Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
Letter ID: 663
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
December 22, 1935
Last night, after hours of bewildering meditation something rather wonderfullish happened: I started with a galvanized unyogic vitality and penned these four sonnets one after the other finishing the four sonnets in half an hour! A word about its context won’t be amiss I hope?
Sometime back my friend Arindam Bose who stopped with me as the Ashram’s guest, started a series of attacks on the ashramites. I kept quiet for a little while whereafter I hit back with my far-from-ahimsa chaleur.... But the seed of inspiration had then been sown of writing a poem on the raison d’être of an ashram. But tell me, was I wrong in not taking it lying down? You know docility is not my swadharma, don’t you? And about the esoteric truth in the poem?
P.S. You wrote to Nirod the other day: “My aim [in writing or encouraging others to write]1 is not personal glory but to arrive at the expression of spiritual truth and experience of all kinds in poetry.”
Please revise this sentence as this I will quote in my new book Sūryamukhī as I have felt greatly joyous on reading this. This line in fact has prompted me to write about these four sonnets which perhaps I would not have attempted otherwise as it might sound somewhat esoteric as an Ashramitic poem. But tell me how can it be so esoteric? Common ideals bind people in a purer tie of friendship the world over is it not?
So? Qu’en dites-vous?
I suppose the words I have added are necessary to fill out the meaning?
Your four sonnets are very fine. What you have written is an esoteric truth that seeks to realise itself – for common ideals in the human world do not always bind people in friendship; often those who have a common ideal are very far from being united. What you write is the psychic and spiritual truth behind friendship and comradeship in a common aim, what ought to be always. The personality in you which writes poetry knows esoteric things very well and has faith also.
As for Arindam’s utterances, they were evidently secondhand; the voice in this case was Esau’s2, though the mouth that uttered them was Jacob’s. I am glad you gave him the straight and fiery answer.
1 These words within brackets were added by Sri Aurobindo.
2 (For the non-biblical reader:) Esau, son of Isaac and Rebecca, elder twin brother of Jacob to whom he sold his birthright for a mess of red pottage. Traditional founder of Edomites. Jacob is the traditional founder of Israel.