Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 1
A very fine poem this new one. The metre is a great success.
I return you the former letter from Prabodh Sen which I managed to find time to read only today. He has a most acute, ingenious and orderly mind and what he says is always 
thought-provoking and interesting; but I am not persuaded that the form of Bengali mātrā-vṛtta and Sanskrit laghu-guru is really and intrinsically the same. Equivalent, no doubt, in a way,– if we substitute Bengali metre for Sanskrit quantity; but not the same because Bengali metre and Sanskrit quantity are two quite different things. It is something like the equivoque by which one pretends that an English iambic metre or any other with a Greek name is the same as a Latin or Greek metre with that name – an equivoque based on the fiction that a stressed and an unstressed English syllable are quantitatively long and short. There is a certain kind of general equivalence but a fundamental difference – as those who have tried to find an equivalent in the English stress system to the quantitative Latin or Greek hexameter, alcaic or sapphic metres have discovered – they could not be transplanted, because it is only on true quantity that they can live.
As to Jyotirmayi’s cousin, I don’t know quite what to say. If he is not interested in Yoga, there seems to be no ground for his staying in the Ashram or for seeing the Mother – that is for the Mother receiving him. If he only wants to come to Pondicherry, visit you, see the Ashram, that would be a different thing – or he might even be allowed to come once to pranam and so see the Mother.