Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

Letter ID: 341

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

February 23, 1933

The question as it is put can admit of only one answer. I am not aware that nursery rhymes or folk songs take any important place or any place at all in the history of the prosody of the English language or that one starts the study of English metre by a careful examination of the rhythm of “Humpty Dumpty,” “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” or the tale of the old woman who lived in a shoe. There are many queer theories abroad nowadays in all the arts, but I doubt whether any English or French critic or prosodist would go so far as to turn to “Who killed Cock Robin?” for the true movement of English rhythm, putting aside Chaucer, Spenser, Pope or Shelley as too cultivated and accomplished or too much under foreign influence or seek for his models in popular songs or the products of the café chantant in preference to Hugo or Musset or Verlaine.

But perhaps something else is meant – is it that one gets the crude indispensable elements of metre better from primitive, just-shaped or unshaped stuff than from more perfect work in which these are overlaid by artistic developments and subtle devices – an embryo or a skeleton is more instructive for the study of men than the developed flesh-and-blood structure. That may have a certain truth in some lines of scientific research, but it cannot stand in studying the technique of an art. At that rate one would have to go for the basic principles of musical sound to the lullaby or the jazz or even to the hurdy-gurdy and for the indispensable rules of line and colour to the pavement-artist or to the sign-board painter. Or perhaps the suggestion is that here one gets the primary unsophisticated rhythms native to the language and free from the artificial movements of mere literature. Still, I hardly fancy that the true native spirit or bent of English metre is to be sought in

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall”

and is lost in

“Rarely, rarely, comest thou,

Spirit of Delight.”

Popular or nursery verse catches the child’s ear or the common ear much more easily than the music of poetry because it relies on a crude jingle or infantile lilt – not because it enshrines in its movement the true native spirit of the tongue. There seems to be the fallacy to think that the real spirit and native movement of a language can be caught only in crude or primitive forms and that it is disguised in the more perfect work in which it has developed its own possibilities to their full pitch, variety and scope.

As for foreign influences, most of the elements of English prosody, rhyme, foot-scansion, line-lengths, stanza-forms and many others have come in from outside and have altered out of all recognition the original mould, but the spirit of the language has found itself as much in these developments as in the first free alliterative verse – as much and more. The spirit of a language ought to be strong enough to assimilate any amount of imported elements or changes of structure and measure.