Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 3
A most curious poem [kalor chokha aloi kalo] has come out just now (8.45 a.m.). I have marvelled a little what it 
exactly conveys??Eh? – but I suspect it is some genuine stuff as line after line it came, the form and all. A drop of inspiration with “kālo” [black] and “quintessence” came as I was sipping tea alone at 8 a.m. This expanded and I sat down with a feeling which was very beautiful but very vague. I started dubious – and here it is. I don’t quite follow what it is but a curious delight rasa?) is the reaction as well as the spring of this poem. I feel no need very carefully to chisel it as I usually do perhaps because I fear I may by so doing spoil it. It isn’t at all my vein – this reticence and the delicate winging imponderable perception of the far expresses what some part of me has deeply felt at odd moments under the stars many a lonely night. Please read it slowly and tell me what is it? and if it strikes you as obscure? Perhaps it is a little, what? Anyhow to me it is. But somehow I don’t want to make it (for the public?) more intelligible. O no-no-that is not my way either – has never been. So I will leave it as it is. Tell me how you find it and what is its exact sense if you possibly can find time to put it down in black and white.
So I have copied it in ink carefully. It has come in less than five or six minutes, I think. Well, I certainly feel the inspiration has come from you. I was going to start a long-demanded article on music, but the urge was so strong that I had to put it off. I am glad I did. For I find this offspring of my pen born of a curious inspiration, what?
I do not myself find either the thoughts or the expression in the least obscure. It expresses with considerable luminosity and depth the perception or rather the intuitive feeling that what seems to be dark can be really a greater, more dense and deep light than the light which the surface vision is capable of seeing – the very intensity and condensation of the light itself which withholds itself from the shallowness of all superficial seeing. Very fine intuition, kin to the Christian mystics’ experience of the Night of God, which is to the ordinary consciousness a sheer blackness bare of all things but into which one has to plunge to find that in it is all the Light and opulence and ecstasies of the Divine. It is probably because it has come to you through a feeling, and intuitive inspiration which contains more than it says that you find it obscure. That of course remains in the poem – it suggests more than it says, but the expression or form of the thought is not at all obscure. It would certainly be a mistake to alter it or try to make it more mentally explicit for that might diminish the suggestiveness. The expression is beautiful and profound and does not bear change.