draw aside,

Which hangs between thy inturned gaze

And Him of the irradiant face:

His musical tranquillity

Shall once more in thy ear abide

And all the heart-beats of thy life’s increase

Count but the starlike moments of His peace.”

[Sri Aurobindo wrote the paragraphs published, in revised form, on pages 5 to 7 above, and continued:]

Your present effort is slightly improved, but most of it comes from or through the outer intelligence. Only in the closing passage are there five lines from your highest source, and the rest is reasonably like what the creative intelligence in you wanted to transmit. But the “red” veil with its splash of pseudo-colour comes from the brain, not from the true source. All the opening part is an attempt of the outer intelligence to put into its own language something it did not catch in its pure form. It is in a quite different tone and speech from the close; for that is either grave and deep or of a high elevation and illumined power, but this opening is all imitative intellect stuff — romantic pseudo-colour, Shelley-Byronic, fairly well done in its own kind of stuff, but not the thing at all. I have suggested some alterations — supposing you want to give to this opening too the same tone or nearly the same — grave and deep — as the major part of the close. The alterations may seem slight to you, but in all writing, prose or poetry, indeed in all art, a few slight alterations, a touch here and a touch there can alter the whole tone and quality of a work or a passage. My alterations are meant either to set right verbal poverties or awkwardnesses or to wipe out false vital colour and give instead the gravity of the higher poetic source.

2 June 1931