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) [5]

I was wondering whether a second such burst of quintessential romantic poetry as Coleridge’s Kubla Khan was not possible. The day before yesterday I got some kind of inspiration and wrote the first draft of these lines that form a fragment on the same theme as that of Coleridge. But can it come anywhere near that gem?

Kubla Khan

“For thy unforgettable sake

See my royal passion wake

Marmoreal sleep to towering dreamery,

In wide felicitous splendour hazed,

With echoes magic, numberless, that throng

Through blossoming vales, an ever-vigilant song

Of naked waters tremulously embraced

By shadows of my shining ecstasy! ...

“ ... The moon enkindles in the eyes

A lonely virginal surprise —

O hasten while the warm blood runs,

To odorous gardens born for thy delight!

What memories that oppose the charm of night

Allure towards unseen magnificence

The inaccessible beauty of thy face?

Must Kubla ever in thy silence trace

The strange voice of the sacred river flowing

Beyond the lustrous hours of Xanadu

And the sweet foison of their passionate sowing,

Down to cold caverns hidden from his view,

In search of some unpathed phantasmal sea’s

Remote profundities?”

I fear your inspiration has played you false — far from the quintessence, I do not find even the essence of romantic poetry here. It is not inspiring either. I do not know why this fancy has seized on you to follow in the trace of others, improving on Abercrombie, “rivalling” Coleridge,— and if to improve on Abercrombie is easy (though why anyone should try it, I don’t know), to rival Coleridge is not such an easy job, I can assure you. In any case, no good work is likely to come out of such a second-hand motive.

Let me add that this poem of Coleridge is a masterpiece, not because it is the quintessence of romantic poetry, but because it is a genuine supraphysical experience caught and rendered in a rare hour of exaltation with an absolute accuracy of vision and authenticity of rhythm. Farther, romantic poetry could be genuine in the early nineteenth century, but the attempt to walk back into it in the year of grace 1931 is not likely to be a success, it can only result in an artificial literary exercise. You have a genuine vein of poetic inspiration somewhere above your intellect which comes through sometimes when the said intellect can be induced to be quiet and the lower vital does not meddle. If I were you, I should try to find that always and make the access to it free and the transcriptions from it pure (for then your writing becomes marvellously good); that would be a truer line of progress than these exercises.

21 August 1931