Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1938

Letter ID: 2193

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

September 20, 1938

“Thy Presence wraps around my revened sense

An air burdened with heavenly frankincense...”

I say, this sounds like making a perfumed package. Reveried?

“And in my soul I feel an awakening

Of thy eternal Beauty ring on ring.”

Guru, I smack my lips today in satisfaction, because I find the poem damn fine! Though there are a few anomalies, e.g. heavenly, ring on ring, etc. What do you say?

Umph! Smack away but I smack also with my hand of correction. However the first stanza is O.K. and the last stanza the same when relieved of reveried and heavenly and unwrapped.

Perhaps you find the Presence of my romantic-sentimental self?

Well, there are certainly traces of both romance and sentimentality in the 4th line and the lines 9-11 are as weak as they are incomprehensible. I have corrected but it keeps the romantic touch.

Ah, what a hard Master you are and what a tough customer!

Can’t help being that, otherwise you would fall back into a lax and feeble imitative romanticism which would be quite inadvisable. By “romanticism” I mean really “pseudo-romanticism” or sometimes “reproductive romanticism”.