Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 3. Practical Guidance for Aspiring Writers
Remarks on English Usage

On Three Words Used by Sri Aurobindo [1]

I should like to know what exactly the meaning of the word “absolve” is in the following lines from your Love and Death.

But if with price, ah God! what easier! Tears

Dreadful, innumerable I will absolve,

Or pay with anguish through the centuries ...

There is another passage a few pages later where the same word is used:

For late

I saw her mid those pale inhabitants

Whom bodily anguish visits not, but thoughts

Sorrowful and dumb memories absolve,

And martyrdom of scourged hearts quivering.

In the second passage it is used in its ordinary sense. “Absolution” means release from sins or from debts — the sorrowful thoughts and memories are the penalty or payment which procures the release from the debt which has been accumulated by the sins and errors of human life.

In the first passage “absolve” is used in its Latin and not in its English sense, = “to pay off a debt”, but here the sense is stretched a little. Instead of saying “I will pay off with tears” he says: “I will pay off tears” as the price of the absolution. This Latinisation and this inversion of syntactical connections are familiar licences in English poetry — of course, it is incorrect, but a deliberate incorrectness, a violence purposely done to the language in order to produce a poetic effect. The English language, unlike the French and some others, likes, as Stephen Phillips used to say, to have liberties taken with it. But, of course, before one can take these liberties, one must be a master of the language — and, in this case, of the Latin also.

The word “reboant” occurs in The Rishi. Evidently it is a misprint. What ought to be in its place?

Why is it evidently a misprint? It is a recognised (though rare and poetic) English word, from Latin reboans. Reboare in Latin means “to cry aloud again and again”.

1931