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)

George Santayana

There we live o’er, amid angelic powers,

Our lives without remorse, as if not ours,

And others’ lives with love, as if our own;

For we behold, from those eternal towers,

The deathless beauty of all wingèd hours,

And have our being in their truth alone.

... and I knew

The wings of sacred Eros as he flew

And left me to the love of things not seen.

’T is a sad love, like an eternal prayer,

And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease.

Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase,

And heaven shines as if the gods were there.

Had Dian passed there could no deeper peace

Embalm the purple stretches of the air.

George Santayana, the writer of these, is a Spaniard who has a post at Harvard — English is not his mother tongue. In spite of traditionalism and lack of any very individual or developed technique, is there not some arrresting quality in the above extracts?

It [the two extracts considered as a unit] has a considerable beauty of thought and language in it. It is a great pity that it is so derivative in form as to sound like an echo. With so much mastery of language and ease of rhythm it should have been possible to find a form of his own and an original style. The poetic power and vision are there and he has done as much with it as could be done with a borrowed technique. If he had found his own, he might have ranked high as a poet.