Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 1. On His Poetry and Poetic Method
Metrical Experiments

The Genesis of Moon of Two Hemispheres

After two days of wrestling I have to admit that I am beaten by your last metre. I have written something, but it is a fake. I will first produce the fake.

A gold moon|-raft floats | and swings | slowly

And it casts | a fire | of pale | holy | blue light

On the drag|on tail | a glow | of the | faint night |

That glimm|ers far, | swimming,

The illum|ined shoals | of stars | skimming,

Overspread|ing earth | and drown|ing the | heart in sight |

With the | ocean-depths | and breadths | of the | Infinite. |

That is the official scansion and except in the last foot of the two last lines it professes to follow very closely the metre of Nishikanta’s poem. But in fact it is full of sins and the appearance is a counterfeit. In the first line the first foot is really a bacchius:

A gold moon|-raft floats

and quantitatively though not accentually the second is a spondee which also disturbs the true rhythmic movement. “Slowly” and “holy” are in truth trochees disguised as pyrrhics, and if “slowly” can pass off the deceit a little, “holy” is quite unholy in the brazenness of its pretences. If I could have got a compound adjective like “god-holy”, it would have been all right and saved the situation, but I could find none that was appropriate. The next three lines are, I think, on the true model and have an honest metre. But the closing cretic of the last two is nothing but a cowardly flight from the difficulty of the spondee. I console myself by remembering that even Hector ran when he found himself in difficulties with Achilles and that the Bhagavat lays down पलायनम् [palāyanam] as one of the ordinary occupations of the Avatar. But the evasion is a fact and I am afraid it spoils the correspondence of the metres. I have some idea of adding a second stanza,— this one will look less guilty perhaps if it has a companion in sin — but if you use this at all, you need not wait for the other, as it may never take birth at all.

2 July 1934