Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 1. 1936

Letter ID: 1521

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

January 13, 1936

“Like a flame of flowers on yonder tree,

Like the rippling waves of the sea,

Dance, dance, O my soul, thou playmate of Light,

Winging the sapphire height.

Into the luminous calm of skies

Uplift my leaden eyes

And on a widening vision pour

The sun-wine of thy soar.”

A small poem. Trickle? Opinion, please. Soul dancing too much? The first stanza came quite easily, but I got stuck after that. Then Amal hopped in and helped me with the second stanza.

I have no objection to the soul dancing, but to make it dance and wing a height at the same time is a little acrobatic. Also to pour wine (even of a soar, though what the wine of a soar may be I don’t know) on the eyes would hardly be beneficial to the vision–in most cases. I admit however that these are perhaps rather too prosaic and Johnsonian objections to the sunwine of your or Amal’s dancing soar.

Here are some new lines:

Trickle, trickle O mighty Force divine.

Pour, pour thy white moon dreams

Into my stomach, heart and intestine

In little silver streams.

Two most damnable blunders, sir. “Intestine” is stressed on the second syllable and pronounced intestin, so how the blazes is it going to rhyme with divine? A doctor misstressing “intestine”– shame! How are you going to cure people if you put wrong stresses on their anatomical parts?

Second blunder–

Yogically, psycho-physically etc., etc. stomach, heart and intestine lodge the vital movements, not the physical consciousness –it is there that anger, fear, love, hate and all the other psychological privileges of the animal tumble about and upset the physical and moral digestion. The Muladhara is the seat of the physical consciousness proper. So you have to emend the third line into “Invade the

mournful   yearning bottom of my spine”. That will   yearnful

make it poetically beautiful and psycho-physically correct.