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)

Swinburne [5]

Your explanation has convinced me that the lines in their context had better be considered without any idealising ingenuity; so I shall recast that portion and send it to you.

It does not seem to me legitimate to turn the meaning of lines in a poem upside down like that by lopping the syntax and giving it a twist which turns into something else — une autre histoire. But even so, it only turns an acme of perverse sadism into an acme of perverse masochism. To make one’s body a lyre of agonies, faultless (?) or not — I don’t know quite what is meant by a faultless agony — is not an ascetic discipline or a spiritual sacrifice. One has to bear pain with fortitude when it comes, but to inflict it wantonly on oneself is not spiritual. I am aware of the austerities of the Tapaswis of old, but these, condemned by the Gita as Asuric tapasya, had at least for their motive a mastery over the physical consciousness and might therefore be called a discipline, but to torture oneself or allow oneself to be tortured either for the joy of it or the beauty of it was not their idea — be it either the victim’s joy or the torturer’s; for I don’t quite know to whom is the fierce sacrifice here supposed to be dedicated. An extremity of pain has nothing in it that is ideal or spiritual.

27 December 1934