Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1

Letter ID: 410

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

November 18, 1933

But your definition of allegory and symbolism leaves me somewhat at sea. Please let me know clearly what the type of my poem is, in essence. Is it allegorical or symbolic? Also I have a feeling it is in a sense truly mystic, properly speaking; at any rate, more mystic than many that I have hitherto written. Am I right?

I return the poem. I need not I think say anything about the poem as a poem – it rises to your full standard in rhythm and language.

It is a little difficult to fix its type, because it starts as a kind of allegory and merges into the symbol. I mean in the details – for the cloud is evidently a symbol, while the earth is neither allegory nor symbol, but simply the earth – or the earth-consciousness, if you like, which comes to the same thing. If you intended it for an allegory throughout, I do not think it keeps its character. For an allegory must be intellectually precise in its basis however much adorned with imagery and personal expression, but in each case the interlocutors express not the play of abstract things or ideas put into imaged form, but the experience, one of the earth as consciousness in its blind feeling for something it cannot reach and which it yearns after while not even sure of its existence the other of the seeking Intermediary which seeks and finds and brings down to the earth what the Vedas call the Rain of Heaven. It should therefore be called a symbolic poem rather than an allegorical poem. The poem is in its nature a first step between the poetic mental treatment of these mystic subjects as in one or two of the earlier poems (not the more lyrical ones, for those were psychic) and the sheer mystic – a step from thought towards sight.