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) [9]

Men dreamed of her strange hair; and they saw it fall

A cataract of nectar through their sleep,

Crushing the soul with sweetness; — and they woke a — from {{0}}dread,[[“A-dread” seems to me rather feeble.]]

In With all their limbs a speechless heaven of pain!

Her voice reached {{0}}soared[[“Reached” is very weak.]] to Creation’s highest peak,

And though a music that most delicate its music with its rapture

Swepteping through the seven worlds and found out the gods

Helpless like flames swaying in a huge wind!

A terror beautiful were terror were those dark conscious eddies,

Her fathomless pure vague-glimmering pure and fathomless eyes,

Wherein Therein the spirits that rashly plunged their love

Fell Wwhirled through a lifetimes of bewildering bliss!

But all in vain, her voice and gaze and hair

Before the snowy calm -pale and immutable calm

Of Shiva’s meditation, a frozen fire

Of lone omnipotence alone with its locked in self-splendour light!

His far face glowed Llike an immortal death: his far face glowed {{0}}—[[Why this inversion? It spoils the power and directness of the line.]]

The Iinaudible disclosure of some white

Eternity, some {{0}}of[[The double “of” is very awkward and spoils both force and flow.]] unperturbed dream-vast,

Behind It slew the colour and passion of time’s heart-beat!

It looks as if you were facing the problem of blank verse by attempting it under conditions of the maximum difficulty. Not content with choosing a form which is based on the {{0}}single-line[[I mean, of course, each line a clear-cut entity by itself.]] blank verse (as opposed to the flowing and freely enjambed variety) you try to unite flow-lines and single-line and farther undertake a form of blank verse quatrains! I have myself tried the blank verse quatrain; even, when I attempted the single-line blank verse base on a large scale in Savitri, I found myself falling involuntarily into a series of four-line movement. But even though I was careful in the building, I found it led to a stiff monotony and had to make a principle of variation — one line, two line, three line, four line or longer passages (paragraphs as it were) alternating with each other; otherwise the system would be a failure.

In attempting the blank verse quatrain one has to avoid like poison all flatness of movement — a flat movement immediately creates a sense of void and sets the ear asking for the absent rhyme. The last line of each verse especially must be a powerful line acting as a strong satisfying close so that the rhyming close-cadence is missed no more. And, secondly, there must be a very careful building of the structure. A mixture of sculpture and architecture is indicated — there should be plenty of clear-cut single lines but they must be built into a quatrain that is itself a perfect structural whole. In your lines it is these qualities that are lacking, so that the poetic substance fails in its effect owing to rhythmic insufficiency. One closing line of yours will absolutely not do — that of the fourth stanza — its feminine ending is enough to damn it; you may have feminine endings but not in the last line of the quatrain, and its whole movement is an unfixed movement. The others would do, but they lose half their force by being continuations of clauses which look back to the previous line for their sense. They can do that sometimes, but only on condition of their still having a clear-cut wholeness in themselves and coming in with a decisive force. In the structure you have attempted to combine the flow of the lyrical quatrain with the force of a single-line blank verse system. I suppose it can be done, but here the single-line has interfered with the flow and the flow has interfered with the single-line force.

In my version I have made only minor changes for the most part, but many of them,— in order to secure what I feel to be the missing elements. I have indicated, in the places where my reasons for change were of another kind, what those reasons were; the rest are dictated by the two considerations of rhythmic efficiency and quatrain structure. In the first verse this structure is secured by putting two pauses in the middle of lines, each clause taking up the sense from there and enlarging into amplitude and then bringing to a forceful close. In the second verse and in the fourth I have attempted a sweeping continuous quatrain movement, but taken care to separate them by a different structure so as to avoid monotony. The third is made of two blank verse couplets, each complementary in sense to the other; the fifth is based on a one-line monumental phrase worked out in sense by a three-line development with a culminating close-line. The whole thing is not perhaps as perfect as it needs to be, but it is in the nature of a demonstration, to show on what principles the blank verse quatrain can be built, if it has to be done at all — I have founded it on the rule of full but well-sculptured single lines and an architectural quatrain structure: others are possible, but I think would be more difficult to execute.

I had half a mind to illustrate my thesis by quotations from Savitri, but I resist the temptation, worried by the scowling forehead of Time — this will do.

P.S. I don’t consider the proximity of the closing words “light” and “white” in the last stanzas an objection since the quatrains stand as separate entities — so I did not alter; of course in continuous blank verse an objection would be called for.

18 July 1933