“... the wan shadows are castSri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1938
Letter ID: 2088
Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar
April 28, 1938
“Mystery’s heavenly fane” all right?
Get rid of this fane, please. So long as we keep it, all emendations will be in vain.
“The flames of a timeless dawn...” Can “flames” be made singular?
No, it can’t be singularised, as intuition will then walk off in a huff.
“... the wan shadows are cast
From its sleepless whirl...”1
... End of 1st stanza all right? and the repetition in the last stanza?
I can’t make out for the life of me what are these wan shadows and why they poke their pale noses in here!
As you wrote it it is a dream-poem. I have tried by a few alterations to wake it up – now, I think it is truly excellent as a vision-poem. It must be “thy sky” [instead of “the sky”] – for otherwise it is the ordinary sky and since Science has shown us that that does not exist – it is only a hallucination of blue colour created by azotes or some other such chemical entity, anything written about the ordinary sky can only be either unconvincing or purely decorative. So!
Repetition all right and very effective.
1 “Sky Transcendent”, Sun-Blossoms, p. 79.