Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 3

Letter ID: 698

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

1936

X. writes, “Can’t you get Sri Aurobindo to comment on it?” It is some sort of spiritual surrealism and I don’t know if I have succeeded! Do let me have even a monosyllabic comment if you have no time for more.

Veda

1. Milk within mighty breasts for a mute child

Born of the inmost Womb is the light beyond!

From the teat’s mouth to a clinging mouth pass all

The glowing Godheads – sages that burn wide

Shrink to a blinded bliss in giant arms

To suck the Whiteness hung in the highest blue!

Awful!

2 Soaring towards the White that has no end –

O Swan, plunging

into the Vast, the Pure –

Thyself the vastness and the Purity –

Look not beyond for ever, turn back and shine,

A Lord of rays that cleave to the core of things,

A sun whose fingers touch truth everywhere!

(referring to the last line:) This line is good. The others fail to arrive.

3. Lost lover of the glimmering herds of the Sun,

The brute is stretching his slow neck of night.

Eyes of gold frame covered with lids that are rock

Hunger for a lightning stroke: O Thunderer Hand,

See the pale arms of the abyss’s prayer –

Two horns of a moon upon a black bull’s head!

Neck stretching! The stanza might have succeeded in being very good if it had forestalled that success by succeeding in being very bad.

(Referring to the underlined words:) I see no justifying reason for this awkward internal rhyme.

A variant of the opening two lines of 3 is:

The belly of the brute is a caverned Day,

Horror!

Mate of the Immense whose navel is the Sun.

Is this more in tune with the spiritual surrealism of the poem?

Dilip, I have sent you two dissyllables instead of one mono-syllable and some sentences besides. My stiff silence should have been eloquent enough. What the deuce is this neck-stretching Muse that has rapped him by the neck, anyway?

If you insist on monosyllables here are two that express my attitude à l’Américaine, “Great snakes!”