Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Examples of Western Poetry (up to 1900)

Shakespeare [2]

The phrase occurs in Sonnet CVII, beginning

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,

Can yet the lease of my true love control,

Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.

What I should like to know is whether the rhythm of the words I have picked out is a fusion of the overmental and the vital; or is only the substance from the overmind?

There is something from the Above in the rhythm also, but it is rather covered up by the more ordinary rhythm of the first half line and the two lines that follow. It is curious that this line and a half should have come in as if by accident and have nothing really to do with the restricted subject of the rest.

19 February 1935