Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
After two days wrestling, I have to admit that I am beaten by your last metre. I have written something, but it is a fake. I will first produce the fake:
A gold moon-raft floats / and swings / slowly
And it casts / a fire / of pale / holy / blue light
On the dragon tail / aglow / of the / faint night
That glimmers far – / swimming,
The illumined shoals / of stars / skimming,
Overspreading earth / and drowning the / heart in sight
With the / ocean-depths / and breadths / of the / Infinite.
That is the official scansion, and except in the last foot of the two last lines it professes to follow very closely the metre of Nishikanta’s poem. But in fact it is full of sins and the appearance is a counterfeit. In the first line the first foot is really an anti-bacchius:
“A gold moon/-raft floats....”
and quantitatively, though not accentually, the second is a spondee which also disturbs the true rhythmic movement. “Slowly” and “holy” are in truth trochees disguised as pyrrhics, and if “slowly” can pass off the deceit a little, “holy” is quite unholy in the brazenness of its pretences. If I could have got a compound adjective like “god-holy,” it would have been all right and saved the situation, but I could find none that was appropriate. The next three lines are, I think, on the true model and have an honest metre. But the closing cretic of my last two is nothing but a cowardly flight from the difficulty of the spondee. I console myself by remembering that even Hector ran when he found himself in difficulties with Achilles and that the Bhāgavat1 lays down palāyanam [flight] as one of the ordinary occupations of the Avatar. But the evasion is a fact and I am afraid it spoils the correspondence of the metres. I have some idea of adding a second stanza – this one will look less guilty perhaps if it has a companion in sin – but if you use this at all, you need not wait for the other as it may never take birth at all.
Nishikanta’s poem on the Bazaar is very good work admirably done – he is evidently a craftsman in language and rhythm. I cannot go so far as to subscribe to your epithet “great.” There is however some power of developing a poetic subject which is full of promise. The thought-side of the development is not quite flawless – the emergence out of the ethical into the spiritual-philosophical standpoint in the speech of the Man of the Market is rather awkward; the transition from the sordid to the sublime jars a little. As for the culminating gospel of “Nothing good, nothing evil” it is a rather dangerous truth, unless it is balanced by admitting the [?] antinomy of the higher and the lower into the ecstatic uniqueness of the Brahman. “This which they worship here is not that Brahman” is a truth as much as “All this is the Brahman.”