Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

Letter ID: 332

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

January 28, 1933

It is certainly not true that a good metre must necessarily be an easy metre – easy to read or easy to write. In fact, even with old-established perfectly familiar metres, how many of the readers of poetry have an ear which seizes the true movement and the whole subtlety and beauty of the rhythm – it is only in the more popular kind of poems that it gets in their hearing its full value. It is all the more impossible when you bring in not only new rhythms but a new principle of rhythm – or at least one that is not very familiar – to expect it to be easily followed at first by the many. It is only if you are already a recognised master that by force of your reputation you can impose whatever you like on your public – for then even if they do not catch your drift, they will still applaud you and will take some pains to learn the new principle. If you attempt to bring in the principle of laghu guru metres, you are imposing a principle not only of rhythm but of scansion to which the Bengali ear in spite of past attempts is not trained so as to seize the basic law of the movements in all its variations. A fair amount of incomprehension, some difficulty in knowing how to read the verse is very probable. A poem like Āgamanī, it seems to me, everybody ought to be able to catch on its movement,– even if some will not be able to scan it; but other difficult forms may give trouble. All that is no true objection, novelty is difficult for the human mind – or ear – to accept, but novelty is asked for all the same in all human activities for their growth, amplitude, richer life. As you say, the ear has to be educated – once it is trained, familiar with the principle, what was a difficulty becomes easy, the unusual, first condemned as abnormal or impossible, becomes a normal and daily movement.

As for the charge of being cryptic, that is quite another matter. On what does it base itself? Obscurity due to inadequate expression is one thing, but the cryptic may be simply the expression of more than can be seized at first sight by the ordinary mind. It may be that the ideas are not of a domain in which that mind is accustomed to move or that there is a new turn of expression other than the kind which it has been trained to follow. Again the ordinary turn of Bengali writing is lucid, direct, easy – in that it resembles French. If you bring into it a more intricate and suggestive manner in which the connections or transitions of thought are less obvious, that may create a difficulty. To which of these causes is the accusation of being cryptic due? Certainly not the first, since you are accused of having too adequate and not too inadequate a vocabulary. If it is any of the others, then the objection has no great force. One can be too easy to read, because there is not much in what one writes and it is exhausted at the first glance,– or too difficult because you have to burrow for the meaning. But otherwise it makes no difference to the excellence of the work, if the reader can catch its burden at the first glance or has to dwell a little on it for the full force of it to come to the surface. One has perhaps sometimes to do the latter in your poems, but I do not find anything unduly cryptic – certainly there is nothing that can be really called obscure. The feeling, the way of expression, the combinations of thought, word or image tend often to be new and unfamiliar, but that seems to me a strength and a merit, not an element of failure.