Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Quantitative Metre in English and Bengali

Bengali and English Quantitative Poetry [2]

Is it true that the laghu-guru is to the Bengali ear as impossible as would be to the English ear the line made up by Tagore: “Autumn flaunteth in his bushy bowers”? In English such a violence could not be entertained for a moment. It was because Spenser and others tried to base their hexameters and pentameters on this flagrant violation of the first law of English rhythm that the first attempt to introduce quantitative metres in English proved a failure. Accent cannot be ignored in English rhythm — it is why in my attempts at quantitative metre I always count a strongly accentuated syllable, even if the vowel is short, as a long one — for the stress does really make it long for metrical purposes.

21 July 1936