This is too jocular a form for a solemn “remark”. The rest by itself sounds as if you had written the Iliad. Better say more modestly “An extremely fine poem”.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1937
Letter ID: 1949
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
May 24, 1937
In the couplet, Amal says, especially your line “Light through her [earth’s] dead eclipse of mind is poured,” is magnificent. Is it?
Yes.
How I struggled with the line, and you, Sir, by just a touch here and there fixed it up! I wish I could do that.
It is a question of getting the right words in the right places instead of allowing them to wander haphazard. Naturally it depends on inspiration, not on any clever piecing together. One sits still (mentally), looks at the words and somebody flashes the thing through you.
Oh, this blessed mind! But how the hell does it intervene?
By suggesting an inspiration of its own or a form of its own for the inspiration that is coming and in a hundred other ways. The mind is very active and clever for interference.
At times there are good lines, at others utter failures. If I had doubted at every moment, questioned, I can understand.
The mind can suggest as well as question.
I don’t seem to have still caught the metrical rhythm.
It is not the metrical rhythm you have not caught – it is the fact that in English words the stresses cannot be shifted about at pleasure. It can only be done occasionally and within judicious choice.
About the poem of yesterday, this remark will do: “Quite awfully fine ... A magnificent poem”.
[Sri Aurobindo put brackets around “Quite awfully fine”.]
This is too jocular a form for a solemn “remark”. The rest by itself sounds as if you had written the Iliad. Better say more modestly “An extremely fine poem”.
By the way, I know that Mother’s programme is too crammed; still, I was wondering if I could be occasionally or rarely put in edgeways as one of the interviewers. Any decision will be taken with yogic samatā.
Better not press that now. Wait for better times.