Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1938

Letter ID: 2109

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

May 25, 1938

Guru, why for some time has my poetic inspiration waned? Does the Divine want me to stop for the time being or is it a temporary phase? At times I strongly suspect that you have left me to shift for myself, perhaps relieved very rarely whenever your Supramental leisure allows, by a little whiff. Is that so?

It is probably because you had hitched on to a certain province of insight and inspiration from which the poetry came. Your abandonment of its “standing terms” (which was quite right, for one can’t go on writing the same subject and language for ever) has pitched you off and now you are trying to hook on elsewhere but have not quite grappled your “moorings” into the right spot. Sometimes it catches on, sometimes it doesn’t. E.g. in stanzas 1 and 3 hooked, in stanzas 2 and 4 dishooked, stanza 5 half-hooked, half-dishooked.

Which or what?

Neither and nought.