Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1938
[Sri Aurobindo and the Mother]
Z has broken our thermometer. She wants to pay, shall we accept?
[Mother:] If she goes on taking her temperature she must pay as it will make her more careful in future – But is it wise to attract so much her attention on her temperature? It does not seem to help her to cure – – – –
In yesterday’s poem, you have hurdled very well indeed! You call this line, “A fathomless beauty in a sphere of pain,” a magnificent one, but I did not feel its magnificence when I wrote it and am unable to see where you find it. I think you find behind these things some inner truth which magnifies everything to you, no? Otherwise the rhythm and the word music aren’t very striking, what?
Well, have you become a disciple of Baron and the surrealists? You seem to suggest that significance does not matter and need not enter into the account in judging or feeling poetry! Rhythm and word music are indispensable, but are not the whole of poetry. For instance lines like these
In the human heart of Heligoland
A hunger wakes for the silver sea;
For waving the might of his magical wand
God sits on his throne in eternity,
have plenty of rhythm and word music – a surrealist might pass them, but I certainly would not. Your suggestion that my seeing the inner truth behind a line magnifies it to me, i.e. gives it a false 
value to me which it does not really have as poetry, may or may not be correct. But, certainly, the significance and feeling suggested and borne home by the words and rhythm are in my view a capital part of the value of poetry. Shakespeare’s lines “Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain” have a skilful and consummate rhythm and word combination, but this gets its full value as the perfect embodiment of a profound and moving significance, the expression in a few words of a whole range of human world-experience. It is for a similar quality that I have marked this line. Coming after the striking and significant image of the stars on the skyline and the single Bliss that is the source of all, it expresses with a great force of poetic vision and emotion the sense of the original Delight contrasted with the world of sorrow born from it and yet the deep presence of that Delight in an unseizable beauty of things. But even isolated and taken by itself there is a profound and moving beauty in the thought, expression and rhythm of the line and it is surprising to me that anyone can miss it. It expresses it not intellectually but through vision and emotion. As for rhythm and word music, it is certainly not striking in the sense of being out of the way or unheard of, but it is perfect – technically in the variation of vowels and the weaving of the consonants and the distribution of longs and shorts, more deeply in the modulated rhythmic movement and the calling in of overtones. I don’t know what more you want in that line.