Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Metrical Experiments in Bengali

Mātrā-vṛtta and Laghu-guru

I return you the former letter from Prabodh Sen which I managed to find time to read only today. He has a most acute, ingenious and orderly mind, and what he says is always thought-provoking and interesting; but I am not persuaded that the form of Bengali mātrā-vṛtta and Sanskrit laghu-guru is really and intrinsically the same. Equivalent, no doubt, in a way,— if we substitute Bengali metre for Sanskrit quantity; but not the same because Bengali metre and Sanskrit quantity are two quite different things. It is something like the equivoque by which one pretends that an English iambic metre or any other with a Greek name is the same as a Latin or Greek metre with that name — an equivoque based on the fiction that a stressed and an unstressed English syllable are quantitatively long and short. There is a certain kind of general equivalence, but a fundamental difference — as those who have tried to find an equivalent in the English stress system to the quantitative Latin or Greek hexameter, alcaic or sapphic metres have discovered — they could not be transplanted, because it is only in true quantity that they can live.

23 September 1932