Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1934 — 1935

Letter ID: 565

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

February 22, 1935

I was indeed delighted by your generous praise with which I felt your response came in part. As a result I dashed off two poems in no time. Here they are. You will easily read between the lines – knowing my habit of eternal wail – poetic, attitudinising and what not. My spirits have risen while writing this. It is strange how a vocal attempt fortifies this silent sorrow! But it does nevertheless.

As for the metre I am glad too. This is a difficult metre (as rightly says Prabodh Sen) to write in but very easy to read. It has a peculiar composite lilt made up of the syllabic and quantitative rhythms. None after Satyendranath developed it as Prabodh Sen regretted. But the reason is, he wrote, its difficulty, as every foot has to contain only a fixed number of closed and open syllables. Here every foot has got one closed and three open syllables. But its lilt is new (...)

What you say about the spontaneous development of the capacity in the metre after a silent and inactive incubation of over two years, is quite true. But it is not amazing; it often happens and is perfectly natural to those who know the laws of the being by observation and experience. In the same way one suddenly finds oneself knowing more of a language or a subject after returning to it subsequent to a short interim without study, problems which had been abandoned as unsolvable solving themselves spontaneously and easily after sleep or when they come up again; knowledge or ideas coming up from within without reading or learning or hearing from others. Sudden efflorescences of capacity, intuitions, welling up of all sorts of things point to the same inner power or inner working. It is what we mean when we speak of the word, knowledge or activity coming out of the silence, of a working behind the veil of which the outer mind is unconscious but which one day bears its results, of the inner manifesting itself in the outer. It makes at once true and practical what sounds only a theory to the uninitiated – the strong distinction made by us between the inner being and the outer consciousness. It is how also unexpected Yogic capacity reveals itself, sometimes no doubt as a result of long and apparently fruitless effort, sometimes as a spontaneous outflowering of what was concealed there all the time or else as a response to a call which had been made but at the time and for long seemed to be without an answer.