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 the Work of Poets of the Ashram

Harindranath Chattopadhyaya [8]

I have seen the poems marked by you — they are certainly among the best you have written before you came here. I have looked carefully at the “Jealousy of God”; it has much poetic beauty throughout. The idea of the Divine jealousy is a very apt imagination and serves to carry the meaning of the poem beyond the earth-limits to the beyond — as such it is striking and legitimate. But it has to be taken as a God constructed out of universal appearances by the lover’s mood — it is evidently not A. E.’s Divinity, so A. E. need not have been in pain for him — and as such any objections (I don’t know precisely what they may be) are out of court. I should like to read Forgiveness again before I pronounce as between Binyon and Amal. There is no bathos in the Desert; it has not the sustained level of some other poems, but throughout there is much imagination and colour and many fine lines, not only at the close.

P.S. I have looked again at Forgiveness [text of poem not available],— both Binyon and Amal have some foundation for their opinions. It is an exceedingly fine poem and quite perfect in its expression of the underlying idea or rather psychic perception of an occult truth hidden from the surface mind. I don’t see anything fanciful in it or discern what is according to Amal fancy and what genuine imagination — if you look at it with the surface intellect the whole thing is a mere fancy or else a fine imagination, but if you look at it with the psychic perception there is neither, only a truth of behind the veil. But — it is here that Amal is right, the two closing lines are a terrible anticlimax; they spoil the perfection altogether.

31 January 1935